US Has Health Greed, Not Health Care!

The New York Times ponders “The New Health Care, a Medical Mystery: Something Happened to U.S. Health Spending After 1980
The spending began soaring beyond that of other advanced nations, but without the same benefits in life expectancy. [By Austin Frakt, May 14, 2018.]
The United States devotes a lot more of its economic resources to health care than any other nation, and yet its health care outcomes aren’t better for it.

That hasn’t always been the case. America was in the realm of other countries in per-capita health spending through about 1980. Then it diverged.

It’s the same story with health spending as a fraction of gross domestic product. Likewise, life expectancy. In 1980, the U.S. was right in the middle of the pack of peer nations in life expectancy at birth. But by the mid-2000s, we were at the bottom of the pack.

What happened?”

What happened is that Reagan became president in 1980. President Greed.

The more greed one has, the shorter the life, the sweeter, both for victims and perpetrators…

Other nations have health care: the mission of doctors, nurses and supporting medical staff, in these nations is to optimize health of the citizens. However, in the USA, starting with the presidency of Reagan, greed came to be viewed as the best motivation for everything. Reagan himself, as governor of California had made it sure it would be so, in a breakthrough case: Reagan forced the University of California to charge for education. Initially the University was public, that is 100% publicly financed and 100% free for qualified Californian students. Reagan made sure only the wealthy could attend, in the long run: now only 13% of the University of California financing is from the state.

The greed modelization of everything, in the modern US, enforcing the principle that only the wealthy can pretend to full human rights, be it education or health, has been extended to the entire society. “Your Money Or Your Life!” works best when people are dying, or in pain!

The propaganda of the powers that be, the propaganda of the power of greed, is incredibly deep. It’s a programmation not just of ideas and systems of ideas. It is a programmation of feelings, emotions, occupations. A programmation of moods and inclinations. A programmation of souls and hearts!

We the People of the US has not understood that we are confronting the formation of a new aristocracy, the aristocracy of wealth. Some individuals, famous and esteemed, in the US, have made billions of profit in health care. One year, a hopital executive made half a billion.

Want to improve US health care? It’s time to understand that greed is antagonistic to care.

Patrice Ayme

Note: My preceding observations are supported by the NYT as follows:

.…”differences in public policy on health care financing. “Other countries have been able to put limits on health care prices and spending” with government policies, said Paul Starr, professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton. The United States has relied more on market forces, which have been less effective.

“Confronted with fiscal pressures, as the share of G.D.P. absorbed by health care spending began to get serious, other nations had mechanisms to hold down spending,” said Henry Aaron, a health economist with the Brookings Institution. “We didn’t.”

One result: Prices for health care goods and services are much higher in the United States. Gerard Anderson, a professor at Johns Hopkins and a lead author of a Health Affairs study on the subject, emphasized this point. “The differential between what the U.S. and other industrialized countries pay for prescriptions and for hospital and physician services continues to widen over time,” he said…

According to a recent study, the United States has higher health care administrative costs than other wealthy countries.

“We have big pharma vs. big insurance vs. big hospital networks, and the patient and employers and also the government end up paying the bills,” said Janet Currie, a Princeton health economist. Though we have some large public health care programs, they are not able to keep a lid on prices. Medicare, for example, is forbidden to negotiate as a whole for drug prices, as Ms. Currie pointed out.

But none of this explains the timing of the spending divergence. Why did it start around 1980?”

Interestingly, the NYT doesn’t point at Reagan directly… although it does, indirectly, by saying the USA started to spend less on social services… that would include Reagan getting the crazies out of mental hospitals, and into the streets… although the NYT, once again, doesn’t say it… Instead it points out the lag in social spending of the USA with rich countries went from 4% GDP, to 6% GDP…

“

Space X: Greed Makes Stupid

One can be smart, without being really intelligent. A crocodile can be smart, but it is not really intelligent. And this true not just of individuals, but of civilizations.

We live in the age of stupid. A major freeway which I know all too well, has proclaimed itself “smart”, according to the giant, very bright LED panels along it. Those “smarts” involve red lights on access ramps. By smoothing the flow in, they are supposed to make traffic smoother. And they do. On the freeway. The freeway flows a tiny bit better, but traffic jams on the streets and roads leading to said access ramps extend now for miles, and the global gridlock is worse than ever, because those blockages in turn block streets and roads parallel to the giant freeway (those secondary thoroughfares used to carry traffic parallel to that of the freeway plus local traffic; now they are parking lots).

When Obama climbed on the throne, he proclaimed that everything would get “smart”, just like He is. Example: the “smart” electric grid (as if grids had not been maximally smart before). It is true that Obama became president with what, in retrospect, were smarts tricks… rather than substance (as the ongoing crash of Obamacare demonstrates… accompanied, as it is, with the crash of nearly anything Obama touched; OK, today China’s president Xi shamed Obama into signing the Paris climate accord, COP 21, so maybe I should say thank you for consenting to save the planet a bit).

The productivity in the US, (and other leading Western countries) keeps on going down. Why? Education has been going down. We enjoy the age of stupid. We wallop in stupidity. And it shows:

Space X Sept 1, 2016 explosion. Not an accident, a system where greed has replaced expertise..

The age of stupid was inaugurated by Ronald Reagan, a remarkably stupid B movie actor whose first claim to fame had been to make the PUBLIC university of California, which had been specifically founded to provide FREE topmost education to the students of California, into an institution which only the rich could attend. Why? Because the stupid Reagan thought that was smart that only those who have money would have the keys of the world. (Then they would give careers to uneducated losers such as himself.) Reagan’s career started as a sport announcer on the radio: he was always owned by bosses full of money, and reacted to rich masters as dogs do, salivating, wagging his tail, barking in their defense.

Now, Reagan’s obscene mentality has conquered the world. It has become smart, hip, fashionable, to proclaim that Reagan was great. Even the French press views Reagan as a great president (for doing what he did not do, namely bringing the USSR down). And modest people, the non-rich, get as good an education as Reagan did, learning increasingly nothing, and most of what they learned, strictly by serving the rich.

Obama has proclaimed himself an admirer of Reagan, and a devout follower of the Financial Times. His presidency was under the sign of this doubled headed vulture.

Reagan, a creature whose fate barred him from higher mental pursuits, extolled instead the base notions of profit and greed. Profit and greed, said Reagan, were the highest, ultimate, most lofty, and most motivating pursuits of man. And a magnificently programmed Obama bleated faithfully behind. So Obama, smartly following orders, set-up Obamacare. Obamacare is characterized by insufficient spending control: so that healthcare vultures can prosper with ever more profits and greed. That, according to Reagan, Obama’s guru, will insure better health care, because greed and profit are much motivating than care (Reagan and company claimed). That’s all very smart, makes us all smart, because it is such a deeply flawed logic: greed and care do not apply to the same modes of brain operations. When one provides with care, one is not spurred by greed. These are antagonistic modes of mental operations.

Obama also decided to apply profit and greed to space: surely, that would be smart (his guru Reagan had said so). If there was profit and greed in space, space would open up, prosper, get smarter. Thus, instead of two private rocket launching companies contracting with NASA, the smart Obama fostered the creation of several others. Not understanding that the number of rocket scientists and technicians is limited.

This flurry of new space enterprises was the case of “private” companies, founded and funded… by the government. Bezos’ Blue Origins is government subsidized, because Bezos’ business, Amazon, does not pay taxes (a tax exempt status the worst of terrible men, Donald Trump, has proclaimed he would change, in his mental imbalance).

Space X, led by a self-taught engineer, Musk, smells even better: Obama gave him direct and indirect subsidies, and that was it.

Tall, telegenic Obama signed with tall, telegenic Musk a Space Act Agreement (SAA) “to develop and demonstrate commercial orbital transportation service“. (Notice the stupidity: with whom do you “commerce” in space? You set up space stations for plutocrats, thanks to their tax-exempt status?)

All this makes Musk very profitable. Penniless when Obama ascended the throne, Musk, propelled for years by billions of Obama dollars, was soon worth more than 12 billion dollars, all by himself. Let’s hope Musk is grateful and remembers who made him, after Obama retires.

In 2011, SpaceX estimated that Falcon 9 v1.0 rocket development costs were on the order of $300 million. Cheap. Investors were thrilled. Indeed, NASA evaluated that development costs would have been $3.6 billion if a traditional cost-plus contract approach had been used. (Indeed development of the new Ariane 6, which uses existing French military rockets for boosters and the existing Vulcain Hydrogen engine, will cost at least 4 billion Euros.)

Let’s stop here for a moment: Space X is supposed to be a private company. However, it develops rockets miraculously at 1/12 of their real cost, says NASA itself. Explanation? NASA has got to be making the difference (it’s helping Space X is in myriad ways). Obama invested 12 times more public money in Space X than the extremely wealthy private individuals who profit from it. Jesus turned the water into wine, Obama turned NASA into a cash cow for his friends. Mooo. Honni soit qui mal y pense.  

Can the USA do with four, five, or more rocket companies?

No.

Why not? Because launching chemical rockets is a flimsy business. In the Sixteenth Century, a Chinese inventor has been rumored to have strapped himself to a rocket propelled kite, and gaily went out in a puff of smoke. The fundamentals have not changed since: we still use chemical propulsion.

Space X uses primitive propulsion: RP1, rocket grade kerosene, basically the same as civilian jets. The more sophisticated US and European rockets use liquid hydrogen.

The flimsiness of space rockets and their engines presents the same problem as it did eight centuries ago: it requires minute attention to detail to make it work. If we had enormous power at our disposal, we could insure wide safety margins. But, for that, one would have to have more than chemical propulsion. Musk has claimed he could divide by ten the cost of launches with re-usable rockets. Experienced US companies, the Russians and Europeans aerospace engineers, beg to differ: they have long pondered the re-usability of flimsy rockets.

(Ariane Espace has now ‘project Adeline’ to recover the expensive parts of Ariane 6, mostly engine and electronics, using drone technology, in the long run; but that completely different method from recovering the entire fragile, heavy rocket would use only 1/17 of the fuel of Space X fuel stage recovery, with much fewer stresses…)

The Russians have launched more than 1,700 Soyuz, with a failure rate of 1/39. Ariane 5 has launched successfully more than 70 times in a row, putting a record 11 tons in GTO (Geostationary Orbit, 36,000 kilometers up) in August 2016.  Space X had two total losses out of 25 commercial launches… making it even worse than the notorious Space Shuttle.

Not all is bad about Space X. Musk’s notoriously bold technological spirit is refreshing, a bit like Donald Trump is refreshing. It is actually the sort of spirit which animated the Nazi engineers who developed the V2 (and then Saturn 5 in the US). There is little doubt that, to relatively little cost, one could fly heavy duty missions to Mars of Enceladus (a satellite of Saturn which has a huge ocean of water, and may harbor life, as the Cassini spacecraft, flying through plumes, found them laden with organics).

If anything, Space X forced Ariane Espace to decide cutting its launch cost by half (by scaring the French into developing Ariane 6, while forcing the Germans to give up on Ariane 5).

Yet, fundamentally, the ecology pushed by Obama of having many rocket companies cannot work. The serial explosions of Space X, in spite of its massive NASA support, demonstrate it.

At this point, rockets are too flimsy: they require great expertise from enough technicians and engineers. Say the total mass of these ‘rocket scientists’ is M. Obama decided to divide M by 6, on any specific rocket project. However, suppose one needs M/2 to operate one rocket project safely. Then Obama’s naive strategy of the more, the merrier, will lead to serial explosions, as observed. Obama, never an expert, does not seem to understand the notion of expert. Greed does not grow experts, education does.

Instead, one should go back to the strategy of the 1960s, as led by president Kennedy: big private-public projects, with clear state exploration goals. This actually built up on a strategy launched by president Roosevelt, and pursued by Eisenhower. Massive public spending on education, infrastructure, science, technology, and associated defense projects.

Efficient, large scale Space colonization, ultimately, will rest on new science, thus new education. Ultimately commuting to LEO (Low Earth Orbit) safely, efficiently, will require completely new propulsion and, or, material science (futuristic material science would allow to deploy enormous wings, and de-orbit softly, cooly and thus safely).

As I have long argued, i is clear that, to go to Mars, we need nuclear fission engines (because of radiation away from Earth’s magnetic shield, we cannot stay in space the 18 months it takes now; a nuclear fission engine could get to Mars in just 6 weeks). Space X cannot develop this: it does not have the expertise. Yet, the US has operated nuclear fission rocket engines before, and now NASA, following Russia, is warming up to the possibility again. Nuclear propulsion is what needs to be financed, instead the musky greed of eight century old technology.

The philosophy that greed does it all, is deeply flawed: otherwise crocodiles would have inherited the Earth. It is a philosophy by imbeciles, for imbeciles.

History shows that imbecility is what kills most civilizations. Imbecile leaders, though, favor imbecile followers, and an imbecile mental ecology. Nowadays, though, there is just one civilization, on one planet, and, if it dies, there is no replacement. That is why it is so important to deconstruct the planetary, Reagan-Thatcher inherited mood that greed can replace expertise.  

… While it keeps on festering, NASA’s internal watchdog, Paul Martin, called out his federal agency’s decision to allow Space X to lead the primary investigation of Space/Greed X explosion in 2015, observing it raised “questions about inherent conflicts of interest”. It is telling that the US administration, which has invested more in Space X than the private investors who stand to profit from it, is not interested by what happened to the public’s money.

Space X’s waste of taxpayer money similar to that of big banks. Both are protected by complexity so great, it escapes (according to plan) the understanding of the Commons. When the government gives your money to plutocrats, no question stands scrutiny. All the billions given to Space X, a dubious tech company, is as much money not given to fundamental research (where government is irreplaceable).

Our spaceship Earth, mismanaged by our stupid and greedy leadership, threatens to get completely out of control. All the ways out involve much more advanced technology (whether we opt for world war, or peace and concertation). Hence it is important to realize that the role of government is that of leader in matter of science and technology. And that the mood which shall lead cannot be just greed, but the most noble aspects of the human spirit.

It is the present oligarchic system which is the source of the present pandemic of stupidity. Because, given the same level of education, few brains think less well than many brains. For example, now in the US it’s down to just two minds: Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, both of whom have been associated to extremely unsavory characters over the years. Anyway, how come those two are supposed to think and debate for us all? Well, for the same reason that Space X got many billions of public money. Greed. Not the honor of the human spirit.

Patrice Ayme’

P/S: [Written January 30, 2018, as Space X prepares to launch another re-used rocket… which may well explodes, but that’s besides the point…]

I was long very skeptical and critical of Musk… and the massive support he got under Obama (through NASA; see above). However, I must recognize that I am changing my mind, in light of Musk’s exploits.
Musk seems to have won the re-usability gamble. Reusing the rockets changes everything to the cost of going to space. A back of the envelope computation shows that going to low Earth orbit with a one hundred metric tons load shouldn’t cost much more than a couple dozens transoceanic flights by jumbo jet. This changes everything. Going to methane as propellant (“Raptor” engine) will enable to make fuel on Mars (where there are colossal ice cliffs and lava tubes… both enabling colonization).

Only imbeciles don’t change opinion, in light of new facts contradicting previous opinion. Wisdom is not a faithful mistress.

[BTW, at the time of this writing, January 2018, a government commission just recommended NOT to allow Space X to launch humans, as long as the accident above is not thoroughly understood. Apparently it came from an oxygen leak into defects of a carbon fiber wrap… Followed by an extremely violent detonation…]

USA As A Police State

Many rage against Donald Trump, while singing the praises of Obama. They overlook that the Donald duck is what the Obama cat dragged home. How? Those who like false explanations call Trump supporters racist. However, Obama is personally popular, with a favorability rating of more than 50%, something rare for a president finishing his mandate. Meanwhile their anti-establishment rhetoric is strong (they detest Hillary Clinton, a blonde). So what irks Trump supporters is not so much the color of one skin, but the fact they have little skin in the game. For seven years, I wrote that the Obama’s administration, plus the Federal Reserve, deliberately favored the richest and especially the financial sector (say through Quantitative Easing, which directed money to the biggest banks).

Now the poorest are enraged. And the (plutocratically owned) media tell us that this “populism” is a dangerous form of racism. You want to see racism? Here it is:

Living While Black Is A Dangerous Condition. Obama Has Nothing To Do With It.

Whereas, the obvious explanation is that average people are suffering as they see their median income, the median social fabric, their median everything go down, except for Obamacare copays, and for huge inflation striking not just healthcare, but education, and lack of upwards mobility. 

My friend John Michael Gartland told me that: “The American middle class pays 20%+ more every year in medical insurance payments and gets 40%+ less benefits. The political elite has no idea what regular people pay for anything. President Obama says fanciful things with sincere oratory but very little of it is true. At best, it is good intentions not backed up by reality.”

Another class of low lives experience discontent: those who are directly under the brunt of the police state. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arY3gtdNhjY

More and more videos are showing how ugly the system is.

Suppose the following. You are stuck somewhere, you don’t have the means to move. Somebody in the neighborhood comes to you and accuses you to have shot at them years ago, and you missed. Suppose also that you have never touched a gun in your life. You are accused of a complete lie. What to do? Apologize? But an apology would acknowledge that what did not happen, happened: it would make you an accomplice of your own victimization, and a culprit in two ways (of an act of violence that you did not commit against someone else, and of an act of violence you did commit against yourself).

So, what is the wisest course? Get a gun. It may seem counter-intuitive that arming oneself for ultimate violence is the wisest course. And for the individual, it is not, if the individual is willing to forgo all dignity. But, for a community, arming oneself is generally better than harming oneself.

There are two ways to abuse people: neglect them, or directly assault them. If one can get abused people to apologize, they will join in their own abuse, and take a beaten dog mentality. Making them even easier to abuse.

Another trick to rule is to divide by dividing patterns of abuse. The rage of more and more young African-Americans is a healthy reaction to a pattern of abuse meant to destroy self-worth. The abuse has increased with the repression. A Darwinian system has been set-up to subdue rebellious low lives.

Philando Castile was pulled over in July by a police officer in a car. It was at least his 46th traffic stop. Nearly all for minor traffic violations. It was his last.

After the stop — over a broken tail light — the police officer was told by Castille himself, that he, Castille carried, legally, a gun. Apparently scared that Castile could grab said gun, the officer shot and bled to death the 32-year-old. Castile’s girlfriend then live-streamed the dialogue she had with the officer on Facebook, sternly retelling the story of how a traffic stop for a low-level offense turned into a legal execution… while making sure of calling respectfully the assassin “Sir”.

Castile’s story has been the rule, for decades. Simply, good thinking people ignored it. Only now, thanks to modern technology, does the method become hard to deny. Eric Garner, Samuel DuBose, Sandra Bland — these are just a few of the victims of police and the criminal justice system over the past several years, but they all fall into the same basic framework: a routine stop or arrest for a low-level offense goes horribly wrong, leaving someone dead after they were accused of a misdemeanor or crime that doesn’t even involve any prison time.

Why? The police in the USA is trained to terrify the population into respectful subjugation (notice the analogy with Islam). That keeps said population focused on eating sugar (subsidized), corn syrup (subsidized), and watching sport on TV (subsidized) happening in the stadium (subsidized). Instead of having the population daydreaming about changing the system into a better place.

The criminal justice system in the US has become profit generating: there are private prisons, their companies are on Wall Street.

But local communities also share in the profits the abuse generates.

The law enforcement system make these encounters with the law happen frequently, and with increasing weight in a person’s life, once that person has been detected as a low life, and especially a low life who does not respect orders well.

It begins with one ticket or a traffic stop. But if someone can’t pay that fine, police will stop or arrest him or her again to get that someone to pay up. This leads to that someone getting fined again for not paying up already. And again. And again. One ticket brings a vicious cycle that can destroy a life.

With each of these encounters, someone’s record piles up — giving officers more reason, in the view they have been trained to have, to stop him or her, because they see the person’s record when running a license plate. Each time the arrests happen, the exasperation of the victim augments. At some point, they snap (we have videos testifying to victims saying they had enough, after being arrested dozens of times; they were then killed, one way, or another).

Neighborhoods with poor people of color are heavily policed, so miscreants are more likely to catch a cop’s eye if they run a stop sign, fail to signal on a turn, have a broken tail light, or sell untaxed cigarettes.

This isn’t just about a few police killings. It’s a criminal justice system that’s biased towards a Prussian like discipline for low lives. That’s even true with drugs: for an equal mass of the offending product, the sentences are ten times harsher on the sort of cocaine poor people use, than on the refined powder the rich use.

The USA is a multiracial society where low lives can keep on living, as long as they obey the system strictly. Otherwise the police’s ominous presence is there to remind them they can be shot. Appearances of fairness abound. Obama was made president and a Nobel laureate, but then was told, as he knew he would be, to obey the system strictly. Being smart, and all that, it’s exactly what he did. That’s why Obama gave so much to the hyper wealthy, the same who now embrace Hillary Clinton. (To compensate for his loss of dignity, he is an expert at looking full of it.)

When lauding the US model, with its ultrapowerful financial pirates, its high inequality, its performance oriented work ethics (certainly the highest, by far, of the countries which view themselves as most decent), supporters forget to mention the police state aspect. Even more striking, they forget to mention that it was roughly multiplied by ten, after Bill Clinton passed severe laws which set a very stern ambiance… And nearly doubled the incacerated population. 

(This is only the tip of the iceberg; total population under “judicial supervision” in the US, is now more than eight millions.)

This will not end well. But when will it end? The nasty plutocratic Roman system was the sorry predecessor of the present one. It ended as total degeneracy of everything. The alienation of Roman “populus” (people) from themselves lasted up to eight centuries (in the parts which were invaded by the Islamists, and the Oriental Part, Pars Orientalis). In the Occident, the system collapsed when the Franks and other Germans took control around 480 CE. In other words, the corruption of democracy into plutocracy can last extremely long before the plutocracy loses control: a generation of dummies brings up another generation of dummies, etc.

(Archeology has shown, that, at least in the east, and until the devastation of war set in, the Roman empire was very prosperous, economically speaking; what decayed was its intelligence, obviously from an excess of fascism and theocracy. That defect, in turn, brought the invasions. Something to meditate as hordes of Islamists try to enter Europe; at this point, in the last year, at least four millions, with three millions held up by the Ottoman sultan Erdogan, in a deal with the EU…)

Planetary devastation will probably precede plutocratic collapse. Because there is so much We The People has to understand, before attempting any revolution, and it is very far from evern knowing what all the dimensions of understanding are. The otherwise excellent article “The Tyranny Of A Traffic Stop” fails to understand the root of the big picture completely: the tyranny we have now, extending all the way down to traffic stops, is one of the means to impose a tyrannical ambiance. Such a satanic ambiance being the essence of plutocracy, when the law violates goodness, decency, and everything human, everyday, just because it can. One falls again in the dominion of that old instinct, perversity, for perversity’s sake.

Allright, this is how the West was conquered. However, the empire now extends from sea, to shining sea. It’s not the empire which has to be extended further, inasmuch as the planet, to be saved. Besides, one can hardly present the US as a model, when it is so much about terrorizing the innocent.

Patrice Ayme’

 

GREAT BITTER LAKE CONSPIRACY

A conspiracy occurs when a number of individuals together (“con”) breathe (“spirare”).

Conspiracy doesn’t imply necessarily plotting, although, in the case of the Great Bitter Lake Conspiracy, a conspiracy launched by president Franklin Roosevelt, the famous “Democrat”, this is exactly what happened. Three quarters of a century later, we are still in the thick of it.   

History is made mostly of… conspiracies. Those who don’t want to learn about conspiracies, don’t want to learn about history. A friend, Paul Handover of Learning From Dogs, attracted my attention to the British movie, “Bitter Lake”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UM8W87UcO2U&feature=player_embedded

“Bitter Lake” is about the conspiracy between American plutocracy and Saudi plutocracy. Plutocrat Roosevelt was freshly flown from Yalta, to the Great Bitter Lake, on the Suez Canal. The idea was to steal the Maghreb, and the Middle East from the French and the British, by making a theocratic alliance, with Abdulaziz Ibn Saud.

Abdulaziz Ibn Saud had proclaimed himself king of Arabia in 1932, after conquering most of it, with British military help. The Saud family ascent rested on an alliance with Wahhabi Islam, an extremely intolerant version of Islam, which interprets the sacred texts of Islam literally (Wahhab followed an earlier fanatic, who had been condemned to death, for Islamist Fundamentalism in… 1200 CE, more than eight centuries ago).

Abdulaziz Ibn Saud had established an authentic “Islamist State“. It made a natural partner to US oilmen, and US financiers. This partnership extends to this day: look at Obama preventing pursuits against the Saudis for 9/11, their financial support of the Islamist State, and the friends the Clintons keep.

At Yalta, Roosevelt had warmed up, by giving half of Europe to his Comrade Stalin. (Plutocrats of the world naturally unite!) That should break the back of Europe, if Hitler had not done enough already (correctly thought the US Deep State).

Never mind that Poland had fought the Nazis courageously the Nazis, at a time when the USA was militarily and diplomatically collaborating… with the Nazis (or maybe, precisely, the Poles had to be punished!) Roosevelt had to be strict: the French had successfully escaped from the military occupation (AMGOT) he had set-up for them.

Having warmed up at Yalta with its continent-sized gift to Stalin, US president Roosevelt was ready to make a diabolical pact with Abdulaziz Ibn Saud. After all, the Brits had shown the way, decades earlier, and it had been a bloodbath. This would organize the world economy for the “American Century”.

The USA agreed to protect Saudi Arabia, as the UK had done earlier. In exchange for oil, and the recycling of the profit in the worldwide dollar system, controlled by the USA. this became even more pronounced under Obama…

The movie “Bitter Lake” exposes (some) of the American plutocracy led conspiracies which led to the devastation, among other things, of Afghanistan, and other constituencies, thanks to the Wahhabist Islam it unleashed on the world.

Readers of this site will be familiar with the general ambiance.

One caveat: all what is in the documentary and makes American plutocrats (Roosevelt) and their servants (Reagan) look bad, is correct. However the real situation, the real badness is way worse. (For example the secret, official USA intervention in Afghanistan was under Carter, on July 3, 1979. However the real even more secret intervention, through the Pakistani ISI was even earlier and even more vicious.

So is history all conspiracies, and nothing but conspiracies?

Not quite. (Although in nearly all cases, whatever the spark is, the new situation is handled with new conspiracies: breathing together is intrinsic to the human experience!)

Sometimes civilizations are brought down by occasional natural cataclysms: a volcano exploding, accompanied by earthquakes, and a tsunami helped to bring Cretan civilization down. Earlier, a great flood had brought the Sumerian cities down, drowning them all (that flood is probably alluded to in the Bible). It did not look man-made, but it was (from human impact up rivers from abusive land usage). The Sumerian cities brought many invention central to Western civilization (the bicameral representation, the alphabet). Up the Euphrates and Tigris basins, agriculture and herding ravaged the soils and made them unable to store water. At the same time salination ruined the delta.

The Maya, after millennia of establishing a great and dense civilization resting on intense agriculture and a sophisticated, gigantic hydraulic system, with huge canals and dams, stumbled into a century long, drastic drought, just when they were losing control of their ecology (they over-harvested their key construction tree, to the point they had none, and were forced to switch to inferior species, for example).

Thus, even natural disasters are not, quite often, not that natural: the hand of Homo has been all over, for a long time. The Mongols knew this. After Genghis Khan took control of Northern China, having exterminated the Buddhist Xia, and conquered the Han, his generals insisted that he should destroy not just the Chinese population, but also the Chinese ecology (by destroying the forests, and making the landscape suitable to Mongolian species such as goats, horses, etc.).

Genghis Khan wanted to save Chinese civilization: he refused.

Sometimes one great leader can do more than Jesus ever did. (Genghis as the Jesus Jesus never was: the inversion of all certainties. The Mongol leader was actually educated by Christians, Nestorian Christians.)

And then there is determinism, inertia.

Often plutocracy gets established through sheer inertia, because of the power of compounded interest. This is why many a civilization sent the wives to the funeral pyres, with the Great Leader.

I have a personal connection to Afghanistan. Although I never visited, my parents did, several times, in the 1970s. Geology opens many doors.

As it happened, my dad was among a European group of geologists working for the Afghan government, who discovered Afghanistan’s riches… In the 1970s. All hell broke loose shortly thereafter. I have narrated in the past why I think that this was not a coincidence: the USA wanted its cake, and did not feel the same about Afghans, Russians… and the French.

I write about these sorts of things, day in, day out. But most people prefer the opium of feel-good… Pet a dog, dream about (being) celebrities…

In the end, “Bitter Lake” accuses the growth of the financial system, and its connection with the military-industrial complex (Ike warned about), corruption.

Readers of this site knows that plutocracy, as a controlling mind of its own, had started before the inception of World War One.

Nowadays, plutocracy is an apex of glory and mind control. Giant American global corporations, the 200 largest ones, do 100 billion dollars of tax evasion through Luxembourg alone. Each year. Many are media companies. Wonder why stories make no sense?

Juncker directed that. Now he is head of the European Commission, and insist Greece shall pay every single penny of its debt. Pluto insists little ones shall pay.

Oh, by the way, the real name is “Great Bitter Lake“, not just “Bitter Lake”. It’s actually a bitter ocean we are all drowning in.

In any case, the movie “Bitter Lake” is good start. A bit of what is going on, through the Afghan microscope. Much is made of the sci-fi movie Solaris, where a planet changes the minds of those who mess with it. Well, sure. But it’s not Afghanistan. That planet is planet finance, planet Pluto, and it’s malevolent.

“Bitter Lake” ends this way: “At the end of Soviet science fiction film, Solaris, the astronauts returns to Earth. Everything seems real enough but somehow he does not trust in anything any longer…

Our leaders seem to have lost faith in anything. And the simple stories they tell us don’t make sense any longer. The experience of Afghanistan  has make us begin to realize that there is something else out there, but we don’t have the apparatus to see it. What is needed is a new story, and one that we can believe in.”

Well, I have that story. And that “apparatus”. But, by definition, it’s out of the comfort zone. As usually defined.

Patrice Ayme’

Obama, Neo-Con

About this title: Obama enabled maximally prominent Neo-Cons to represent and govern the USA. When I asked Silicon Valley cognoscenti what it meant for a supposedly “democratic” presidency to nominate maximally prominent neofascists, I was told: “They represent the HIDDEN government of the USA.”

For years it was incorrect to point out that emperor Obama had no clothes, that all he had was playing with his brown skin. That observation was called racist. Yet, it has been made recently, loud and clear, by leftists of renown: president Obama has been incompetent, and a sell-out. As Thomas Frank puts it in Salon:

“Right-wing obstruction could have been fought: An ineffective and gutless presidency’s legacy is failure.

Yes, we know, the crazy House. But we were promised hope and change on big issues. We got no vision and less action.”

Change? Skin Color

Within days of Obama’s accession to power, banks were given public money without any counterparts. This was an outrageous theft of public money. I advocated it was “Time for RICO“. I may as well have told the mafia to summon the police.

Just as Reagan-Bush 25 years ago, and Sweden later, after 2007, the UK and Germany nationalized giant banks such as Northern Rock, RBS, Hypo Real Estate, when they had to give them hundreds of billions to save them. Instead in the USA, the banks were given trillions, without so much as a change of management; the fact the banks were given money was hidden by the simple device of TARP, then giving plenty more to banks through Quantitative Easing, to reimburse TARP…

To the great applause of conscientious, politically correct “liberals”, such as drummer boy Krugman.

This has world consequences: it made American financiers rule the world, more than ever; GE, saved by Obama’s $60 billion, just bought a French giant competitor, Alsthom. This is the Faustian deal of the USA: its plutocrats may rule the USA, but they also rule the world, and that increasing empire profits average Americans.

The dying Roman Republic went through a similar Faustian bargain with its increasing militarization: the resulting empire profited the Populus Romanus, while killing the Republic. The most insidious corruption corrupts the souls.

Real Change: Beggar In Chief

[Profitable presidency: Obama spent at least 400 day raising billions from the richest plutocrats.]

Then, unbelievably, Obama kept on saying he could not do a thing without Republican’s approval (never mind that he had 60% of the votes in the Senate, and a strong majority in Congress). It was, Obama explained disingenuously, a new way of doing politics by consensus. The savages opposing him rejected it, Obama’s fanatics informed us, thus making him a failure.

In truth, Obama had such strong control of all the government and the legislative, he could easily have imposed “Medicare For All“.

I have said all of this in the past, but, from another pen, my point of view comes out stronger. Thomas Frank again:

“America should have changed but didn’t… [how] to explain an age when every aspect of societal breakdown was out in the open and the old platitudes could no longer paper it over—when the meritocracy was clearly corrupt, when the financial system had devolved into organized thievery, when everyone knew that the politicians were bought and the worst criminals went unprosecuted and the middle class was in a state of collapse and the newspaper pundits were like street performers… for an audience that had lost its taste for mime and seriousness both. It was a time when every thinking person could see that the reigning ideology had failed, that an epoch had ended, that the shitty consensus ideas of the 1980s had finally caved in—and when an unlikely champion arose from the mean streets of Chicago to keep the whole thing propped up nevertheless.”

As early as 2009, it dawned on me that Obama was neither incompetent nor a sellout. I said so on some leftist sites, and was promptly thrown out, as a “troll” and a “Neo-Con”. Obama was a Neo-Conservative from the start and was chosen for that, by the higher-ups of the “democratic” party: they gave him a keynote speech, and their top master operative.

Obama practiced Dick Morris and Bill Clinton’s theory of triangulation — basically the democrats do the republicans’ work for them: democrats deregulated, balanced the budget, and unleashed the financial markets of the USA, while allowing huge corporations to pay no taxes. Clinton declared that the “era of big government is over.” Big banks, small government.

All of this covered by noises to the contrary while the notorious weasel, Dick Morris, chuckled. Weasels are somewhat below apes in the evolution of evolution. Not to worry, French judges never heard of Dick Morris, and he is white, in any case.

Nearly all American leftists, including myself, did not see early enough that Obama was a Neo-Con with Martin Luther King’s mien. We got manipulated by his speeches and rhetoric. His King-style voice rhythms sucked all back to the nostalgia of the progressive 1960s.

We were blinded by political correctness. I recovered quickly, in the first few weeks of Obama’s administration: it was clear Obama was all in rhetoric, and no action.

Obama claimed he could not do a thing, because the “Republicans” blocked him. In truth, fifth generation plutocrats such as Max Baucus, a major democratic senator, were the excuse Obama evoked, in democratic circles, to say he could not a thing. (That Max Baucus lather authored “Obamacare”, is pretty telling.)

I wrote, on this site, about the commonality between Obama’s behavior and that of the “boys” who used to serve white masters in Kenya. Some in my family wrote to me I had trampled on their hearts, and had no common decency. I replied my decency was uncommon. (No doubt it made their stays at Camp David less comfy, so they have hated me ever since.)

Obama is a far more competent Neo-Con than Bush Jr., or even Reagan, ever were. Those had opponents. Obama got collaborators, all over. No banana peel shaking for him. No need for French judges.

The two Bushes generated a backlash and really could only rule in secret, or though devious means. Obama instead pushed the agenda of Wall Street Banks, USA corporations, and the CIA/NSA much further than Bush ever dreamed of, by going public about it while carefully misrepresenting the truth.

For example, Obama officially clashed with Netanyahu. However, below that surface of enmity, extensive cooperation developed, say on anti-missile systems (the fact I like those systems is irrelevant). Such systems were crucial to allow Israel to not negotiate with the Palestinians.

Clinton was the best president the republicans ever had. Under him Franklin D. Roosevelt’s revolutionary reforms of finance and banks were completely undone; Rubin, that is Goldman Sachs and their followers were solidly in command. Clinton, while officially at war with Newt Gingrich, was actually doing the work the Republicans could never have done, had Bush Senior still been president.

As the Republicans got all they wanted, the debate switched further to the right. When the democrats acquired control of Congress in 2006, they went right. Pelosi and company accepted to give all the money banks and shadow banks wanted in 2008. Without any counterparts. Obama became the best president the Neo-Cons could dream of.

Obama once convoked all the top bankers to the White House. He announced, triumphal, that the Obama team was “the only thing between you and the pitchforks”. He delivered. Thanks to political correctness, nobody important dared say that the emperor had no clothes. That, would, indeed, have deemed to be racist. Still is. But not for long.

The picture that will stick with Obama is the one I observed six years ago: a black boy, serving the white masters. and not for brains: under Obama, the share of scientific publications by the USA has collapsed. Why? Under Obama, plutocratization has jumped (as I said, because of the treatment of finance). So it has in academia. But money has deleterious effects on research (if nothing else, it creates the wrong mood and obsession).

Obama ran his first campaign as “change you can believe in”. Yes, none at all. Obama, at best consolidated Bush’s Neo-Con rule. At worst he is still the engulfing lie that appearance is all what reality is about.

Patrice Ayme’

Housing & the Money Trap

Economics is a subject founded, and dominated, by philosophy. or rather, it should be. Instead it got to be dominated by gangsters and banksters.

The crisis the western economy comes from what passes for rational economic theory is far plutocratic lunacy. To put it in one sentence: “greed is not just good, but god.”

How did this come to be? Force. Force is what gave meaning to economics. In 1945, Allen Dulles, head of the OSS, was sitting in Berlin, in charge of de-Nazifying his Nazi friends he had made such good business with. A few thugs got tried, but the real friends and business associates were taught to make American style jokes, so they could go back to business. Force works:

Wall Street Golden Calf: Larger Than Life Itself

Decades unfolded. The OSS, now called the CIA imposed military men all over the Americas, if not the World, covered up by Harvard, Chicago or Stanford certified “economists”. No god, but greed: an old story, already found in the Bible (the adoration of the gold calf). That was great for We The People of the USA, as riches flowed towards the USA. That comforted USA universities in their knowledge that their vision of economics as all about greed was correct.

The City of London poodle reinforced that notion and that system, after Thatcher came to power.

Then Reagan came to power. His greatest feat was probably to have introduced a tuition in the public University of California. That University had been founded specifically to be free, in contradistinction with the plutocratic universities, where diplomas were paid for, to give the appearance of distinction and qualification on merits to the children of plutocrats. Reagan broke that nasty idea.

From there on, all what was worthy in the USA would be paid for.

Reagan had in his cabinet two twenty-something economists, eager to please and succeed: Larry Summers, hyper connected to plutocratic economists with Nobels, and Paul Krugman. Nowadays Krugman, is viewed, erroneously as the most progressive economist there is. And his blog is the most read in economics, worldwide (complete with my more damaging comments censored).

Summers’ attempt to head the Fed, supported by Obama, was shot down by an Internet born campaign. As far as I know, I am the first to have excoriated Summers from way back. What Summers did under Clinton would have made FDR scream. Summers not only destroyed the Banking Act of 1933, FDR’s most important economic reform, but he allowed the expansion of banking scams to realms never imagined before.

Now, Summers, seconded by Krugman, has embarked in a vast campaign to justify the abysmal economy they helped to create in the last three decades. See:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/16/secular-stagnation-coalmines-bubbles-and-larry-summers/

Recently, Krugman has been trying to explain that Keynes was not an idiot, that Keynes was just joking when he said real stupid stuff. I have long argued Keynes was partly a confirmed idiot, and even a lethal one.

See: https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2010/09/04/colbert-good-keynes-not-so-smart/

Lord Keynes was just not an idiot, in many ways, he was also a Nazi. A Nazi incubator. a mother hen for Nazism. No wonder he wanted people to fill up holes at the bottom of coal mines; he was inspirational for Nazism.

Krugman is a strange case: on one hand, he is violently and haughtily condemning those who call him, Larry Summers, Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin Jews, as they originally are, although he admits he is badly estranged from his roots.

On the other hand, Krugman exhibits wild enthusiasm and total devotion to Lord Keynes. Lord Keynes was a rabid partisan of murderous, German fascism, and regretted loudly and extensively that the Versailles treaty had freed enslaved nations subjugated by Prussia and Vienna. Keynes, as early as 1919, wrote down the entire system of thought the Nazis would run away with. Then he published it, as “The Economic Consequences of Peace” and that piece of trashy Nazi propaganda became the Bible of pseudo-progressives plutocratic sycophants throughout the Anglo-Saxon world. Including presumably, that of Krugman as he is all things Keynes, night and day.

To this day, Keynes’ TECP is the source of much anti-French hatred and contempt in the Anglo-Saxon world (something Krugman deplores, another of his charming contradictions). Most cultivated Americans have been brain washed, by a time honored Nazi tradition,  to deplore “Versailles” as the cause of everything bad. Those Americans ought to have to line up, and be spanked vigorously by Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Romanians, Serbs and assorted others. French judges could assert when USA buns are rosy enough.

So now Krugman is again in love with Summers for all to see (Curiously he does not extend that affection to Summers’ compère, the Maestro of bubbling, babbling and mumbling, Alan Greenspan (Greenspam, Greenmail? who is out with another trash book).

Summers’ theory is that bubbles are good. It’s nothing new: that “theory” was put in practice by him and Greenspan under Clinton. Now our errant boy, Krugman, is embracing it idly (caveat: although, before anyone, I pointed out 4% inflation was good, I do not embrace bubbles.) In ‘Bubblephobia and Monetary Policy’ Krugman opines that:

“How do you know that monetary policy is too loose? The textbook answer is that excessively expansionary monetary policy shows up in rising inflation; stable inflation means money is neither too loose nor too tight…I’m pretty sure the side Janet Yellen is on, says that at low inflation rates this rule breaks down… stable inflation at a low level is consistent with an economy operating well below potential. [I agree with this.]

But there’s a critique from the other side that seems to be gaining a lot of traction with central bankers not named Janet Yellen — namely, the notion that if asset prices are rising, and that this might signal a bubble, it’s time to tighten, even if inflation is low or falling.

And Krugman to inform us than an esteemed colleague at the Swedish Central Bank was fired because he disagreed with rising interest rates. Indeed, it makes no sense:

Killing The Economy: Good, Say The Plutos, We Will Shine More Brightly

 

The Riksbank raised rates sharply even though inflation was below target and falling, and has only partially reversed the move even though the country is now flirting with Japanese-style deflation. Why? Because it fears a housing bubble.

This kind of fits the H.L. Mencken definition of Puritanism: “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” But here’s the thing: if we really are in the Summers/Krugman/Hansen world of secular stagnation, things like this are going to happen all the time.”

Krugman, Summers, Greenspan, and the entire economic establishment are barking up the money tree. But an ultra major economies have worked without money. I sent Krugman the following, and, perhaps having understood it, he kindly published it.

Thinking of the economy in terms of money only brings the lowest bounds and deliquescent traps to the economic discourse.

There is a housing problem, from Germany to California. A neighbour’ two full grown, professionally employed children, just moved in to share her small apartment. Why? Because in San Francisco, studios are renting at $3,000 a month.

Real estate prices have tripled in Munich, und so weiter.

Verdict? It’s not about money, or “inflation”, it’s about supply of housing. The old solution is to throw money at banks and to hope them to throw some more money at the housing market.

But bankers, and other rich people, have interest to see housing prices go up: thus they become richer, while doing nothing. That is they have more and the others, relatively less. So housing’s supply diminishes, relatively speaking.

In more than three decades, the population of California more than doubled, but housing did not. Especially not where the jobs are. So prices exploded, especially after international plutocracy bought itself a few adobes. Does that mean there is inflation? No. Just not enough housing.

How was the problem solved after WWII in Europe? Entire cities had been levelled (say Toulon in France). Well, the governments simply decided to build housing. Forget the banks. Just pay the contractors directly, and get on with the work.

This stays true today. Government driven, quality (energy neutral) housing ought to be governmentally decided throughout the West.

That would surely help the economy more wisely that frantic fracking. (Fracking can be considered a Ponzi, or pyramid scheme, because it does not pay for the escalating damage it causes, so it’s a repeat of the “subprime” madness, and a crazed bubble.)

So we need more governmental intervention in the economy. But not by just exacerbating the consuming. Turning “patients” into “consumers”, on the “health marketplace” as the clueless Pelobama did, is the way of error. What we need is a government that brings work where needed, directly. (Although fiscal tools could help, say by cutting taxes on construction, and relaxing some regulations.)

Big time energy policy, both in research (Thorium reactors, Thermonuclear Fusion, etc.) and development (replacing planes by nuclear-electric trains, so to speak, etc.) scientifically driven is needed. There are simply projects only the government is big enough, and free from short term profit enough to engage in; see “Synthesis Found”.

Just throwing money at banksters, so they be good, as Krugman and his colleagues have advocated, forever, is not good enough. It’s just perverse enough.

And measuring inflation, as is done in housing, by lack of supply, is deeply erroneous, indeed.

***

Patrice Ayme