Friday, July 31, 2009

HEALTH: FRANCE VERSUS NIXON.

FAIR HEALTH CARE OUGHT TO BE A DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTION.


Justice is an institution. It is separated from other branches of government. In theory at least (but not really since Obama has been interfering with Holder's sword of justice).

France has the best health care in the world, according to international evaluations. Friends of the American health care private profiteering scheme scoff that the French are subject to their government. It will come as a surprise to typically misinformed Americans that private health care insurance covers more than 90% of French subjects. Proportionally more than in the USA!

Not just that, but French insurance companies are doing great: one them, AXA, not content with owning a giant tower in... Manhattan, is building the highest one in Paris, as if there never had been a crash, and so it is for AXA's profits.

So what is going on?

The French "PUBLIC HEALTH" system functions as a single payer for all basic health care, with greater efficiency than a private system, because it does not have to pay managers and owners handsome amounts of money to keep them more interested by the health of their citizens than by exploiting workers in China.

The French "Public Health" negotiates with pharmaceutical companies as a single dealer. The companies make excellent profits, because they do not have huge marketing costs. Their financial maneuvers are watched over, so they can use their capital to make research, not fortunes for third parties. And so on.

The French Public Health actually is self regulated, and is, de facto, an independent democratic institution. It's the government, only in the sense that the justice system is the government.

And what of private insurance in all this?

Well, because basic dental crowns, as reimbursed by "Public Health" do not have that translucent quality you can get from a real artiste, and because, if the doctor prescribes going to a four star resort, and, considering that the Public Health system is cutting down on those... then private insurance steps in.

There is nothing anti-American about the French Public Health system. But there is definitively something anti-American about the present health care plutocracy in the USA. And no wonder: Nixon created it. With tax dollars.

Much more details on my site...http://patriceayme.wordpress.com
***

Patrice Ayme

Monday, July 27, 2009

HEALTH CARE IN PROFIT CONTEXT ALWAYS?

WHEN PROFITS IN THE POCKETS DO NOT PROFIT HEALTH AND MINDS:

Interesting: Here we had on CNBC, Maria Bartiromo (the mile a minute talking head with partially eye occulting hairdo, friend and party to the plutocracy) interviewing the head of the "Cleveland Clinic" .

The later clinic is one of these private contraptions given as an example of excellent private health care for the People. With a third interviewee in tow, Maria and the private head concluded in a chorus that a "public plan" would kill the private sector by offering lower premiums. That, in turn would kill innovation in new treatments and drugs, they all took turns to howl to the sky.
Maria led the howling about the USA having the best health care, the best drugs, the best everything, that the Public would savagely tear apart, etc... The Res-Publica, the Public Thing as a threat to goodness...

This is all the wind of lucre howling... This can be pointed at quantitatively by looking at new drug production.

The creation of drugs in the last twenty years ought to have followed the productivity of computers, and being multiplied by hundreds (the potential for new drugs from natural products is known to be in the millions: countless natural biological products are known to have very strong, very targeted physiological effects, meaning they could be made into drugs). Instead it was divided by three. coming down to a trickle. The production of new antibiotics outright stopped for a decade (now it's starting again a tiny bit). As I pointed on "Too Sick To Care?" (patriceayme.wordpress.com), this has been caused by pharmaceutical companies spending most of their disposable capital in financial maneuvers.

Graphs could be produced, with drug development spending plummeting, while financial maneuvers spending soared, in a zero sum game.

So here we had the example everybody brandishes, and Obama himself brandishes, the Cleveland Clinic, and the discourse was blatantly unbalanced toward the plutocratic, for profit context. No care context. All profit context. And to sugar pill it all, ludicrous chest thumping about the health care of the USA being the best, so far.

As long as it was just having 50 million Americans without health insurance, and many others being driven to bankruptcy from their health problems (as health failure is the # 1 cause of that), it ought to have been fine for the hyper rich. After all they are not known for their altruism, and they were not the ones dying or getting morbid from lack of potential care. Or so they thought.

But now even those rarefied few should get alarmed: the loss of potential improvement in health, even for the plutocracy itself, is enormous, and getting greater every year. The statistics are clear: I am sure that even Paris Hilton could teach them.
***


Patrice Ayme
wordpress.com

Friday, July 24, 2009

THEY SINK, THEREFORE THEY CARE NOUGHT.

(Published by NYT, 23 July 2009)
*

The talking heads in the media have whined. Not enough "folksy anecdotes" in the analysis of health care during Obama's conference on health care, for them? So they claim.

There is a deeper problem. And that is that enforced stupidity has become an instrument of deliberate oppression.

Talking heads in the media and their public have learned to be like children: they want to be told bed time stories, so that their tired little minds can go to sleep.

They cannot handle culture and logic, they are not trained for it. All what appeals to them is what would appeal to little children talking to each other, little anecdotes with a strong imaginary component.

As the Roman republic went down, culture and art went down, and they went down well ahead of the military and economic capabilities. Rome became idiotic first, and then , several decades later, it became completely incapacitated in all ways. Only then did the Huns moved in, from distant Mongolia.

Why did Rome become idiotic? Because the Roman republic had been kidnapped by the hyper rich "Senatorial" class. The hyper rich quickly learned that they ruled best over dummies, and bleating sheep. During the transition to generalized idiocy, those who refused to cooperate were killed. The philosopher and Consul Cicero, saw the hands he was writing with chopped off, and nailed to the Senate door. And that is not an imaginary anecdote a la Reagan. This atrocity was meant to impress those too willing to keep on writing down smart, progressive thoughts.

Finally the plutocracy mixed up with the theocrats, and any knowledge or thinking was denounced as an insult to "God". This episode is now called the Dark Ages. But it started with the rise of the stupid, paid by the hyper rich to extinguish c ulture and intelligence.

This is exactly what is going in the media today. The venality and stupidity of the "debate" on health care is deliberate, it is made to encourage stupidity, it teaches stupidity, it celebrates stupidity.

In truth, if anything should escape the profit motive, it is compassion. The obsession with profits and costs (not just the profits and costs of a financial, but also those of a legal, business, or marketing character) perverts the entire health care system in the USA. And not just for medical decisions.

For example, a peer reviewed article in Science Magazine explains that fewer and fewer drugs are brought to market (down to less than 30 from a peak triple this twenty years ago), because pharmaceutical companies are playing Wall Street. In truth MILLIONS of drugs could be brought to market, from natural products alone, says Science.

And so on. The health care insurance industry exists in a country such as France (with the best health care according to the WHO), but it does not insure the life threatening conditions' basic treatments. That is automatic (even for sick or hurt Americans who would happen to pass through France). Private health care in France insures only added comfort or plastic surgery type treatments. The moral position that an industry can thrive according to the modus operandi:"Your money, or your life!" is untenable in this civilization, and has been rejected in all advanced countries, except the USA.

At this point the extravagant portion of GDP given to those who profit financially from the bad health of others has become a strategic threat to the USA.

Wisely, Obama is gambling that he can defeat the stupidity head on, by rising the mental level of the debate. If he fails, the USA will keep on collapsing mentally, and the rest will follow. After all, the financial crisis, and the way it was solved (replenishing with20public money, the private perpetrators themselves, without any strings attached) is the sort of idiocy that history shows change the fate of civilizations, and not for the best.
***

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

WHAT AILS THE ARABS? [A foretaste.]

ZIONIST ENTITY VERSUS ISLAMIST ENTITY? OR JUST THE LATER?


"The Economist" disserts on Arabia (July 23, 2009). Another occasion for me to attack the subject with the sharp knife of unbowed philosophy, while proffering my usual incantations (please respect me as I practice my religion of universal critique). (A more detailed essay extending this will appear, hopefully, on wordpress, where many articles on the subject already exist, following those on patriceayme.com.)
***


"The Economist" comes back on the mysterious philosophico-political disease that afflicts Arab speaking nations, and turns around the problem like the wolf turns around the moose, not daring to bite, or even to come too close... No apparent desire to experience high explosives, or sharp blades, how to blame them?

An instant optimistic, "The Economist" opines in its lead editorial that:"A quiet revolution has begun in the Arab world; it will be complete only when the last failed dictatorship is voted out." Still "The Economist" wonders: "What ails the Arabs?", but it does not dare, or is unable to give one of these sharp answers it likes.

All it dares to do, is to hint at the nature of the disease:

..."more people, especially women, are becoming educated, and businessmen want a bigger say in economies dominated by the state. Above all, a revolution in satellite television has broken the spell of the state-run media and created a public that wants the rulers to explain and justify themselves as never before. On their own, none of these changes seems big enough to prompt a revolution. But taken together they are creating a great agitation under the surface. The old pattern of Arab government—corrupt, opaque and authoritarian—has failed on every level and does not deserve to survive."

In other words, according to "The Economist" what ails the Arabs is a cultural phenomenon.

Reading more carefully, one see that it has to do with Islam:

"Some in the West are wary of Arab elections, fearing that Islamists would exploit the chance to seize power on the principle of “one man, one vote, one time”. Yet Islamists seem to struggle to raise their support much above 20% of the electorate. Non-Arab Muslim countries like Turkey and Indonesia suggest that democracy is the best way to draw the poison of extremism. Repression only makes it more dangerous."

"The Economist" forgets to mention that such was the theory of the Islamists in Algeria, twenty years ago. After they won the first round of elections, the Algerian army had to seize power, and reset the (would-be) democratic system to zero. Otherwise Algeria would be now like Iran (or probably much worse, because there is so much Western European culture in Algeria, that there would have been an even more horrific civil war than what happened, with just a few hundred thousands killed).

"The Economist" forgets to mention also that in most countries where Islam cohabits with democracy nowadays, a very violent past cracked down on Islam, way back.
***

WE PRAY QUIETLY, THUS THEY CAN PREY MIGHTILY:

OK, enough with the wooden tongue, the one that is in the mouth, but does not quite work, due to rigidity and inappropriateness to the supple nature of thought.

Some Arabs would say it's the Zionist Entity, or colonialism, that afflicts Arabia, or... But rarely is the Islamist Entity evoked.

Islam is to blame for the friendliness of Arab countries to dictatorship. A command in Islam (a verse in the Qur'an) orders believers to follow their leaders without any question, as long as they are Muslim. To do otherwise is to disobey God.

Thus the problem is very simple, and not really different from the catastrophic fanaticism that caused the Dark Ages in the Roman empire.

Islam is actually a direct prolongation of it: Muhammad faithfully copied what he had below his nose, and that inspired him so much, the demented caesaropapism a la Justinian, which had immensely damaged the Roman empire and civilization itself, from a particular interpretation of Roman Catholicism, which was imposed by killing millions and oppressing even more (leading to a terrible war with Sassanid Persia).

What of countries which have Muslim majorities, and are not dictatorship? Well, they adopted enough of the Western European model in their political culture to fight off Islam. This is true for Turkey, or Indonesia, etc... In Iran, the father of the late Shah, founder of his dynasty, took even more terrible measures against Islam than Ataturk did. Simply something is left of that history today.

Here is the verse in the Qur'an:

“O YE WHO BELIEVE! Obey Allah, and obey the messenger and OBEY THOSE OF YOU WHO ARE IN POWER.” (Qur’an’s , Sura 4; verse 59).

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com

For more details please see:

http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2009/06/14/

And also:

http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2009/06/22/

Thursday, July 23, 2009

PLUTOCRACY REIGNS BEST OVER IDIOCY

ENFORCED STUPIDITY AS A TOOL OF DELIBERATE OPPRESSION.


Talking heads in the media complained that Obama did not tell just little anecdotes during his description of the problem of the health care system. Krugman opines that: "what are the talking heads really complaining about? It’s not what Obama didn’t do — it’s what he did, namely talk seriously about policy. How unpresidential of him!"

But there is a deeper problem. And that is that enforced stupidity has become an instrument of deliberate oppression.

Talking heads in the media and their public are like children: they want to be told bed time stories, so that their tired little minds can go to sleep.

They cannot handle culture and logic, they are not trained for it. All what appeals to them is what would appeal little children talking to each other, little anecdotes with a strong imaginary component.

As the Roman republic went down, culture and art went down, and they went down ahead of the military and economic capabilities. Rome became idiotic first, and then was progressively completely incapacitated.

Why did Rome become idiotic? Because the Roman republic had been kidnapped by the hyper rich "Senatorial" class. The hyper rich tolerated only dummies. During the transition to generalized idiocy, those who refused to cooperate were killed. The philosopher and Consul Cicero, saw the hands he was writing with chopped off, and nailed to the Senate door. And that is not an imaginary anecdote a la Reagan. It was meant to impress those too willing to keep on writing down smart, progressive thoughts.

Finally the plutocracy mixed up with the theocrats, and any knowledge or thinking was denounced as an insult to "God". This episode is called the Dark Ages. But it started with the rise of the stupid, paid to reign by the hyper rich.

This is exactly what is going in the media today. The venality and stupidity of the "debate" on health care is deliberate, it is made to encourage stupidity, it teaches stupidity. Wisely, Obama is gambling that he can defeat the stupidity head on, by rising the mental level. If he fails, the USA will keep on collapsing mentally, and the rest will follow. After all, the financial crisis, and the way it was solved (replenishing the perpetrators) is the sort of idiocy that history shows change the fate of civilization, and not for the best.
***

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/
***
(published in Krugman's blog comments, #10)
***



Here is the full Krugman blog post.
July 23, 2009.

"What’s in a name?
OK, so let me get this straight. The initial reaction of the cable talking heads was that Obama blew it because he didn’t couch his argument in terms of personal anecdotes, Reagan-style. Then, when it was pointed out that he did, in fact, offer a number of specific examples of people harmed by our current system, the whine became that he didn’t give their names.

Now, it’s true that George Bush liked to give names of people who would benefit from his tax cuts; but Ronald Reagan’s anecdotes — about, say, the Cadillac-driving welfare queen — generally didn’t name names. And there was a good reason for that: with rare exceptions, Reagan’s folksy anecdotes weren’t true.

So what are the talking heads really complaining about? It’s not what Obama didn’t do — it’s what he did, namely talk seriously about policy. How unpresidential of him!"

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

THINKER IN CHIEF?

In his blog, Krugman reveals that Obama is the "Professor in chief": "I found Obama’s health care presentation so impressive — so much command of the issues — that it had me worried. If I really like a politicians’ speech, isn’t that an indication that he lacks the popular touch? (A couple of points off for “incentivize” — what ever happened to “encourage”? — but never mind.)

Seriously, it’s really good to see how much he gets it."


Yes, well, I particularly loved the sneak attacks against "the profit motive" delivered with great care and subtility, so as not to hurt and revolt, but just so as to leave a deep mark on the subconscious of the bleating media sheep (which seemed aware of their own mental short comings as they struggled to rise to the occasion, something I have observed with sheep in the wild, when they try to understand what to do). And, of course, that presentation was made to change the subconscious of the nation, as the dose of higher philosophy ("health care is not about profit, and actually the profit motive is toxic to health") was delivered twice with an extremely light touch, as if Obama himself was baffled by the idea, and was just trying to formulate modestly gathering thoughts...

Indeed, it's high time that "We The People" understands that stupidity is the road to hell in a waste basket. The popular obsession of mental retardation shrouded in sport scores, is not just ludicrous, it's an indecent threat to planetary survival.

In the present situation, the revolutionary reflex: "Off With Their Heads!, cannot even be evoked. Verily, before the people's heads could be cut off, they would need some. We may as have been dealing with sponges placidly bathing in plutocratic juice, but now Obama is showing them what a brain can do.

Obama's role is to be father of the nation, and he does that very well, because a father is someone who knows, and feels, more. It's easy to know more than children who have travelled nowhere. Obama has lived overseas, and not just overseas in an equivalent place such as Western Europe, but overseas in a (at the time) severely underdeveloped country of the Muslim type (my case exactly, by the way, but longer and deeper, making me fiercer).

So Obama is mentally deep (except in the waters where Larry Summers swim like a self assured globular sardine, while Obama is not hungry yet). It is good that the American People is exposed to some mental activity of the higher type, that's what the USA needs. The best profits are of the mental type. Learn.

By the way, there is a tradition in a country such as France, of presidents who actually know their stuff, and have the "vision thing" as Bush the First used to say, in one of his most notable efforts to form a sentence.

It is a particular grotesque behavior that American presidents have been overly dependent on "speech writers" to think. Obama is the Thinker In Chief, and powers to that! It is not just human, what man is all about, but it is also honest: instead of a plutocratic machine producing a figurehead actor, we get a human being thinking higher thougths.

So do not tremble, oh little Krugman, sheeps cannot devour minds.

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

FREE MARKETS FANATICS CRASH AND BURN.

AMERICAN ECONOMISTS AS UNIVERSAL MECHANICS:

Doctor Paul Krugman suddenly shows his true colors, from back when he was an adviser of Ronald Reagan, before he played progressive in the media, for his greater glory.

He writes in his blog, July 21, 2009: “The solution to climate change must rely... on market mechanisms — it’s too complex an issue to deal with using command-and-control. ”

Really? Another complex issue is air traffic control, which, thus, according to the good Dr. Krugman, "must rely on market mechanisms". Goldman Sachs could sell the right to land first to who will pay more in the instant. Then if someone pays even more, they could sell the right to land first to that one instead. And so on. Then they could sell bets on who will crash first.

No doubt, pretty soon, air travel would experience a final solution to the problem of its existence. Most planes having crashed, there would be no more carbon emission that way. The air travel industry would follow the American society into the ground. Or even below, where Pluto is located.
***

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

P/S 1: Of course high fossil fuel taxes is the way to conserve and force efficiencies. A carbon tax is the way to fix, worldwide the worst proble of globalization, which is that it gave ways for plutocracy to turn around legislation.

[P/S 2: The central argument above is too critical of the market concept as panacea, so the New York Times refused to publish it, pursuing a pattern of avoiding to publish my deepest critiques against the present economic system (they systematically refused to publish my observations about the private fractional reserve banking system, for example)...]

Sunday, July 19, 2009

RUB IT IN: RUBIN FOREVER.

PLUS DE CHANGE, PLUS DE PLUTOCRACIE:
***

In his blog post, "Morning Joe" (July 19, 2009), Paul Krugman deplores the absence in the Obama administration of a great economist such as Stiglitz (and, implicitly, and naturally, himself). Paul makes a few observations:

"...the larger story is the absence of a progressive-economist wing. A lot of people supported Obama over Clinton in the primaries because they thought Clinton would bring back the Rubin team; and what Obama has done is … bring back the Rubin team. Even the advisory council, which is supposed to bring in skeptical views, does so by bringing in, um, Marty Feldstein..."

[Martin Feldstein is an extreme conservative (by European standards) economist, a partisan advising G. W. Bush to privatize social security, and a fanatical enemy of Europe, who views Europe as a natural enemy of the USA, and who naturally opposed the European currency in all ways.]

OK, let Paul finish his discourse:

"The point is that even if you think the leftish wing of economics doesn’t have all the answers, you’d expect some people from that wing to be at the table...

Joe Stiglitz stands out because in addition to being on the progressive wing, he’s also, as I said, a giant among academic economists. But I think the real story is more about excluded points of view than excluded people."
***
So I sent the following comment supporting Paul's views:

Indeed, many people supported Obama because they were sure that Clinton would bring back the Rubin team of plutocratic critters.

So Obama brought back the Rubin team, demonstrating that the plutocratic octopus is everywhere, and that there is something deep about Nader's insistence that the game is rigged.

Nader did not invent that line: it's the old saw that Communists and Socialists were using already a century ago.

After the Communists and Socialist made headway with that observation, the plutocrats produced the fascists who carefully imitated Communist and Socialist headlines with their own propaganda (Mussolini and Hitler said that they carefully did so).

So now, here we are. Just standing in place is called being part of the "progressive wing". Because what we are facing is a regressive movement. People who insist that destroying the earth is no worries of theirs, people who insist that worth is defined by financial profits, and that only a small oligarchy can have access to these financial profits, and that the entire population should pay to make it so, are not conserving any of the character of the republic.

In truth, they are regressives, who want to go back to the Middle Ages, and have already partly succeeded to do so. Why? Because they are turning into the new Lords. Politicians are motivated to help them achieve this status, because they are themselves rewarded the old fashion way, by being elevated to considerably greater riches as Clinton was (the average Congressman and Senator are already multi millionaire while they "serve" their mandates, namely themselves).
***

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/
***

P/S: A president, though, contacted Stiglitz, and gave him a mission: try to define a better definition of GDP.

This has been one my war horses: to redefine GDP completely (and I have an elaborated solution, involving USING ENERGY AS CURRENCY, which allows to discard the inefficient part of GDP, and introduce in GDP what is very worthy, but not in the present GDP).

That president is located in Paris, he is the president of France, and his name is Sarkozy. It is instructive to realize that Merkel, Sarkozy, and even Brown, are way left of Obama, and are using American intellectual resources to progress. But, once one has realized that economically Obama is the Rubin team, that is not very surprising.

One thing that would surprise Americans, though, is the spite and anger, even among leaders, that the impudence of American plutocracy is causing overseas.
***

Friday, July 17, 2009

WHEREOF ONE CANNOT THINK, THEREOF ONE MUST NOT KILL.

Tyranosopher wrote:
July 18, 2009 5:39

What is the aim of the war in Afghanistan? For the Afghans, it is to get rid of the invaders. For Mr. Obama, it is to get rid of Al Qaeda. But Al Qaeda is not in Afghanistan anymore. So why is Mr. Obama truly sending more combat troops in Afghanistan and making more war? So that more people, and soldiers, will get killed?

It is more important to know why one is fighting a war than to fight it. Why one is fighting is the most important ingredient for victory, when the issue of a war is uncertain. When one bombs people's home, to kill them, one better make sure one's reasons are good. But the West is bombing people's homes, in Afghanistan, and its reasons are no good.

Neither the Taliban, nor Al Qaeda were created by Afghanistan, or by Afghans: both were created by the CIA, or by proxies of the CIA such as the ISI from Pakistan.

Mr. Obama heard that the Afghan government has confirmed a misogynistic law confirming that women, by law, can be raped by their husbands, but, by law, they have to enjoy it. He became indignant, asked for reconsideration. Why? Does Mr. Obama celebrate Islam? Has not he declared in Cairo he would be the defender of that faith? The Qur'an explicitly take the position confirmed by the Afghan legislature allowing men to rape women ("women are your fields, so men go into your fields however you want, etc..."). When he heard of this, Mr. Obama decided to fall silent, deciding suddenly to follow Wittgenstein's advice: " "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent".

The constitution of the Islamist Republic of Afghanistan is Islam (and thus the Qur'an). So far, so good. So what is NATO doing in Afghanistan? Defending the Afghan Islamist constitution. Against whom? Islamists. Mr. Obama made clear he loved Islamists, just not those. Those he wants to kill. Why? Because they kill people. Why does Mr. Obama go to Afghanistan to kill Islamists? Because that's where they live.

In other words, Western leadership has obviously gone crazy. The philosophical aim of the war has become to defend a peculiar view of Islam against a certain group of Islamists (thus it aims at establishing a particular religion, a characterized violation of the constitution of the USA).

To understand the Afghanistan war, at this point, G. Orwell' "!984" seems more important than American discourses. Time to go home.

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

(Published in "The Economist")

GOLD MAN SACKS

REFINED CENSORSHIP:
The comment below (after ***XXX***) was sent swiftly to the New York Times, after Krugman's editorial. My comment agreed with the editorial, but it went much further; for some reason, the NYT thought it was better not to publish it; now the strongest statement in my comment, was, by far, the attack against the Fractional Reserve Banking System; thus the conclusion I reach that it is viewed as a dangerous assault against the core of the system. Which it is. This shows the power and subtility of media control. This is not the first time this happens.)
***

THE PLUTO IN PLUTOCRACY:
In Russia one more courageous woman lawyer fighting for human rights was arrested by uniformed security forces, in full day light, and promptly shot to death. This is what happens when an oligarchy is even more out of control than the one in the USA today.

The criminal behavior of some fascist oligarchs in Russia is reminiscent,in its reckless disregard for a semblance of civilization, to the reckless behavior of some financiers in the USA. Or conversely.

Paul Krugman has joined the chorus against Goldman Sachs, a typical, ongoing financial conspiracy in the USA (before 2009, that conspiracy was called an "investment bank", now it's simply a "bank").

Says Krugman in his NYT editorial (July 17, 2009): "Goldman Sachs’s record quarterly profits show us that the investment bank is very good at what it does. Unfortunately, what it does is bad for America."

Here is my comment below (a more incisive version, "Gold Man Sucks", with sharper philosophy, will hopefully be posted on patriceayme.wordpress):
***XXX***

COMMENT ON GOLDMAN SACHS AND BANKING SPURNED BY THE NEW YORK TIMES:

Goldman Sachs would not exist if not for the taxpayer. The taxpayer saved Goldman Sachs from extinction in 2008. To reward the taxpayer, Goldman Sachs is fully reestablishing its dominion.

Goldman Sachs got a 13 billion dollars gift through AIG, from the taxpayer, and probably much more, secretly, at some point through the secret operations of the Federal Reserve (unaudited by the US Congress). Just these $13 billion is about 25% of the stimulus distributed, so far, for more than 300 million Americans. But Goldman Sachs got it in 2008. Goldman gets first class service, and most of the service that exists. The USA seems to exist to serve Goldman.

China's economy is growing again close to 8% per year. Why? Because of a giant stimulus to its economy. In the USA, there has been an even much larger stimulus. But not a stimulus for the economy; that one is small: officially $787 billion but in truth a small fraction of this (once the AMT and the subventions to the crashing states have been removed).

No, the giant stimulus in the USA has been for the bankers, the same group of private individuals, some particular bankers, that caused the disaster to start with. All of Goldman Sachs is part of it. Banks should have been saved as institutions, no doubt. But should well organized criminals be saved too? Yes, it sounds like an unrelated question. So why did the government of the USA relate both propositions? Because there are always Goldman Sachs officers in the government of the USA? Does this have to do with Goldman Sachs' acumen in profiting from the disasters it itself advise periodically to engage in?

China has banks too. But the Chinese government gave guidelines about who and what should get money for its real stimulus to the economy, and that meant the real economy, not speculation.

How come China could achieve this, and not the USA? Because China is a People's republic. The Chinese government controls its bankers. In the USA, the bankers control the government.

Make no mistake: China is also a plutocracy. Children of Communist party officials control the economy to a great extent. official statistics show this. Simply, the USA is even more of a plutocracy, and thus, in that particular dimension, less of a republic.

In the fractional reserve system, bankers, private individuals, fabricate the money. It is time to realize that this FRACTIONAL RESERVE SYSTEM IS A DEVOLUTION OF CIVILIZATION. The only way out is to reestablish a greater control of banking, enforcing on bankers an ontology, an oath of office, and severe controls, to finally make them officially into the officers of the state they already are. It is part of the solution for allowing its rightful owners, the People,to repossess the State.

Indeed, right now, a particular group of private bankers and their business associates, rule the USA as their own private state, instead of letting the public do their own thing (which is what a republic is, supposedly).

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

INFINITE WISDOM ONLY FROM ETERNAL LIFE?

SINCE WISDOM EXTENSION WE NEED, LIFE EXTENSION WE WILL SEEK.

Extending life will extend wisdom. Not just because people will know more, including how childish many a passion is, but because they will have more to lose if policies go wrong.

So life extension will not be a luxury, but a necessity, because if a given threshold of wisdom is not reached, humanity will be exterminated.

BTW, there is a theory, by very serious people, that it is stress, not calorie restriction per se, which causes life extension in animals. So here! (Anti oxydant studies' perplexing results have led to this counter-intuitive view...)


Patrice Ayme

http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

Thursday, July 2, 2009

MONEY SWINDLER GUIDANCE

WHEN THE HOUSE GOES TO THE FOXES.

Obama passed a pseudo stimulus package of around 800 billion dollars. Some of it was fake, such as the AMT adjustment(a standard part of the Fed budget), some was running in place: such as money sent to states that are cutting their own spending. Best example: 50 billion dollars of the Federal stimulus is sent to California, at the time when California state budget went into a deep freeze (thousands of California state projects were stopped, all employees were told to stay home, and not be paid one Friday out of two; starting July first, it's three days with no work and no pay, almost two months worth of salary, and work, a year, now reduced to zero, and the pitiful Obama stimulus cannot stop that non sense).

Moreover, the Obama "stimulus" spent so far is about 50 billion dollars. China's stimulus was about 500 billions, but three quarters of it has been spent, and it's on real infrastructure.

By comparison, Goldman Sachs, through TARP money sent to AIG, got a gift of 13 billion dollars from the proverbial "taxpayers", the government of the USA, in the name of the American People. Question: what does Goldman Sachs make? What employment does it support? For example, Boeing makes planes. Goldman Sachs makes transactions, as many as possible, and then extracts a cut for each. It does not make anything real, let alone anything that would help people. Goldman Sachs has been about greasing the wheels for so long, there are not more wheels, only grease.

When FDR was president the Federal budget was a very small part of GDP (this changed only with World War Two) . So FDR could do little, but to legislate very creatively and very boldly and intelligently, and all of that he did.

Obama, by contrast, controls a huge part of the GDP, but he gave most of this control to the dim witted foxes he put in charge of watching the hen house (see above: 50 billion stimulus, so far, 13 billion for Goldman Sachs alone, if not more through the central bank secret operations). Obama can do a lot, but, as long as he puts the profiteers in charge of not changing the system, all he can show is the profiteers profiteering again, as he boasts of regularly on TV, as if he accomplished something important. Well, maybe important to him.

Just two examples from France: the government there has decided to create a gigantic fast automatic 24/7 train in an immense eight connecting all four of Paris airports and business districts and central hubs. Cost: 50 billion dollars. Work on four new high speed train lines is proceeding. The high speed train line through the "metropolises" of the French Riviera (Marseilles-Toulon-Cannes-Nice) was decided this week. It will be underground a lot, so it's immensely expensive: 30 billion dollars. Next generation nuclear reactors are also being built. And so on. That is what one calls really stimulating.

Eco-nomy means house-management. It does not mean profiteering from the house. As long as Obama puts financiers (Summers, Geithner, and various other mental gnomes from Goldman Sachs) in charge of managing the house, they will keep on stealing it. That's all they know. For a fox, the essence of intelligence is killing chicken.

House-management is fundamentally not about money. Money helps to motivate the children, and keep tabs on their activities, but rather it's just a way to help, not the essence of the thing. The essence is productive work. It's for the People and its democratically elected government, guided by the deepest thinkers to decide what productive work is, it is not the business of the money swindlers.

Such is Obama's mistake, and it could all end very badly, if he does not correct this in time.

I know someone with a PhD who works as an quality control inspector overseeing the Food and Drug Administration. She informed me an hour ago that all her portion of the overseeing system she works for will be cancelled in September. Meanwhile Mr. Obama is stimulating the Afghans by killing and terrorizing a lot of them. Change you can sneer by.

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/