THE PLUTOCRACY OF THE USA MANIPULATES THE PEOPLE OF THE USA WITH LIES, BY BRANDISHING FRANCE AS AN OMINOUS FATE.
In an editorial in the New York Times, "One France Is Enough", Roger Cohen opines that: "President Obama, in his restorative counterrevolution, must be careful to steer clear of his French temptation." (March 5, 2009). Indeed he claims that: "Nobody in their right mind would give up the manifold sensual, aesthetic and gastronomic pleasures offered by French savoir-vivre for the unrelenting battlefield of American ambition were it not for one thing: possibility."
Cohen insists: "Americans, at least in their imaginations, have always lived at the new frontier; French frontiers have not shifted much in centuries."
This sort of thinking is rampant in the USA. It is part of a relentless droning by the opinion makers of the USA: France is continually brandished as if she were an ominous fate. (The following was published in the New York Times, electronic edition, March 4, 2009.)
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To claim that Obama is in danger of turning the USA into France is in direct opposition with the observed facts.
If Obama wanted to do this he would have signed two executive orders on the day he became president:
1) Hedge Fund and Private Equity managers would have been taxed at the maximal tax bracket, instead of the outrageous 15% they enjoy now.
2) Citigroup and Bank of America would have been nationalized, their management fired, and they would have been yanked from their holding companies and the derivatives and hedged funds. They would have been recapitalized, and ordered to extend credit as usual.
Obama did not do any such thing. I hoped he would, but he did not. He did quite the opposite. Actually Obama is clinging to the notion of privacy to the point of ruining the world economy. Baker, Greenspan and Graham, all right wing statesmen, have begged him to nationalize the four giant banks that are blocking the world economy. But Obama clings to his hedge funds managers like a little one to mummy.
The credit system is still frozen, and the world economy is in free fall. Obama is advised by Larry Summers, the greatest advocate of Credit Default Swaps, Credit Default Swaps have destroyed the world financial system. Germans and French want to regulate them. Summers wanted the Credit Default Swaps free, so they were set free, and destroyed the world. Summers did that in 1998, when he was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury.
To claim that there is "possibility" in the USA and much less in France is disjoint from the facts. It cultivates anti-French bias. Perhaps companies get created and destroyed in the USA, but so it is in France. Because the USA is bigger, and because of less social legislation, a company such as Wall Mart can grow faster than its French competitor, Carrefour (which is nearly as big, but which allows union membership).
When looking at the history of inventions, art and ideas, France arguably did much more than the USA, even in recent times. Accusations that are too off base, smacks of racism, and the last thing the USA needs right now, is a bigger serving of hubris, while taxing Obama of being French.
Obama is so completely American, it's not even funny. Obama is affected by exaggerated claims of American unicity, a form of nationalism that has blinded the USA in recent decades.
Obama goes around saying that "only in the USA is my story possible". That is literally true, but only in the sense that only in the USA there was so much racism based on skin color, that, a little while ago, he would have been a slave or a janitor, but he is president. But it is not because suddenly the USA is less racist, that the USA has invented antiracism. The Roman empire had Hispanic, Gallic, African, and Arab emperors. Great Britain and France long ago already had Jews leading their governments and/or states (Disraeli, Mac Mahon, Blum). The present French president is the son of a foreigner.
Obama claimed that "the USA invented the Internet" (physicists at CERN in Geneva have a different idea). Obama also claimed that "the USA invented the automobile". As someone who has long known him quipped: "that's why it has a French name". But that is the point entirely: Americans are trained not to think. It has a French name, therefore the USA invented it. This is neo-American logic: I don't think, therefore I am. Saddam killed his own people, as Bush loved to say, therefore I kill Iraqis too. Now Obama sends 17,000 soldiers to kill and get killed in Afghanistan, without a plan, he admits, but Bush wanted to send twice more, so it's "bipartisan": half and half. American logic in wonderland, very neo-American.
In truth the first automobile was by Cugnot, a Frenchman, in 1769, as recognized by everybody, including the British Automobile Association. These first automobiles were steam powered. The internal combustion engine was invented by a Swiss around 1800, and ran on hydrogen (!). A whole slew of European inventors perfected it during the nineteenth century. The first car manufacturers in the world were French: Panhard & Levassor (1889) and Peugeot (1891). But lying about technology make the USA feel good about itself, it creates a sense of national unity. Example of an oft told lie: "the USA invented the transistor (1948)". In truth Germans had invented the first transistors (using Germanium as semi conductor), 15 years earlier.
In general the most fundamental science and technology has been invented in Europe, not in the USA. The USA has not produced thinkers of the caliber of Lamarck, Hugo, Darwin, Nietzsche, Einstein, Poincare', Godel, De Broglie, Dirac, etc. Civilizational class thinking does not blossom in the USA. When one looks at the present USA financial crisis, the greatest heist in the world, and the incapacity of "We The People of the USA" to stop the non sense, while patriotically sending ever more money to those who stole all the money, one is ready to change the meaning of the USA acronym from United States of America into "United Stupid of America".
There again, Obama came up with that very American tendency of making fun at the expense of foreigners. Asked why he did not nationalize the banks, he replied: "Sweden had like five banks", and he laughed. First, of course, it's false, it's a lie meant to create a diversion, sugar coated with a joke: "five banks, ha ha ha". Foreigners living in the USA are often submitted to this sort of demeaning jokes. They happen when American racism is relaxing, and in need of a diversion. In truth, the USA presently has four bank holding companies that are in huge trouble and, together, make two-thirds of the USA market. Thus the USA has four banks, ha ha ha.
The immensely catastrophic socioeconomic system that is devouring the USA needs no encouragement. The usual trick of the US plutocracy is to claim that France is a disaster for creativity, riches, etc. And then to claim that any socioeconomic progress in the USA smacks of France, thus is unpatriotic. In truth, France is richer per capita, has better health care, better high technology in roughly all dimensions, has higher productivity per hour, and so on. What the USA has that France does not have, is the wealthiest class in power, having reduced the middle class to crumbs. To bash foreigners to justify the increasing backwardness of the USA is getting a bit old.
I will try to put more details on my site(s).
Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/
1 comment:
Bravo!
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