Good Will Is Not Enough

Is the USA a bystander, or a perpetrator? We all know the answer. The USA is the world greatest polluter and consumer, once the factories working in China for the USA are considered.
As the wise has said, and will say, for evil to triumph, all it takes is for men, and countries, of good will, to do nothing. The USA has done nothing, once again, as happened when fascism rose. And evil will triumph. Again.
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Obama, Funny Guy

So finally Obama is going to stimulate infrastructure instead of sending palliative money to daily spending. 50 billion dollars.
France is building several LGVs, Lignes a Grande Vitesse (High Speed Rail Lines). One of them is the TGV des Metropoles du Sud (Southern Metropolises LGV). Presently High Speed Rail can go only at 125 mph on the regular lines on that 150 miles region. The new speeds will be up to 250 mph.
Cost? About 30 billion dollars. Just that one line.

Compare with Obambi.
PA

Imagine there is no thinking...

Plato and Aristotle were pro-fascist, pro-plutocratic. They naturally recommended intellectual fascism, and thus, censorship in general, and suspicion towards art and poetry, or the imagination.

The imagination branches out possibilities and probabilities into the future. Art, poetry just put it down into a material medium. To be against it, is to be against freedom of minds, and the future. A tall order. But not tall enough for fascism and plutocracy, whose very essence is to crack down on independent minds, and the future.

Aristotle was more open to art than Plato. However, even the invention of the word "catharsis" and the concept attached to it by Aristotle is suspicious. The qualities in poetry Plato thought so negative were useful to "purge" violent and destructive emotions. Such was the importance of performance art for Aristotle: a will to control permeates his "Poetics".

By enacting violence and destructive emotions on the stage, poetry "purged" audiences of these negative traits. Thus catharsis elevated the human personality and made better domesticated citizens, ready to serve Aristotle's pupil, Alexander.

We are far from the rebellious spirit the Franks would impose later to the Roman (Catholic!)empire.

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Carbon Tax To Reduce China

Krugman accuses China of playing games with its overvalued currency. He threatens trade sanctions.

Instead of talking sanctions, why don't we talk carbon tax? That would be more polite.

Let me explain for those who are not in the know: any item bought from China has a hidden cost in carbon pollution which is much greater than in goods locally produced (no transportation costs) and, moreover, China uses much more very polluting coal to produce said goods. By slapping on Chinese goods the cost of this pollution that everyone pays for one could cripple Chinese trade. And Chinese pollution is a serious problem, not just in China: it's a major contributor to pollution, worldwide, even in the Arctic, where mercury vapor from burning Chinese coal poisons the sea life.
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Trading Vipers

From a pirate of finance: "newsflash: people with no hands on experience of derivative markets should stop writing things that make them look stupid."Pete D


Reply:
@ Pete D: What is stupid is to derivate most of the universe free, investable capital, towards a derivative universe. because it is the path of destruction of civilization.

Not all trading is allowed: for example, one cannot buy and sell people anymore. Although it was long lawful in the USA. Progress is often about making unlawful tomorrow what was lawful, yesterday. Those who don’t understand that are stupid. Ultimately capital represents energy, and deliberately wasting capital in mutual bets in derivative universes is a crime, because, in the fullness of time, we have only that much energy to waste before switching to a more sustainable civilization. If we don't switch, we must deperish.

But of course, some people are so stupid that all they understand is their pocket, and how to fill it.

A viper’s brain is fast, about one thing, and it does only that one thing really better than any other creatures: inject poison, and swallow. I do not expect vipers to understand much more than that. Derivative traders and vipers may be fast and well fed, but they do not a civilization make.
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/
PA

Way Out

The way out of the present Great Depression should have three axes:

1) a higher inflation target, around 4%. The European Central Bank targeted 1%, which is 1% removed from deflation, which is a trap with no exit.

2) government organized stimulus, New Deal style. It worked in the 1930s, in the USA and Germany.

3) national banks investing in the real economy (an old European trick now used by China and India)


Let's notice that Japan would be in depression, if not for massive government spending. Now, of course Japan has a total debt of 200% of GDP, nearly twice the one of Greece.

The American plutocrats' obsession about Greece not be ready for the euro is neither here nor there.

The drachma was converted at the wrong rate.

Moreover, the present crisis is made to bring the euro down to parity with the dollar quickly. Europe is punishing China and the USA for atrocious behavior at the Copenhagen climate conference. The euro is still more than 20% overvalued right now (mid May 2010).

American economists may have to enjoy the future double dip, if they do not mind USA plutocracy more than they do the European Union.


http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

American Plutocrats No Pasaran Mañana.

Paul Krugman, playing half clueless, bemoans that the Euro did not head back up in the stratosphere, where it can't breathe: "Yes, I know — the point is not to lift the euro. Still, the exchange rate is a quick measure of the impact on eurozone confidence, which bounced with the policy announcement but doesn’t seem to be staying up …"

OK, let's repeat slowly, so Krugman can learn the half of the lesson he did not quite digest yet:


To relaunch growth in Europe, the Euro, and its poodle, the Pound, have to come down big time. So rescue all you want, but go down. Go down at a more sedate pace, but go down. Down is a long way down.


The Euro was established by fixing parity against the very long term value of the French Franc. More recently, under the EMu and the Ecu, the long term average was a bit higher, at 1.07.


In any case, the support of the European Union for the economy of the USA is over: time to care about number one, namely Europe. The modern version of Smoot Hawley bill, Obama's ill conceived plan to double USA exports, will not pass. No pasaran.

Smoot-Hawley, passed in July 1930, boosted tariffs by 50%, and caused the Great Depression of the 1930s. To lift the Euro by 60% belongs to the same sort of ilk. Fortunately this time Europe is unified and democratic, and, while the somewhat confused Merkel went to find solace with her Russian friends, Sarkozy and company did what needed to be done (OK, they may have started the whole thing as a device to lower the Euro, agreed, so they were well placed to stop what they started...)


Notice that, last time this battle cry was offered, by "La Pasionara" during the attack against the Spanish republic by the fascist forces of Italy and Germany, with a rebel army from spanish Morocco headed by traitor general Franco,they passed nevertheless. And stayed for several decades.

But they passed, because they flew overhead, fueled by Texas oil (it was one of the rare things that made Adolf Hitler laugh). The Spanish Navy had blockaded Africa, where the fascist rebel force was, so Hitler's Luftwaffe organized an aerial bridge into Spain. That is also what we are talking about when we defend the Euro.


Nowadays, though, the risk has come down. There is less oil in Texas, and we know where the Gulf oil goes, and the US Army is searching for oil in all the wrong places...


Those who bathe in crude shall drown in it too.

PA

Fusion-Fission Solution

Oil and the like can be extracted at increasingly unbearable cost (same holds for coal and sand oil, shale oil, etc...). It's not just a question of CO2, but of exhausted technology. Something similar happened to the Romans: they called it: "the world is getting old".


A program to build Fusion-Fission thermonuclear power plants program should be started in a hurry. Besides enormous clean energy production, it would allow to get rid of nuclear waste, all over the world, and produce plenty of electricity to run an electrical economy (besides renewable energies).

All indicates that, differently from PURE thermonuclear fusion plants, the technology exists already, it's just a matter of putting together the details. Existing thermonuclear reactor (such as the JET, Joint European Torus) can produce plenty of fast neutrons to split, among other things, conventional, not very radioactive U 238. Future reactors such as ITER aim at producing ten times as much energy thermonuclearly as is put in. But the walls will take a beating.

In a fusion-fission reactor, the walls are made of a fissionable materials (U238 split under fast neutrons, as produced by thermonuclear fusion; enriched in U235 uranium splits under slow neutrons). So the walls get destroyed, made progressively less radioactive (I simplify), but that produces energy. This way all nuclear waste can be burned.

The reason why fusion-fission has not been pushed so far is that Beyond Pain (BP) companies such as BP have zero interest to see it appear.
PA

http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

WHY BIG BANKERS ARE OUTLAWS.

1) We are living in a state of law. Supposedly.

2) That state is democracy, the rule of the demos, the people.

3) Political leaders have recently given PRIVATE unelected individuals, the bankers, the means, and the right to create money, the money everybody uses, through debt, starting from PUBLIC funds.


3) Contradicts the union of 1) and 2).

Thus, the present system incite, big, money creating BANKERS TO BECOME GANGSTERS, and OUTLAWS.


It is as simple as that. Thus one needs to get rid of the private fractional reserve PUBLICLY funded money creating system.


PA

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Punish China For The Right Reasons.

Paul Krugman has been the instigator of what is now a vast chorus to view the underevaluation of the Chinese currency as a serious problem. I do agree, sort of, but I extend the critique to the US dollar: it, too is undervalued.

So, according to Paul, China has got to be punished, because it exports its savings, and we are so incompetent, we do not know what to do with them, because we are not expansionary enough... As it is, this reminds me a bit of punishing people, because they saved too much, and were too industrious, thus owning too much, in part thanks of an alleged conspiracy of them... Hmmm... Was not that exactly the Nazis' main drift against a particular minority?

Being also as bad as they come, I also want to punish the Chinese, but only to encourage them to become better planetary citizens. I do think that the technological and economic, not to say social stagnation of the West is the West's problem, not China, and China ought not to be punished for it. Instead the West ought to be punished for not striving to stay on top of the existing hierarchy, and on top of the planetary problems we have.

Not to preserve the existing hierarchy will lead to instability, hence war. Same with not solving the drastic ecological problems (acidification, water, climate change, population growth).

If China manipulates its currency, it has to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. First. Also the duties ought to correspond to the minimum of the proven depreciation; if the renminbi is undervalued by 10% minimum, then impose 10% minimum duties, etc.

China working hard and saving is a good thing. We ought to emulate it. What we ought to not emulate, and encourage China to get out of, is its carbon solution. Reigning in our plutocrats, in bed with the Chinese dictatorship, is our problem, not China's. Just as the plutocrats out-maneuvered the Nazis, in the end, they will out-maneuver China at the first occasion. They out-maneuvered us on health care, and with the on-going existence of their vampiric financial scheme. We do not want them to out-maneuver us again, using China as a trampoline.

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The Main Points About The Regalian Banking System We Have.

The first key point about finance as it exists is that private, unsupervised, unelected financial establishments are able to create most of the money in use in the realm. It is a major misleading omission to behave as if this was compatible with democracy (see what Rothschild thought about it below).

The second key point is that they are allowed to create it through debt, in other words, serfdom.

The third key point is that modern financial creators are allowed to give said money they created to whoever, and whatever they please. "Whoever" they call that "talent", and "whatever" is the derivative universe, which, as its name indicates, is not the real universe. The derivative universe is just a way to claim imaginary revenue, imaginary profits, and, thus, all too real bonuses, and manipulative powers onto the world of economics, politics, and sociology.

The fourth key point is that they avoid supervision, election, and, in general the entire democratic process; this is called the 'independence" of the Federal Reserve bank. "independence" from democracy, that is.


All these powers of modern finance are regalian.


As Rothschild said: "I care not what puppet is placed on the throne of England to rule the Empire, ...The man that controls Britain's money supply controls the British Empire. And I control the money supply."


But kings, especially non elected ones, become arrogant, because they want to celebrate their power. Thus now they have forced the people to humiliate itself by forking over all its economies, and then by making it plain that they could get away with anything. Hence the criminality, and blatant influence peddling.


None of this has to be. making banks into the realm's money creator is an extraordinary privilege that was not accorded during most of civilization, for the reason that, as Rothschild said, it makes the king into a puppet. Thus Obama is a puppet, says Rothschild.

One could revert to the earlier system used in feudal times and times before that: banks lend what has been deposited with them, and not more. Governments would then create money as needed. To insure that enough money would be created for valid projects and investments, banking officials would be rewarded reasonably according, and proportionally to the long term profitability of said projects and investments. In other words, the more leveraged a bank is, the more governmentalized it ought to be.

The only banks who are truly private are those using strictly no leverage. Others ought to be viewed as the government institutions they truly are, meaning that the government is not what conventional wisdom assumed it to be.



PA
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The Really Unfair Chinese Economic Advantage

If currency intervention with the aim of undervaluing the Chinese currency can be proven, there are official avenues to make that official through the IMF. This ought to be the next step. Guilt has to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt before punishment can be envisioned.

The real problem with China is somewhere else: western plutocrats have used it as an avenue to avoid Western various regulations, especially about pollution. Thus an unfair trade practice and a world pollution (Chinese pollution strikes the USA). The way out is to install a carbon tax, as France is in the process of doing. Then it could go worldwide, and China will lose an enormous comparative advantage of the criminal type (coal Chinese pollution poisons the Arctic with condensing mercury vapor, for example).

Plutocrats used Nazism in a similar way, starting 90 years ago (yes plutocratic intervention and procreation of Nazism preceded its existence). In that case, American plutocrats, starting in the 1920s were able to turn around American anti-monopoly laws, and, later many other laws. Plutocracy fed fascism, and reciprocally. When fascism died, plutocracy thrived even more, and here we are…

PA
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

What's Fundamentally Wrong With Banking Today

What is fundamentally wrong is that bankers are the ones allowed to create capital in the fractional reserve system AND directly profit, without any reservation, from that capital creation. Money creation by private, unelected, unsupervised, intrinsically biased and interested bankers is a REGALIAN function. For millennia that regalian function was exerted by the rex, the king, namely the state.

Money creation is NOT intrinsic to banking: originally banking did not have that regalian function, and just loaned money which was deposited in banks, one on one.


So what we have in front of our eyes is a worldwide CIVILIZATIONAL REGRESSION. (By the way, to claim that some countries escaped the crisis is a bit silly, because it may simply be that the crisis is better hidden there, or, thanks to derivatives, was exported somewhere else (in Canada the Whistler resort is bankrupt, maybe a symptom of something bigger).)


The crisis has reinforced bankers as rulers. Even France is having severe problems with the increased arrogance of powerful bankers: major profitable French companies could not get loans recently for specific obviously profitable projects. They complained to the presidency, which convoked the bankers. But BNP, the giant French bank, thanks to derivatives, and the like, made nearly 6 billion euros profit in 2009: hard to argue with such success in a system where bankers are kings to start with: who is going to reduce the size of their crowns? (Disclosure: I bank at BNP and has known some top executive there.)

The problem is not just to resist powerful bankers, or protecting financial consumers (after all many of the later profited from the crisis, and are now living rent free in their ill gotten properties, and the bankers are the first consumers of their own banks!). The problem is HOW to PUT BANKING UNDER DEMOCRATIC SUPERVISION.

As Baron Nathan Rothschild (yes, from the Rothschild family) put it: "I care not what puppet is placed on the throne of England to rule the Empire, …The man that controls Britain’s money supply controls the British Empire. And I control the money supply."

In the USA, the Federal Reserve Bank is independent of democracy. It depends only upon bankers. Jamie Dimon, head of JP Morgan Chase, for example, sits on the board of the New York Fed. Obama probably dreams every day of having this good friend who impresses him so much, Secretary of the Treasury: after all, Rubin, Clinton's first Sec of Treasure served at Goldman Sachs for 26 years prior.

Economy Nobel Laureate Stiglitz recently called the (financial) system in the USA "corrupt". Because of the size and leadership of the USA, it's the entire civilization which is now "corrupt". Time to review the basics, and it's not just about making consumerism of a few wiser. it's time to all get wiser, and more moral.

PA

http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2010/02/20/greed-cant-lead/

Mediterranean Union As Israel Palestine Solution

Roger Cohen in Hard MidEast Truths, opines on the Palestine-israel problem that: "If there are not two states, there will be one state, and very soon there will be more Palestinian Arabs in it than Jews."

In other words, Cohen says that the present Jewish supremacist strategy leads to the extinction of Israel.

Cohen calls onto Obama to rise to the occasion. But...

Considering that Obama cannot see the simplest thing, such as the present big banking sector having nothing to do with the free market, it is dubious he can do anything useful about Israel and Palestine. His Cairo discourse, much admired, was pure demagogy with no concrete content anywhere, whatsoever.

Many are happy about the creeping annexation. Many do not see the hatred, and it is a truth that a lot starts in religious texts.

The USA was not a force behind the creation of Israel. All it probably sees about the area is oil, oil, oil, and the strategy of dividing to conquer, to get ever more oil. The 250,000 troops on the ground put there by Bush and Obama are clear enough a symbol.

Ultimately the only pacific way out is to extend a variant of the European construction, a Mediterranean Union, to the entire region (as Sarkozy initially proposed). This dialogue worked well in Europe, there is no reason it would not work as well around the Mediterranean. A target for conceptual destruction ought to be superstitions and their associated racisms (clearly, for example, some part of the Qur'an are as offensive against the Jews as possible; even the Nazis in their worst state did not talk about the people they hated the most in such an absurdly violent fashion.)

Indeed the last time the Mediterranean area was united was under the Roman empire. It is the rise of superstition, even well before, centuries before the invention of Islam, that originated the present problems (by leading for example to the destruction of the gigantic Jewish temple in Jerusalem and then spreading aggressive heresies of Judaism, namely Christianism and Islamism).

If we want peace, we need to go back to some somewhat similar situation to that which existed under Rome (but with more national freedom, as exists in the European Union.) So the Mediterranean Union is the solution. Anything else is a waste of time, and should lead to an orgy of destruction, especially when some youth understand better the game of the USA.

Patrice Ayme

Banks As Government

The clueless Obama just claimed that bankers' bonuses are no more shocking than athletes' incomes. According to him, it would be against the free market to be against said bonuses.

But of course bankers are getting all their money from the government. Banks are not about the "free market". They are about the mechanism to create money that can be used in the market, and all over the economy. "Private" banks have recently been endowed with a prerogative governments kept for themselves for millennia. Apparently Obama does not know any of this.

A way to support banks has been by giving them hundreds of billions through TARP (which I mockingly called at the time: Transfering Assets To Rich People).

Another way has been to buy mortgages using taxpayer money to keep interest on mortgages low. This is not innocent as it looks. In connection with the FHA back-up of most new real estate loans, it is mostly a government run subprime program to the benefit of bankers and real estate flippers. What is the interest for the bankers and their White House? In light of a FEW transactions to flippers (or to the banks themselves!), it allows bankers and White House to claim houses are really worth a lot, therefore principals should not be lowered (a cornerstone of the friendly-to-bankers policy).

Another way to help banks is for the government to give them money at basically zero interest, and then allow them to re-invest the same money with the same government, at 3.5% interest.


More fundamentally, the main support to the banks has been the FRACTIONAL RESERVE SYSTEM. It allows private, unelected, unsupervised individuals called the bankers, to create the money society uses. Moreover, it is created under the form of debt. Thus it tends to increase and put the vast majority of People into two categories: those without money, completely out of society, a sort of underclass, and those who are over-indebted.

The Fractional Reserve System [FRS] makes bankers enormously powerful, because it makes them in control of most of the money (under a reserve requirement of 10% they control about 4/5 of it all; it can come arbitrarily close to 100% as the reserve requirement is allowed to go down to zero).

Rothschild actually explained, more than two centuries ago, that the FRS made bankers into the people who controlled nations.

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AMERICA IS NOT YET GONE

... BUT, WITHOUT A CHANGE OF MOOD, IT'S ON ITS WAY...

Paul Krugman in America Is Not Yet Lost makes an excellent depiction of the dismal situation of the USA, comparing it to Poland in the 18C.

"The way the Senate works is no longer consistent with a functioning government, and senators should change the rules to end obstructionism."

Constitutional stasis in the USA contrasts with the hyper dynamic constitutional process in Europe. Now, of course, Europe is changing constitutions globally and nationally, and regionally because of European construction. But also the diffuse feeling was left among Europeans, after the war against fascism (1870-1945), that it was most important (namely nothing more important) to have the best constitution imaginable. Even if it meant tinkering with it all the time.


That is one of the reasons for the Euro: to prevent competitive devaluation, a cause of war (for example Germany destroyed its own currency in the 1920s rather than to help repairing North West France that it had just deliberately destroyed, all the way down to telephone poles). True, such a concept as a unique currency brings, in turn, problems, but those can be, in turn, solved, modulo more constitutional tweaking.


In the USA the parliamentary system is broken, in part because the Senate (not really a democratic representation since a Senator in Wyoming represents 200,000 people and one in California, 19 millions!) damages the work of the national assembly (\"Congress\").


In a country such as France, the Senate plays a distinct role from the National Assembly, and both get together with the president in constitutional changes (the so called \"Congres\").


The USA is not yet lost, true, but far gone, already. Only a mighty neurohormonal and cultural reflection will get it out of its plutocratic stupor. And that is hard to do, after decades of cool.


PA

AS COOL AS DEAD IN THE WATER ?

Krugman, finally following the drift in my various blogs makes a direct attack on Mr. Obama's mentality. So did "The Economist". As Krugman puts it gently:
"President Obama’s troubles result from misjudgments: the stimulus was too small; banking policy wasn’t tough enough; and he didn’t shelter himself from criticism."

Well, here is my add-on, and i have plenty of reasons, some even personal, to not be that gentle, although I stay within the best of my rational consideration:

Obama is persuaded that cool is cool, and that it is all what a man has to do with his brain to excel: do what you are told, and look cool. Cool is the way. But Obama knows physics not. When you want to change things, you don't wait, cool as a glacier, for the great melting of the minds. Heat is motion. If you want to move, you have to get hot.

Obama came in, he admired Reagan (an actor who got the plutocratic demolition of the USA on the way), and hired Larry Summers (Reagan's internal affairs economic adviser, and the main DESTROYER OF ROOSEVELT's financial SAFEGARDS, as Treasury Secretary earlier, under Clinton). Obama was elected, it turned out, to pursue Larry Summers' America: for thirty years going, and still collapsing. Then Obama talked as if all he had to do was to persuade the elders of the republican party: dreaming of his father. How touching.

So, Godspeed America (as the actor Reagan would say). Even the pro-plutocratic magazine "The Economist" wants Obama to put fighting gloves on (Jan 14, cover). But, before putting the gloves on, maybe Obama should warm his brain enough to find who to beat up, and that his first enemies are in his own cabinet. As it is, Obama is surrounded by cool plutocrats whose only real ambition is to fill up their pockets some more, in tomorrow's even cooler plutocracy, so they make it all it can be.

PA