The Four Words Of Economic Salvation

The Asians had it, the Latin Americans had it and now the Arabs are having it. I refer to the transition from an agrarian or nomadic society to an industrial one. The transition has been a painful moment for these societies as much as it has been for the societies that made a similar sort of transition a century or two before. These were the societies in Europe and in America that took turns at staging their own revolutions and civil wars, each bloodier and more savage than the other, and certainly more so than anything we see today. It has been known for some decades that when a society reaches a certain level of development, discontent among the masses reaches the boiling point then erupts into unpleasant occurrences such as we have seen happen among the various societies. And the Arabs are proving to be just a different flavor of the same old dish.

The crucial point to highlight is that the societies which are now industrializing (known collectively as the emerging nations) have several blueprints they can study and draw lessons from. This is because there has been more than two centuries of industrial development on this planet, and those societies will find it easy to search for a model to follow and pitfalls to avoid. The big problem, in fact, is not what is happening now but the flip side of the equation. I refer to the nations which are already industrialized and find themselves in a changed situation because the emerging nations are presenting them with a formidable challenge in that they have markedly altered the economic landscape of the world and they continue to do so. Up to now the industrial nations have held seemingly well but the signs are here to the effect that they too must undergo a massive transformation to remain on their feet. The fear is that in the absence of such transformation, they may reach the boiling point and erupt into unpleasant occurrences of their own. But unlike the developing nations, these societies have no blueprint to follow or to draw lessons from which prompts the question: What can they do? The answer is that we should try to understand what is happening to the global economy beginning with the injection of some precision in the language of economics that we use everyday.

Innovation, development, productivity and competitiveness are the four words most often used when discussing the economy now but when they are used haphazardly, they create so much confusion that the message they intend to convey becomes almost incomprehensible. For this reason, it is worth stopping for a moment to take a fresh look at them, perhaps even try to restore to them the definitions they once had. As it happens, it is better to discuss these words in pairs because this is how they become misidentified most of the time. That is, the two words innovation and development are often used interchangeably when in reality they are two different things; while the two words productivity and automation seem to carry the same sense in the mind of some authors when in reality they are different from each other.

To begin with, most of the people in the media and in politics who instinctively dislike science, math or technology do not seem to take seriously the notion that two words which seem to mean the same thing on the surface may mean different things in reality. These are the people who use the words innovation and development interchangeably as if they were synonymous. But when these people proceed with the discussion and you see them attribute to innovation what is of the realm of development and vice versa, you realize how confused they are in their own mind about the entire subject, and how erroneous can be the ideas and the messages that they try to communicate to their audiences.

Perhaps the worst example of this sort we encounter when discussing economics and the related subjects is the attribution to the military or to NASA innovations like the computer and the internet among other things. The people who make these attributions rightly point to the fact that because of their need for products based on such inventions, the military and NASA have provided the money and the impetus that made the inventions the success they are today. This is correct but neither the military nor NASA have contributed an ounce of the creativity that alone is responsible for the innovations. When you probe deeply into the matter, you find that these institutions only contributed financially toward the basic research and/or the development of the technologies that were already there. Such institutions normally engage in what is known as government procurement which is the use of the enormous purchasing power they have to acquire what they need. This, in turn, supports the inventions that are made by individuals such as the thinkers and the tinkerers who work alone and come up with inventions, something that no institution or even a committee of people can ever do.

The individuals that think and tinker dream up new ideas (also known as innovations) which are turned into parts and components that are themselves assembled into products like the computer and the internet. The development of the ideas into components, and the assembly of the components into products are done for the institutions that need them, procure them and pay for them. The work itself is done by small and large corporations that own research labs, development facilities and production lines. They get rich in the process of doing the work, and this stands in stark contrast to the luck of the innovators who are paid very little if anything at all. But there are times when the innovators turn out to have acquired enough entrepreneurial skill to start a business by themselves, mass produce their own inventions as well as those of others and do well in life. Microsoft is one such example. These people are the innovator-entrepreneurs who may hold the secret to the salvation of the vulnerable Western economies as we shall see.

We can also go back in history and make the same argument with regard to the highways and the railways neither of which was innovated by the government yet both were financed and developed by it. In any case, it is important to make and to emphasize the distinction that exists between the words development and innovation because the latter has become the indispensable word that people insert into every discussion on the economy these days. Such people speak of innovation as if it were something that can be snatched out of thin air or produced on demand at the snap of a finger and sprinkled like a miracle cure over the difficult problems plaguing the economy. These people seem to argue that any and every problem can be made to vanish in an instant if only we innovated our way into the magnificent world of their imagination. We'll come back to these points in a moment.

Meanwhile, let us look at the two words productivity and competitiveness which are also used interchangeably when discussing the economy and where a great deal of confusion is generated. When used to describe the output of a worker, the word productivity refers to the quantity of goods or services that he or she can produce per unit of time like an hour or a day. In this case, the worker would be competing against the self or against time which is different from when you use the word productivity to compare two or more workers. Here you need to specify what tool or machine each worker is using because these contraptions affect the output of the workers.

This brings us to the word automation which refers to the tools and machines that a worker can use to produce goods or services at a higher rate. To be sure, automation refers to the machines that need little or no human supervision to produce the goods or services they are hardwired to produce or programmed to produce according to a predetermined set of specifications. For example, a factory with 32 identical machines requiring 32 operators to run them can be upgraded by outfitting the machines with automatic systems that will allow one operator to run as many as 4 machines at a time. This means that you can now reduce the number of workers in that factory to 8 people because each one of them will be 4 times as productive as before. Not only that but the operator can program one or all the machines to produce the goods with the same set of specifications or with different ones so as to comply with the demands of several customers. And the operator can do all this with only a few touches on a keyboard.

Now, when people say we need to boost our productivity to compete effectively against the emerging nations, they say the right thing but when you listen to them explain in depth what they mean, you find that they are making false assumptions which render their point of view meaningless. For one thing, these people assume that the emerging nations are not using automatic machines or cannot use them for some strange reason. And so they imagine that if only we gave our operators the most automated of machines, they will be able to outproduce the Asian workers therefore compete against them effectively. There are at least two reasons why this view is even more erroneous than it seems on the surface. First, competitiveness is not only a function of how much you can produce per unit of time but also how much you are paid per unit of time. For example, if a Western worker and an Asian worker are given the same machines and they produce the same amount of products or services per hour, the Asian worker will be called more competitive because he or she will work for less money therefore will have a “competitive advantage” over their Western counterpart.

Second, no one nation has a monopoly on automation any longer because no one jurisdiction controls innovation or development in this age of globalization. This reality stems from the fact that in the modern world, the multinational corporations will take their basic research, technological development and production lines to the jurisdiction that will offer them the best of incentives. These are packages of concessions which, in the aggregate, give the multinationals a competitive advantage of a different sort. That is, in addition to or in lieu of accepting low wages, these jurisdictions may give tax concessions, offer relaxed labor laws, exempt from obligations that pertain to the environment and so on.

And this stands in contrast with the old days when the nations that had a head start were able to keep hidden their inventions and the processes by which they produced goods and services from everyone else. They enjoyed monopolies that lasted for a long time and got wealthy at the expense of the rest. What happens nowadays is that the individual innovators are granted a patent which they may sell directly to the corporations that will develop them, or sell to companies that specialize in acquiring such patents. The latter then turn around and resell the patents to the multinationals for a hefty profit and a royalty. The multinationals are given a limited period of time during which they alone can use and profit from the inventions while everyone else is forbidden from competing against them. But at the end of the period, everyone that wants to get into the act can do so, can have access to the invention and thus be able to produce generic replicas of it.

What all this boils down to is that if you want to get wealthy or remain wealthy as a nation, the practice of innovation alone will not do it for you. Simply put, you cannot live well by innovation anymore than the thinkers and the tinkerers can live the high life selling ideas. There are many more things you must do to become competitive and be able to stand up to the challenges of the emerging nations. One important thing you can do is replicate the approach taken by the innovator-entrepreneurs which is to produce what you invent. But this will mean that you must revamp many of the social and financial structures that were fought for, hard won and erected over the decades. It will not be easy, and this is why a full blown and honest debate must begin as soon as possible before we are told we have passed the point of no return.

One way or the other the emerging nations will succeed because they are the ancient civilizations that know how to survive adversities and because they have accepted to change. Let us not, here in the West, resist change and see ourselves slip back because we like to hang on to the dogma that our social and financial structures are sacrosanct and cannot be altered.

The Furniture In The Oval Office

What would you say about a bunch of people who cannot point to one thing they are proud of which they might have done when they were in office but take credit when their successor performs admirably at which point they pounce on what he did and make the claim that they were the first to do that very thing when they were in charge? This is how some people are behaving these days in a futile attempt to build a record of achievement for a GOP Administration that did nothing admirable when they were in office; nothing that history will deem memorable or will want to honor. And so I predict that this bunch will abandon the trip they just embarked on because they will not be able to sustain it much longer and because they find themselves on a similar trip already; one they took earlier and have not yet abandoned.

That trip is the case of George W. Bush who is better known as the W. He is the one who was given the title of President of the United States but sat in the White House like a piece of furniture and left the running of the country's affairs to a bunch of charlatans who claimed to be of the GOP stripe but could really have been of any stripe -- from the tigers of Asia to the zebras of Africa to any jackass you may find in Europe or find in America. These people tried to run the superpower that was America but managed only to transform that nation into a pale image of the W himself. And this is why the removal of the thing from the seat of power in the Oval Office came as a relief to all of humanity. The trouble is that the people who live with the nostalgia of an era when the intellectual landscape of America looked like a wasteland more than it did the handicraft of an advanced civilization -- now invoke the name of the W with fondness as they yearn to return to the dark ages of his time in office. However genuine these sentiments may be, there is no denial that these people also do what they do as an attempt to make it look like his reign was not the total loss that it was and their participation in it was not the waste of time that it was.

What these people are doing is not completely original in that it is reminiscent of what they were doing when they “governed” America or thought they did. Just as they did then, they are now swimming in a miasma of contradictions not knowing if they are coming or going or if they are standing still. On the one hand they ask everyone to let bygone be bygone and leave the memory of the man alone who is himself keeping quiet; on the other hand they pounce at every opportunity to point to something his successor is doing to take credit for it. They do this by claiming that what the successor is achieving was inspired by the philosophy of the W who did something similar while in office or would have done it were he still President. And to this, I have one thing to say: Make up your mind guys. Do you want to talk about the W and let everyone do the same or do you want to shut everyone up and shut up yourselves? You can have one or you can have the other but you cannot have it both ways. If you want to come, by all means do so; if you want to go, by all means do so otherwise stop making new rules with regard to the mention of history every time the truth hits you in the face concerning the desolation that was your time in office.

To be fair to the man, however, it must be said that he did not himself create the negative things that have dragged America into the gutter. To be honest about it, he did not have the brains to invent such things anymore than he had the brains to invent one positive thing. What happened was that in the absence of the capacity to generate the positives that would have offset the negatives, the latter sprouted unimpeded and permeated the system which is what dragged America down. These were the negatives that had been growing organically over and around the American political culture for decades but were kept in check by men and women who could generate a few positive things. A rough balance between the two was maintained until such time the W came into office and the checks disappeared along with the ability to generate positive things. The most important of the negatives that were generated, I would say, was America's over reliance on the domestic and foreign charlatans who pretended to be what they were not or pretended to know more than they did. They offered advice or rendered services for a fee thus got something for nothing. In some cases, these people even got paid to mislead America, sending it deliberately onto the path of a ruinous descent toward the abyss in an attempt to fulfill the agenda of a foreign country most prominent of these being Israel.

Many of the charlatans were and still are motivated by ideology in addition to having an ax of their own to grind. Rather than advise America on how to avoid stepping into minefields that had the potential to hurt it grievously, they sent America into the fields they wanted to blow up or wanted to see cleared at any cost. If and when this happened, it was one more step toward the implementation of the grand strategy they kept at the back of their heads. When one step was taken and done with, they went on to conspire, plot and orchestrate for the next step. The adventure in Somalia that ended with a Black Hawk Down was one such example, an event that took place even before the W had come into office. And this explains why it was important for these people to have a piece of furniture pretend to be president come and take control of the levers of power in America. The move gave them a daily access to those levers which they utilized to implement the grand strategy they had at the back of their heads. However, this being a way to interfere in the affairs of the other nations, America made many enemies around the world during the W years but was told not to worry because all that the country needed to stay supreme and reign supremely were the military and economic powers it already possessed. Thus America needed no new friend aside from the one it already had which was Israel. And the people who made such claim quickly added that the powers America possesses must now be placed in the capable hands of the Israelis and their Jewish cohorts – those that reside in America and those that reside elsewhere.

The trouble was that nothing actually worked as promised which is why America lost many of its friends and allies abroad. In addition, America saw the luster of its military power dim and witnessed the supremacy of its economy wither away. It then became obvious to anyone with an IQ higher than a piece of furniture that America's salvation was to be found in retrenchment. Thus, rather than go around the world and poke everyone in the ribs to move them this way or move them that way – which would have satisfied one special interest group or another in America – the new Administration wisely adopted the philosophy of live and let live by letting things take their natural course. The alternative would have been to stand in the way of the nations of the world and pretend to direct a traffic that no one in his right mind should try to figure out because no one knows in which direction the traffic will want to flow next. Thus, the approach taken by the new Administration has saved America from being crushed such as it was in the cards for it had the country insisted on staying the course of the W following the world financial crisis for which America was responsible to a large extent. This was the crisis that was prepared for and triggered by the characters who thought they governed the country when the W occupied the Oval Office and his presence blended nicely with the rest of the furniture.

The one area where the W has displayed a sign of life is that he was able at times to generate what sounds like human utterances. Take for example the time when Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel went on a private visit to Spain. To make something out of nothing such as the Israelis always try to do, Netanyahu conspired with his AIPAC buddies in Washington and New York to have the W give him the best gift that an Israeli official can dream of getting. It is to have the President of the United States say something nasty about the Arabs. Of course, there are many ways to do this, some being nastier than others. The nastiest of the ways is to come out of the blue, without warning, provocation or apparent reason and say something false or ignorant about the Arabs with the intention of hurting them for the apparent pleasure of doing so. And this is what the president/furniture at the White House did to please the Netanyahu of Israel. To wit, the W blurted the opinion that was stuffed in his mouth, something to the effect that the economies of the Arabs are so stagnant, Spain alone had a GDP that surpassed the combined GDPs of all the Arab nations put together.

But given how the W ran the economy of America and what the consequences have been for Spain and a few other nations on the periphery of Europe, future historians have been handed a gift on a platinum platter that will explain how an empty skull and a runaway blabber mouth have combined to ruin the world almost imperceptibly until the last moment when the Arab and the Asian sovereign cavalries were called upon to hurry up and come to the rescue. Everything can now be explained with clarity, the details of which will undoubtedly come out in time and in due course. In the meantime, I can here state in brief the following simple truth: In the same way that it happened with Enron -- which was worth less than zero but was made to look like billions through the use of creative accounting – you can make a nothing GDP of a nothing country look like it is worth something. Israel has a fantasy economy that is worth nearly nothing but is made to look like it is worth something by the magic of that same sort of creative accounting. Indeed, the economy of Israel would look like the nothing it is if and when America stopped feeding it which is something it must seriously consider. In the meantime, a similar sort of accounting but not as extreme was adopted by the economies of the European periphery including Spain, and the approach is now plaguing these countries as they struggle to get out of their bind. Whether or not Netanyahu knew all this at the time he visited Spain is immaterial. The main thing is that he called it a superior economy for one reason only; to make a false comparison and denigrate the Arabs. To this end, he found the right dummy to utter the words for him as he gave the W a temporary voice with which to mouth-fart the Netanyahu gas. The W did and the world stank for a few moments.

What the diehard followers of the W need to do now is listen to the good people of the Earth tell them what to do for a change. Here is my contribution in this regard. You cannot reverse the damage you have done to America or to the world anymore than you can reverse organic mutation. And neither can you force mutation or the course of history to go in the direction that you choose for them. What you can do is let nature take its course while you take advantage of the opportunities that nature offers to you on its own. The Jewish rabbis who have been around for centuries understood this reality but they will not tell you about it. In the meantime, they have used the proper tools to work harmoniously with nature and have thus achieved many initial successes. But then they failed each and every time at the end of every adventure for a reason they never understood but you will now understand.

The rabbis failed because their approach contained something troublesome and totally illegitimate. It is that their aim has always been to commit something evil and never to do something good. Nature has responded to this situation the way it always does which is to take its time before turning the table on those who abuse it. And this is why things have ended badly for those who thought of themselves as the Jewish people each and every time, having started brilliantly for them. What you need to do now as followers of the W is to use the tools that the rabbis have used but you must work with nature to achieve a goal that is different from theirs. The most important of these tools is well known to everyone; it is the education of the public. However, instead of educating the people to worship the Jew like the rabbis were advocating, you must educate the people on what transpired when you were being recruited to implement the agenda of the rabbis and of Israel. You need to do this so as to tell future generations how they can avoid falling into a trap such as the one in which you were dragged and pulled down.

You need to tell the people of America and the people of the world that you were made to believe you were serving a good cause when, in fact, you were serving the cause of the devil himself. Do this and explain in detail how it all happened, and you will have participated in the salvation of the human race. To serve humanity may have been the sentiment that motivated you to join a group that pretended to do so. To denounce this group now that you know how evil it turned out to be is something you must do because it has become your solemn duty to do it.

Do not be shy or intimidated, my friend; just do what you have to do and feel good about yourself for doing it with courage and determination. And may the “Force” of the stars be with you.

Corruption By Self Delusion

Let's be honest with ourselves; nobody is a saint. We all cut corners when we are certain we can get away with it. Some people do not even wait till they are absolutely certainty as to the outcome of their behavior; they weigh the risk they may have to face doing something out of the ordinary and proceed with it if they deem that the potential benefit outweighs the risk. What this means is that corruption is woven into the fabric of human culture regardless as to who the human beings are and what their culture looks like. And this reality forces us to pose a serious question: Why do some people make it their business to run around as if gripped by hysteria and accuse many others of being hopelessly corrupt? Some of these people even go so far as to advocate the destruction of countries they accuse of being too corrupt to merit salvation. Such people argue that these are failed states anyway which deserve to be taken down under controlled conditions rather than be left to crumble on their own and cause the sort of damage that no one can foresee ahead of time.

This picture of reality is very much a part of the human condition such as we see it and recognize it in the works of art and literature that our ancestors have bequeathed to us. Thus, there is something old in this condition but there is also something new in it. The old is that some human beings pretend to be perfect by employing the trick of accusing others of not being perfect enough. In fact, the story they used to tell in the olden days to illustrate and to express this point of view is that of the woman who went around accusing every girl she saw of not being a virgin to give the impression that she was a virgin herself and thus hid the fact that she was a professional prostitute. They still do things in a similar fashion nowadays but they also go beyond it. Whereas the prostitute of the story inconvenienced the girls for a short period of time to throw a protective shield around her, the people who throw accusations of corruption against the others use this overture as a weapon to attack and to hurt their rivals. This is bad enough, as you can imagine, when it happens among individuals in the society where you live but when the intended victim is the regime of another nation, the consequences can have far reaching implications for the world. This is because unlike the girls of the story who could keep their distance and thus avoid being affected by the presence in their midst of a prostitute in disguise, the vulnerable regimes in the world of today may be hunted down to the end of the Earth by an evil force against which they may not have the wherewithal to adequately defend themselves.

But what is this evil force which battles the other nations, and who are the people behind it anyway? This question can be answered briefly as follows: there are two groups vying for the honor at the present time. One group is a recent phenomenon that calls itself Al Qaeda and the other is a pernicious thing that has come to be called World Jewry for several generations even though it has assumed other names as well. The kids that make up Al Qaeda tried to use the Muslim religion to rally around them the Muslim World but failed miserably in that they managed to attract but a handful of disgruntled lone wolves who know about Islam as much as say, the American Congress knows about self-respect which is zilch wrapped in more zilch. The World Jewry, on the other hand, has had a string of initial successes with the political and social movements it has been able to infiltrate, something it did on and off throughout the ages and around the world. The trouble is that it ended each adventure with a calamity that has engulfed and seriously hurt its members as well as the societies it was able to draw into its sphere of influence. At this time, the movement is enjoying a moment of great success riding high on the wings of the American Eagle it was able to tame, harness and put into the service of its own ends by turning the American Congress into Israel's rubber stamp and obedient whore-on-demand.

Members of the World Jewry gave themselves several names throughout the ages but their preferred name at this time is “Jewish Lobby”. This is because they use the Jewish religion to rally around them not only those who adhere to the Jewish religion but also the troubled Christians who are attracted to the cause because of one reason or another. The Jewish Lobby has achieved this much success by advancing the argument that the Jews and the Christians are a part of the larger movement of Judeo-Christians whose time has come to own and to rule the world. Never mind that this terminology is the ultimate oxymoron given that Christianity was founded by Jesus Christ as the peace and love antidote to the Jewish religion of blood, gore, mayhem and hate which he detested like the plague. Thus, the two religious movements are by logic mutually exclusive because if you are a real Jew you would want to crucify a Christian; and if you are a real Christian you would love a Jew enough to convert him or show him the way to the gas chamber. Alas, the human condition is such that if one part of the brain can imagine the absurd, another part of the same brain would labor in vain to turn that absurd into a reality.

These then are the Judeo-Christians who relentlessly go around the world and accuse other peoples and other nations of not being perfect enough to deserve being left alone. What gives them the power to do what they do is that they have been able to mobilize America -- the superpower of the day -- and were able to use it as their attack dog. In fact, they do not themselves level the accusations they fabricate against the regimes they intend to hurt if they can avoid it but let the superpower do it for them which then compels the latter to threaten the smaller nations of dire consequences if they do not comply with the dictates. There are times, however, when action follows the threat whereby America comes out of each adventure looking like a big loser and the biggest of all fools. As for the Jewish Lobby, it usually gains little or nothing at the expense of the other nations because everyone knows what is going on and they dodge the bullet the best way they can. If hit, they lick their wounds and move on to something else as quickly as possible. But where the Jewish Lobby makes a few gains is in America itself where it consolidates its powers even more after each calamity it inflicts on the country. And this consolidation happens in the worst way that you can imagine; it is that the American institutions are made to accept even more infiltrators of the “Judaists” kind – get this now -- to fix a system they themselves have weakened or have destroyed. And so these people get into the institutions where they engage in the usual machinations that embroil America in more and more calamities, again and again, on and on, for ever and ever. And so it goes on without end, without respite and without the mercy of even a temporary relief.

But what kind of corruption do these people say irritates them so much that they want to get rid of it by bludgeoning to death those who need to be saved from it? Well, this is where you are allowed to smile, my friend, because we are not talking about an Enron or a Madoff kind of corruption. In fact, we are not talking about a behavior we would recognize as corruption at all. Let us take the example of Egypt which has been the target of their artificial wrath for some time now. They came around to talking about corruption in that country when they discovered that kids who -- instead of selling lemonade on the corner of their street such as they do here in the West -- sell bread instead at the regular price having bought it at a subsidized price from government stores. In the West, we would call these kids enterprising and view them as excellent material to grow up and become leaders. We may even encourage them to continue doing what they do given that they have not created the situation from which they profit but are using it to benefit personally. So then, where did the idea of corruption come from? The short answer is that it comes from the local culture but to understand this answer fully, we first need a bit of preparation. In some cultures what is not specifically forbidden is allowed; in other cultures what is not specifically allowed is forbidden. Here, the words: allowed and forbidden are not used in the legal sense but used in the sense of ethics and morality. Thus, while these kids may not be punished in Egypt for what they do, they are seen to prepare themselves for a life that may end up looking like that of a Madoff or the Enron characters. And so, the move by the kids to exploit a weakness in the system is, within the context of the Egyptian culture, a form of corruption that may not be punished but will not be praised either anymore than we would praise the scalpers who hoard and sell tickets to sport events at a high price here in North America. So then why take the local definition of corruption and apply it out of context where it does not belong?

Before we answer this question let us look at another example. Someone has just discovered that he can pronounce the Arabic word “wasta” and write about it in English. This is because some people in Egypt have pointed to the existence of wasta as proof that the system is corrupt, a description that was picked up by the Anglo media and turned into big hay with the further description that the entire Egyptian system is “hopelessly corrupt”. The people who started to make these accusations in Egypt were by and large peasants who moved from the farm to urban settings looking to start a new life as the economy is now transforming from the agrarian to the industrial. These people were asked by potential employers if they had wasta and many said no. What happened after that is of little consequence when you understand what this is all about. The analogy that best applies here is something that is well known to new immigrants in North America and to the local young men and women who -- just out of school -- apply for their first job. The new immigrants are asked if they have Canadian experience; the local youngsters are asked if they have a letter of recommendation from someone that knows them. To see the parallel between all of these situations you must understand that the word wasta is derived from the word “wassat” which translates into the English word “middle”. Thus in Arabic, the wasta is a letter of recommendation written by a third party -- an “intermediary” that may have been a previous employer or is a lawyer, a banker, a public notary or some such personality. Unfortunately, the people who move from the farm to the city do not usually have urban experience and do not carry with them a letter of recommendation. They find it difficult to get a job right away which is something we can deplore but cannot ascribe to a hopelessly corrupt system. However, in a culture such as the Egyptian where a weakness in the system is expected to be responded to and compensated for immediately, the word corruption is used loosely to describe the failure of the people who are in charge of alleviating the situation to do so immediately. As can be seen, the word corruption is here used to mean ineptitude.

Now, why is it that big hay is made of this kind of non-events in publications as prestigious as the New York Times? The answer is that the Jewish Lobby has repeatedly failed to drive the wedge between America and Egypt even after using all the ammunition it had at its disposal. Thus, the Lobby was forced to turn up a sleight of hand as a last desperate act to move things in its direction. But the result so far has been a dubious one for the following reasons: organizations were set-up to draw up indexes to measure, rate or rank the nations of the world in terms that range from the income of families to the weight of the citizens. Such organizations do the ratings according to criteria they publish and apply universally. For some mysterious reason, however, there is one exception to this rule where the rating is not done according to universal criteria. It is the rating of corruption which they leave up to the people of each country to do themselves by applying criteria that are chosen in accordance with the local culture. This being the case, you would expect that no one who wants to appear honest, let alone someone as prestigious as the new York Times, would want to take advantage of the confusion that results when they use words that mean one thing in one setting and another thing in another setting without first explaining what is involved. Yet, this is exactly where the New York Times consistently fails and yes, this failure ranks as an outright intellectual fraud because it is obviously committed as a deliberate act. But then again, when it comes to carrying water for the Jewish Lobby, there is nothing that the New York Times will not do deliberately or otherwise.

When a publication like the new York Times writes about corruption, the word is automatically associated with images of Enron, Madoff and all the others. When a country like Egypt is then associated with the same word without explanation as to the local context in which the word is used, the readers of the new York Times do not see a kid selling subsidized bread at the regular price or see a farmer looking for a job having no letter of recommendation. Instead, they see an Egyptian ogre loot the country the way that some people do in America. Insidious by its nature, this is such a deliberate lie, it is not the kind of journalism that is expected of the New York Times. It is journalistic prostitution that stands at par with the Congressional prostitution of the hopelessly corrupt nation that America has become. It is, in fact, corruption of the worst kind because it promotes self delusion and feeds on it as it sends the country into a never ending downward spiral.

Can there be something worse than that? Of course there can be. No matter how bad you have become, there is always someone that can prove to be worse than you. And if not, you can always outdo yourself and show the world how much worse you can become when you want to. Horrendous isn't it? Yes it is and here is the sordid story to prove it. It happened a month or two ago while I was reading that same new York Times but I got so disgusted reading the thing, I did not take notes and did not finish reading the story either. Look, my friend, there is an organization that has been rating the universities of the world according to published criteria that are out there for everyone to see. Not once did someone object to the choices that the organization has made over the decades. Not once that is, except this one time when the organization rated the University of Alexandria in Egypt highly and someone objected. The New York Times promptly picked up the article of objection and published it. I started to read the article and, to put it bluntly, it was intellectual masturbation of the most Jewish kind. The beating of the intellectual balls was so frantic that the computer began to ejaculate syphilis with stars of David streaming out of it like a deadly disease. I realized there and then that I was seeing something worse than journalistic prostitution; I was seeing an act of journalistic pornography. And I turned off the computer to turn off the new York Times. And what a relief that was!

What the editors of the New York Times did in effect was that they avoided setting a standard of journalistic excellence and stick by it the way things are done in the places where they trumpet the rule of law. Instead, these editors have adopted a flexible sort of morality whereby they pick and choose the criteria that suit them best at every moment. This approach has made it possible for them to paint a country like Egypt with a bad brush based on the criteria that do the job in each circumstance. For example, since the day nearly six decades ago when the Americans tried to bribe the Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, and he used the money to build the famous Cairo Tower as a monument to America's stupidity, the world has known that the Egyptians are incorruptible. Thus, if and when they are tested according to universal criteria, the Egyptians come out way, way, way ahead of everyone else. By comparison, the Israelis come out way, way, way behind everyone. In consequence of this reality, the New York Times now uses the local criteria whereby the Egyptian people will say they have a problem with corruption because kids are allowed to buy bread at a subsidized price and sell it at a regular price and because farmers are not given a job right away when they do not have a wasta. This happens at a time when the Israelis will say that they have no problem with corruption because all that they have had so far were presidents and prime ministers each and everyone of whom was caught stealing, taking bribes, engaging in serial rape and the like; and they have had functionaries ranging in rank from border guards to army generals that engaged in international prostitution, human smuggling, trafficking in drugs, trafficking in weapons and body parts but nothing worse than that. And the New York Times has concluded, based on this evidence, that Egypt is plagued with a hopelessly corrupt system whereas Israel is the ooonly country in the Middle East where angels live and conduct themselves like veritable saints.

The idea, therefore, was never to practice good journalism at the New York Times or to appear to do so by sticking to the accepted journalistic norms of telling the truth as best they can while running the joint in accordance with a fixed set of criteria. Instead, the editors of that publication have chosen to become the open advocates of the Jewish causes by turning themselves into the shameless mouthpieces of the Jewish Lobby. But there is more than that. Because some Jews believe that their religion began with the “Exodus” from Egypt, these people have considered it the basic tenet of their religion to use every means at their disposal to attack Egypt. This is their religion and to them, badmouthing Egypt is the way that they conduct a prayer, something they like to do as often as they can. Thus, in taking the direction that it has, the New York Times has joined these people in prayer whereby it is badmouthing Egypt at every turn thus trumpeting not the rule of law but the worship of the mythical Jew of the Exodus. It is the worship of the individual and not any individual; it is the worship of the sickest of all individuals – the one whose DNA is made of moral and cultural syphilis.

No one sane in the world will expect the New York Times to become a respected newspaper again. What a loss! What a shame!

Enough Time-outs, It's Now Time-up

The serial rapists of the last two millennia are hot again and they are recidivating like there is no tomorrow. While asking the American Administration to call for time out in the matter of its involvement in the Middle East peace process, the Israelis are tearing down more structures in occupied Palestine to build homes for themselves and their followers. And so the time has come to talk not to the Israelis anymore but to the Americans who are their enablers and have been for a number of years. These are the Americans whose country has made it possible for the Israelis to inflict the horrors they are inflicting on the people of Palestine and inflicting on the sensibilities of every human being.

It is time for the White House in Washington to tell the madmen who rule in Israel and tell their cohorts in America -- be they Jewish or gentile -- that time is up for the little twit that has managed to bring the American superpower to its knees. Ever since America contributed to bring Israel into existence, the latter has misbehaved in such a way as to accomplish two things simultaneously; it hurt America badly while promoting its own interests. Yet, Israel's handlers have always managed to make it look like they were only hurting third parties, not hurting America. This done, they shamelessly argued that, as a consequence of their activities, they and Israel are making life better for the American people. In fact, the Israelis and their cohorts turned the thing upside down when they threw away the notion that America's well being was part and parcel of a healthy human existence and replaced it with the false notion that America's well-being depended on the misery of others. And because in their twisted minds this was a good enough reason to make life miserable for others, they mobilized America's powers and used them to make life miserable for their chosen enemies of the day. But instead of making life better for the American people as promised, the activities of Israel and her friends resulted in making life miserable for the American people too. But by that time, no one was checking the facts or checking to see if the promises were being fulfilled -- and things kept on going from bad to worse.

Study the following example, my friend, and you will get an idea how the Israelis and their cohorts pulled off their demonic tricks one after the other without someone opposing them. When they started building settlements in the Palestinian territories, they made it look like it was something innocuous if not something admirable to do. To this end they argued that what is being erected today can be taken down when the circumstances will allow it thus gave the impression that the measure was an interim one. They went on to explain that in the meantime, people need to live somewhere, so why not live on this part of the Palestinian lands as if they were respectfully asking to be considered temporary guests. And they finished their dishonest presentation by saying that this would be a merited defeat for the notion that says there are places in the world where Jews are not allowed to live, the usual bellyache to which they hark back to throw sand in your eyes. Well, if a notion like this ever existed, it had nothing to do with the Palestinian people whose land and properties are being looted by force of arms at the hands of Jews and no one else. If anything, the events that have accompanied such criminal activities and the events that are unfolding today demonstrate that far from believing they were going to take down the buildings they were erecting on stolen lands, the Israelis and their cohorts who bankroll the construction projects had a well developed and hidden agenda all along to which they still cling tooth and nail. It is an agenda to steal and keep on stealing till someone forces them to stop; and they do this knowing full well that America their enabler will keep on enabling them instead of stopping them. This was and still is a well articulated policy that does not allow daylight to show between the twit and the superpower. In the absence of such daylight, the princes of darkness have always set the tone in the relationship between the two, and have orchestrated their activities in such a way that the world has come to recognize them as the most dangerous set of events to be inflicted on the human race since the beginning of time.

But how did they get away with a behavior this repugnant without triggering a worldwide general revolt? Well, to make an outrageous argument look innocuous and get away with it, you need to snuff out any possible opposition to it before you even begin the argument. The big secret in the hand of the Israelis and their cohorts in this regard has been to convince the cultural and political barons of America that to oppose anything Jewish or anything Israeli was to display anti-Semitic sentiments. Thus, for nearly half a century, anyone that tried to speak in opposition to the Jewish-Israeli arguments was mugged by the barons of American politics and culture who thought they were siding with the angels when, in fact, they were siding with demons wearing fake angel wings. The end result has been that the opposition was blacklisted and thoroughly silenced while the Jews were given the field all to themselves where they put forward both the argument and the counter-argument to every topic. They also had the privilege of appraising their own works and so they judged themselves to be light years above the excellent. Finally, they rewarded themselves and each other with honors so high that the Universe had to be expanded to accommodate them and their pumped up egos. But in reality, these people were only getting away with nonsense as shown in the examples that follow. These are but two of the myriad of examples I have discussed in detail throughout this website.

First example: In one paragraph they would write that the Arabs are bad because they spend the oil money on themselves and not on their people. In the next paragraph they would write that the Arabs are bad because they spend the oil money pampering their people. Second example: In one paragraph, they would write that the Arabs are bad because they do not build homes for their people. In the next paragraph they would write that the Arabs are bad because they build entire cities for their people. Multiply these examples of mutilated logic by a million – which is how many times the Jewish writers and their echo-repeaters have puked toxic nonsense from both sides of the mouth simultaneously – and you will get an idea as to the intellectual catastrophe that was inflicted on the North American Continent and by extension, the English speaking world. In fact, things have become so bad that there is serious doubt now as to whether or not there is a single Jewish writer out there that can write a single paragraph without contradicting himself or herself at least once. And if the Jews cannot pass this test -- having usurped the privilege of free expression and having kept it for themselves while shutting out everyone else -- no one can pass it either. And neither can the people who are supposed to run the American ship of state. How sad! In fact, this is an all around cultural horror whose implication is being felt in the deterioration of the public discourse that is in evidence in the English speaking world today. The Israelis and their cohorts have, for all practical purposes, killed Shakespeare's language of intelligent discourse and have buried it in the graveyard of the Yiddish assault on reason. What a crime!

As far as I know, Sandy Berger was the first American high official to spell out in detail the Israeli-Judeo-American plan to turn America into Israel's beast of burden and do for Israel what no other jackass would want to do. Berger was the National Security Adviser under President Bill Clinton, and he basically said that whatever the cost to the American people, America must give Israel all that it seeks in terms of weapons, money, political backing, diplomatic protection and so on yet never tell it how to behave because in the end, the peace will have to be negotiated between the Israelis and the Palestinians with no American interference. But what about the right to fair play when it comes to the Palestinians? Well, these people must be kept unarmed, impoverished, under siege and constantly under Israeli terror so as to force them to accept Israel's dictates, period. Expressed in one form or another, this has been the standard response given by the Israelis to a simple question regarding equal treatment between them and the Palestinians. And so, when I saw this kind of horror being expressed this freely, I called Sandy Berger the number one American terrorist on the planet. As if to prove my point, he ordered the destruction by cruise missile of a factory making baby formula in Sudan for no reason except to show that as a Jew he can murder all he wants and get away with it. However, the man was later caught stealing secret documents he tried to stuff into his pants, a trick he devised perhaps to insinuate that he was mentally unstable thus eligible to be forgiven for the murders he committed and those he encouraged Israel to commit. I do not know if anyone forgave him but I know he was never punished for his evil deeds.

What Sandy Berger did then was to call for time out to give Israel the breathing space it needed to entrench its position and come back with new tricks. And it is to repeat this history that the Jewish organizations are now calling for time out to give the Israelis the breathing space they need to come up with new tricks and put the American beast of burden to work for them again while they continue to slash and burn Palestine, and to build on its ashes the “Greater Israel” of their sickly fantasies. And this is where the American Administration ought to be saying that no, this is not a time-out for Israel but that time is up for that thing. America has decided to exit the business of being Israel's accomplice in its campaign of terror, murder and mayhem against the people of Palestine. Israel's time is up and if the pimps and prostitutes, the madams and gigolos of the American Congress want to challenge this notion, they will be countered by the President of the United States who will make a public appeal during which he will ask the low life traitors to work for America not sell America to feed the never ending appetite of the Israelis and their bloodsucking cohorts in America. In the meantime, America is withholding all aid to Israel and is withdrawing all guarantees to loans taken out by Israel. Furthermore, America will treat Israel in world forums such as the UN Security Council like the murderous little twit that it is. There will be no more a VETO to shield Israel from the consequences of its crimes. Only then can America consider leaving it up to the Palestinians and the Israelis to negotiate a peace treaty between them given that the playing field will have been more reasonably leveled though not completely so.

The charade is over because America is sick of itself pointing a finger at everyone else when each of its own fingers is dripping with the blood of the innocent that it killed to please Israel, and dripping with the blood of those that were killed by Israel using American weapons. In short, the American beast of burden is now morally and materially on its knees and there is no one out there who will come to the rescue if and when the last straw will break its back. If anything, there will be someone calling himself a Jew who will crouch by the dying body of America and lick every drop of blood that comes out of it. Yes, it has been this ghoulish all along, and there is nothing that says things will be different this time unless the parasite that is Israel is neutralized or the host on which the parasite is feeding has been depleted and rendered unable to nourish the parasite.

What a stupid end to the most stupid story of this stupid age!