When Self Service Is Their Goal

What is it about people who are supposedly schooled in the arts and the sciences of economics, making big mistakes in simple matters and tripping over them, that even a high school student would have fared better? This time, it is Michael Tanner who is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. He wrote: “Egypt: Europe's Economic Cousin,” an article that also has the subtitle: “The unstable nation suffers from the same problems, and lacks leadership.” It was published on May 30, 2012 in National Review Online.

He says Egypt's economy is in tatters and he tells why: “Real GDP growth was just 1.8 percent in 2011, and is projected to be lower still this year. Unemployment is 10.4 percent and rising. Youth unemployment tops 25 percent. Inflation runs well above 10 percent per year.” Hey, even if things are as bad as this, how do they compare with “cousin” Greece whose GDP was not expressed as a positive number but the spine chilling negative 20 percent? He also laments that unemployment in Egypt is 10.4 percent when “cousin” Spain suffers from a rate that tops the 24 percent level. And he reports that youth unemployment in Egypt tops 25 percent when it tops the 50 percent level in the European cousins.

And to say that Egypt just had a revolution, how is that for comparing apples and oranges only to find that Egypt comes out smelling -- if not like roses -- at least like the blossom of fruit trees. And the true picture of the Egyptian economy is even better than this because the last quarter has grown not by worse than 1.8 percent as Tanner projects but by better than 4.5 percent. And there is also the fact that in addition to all this, you would expect that a young nation where the bulk of the population is under the age of 30, the youth unemployment should be higher than the geriatric populations of Europe. But Egypt beats Europe in this classification by a factor of two. Take it from me, none of this can be a sign of instability. On the contrary, it is a sign of fundamental stability that the country was able to withstand a shock that would have been powerful enough to demolish a European “cousin” had it happened to one of them.

Tanner goes on to talk about the debt and deficit in Egypt not to relay to his readers a detailed picture of the situation in that country but to articulate a cause he is promoting back home in America. This would be the idea that big government, taxes and debt are bad for you. His aim is to point to the danger of being saddled with a large debt and worse, being saddled with the idea of unfunded liabilities which he says, reach a level that is 4 times as large as the GDP. Yes, this is bad but not so much in a country where the population is young, where the saving rate is 20 percent, and where the budget deficit is due in large measure to the money spent on the infrastructure that the young population will be using for decades to come. Compare this with America where the saving rate is near zero, where the population may be younger than that in Europe but older than that in Egypt, and where the deficit goes to fund consumption as well as the useless wars that do not build bridges in America – not even bridges that go nowhere.

A sign that shows Tanner is using the discussion on Egypt to push his agenda for America is the fact that he keeps dancing around the issues. Look what he says first: “...there has been relatively little discussion of … the need for economic reform.” But then says this: “Egypt had started to reform its pension system … but those reforms have been … postponed...” Again, he first says this: “Some of Egypt's economic problems are obviously aftershocks from the … Arab Spring.” But then says this: “Egypt's economic problems existed long before … and begin with the crushing burden of a vast and intrusive welfare state.” And this tells you that what is really bothering him is the idea of welfare state. A message he is sending to someone in America.

But how is this welfare state manifested in Egypt according to him? This is how: “The Egyptian central government consumes a third of all the goods and services produced in the country … the tax burden exceeds 23 percent of GDP.” First of all, the consumption by the government is not all consumption but is part investment in the sense that some of it goes to build the infrastructure as indicated above. Another part goes to partner with the private sector in the construction of the large projects that the private sector alone cannot shoulder, a situation you encounter in all the emerging economies.

Second of all, Egypt is a unitary state where there is a central government in charge of the responsibilities which are traditionally those of a federal government plus health, education and welfare which, in a federated state, would be the responsibilities of the municipalities as well as the provinces (in Canada) or the states (in America). In Egypt, the provinces and the municipalities function with the money transferred to them from the central government. Thus when it is said that the Egyptian bureaucracy is made of 6 million employees, it includes the teachers, hospital employees, police officers on top of the air traffic controllers, the coast guard, the foreign service, the center for disease control and all the other services you know about or never heard of. When you know this, you know that 23 percent of GDP going to pay for all these services compares very well with the other countries in Europe where the bill may reach as high as 75 percent of GDP, and in North America where it may reach as high as 50 percent.

Having indicated his dismay that: “...much of the attention … is being focused on issues such as … the rivalry between the military and the Muslim Brotherhood,” he now says this: “...enterprises … run by the military dominate large areas of the economy.” But this is part of the current debate, and it has to do with reforming the economy, something Tanner says is not happening. But then, he goes on to say this: “These businesses are not fully accounted for in measures of government expenditures (revenues from military companies are a state secret), but are estimated to make up roughly a third of Egypt's economic activity.”

And this is where his entire discussion on the Egyptian economy comes down like a house of cards. Let me begin by explaining something in mathematics. Take a stick and divide it in three equal pieces. Now hide one piece and look at what is left. You will find that there are two pieces left. You know what this means? It means that what is hidden is half of what is apparent. Expressed in percentage, it would be 50 percent. Thus, when Tanner says that a third of the Egyptian economy is hidden, he means to say that the real economy is 50 percent larger that what is observed. If so, none of what he said about the levels of debt and deficit make any sense at all. And so it has always been when the discussion pertained to the Egyptian economy because all those that jumped into the fray, copied from each other and echoed what was said before without thinking for themselves.

But there is more to it than that. The fact is that in all emerging economies, a large number of people especially in the rural areas, produce goods and services that do not figure in any ledger, therefore do not show up in the GDP estimates. And even in the urban areas, there is what is called the underground economy where unlicensed operations produce goods and services that remain hidden from the taxman. When you take all this into consideration, you realize that as the country advances, these operations are brought into the open and they will eventually make the GDP look much larger than it appears at this time. When they all start to pay their taxes, the debt and deficit will be erased in no time at all. And this is something that escapes the rating agencies who should look for something else to do.

Having denied that the two leading candidates were interested in talking about reforming the economy, Tanner now picks on their talking points and criticizes both sides because neither has said what would be music to his ear. And this is to reduce the role of government to absolute insignificance. But the choices that you make for an emerging economy are different from those you make for a developed economy. While you can experiment with the level of social safety net in the latter, it is much harder to do so in an emerging economy because people react differently when they get hurt. Whereas austerity might push an older man in Greece to commit suicide so as not to burden his daughter, a young father in Egypt with a wife and three children to feed will want to entertain other ideas before contemplating suicide.

In short, the candidates over there are the best judges of their situation, and the last thing they need is the self-serving advice that comes from people so absorbed by the look of their bellybutton, they cannot lift their head long enough to see a whole new and different world out there.

And what strikes you as grotesque is when the self-styled do-gooders give their unsolicited advice then warn: “Without such reforms … the door to extremism will open wider.” Believe me, Sir, nothing can be more extreme  than the uselessness of your advice.

Two Clowns One Funny The Other Boring

What is America afraid of, Islam or Judaism? What should America be afraid of? We have two articles published in the National Review Online that may help us answer these questions. The first article came under the title: “Coexisting with Sharia” and the subtitle: “A trial involving child sex abuse in England sends a warning.” It was written by Karen Lugo and published on May 25, 2012. The second article came under the title: “The Facebook Caliphate” and the subtitle: “Liberal democracy cannot be tweeted.” It was written by Mark Steyn and published on the next day, May 26, 2012.

Let us begin with the second article. It discusses the Egyptian presidential election about which Steyn reports that the early count indicates a member of the Muslim Brotherhood has a good chance of winning. Steyn then warns that such development will be dangerous to the West which includes Europe and North America. In fact, the author has made it a career to issue this sort of warnings, and has been at it for many years. The implication of the title in his newest article is that as a consequence of the Facebook Revolution in the Arab World, a Muslim Caliphate has come this much closer to conquering the world and to ruling it. This being the author's nightmare scenario, he could not go to sleep that night or wait till the morning to see how the count had gone before writing what he had on his mind, and apparently had on his chest too. This is how he expressed it all: “As I write, they're counting the votes … by the time you read this the pecking order may have changed.”

But what does he say his problem is with Islam? He answers this question somewhere in the lower half of the article. Speaking of the youngsters who started the “Facebook Revolution,” he laments: “If they supposedly embody the forces of progress and modernity, then they've just taken an electoral pounding from guys who haven't had a new idea since the seventh century.” This is to say Steyn believes that progress and the march toward modernity in the Muslim World stopped the moment that Islam began. And this, in turn, means that the splendors of the Muslim Civilization which extend from Southern Europe to Eastern Asia were not accomplished between the seventh century and the nineteenth century like say the history books but were there already before Islam began in the seventh century. It also means that as a result of the advent of Islam, progress and modernity came to an abrupt end. Wow! I tell you this is really something, my friend. I've seen the deliberate rewrite of history before but there is nothing deliberate about this one; it is simply pure ignorance. And for someone to be this careless about historical events when he can so easily check them out, demonstrates that when it comes to measuring levels of IQ, you will find a higher level in the skull of a bird than the skull of Mark Steyn.

I go over the rest of the article several times to see what else is in it that may help improve the image of the guy with bird brain but find nothing more than the description of a non existent world. Needless to say I read Arabic and I have remained in touch with the Arab world, especially Egypt, for the past fifty years. What I read about these people here and what I hear that is said about them in English, is nothing like what they write in their own publications, and nothing like what they say to each other. In fact, the Jewish organizations here have blacklisted people like myself and have shut us out to give the Jewish propaganda machine free range to create a fantasy world where no one was allowed to scrutinize it; to fact check what it reported or push back against the claims it made. Those organizations and the people running them did all this because their aim was and still is to consolidate the Jewish grip on North America. And this is something they succeed in doing by accusing the Muslims of scheming to take over the world, thus divert attention from the fact that they are the ones doing so.

Consequently, you get to read a passage like this in the Steyn article: “Ideas on liberty, free speech, property rights, women's rights, and all the other things conspicuous by their absence in the philosophies of Egypt's new political class.” It should not have surprised me to read this but it did because even a bird brain should have known better. I happen to follow the Egyptian debates on these topics and the other topics which are urgent to them at this time such as the economy, health care and education; and there has been some writing about it even here. How could he have missed that? I stopped for a moment to try and understand why he would say such a thing. I thought of several possible scenarios and settled on the one that expressed it best. Actually, it's a neat little analogy that isn't even mine. I came to know about it because it happened one day that I read something false about Egypt. I took it to my good friend who happened to be a prominent Jewish lawyer and asked him why they would choose to say this when the truth is that? He thought about it for a moment then asked me: If you place the complete works of Shakespeare and a basket of bananas in front of a monkey, which of the two do you think the monkey will take? I did not need to answer because the example said it all. Likewise, Mark Steyn does not see the great value in the Egyptian debates because he is fixated on the bananas. The bird has suddenly transformed into a monkey. Quite a clown/magician, this one.

Keep up the good work, Mark; it saves me having to go to the zoo and look there for cheap entertainment and a good laugh watching the antics of the birds and the monkeys.

We now turn our attention to the equally goosey but less funny article of Karen Lugo. The subject of her piece is the trial of a horrible gang of boys in Britain who committed some very bad crimes. She finds in the story a marker or two she could latch on to argue that the boys did what they did because they were Muslims. From there, she goes on to say that we cannot coexist with Islam or the Sharia law it brings with it because it allows the Muslims to behave this badly, and because it will make such behavior a permanent feature of the European and American cultures.

Karen Lugo is a California clown that is so incompetent, she could not bring a smile to the face of small children at Disney World if she tried harder. Her motives for doing what she does are so pointless, it is difficult to think of her as being capable of committing something that is extremely dangerous. There is, however, something about being a “Judeo-Christian” American, and continually attributing to Islam what a gang of delinquent boys do whether they are homegrown boys or they are imports.

It is that when such attribution is made and repeated over and over, there comes a time when someone in the Arab or Muslim world will look to see what the Americans are saying to each other. And those over there will conclude from what they see and hear over here that because the Christians attribute to Islam every crime that is committed by a Muslim, it must be that every crime that is committed by a Christian is due to their Christianity. In consequence of this, the Arabs and the Muslims will deduce that every Columbine type shooting is a Christian crime. That killing women, cutting them into pieces and selling that as pork chops is the Christian way to add to one's income. That beheading a fellow traveler on the bus and eating from his flesh is a Christian delicacy. That tying mentally challenged people with chains and keeping them in a boiler room to collect their social security checks is a Christian habit. And so and so on and so on. And we, North Americans of Arab origin can try all we want to explain to them that these are isolated incidents, but we fail to find the right words or the right approach that can help us overcome the activities of Karen Lugo and the other fools like her. It is simply that their actions speak louder than our words each and every time.

And in the same way that she and all the other boring clowns of her ilk keep warning that the Muslim boys are but a fifth column who will use the Sharia law to bring to Europe and to America the crimes which are peculiar to them, there will emerge a clown or two in the Arab and Muslim worlds who will want to do the same thing. They will reason and will warn that the Christians who live among them in the Arab and Muslim countries are but a fifth column using the faith as an excuse to bring to their countries the Christian crimes which are peculiar to Europe and to North America. And this is how Christian Arabs will end up suffering not because of the evil they commit or because their Muslim countrymen are bad but because the evil would have originated right here and exported to them over there.

What is not surprising about Karen Lugo is that sitting in California, she should try to second guess the assessment that was made of the situation in London by both the chief superintendent of detectives and the assistant chief constable over there. It happened that the first has refused to get “hung up on race and ethnicity issues,” while the second has observed that it was happenstance “the demographics were that these were Asian men.” Obviously these two professionals know something she does not. They know that any big time organized crime or any small time gang of thugs will eventually be defeated by regular law enforcement. This is what happened in America to the Italian, Jewish and Irish mafias; it happened to the Chinese, Vietnamese, Russian and many other mobs, and it happened to homegrown gangs doing all sorts of bad things for profit or for the thrill of doing something forbidden while getting away with it.

But something good can still come out of all this. The fact is that Karen Lugo fancies herself as being an expert on constitutional law. So maybe she ought to read a little history whereupon she will discover that while groups of lawbreakers may cause havoc where they operate, their activities never go beyond the neighborhood. On the other hand, the groups that manipulate and distort the administration of justice end up causing so much damage to the nation that the whole society eventually descends on them to administer a pogrom style justice. When Lugo will be convinced of this, she could then look closely at what is happening in the office of Cyrus Vance Junior, the District Attorney of Manhattan.

What she will find there is that a man widely known in his country of France for being a retail rapist, a gang rapist and a prostitution ring master was let go by Cyrus Vance Junior for committing a similar sort of crime in America because he was Jewish. As a result, it is getting to be known in some legal circles that Vance was given a list of acts that the Jewish organizations want him to commit. These are acts that will subvert the American system of justice and will certainly provoke reactions similar to those that happened in Germany -- reactions that were instrumental to the rise of a dangerous ideology in that country.

If Lugo wants to know why Junior is doing this, she can look into the history of what happened to his father, the late Cyrus Vance Senior. He was Secretary of State to President Jimmy Carter when the latter decided to rescue the American hostages that were held in Iran. Vance did not like the idea, believing it was too risky and so he resigned. He later founded the American-Iranian Council, an organization that seeks to push back against the venom which is constantly pouring out of the Jewish hate and incitement machine. After the passing of the old man, Junior was told by the Jewish organizations to do as they say or the memory of his father will be dragged in the mud, having associated himself so closely with the Iranian causes. The kid had no choice but to knuckle under in order to save the name of the family and save his own career.

The list of subversive activities he is asked to commit is a long one but two areas of interest to the Jewish organizations stand out. Junior is to revise and whitewash anything that may reflect a true picture of the Jewish existence in New York beginning in the late Nineteenth Century. This is when the Jewish Mafia was helping to establish and to organize the Italian Mafia in New York. And he is to minimize the role that was played by Jewish individuals and organizations – be they corporate or otherwise -- in the financial crimes that were committed on Wall Street and elsewhere.

Thus, if Karen Lugo would leave the business of law enforcement to the professional law enforcers and concentrate instead on the administration of the law and the preservation of the American Constitution, she will do her country a big favor because America is not in danger of being taken over by a bunch of young thugs who break the law for the thrill of it; America is in danger of being destroyed by those who team up with a foreign power to chew on its foundation and consume it like critters from hell. These creatures, it must be said, are the most damaging and most persistent evil force that has plagued the human race since the beginning of time.

They did it to others many times before and they are doing it again to America because they cannot help it -- it is in their DNA.

To Be Free Of Jewish Democratic Tyranny

Here is another valuable gift from Clifford D. May. This time it is a column that goes by the title: “What Iran's Rulers Want” and has the subtitle: “War, genocide, and nuclear weapons.” It was published on May 24, 2012 in National Review Online. It is a gift because the four words of the title encapsulate the strategy by which the Jewish leaders were able to gobble up America, subjugate it and turn it into a giant client state orbiting the little thing they call Israel. Thus, if you make the effort to uncover what is hidden in the title, you will understand how a handful of demons in human clothing were able to use the weakness of Christian democracy to strengthen Jewish authoritarianism.

For fifty years, the Jewish propaganda machine had been telling the Americans -- be they commoners or leaders in any field of endeavor -- that they must not dialogue with anyone in the world or listen to what they say because the Jews will tell America what everyone want, what they are about, how to deal with them and so on and so forth. Upon this, the rabbis immediately started to “educate” the public about how good, smart, generous, intelligent, compassionate, civilized and superior the Jews are. While doing this, they picked on someone in the world, called them the enemy of the day and attacked them for being bad, stupid, stingy, unintelligent, cold, uncivilized and inferior. It was perfect symmetry; a Jewish style Yin and Yang.

Having inherited centuries of experience dealing with the Christians of Europe, the Jewish leaders knew how to work on their descendants; the Christians of America. This time, they did things in a way that was so subtle, they were able to avoid the kind of immediate backlash they used to provoke in Europe; the kind that served to unleash pogroms and holocausts on their followers. But their goal did not change in the sense that it remained the same old quest to infiltrate the system, occupy the strategic positions and get the locals to slavishly serve the Jewish and/or Israeli causes. The Jewish leaders were able to accomplish all this by making the locals believe they were protecting themselves while also helping to save the world and save civilization “as we know it” from the evil people who are out there living for one reason only: to destroy the American way of life.

So here they are again, the political descendants of Karl Marx and cultural descendants of the Kibbutzim collective farms of Israel no longer pretending to be members of the Jewish Defense League – which is on the American list of terrorist organizations -- but members of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies – which ought to be on the list of inciters to hate and fight wars – trying once again to convince us that Israel and the Jews are in danger because they are saints. And being saintly is the reason why the evil characters who rule Iran labor to hurt them, says the author. And he hastily adds that in doing so, the Iranians also demonstrate they plan to hurt America.

Now this question: Do you know what proof he gives for all this? It is that America is just as democratic as the concoction that was erected by the work of the Irgun and the Haganah, the first terrorist organizations to ever plague the Middle East when the Jewish hordes went about bombing the British out of Palestine, and went about machine gunning the unarmed people of Palestine out of their homeland. Of course, the Jewish leaders do not use these words, and they do not tell this history to relay their message. Nevertheless, the message is being relayed by their activities as it has been for half a century.

Clifford May begins his column by telling us what the chief of staff of the Iranian armed forces has said. I am certain that whatever the man has said, he said it not in English but in Persian. Well, I do not have the luxury of being able to go check because I do not speak Persian. But I speak Arabic, and every time I hear or read these people relay what was said in Arabic, it turns out to be as false as translating something like “Let's all get together and make an effort to rebuild our country” into something like “Let's start a worldwide holy war.” And I tell you, my friend, that when you encounter a translation as stinky as this, you feel as sick to the stomach as when you step on a poop left on your porch by the neighbors' dog. And this particular author has been one of the most heedless offenders when it comes to quoting people who speak in a foreign language too remote for Americans to verify. It is like rancid acid being injected into your nostrils.

So then, what does Clifford May claim the Iranian Chief of staff has said? This is what May claims: “he vowed 'full annihilation of the Zionist regime of Israel to the end.'” But you know what I think the Iranian most probably said? He most probably said something that went like this: As usual, the Zionists are once again spreading hate and inciting the Americans to cause a regime change here in Iran with every means being on the table. But I promise you, my fellow citizens, that Iran will be the one to bring about a regime change in Israel with every means being on the table to respond to any means they will dare to use against us. We are your armed forces and we shall defend our ancient homeland to the last drop of sacred blood in our veins.

Do you know why I think so, my friend? I think so because Iran has been one of the earliest civilizations to grace this planet; and that is how civilized people talk among themselves, and talk openly for the whole world to hear. On the other hand, the American Jewish leaders are the most savage things you will encounter on this planet since the Nazis ruled in Europe, and the Khmer Rouge ruled in Cambodia (now Kampuchea). That is how savages distort in their own screwed up little brains what someone else has said, how they translate it and how they report it to others.

Guess who else our esteemed author quotes in his column. He quotes none other than José Maria Aznar. Do you know what this thing is? It is the former prime minister of Spain. Do you know how he came to be former? Because he was caught committing the most heinous crime a leader can commit against his own people and against the very essence of democracy – yes, even that screwy brand of democracy you find in Israel and in Jewish America. It all happened just before the election he was expected to win in Spain but lost decisively.

You see, as fate would have it, al-Qaeda had bombed the trains in that country during the electoral campaign, something it promised it will do if Spain did not withdraw its troops from Afghanistan. Aznar knew who did the bombing but blamed the act on a local terrorist organization because his opponent was promising to withdraw the troops from Afghanistan if he won the election. The truth came out anyway, Aznar was trounced, the opponent won and fulfilled his promise. Thus, I would not believe a word that Aznar says or what May says Aznar has said. It is all dog poop on your porch and mine.

He also quotes Anthony Cordesman who basically says that the Iranians have the knowledge to produce a nuclear weapon if they want to but have not done so. Based on this, however, May goes on to say the following: “Besides being committed to war, genocide, and developing nuclear weapons, Iran's rulers are the world's leading sponsors of terrorism...” But the fact is that Iran has not attacked anyone, and that Israel has attacked everyone it could attack in a neighborhood that was once the garden of Eden but is now a garden infested with a skunk called Israel. As to genocide, the only genocide being committed these days is committed against the unarmed people of Palestine by the savage Jewish hordes, be they in uniform or wearing the civilian attire of settlers. As to the subject of nuclear weapons, it is Israel that pretends to have what it does not have while denying it has what it may or may not have. They call this the purest form of Jewish immersion in ambiguous Marxist-Jeffersonian thinking. But the world calls it the kind of screwed up Jewish behavior that will once again lead innocent people to the gas chamber and the incinerator. Don't they ever learn?

This portion of the presentation complete, he now tells the American negotiators who are a part of the P5+1 group not to give an inch in the negotiations with the Iranians pertaining to their nuclear program, but to ask for absolutely everything while threatening war if they do not get it. This being the case, I have my own advice to give to the Americans. It is this: The people who form organizations and stick the word Jewish on them are charlatans. Listen to them at your peril; something you ought to be familiar with, having been shafted several times already during the last five decades while playing the role of beast of burden and carrying the luggage for world Jewry.

All that these people look for is the fabrication of incidents that will allow them to claim compensation for events deemed to be anti-Semitic. They accomplish this by stealing the Semitic identity when, in fact, they are neither Jewish nor Semitic. But even if they were, they have no more right to compensation than I have for being Christian, and given the fact that my “ancestors” were fed to the lions and other wild animals in the arenas of ancient Rome. But I am of Egyptian origin and as such I am a Semite. And I can tell you from personal experience that the worst thing I dread is being told these characters are my kin folks.

I feel this way not because I am a racist but because I consider that what they do are acts that diminish the value of the entire human race. I feel this way and you should too all the more so because they will continue to incite America -- as they have done with many other peoples in the past -- to start a war and kill millions in the hope that their followers will get hurt in the process thus give them the opportunity to ask for compensation. Simply put, these characters are an insult to the human species and we should see them for what they are.

There is the saying: With friends like these, who needs enemies? And yet, presenting themselves as friends of America, they have infiltrated that society, took it over by turning their journalists, legislators and politicians of every stripe into shameless prostitutes who would sell the children of their neighbors if not their own to the lords of endless wars. And what do these Americans get in return? They get a pat on the back, a smile and maybe a favorable write up in the local newspaper. America has become a sort of democracy where the practitioners give so much of what belongs to the public for so little that may benefit them personally. This is a horror story all by itself.

These examples of low life practitioners of democratic politics Jewish style ought to be unmasked for what they are: the running dogs of the dogs of war who inhabit the doghouse they call Israel. But this is not all because the trainers of the American dogs of Congress and elsewhere can be found in all the places where they stick the word Jewish to make it sound like it is a privileged place that must be approached with respect and reverence. Do that if you want but once inside the premise, call the spade a spade, and call the asshole you meet inside the asshole that he is.

As for you, America, go ahead and negotiate with the Iranians in good faith so that we may save this planet from the only plague that has plagued it since the beginning of time; the idea of supremacy accorded to a people chosen by God to rule over you and me and the rest of the human race.

They are nothing like that. If they were, no one would want to gas them or incinerate them.

Response Of Economic Circuits To Stimuli

On May 21, 2012 the Wall Street Journal took up the debate now raging in the American presidential campaign. It is about the role that financiers play in the economy, and the instruments they use to conduct their business. To articulate its position on the subject, the Journal wrote an editorial under the title: “Bain Capitalism 101” and the subtitle: “How does a rapacious company get repeat business?” The editorial defends the activities of Bain Capital (once run by one of the candidates) against the charges that it “...buys a company, loads it with debt and then sucks out cash before foisting the wounded business upon an unsuspecting buyer or a bankruptcy court.” The editors of the Journal argue that this could only be true if the critics assume that “the financial industry is full of saps,” but these same critics also describe the financiers as being “greedy schemers,” say the editors. And so they conclude: “...financiers can't be both knaves and diabolical geniuses at the same time.”

This is an argument based on reason that puts the subject inside a neat little frame. But things are not always this reasonable or this simple. The fact is that markets are driven by fear and greed. At any given time, the same person could be motivated by one sentiment or the other or even both sentiments at the same time. And it often happens that people make money one day then lose it the next day not because they thought things through before choosing a course of action but because they let their emotions dominate the process of making a choice. Thus, it can be said that the engine which powers the markets is not that of knave versus genius; it is that of greed versus fear. But this is not what the debate ought to be about. Instead, the debaters should focus on the search for a solution to the current problem of anemic growth. And when they find it, they should advocate it regardless as to who may be embarrassed in the process.

Given that the situation has aspects never experienced before, we need to go back to the fundamentals and start our probe there. Since the business cycle has not yet been repealed, it happens that an economy can go into a period of slowdown thus cause vexing problems, chief among them unemployment. If the situation persists, the central bank and the treasury will be inclined to intervene so as to nudge the economy into moving again; and they have the means to do so. The central bank has monetary tools such as the authority to set the interest rates and to print money. The treasury of the government has the authority to tax, to borrow and to spend. The aim of both institutions is to regulate the money supply which, in turn, is supposed to regulate something called the velocity of money.

What is that? Good question. Perhaps the best way to explain it is to take an example. You and I are friends; we graduated from school not long ago and had some work experience. We each have an idea for a venture; we each want to go into business but neither of us has money. In the meantime, your uncle who is till young has been working for a time and has saved some money. He too wants to go into business and he knows exactly what he wants. He has an eye on the hardware store that is up for sale around the corner from his house. The owner of the store is asking 100,000 dollars but your uncle has put together only 75,000 dollars. He says he will borrow the balance from the bank and pay it back from the profit that the business will generate.

What a great idea, I say to you; this will give us the opportunity to launch our own businesses. No we can't, you say, because neither of us has any money and the bank will not lend us 100% of the capital we need to start the businesses. True, I say but it is customary in such cases that people borrow seed money from friends and family then approach the bank for a loan. Yes, you say but the friends and families of both of us have already done that. In fact, this is how the uncle was able to put together the 75,000 dollars. Yes, I retort, and this is precisely the point I am making.

Puzzled, you ask: How is that? I explain that the hardware store will generate a cash flow. The uncle can either pay back the loans at an accelerated rate or he can pay only what is due each month, and lend to you the surplus. With this seed money, you start your business on a modest scale and grow it a little at a time using the cash it will generate and the cash you will continue to receive from your uncle. When your business will start to generate a surplus, you will begin to lend to me and I launch my business. Thus, we see that a flow of cash will be moving from your uncle to you and then to me at a rate we call the velocity of money.

But who has the power to affect or determine the velocity of money in the grand scheme of an economy? This too is a good question but it is more complicated to answer. In normal times, the central bank and the treasury have this power but things do not always work out that way especially when times are not normal. The principle involved here is that when money is pumped into the economy, and if it is made cheap enough to borrow, the businesses and the general public will borrow and spend. Depending on how much of it is pumped and how cheap it is made to borrow, the money will exchange hands at a corresponding rate which means it will move at a commensurate velocity.

But there comes a time when the psychology of the business owners and/or the public plays a major role in determining the velocity of money despite the measures taken by the central bank and the government. This happens when something serious hits the economy, and the people lose confidence in the system that underlies it. Fearful of what tomorrow may bring, the people tend to hold on to their money instead of spending it. No matter how much of it the central bank and the treasury pump into the economy, and no matter how cheap it is to borrow, the people will hoard the money and wait for better days before spending it. The Japanese were the first to experience this phenomenon, and they described the act of pumping money into the economy under these conditions as being like pushing on a string.

Oddly enough, this is where a possible solution to the problem can be found. Why not pull at the far end of the string rather than push on it at the near end? I began to think about this approach because I could see the resemblance between electronic circuitry and a theory I had developed a while ago calling it the circuitry of economics. And then it happened that something like it was tried and proven successful but only partially. It is that a stimulus package was put together whereby potential buyers were offered a rebate if they traded their old car for a new one. The plan worked while it was in force but stopped when the incentive money dried up. In addition, the sale of cars in the immediate future dropped because the people who would have bought a car then had already satisfied their need for one. Thus, I concluded that this one-time operation cannot be a substitute for refurbishing the economic circuitry. What is needed is a more comprehensive overhaul.

To do that, we need to understand that the problem plaguing the economy at this time can be described with one sentence: it is exhibiting poor response to stimulus. Well, the same sort of problem exists in electronics and there are remedies for it. Can these remedies be applied to the economy? It looks to me like the answer is yes. To see how this may work, we need to know that there are three types of current. The two most familiar to people are the Direct Current (DC) and the Alternating Current (AC). But there is also the pulsating current which happens to play an important role in digital circuits.

The first thing we need to know is that DC cannot carry information; therefore it is not used for communication. What is needed is an alternating current or a pulsating one because they can be in one of two states: ON or OFF. Having this characteristic, they are used in the form of a code to carry a message; be it a Morse code, a human voice, a picture or what have you. And when something goes on and off, the speed at which it does so is called the frequency. This is what determines the velocity at which the message moves through hardware. Thus, the frequency response of a circuit becomes one of its most important features. And the same can be said about an economic circuit where a speedy response to stimulus is the goal. I must, at this point, caution the reader that a message moving in hardware must not be confused with the electromagnetic wave whose velocity in the ether remains the constant speed of light at any frequency.

The importance of seeing that the message is a part of the economic circuitry becomes apparent when we consider that the psychology of people plays a role in determining their propensity to hoard money or to spend it. And this says that in the same way we design an electronic circuit to make it respond better to a higher frequency, we can make an economic circuit respond better to a financial stimulus. In modern electronics, a stand alone transistor or a number of them integrated into a chip act as switches. They go from the ON position to the OFF position or the other way around by charging and discharging a small amount of electricity. How fast this is done depends on the quality of the components and the design of the circuit. But this is what determines the frequency response of the circuit.

But if you are a designer of circuits, and you are constrained by the components you must use as well as the design that suits the application, can you do something that will make the circuit respond faster than normal? The answer is yes. To see how this is done, you need to know that the discharge of a pulsating current normally goes to a neutral ground which acts like the drain of your sink. To make the discharge go faster, you can attach to the system a pump that will suck that discharge. In electronics, this is done by having the discharge go not to a neutral ground but to a negative terminal. This is why some circuits have a negative terminal in addition to the positive terminal and the neutral ground.

The transistor switches take time to charge and discharge because they have an internal capacitance even though they are not capacitors. This property being what allows them to operate the way they do, what is there in economics that equates with the electronic capacitor? The answer to this question is made complicated by the fact that it is twofold. There is the storeroom and there is the wallet/bank account. The first is an area with the capacity to hold goods for a time before shipping them out. The second is a place where money is stashed and taken from. There was a time when the Japanese had attempted to make use of the storeroom capacitance to force their economic circuitry to operate at a higher frequency. But the idea backfired because it was the wrong thing to do at the wrong time. They called the operation a “just in time” approach to doing business. For example, an assembler of appliances would order the parts that he needs just in time before using them. He thus shortened the time during which he stored them and thus saved money.

That approach failed because it distorted the message as it rippled through the economic circuitry. It did so in two ways. First, it caused the volume and velocity of money to increase so as to keep up with the payment of bills in the just-in-time environment. Second, the approach conveyed to the public the notion that the goods they produce and consume have a value stored in them that is no better than the trash they dispose of. The idea then spread to the services and caused the same problems there. The result has been that the magnitude and complexity of the distortion forced the people to look for something they can think of as having a more durable value stored in them. They turned to real estate and to art objects where bubbles formed and brought down the whole economic system.

In a nutshell, what happened that started the ball rolling was that the message was distorted. When something like this happens, the psychology of human beings is such that they distrust and reject every message that comes their way without bothering to check whether it is a valid message or a fake one. They curtail their activities and wait for the situation to clarify itself. Thus, the question to ask is: How to change all that?

The first thing we do is state what the goal is. It is to have a source of money and a circuit in which it can move unimpeded by bad psychology or otherwise. When things go normally, the money will drain itself and no extraordinary action is needed. When things start to go badly, the demand for money slows, and this compels the central bank and the treasury to act as sources of last resort to stimulate the economy. But things can get worse still, and no matter how much the bank and the treasury try to stimulate the economy, the circuit remains blocked because it is like pushing on a string. In this case, the government and the treasury must act as pump to suck the money at the other end of that string. In fact, right now the bank believes it can do so by manipulating the short term versus long term curve of interest rates. But the method has proven to be largely ineffective.

What is needed is a comprehensive approach not a half measure. In fact, the appropriate question has only now been asked: How to stimulate the economy and have austerity at the same time? To properly answer this question, we must deal with three areas. They are the source, the bulk of the circuit and the drain. At the source, you maintain the money cheap and plentiful. At the drain you lower the taxes on profit realized from operations but you raise them on capital, especially the large dormant bank accounts. Mind blowing but it must be done – preferably by all nations at the same time.

As to the bulk of the circuit, you help create bypasses by encouraging second tier financial institutions to grow and take business away from the “too big too fail” so that they understand they are too big to be left unbroken. Either they break themselves or the law will compel them to do it.

The Neocon That Is An Old Con Artist

I suggest that before you continue to read this piece, you first read an article that was published in the National Review Online on May 19, 2012. It was written by Andrew C. McCarthy under the title: “From Democracy to Sharia” and the subtitle: “The 'Arab Spring' shows that democratic process is useless without democratic culture.” The reason why I wish you would read him first is that I want you to get a feel of what it's like to be exposed to an article like that before seeing the other side to the story. Then, by all means, go ahead and read the other side.

Whether you are a Christian living in Egypt or a Christian of Egyptian origin living abroad, you learn that there is a thing or two you need to keep an eye on. If you live in Egypt, the thing you dread the most is that some highly placed character in Europe or in America will dare to speak in your name or dare to say something to the effect that you need protection or dare to utter an idiocy of the sort you will find in the book of morons. In fact, the only protection that the Christians of Egypt need is that of being shielded from the meddling of a foreign self-styled mentally challenged do-gooder poking his crooked nose in their affairs.

If you are a Christian of Egyptian origin living in a place like Canada, the thing that opens your eye is when you are mistaken for a Muslim -- which is what happens every time you join a new aggregation. This is when you learn what it means to be treated like dirt or close to it. But if and when the aggregation surrounding you learns that you are a Christian, you get hit with the second eye opening experience. Have you guessed what it is, my friend? It is that they try to draft you into their relentless effort to explode a sectarian war somewhere in the Arab or the Muslim world, preferably Egypt.

Knowing this, you may now understand why I tolerate, even welcome an article such as that of Andrew McCarthy. I welcome it because there is only one way to attenuate the damage that he and people like him inflict on the civilized world. It is that when they become this extreme in their views, they begin the process of defeating themselves by themselves. What is worth noting here is that the author is a former prosecutor which means he was trained as a lawyer. And part of the training that lawyers receive is something known in the acting profession as the method. This is what sends actors to glory and sends lawyers to dishonor.

Before taking up a role, an actor of the Marlon Brando stature learns as much as he can about the character he is about to play. He does so by living the life of that character -- be it a contemporary one or a historical one -- until he can psyche himself into believing that he is the reincarnation of the person. Similarly, in order to sympathize with the cause of his client, a lawyer does exactly the same thing. And this is why you may at times hear a lawyer say something like: “we did not commit the offense we are charged with.”

It can also happen that a lawyer is not in a courtroom defending a client but out in the world defending a cause. And this is where you see some truly weird effects. They are due to the fact that a cause is an abstract concept which the lawyer has no choice but to personify in his mind. He does this by imagining the cause to be a living person, and he treats it as such. He then imagines himself defending a most saintly victim that was wronged by the most evil aggressor. And this is the weird effect you see in the McCarthy article.

Before I get into the heavy stuff, let me start with something light that is also informative to those who do not speak Arabic. Somewhere in the middle of the McCarthy article, you encounter this sentence: “'Islamophobia' was coined by the Muslim Brotherhood and seamlessly adopted by its Western confederates.” Well, my friend, I can say categorically that nothing can be more false than this, more ignorant or more reckless. The English expression is made of two words: Islam and phobia. This is common in the Western languages but not in Arabic. Thus, what the author has said is something that is purely out of his imagination.

But let me assure you that now -- only now – some Arab journalists are beginning to experiment with this manner of coining new expressions. But so far, they are only doing it in the field of technology. One such expression is hydroelectric. You see, the word electricity in Arabic is pronounced “kahraba”, and water is pronounced “ma-e”. And so they coined the word “kahroma-e” to refer to the hydroelectric power stations. Now, do yourself a favor and find someone that has left the Arab world more than three years ago and has not kept in touch. Ask them if this word means anything to them. They will say it means nothing. Now, let me tell you that the word Islamophobia has no counterpart in Arabic.

So then, what did happen? Well, what I saw happen was that for many decades, some people on this continent started to attack the Arabs and the Muslims in the most virulent fashion you can imagine. The Arabs and the Muslims in their world did not seem to notice the trend till one of them wrote that there is a strain of  “Ada-e lel-islam” which literally translates into “enmity towards Islam.” These are the words they use to express what they see happen here if and when they turn their attention to such matters which is – not once in a blue moon – but once in every two or three blue moons. It is that these people would not give a hoot what the idiots over here say about them. Thus, for McCarthy to make it sound like he knows something his readers do not know is to show the world that he is a fake, ignorant and reckless individual.

That was the light stuff; now the heavy stuff. You read the article several times over to try and make sense of what he is trying to describe as being the Arab and/or Muslim democracy. But you feel like he is deliberately torturing you with nonsense. And so, you give up trying to understand this part of his presentation to ask yourself: But what does he understand democracy to mean? You go over the article one more time and find only this: “American Democracy … a culture of liberty … that predated … the Revolution … the Constitution … the first federal elections.” That's it? Is this sufficient to define a concept as complex as democracy? All he says is that democracy is a culture of liberty? But what is culture and what is liberty?

Tired and disheartened, you try to guess what kind of liberty he is talking about. According to him, is it American liberty when a pastor goes on television and tells the flock they must worship the Jew like a God? Is it American liberty when the Congress of dogs fails to get anything done to save the country from falling over the cliff but rushes to pass bills by a near unanimous vote when they serve the interests of Israel? Is it American liberty when the prime minister of a foreign little fart comes to urinate on the rug of the Oval Office then goes to get a standing ovation in the Congress of dogs?

No, this guy has no idea what democracy means. He could not write one paragraph that would please even a high school teacher. But he wants you to believe he is a neocon which may mean something that is as yet undefined. For now, we have to view him simply as an old con artist who is out of his league writing about subjects that are way above his head.

Insight For A World Reserve Currency

Worried about their currency not being respected as much as before, some Americans have started to murmur about the value of the dollar and its role as a reserve currency for the world. Add to this the fact that the Euro seems to be going downhill nowadays and you can understand why there has been calls to return to the gold standard, a measure that some people believe will make of the dollar “sound money” again.

Unfortunately, the fundamental principles involved in this matter were barely mentioned if at all during those murmurs. But without developing an understanding of the principles involved, the full discussion of this subject – if and when it comes -- will be a waste of time. What follows is an attempt to elucidate the matter to the extent that it can be done, and thus get to the principles which are involved in giving a currency its value.

Let me start with an example. Twin brothers Peter and John who think alike marry twin sisters who also think alike. Each of the brothers inherits the same amount of money, and they launch the same sort of manufacturing business but do so at opposite ends of the city. Each of the sisters also starts her own architectural business away from each other. After a while, both brothers see the need for a bank loan to expand the business, and so they approach the neighborhood bankers who are not twins and do not think alike.

Peter's banker says to him draw up an inventory of the machinery and real estate you have then come back and we'll discuss how much we can lend to you. I have it right here, says Peter, and he shows the banker a list where the bottom line says one million dollars ($1,000,000). In this case, says the banker, we'll extend to you a line of credit in the amount of one million dollars. Peter goes to his wife and tells her what happened. Too bad, she says, because I have three talented architects in my own business but very little in terms of machinery or real estate. We generate of lot of sales, make a good profit, and I could do better if the bank would lend me enough money to do two things. I need to print an attractive sales kit showing all that we have accomplished up to now, and I need to hire and train a sales force that will go out and seek new customers. But from the looks of it, I have the feeling that the bank will not lend to me because I have little in terms of capital outlays.

At the other end of town, John's banker says to him draw up a balance sheet for the last full year of your business, then come back and we'll discuss how much we can lend to you. I have it right here, says John, and he shows the balance sheet to the banker where the top line says three million dollars ($3,000,000) in sales, and the bottom line says thirty thousand dollars ($30,000) in profit. Impressive sales but a small profit, says the banker, and I suppose you want to borrow money so as to improve on your productivity and thus generate a better return. Exactly, says John, and the banker says he will extend to him a line of credit in the amount of one and a half million dollars ($1,500,000). John goes to his wife and tells her what happened. She jumps for joy because she employs talented architects who generate a lot of sales and profit; and she knows she can do even better if she advertised. To know that the bank will lend her as much as half her yearly sales is to know she can expand the business to its full potential.

We see from these examples that there are at least two ways to evaluate a business. One way is to base the valuation on the amount of wealth that the business generates. The other is to valuate the business based on the amount of capital it has already accumulated. Which way is the better way? Well, in reality this is not a fair question because other variables come into play when valuing a business. There is, for example, the question as to where the economy stands at the time of valuation, what sector of the economy the business is in, how the sector is expected to perform in the future, what kind of management the company has and so on. But we assume for the purpose of this discussion that all of these factors have a negligible effect, and we ignore them.

We now examine a few other principles before we can resume the discussion on the currency. To this end, we imagine a spaceship full of human beings getting stranded on a planet that looks like earth in terms of the plant and animal life it contains. It is not inhabited by indigenous intelligent beings which makes it easy for the people from Earth to colonize it. The earthlings -- now calling themselves people of the planet -- understand they will be here for several generations without anyone from Earth knowing where they are or what happened to them. Thus, they decide to make the best of a bad situation by settling in and putting down the foundation for a whole new society to emerge and to evolve on this new home planet.

The first thing they do is establish a system of valuation for the goods they produce and the services they perform. They know they will soon be able to print money which they will use as a medium of exchange but until they do, they institute a system of barter that is based on the relative value of the goods and services they exchange with each other. Because the population is small, they do not rely on the marketplace to determine the value of each item. Instead, they consider the egg to be the unit value of the barter currency, and they price everything else accordingly. For example, when it comes to the proteins, a chicken is worth ten eggs; a lamb is worth ten chickens and a cow is worth ten lambs. As to the grains, legumes, fruits and vegetables, the people of the planet fabricate a basket, the content of which is given a value depending on what that content is. For example, a basket of apples is worth five eggs; a basket of wheat is worth seven eggs; a basket of mangoes is worth a chicken plus two eggs and so on. In the services, a haircut is worth half a dozen eggs and everything else is bargained for. The arrangement is not tailored to function like a commune or a system of free enterprise; it is something in-between.

Years later, the population has grown large enough for the people of the planet to move to the next stage. They print money, call it the Mighty Egg (ME) and use it as a medium of exchange. They also introduce elements of the free market economy where the forces of supply and demand are allowed to determine the relative price of each item. They elect a woman to operate the printing press, and call her the banker. But the economy is not yet a fully fledged one, and so the banker estimates how much goods and services will be produced each day, also estimates what the price of each item will be on that day, and does the math. She comes up with a figure and prints money in that amount.

The people of the planet muddle through for a time but after a while things start to go wrong, and everybody feels it. However, because the people are still nice to each other -- being in it together on this isolated planet -- they do not complain right away. With time, however, enough cracks accumulate in the system to create one big problem that has several sides to it. This is when the people decide to face up to the reality that they have a serious situation and that they must do something about it. They elect a number of individuals from among their ranks and delegate to them the power to go sit with the banker and discuss the situation on their behalf. The delegation meets with the banker who says she does the best she can to assess how much of each item the people of the planet will be producing during the day, and she prints the corresponding amount of money. But the members of the delegation reassure her that the mismatch between her assessment and the reality is so minor, it is not the problem they came to discuss. So then, what is the problem? she asks.

They say it is the way she distributes the money. To respond to them, she picks yesterday's example and explains what she did. She says she estimated that the planet will produce two hundred thousand (200,000) Mighty Eggs (MEs) worth of goods and services, and she printed this much to serve as money supply for that day. She divided 200,000 by the 20,000 inhabitants of the planet and got the number 10 which represented the number of MEs there was per capita. She distributed the money to each family according to its size. For example, a family of 4 received 40 MEs; a family of 7 received 70 MEs and so on. But this is precisely what is wrong, they say to her, because while the move may be laudable as an egalitarian gesture, it sets up a flawed situation whereby people are paid not for what they accomplish but for being there. They ask that the system be amended whereby each person will be paid according to merit based on what they have accomplished say, the day before.

We'll try that, says the banker, and she tells the people of the planet to get ready for a whole new social experiment, one that is based on meritocracy and not on egalitarian principles. To this end, she asks everyone who is of working age to pick ten people at random at the end of each day, and evaluate the work they did on that day. The people are to vote at the computer terminal she programed for the purpose when they come to pick up their salary at the end of the day. The thing everyone knows is that the computer is the one they had on the spaceship; it is so advanced it recognizes each person and will disallow anyone from voting for themselves.

Things went well on the first day of the experiment in that people got paid almost as much as before plus an allowance for the dependents they have. As a result, the price of goods and services remained more or less stable. But by the next day, and for every day after that, the pace of things picked up. What happened was that some people started to get paid evermore with each passing day. This meant that more money had to be printed, a move that resulted in prices inflating evermore with each passing day. It took little time for inflation to turn into hyperinflation, and the people whose salary did not keep up with the rising prices revolted. They asked that things be returned to what they were under the old regime; the banker agreed and so ordered. And she followed by appointing a commission to find out what went wrong.

After a thorough investigation it was revealed that a system of “you scratch my back and I scratch yours” got into the works and permeated the system. While it was true that people could not vote for themselves, they could form cabals and protection rackets whereby the members could vote for each other. This is what happened, in fact, as the people voted the highest grade for one another, a fraud that the computer did not detect. Those who got ahead as a result left behind those who were not adept at playing this sort of social games. In the end, it became clear that the system of meritocracy got corrupted by the fact that instead of true merit being attributed based on the work done by each individual, a false merit was attributed based on the political abilities of some individuals, on their ruthlessness and such other considerations as may go under the rubric of “beauty contest.” Moral degradation set in and played a big role in the collapse of the whole arrangement.

What to do now? asked the people of the planet. They discussed the matter and came up with the idea of having a full fledged free enterprise arrangement coupled with a monetary system that was based on the gold standard. From then on, the people who had a business would hire workers and pay them wages and salaries. To get going, the business owners were allowed to borrow from the banker an amount commensurate with the capital they had accumulated so far or the amount of sales they were doing on a daily basis.

An ounce of gold was fixed at the price of 35 Mighty Eggs, and every financial institution was required to keep in its vaults an amount of gold valued at no less than 10% what the institution normally loans to its clients. Things worked nicely for a while in that consumer prices were held steady. But what was not immediately apparent to most people was that pressure was beginning to build. The few wizards who knew what was going on, realized that an explosion was inevitable and that it would come sooner or later. The trouble they saw coming was two-pronged. The first prong was that wages had risen so much, it was costing almost 35 MEs to produce an ounce of gold; and this was forcing the gold mining companies to shut down. This in turn put an upward pressure on the price of gold that nevertheless was not allowed to rise in price by law. And this is why the gold miners were asking that the price of gold be liberated and allowed to move according to market forces.

The second prong of the problem was that the planet had gone from being a handful of hamlets to being a sizable city state. It now contained buildings, infrastructures and machines worth billions of MEs. These could be used as collateral by the businesses that wanted to borrow except that the lending institutions could not lend this much money because they did not have the gold reserves that the law required them to have. And this is why the business people and the financial institutions were asking that this provision of the law be dropped or that the price of gold be liberated and allowed to move according to market forces.

And this brings us back to the question: Which way is the better way to evaluate a business? Is it to base the valuation on the amount of wealth that the business generates? Or is it to valuate the business based on the amount of capital it has already accumulated? The answer is that it does not matter which way you do it because these are the two faces of the same coin. In fact, what we have here is not even a coin-like flat object; it is a multi-dimensional object with several faces, three of which are important to this discussion.

And this is how all this relates together. The level to which an economy has evolved is expressed by the permanent infrastructures underlying it. And these infrastructures could not exist were it not for the wealth that the economy generates on a daily basis. And so, these two aspects of the economy are so closely and naturally related, they must be thought of as one and the same phenomenon. For a bank manager to pick one or the other, and use that to assess the value of a business is purely a matter of personal preference. But whether it is one or the other, the cumulative effect of these choices by the lending institutions is what determines the size of the money supply in an economy. This, in turn determines the value of the currency.

What is not naturally related to that phenomenon is the value of gold. Given that the supply of the precious metal is finite, what comes into play here is the law of supply and demand. Whereas the daily output of an economy and the size of its infrastructures are determined by human activity, the supply of gold is largely determined by its availability in nature. Thus, to use gold as the only factor by which to give value to a currency is to take the wrong approach. What is needed, instead, is a system that will take into account other commodities as well. Added to the mix should be the level of development in the world as it is measured by the output of all the goods and services produced by the entire planet.

A currency that is real such as the dollar or the Yuan, or a currency that is virtual such as the Special Drawing Rights, can then be created based on that mix. It should also be made to vary and remain in step with the evolution of the planetary economy.

A Voice From The Mausoleum Of Oblivion

He is alive, healthy and kicking which is a good thing but when it comes to his contribution in the cause of human progress, former President George W. Bush is better relegated to the mausoleum of oblivion. I am aware of the “quiet” effort he made to help my cause during my darkest days when Canada was ruled by a monster called Jean Chretien, but his effort came to naught for predictable reasons. Someday before I die, I may tell this story but I cannot promise I will. In the meantime, Mr. Bush – whom I thank for having tried to help -- has delivered a speech that was adapted and printed as an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on May 18, 2012 under the title: “The Arab Spring and American Ideals”. The piece also has the subtitle: “We do not get to choose if a freedom revolution should begin or end in the Middle East or elsewhere. We only get to choose what side we are on.”

He says at the start: “The idea that Arab peoples are somehow content with oppression has been discredited forever.” This acknowledges that it was the reigning idea till it was no more. But while it was, America used it as a guide to fashion its relationship with the Arabs. You think, therefore, that he will be inclined to say what he would have done differently had he known then what he knows now but no, this is not what he says. Look what he says instead -- but please don't scream because I may hear you hundreds of miles away: “Some in both parties in Washington look at the risks inherent...” What? Both parties where? In Washington, he says? Is he still looking at the Middle East through the prism of Washington? Horror of horror, did he say the prism of the parties of political sewage in charge of America today? Has he not learned something?

He goes on to give a dissertation on freedom and governance that is full of platitudes such as any high school student can write these days. He tells of the challenges that the people of the Arab Spring now face to build the future of their dream. But then, he explodes the same old bomb of horror you wished he would never bring into the discussion. But he does, and look at this passage of pure disgust: “As Americans, our goal should be to help reformers...” Wrong, Mr. President, wrong. As Americans, your goal should be to get the hell out of their way and keep your nose from coming anywhere near their affairs. These people braved decades of your criminal interference in their affairs, and they brought about the change they wanted despite your demonic efforts to undermine their progress. Don't you recommit those crimes again under a different pretext.

But I must say that the man is innocent of these charges because he was never personally responsible for any of the crimes. He stayed in the Oval Office like any other piece of furniture while a handful of demonic characters did what they did to America and to the world in his name. And you can tell they are still telling him what to do because you see their fingerprints in the speech we are discussing. You detect their attempt to have it both ways in the contradiction where he says at the start: “We do not get to choose if a freedom revolution should begin or end...” but later explains how to control the process. In fact, this is the style of the so-called neocons (a cabal of Jewish leaders) whose philosophy is expanded in an article that appears in the May edition of the Commentary magazine. It was written by Sohrab Ahmari under the title: “The Failure of Arab Liberals”.

Before I discuss this article, let me begin with two analogies that will help to explain how I see things. The first analogy has to do with a satellite that failed while on its way to the planet Mars. Actually, the technology itself did not fail but the mission did because of a human mistake that was made here on Earth. It is that the project was a joint venture between the Americans who use the English system of measurements and the Europeans who use the metric system. Bad coordination between the two had each side work with its own system which meant, for example, that a function of the satellite designed to be executed in feet per second could be executed by mistake in meters per second. This, in fact, is what happened and the mission was doomed.

The second analogy is something that happened even before that. It was a time when Japan was thought to be turning into an economic superpower whose GDP will soon surpass that of America. For this reason, the American Federal Reserve Bank decided to initiate a process by which to set its interest rates not based on the readings of the American economy but the readings of the Japanese economy. I wrote then that such move was akin to having the heating system of your penthouse apartment controlled by a thermostat situated in the lobby of the building where the entrance door is constantly being opened and closed resulting in the back and forth cooling and warming of the place. I saw that decision as being funny and foolish.

Believe it or not, the scientific analogy that has an economic resemblance also has a social and political resemblance. And this, in part, is what this discussion is about. First, let us recall some historical background. It happened during the decade of the Nineteen Seventies that the Zionist movement had lured into Israel all the Arab, Asian and European Jews it could lure. Desperate to take in more people, Israel had the choice of working first on the Ethiopian Jews -- something that would have been easy to do -- or work on the Russian Jews -- something that would have been more difficult to do. For some reason, Israel and its Zionist allies chose to go first with the Russian Jews.

The difficulty with the Russian Jews was that unlike the other countries that let their Jews go without condition, the Soviet Union did not like the idea of giving free education and health care worth billions of dollars to these people only to see them go somewhere else. What galled the Soviets even more was that they knew many of these people will only use Israel as a stopover to then head to their nemesis America, taking with them all that free knowledge and wholesome upbringing. And so, they instituted a process by which the Jews who wanted to leave would pay for the education and the health care they received before getting an exit visa. However, this being a communist country, people did not have the level of savings that would pay for a lifetime of services paid for by the government. A stalemate was created.

This is when the worldwide Zionist movement organized two projects to run simultaneously. One project was to gather as many people as they could and have them march in front of the Soviet embassies and consulates anywhere in the world they were allowed to do so. And the marchers chanted: “Let my people go” which, according to legend, is what Moses pleaded with the Pharaoh of Egypt when he wanted to take the Jews out of that land. The other project was to work on the American Congress through one of its own members. The most receptive to the cause was Senator Henry Jackson (nicknamed Scoop) who spoke on behalf of this and other Jewish causes. Jackson also teemed with Senator Charles Vanik to formulate and pass an amendment that restricted trade with the Soviet Union as a way to force it to let the Jews leave without paying dues to the Russian state.

Since the control of nuclear weapons was the preoccupation of the planet at that time, and since the two main nuclear powers were America and Russia, Henry Jackson who had a strong background in foreign policy got involved in this file as well. What he probably did not realize was that the consequence of fusing foreign policy with military power would give minor assistants in his team such as Richard Pearle big ideas. Years later, Pearle and others got together and translated that approach into a doctrine that came to be known as Pax Americana. It consists of using American military power to implement the Jewish agenda of controlling the world, a neocon aspiration. Hence, the view that Henry Jackson was the inadvertent founding father of the neocon movement.

Much has happened in the three and a half decades that followed those activities. For one thing, America was made to shift its attention from Asia to the Middle East, was made to start a war on Islam and was duped into invading Iraq. Meanwhile, the speechwriters who wrote speeches for President George W. Bush were putting words in his mouth that signaled to the Arab and the Muslim nations that America was now under the full control of the Jewish and Zionist leaders. And since the W (as he came to be nicknamed) was becoming more of a joke with every passing day, the Jewish and Zionist leaders thought of creating an instrument that will allow them to distance themselves from him, yet let them implement the ideas they had him spew in the speeches they wrote for him.

At the start of the Bush second term, the neocons founded the Henry Jackson Association and had it based in England and in America. They made it bipartisan which is what you do when you aim to take the full control of something. And they made it a charitable organization to avoid paying taxes – no surprise here, being Jewish to the core. At first, the founders renounced the use of force as a means to implement their agenda, a move that helped them draw several prominent people into the movement and gain name recognition. But then, they took advantage of some little incidents that happened in the world to argue that violence was sometimes necessary to do good things. And so they put out a statement of principles allowing the use of military power to intervene in the affairs of other nations; a stance that exactly matches the neocon agenda.

Then came the next big move when they began to recruit Middle Eastern people of every background and every religion. They called them upstart neocons and gave them the task of spreading their influence in the region, especially after they saw what the Arab Spring was doing. Their aim is not as yet well defined, and it may never be, but their method is clear. It consists of fusing together the so-called “Freedom Agenda” they had President Bush spew in his speeches, with the idea of employing tough rhetoric to intimidate the Arabs and the Muslims. If necessary, that performance will be followed by military intervention. And this is where the analogy of constructing something using two incompatible measurements is seen to apply with the consequences that follow.

We see how this works in the Ahmari essay who is of Iranian origin and now a member of the Henry Jackson Society -- apparently specializing in Arab affairs. The gist of the piece is this: Yes, there are good reasons to lament the illiberal fruit of the Arab Spring but take heart because there is something we can do about it: the implementation of the Freedom Agenda. But you see right away that he is not writing just to explain his views, he is writing to advocate the philosophy of the Agenda. And he is doing it in a smooth and subtle way to appeal to both the liberals and the conservatives. It is important to be aware of this because it is the method by which the neocons have managed to take complete and effective control of the American Congress and many other American institutions.

But you know the method will fail in the Middle East because you see the flaw in his reasoning as you detect that what the Arab Liberals want for their country, and what he believes they should want are two different things. In the same way that the Jewish leaders have over the decades split America, the Congress and every institution in the country into poles they pit against each other, Ahmari see the Egyptian beneficiaries of the Revolution as being made of two parts, the liberals who want one thing and the Islamists who want another thing. And he tries to pit them against each other. What he does not understand is that Egyptians of every stripe do not measure their revolution in these terms; they measure it by the common dream they have for the future of their nation.

He boils down the whole subject matter in the form of a question that goes like this: How can this revolution be made to serve Israel and the West? They boil down the whole subject matter in the form of a question that goes like this: How can we make this revolution yield the good things we are entitled to, being a diverse people with diverse needs and aspirations we all share? And these are two measurements that will never meet.

The Ahmari essay is a long piece, and I shall not respond to it point by point. But given my introduction you will see in it everything you need to see. I would only draw attention to a passage at the end that reads as follows: “Our liberal allies … are deeply flawed. Disengaging from the region … will only leave them more vulnerable … to their own worst urges … the Middle East today is desperately in need of an ideological plan … But to make the investment worth its while, the United States should … shape and articulate a Middle East liberalism that is at peace with Israel...” You clearly see that these are sick people whose only passion is to serve Israel. And you will see this again when you look at an article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal on the same day that the Bush piece did.

That piece was written by the Jewish affairs correspondent for the Jerusalem Post, Gil Shefler. It has the title: “A Successful Jewish Return to Tunisia” and the subtitle: “The new Islamist government passes a religious freedom test.” Reading it, you see how a sick mind powered by a sick ideology has created a fictitious problem that the author says could have existed but did not exist. Yet, he builds a whole theory on a piece of fiction that goes like this: “...only a few dozen people came from overseas … But it's hard to see the event as anything other than a success ... had Qaradawi stirred up trouble ... or had inadequate security been provided ... it would have cast a pall on the future of the Jews in Tunisia and, in turn, on the new government's commitment to human rights.”

To him and to the Jewish leaders in America, everything is to be measured by the yardstick of Israel and the Jewish causes. This has been the George W. Bush legacy; it is what has come to be called the Freedom Agenda. It is more like the Neocon Agenda of Raw Sewage.

Take it with you anywhere you go, America, and the world will run away from the stink you will be diffusing.

Six Mental Dwarfs Blackmailing America

They are Meir Dagan, August Hanning, James Woosley, Charles Guthrie, Kristen Silverman and Mark Wallace. They are Israeli, German, American and British. They were at one time or another head of intelligence services or ambassador. They are now members of a screwy kind of think tank based both in America and in Britain which is the way to doing things these days given that a think tank based solely in America is automatically thought of as being a septic tank or a cesspool of toxic ideas.

They wrote: “Total Sanctions Might Stop Iran”, an article that also has the subtitle: “The regime is hurting. Fully cutting off its access to international business, especially banking and shipping, could be the solution to its bomb program.” It was published in the Wall Street Journal on May 17, 2012. You would think that people of this stature had been counseling their heads of state all along to think hard before doing something that will add misery to the world. And you would think that having waited this long in vain for the subject matter to resolve itself, they would come out now and say the right thing publicly. But no, this is not what they did.

The right thing would have been to say that no, we are not going to inflict untold misery on the world. No, we are not going to be responsible for the death of thousands of people. No, we are not going to be responsible for the creation of millions of new refugees. No, we are not going to see mothers so weak they cannot breastfeed their babies. No, we are not going to see fathers fight for scarps of food they can take to their families. None of this, not for the sake of Netanyahu, not for the sake of any Jew, not for anyone.

Enough of having to live through the murderous charade of making a stinky Jew or a million of them feel they are “THE ONLY ONE” allowed to have an ambiguous nuclear erection in the region; and be protected by the sissy boys and tomboys in charge of the Western world these days. You want to make Netanyahu feel like the man he is not? Go into his office and hold his dick up for him in private because the world is grossed up by the never ending spectacle you have been putting on for too long already.

There is only one way to resolve the matter of nuclear weapons; it is to have a treaty that will be enforced by the big powers to keep the Middle East free of it. A good working plan is already on the table, and all that is required is to get Israel to accept it. But like always, the castrated Jew has argued he does not want the neighbors to see that all he has is enough material to make a couple of dirty bombs. That he does not want the neighbors to see he has only the knowledge to make a nuclear device but he cannot be sure until he tests it. That he is light years away from being able to produce missiles capable of delivering a nuclear device. That no one will sell him submarines capable of launching ballistic missiles. In short, he does not have the dick to wave at his neighbors and scare them. All he has is a big mouth to mouth-fart the wrong tune, and an American megaphone to amplify it further for him.

Instead of putting it this way, the six dwarfs come up with a plan that this world must be rid of once and for all. They want the world under their control to: “deliver a potentially decisive economic blow to the regime.” Are these people mentally disabled or something? They want us to believe they can blow the regime without hurting millions of people in the process? And why would they want to do that? To allow Netanyahu to pretend he can have a nuclear erection and parade his false manhood in the neighborhood? They will cause this much misery in return for this little?

They gloat about how much they have accomplished so far with the sanction regime already imposed, and they argue for more of the same like this: “With these measures in place, now is the time for the international community to truly isolate the regime.” No, it is not Iran that will be isolated; it is America. And when America is isolated from the world, the Jews inside it get to control it even more tightly. And America will find itself caught more and more in the syndrome of its own Jews in the Congress blackmailing it as did Senator Dianne Feinstein recently when she reiterated the standing blackmail to the effect that Israel will do things in such a way as to draw America into a war it does not want. That senator must be impeached.

The writers of the article go on to say: “This means passing the most robust sanctions against Iran in history. We propose decisive action in four key areas.” And they propose the very things that should be waved at Israel if it does not stop the childish game of telling the world: Look at my bulge. It is big and it is hard but I won't tell you if it is a real dick or an artificial dildo. And if you think it is an artificial dildo, you will never know if it can perform like the real thing.

Well, the rest of us are saying this in response: Enough of that America, and you too Britain, and France, Russia, China and Germany. Enough of this political pornography on the world stage. Grow up, kids and start behaving like men and women of stature not sissy boys and tomboys just trying to get through the day.

The six clowns end their presentation like this: “Doing so will show the regime that the world is serious and committed, willing to do whatever it takes to stop Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons.” Come on guys, stop masturbating your diminished intellects in public. The Iranian regime does not need you to show it what the world is serious about. They know you inside out. All they see inside is the shit you are full of; and all they see outside is the horrifying image of people so deformed, you look more like monsters than human beings.

Get out of the cesspool that is clouding your judgment.