What’s All The Talk About Taxes?

It is said that two things are certain: Death and taxes. But this leaves out one more certainty and it is the incessant preoccupation with taxes. Today is no different from any other day in that taxation is on the mind of most people, and the talk about it is everywhere. But because much has been covered already in this field, the only thing left to probe is the notion of progressive taxation. More specifically, the question we need to answer is whether or not progressive taxation should be maintained or should be replaced with a flat tax.

To be clear, a flat tax is the payment of a fixed percentage of one’s income regardless of the bracket in which the earner falls. For example, if the rate is set at 10% it would entail someone earning a hundred thousand dollars to pay ten thousand, and someone earning a hundred million dollars to pay ten million.

By contrast, progressive taxation would entail that the one earning a hundred million dollars pay 10% on the first portion of ten million, then pay 20% on the second portion of ten million and progressively so until the last portion where the rate reaches the 90% level. You add up all this and it comes to forty five million dollars paid in taxes versus the ten million that would be paid under the flat tax regime.

Now, in order to come to grips with the original question let alone answer it, we must clarify the philosophical differences between the two forms of taxation. And to do this, we must define the concept of leverage which is as follows. In the same way that someone may use little money of their own to gain control of a big asset, the social contract creates the condition by which someone may make a small effort and amass huge amounts of capital. This is what is meant by leverage and you find it everywhere in the business world especially in the leveraged buyouts where people put down little money of their own and borrow a whole lot to buy something big like, for example, a multi-national conglomerate.

What this means is that the leverage which is inherent to the social contract under which we live allows someone like Bill Gates to create the business that he did. Certainly, the man did not amass a million times more wealth than the average citizen because he is a million times better but because he lives within the confines of a social contract that allows him to amplify his talent. Put this man in a setting that is governed by a different social contract or put him in a place that is governed by the law of the jungle and Bill Gates may prove to be at best twice as good as the average person or he may not have the necessary wits to gather his daily bread.

Consequently, the conclusion we drawn from this is that wealthy people become wealthy in a given system not only because of their innate talent, which no one wants to take away, but also because of what the system offers them in terms of the support that amplifies their talent and their work. And this support is something that most wealthy people acknowledge receiving when they engage in philanthropic activities, their way of saying thank you to society.

But the wealthy do more than thank society because philanthropy is also their way to give back to society some of what it has given them. And they do so despite all the taxes they are paying which suggests they feel they are not paying enough and wish to pay more.

In fact, when the very wealthy pay taxes, they pay for two things. First, they pay for services rendered by the various levels of government, and these are the services which every citizen receives and pays for. Second, they pay for the maintenance of a system that guarantees to them the leverage by which to amplify their work, and this is a luxury that the average citizen does not use or enjoy.

The amplification of one’s talent and work is not restricted to the world of enterprise. It is everywhere, most notably in sports and in the arts where those who achieve stardom earn thousands of times more than they did before they reached that level and more than their nearest competitor. And this could not have happened without the literal amplification of their talent by the electronic and the print media that turn them into a sensation overnight and in every household.

But the one area that is of interest to this discussion is what happens in the world of politics. This is where some people with seemingly limited abilities may, by the confluence of circumstances, be given the opportunity to amplify their talent and show what a great leader they can be. Many have traveled this road, Winston Churchill being one of them. But what happens to some of these people as time passes is what should happen to some business leaders but does not for one reason or another.

What happens to politicians is that they get tired after being at the helm for a few years, they run out of ideas and their output is reduced. Those who try to linger on are disliked by the public and tossed out of office at the first opportunity. In a similar fashion those who come into business with a great promise tend to wilt with time except that their weaknesses are not readily detected because they do not come under the same scrutiny as the politicians; and no one is in a position to toss them out because no one has elected them in the first place.

These people linger on at the helm but their business continues to prosper because the social contract guarantees it. And the bigger the enterprise, the more the social contract is willing to shore it up because it represents jobs that the public wants, it makes products that the nation needs and it represents a link in a chain that does not tolerate having a weak link along its line. Thus, the social contract which allowed the business to expand and hire more people now becomes the insurance policy that maintains its survival because it sits like an indispensable icon.

You ask: What did these people do to merit all this? You read their biographies and learn that some inherited the money and went on from there but others were lucky enough to be standing in the right place at the right time when it all began to happen to them. And this leads to two more questions.

First, does someone who inherits the money and may not have the talent of the parent merit receiving the benefits of the social contract? Second, does the recipient of fortuitous circumstances deserve to be rewarded still more as we consider how much taxes they should pay on the profit they make?

People like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet do not want their progenies to inherit all the money they have amassed. They say they will give the kids some money to start them off in life but the kids will have to work, to use their own talent and to amass their own fortunes. Thus, it seems that the parents themselves do not believe dynastic rule is good in business anymore than it is in politics, and they want their kids to make it on their own merit.

Which brings us to the original question: Should progressive taxation be maintained or should it be replaced with a flat tax? I cannot escape the conclusion that progressive taxation must be maintained. Not only that, but the case has also been made for maintaining the inheritance tax.

Charity Begins At Home Not Israel

The Tweedle brothers may have started as fictional characters but they seem to have materialized as a couple of real ones in North America today. These may only be actors playing the role of Tweeddledee and Tweeddledum but to stay safe, we better remind ourselves of the saying: “Charity begins at home” before the two of them do more than give away the store.

Look at them act and you realize they are preparing to throw the entire estate comprising Canada and the United States into the ruinous black hole that is Israel. To explain how all of this came about let me begin by relating the following true story.

Something happened during the Fall season around the middle to late Nineteen Nineties. It was a good time to be invested in the Canadian resource industries and I was invested as I had been on and off for more than three decades. Also, the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto was hosting an exhibit of the Canadian miners’ association and a pavilion of Egypt among the many other exhibits.

Furthermore, the Government of Egypt had opened an office in Montreal a few months before to house a trade mission whose mandate was to seek and to promote trade and investment between Canada and Egypt. Aware of all these coincidences and of the fact that Egypt was interested in developing its own mining industry, I decided to get involved and perhaps make a buck in the process.

I knew a number of mining executives as I talked to them on the telephone or met them at the gathering of shareholders for many years. I mentioned to a few the fact that in ancient times, Egypt had rich gold mines where it is now believed gold can still be extracted cheaply using modern technology.

I was enthusiastic about rumors that swirled around a place in the eastern desert near the Red Sea where newly discovered maps pointed to gold mining sites that were exploited thousands of years ago then abandoned. But the executives with whom I shared this information did not share my enthusiasm and they asked me to remind them of the facts later on. The excuse they gave for not wishing to go now was that they had their hands full and would not embark on a new venture at this time. But I was not convinced of any of that.

Because I sensed there was something else and because the coincidences were too compelling to let go of the idea, I pressed the executives for an answer. I insisted that they give me a positive answer or give me an explanation as to their stand on the issue. My insistence paid off when the executives started to talk honestly. One of them said he would be interested to map out concessions with aerial surveillance and seismic testing if and when the climate became propitious. I asked him to explain further and he said that his company was based in Ontario where a new law was enacted making it difficult to do business with the Arab countries.

Questioned further, he went on to say that the government of Ontario had emulated the Americans and passed legislation to prohibit Ontario businesses from complying with the Arab boycott of Israel. This meant that every time a company did business with an Arab country, the executives could be dragged to court and forced under the threat of financial ruin and the prospect of time in jail to explain why they are not doing business with Israel as well.

The executives and their companies would be considered guilty of anti-Semitism before the first question was even asked and the onus would be on them to prove that they have only good feelings towards the Jews and towards Israel. They would have to show they are doing business with an Arab country and not with Israel because it would not be profitable to do business with Israel at this time. And they would have to promise that they will do business with Israel as soon as an opportunity opens up.

They would have to apologize profusely in public and show profound remorse if not shed a few tears for not being creative enough to have found a way to do business with Israel at this time. And they would be placed on the watch list of every professional and every amateur trouble maker who will incessantly point out to them where the opportunity for a venture in Israel does exist. And they will be expected to jump on the occasion and pour money into that country whether or not the proposed venture made sense.

In the meantime, every document in the filing cabinet of the company pertaining to their business practices and to their employees could be subpoenaed and examined by the Jewish organizations, their lawyers and anyone who would pin the Star of David on his lapel and call himself a Jew. And every aspect of the business could be questioned to ascertain that no one involved with the business harbors at this time or has ever harbored ill feelings towards Israel or the Jews.

This would be the sort of nightmare that the media, the political class and academia are being subjected to nowadays and no business could survive this kind of harassment. This is why everyone in the mining industry, whether based in Ontario or based elsewhere but having to deal with Ontario shied away from doing business with the Arabs.

And all the executives I questioned intimated they understood that cutting off ties with the Arab World was the original intent of the legislation. It was as if the Jewish organizations were saying if the Arabs own the Arab countries and they give themselves the right to do as they please within their borders, the Jews must give themselves the right to own Canada and America and do as they please within these borders.

And while all of this was going on in North America, the Australians made contact with Egypt. They established a company to explore the designated areas in the eastern desert, they discovered more than ten million ounces of gold already, they began to build the mine and they expect to smelt and refine the first bar of gold before the end of this year. And they were given permission just lately to explore deeper in the same claim where they expect to discover still more of the yellow stuff. And the irony is that they listed their shares on the Toronto stock exchange along with the Australian exchange and the AIM in London.

The infamous Ontario law was passed by the government of Bob Rae when he was still a socialist and was wedded to the ideology of the Canadian Jewish Congress. The law still stands in Ontario as much as its counterpart still stands in the United States. Of course, neither the current Premier of Ontario nor the Prime Minister of Canada or indeed the President of the United States had anything to do with these laws but when the Jewish organizations concoct something, they plan for it with a long range view of things, and that is where the responsibility of the Tweedle brothers comes into play.

What we are witnessing in Canada and the United States at this time are the effects of that long range planning. President George Bush and Prime Minister Stephen Harper did not happen spontaneously nor did they come out of nowhere; they were invented and were meticulously planned for by the Jewish organizations long ago.

Look what we have in these two countries. We have a Prime Minister in Ottawa that encourages Israel to murder Canadian soldiers sent by their government to keep the peace in the Middle East. And we have a President in America that is sacrificing thousands of American lives and squandering trillions of dollars to please another couple of Tweedles that happen to dwell in Israel.

But to please them about what? Well, it must be understood that the Old Testament is all about being macho boys, and the leaders of Israel made it their religion to become the macho boys of the Middle East. To accomplish this, they got Bush to castrate himself and got him to start the process of emasculating America so as to make Olmert and Netanyahu look like the two studs who win by the power of the sword and not the art of negotiating honestly. They want to be recognized as the undisputed Tweedlemacho and Tweedlestud which is in keeping with the mentality of what perennial losers always seek to accomplish.

If an observer may claim they do not read history and thus legitimately deny the Holocaust, no one may deny the content of the Protocol of the Elders of Zion. This is because once history is done, it is gone for ever and can only be recovered by reading history but the activities of a recidivist are a recurring phenomenon. And no one can be so naïve as to fail seeing the Protocol of the Elders of Zion being written anew before their very eyes by the recidivists who never seem to vanish. In fact, the Protocol is a lot more real to a lot of people than the Holocaust can ever be real to anyone under the age of 70. If something must be criminalized, it is not the denial of the Holocaust it is the denial of the Protocol.

Consequently, I ask: What can Bush or Harper do to reverse the situation and save North America from the damage they have inflicted on the Continent? The answer is that they can work to throw out the two notorious laws in their respective countries. This done, they should appoint a panel of jurists, each in his country, to look for and to expunge from he law books every law of shame and every non-binding resolution that the Jewish organizations have managed to sneak into them in the middle of the night.

The end game should be that Israel must make the effort to become a good neighbor and win the goodwill of her neighbors not seek a couple of foreign Tweedles who would ruin their own countries for the glory of the losers she has been spawning since the beginning of recorded history.

Let Bush and Harper fail to do this and you will continue to see the local businessmen and women take their businesses elsewhere because no one wants to do business in a so-called democracy where Democracy has been so bastardized by the phony studs of the Twentieth Century, its founding fathers are turning in their graves wondering what has happened to their cherished progeny.

How Compulsion Creates Magic

When Islam spread into backward places long ago, it prohibited the consumption of pork on religious and health grounds. Unable to carry on without eating pork in some places, the locals gave the pig another name and continued to eat its meat. We see here that when people come under compulsion, even the primitives among them find a way to get around the difficulty and make their problem go away as if by magic.

In this case, by the simple trick of renaming the pig, the people turned the animal into something they could put back on the menu. As for the animal that existed before the name change, well that one became a mythical creature that no longer exists. And because it is not here anymore, it cannot stand between the need of the people to eat a nutritious meal and the need to comply with their religious obligations. To quote Shakespeare, all is well that ends well.

Morphing something to change reality is an art form that is not lost on modern societies. In fact, it may be said that the form has become the currency for interaction between people of all backgrounds. And the difference between the ancient practices and the modern ones is that the modern expression of the art has been given a vast array for disguises.

For example, we use different words or expressions to describe the same thing depending on who the thing is attributed to. A notorious example in this category is that of the word retaliate which we use when we do the deed ourselves or when our friends do it. But when someone we dislike does the same deed, we say they are taking revenge.

Not only do we use different words to mean the same thing, we use different mindsets to speak of the same thing. A good example to give in this category is that of Stephen Harper, Canada’s Prime Minister who turned upside down Canada’s tradition of being a peacekeeper to the World, a tradition that started before he was born and was adhered to until he took office.

The Prime Minister agreed to change Canada’s role in Afghanistan from being a mission of peacekeeping to one of combat. This may or may not turn out to be a good idea in the long run; only time will tell. But this is not the bewildering part concerning Mr. Harper’s doing; this part will come in a minute and will seem like something right out of the Twilight Zone.

Harper lauded the combat role that Canada has taken in Afghanistan, describing it in terms of the courage, honor and duty which are words usually engendered by militaristic speeches. The trouble is that Harper did this at the same time as he decreed that the soldiers who served with courage and died with honor fulfilling their duty must not be shown to the public when they come home on their final journey to their resting place.

But this is not the bewildering part in Mr. Harper’s thinking either because here too, it may still be possible for someone to strain credulity and make an argument that would explain the contradictions in the Harper mindset. But where the rope breaks and the argument shatters is when we look at the following aspect of the Harper mindset.

This one came to light when United Nation peacekeepers that included Canadian soldiers in Southern Lebanon were deliberately murdered by Israel. Harper’s reaction was to scold the dead soldiers by asking derisively: “What were they doing there anyway, didn’t they know there was a war going on?” This is so unreal it is out of the Twilight Zone.

It seems that Harper has at least two views of the Canadian soldiers. One view paints them as valiant young men and women who fight the bad guys out there to save us good guys down here. And the other view is that the soldiers are disposable things who sometimes go astray and do bad things. And what would be the bad things? They would be the fulfillment of the duties to which the soldiers were assigned by Canada such as keeping the peace where Israel does not want to see peace. Therefore, according to the Harper mindset, Israel can murder Canadian soldiers and count on his blessings, his cheers and his encouragement.

Under ordinary circumstances such a deficiency in personal, political or professional morality would be viewed as a case of split personality or a mental affliction. However, there are times when there is more to the story than this as there may be a long history behind the apparent deficiency and/or affliction.

In fact, Stephen Harper does not seem to have been born deficient or afflicted with any known illness. It is more likely he was damaged by the circumstances through which he was forced to live on his way to getting where he is now. Someday it may be shown that Harper was a victim of such circumstances as much as the souls he is victimizing on account of his intellectual and moral cowardice in addition to his feeble connection with reality.

Stephen Harper now heads the Conservative Party of Canada but things did not start out this way. They started when he was just another member of a regional party that was known for its racist and “anti-Semitic” stand. When the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada lost badly to the Liberals in one election, all conservative movements in Canada joined forces and merged to stand in opposition to the Liberals. For the move to succeed and for the merged party to win a national standing, Harper’s regional group had to change its racist philosophy.

During the numerous steps of that metamorphosis, Harper had risen in the ranks until he eventually became head of the Conservative Party of Canada and was elected Prime Minister. But awful things must have happened during that rise which made Harper lose his humanity if not the control over his mental faculties. Exactly what those awful things were will be difficult to assess at this stage as they are the sort of moments and events that only history can shed light on. Thus, we must wait decades before the real story will be told.

But we can get an idea as to what may have happened to Harper when we study another historical event. This one involves the Canadian province of Quebec where a priest and educator called Lionel Groulx lived and died in the year 1967 at the ripe old age of 89. Anyone that knows something about this man or has read some of the things he wrote concedes that he was a chauvinist who disliked several races and religions, including the Jewish.

Despite his shortcomings, Lionel Groulx did good things for Quebec, and his people honor his memory all the time. But of all the groups that were offended by his writings, only the Jewish organizations milked the situation for all its worth. It is not that the organizations were offended by the man’s writings; they are never offended by such things. In fact, they call the discovery of this sort of writings a treasure trove and they celebrate every time they find one because it means that money, power and control will start to flow in their direction. These writings are like manna from the sky to the Jewish organizations who never abstain from milking them.

The thing, however, is that the French people in Quebec acknowledged the shortcomings of Lionel Groulx, gave in a little to the demands of the Jewish organizations then said enough is enough. But standing firm after you pay your dues is something that never happens in the English speaking world. And this is what enabled the Jewish organizations to get around the French character and exploit the Lionel Groulx saga. They got this opportunity when an Anglophone was appointed Minister of Education in Quebec at which time they did their shtick and got themselves a whale of a deal.

I wrote about this incident in the book whose publication was blocked by those infamous Jewish organizations, and the following two paragraphs are a reprint of the pertinent passages:

“But the Jewish leaders had something up their sleeve for Quebec too. At a time when the Provincial Government was cutting on education and the student loan programs, the Jewish leaders worked secretly with the English speaking Minister of Education and managed to get cheques totaling millions of dollars for their religious schools despite the existence of a law that forbids it. And all this happened even as the Jewish leaders preached the principle of separating church and state which they wanted to see enforced on all religions except theirs. When this reality came to light, the students in Quebec rose up and threatened to shut down the Province. The money to Jews was cut off, grants and loans to students were increased and the Minister of Education was fired.”

“Still, a phony explanation was given for what happened but it made matters worse which is what the leaders were aiming for to begin with. They said the money was given to promote understanding between the two communities. We already understand, replied the students, we understand that you will push the envelop further still until something drastic happens then bellyache your songs of anti-Semitism and ask for new money to combat it. And the Jewish leaders wrung their hands with glee, congratulating themselves and each other for a job well done. Anti-Semitism was given new oxygen to breathe and to revive in Quebec. All that is needed now is an incident or two and they will be back in the money again.”

The bet is that in the same way the Jewish organizations made use of a historical situation in Quebec to milk the Province of all they could, they are now making use of the “anti-Semitism” that existed in the regional party to which Stephen Harper belonged in order to milk Canada of all that they can.

In the case of the Quebec Minister of Education all was not well and nothing ended well for him. As for what Harper is doing to Canada, history will have reason to express disgust because if you can rename the pig and make a problem go away as if by magic, you cannot explain a pigheaded mindset and make it look like a reasonable stand.

When Bad Company Leads To Tragedy

The American President George Bush went to the Middle East not long ago and stood at the Davos World Economic Forum in Egypt to extol the virtues of democracy and to criticize the countries that have not yet looked at his brand of democratic light. This is a tragedy and you will know why when you try to answer two simple questions: What does George Bush know about democracy? What does America know about democracy?

Nothing happens in the American Administration, the Congress, the Military or the Treasury without the approval of the media, and the policy of the latter has been to ignore the Middle East. Except for a few instances, the media are under order from the World Jewish Congress and the North American affiliates to maintain a kind of “radio silence” about the region. The silence can be broken only to praise Israel or to say something tragic, demeaning or insulting about everyone else, especially Egypt.

For example, during Bush’s stay in the Middle East he attended the Economic Forum, and the New York Times was forced to mention the visit in one of its editorial. But the paper never saw fit to say in this editorial or in any other that the President was in the region, among other things, to attend the Economic Forum in Egypt because to say so would have meant to associate the two words Egypt and economics. And this would be a sacrilege the paper was not prepared to commit and risk the wrath of the World Jewish Congress. What kind of a democracy is this?

At about that same time, a Canadian company that wants to build a chemical plant near a fishing and tourist town in Egypt was met with protest from the local residents. The people did not want the plant in their backyard and the stock of the company was going up and down on the stock exchange in tandem with the rumors about the situation. The Canadian media reported the news but, to comply with the orders of the World Jewish Congress, they did not mention the word Egypt even once. What kind of a democracy is this?

And to show that this is not something new, four paragraphs follow which are reprints from a book I wrote and whose publication was blocked by that same notorious World Jewish Congress. Read, gasp and exclaim: What kind of a democracy is this?

“This being the year 2004, my friend asked if I was going to watch the Olympics in a few weeks time. I said he should know I am not much of the sports type and he cut me off with: But it’s on the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation). So I asked: what’s the big deal?”

“He said that he learned from an insider and he was able to verify that during the live broadcast of the opening ceremonies during at least the past two Olympics, the Jewish masters at the CBC organized for the network to cut to a commercial at one or two seconds before the entry into the stadium of every Arab team, and to return to the broadcast after the team had gone out of view. He said that when you watch the ceremonies you never realize there are twenty two Arab countries on the planet, not even one Arab country. As far as the CBC is concerned, the Arab countries do not exist. He added that on orders from Netanyahu of Israel, they were planning to do it again during the 2004 Olympics. I said I’ll see what I can do to watch it this year.”

“Then came the day of the ceremonies and I watched. Lo and behold, the thing unfolded exactly as my friend said it would. There were no Arab countries on this planet according to the CBC.”

“I thought to myself that long before anyone had wiped Israel off the map, the CBC had wiped 22 Arab countries off the Globe, and had been doing it for at least 3 Olympics. Wow! How can an organization of this stature which stands as the beacon of Canada’s independence and one that considers itself the flagship carrying Canada’s freedom of thought be so slavishly led by the nose to perform degrading acts of servitude on command from a foreign entity located thousands of miles away? How can this be?”

To answer these questions, we need to go way back to the beginning.

A phenomenon that parents and teachers find most dreadful is the sight of a good kid getting involved with bad company. Most of the time the good kid would have been swept off his or her feet by someone they consider an idol but is in reality a devil in disguise. The good kid falls under the influence of the bad one and seems incapable of snapping out of it.

If that is a level one tragedy, it gets worse when the relationship moves to the next level. This would be level two which is especially difficult to watch because you see the good kid steadily go deeper under the control of the bad one. You feel powerless to do anything about it because the more you try, the more you antagonize the kid you want to save and the more distance you put between the two of you.

Worse than that is level three of the tragedy which is reached when the bad kid succeeds in turning the good kid against the parent or teacher that is trying to help. This happens when the bad kid convinces the good one that parents and teachers are the enemy. The more devilish of the bad kids are so sophisticated at this, they have developed a way to demonstrate their theory to the kids they dominate. What these devils do is predict that a parent or teacher will react in a certain way to an event, and advise the good kid that such reaction, if and when it comes, will be proof that the parent or the teacher is a bad person. Then they provoke the event.

To give an example, the two kids go to a teacher at the suggestion of the bad kid and ask that they be allowed to write the exam later on because they will both be working on the day that the teacher has designated as exam day. When the teacher says no, as predicted by the bad kid, the good kid takes this as proof that the teacher is a bad person.

This tragedy does not happen to kids only. It happens to adults too, as for example, at the office where someone naive may become anxious about something and seek advice from a bad colleague. A self-serving devilish soul would take advantage of the situation and push the anxious person to do something idiotic or something that serves the interest of the colleague.

It can also happen to a country that becomes too dependent on another country for its well being or survival. A case in point was Cuba when it fell under the influence of the old Soviet Union and went so far as to become a surrogate for the latter. As such, Cuba sent soldiers to fight in Africa to help spread the communist ideology there. Cuba had by then hit level three of the tragedy.

Now, for the sake of argument imagine turning the table and making Cuba use the Soviet Union as surrogate. Imagine the Cubans achieving control over the Kremlin, the Soviet military, the treasury and the media. Imagine the Russians fighting a disastrous war in South America to spread the Che Guevara ideology there and pave the way for Cuba to go in and take over the whole Continent.

You will be forgiven to think this is so absurd nothing like it can ever happen. But what if you discover that something similar is happening right now in the relationship between Israel and America? What if you learn that the Israelis who depend on America for their food, fuel, development and defense are in total control of both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue, the Pentagon and the US treasury? As absurd as this may sound, it is the reality, and the World is flabbergasted by the unseemly spectacle.

The reality is that Israel has managed to get America involved in a level three tragedy by pushing the mindless giant to fight a surrogate war in the Middle East where the original aim was to cut up the region into bite-size pieces and make them available for Israel to devour one by one at her leisure.

Furthermore, when the Israelis felt they had scored a spectacular success subjugating America, they upgraded an ancient dream of theirs. They turned the dream of grabbing the land that extends from the Nile to the Euphrates into a dream where they would grab the entire Middle East and control it tightly.

Then they upgraded this dream too and fantasized about going to a place where no dreamer has gone before. This would be a place where the locals will hail the Jews and their American surrogates as liberators and will shower them with flowers and kisses. Did someone ever say that the power of self-delusion has no limit?

The burning question now is this: How did Israel manage to bring the American giant to its knees? And the answer is: It started with the promise that if America guarantees the survival of the state of Israel, the latter will be so grateful that Israelis and Jews everywhere will work to guarantee a Middle East free of Soviet influence.

But as time went on, it looked like the promise was bogus because no scenario could be imagined where Israel or the Jews will be called upon to play such a role in the Middle East. The promise was then altered to claim that Israel can guarantee the Americans a cheap supply of oil if the latter would guarantee to help Israel maintain a supremacist status in the Middle East.

Supremacy is a theme that is lifted from the Old Testament, a document that is itself the compilation of all the metaphors, half truths, legends and fantasies of a people who never had a land of their own. To compensate for this insufficiency and to justify the evil they were committing, they created stories about a land that was promised to them by the Almighty.

But why would the Almighty do that? Well, He chose them to be His favorite children, you see. While this answered the question why, it also made the Jews superior to everyone else. And as they waited for God to fulfill His promise, the Jews wandered the deserts, raided all those they encountered and stole their foods and possessions not because they were thieves and vagabonds but because they were superior. Get it now?

These people bragged about the gore they inflicted on the others as they looted them, and they bragged about the destruction they wreaked on anything they failed to grab and run with. And they recorded all these horrors in the Old Testament to put humanity on notice as to what they stand for. And to this day, no writer has been able to write horror stories more horrifying than the existence that these people have lived over the millennia.

Those who call themselves Zionists have inherited that despicable mantle and they are today carrying on with the same pattern of looting, destroying and bragging as if it were a matter of religious duty. But to go with the times, they have formulated a new discourse which they run parallel with their activities. They are now saying they want peace and security because they have been pogrommed and holocausted enough already. To achieve their goal, they asked the Americans to help them maintain peace through strength.

The Americans responded by giving Israel all she asked for which was complete support that ranges from the verbal encouragement to butcher Palestinian children asleep in their beds to giving Israel the helicopters and the bombs with which to carry out those deeds. But no one in the region knuckled under this kind of primitive savagery, not even tiny Palestine.

And this was the thing that the Jewish organizations had predicted might happen and whispered about it in the ear of the Americans. Like the evil kids who play the game to dominate other kids, the Jewish organizations had suggested that to resist knuckling under when Uncle Sam roars is proof that the Arabs are a bad people and that they are a threat to America. And so America roared, the Arabs failed to knuckle under and America felt threatened. See how it works when the devil incarnate whispers in the ear of the gullible?

In a situation like this, the rule is that you get the unintended consequences more often than you get what you wished for. Yes, everyone in the region suffered their share because of what was inflicted on them, but the Americans suffered the most because only they chose the company in which they found themselves.

As it turned out, no one in the region was intimidated enough to give the Israelis reason to feel superior. But something entirely different happened in the relationship between Israel and America. Having served the interests of Israel to the detriment of their own interests, which is what the domestics of old were supposed to do, the Americans felt inferior to the Jews while the Jews felt superior to the Americans. This mind-boggling situation reached a point where most religious leaders in America started telling their flock to go out, find a Jew and worship him as your God. Literally.

So I ask again: What does George Bush know about democracy? What does America know about democracy? And the answer to both questions is absolutely nothing. In fact, when America lectures to the World on democracy, it is like a witch doctor lecturing to neurosurgeons on brain surgery. It is a sick joke. A very sick joke.

Why Soviet Economics Failed (Part 2 of 2)

It is now recognized that one of the biggest blunders committed by the Western intelligence agencies was the fact that they continually misread the Soviet Economy through most of the Twentieth Century. They never realized that the Soviet Union was failing economically and they missed the opportunity to learn the valuable lessons that were begging to be learned.

Those lessons could have come handy at this time and they could have been of use to the ill-advised Americans who mindlessly follow the steps of the old Soviet Union not realizing what they are doing to their economy or where they are taking their country.

The most damaging aspect of Soviet economics was not that it was centrally planned, though this was a factor, but that the Soviets planned the wrong things. To give credit where credit is due, they did well building and erecting big projects such as the power plants, railroads, steel mills, tanks, missiles and ships but they proved to be myopic when it came to the consumer side of the equation which they neglected woefully.

What is wrong with this approach to economics is that without an industry to produce the goods and services that the ordinary people are eager to buy, there is little to sponge the money paid to the workers. In fact, the Soviet workers could not buy or own the projects they were building and so they spent the money on the few items they found in the stores such as the food, the clothing and the everyday necessities of life.

But then nothing remained on the shelves to motivate the people to want more or want better things. Indeed, nothing was left to the imagination to inspire them to work hard in order to get.

And numerous stories surfaced about life in the communist countries, stories that illustrate the lack of ambition the system induced in the population. They were dispirited people who went home at the end of the day, slumped in their seats to review what had gone on throughout the day and if nothing terrible was pointed out, considered themselves lucky and prayed that tomorrow will be as uneventful as today.

All the while, the Soviet government was forced to control all aspects of the economic life including the wages and the prices. And despite the fact that the people had little money to spend on anything, the inflationary pressures were always present because the people had even less goods and services on which to spend the money. Still, the people found a number of items on which to throw some money, items such as the contraband goods that sold at inflated prices.

These items were found on the black market of what was considered luxury goods smuggled into the communist countries from the outside. Sold at exorbitant prices, the goods caused the emergence of a myriad of unsavory practices adopted by the smugglers. In turn, the practices prompted the authorities to take measures that were no more elegant than those of the smugglers.

The spectacle made the system look like a failure in the eyes of its own citizens and the impact was best expressed by the joke that the communists circulated about themselves. It went something like this: "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us." In other words the system had fallen into a sea of lethargy and because they were powerless to do anything about it, the people willingly rode the wave of apathy.

After decades of this sort of experiment, the Eastern Europeans who lived nearest to the borders of the Western countries realized that the West had more to offer to its citizens than their regime could ever provide for them, and they began to grumble. The contagion spread to Russia itself and before long the communist empire was beginning to crumble.

Yet, had the Soviets employed a fraction of their workforce to produce enough consumer goods to satisfy the population, the regime would still be alive today and the communist economies would be looking like that of China. But none of this happened and the result was that the Soviet empire was overturned and Russia, together with her satellites, was forced to change for ever.

And here we are today faced with an America where some people are dismantling the once vibrant system of the country in an apparent effort to make it operate like the Soviet system of old. The way these people implement their plan is to create a climate of paranoia which they inject into the country’s politico-cultural body. This mobilizes the country’s resources, the control of which they grab and put in the service of their hidden agenda.

The result is that in the same way the communists feared the outside world, the Americans are being scared by the repeated assertions that the world is hostile to their values and is out to destroy their country. This creates a culture where the mega projects are encouraged at the expense of the smaller ones in the mistaken belief that America’s security will be better served when the low tech consumer products are made by the emerging nations while America frees herself to build a high tech military industrial complex.

What is wrong with this idea is that while money is being pumped into beefing up a high tech industry, the country is gradually producing less of the low tech parts and components that feed into the weapon systems. Such parts and components are now imported from outside the country, placing America in a situation where she can be cut off at the whim of the foreign suppliers. For this reason, the calls went out to start manufacturing those parts and components locally.

And there are two ways to do this. Either you produce just enough parts to satisfy your needs or you mass produce them and have more than you need. In the first instance the cost per part will be prohibitive; in the second you will look for customers who would buy the extra parts. But since the country does not have the low tech civilian industries that can absorb such parts, you go with the first option which is the recipe for ruining the economy.

This was the choice that the Soviets made when they traded a functioning economy for an impressive military, and this is where America is being dragged today. Choosing guns over butter did not work for the Soviets and will not work for the Americans. It is now obvious that when you are defeated economically it does not matter how impressive your military is because nobody will take you seriously.

Moreover, the reason why the Soviets were able to become a military superpower in the first place was that they lived off the inheritance left to them by previous regimes. But after 70 years of surviving on past achievements, the Soviets had depleted their inheritance and were forced to expose the bankruptcy of their system.

Likewise, the Americans are now living on the inheritance left to them by their forefathers which will soon be depleted. And this inheritance is nothing more than the country’s good name against which America is borrowing trillions of dollars to buy the products that are no longer made locally. And however powerful America’s military may look today, it will become as useless as the Soviet military when the rest of the economy will cease to function.

And you will know the economy has ceased to function when the country will find it difficult to borrow money on the international markets. Unable to buy from abroad the goods and services that are not made locally, a contraband industry will flourish where the smuggled goods will trade at exorbitant prices. And America will come to look like a Third World country.

What get you into a situation like this are the subtle attacks by people who pretend to be your friends and the protectors of your values. But in fact these people have a hidden agenda, and they can only stand on the ashes of your values. To succeed in implementing their agenda they reverse the reality as to who is your friend and who is your enemy. This done, they get you to reverse the policies that brought glory to your country under the tutelage of your forefathers.

It is now evident that the Marxists who destroyed the Russian empire from within have imported the same wrongheaded policies into America perhaps to get their sweet revenge for the real and imagined injuries caused by the events of the McCarthy era. And they are mobilizing the gullible and the naïve among the locals to support them into recreating the conditions which caused the demise of the Soviet Empire.

The way out of this muddle is to know who your real enemies are and who your friends are, a job that the Western intelligence agencies must now undertake to redeem themselves. What is clear is that Karl Marx was never an Arab and if he were alive today he would be a rabid anti-Arab. Consequently, America must not be afraid of the World and must rebuild her industrial base to become a diversified economy again.

The supposedly new conservatives who call themselves neocons have turned coat not because they believed in the conservative values of the Liberal Democracies but because they retain the values of the Bolshevik Social Democracies that failed so miserably in Russia and in Eastern Europe. In plain English these people still cherish the old communist movement and they remain as deadly as ever except that now they have their claws stuck well into the politico-cultural body of America.

It would be more appropriate to refer to these characters as the neo-coms rather than neo-cons.

Why Soviet Economics Failed (Part 1of 2)

Most people are familiar with the saying: “guns and butter.” It came about when someone suggested that you can conduct a major war and still have enough resources to give the population a decent standard of living. But I know of a story that leads to a different conclusion, one that sat deep in my memory for about fifty years and now seems ready to be told. It is the story not of guns that were pitted against butter but a Sputnik that was pitted against soap.

There was no television where I lived fifty years ago but radio was there and it was doing a lot of drama which, I must say, was good drama in most part. I lived in Egypt when the Russians launched their Sputnik into space and I was so taken by the event, I never tired listening to news and to stories about it. I suppose the only way I would be moved as much today is if intelligent life was detected on another planet.

Fifty years ago I listened to a drama that was broadcast out of France called: “l’Oeil de Moscou” which translates into: Moscow’s Eye. It was the story of an American expedition going to the moon and discovering that the Russians have been there already and where they built an impressive base. The Russians set up a telescope inside the base which they used to spy on the Earth, including the United States of America. The telescope was named Moscow’s Eye by the Americans, which was also the title given to the drama by its author.

A discussion followed the radio play among a number of pundits who were picked from a variety of fields. During the talk, the point was repeatedly made that the Russians were ahead of the Americans by several years if not several decades. And the reason why this situation developed, said the pundits, was that the two countries started out with different priorities. The pundits explained that the Russians were interested in technological and scientific advances which is why they chose the heavy industries over light manufacturing.

By contrast, continued the pundits, the Americans were more interested in perfecting their light industries for consumer products such as the chewing gums and the soaps. And it was predicted that the Russians will get still further ahead of the Americans as time goes by, and will beat them in every field of human endeavor including the overall economy. And the reason why this will happen, opined the pundits, was that a steel mill adds more to the gross national product of a country than a bar of soap or a factory of chewing gum.

We know now how wrong those pundits were and we have the luxury of hindsight to figure out why. They were wrong because an economy runs on money and motivation, something that the Soviets seemed to ignore. By contrast, the American Henry Ford figured out the role that money and motivation play in the economy at just about the same time that the Bolshevik revolution was brewing in Russia. And Henry Ford put his knowledge to good use.

What the man did was to pay his workers enough money so as to give them the purchasing power to buy the cars they were making. So ingenious was this decision that the workers responded by producing the cars in a climate of high morale, working hard as if they owned the company even though they knew they did not.

Standing in opposition to those ideas were the Bolsheviks of Russia who were under the spell of Karl Marx, a thinker of German Jewish descent. This man advocated handing the tools of production to the workers and he inspired the Bolshevik leaders who adopted his mantra. The ideas encouraged the collective to grab the economy and run the show and this is what happened when the revolution succeeded and the Bolsheviks came to power in Russia.

In time, the leaders of the revolution completed the takeover of the tools of production and they came to own and run the economy. Had the Marxist predictions been correct, the leaders should have been able to establish a climate of high morale in the factories since the workers were made to own the companies in which they worked. And the latter should have been motivated to work hard and work happy so as to produce the goods with more zeal and high spirits than the Ford workers in America. In so doing, they should have been able to create enough wealth for their society to swim in money and bathe in luxury.

In fact, the newsreels that came out of Soviet Russia and the other communist countries depicted the happiest of workers producing an abundance of goods. But as we know now, all this was a big lie. The reality was the opposite of that, as the communist dream had failed and was replaced with a fantasy on celluloid. The workers did own the tools of production, at least in theory, but they acted as if they did not. And so the questions were asked: Why did it come to this? And what is it that went so wrong with the Soviet system of economics?

What got in the way of creating a communist Nirvana is encapsulated in another saying: “Everybody’s business is nobody’s business.” This happens all the time because when people own something collectively, nobody feels they work for themselves but everyone feels they work for the collective. And the problem is that the collective soon becomes an abstract notion with which the people cannot bond or develop an affinity.

Under these circumstances the motivation disappears, the zeal and the high spirits deflate, the wealth ceases to be created and the money is not made because the goods are not produced in abundance or if they are, they are produced sloppily. And all these troubles can be traced to the fact that the collective has always failed to take the place of self-interest which is something that is written into our DNA and something that is destined never to be erased with words or removed with theatrics.

Nonetheless, as the Russians have shown, you can still develop some form of pride in the collective and substitute that for self interest. However, as recent history has shown, the effect of this trick will only last for a short period of time as it did in Russia following the launch of Sputnik. But sooner or later the individual will come around to asking the most ancient and most pertinent of all questions: ‘What’s in it for me?”

The question was asked in Russia and this is when the Soviet empire began to erode. The empire then collapsed while Sputnik remained high up in the history books as the first artificial satellite to go into orbit around the Earth. But with the passage of time the Russian pride was transformed into a human pride and a heritage that belongs to all the races. Now, Sputnik is no longer discussed as a Russian triumph and no longer viewed as a Russian exclusive.

And to answer the question: “What’s in it for me?” various attempts were made to show that anything good done for the collective was something good done for every member of the collective. But every philosophical point made in this regard produced a counterpoint that rebutted it effectively and in the end, the clash of ideas always came to a draw.

The back and forth discussions went on until such time that the proof as to which side had the more effective economics came with the proverbial pudding, and the news was bad for the communists. When the puddings were distributed and the tasting began, the Soviet pudding proved not to have a heavenly taste as promised but something closer to a hellish aroma.

The communist soufflé started to deflate as the Soviet Union started to collapse. And it all happened not because of an ill wind that blew from outside the country as originally feared but because of the bad economics that the Soviet regime was pursuing.

The lesson to be learned here is that the Russians were not able to have their version of the guns and butter because they concentrated on the guns, believing that the butter will follow automatically. They neglected to produce both the Sputniks and the goods that consumers crave, and their shortsightedness proved fatal.

By contrast, the Americans concentrated on the butter and this made it possible for the guns to follow. They produced the chewing gums and the soaps but also the powerful military machine that still exists today.

However, the American approach is now coming under strain and the problem is that the Western intelligence agencies which failed to detect the impending demise of the Soviet system are doing very little to help America avoid the same fate as the Soviets.

This last point and a few others will be discussed in Part 2 of this series.

Don’t Know What, Who Or Why

Something happened, I am not sure what, but suddenly talk filled the airwaves a while ago with regard to the latest census in Canada, the result of which apparently revealed that half of Toronto is made of visible minorities. And the commentators were almost unanimous in wondering if we should not be teaching somebody - I am not sure who but probably the minorities - something about our history and system of governance. But none of the commentators revealed why they were prompted to say this.

As someone who spent most of my life teaching, I have a few observations to make in this regard. I believe that in the same way we need to learn how to think in order to produce useful thoughts, we need to learn how and what to learn in order to make our endeavor a useful one. So let me begin from the beginning.

Teachers exist to teach but the students are so varied and they can be so single minded in their approaches to learning that no teacher may go through the experience without learning a thing or two from them. In this regard, the one thing that impressed me most about some of the students was the way that they believed they could learn. Even though some were in their twenties, they believed they could learn just by listening to the lecture in class and by owning the books without ever opening them.

I remember having a comparable attitude myself but with a difference since I was around three years of age when it happened to me. I asked my mother to teach me to read and write; she said I must learn the alphabet first which she set out to teach me. I do not know how long it took me to learn the thing but one day I discovered I had memorized all twenty eight letters that make up the Arabic Alphabet.

The moment I succeeded in reciting the whole thing I pounced on the pen and tried to write something but could not. Disappointed, I turned to my mother and asked why. To my chagrin and to her amused astonishment she replied that I have yet to learn how to write the letters I just recited. Well, I suppose I displayed no more naïveté than the students who believed they could learn the content of a book they never opened.

Now that I am not three years old and not even young enough to return to my old profession, I see something comparable happening all around me. We have in this culture several levels of legislatures that churn out new laws and regulations almost everyday. We also have several levels of courts that churn out new precedents every hour of the day. And yet we never encounter someone thinking aloud or talking about the best way to comply with the laws and regulations, be that on the air or off the air.

On the contrary, we are exposed at every turn to the news and to advertisements that tell how the lawyers and the accountants of this country navigate their clients around the law to get away with murder and to save on taxes. In a climate where the example is the thing, you cannot blame ordinary people, including some members of the visible minorities, for taking the attitude of who needs to open the law books when the officers of the court and the chartered accountants are thrashing them left and right!

What come out of this are two lessons. First, we do not go through life knowing all there is to know about the things on which we base our decisions; therefore most of the decisions are imperfect. Second, more often than not we tend to build a system of beliefs based on false premises, a reality that determines how we live our lives and how we interact with each other. This happens not because we lack access to knowledge but because we are too lazy to access that knowledge.

Looking at our current human condition - which is probably what the commentators were trying to tackle on the air - we profess to cherish the notion that we have a system of laws and not a system of men in this country. But the fact is that we are as illiterate about the system by which we govern ourselves as a three year old who has yet to learn how to write the letters of the alphabet.

And the reality we refuse to acknowledge is that a book of laws written by special interest in the middle of the night, now sitting on the shelf of a lawyer or an accountant, does not make a system of laws. And since democracy is supposed to flow out of this system, democracy itself has ceased to flow despite the fact that it is the religion to which we must all adhere, being the common language that is supposed to bind us together.

Having pulled down the curtain on the real thing, we find ourselves compelled to put on a make-believe show to give the impression we have a functioning democracy. But when something is created for a purpose and the purpose is forgotten yet the people act out the thing, we call this a ritual. Therefore, what we now have is the ritual of a democracy through which we make the correct moves but seldom practice what we pretend to be.

Rituals have existed for a long time. They were invented to replace the religious demands that were beyond the ability of some people to perform. And because there is a resemblance between religious beliefs and political beliefs, a few things were equated between the two and transferred from one to the other. This being the case, we can do a test on the religious side of the equation to see how it might apply to political governance.

For example, if we need to measure how strong someone’s belief is, we may ask how far that someone would go to invoke or to affirm their belief. And the best real-life example to illustrate this point is the legend surrounding the American actor John Wayne who was the quintessential blue-blooded all-American shoot-them-up swaggering extreme right wing cowboy on the screen.

The story is that contrary to the character he played, John Wayne was never certain he was doing the right thing. He was concerned that he might have sinned all his life being so extreme in his views, and he was afraid to die and go to Hell. So he converted to Catholicism on his deathbed and asked to be baptized right there and then. He did this because he heard that in Catholicism all sins are wiped clean when someone submits to the ritual of the baptism. Thus, to force God to take him in Heaven, John Wayne did what he thought would fool God for eternity in the same way that he fooled his fans and audiences during his lifetime.

The question now is this: Do we believe in our democratic fantasy like a fanatic who would die for his religion or do we believe in it the same utilitarian way that John Wayne believed in Catholicism? Whatever the answer, I have a few more questions. What sort of civic education those commentators thought was needed? And who would they teach it to? The lawyers? The accountants? The visible minorities? The invisible majority? Or the commentators themselves?

And what would happen if we are shown that our knowledge of the system we adhere to does not exceed the knowledge of the students who never opened their books? Or the knowledge of a three year old who has yet to learn how to read and write? Do we then import teachers from where the visible minorities came the same way that we imported their priests when we realized we had lost our moral and religious compasses?

When I think of these questions I am reminded of what happened ten years after I learned to recite the alphabet. I was so eager to say things before I thought them through; a teacher felt compelled to give me advice. He said I should engage my brain before I open my mouth. And this is the advice I now give to the commentators who would say something just because the least informed among them said it first.

Whether born here or born elsewhere, most of the minorities that the commentators wonder about are likely to be better informed about the history and the civics of this country than anyone else. And there are a couple of reasons for this, they chose to be a part of this country and they know how to be responsible citizens. Can the commentators say the same thing about themselves?