Never again should America or the world be dragged so close to the precipice of a financial meltdown as we did in October of 2008. To make sure that such a thing never happens again, we must find out what happened the first time and devise a cure to neutralize the problems that led to it. So let’s begin by taking an honest look at the historical background.
Pyramids have troubled those who call themselves leaders of the Jews for ever. Throughout the centuries, the rabbis of Europe and their sidekicks who impersonated the Jewish people went around preaching that the ancient Jews built the pyramids of Egypt. The Europeans believed them because they did not know enough of the history to ask the right questions while the rabbis and the sidekicks sounded so believable.
Also, the rabbis took advantage of the fact that the Europeans were by now mostly Christian. The Bible being written in such language that you can interpret it as saying anything you want it to say, the rabbis made it sound like it was saying the religious duty of every Christian was to believe that the Jews built the pyramids.
But things have changed since the Dark Ages that used to plague the European continent, and they changed at the hands of the Arabs who sparked the Renaissance of the continent and brought about the period of Enlightenment that followed. This was a time when Arab style universities were built throughout the continent, when history was taught on sound bases and when critical thought was given roots in those lands where critical thought never flourished before.
The injection of Arab modernity into the European continent resulted, among other things, in the realization that the Jews could not have built the pyramids because no Jew or impersonator set foot onto the land of Egypt until a thousand and five hundred years after the building of the last pyramid. Thus, it was the simple common sense of the Arabs replacing the muddled thinking of the Jews that saved Europe from the darkness of the self-serving ignorance which the rabbis and their sidekicks were sprinkling throughout Europe. Incidentally, sprinkling darkness and ignorance is how those characters "educate" the public they encounter everywhere they go.
And true to their form, when unmasked in one location, those who impersonate the Jews pop up in another location, something they are programmed to do relentlessly and do without fail. They pop up where people are still innocent and gullible, and where the rabbis and the sidekicks can play a new pyramid scheme without being detected at least for a while. Right now they have found a fertile ground in America where they brought with them not the ten commandments of Moses but the Ten Commandments of Charlton Heston. And that is where they pulled a pyramid scheme of the financial kind, and almost wrecked the republic and wrecked the world with it.
Out there in California near Hollywood, Michael Milken was the first to play such a scheme on a large scale during the decades of the Nineteen Seventies and Nineteen Eighties. He invented the Salami method of stuffing toxic commercial papers into what came to be known as junk bonds, and he sold slices of the poison to the retail crowd. He did so using a network of wholesalers who participated in the scheme which he structured in the same way that a pyramid scheme is usually structured. Thus, Milken was able to reach out to more victims at the base of the pyramid than anyone before and he ensnared them like a predator ensnares his prey.
But this was just the beginning. It was a dry run for the worldwide securitization of toxic mortgages that was yet to come and where the base of the pyramid was extended to engulf the entire planet. The snare was a mortgage that had a rising interest rate, and the prey were the hapless individuals who bought not the American dream of owning a home but the pipe dream that the value of the home will keep on rising for ever.
But there was more to come because the reach of the snare went beyond all of that. It caught the buyers of the securities at the base of the pyramid all around the world, those who believed that America’s model for doing business was a model based on honesty and a sense of decency.
Alas, those buyers were deceived precisely because the scheme has used America’s good name to package a toxic product. In the same cavalier way that the good name was used on the political stage to immolate the republic for the glory of Israel, the name was used in the financial marketplaces of the world to fatten the wallets of the friends of Israel. And so America was transformed overnight from a triple A financial superpower to the status of a junk republic.
We stand at this juncture today and the question is this: Can America recover from her nightmare? The answer is: Yes, she can but there is a lot of work to be done before she gets there. In the same way that Arab help was utilized to save Europe from the Dark Ages of the self-serving rabbinical ignorance, so can America recover with the help of the same Arabs who remain today as generous as they ever were.
After all, America prides herself on the fact that she adopted a form of capitalism that is based on the free market system, one that was and still is the pride and glory of the Arabs since the days when they opened the trade routes between East and West. The Arabs traveled back and forth on these routes and took their commerce to every corner of the known world thus creating new wealth in places where wealth was scarce or non-existent.
Consequently, the onus to take the initiative now rests on the shoulders of those Americans who are serious about finding a solution to their problems. They need to create a sea change at home by recognizing that at the root of their troubles lies the adoption of the Talmudic style distortion of reality and the Talmudic form of authoritarian rule practiced by those who pretend to be descendants of the ancient Jews.
It was this Talmudic culture that made it possible for the rabbis to maintain a tight grip on their flock throughout the centuries. And it was this style of rule that gave them the initial success they enjoyed every time they pulled a pyramid scheme anywhere they went. However, such schemes were defeated each and every time by the best disinfectant of all, the truth and the honesty that were used as medicine. And it is this disinfectant that the concerned Americans must now use to free themselves from the demonic hold that the Jewish lobby has on their country.
Since everything that the impersonators and the friends of Israel did was done with the Arabs in their crosshairs, the truth must be told about the role that the infamous lobby has played to drive the wedge between the Arabs and the Americans. The holders of high office who participated in the spread of anti-Arab hatred must now come forward to tell how they were approached by the Jewish lobby, and what they were asked to say and do that gored America on the altar of anti-Arab hatred to make Israel look more glorious than it is.
A noble act by the holders of high office in America will make it difficult for the Jewish lobby to go after the new Congress and the new Administration which, if it happens again, will repeat the same tragedy all over again. Enough is enough must be the battle cry of the new breed of American officials; and let the sea change flow from there.
The next order of business should concern something I wrote in a book circa the early Nineteen Nineties at a time when the world was negotiating to form the World Trade Organization. Like everything I wrote, however, the publication of the book was blocked by the notorious Jewish Establishment because they realized that to let someone like me connect with the public at large would make it harder for the Jewish lobby to prey on the gullible and the innocent in the North American circles of power. So they used the savage Talmudic dagger to savagely stab democracy in the heart, something they are programmed to do with religious zeal.
What I had in the book was the recognition that good commerce is based not only on trust and credibility, though they are necessary ingredients, but also on the sense that what you negotiate is beneficial to all parties concerned. Consequently, everyone must be made to feel comfortable with the agreements that were being hammered.
To that end, I proposed that every country be given the right to protect up to a negotiated percentage what it will deem to be a strategic industry if and when this became necessary. For example, had the idea been adopted then, America would be in a position today to declare that energy had become a strategic industry and thus take measures to protect all related industries so as to attain a full or partial self sufficiency in energy without inviting retaliation from the other countries.
The philosophy behind the suggestion was to do away with the need to demagogue the issues such as the constant painting of those who have the energy as demons out to hurt America. This Talmudic approach of hurtling Yiddish style insults at those who are blessed with an abundance of the resource did nothing to bring self sufficiency to America in thirty years and will do nothing in thirty more years. My way would be a better way.
What is poignant about this chapter in the history of America is that the purveyors of hate and distortion were the ones who benefited the most from speculating about oil and from trading with the enemies of America. All were not caught red handed like was Marc Rich, thus they did not have to flee the country or ask for a pardon from a President on his way out of the White House, but they fattened their wallets just the same while those of their ilk were sprinkling the anti-Arab venom as if the Arabs were the ones who did something wrong.
The time has come to try another approach. So how about being nice to the Arabs for a change and watch what will flow from there. You will be pleasantly surprised, America.
Friday, October 31, 2008
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Fudging The Economic Numbers
There has been talk lately concerning the possibility that the Chinese may be fudging their economic numbers. Some people refuse to believe that China has been growing at 10% or so a year and they question the veracity of the statistics put out by the Chinese with regard to their Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Other people believe the statistics are correct but they cannot explain some of the numbers they see.
So the question remains: Does China fudge the economic figures, yes or no? The simple answer is both yes and no but the explanation is more complicated than that. To make it easy for me to write this piece and for you to read it, I ask that you imagine a hypothetical case where I shall use round figures to illustrate my points rather than delve into the actual numbers which are lengthy and cumbersome.
Imagine a country with a population of a million people. These are mostly subsistence farmers and therefore they have a primitive economy. Their GDP barely reaches 200 million dollars which means that their per capita income is 200 dollars a year.
They begin to industrialize and they manage to expand their economy at an average real growth rate of 5% a year over the following 50 years. To see what this does to the economy, you grab your calculator and raise the number 1.05 to the power of 50. You obtain the answer 11.47 which means that the 200 million GDP will grow 11.47 times to the approximate value of 2.3 billion dollars over the period. Inflation is excluded from this calculation.
If we assume that the population of the country grows by 1.5% a year, it will grow to 2.1 million people over the 50 years. In this case, the per capita income will go in real terms from 200 dollars a year to 1,095 dollars. Now, let us assume that inflation will grow by an average 3% a year. In this case the 1,095 dollar per capita income of the base year will grow to about 4,800 dollars at the prices that will prevail 50 years hence.
Now let us get realistic. We live today in the year 2008, and fifty years ago was the year 1958. Can you point to an agrarian society that began to industrialize in 1958 which grew at an average 5% a year and is today stuck with a per capita income of only 4,800 dollars? No you cannot point to such a society because there isn’t one.
The reality is that the nations of Asia and Southern Europe which started to industrialize at about that time and scored a consistent rate of growth approaching 5% a year do enjoy a per capita income of no less than 28,800 dollars today. This is 6 times the 4,800 dollars calculated above.
Does this mean those nations grew at 6 times 5% a year? No it does not mean that because what we are dealing with is exponential mathematics. When you do the calculations, you find that a growth rate of only 8.83 % over 50 years will result in a per capita income that is 6 times higher than would the 5% rate of growth. But why did the nations in Asia and Southern Europe indicate a 5% rate of growth rather than 8.83%?
The answer is that they did not spend much time thinking about these matters whereas the Chinese seem to have asked the right questions and found the right answers. Consequently, instead of doing what the other nations did which is to reconcile the value of their GDP with the reality on the ground once every 10 years or so, they did the reconciliation on a yearly basis by showing a higher rate of growth than the numbers seem to indicate. And the question now is this: Why is there a discrepancy between the real rate of growth and the apparent rate?
To answer this question we imagine another situation. A teenager doing odd jobs in rural China earns 2 dollars a day. He migrates to America where he washes dishes in a restaurant and earns 40 dollars a day. He is the same boy with the same level of education and the same skills; so why is he now earning 20 times as much as before?
The simple answer is that he now lives in a country where the per capita income is 20 times that of China. But the comprehensive answer is that he earns 20 times as much because he needs this much money to feed and clothes himself in America, something he could do in rural China with only 2 dollars a day.
This leads to the notion that when China will have fully industrialized and when all of its interior will come to resemble the United States, a boy anywhere in that country with no education and no skill will have to earn 20 times as much as today just to feed and clothes himself.
This is due to something I call the complexity factor. For example, the amount of wheat that goes into making a loaf of bread can be purchased at the farm level in America or in China for only 5 cents. This is how much it will cost to make a loaf of bread in a country where most of the population lives on the farm or near it. But when you buy that same loaf in a country that is fully industrialized, you will pay something like a dollar or 20 times as much.
This is because in a modern industrial nation the wheat will be transported from the farm to the flour mill, from there to the bakery and from there to the supermarket. You will buy the bread there and pay for the flour, the wrapping, the transportation, the fuel, the interest on money borrowed by the various parties, the overhead and so on and so forth. This is the complexity of modern industrial life that adds to the price of everything, every step of the way. I call this the complexity gap between the rural and the industrial.
We may therefore conclude that as modernity sprawls into the primitive interior of China from the modern coastal areas, the gap between the levels of complexity in the two regions will steadily shrink until it disappears completely. In fact, the gap between China as a whole and America has now shrunk to a 20 fold gap from the 40 fold gap that it used to be.
Thus, when we do calculations, the rate of growth we assign to a country that is industrializing must incorporate two components. A component that is the apparent rate of growth which is normally in the range of 5%. And a component that would range from negligible to perhaps as much as 4% and that will reflect the complexity gap.
Failing this, there will have to be a periodic adjustment to the GDP in order to boost it by something like 30% or 50% every decade or so to reconcile the numbers. In fact, this is being done now to the emerging economies. It was done to the Thai, Turkish and Ukrainian economies not long ago and it will soon be done to the Egyptian and Moroccan economies because the stated GDPs of these countries are far below their real values.
Now, the beauty about mathematics is that there is always a way to double check your answers. So let us ask the question: At what rate must a country grow in real terms to boost the per capita income of its citizens by 40 fold in 50 years? To answer the question you grab your calculator and take the 50 th root of the number 40. This gives the approximate answer of 1.0766. It means that each year, the per capita income must grow by that much. To turn this into a percentage value, you deduct 1 and multiply the remainder by 100. You get the result 7.66%.
If you do not have the root function in your calculator but have the log function, you take the log of 40, divide it by 50 and then take the antilog of the result. You get the same answer as before and then do the percentage transformation.
Add to this percentage the rate of growth in the population and you come close to the 10% rate of GDP growth that China is consistently showing. You conclude that the other emerging nations are underestimating their own rates of growth because in reality they should be closer to the Chinese rate than they are willing to indicate.
Finally, there are a number of other ways to estimate the GDP, the rate of growth and the per capita income of a country. When you check them out, they all confirm that the emerging nations score higher values than those countries are willing to report, and that China’s figures are closer to the real values.
Thus, if the question is: Do the emerging economies fudge their economic numbers? The answer is yes they do but they do it on the low side. As for the Chinese, the answer is no, they do not fudge because the figures they publish are close to the real thing. But yes, they do fudge if you look at the technical definition of what those figures are supposed to represent.
So the question remains: Does China fudge the economic figures, yes or no? The simple answer is both yes and no but the explanation is more complicated than that. To make it easy for me to write this piece and for you to read it, I ask that you imagine a hypothetical case where I shall use round figures to illustrate my points rather than delve into the actual numbers which are lengthy and cumbersome.
Imagine a country with a population of a million people. These are mostly subsistence farmers and therefore they have a primitive economy. Their GDP barely reaches 200 million dollars which means that their per capita income is 200 dollars a year.
They begin to industrialize and they manage to expand their economy at an average real growth rate of 5% a year over the following 50 years. To see what this does to the economy, you grab your calculator and raise the number 1.05 to the power of 50. You obtain the answer 11.47 which means that the 200 million GDP will grow 11.47 times to the approximate value of 2.3 billion dollars over the period. Inflation is excluded from this calculation.
If we assume that the population of the country grows by 1.5% a year, it will grow to 2.1 million people over the 50 years. In this case, the per capita income will go in real terms from 200 dollars a year to 1,095 dollars. Now, let us assume that inflation will grow by an average 3% a year. In this case the 1,095 dollar per capita income of the base year will grow to about 4,800 dollars at the prices that will prevail 50 years hence.
Now let us get realistic. We live today in the year 2008, and fifty years ago was the year 1958. Can you point to an agrarian society that began to industrialize in 1958 which grew at an average 5% a year and is today stuck with a per capita income of only 4,800 dollars? No you cannot point to such a society because there isn’t one.
The reality is that the nations of Asia and Southern Europe which started to industrialize at about that time and scored a consistent rate of growth approaching 5% a year do enjoy a per capita income of no less than 28,800 dollars today. This is 6 times the 4,800 dollars calculated above.
Does this mean those nations grew at 6 times 5% a year? No it does not mean that because what we are dealing with is exponential mathematics. When you do the calculations, you find that a growth rate of only 8.83 % over 50 years will result in a per capita income that is 6 times higher than would the 5% rate of growth. But why did the nations in Asia and Southern Europe indicate a 5% rate of growth rather than 8.83%?
The answer is that they did not spend much time thinking about these matters whereas the Chinese seem to have asked the right questions and found the right answers. Consequently, instead of doing what the other nations did which is to reconcile the value of their GDP with the reality on the ground once every 10 years or so, they did the reconciliation on a yearly basis by showing a higher rate of growth than the numbers seem to indicate. And the question now is this: Why is there a discrepancy between the real rate of growth and the apparent rate?
To answer this question we imagine another situation. A teenager doing odd jobs in rural China earns 2 dollars a day. He migrates to America where he washes dishes in a restaurant and earns 40 dollars a day. He is the same boy with the same level of education and the same skills; so why is he now earning 20 times as much as before?
The simple answer is that he now lives in a country where the per capita income is 20 times that of China. But the comprehensive answer is that he earns 20 times as much because he needs this much money to feed and clothes himself in America, something he could do in rural China with only 2 dollars a day.
This leads to the notion that when China will have fully industrialized and when all of its interior will come to resemble the United States, a boy anywhere in that country with no education and no skill will have to earn 20 times as much as today just to feed and clothes himself.
This is due to something I call the complexity factor. For example, the amount of wheat that goes into making a loaf of bread can be purchased at the farm level in America or in China for only 5 cents. This is how much it will cost to make a loaf of bread in a country where most of the population lives on the farm or near it. But when you buy that same loaf in a country that is fully industrialized, you will pay something like a dollar or 20 times as much.
This is because in a modern industrial nation the wheat will be transported from the farm to the flour mill, from there to the bakery and from there to the supermarket. You will buy the bread there and pay for the flour, the wrapping, the transportation, the fuel, the interest on money borrowed by the various parties, the overhead and so on and so forth. This is the complexity of modern industrial life that adds to the price of everything, every step of the way. I call this the complexity gap between the rural and the industrial.
We may therefore conclude that as modernity sprawls into the primitive interior of China from the modern coastal areas, the gap between the levels of complexity in the two regions will steadily shrink until it disappears completely. In fact, the gap between China as a whole and America has now shrunk to a 20 fold gap from the 40 fold gap that it used to be.
Thus, when we do calculations, the rate of growth we assign to a country that is industrializing must incorporate two components. A component that is the apparent rate of growth which is normally in the range of 5%. And a component that would range from negligible to perhaps as much as 4% and that will reflect the complexity gap.
Failing this, there will have to be a periodic adjustment to the GDP in order to boost it by something like 30% or 50% every decade or so to reconcile the numbers. In fact, this is being done now to the emerging economies. It was done to the Thai, Turkish and Ukrainian economies not long ago and it will soon be done to the Egyptian and Moroccan economies because the stated GDPs of these countries are far below their real values.
Now, the beauty about mathematics is that there is always a way to double check your answers. So let us ask the question: At what rate must a country grow in real terms to boost the per capita income of its citizens by 40 fold in 50 years? To answer the question you grab your calculator and take the 50 th root of the number 40. This gives the approximate answer of 1.0766. It means that each year, the per capita income must grow by that much. To turn this into a percentage value, you deduct 1 and multiply the remainder by 100. You get the result 7.66%.
If you do not have the root function in your calculator but have the log function, you take the log of 40, divide it by 50 and then take the antilog of the result. You get the same answer as before and then do the percentage transformation.
Add to this percentage the rate of growth in the population and you come close to the 10% rate of GDP growth that China is consistently showing. You conclude that the other emerging nations are underestimating their own rates of growth because in reality they should be closer to the Chinese rate than they are willing to indicate.
Finally, there are a number of other ways to estimate the GDP, the rate of growth and the per capita income of a country. When you check them out, they all confirm that the emerging nations score higher values than those countries are willing to report, and that China’s figures are closer to the real values.
Thus, if the question is: Do the emerging economies fudge their economic numbers? The answer is yes they do but they do it on the low side. As for the Chinese, the answer is no, they do not fudge because the figures they publish are close to the real thing. But yes, they do fudge if you look at the technical definition of what those figures are supposed to represent.
Friday, October 17, 2008
That Invisible Hand Has A Finger
Adam Smith who wrote a book called the Wealth Of Nations said that when an individual adds to his wealth, the nation is better off because the extra wealth that is created by the individual is added to the wealth of the whole nation. Someone later echoed this sentiment when he said something to the effect that what was good for General Motors was good for America. And the Chinese government is now saying that it is glorious for the whole nation when the individuals in it seek to get rich.
Adam Smith explained how this works. He said that things tend to even out in a community because the activities carried out by the individuals in it spread out to the entire community as if an invisible hand was going around doing the good work. Like it or not, history has proved these ideas to be sound because the nations that adopted them prospered while those that rejected them lagged behind both economically and in a few other ways.
But what is now becoming apparent is that the invisible hand has a finger and that finger is giving us a collective pain in the ass. The new reality is that the hand which at first seemed to stroke us with loving care has migrated to the wrong places, and the finger that used to adorn it has transformed into a hard shaft. So, how did it all happen without notice?
It happened because a law whose existence was never envisaged by Adam Smith began to make itself felt. It is Murphy’s Law which says that if something can go wrong it will go wrong. And that dreaded law hit the otherwise good work of the invisible hand despite the existence of an oversight mechanism that was supposed to oversee things and make sure nothing of the sort ever happened.
The trouble with the invisible hand is that it is invisible thus no direct detection of the way it works is ever possible. Rather, the work is detected by the influence that the hand exerts on the surroundings. This situation has led to some serious consequences which translated into the financial crisis the World is now experiencing. To better visualize this situation, I make the following analogy with a well known mechanical phenomenon.
The systems of an airplane can have one or two weaknesses leading to one or two benign failures without crashing the plane. However, what may happen at times is that a number of small failures can occur, apparently all at the same time, and result in the crash of the plane. Such development was given the name catastrophic failure.
Sometimes, the technicians and engineers in charge of safety will dismiss the signs that point to a weakness here or a weakness there in the hope that a catastrophic failure will not occur. But if the signs are ignored for too long, the odds will pile up against the systems and the catastrophe will occur as predicted by Murphy’s Law.
What happens will not be an act of God but a cascade of failures in the sense that one small thing will give way causing another small thing to give way and so on in sequence. And it will be the cumulative effect of the small failures, seemingly all happening at the same time as if by coincidence, that will ultimately cause the crash.
Something analogous to this happened to the financial crisis that started in the USA and spread to the rest of the World. Many people knew of the deficiencies in the system and several commentators warned about them well in advance of the crash. But the people in charge were lulled into rejecting the warnings with the promise that the American economy was resilient enough to withstand the strain; or they were intimidated into keeping their mouth shut under the threat of being denounced as unpatriotic if they don’t.
It now looks like the whole thing was a conspiracy of silence of some sort. Those who orchestrated it were the ones who engineered the status quo and fought to maintain it. They were the Neocons and their allies, the organized friends of Israel who advanced the argument that America can and should go it alone in the World. They repeated the refrain that America was powerful enough to need no one but a solitary ally, that entity they call Israel which they believe was destined to achieve glory by the grace and the will of the Almighty.
Practicing the Yiddish culture of insulting everyone that disagrees with them, that group of people succeeded in isolating the government of America from the rest of the World and from the American people themselves. This done, they methodically went about monopolizing the powers of governance and those of the media as if no one but their kind counted for something in what was quickly becoming a godforsaken place.
And when they secured all the powers in their hand, they engaged in a few more hair-raising activities. They took control of the means of information and used that to demagogue the nations they wished to antagonize. In this way, they managed to drive a wedge between America and those countries, most of whom had no dispute with America or were considered a friend. And when the Neocons and their allies succeeded in this task, they started to beat the drums of war and thus got America to attack some of those countries.
All the while the world watched the unfolding drama and many people shook their heads in dismay. They did so because they understood the consequences that will flow from the adoption of such behavior on the World stage. They knew all too well that the marketplace functions properly only when everybody has the correct information, and what they were witnessing gave them a bad feeling about the state of business in America.
When the friends of Israel took control of the flow of information, the dismayed people of the World anticipated that the marketplace of ideas and finance in America was going to be distorted. A few commented that the result will be the improper functioning of both the political and financial systems in that country. In fact, this came to pass as illustrated by the following three examples which are but a sample of a much larger picture.
The first example was that of the late Senator cum oil analyst Howard Metzenbaum who blamed OPEC for every gyration in the price of oil. The result of this sort of talk by him and by his kind was that he and his fellow speculators made the money, the American people paid the high price for the oil, and the Arabs were blamed for the whole thing. And this charade unfolded even as the Arabs were taking measures deemed detrimental to their own interest in order to stabilize the price of oil.
The second example is that of the Senator from New York, Charles Schumer who demagogued an Arab company, Dubai Ports World, following its attempt to buy a number of ports in America thus causing an ordinary, innocent commercial deal to sink before it could see the light of day. Apparently the Senator had a change of heart later on with regard to the Arabs investing in America but that’s another discussion.
The third example is that of an operation they called Abscam which stood for Arab scam. This was a sting operation designed by the friends of Israel and implemented automatically and without a minimum of thought by the FBI. The objective was to observe and perhaps to catch the American lawmakers who would sell their soul to Arab money as some lawmakers were already doing to Jewish money in a practice that came to be known as JewScam.
As for the Abscam operation, it turned out that no Arab ever tried to approach a single American lawmaker to buy his or her soul. No visible or invisible hand stroked anyone appropriately or inappropriately, or for that matter gave someone a pain in the ass. The Arabs, you see, are conditioned by temperament and by culture to leave this disgusting and cowardly habit to the Jewish organizations and to their allies, the friends of that glorious entity they call Israel.
It is now becoming clear that the invisible hand of Adam Smith will work properly only when it is left alone. You can learn to manipulate it and make it do other things but you cannot control it completely because it will remain invisible to you as much as it is to everyone else. What the hand will not escape, however, is Murphy’s law which will strike when you try to manipulate the hand. And when you least expect it, the law will make the hand hurt you as much as you will those you have in your crosshairs.
Finally, you need not have a special vision to see that what did America in this time around was the fact that the finger on that invisible hand speaks English with a Yiddish accent. How do you say ouch in Yiddish?
Adam Smith explained how this works. He said that things tend to even out in a community because the activities carried out by the individuals in it spread out to the entire community as if an invisible hand was going around doing the good work. Like it or not, history has proved these ideas to be sound because the nations that adopted them prospered while those that rejected them lagged behind both economically and in a few other ways.
But what is now becoming apparent is that the invisible hand has a finger and that finger is giving us a collective pain in the ass. The new reality is that the hand which at first seemed to stroke us with loving care has migrated to the wrong places, and the finger that used to adorn it has transformed into a hard shaft. So, how did it all happen without notice?
It happened because a law whose existence was never envisaged by Adam Smith began to make itself felt. It is Murphy’s Law which says that if something can go wrong it will go wrong. And that dreaded law hit the otherwise good work of the invisible hand despite the existence of an oversight mechanism that was supposed to oversee things and make sure nothing of the sort ever happened.
The trouble with the invisible hand is that it is invisible thus no direct detection of the way it works is ever possible. Rather, the work is detected by the influence that the hand exerts on the surroundings. This situation has led to some serious consequences which translated into the financial crisis the World is now experiencing. To better visualize this situation, I make the following analogy with a well known mechanical phenomenon.
The systems of an airplane can have one or two weaknesses leading to one or two benign failures without crashing the plane. However, what may happen at times is that a number of small failures can occur, apparently all at the same time, and result in the crash of the plane. Such development was given the name catastrophic failure.
Sometimes, the technicians and engineers in charge of safety will dismiss the signs that point to a weakness here or a weakness there in the hope that a catastrophic failure will not occur. But if the signs are ignored for too long, the odds will pile up against the systems and the catastrophe will occur as predicted by Murphy’s Law.
What happens will not be an act of God but a cascade of failures in the sense that one small thing will give way causing another small thing to give way and so on in sequence. And it will be the cumulative effect of the small failures, seemingly all happening at the same time as if by coincidence, that will ultimately cause the crash.
Something analogous to this happened to the financial crisis that started in the USA and spread to the rest of the World. Many people knew of the deficiencies in the system and several commentators warned about them well in advance of the crash. But the people in charge were lulled into rejecting the warnings with the promise that the American economy was resilient enough to withstand the strain; or they were intimidated into keeping their mouth shut under the threat of being denounced as unpatriotic if they don’t.
It now looks like the whole thing was a conspiracy of silence of some sort. Those who orchestrated it were the ones who engineered the status quo and fought to maintain it. They were the Neocons and their allies, the organized friends of Israel who advanced the argument that America can and should go it alone in the World. They repeated the refrain that America was powerful enough to need no one but a solitary ally, that entity they call Israel which they believe was destined to achieve glory by the grace and the will of the Almighty.
Practicing the Yiddish culture of insulting everyone that disagrees with them, that group of people succeeded in isolating the government of America from the rest of the World and from the American people themselves. This done, they methodically went about monopolizing the powers of governance and those of the media as if no one but their kind counted for something in what was quickly becoming a godforsaken place.
And when they secured all the powers in their hand, they engaged in a few more hair-raising activities. They took control of the means of information and used that to demagogue the nations they wished to antagonize. In this way, they managed to drive a wedge between America and those countries, most of whom had no dispute with America or were considered a friend. And when the Neocons and their allies succeeded in this task, they started to beat the drums of war and thus got America to attack some of those countries.
All the while the world watched the unfolding drama and many people shook their heads in dismay. They did so because they understood the consequences that will flow from the adoption of such behavior on the World stage. They knew all too well that the marketplace functions properly only when everybody has the correct information, and what they were witnessing gave them a bad feeling about the state of business in America.
When the friends of Israel took control of the flow of information, the dismayed people of the World anticipated that the marketplace of ideas and finance in America was going to be distorted. A few commented that the result will be the improper functioning of both the political and financial systems in that country. In fact, this came to pass as illustrated by the following three examples which are but a sample of a much larger picture.
The first example was that of the late Senator cum oil analyst Howard Metzenbaum who blamed OPEC for every gyration in the price of oil. The result of this sort of talk by him and by his kind was that he and his fellow speculators made the money, the American people paid the high price for the oil, and the Arabs were blamed for the whole thing. And this charade unfolded even as the Arabs were taking measures deemed detrimental to their own interest in order to stabilize the price of oil.
The second example is that of the Senator from New York, Charles Schumer who demagogued an Arab company, Dubai Ports World, following its attempt to buy a number of ports in America thus causing an ordinary, innocent commercial deal to sink before it could see the light of day. Apparently the Senator had a change of heart later on with regard to the Arabs investing in America but that’s another discussion.
The third example is that of an operation they called Abscam which stood for Arab scam. This was a sting operation designed by the friends of Israel and implemented automatically and without a minimum of thought by the FBI. The objective was to observe and perhaps to catch the American lawmakers who would sell their soul to Arab money as some lawmakers were already doing to Jewish money in a practice that came to be known as JewScam.
As for the Abscam operation, it turned out that no Arab ever tried to approach a single American lawmaker to buy his or her soul. No visible or invisible hand stroked anyone appropriately or inappropriately, or for that matter gave someone a pain in the ass. The Arabs, you see, are conditioned by temperament and by culture to leave this disgusting and cowardly habit to the Jewish organizations and to their allies, the friends of that glorious entity they call Israel.
It is now becoming clear that the invisible hand of Adam Smith will work properly only when it is left alone. You can learn to manipulate it and make it do other things but you cannot control it completely because it will remain invisible to you as much as it is to everyone else. What the hand will not escape, however, is Murphy’s law which will strike when you try to manipulate the hand. And when you least expect it, the law will make the hand hurt you as much as you will those you have in your crosshairs.
Finally, you need not have a special vision to see that what did America in this time around was the fact that the finger on that invisible hand speaks English with a Yiddish accent. How do you say ouch in Yiddish?
Friday, October 10, 2008
A Mirror Image That Is Upside Down
You can scarcely read an article these days or watch a television show that does not attempt to explain what led to the financial difficulties the World is facing at the present time. However, the trouble is that the pundits who contribute their two cents worth of blabber do so by explaining the mechanics of the collapse and by calling it the root cause of the problem.
This is like explaining a car crash by saying the car was going too fast on this stretch of the road and the breaks failed to slow it down. The two things caused the car to skid and slam into the tree. What the pundits do not say is that the driver was drunk at the time of the accident, and this was the only reason why the car crashed.
The reality is that there has been a long history behind the situation that the World is facing today, a history that goes beyond the usual histrionics. It is a human story that is more clearly told through the incidents which make up its elements. However, because I never thought that a day will come when I shall be telling these things, I did not keep adequate notes at the time that the incidents occurred.
My memory is failing me when it comes to some details, especially the names of some of people I mention. Nevertheless, I am pulling the stories out of the drawer I call "do-not-tell history" to do the opposite of what I intended. I shall tell what I can reconstruct from a sketchy memory and a record that is less than complete. I shall then draw the corresponding conclusions with the understanding that I may not have everything exactly right.
It happened in the early Nineteen Nineties that a bank which I believe was called "Bank of Credit and Commerce International" failed. It had a small branch in the US and the failure was barely mentioned in the American press. It also happened that the biggest loser in this incident was an Arab prince whose name I do not remember and who lost something like fifteen or twenty million dollars in the deal.
The finger of blame was pointed at a man of Pakistani origin whose name I believe was Agha Hassan Abeidi and who may or may not have been an American citizen or holder of a green card. In any case, the Arab prince was the victim in this mess and nobody disputed this fact. Nobody, that is, except one person who made a big issue out of a small incident.
That person was a CNN broadcaster who, if memory serves me right was doing the weather, the sports or both. One day this man broke out in apoplectic rage at the end of his regular broadcast and he lashed out at the foreigners - meaning all the Arabs not just that one victimized prince - who mess up with the American banking system and thus endanger America’s prosperity and the wellbeing of its people.
That weatherman/sportscaster characterized the incident as the biggest financial scandal to hit America and he derided those with the power in Washington who should be doing something about it - perhaps hang all the Arabs in a public square - but were not doing it. I believe that person was Bill Schneider of CNN but I could be wrong.
Compare this with what is happening to the financial system in America today and ask why it is that no one of the same ilk is turning apoplectic at the "Friends of Israel" who managed in eight short years to ruin the once economic superstar that was America, and turn it into an economic basket case thus endangering not only the people of America but all of humanity.
The answer is simple, those who took control of the American financial system first took control of the media and used it as a stepping stone to get to the political apparatus which gave them full access to the wealth of the nation. From their positions inside the apparatus, they worked on the financial system itself in a quest to turn it into a cash cow that would serve the never satisfied interests of Israel.
Thus, if we want to understand how the history of America’s demise unfolded, we must study a tangled web that is as Byzantine as the story of the sportscaster who used the time allotted to sports and to the weather in order to make commentaries that served the interests of Israel and to beat up on the Arabs. And he did all this without giving the latter the opportunity to defend themselves or to respond to what he was spewing.
History will not be kind to that man or to such characters as Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky, Robert Maxwell, Andrew and Lea Fastow, and all those who milked America and transferred much of the wealth to what they called charitable causes in Israel. They were the who-is-who of two infamous lists, one called the list of those who cheated America, and the other called the list of those who were and may still be friends of Israel.
I shall let history deal with these people in the manner that it usually does and turn my attention to something that history normally forgets. What preoccupies me are the little things that paint a big picture when viewed from the human angle. The following incident tells one such story as eloquently as anything can.
Robert Scully is a Canadian broadcaster who does shows in French and in English. He used to do a show called Scully Rencontre for the French division of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). The French title of the show translates into Scully Meets With.
Sometime before the death of Robert Maxwell, Robert Scully met with him and had a discussion that was carried on Radio Canada which is the name given to the French division of the CBC. A week or two after the airing of the show, letters from viewers commenting on it came to Scully.
This was a time when the notorious Jewish organizations were known to engage in organizing letter writing campaigns promoting their never ending causes. Of all the letters that came to him, Scully read on the air the one that said Robert Maxwell was so excellent in that interview, he demonstrated why Jews must be allowed to take control of and to run the World.
And there goes the whole sordid story as told in a nutshell. Not only was Robert Maxwell defined as someone who would rob his grandmother of her false teeth, so vile was the man, he was also a natural friend of Israel and a character so impressive to the letter writing campaigners that they tried to make us believe he should control the World and all of humanity.
Now we have a true picture of what the CNN man and those like him attempted to accomplish then and still do now. Their cause is not that of reflecting the world through a mirror where the left hand becomes the right hand and vice versa, it is one of reflecting the world in a mirror that turns the whole World upside down.
We also get a clear picture as to what is ruining America and threatening mankind today. By repeating the accusation that a criticism directed against a Jewish organization or against Israel is a mutated form of anti-Semitism, the self-styled Jewish organizations were able to hide behind the suffering of Jews to do the thing that led to that suffering in the first place. Such organizations were the architects of their own demise, and with their deeds paved the way for the pogroms and holocausts of the past.
And to understand why no one of the same ilk or any ilk dared to speak against the friends of Israel, we must understand that by shielding themselves against criticism, these organizations put themselves beyond all checks and all balances. This done, they acquired and then monopolized the powers that the system denied to everyone else, powers they used to obliterate every opposition.
But in a country like America which used to pride itself on its system of checks and balances, a Congress that never strayed too far from a 50-50 vote on any issue yet voted nearly 100% in favor of the Jewish causes began to look like a Congress of prostitutes operating at the bottom of toilet bowl. Still daring to call itself a democracy, the American regime began to lose the esteem of the World and more importantly the esteem of its own people.
Normally, the strategy employed by the Friends of Israel works at the beginning until such time that the people affected respond to the human stories it creates, that is, when the situation hits them where it counts the most, their livelihood. This is happening now and the future does not bode well for the Jews at large. In consequence of this development, a few brave souls began to speak up which, at last, is a hopeful sign in this entire sordid saga.
These souls can use all the encouragement we can give them and we should all rally to their cause.
This is like explaining a car crash by saying the car was going too fast on this stretch of the road and the breaks failed to slow it down. The two things caused the car to skid and slam into the tree. What the pundits do not say is that the driver was drunk at the time of the accident, and this was the only reason why the car crashed.
The reality is that there has been a long history behind the situation that the World is facing today, a history that goes beyond the usual histrionics. It is a human story that is more clearly told through the incidents which make up its elements. However, because I never thought that a day will come when I shall be telling these things, I did not keep adequate notes at the time that the incidents occurred.
My memory is failing me when it comes to some details, especially the names of some of people I mention. Nevertheless, I am pulling the stories out of the drawer I call "do-not-tell history" to do the opposite of what I intended. I shall tell what I can reconstruct from a sketchy memory and a record that is less than complete. I shall then draw the corresponding conclusions with the understanding that I may not have everything exactly right.
It happened in the early Nineteen Nineties that a bank which I believe was called "Bank of Credit and Commerce International" failed. It had a small branch in the US and the failure was barely mentioned in the American press. It also happened that the biggest loser in this incident was an Arab prince whose name I do not remember and who lost something like fifteen or twenty million dollars in the deal.
The finger of blame was pointed at a man of Pakistani origin whose name I believe was Agha Hassan Abeidi and who may or may not have been an American citizen or holder of a green card. In any case, the Arab prince was the victim in this mess and nobody disputed this fact. Nobody, that is, except one person who made a big issue out of a small incident.
That person was a CNN broadcaster who, if memory serves me right was doing the weather, the sports or both. One day this man broke out in apoplectic rage at the end of his regular broadcast and he lashed out at the foreigners - meaning all the Arabs not just that one victimized prince - who mess up with the American banking system and thus endanger America’s prosperity and the wellbeing of its people.
That weatherman/sportscaster characterized the incident as the biggest financial scandal to hit America and he derided those with the power in Washington who should be doing something about it - perhaps hang all the Arabs in a public square - but were not doing it. I believe that person was Bill Schneider of CNN but I could be wrong.
Compare this with what is happening to the financial system in America today and ask why it is that no one of the same ilk is turning apoplectic at the "Friends of Israel" who managed in eight short years to ruin the once economic superstar that was America, and turn it into an economic basket case thus endangering not only the people of America but all of humanity.
The answer is simple, those who took control of the American financial system first took control of the media and used it as a stepping stone to get to the political apparatus which gave them full access to the wealth of the nation. From their positions inside the apparatus, they worked on the financial system itself in a quest to turn it into a cash cow that would serve the never satisfied interests of Israel.
Thus, if we want to understand how the history of America’s demise unfolded, we must study a tangled web that is as Byzantine as the story of the sportscaster who used the time allotted to sports and to the weather in order to make commentaries that served the interests of Israel and to beat up on the Arabs. And he did all this without giving the latter the opportunity to defend themselves or to respond to what he was spewing.
History will not be kind to that man or to such characters as Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky, Robert Maxwell, Andrew and Lea Fastow, and all those who milked America and transferred much of the wealth to what they called charitable causes in Israel. They were the who-is-who of two infamous lists, one called the list of those who cheated America, and the other called the list of those who were and may still be friends of Israel.
I shall let history deal with these people in the manner that it usually does and turn my attention to something that history normally forgets. What preoccupies me are the little things that paint a big picture when viewed from the human angle. The following incident tells one such story as eloquently as anything can.
Robert Scully is a Canadian broadcaster who does shows in French and in English. He used to do a show called Scully Rencontre for the French division of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). The French title of the show translates into Scully Meets With.
Sometime before the death of Robert Maxwell, Robert Scully met with him and had a discussion that was carried on Radio Canada which is the name given to the French division of the CBC. A week or two after the airing of the show, letters from viewers commenting on it came to Scully.
This was a time when the notorious Jewish organizations were known to engage in organizing letter writing campaigns promoting their never ending causes. Of all the letters that came to him, Scully read on the air the one that said Robert Maxwell was so excellent in that interview, he demonstrated why Jews must be allowed to take control of and to run the World.
And there goes the whole sordid story as told in a nutshell. Not only was Robert Maxwell defined as someone who would rob his grandmother of her false teeth, so vile was the man, he was also a natural friend of Israel and a character so impressive to the letter writing campaigners that they tried to make us believe he should control the World and all of humanity.
Now we have a true picture of what the CNN man and those like him attempted to accomplish then and still do now. Their cause is not that of reflecting the world through a mirror where the left hand becomes the right hand and vice versa, it is one of reflecting the world in a mirror that turns the whole World upside down.
We also get a clear picture as to what is ruining America and threatening mankind today. By repeating the accusation that a criticism directed against a Jewish organization or against Israel is a mutated form of anti-Semitism, the self-styled Jewish organizations were able to hide behind the suffering of Jews to do the thing that led to that suffering in the first place. Such organizations were the architects of their own demise, and with their deeds paved the way for the pogroms and holocausts of the past.
And to understand why no one of the same ilk or any ilk dared to speak against the friends of Israel, we must understand that by shielding themselves against criticism, these organizations put themselves beyond all checks and all balances. This done, they acquired and then monopolized the powers that the system denied to everyone else, powers they used to obliterate every opposition.
But in a country like America which used to pride itself on its system of checks and balances, a Congress that never strayed too far from a 50-50 vote on any issue yet voted nearly 100% in favor of the Jewish causes began to look like a Congress of prostitutes operating at the bottom of toilet bowl. Still daring to call itself a democracy, the American regime began to lose the esteem of the World and more importantly the esteem of its own people.
Normally, the strategy employed by the Friends of Israel works at the beginning until such time that the people affected respond to the human stories it creates, that is, when the situation hits them where it counts the most, their livelihood. This is happening now and the future does not bode well for the Jews at large. In consequence of this development, a few brave souls began to speak up which, at last, is a hopeful sign in this entire sordid saga.
These souls can use all the encouragement we can give them and we should all rally to their cause.
Friday, October 3, 2008
The Sweet Sound Of Neocon Treachery
A fable by the 17th. Century French poet Jean de Lafontaine titled "The Crow and the Fox" teaches us this lesson: Let it be known that every flatterer lives at the expense of those who listen to him. Thus, if you are a Neocon laboring to milk America for the benefit of Israel, you work to cut off America’s relation with those who refuse to bow to Israel even if they are good for America, and you promote America’s relation with those who suck up to Israel even if they are toxic to America.
You achieve all this by singing the praises of the American leaders, describing them as the perfect democratic things who need no allies except the few that the Neocons will take the trouble to choose for them. Thus, like the fox of Lafontaine who tricked the crow by praising his plumage and got him to drop the cheese in his beak, you trick those leaders into delivering to Israel what they would not deliver to the homeless in their own country, the hungry and the least healthy among their masses.
Regarded as a sucker born with the tendency to accept every sweet lie that the Neocons whisper in your ear, you believe in the fantasy world they shape for you and you live by their rule until one day the world comes crushing down on you and reality hits you in the face. You hate yourself for being this idiotic during all these years and you look for a way out of the hole you got yourself into, the hole in which you labored to milk the people of America for the glory of Israel and her shameless supporters inside America.
Getting hit in the face with reality and waking up from a dream-like fantasy is something that happens on occasion to the most careless of human beings and there is a lesson to be learned here which is not different from that of Lafontaine. What follows is a situation I witnessed long ago so let me tell you about it before I go any further.
Students in their late teens and early twenties like to brag about everything. One student I had in my school eons ago so annoyed his schoolmates when he bragged about being a connoisseur of sound that they asked for my help to test him out. I thought I should not get involved in something like this but was so intrigued by the idea myself that I did not give an outright no for answer. Instead, I asked the students to give me time to think about the matter and this answer of mine had its own consequence.
The students took my reluctance as a hopeful sign and they decided to speed up my decision process by making the student in question participate in his own entrapment. I do not know what they said to him but he came to me a little later on and he initiated a discussion on the difference in sound quality between the technology of solid state and that of the vacuum tube. I agreed with him that the tube was superior to solid state with the caveat that I was not a connoisseur of sound myself. As if on cue the student bragged about being an expert in this field and said he will submit to any sort of test that I or someone else would devise so as to prove his claim once and for all.
I called the group of students that thought of the idea in the first place and asked them to design a test. They did and it was a simple test to carry out in practice. The students took advantage of the fact that the South Koreans were beginning to make themselves known around the world for the home entertainment products they were making and were able to sell at a very low price. Among these products was an expensive looking sound system they sold at a cheap price, one that was given the impressive Anglo-Saxon name of Lloyd.
One student brought a Lloyd to the school while another brought a German model whose name escapes me now. The latter looked less impressive than the first but sold at a higher price. In the absence of the bragging student, the two systems were set up side by side one early morning and were tested back to back. I could not discern the difference in the quality of sound between the pair but some students claimed they did and they designated the German system as the better of the two.
When the student in question arrived at the school, the other students told him nothing about the origin of the two units and played a tape for him on one system and then the other. The student in question chose the Korean Lloyd as having a higher quality of sound.
They blindfolded the braggart and played a number of tapes on one system and then the other, and they asked him to choose between the two. His choices turned out to be random. And then they played a tape on the same unit back to back and asked him to guess which unit sounded better. Not knowing he was tricked, he chose randomly. They removed the blindfold and showed him the result of the test and he could not believe his eyes but was humbled enough by the experience that he began to act with a little more humility than ever before.
Finally, they showed him the purchase bill which indicated both the make and the cheap price of the Lloyd at which point he expressed an unusual fury. It was clear that the fury was directed against himself for believing in his own fantasy and for always paying a high price for the products he purchased when other products of equal quality were selling at a lower price. You see, dear friend, that boy had been his own Neocon for a long time, and when he woke up that day, he saw the world of his imagination crumble around him.
Likewise, the Americans antagonized the Arab people and those who stood by them in the mistaken belief that America will obtain the oil she needs at the price she will dictate. The Neocons and those who came before them had planted this fantasy in the head of the American leaders whom the Neocons had corrupted for the purpose of softening those very same heads. And so, like the crow of Lafontaine, they opened their beak to sing the song of a false democracy they thought was the pride of their system and dropped the most prized of their possessions.
What they dropped was nothing less than the American wellbeing which is sometimes referred to as an American cheese. It was what the forefathers had labored hard to produce and to hand over to the generations that came after them. But when the cheese hit the ground, it was the neo con artists and their Israeli allies who pounced on it and feasted with it to their hearts’ content. And then it became clear by the end of this orgy that nothing was left for the American people, not even a crumb for the leaders who made this whole calamity a possible thing.
From that moment on, things went from bad to worse and America spent all that she possessed in the futile attempt to rob the Arabs of what she could have bought at a fraction of what she spent on the misguided adventure. And while this was happening, as if to scrape the bottom of the barrel, the same crowd that got America into the bottomless pit got busy siphoning off the nation’s credit and all her reserves. Now America is waking up to the reality that the Neocons handed to her in Baghdad and in Lower Manhattan the same bitter dish that the British Empire was handed in Suez - the loss of her great power status.
Someone in America will undoubtedly hate themselves for teaming up with the Neocons as did the bragging student I had in my school and did the British and the French who teamed up with Israel to embark on the Suez adventure. But the ordinary people of America will not want to stop at the simple act of remorse and self hate but will want accountability and will demand to see the head of the culprits not only roll out of a job but roll their way to the jailhouses of the nation.
And as always, when a scandal of this magnitude explodes in America, the culprits will prove to be of the kind that call themselves friends of Israel, and the money will have been channeled not to support some social program or cultural institution as claimed by the Neocons but to cleanse the Palestinian homeland of its Palestinian owners at the hands of a Zionist regime that is as bloodthirsty as this planet has ever witnessed.
You achieve all this by singing the praises of the American leaders, describing them as the perfect democratic things who need no allies except the few that the Neocons will take the trouble to choose for them. Thus, like the fox of Lafontaine who tricked the crow by praising his plumage and got him to drop the cheese in his beak, you trick those leaders into delivering to Israel what they would not deliver to the homeless in their own country, the hungry and the least healthy among their masses.
Regarded as a sucker born with the tendency to accept every sweet lie that the Neocons whisper in your ear, you believe in the fantasy world they shape for you and you live by their rule until one day the world comes crushing down on you and reality hits you in the face. You hate yourself for being this idiotic during all these years and you look for a way out of the hole you got yourself into, the hole in which you labored to milk the people of America for the glory of Israel and her shameless supporters inside America.
Getting hit in the face with reality and waking up from a dream-like fantasy is something that happens on occasion to the most careless of human beings and there is a lesson to be learned here which is not different from that of Lafontaine. What follows is a situation I witnessed long ago so let me tell you about it before I go any further.
Students in their late teens and early twenties like to brag about everything. One student I had in my school eons ago so annoyed his schoolmates when he bragged about being a connoisseur of sound that they asked for my help to test him out. I thought I should not get involved in something like this but was so intrigued by the idea myself that I did not give an outright no for answer. Instead, I asked the students to give me time to think about the matter and this answer of mine had its own consequence.
The students took my reluctance as a hopeful sign and they decided to speed up my decision process by making the student in question participate in his own entrapment. I do not know what they said to him but he came to me a little later on and he initiated a discussion on the difference in sound quality between the technology of solid state and that of the vacuum tube. I agreed with him that the tube was superior to solid state with the caveat that I was not a connoisseur of sound myself. As if on cue the student bragged about being an expert in this field and said he will submit to any sort of test that I or someone else would devise so as to prove his claim once and for all.
I called the group of students that thought of the idea in the first place and asked them to design a test. They did and it was a simple test to carry out in practice. The students took advantage of the fact that the South Koreans were beginning to make themselves known around the world for the home entertainment products they were making and were able to sell at a very low price. Among these products was an expensive looking sound system they sold at a cheap price, one that was given the impressive Anglo-Saxon name of Lloyd.
One student brought a Lloyd to the school while another brought a German model whose name escapes me now. The latter looked less impressive than the first but sold at a higher price. In the absence of the bragging student, the two systems were set up side by side one early morning and were tested back to back. I could not discern the difference in the quality of sound between the pair but some students claimed they did and they designated the German system as the better of the two.
When the student in question arrived at the school, the other students told him nothing about the origin of the two units and played a tape for him on one system and then the other. The student in question chose the Korean Lloyd as having a higher quality of sound.
They blindfolded the braggart and played a number of tapes on one system and then the other, and they asked him to choose between the two. His choices turned out to be random. And then they played a tape on the same unit back to back and asked him to guess which unit sounded better. Not knowing he was tricked, he chose randomly. They removed the blindfold and showed him the result of the test and he could not believe his eyes but was humbled enough by the experience that he began to act with a little more humility than ever before.
Finally, they showed him the purchase bill which indicated both the make and the cheap price of the Lloyd at which point he expressed an unusual fury. It was clear that the fury was directed against himself for believing in his own fantasy and for always paying a high price for the products he purchased when other products of equal quality were selling at a lower price. You see, dear friend, that boy had been his own Neocon for a long time, and when he woke up that day, he saw the world of his imagination crumble around him.
Likewise, the Americans antagonized the Arab people and those who stood by them in the mistaken belief that America will obtain the oil she needs at the price she will dictate. The Neocons and those who came before them had planted this fantasy in the head of the American leaders whom the Neocons had corrupted for the purpose of softening those very same heads. And so, like the crow of Lafontaine, they opened their beak to sing the song of a false democracy they thought was the pride of their system and dropped the most prized of their possessions.
What they dropped was nothing less than the American wellbeing which is sometimes referred to as an American cheese. It was what the forefathers had labored hard to produce and to hand over to the generations that came after them. But when the cheese hit the ground, it was the neo con artists and their Israeli allies who pounced on it and feasted with it to their hearts’ content. And then it became clear by the end of this orgy that nothing was left for the American people, not even a crumb for the leaders who made this whole calamity a possible thing.
From that moment on, things went from bad to worse and America spent all that she possessed in the futile attempt to rob the Arabs of what she could have bought at a fraction of what she spent on the misguided adventure. And while this was happening, as if to scrape the bottom of the barrel, the same crowd that got America into the bottomless pit got busy siphoning off the nation’s credit and all her reserves. Now America is waking up to the reality that the Neocons handed to her in Baghdad and in Lower Manhattan the same bitter dish that the British Empire was handed in Suez - the loss of her great power status.
Someone in America will undoubtedly hate themselves for teaming up with the Neocons as did the bragging student I had in my school and did the British and the French who teamed up with Israel to embark on the Suez adventure. But the ordinary people of America will not want to stop at the simple act of remorse and self hate but will want accountability and will demand to see the head of the culprits not only roll out of a job but roll their way to the jailhouses of the nation.
And as always, when a scandal of this magnitude explodes in America, the culprits will prove to be of the kind that call themselves friends of Israel, and the money will have been channeled not to support some social program or cultural institution as claimed by the Neocons but to cleanse the Palestinian homeland of its Palestinian owners at the hands of a Zionist regime that is as bloodthirsty as this planet has ever witnessed.
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