Things Are Getting Serious:
Krugman was in Dubai, in a conference, plutocratizing, I presume. Wrote he:
“A lot of the conference was actually about geopolitics, and I don’t want to think about the quite grim stuff from that end.”
Yes, things are getting interesting. In Lima 196 countries decided that Global Warming was a problem, and all and any country had to present a plan to reduce CO2 emissions within 6 months.
Global temperatures seem ready for a significant jump-up, the exact thing I have been saying, for more than a decade, that it would happen someday. Amusingly, at this rate, in ten years, temperature would jump as high as the worst predictions. for a century from now.
The gigantic Gulf of Maine has already warmed up. It was the stronghold of cod, ever since Europeans, more than 5 centuries ago, started to massively fish there. From Boston to the Bay of Fundy, the Gulf of Maine has become too hot for cods, and they vote with their fins to go somewhere fresher. At the rate we are going, cods may run out of planet within twenty years.
Back to Krugman: “Venezuela-with-nukes (Russia) keeps looking more vulnerable to crisis. Long-term interest rates at almost 13 percent, a plunging currency, and a lot of private-sector institutions with large foreign-currency debts. You might imagine that large foreign exchange reserves would allow the government to bail out those in trouble, but the markets evidently don’t think so. This is starting to look very serious.”
It is called war. War with Putin. War is serious. It’s better done early, on one’s own agenda. Cratering the price of oil is part of it.
Russia’s central bank, in a bid to prevent the Ruble to turn into ruble, raised its key interest rate Tuesday, Dec. 15 2014, to 17% from 10.5%. The repo rate went up to 18%.
War with Putin, is better than the alternative, namely peace with the dictator. Fortunately, we are not following the script from January 1933 (election of Hitler) to December 1941 (Hitler declares war to the USA).
Hitler Blossomed Because As Assad And Putin, He Had Western Plutocratic Allies:
War with Hitler started in 1933, as far as the French Republic was concerned (and the French economy got seriously affected by the war preparations: enormous fortifications, and being ready to field more than 100 divisions).
However, all of France’s potential allies signed deals, official or not, with Hitler. Poland inaugurated this with a January “Non-Aggression Treaty with Hitler.
Great Britain signed a so-called “Naval Treaty” with Hitler in 1935, with the understanding that Hitler could invade the East as he pleased. The Treaty allowed Hitler to re-arm as much as he pleased, in violation of the Versailles Treaty.
Meanwhile American plutocrats invested massively in the Reich. Texaco provided Hitler with all the oil he needed to transport a fascist army from Africa into Spain, and wage war there. Standard Oil (Exxon) provided secretly the Nazis with synfuel technology (not to be shared with the Anglo-Saxon militaries), IBM was given the monopoly of computing in the Reich, Ford (Hitler’s first sponsor) build thousands of military vehicles, and so on ad nauseam: the Reich had turned into an Eldorado for American plutocrats.
When France (1936) declared her intention to give weapons to the Spanish Republic, she was opposed on the world scene & had to back-off. France could not afford to antagonize the Anglo-Saxons, so the Spanish Republic got no weapon, and was progressively devoured in the next three years by Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and their goons.
Spain fell in 1939. Millions more Spaniards would be eliminated by the fascists in the next few years. Great Britain had not supported the French-Czech alliance, and Czechoslovakia had been invaded. Finally the UK understood how serious the situation was, and agreed to support the French-Polish Alliance’s fine print.
Hitler supported German minorities, he said, and gave an ultimatum to Poland. This time France declared her intent to declare war. So Hitler allied himself with Stalin, and invaded Poland. But France, now joined by Britain, which had no army to speak of, declared war. The British Commonwealth soon followed (Canada, Australia, India, etc.)
What did the USA do? The President of the USA, acting on the “Neutrality Act” signed a law making it unlawful for American citizens to support France or Britain, or even set a foot on their ships. Why? France and Britain were viewed as “belligerent”.
Meanwhile, American plutocratic support for Hitler augmented.
Hitler Got Lucky In May 1940:
The rest is well known: the Nazis’ 150 divisions got lucky against the 100 French divisions in May 1940, however the French made it so that the small British army escaped at Dunkirk, and that prevented Hitler to establish a bridgehead in Britain.
Less well known is the fact that the top German generals asked Britain and the USA to simply say that they would support France. Then the generals were to get rid of the Nazis to save Germany. Instead, the British and Americans told Hitler that his generals were plotting against him (this happened in 1937-1939).
Lesson of all this?
The Anglo-Saxon support of Hitler was crucial in allowing Hitler to pursue his apocalypse.
And even encouraged it: Hitler made countless discourses about the democracies having no will.
Is Putin Hitler?
Not exactly, but Putin has nukes. And the foundations of their ideologies have a lot in common. Hitler thought that, to develop economically, Germany needed a greater “vital space” (Lebensraum). Putin has made it clear that he had to reconstitute a greater empire, the USSR
If we do not want to renew the mistakes of the 1930s, the lessons are clear:
France, Britain and the USA have to be united, and promote civilization. They are now joined by Germany, and the rest of Western Europe. The traitors of 1939, among them Sweden and Switzerland, are now firmly on the side of (greater) democracy and against blatant dictatorship (with which they had collaborated in 1939).
When the French Republic went to war against the awful troika from hell, Hitler, Stalin and American plutocrats, the odds were long. Right now, the odds are excellent: the GDP of Russia is less much less than that of France. The Russian economy is in free fall.
United We Have To Stand:
The difference with the 1930s is that, this time, the West is united. Hitler would have been killed by his own generals if the USA and Britain had been solidly behind the French Republic in the 1930s (instead the USA and Britain informed dictator-president-Kanzler Hitler that his own generals were plotting against him).
A non-difference with the present plutocracy in the West is that Moscow has the greatest number of billionaires in residence. Putin was encouraged by what plutocracy got away with in the West, and tried to go a bit further. big mistake.
Now the West has to grimly pursue the job.
In the 1930s, the war of democracy against fascism, by proxy, was in Spain. Democracy lost, fascism was encouraged. Now the show by proxy is in Syria. It’s an enormously complicated situation.
But, as I said, the (representative) democracies had to get involved. They all are: Australia is bombing Iraq. Great. All right, the mentally unbalanced supports of Islamism come out, and fire their weapons in Sydney’s harbor. Not surprising. except to those who did not read the Qur’an.
Mayhem comes from two sources: bad guys, and bad situations. They are entangled: bad guys create bad situations, bad situations create bad guys.
The ultimate bad situation is the CO2 crisis. There too the lesson is that the West has to be united (it was not united in the last two decades, as the USA pursued its own selfish CO2 splurging, namely 20 tons per person per year of CO2, more than double the EU’s; fortunately, Kerry went to Lima).
Hitler was encouraged by his Anglo-Saxon plutocrat friends to get ever worse, until the bad situation he had created escaped his control, September 3, 1939, when France and Britain declared war.
Putin had a bad situation, namely the kleptocratic plutocracy he created led Ukraine to break formally away by associating itself with the European Union. He tried to stop that with threats, and then, prisoner of its own rhetoric, and his thirst for oil, by invading Crimea, and annexing it.
It was the first unilateral annexation in Europe since Hitler annexed parts of France in 1940.
It will not stand, it cannot stand.
Patrice Ayme
