HOW KLEPTOCRACY BECOMES SCHIZOCRACY

+ Four weeks before the decisive elections in Germany, what is the position of the parties?

Today I am providing my English translation of 2 articles, both originally in Italian.
(All emphasis mine in both).

The first one is an article published on Comidad.org on Thursday 16th January 2025, i.e. before Donald J. Trump’s inauguration as US President.

HOW KLEPTOCRACY BECOMES SCHIZOCRACY

It seems that the beleaguered Italietta will have a chance to come into its own in the coming years. Thanks to the experience accumulated over some fifteen years by our exegetes in decoding the hidden meaning of Umberto Bossi's burps, it will now be a piece of cake for them to capture the profound messages nested in Donald Trump's insolences. Why would a US president, a few days before his official inauguration, threaten three of his colonies (Canada, Denmark and Panama) with taking by force territories he already controls? The obvious answer is that Trump is a charlatan and is arousing his public into believing that he is wresting by threats things that had in fact already been obtained long ago. On the subject of Panama, it should be pointed out that this country is no stranger to being a victim of US exhibitionism for its own sake. In 1989, barely a month after the fall of the Berlin Wall, President Bush Senior celebrated his victory in the Cold War by bombing and invading Panama under the pretext of removing Noriega from the presidency, i.e. a man who had been put there by the US itself and who had made a career and fortune through his collaboration with the CIA drug trade. It would then be necessary to explain why Noriega's removal resulted in so many civilian casualties.

The 1989 invasion of Panama probably had more than just a self-celebratory purpose; it was to reassure the arms lobby that the end of the Cold War would not mean less business, but more. To confirm this, in 1991 the US cultivated the euphoria of victory in the Cold War by also attacking Iraq under the pretext of obtaining a withdrawal from Kuwait. The “bomb business” involves such paradoxes as celebrating victories not by ceasing bombings but by increasing them. We have seen how, since the fall of the enemy Assad, Israel has carried out the largest number of consecutive bombing missions on Syria ever in history. All this bombing has been justified under the ridiculous pretext of having to destroy the Syrian army's weapons depots. If those mythical weapons depots had really existed, how come the USA, also present in Syria, didn't take them, perhaps to send everything to Ukraine? As usual, the Israelis present as planned strategic targets what in reality are only the targets available at the time. If a country resorts to bombing once in a while, then it makes sense to ask why it does it; but if a country is bombing all the time (and more and more) it means it is an end in itself.

Israel is like Trump, it must not be taken seriously in its narratives, otherwise one risks in turn losing the chance to be taken seriously. The largest manufacturer of bombs is the multinational Boeing, which in fact has a symbiotic relationship with Israel and in particular with Prime Minister Netanyahu; this proves that it is not only the Israel lobby, i.e. AIPAC, but also the arms lobby that supports Zionism's extermination campaigns. Bombs are like vaccines: an ideal commodity because, like it or not, the taxpayer pays for them; and, like vaccines, bombs can also be passed off in publicity as the preventive cure to a disease that does not exist but could come.

To catch the accusation of anti-Semitism, one only has to question the mantra about Israel being the only democracy in the Middle East. The certain fact is that Israel can boast of being one of the largest kleptocracies in the world. Indeed, since kleptocracy is a supranational system, Israel is an essential link in it. The Times of Israel newspaper noted a strange fact. Israel had been blacklisted for sixteen years as the country most implicated in the crime of money laundering, but in 2019, without a plausible legal reason, the FATF (Financial Action Task Force), the world's intergovernmental organisation against money laundering, admitted Israel among its members, even though the most controversial and criminogenic law remained in force, namely that those who take Israeli citizenship are not required to account for their earnings for three years. Not surprisingly, Israel is the country with the largest number of non-resident citizens.

Then there is the phenomenon of a morbid love for Israel on the part of American evangelical Christians. It is not a platonic love, for it involves collecting donations for Israel that remain tax-free through the channel of non-profit foundations. In this way, one diverts a fair share of one's income from the taxman, and then goes to Israel to take it back cash in hand, leaving there a percentage, perhaps exorbitant, but still less onerous than a tax rate.

Trump is no joker when it comes to money laundering either, as his famous villa-resort at Mar a Lago in Florida is a venue for expensive “events” of all kinds, involving money transfers with which to disguise ill-gotten gains; so much so that Mar-a-Lago has become a textbook subject of study in the laundering of narcotics proceeds. Despite the glaring boil at Mar-a-Lago, Trump has only been made the target of specious and insubstantial judicial enquiries, as launching serious investigations into money laundering would mean opening a chasm into which all the other establishment gangs, starting with Clinton’s and Biden’s, would be swallowed up. Mar-a-Lago's shenanigans do not impress Trump's supporters, who see them as venial mischief and peccadilloes, compared to the ideological and warmongering fury of the neo-conservatives. Trump has built his character by playing the businessman on reality shows and so the public is under the illusion that his antics are part of a negotiating strategy. Maybe even Trump himself is under the illusion. But insolence and negotiation do not appear to be compatible with each other, since politeness is not a formalism for its own sake, but a social buffer for mediation.

Judge Andrew Napolitano, a “critical” Trump supporter in the past, now wonders whether Trump was not always a neocon in disguise. Probably, however, fiction has nothing to do with it; it is instead a dependence on the neocon narrative, according to which the West in general and the US in particular are victims of their own pacifism and excessive goodness, which have allowed the evil Russians and Iranians to take advantage of them. It is a commercial to sell weapons, whose very simple plot is: you got yourself into trouble because of your “too much pietism” and you can only get out of trouble with more bombs. Someone like Fiamma Nirenstein has specialised in this kind of advertising narrative, which she perhaps believes in blindly, so she is looking forward to Trump as the one who will liberate Israel from the laces of “pacifism/internationalism” of Obama, Biden and Harris.

The pattern drawn by Nirenstein provides an illustration of what schizophrenia is. It is no coincidence that today Trump is announcing that he wants to tighten economic sanctions and military threats to force Tehran into a deal that includes nuclear power. That is: I am attacking you to force you to negotiate, but as soon as you are at the negotiating table, I will see this willingness on your part as a sign of weakness on my part and treachery on yours; therefore I will blow up the deals and attack you again.

All systems of power are corrupt and kleptocratic to varying degrees; but a kleptocracy can only be considered complete and integral when it proves itself incapable of social and international mediation. In this sense, the qualification of integral kleptocracy can currently only apply to the countries of the Holy West, which share a number of common characteristics, the main one being the lack of income redistribution. Society exists as a function of income redistribution, and if this redistribution ceases, society takes the road to chaos and self-destruction. It is no coincidence that in the European Union there is a chronological coincidence between the proposals to increase military spending and the impeachment of the minimum wage directive. The coincidence is not only chronological, but also has a logical consequentiality.

The decay of infrastructure in general, and of urban infrastructure in particular, is part of the phenomenon of the absence of income redistribution, since the maintenance of cities, and of the territory in general, is the largest source of jobs. But more jobs means greater bargaining power of labour, hence higher wages and less social dependence on loans. To justify the fire in Los Angeles or the potholes in Milan, the alibi of climate catastrophism is used. In order to keep wages and employment low, the industrial base has to be narrowed down to those production sectors that do not depend on consumer demand but exclusively on public procurement and public money: bombs and vaccines. Since weapons are sold to public opinion as the means to avert war, negotiation cannot always be rejected in principle, nor can it be excluded from the list of general intentions. On the contrary, every aggression and every threat will be presented as a way of forcing the other side to negotiate. Any agreement will, however, be perceived as a danger of disarmament and therefore broken as soon as it is reached. Kleptocracy becomes schizocracy.

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The second article was published on Movisol.org on Saturday 18th January 2025.

Four weeks before the decisive elections in Germany, what is the position of the parties?

Alice Weidel, leader of AfD.

As Germany races towards early elections on 23rd February [2025], none of the parties seem to be aware of the tectonic shift taking place in world politics. Or at least, their election platforms do not address the new realities, starting with the rise of the expanded BRICS and the decline of Western global dominance.

Attempts by the leaders of the CDU-CSU, the SPD, the Greens and the FDP (liberals) to make their citizens believe that it is possible to maintain the current global system, with its top institutions such as NATO, the IMF and the World Bank, will once again prove futile. All recent local elections have seen an increasing percentage of voters choose two protest parties: Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the Sahra Wagenknecht party (BSW). The most recent polls give the CDU-CSU at 31% of the vote, with the SPD dropping to 16% and the Greens to 14%, while the FDP will probably not even reach the 5% threshold for entry into parliament. The AfD, on the other hand, is at 22% and the BSW, born less than 18 months ago, is at 6%. Both parties are in favour of ending the war in Ukraine through diplomacy, resuming natural gas imports from Russia - which would necessarily entail the lifting of sanctions - and are against the stationing of new US long-range missiles on German territory.

Elon Musk threw a useful hand grenade into the German political landscape by conducting a lengthy interview/discussion on X with Alice Weidel, the leader of the AfD (one can gauge how useful it was by the hysterical reactions it triggered in German establishment circles). While Alice Weidel has some interesting proposals in terms of foreign policy, security and energy, the interview highlighted the limitations of the party leadership, which defends a free-market and “anti-statist” approach to the economy and does not seem to reject geopolitics as such. Although both Musk and Weidel reject false “climate” policies and are in favour of the use of nuclear energy on a large scale, they did not touch on the problem of the bankruptcy of the international financial system, which is the main obstacle to any growth policy.

In a way, the developments in Austria are a warning to Germany. In Vienna, the attempt to form a government without the FPÖ party (very similar to the AfD) failed after four months of negotiations, so that the Austrian People's Party (ÖVP), the sister party of the German CDU, had to break the cordon sanitaire towards the “populists”. Apparently, many in the CDU would like to follow the example of their Austrian cousins, which prompted the party's chancellor candidate Friedrich Merz to pronounce an “excusatio non petita” [Latin for “unsolicited excuse”], i.e. that he would resign in the inevitability of a coalition with the AfD.

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