From Meccania to Atlantis - Part 13 (2): Harpo, Gekko, Barko, Sarko
From the desk of Takuan Seiyo on Fri, 2009-12-18 11:45
Chapter 2: Barko = Fundamental Transformation
2 + 3 = 5.03820
But the Chinese have not forgotten, and they are quoting Benjamin Franklin to the American fools. “He who goes borrowing, goes sorrowing,” admonishes Cheng Siwei, ex-vice-chairman of the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party. Beijing University students laugh at U.S. Treasury Secretary Geithner when he reassures them with the transparent fib that his government believes in a “strong dollar.” And Americans swindled by their own government unto the nth generation, take solace in lampooning their Loon in Chief -- here being told by “Hu Jintao”, ”I am noticing that each of your plans to save money involves spending even more money."
To construct an economy whose survival depends on the ability of both government and citizens to borrow money and spend it on mad social engineering programs and redundant imported junk is the stuff of retarded children’s fancy. After that house of cards has collapsed, for America’s government to borrow and print additional trillions of dollars, and to sprinkle that onto failed, mismanaged corporations, corrupt Communist labor unions, cesspool banks, and racial extortion racket like ACORN, is nothing short of terminal lunacy. Or something more sinister.
In 2002, the U.S. national debt was close to $6 trillion. By November 2009, it had doubled to nearly $12 trillion. The debt is running so fast that it’s expected to pass $18.6 trillion in 2014.
But that too is a lie – Snatcher State (1) is founded on lies. For to measure the true national debt of the American Leviathan, one would have to add other U.S. obligations that with respect to unfunded pension and health-care liabilities alone run over $99 trillion.
The true measure of the United States’ insolvency in November 2009 was $111 trillion, or 5.038 to the power of 20. Leviathan says, “Sorry, our forecast was 5, but it turned out to be 5.038.” Pundits then comment on the debt overrun at 5.038 and find that it’s no big deal. But Leviathan has neglected to mention the tiny superscript mark next to 5.038 that makes it $111 trillion. Maybe if Orwell’s 1984 were called 2009, Winston would have been tortured by the state for writing, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus three is five, not 111 trillion.”
Generations of American politicians and bureaucratic barons have defined the government’s liabilities in such a way as to exclude unfunded retirement and health care obligations. Try this creative accounting with your espresso cart business, and see how long you can stay out of prison.
What’s $111 trillion? It’s one of those things that, to grasp, one has to stack up Eiffel Towers all the way to Pluto, or to count seconds backwards until a few months before the Big Bang. It’s an obscene number. It’s nothing compared to the $1.4 quadrillion value of outstanding derivatives, but one insane balloon does not excuse another.
Gordon Gekko was made into a symbol of greed only because a brain-altered leftie, Oliver Stone, made the film. The banksters are indefensible, that’s true. But they are merely little covetous geckos compared to the rapacity of whore politicians and government pashas who lust for power, permanence of power, perks of power, and the buttered money crumbs that fall their way from the table de luxe where the really smart guys dine.
The Club of Crooks and Loons thrives by beggaring the middle class to fund programs that keep enough voters happy to get the Club re-elected. It raises the funds by direct wealth transfer through “progressive” (double meaning) taxation, and by borrowing and printing, i.e. creating money out of nothing. The latter is a form of stealth progressive taxation. And the purpose is always the same: reckless spending.
Manifestly, this “stimulates” the economy with plentiful credit and cheap money. But over time, this robs the middle class by diluting its savings and fixed income through inflation and stealth devaluation. It undermines society as profoundly as the profligate expenditures of the latter Caesars did Rome, financed as they were by shaving the diameter and falsifying the silver and gold content of the coins of the realm.
But the Club doesn’t care. The Crooks know that it’s in their re-election interest to conjure and spend vast sums of money. For the same reason they are keen on replacing the white, largely self-reliant majority with a more “diverse,” imported electorate, inured to government handouts robbed from the dispossessed middle class. And the Loons are happy that such spendin’ and diversifyin’ furthers their pet causes of social justice, equality, peace, and penance for whitey. Each one of these words and concepts is a hypocritical euphemism worthy of Molière.
There has been much media chatter that the current travails of financial capitalism are a crisis of the “free market” system. In a recent BBC poll of 29,000 people in 27 countries, only 11% opined that free-market capitalism works well. 23% saw capitalism as fatally flawed. In 15 of the 27 countries, majorities wanted their government to increase its direct ownership of the main industries.
Although only 11 of the 23 sampled countries were of Euro-origin, the pervasive ignorance embedded in these opinions was evinced in this comment by Doug Miller, chairman of the company that conducted the survey: “It appears that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 may not have been the crushing victory for free-market capitalism that it seemed at the time.”
“Free-market” capitalism? In a system where the government has a monopoly on the price and quantity of money, which it misprices and misprints as a rule? In a system where the government has just bailed out the crooks and the fools from the free market’s judgment, and charged the costs to the productive and prudent?
Greedy financial capitalism has exploited and exploded the credit bubble. But every bubble of the last 20 years has been inflated by the constant expansion of cheap credit by central banks, particularly the U.S. Fed. Had (Federal Reserve Chairmen) Greenspan and Bernanke not flooded with “liquidity,” the Gekkos would not have had the practically limitless free money to play speculative games with.
This is the second systemic sabotage of free market economy even in the freest country of all – the United States. The first one is the government’s persistent failure to exercise its legislative and enforcement powers to restrain fraud, graft, market manipulation and excessive risk taking with other people’s money. A big part of the Crooks and Loons’ scam is that they leave free what they ought to control, i.e. the borders, Islamic infiltration, criminal gangs, bank reserve ratios, derivatives, speculation on margin -- but they control what they ought to leave free, i.e. interest rates, gender and race-blind meritocracy, the people’s right to armed self-defense, and more.
To compound the disaster, after their bubble imploded, the Keynesian monetary drones threw $23.7 trillion’s-worth of moneta (i.e. coins) -- in the U.S. alone! -- to extinguish a conflagration of debt with more debt. None of them saw the advance warning signs of the biggest financial crash in history, but all of them now know how to cure it.
The economy is an organic entity. It gets irrationally exuberant and drunk on cheap money, if there is a misguided central bank providing it. But if the economy gets a chance to sleep through the hangover, fast for a year or two on bread and water, the toxins – what “Austrian” economists call malinvestments -- are flushed out of the system and the patient wakes up full of vigor to start a new day afresh.
If instead of leaving it alone, the government plies the economy with the very drug that has caused its crash, it produces a jolt of activity today, and a bigger crash tomorrow. It’s like pumping a heroin addict full of opium, to cure the addiction. It’s obvious therefore that if the Monkey Business (2) clowns continue “stimulating” the economy they already destroyed through two decades of overstimulation, they must have either a mental deficiency, or a hidden agenda, or both.
Barko, spender
Barko is Barack Hussein Obama -- Great Leader, The One We Have Been Waiting For or, in implanted childrens’ devotionals, “Mmm, mmm, mmm, Barack Hussein Obama.” Mr. Obama’s unique historical significance is as a “community organizer” brought to the levers of supreme power by a stroke of good fortune and able, therefore, to accelerate the Gramscian Long March beyond the wildest dreams of any American socialist radical who ever lived.
Barko is also a phenomenon that extends beyond Mr. Obama himself. It includes what is known as the Obama-Chicago Machine-Pelosi-Reid political axis, its crypto-socialist billionaire backers and upper class “progressive” acolytes, the pierced-and-tattooed slackers, militant labor and civil service unions, socialist NGOs, and the tens of millions of non-white minorities for whom the Barko coalition is a ticket to bounty requisitioned from others.
The Left’s strategy has not changed much since the 1930s. They push government spending ever higher, and then define budget deficits as the problem. When fiscal conservatives point out that the overspending causes the deficits, the Left labels that as extremist, supporting slavery and homicidal. When in power, the Left ratchets up the spending on its clients and picks the pockets of the productive citizens out of a faked concern for the “deficit gap.”
The one rule is that expenditures are never reduced, except as a strategic ploy. If an emergency forces a reduction, what’s reduced is the police, the garbage pick-up, the libraries, but never the budget-busting public workers’ pension programs, or the legions of $150,000-a-year deputies of bureaucrat deputies, hired and retained through thick and thin to fulfill the Holy Grail of Body Snatcher creed: “balance” between competent straight white males and quadriplegic black Muslim lesbians.
But there comes a time when the spending is no longer an exercise in cynical egotism or delusional ‘social justice,’ but a deliberate battering ram with which to fell a nation and steal its future. There is no precedent in history to the reckless magnitude and speed of the Obama–Pelosi regime’s spending. It’s impossible to capture concisely all the details of the confetti curtain of $100 bills streaming day and night from ten million Bernanke helicopters, but a few mileposts are worth mentioning:
The Senate of the most indebted nation in history, a country staggering under mountains of debt that it has no viable way of repaying, continues to pass Titanic spending bills that just in the first nine months of 2009 included:
$787 billion “stimulus” package
$400 billion, earmark-infested omnibus spending bill
$6 billion to federalize charities and pay volunteers
$109 billion loan to the International Monetary Fund
$3 billion for “Cash for Clunkers”
$400 million in corporate welfare to the tourism industry
$4 billion bailout of the Postal Service
In what the New York Post called “a stimulus without the stim", the federal government has spent a half-billion dollars on ten large government stimulus contracts in New York City and Long Island that created 54 jobs. That comes to $9 million per job.
Overall, the government has spent $246,436 per each of the 640,329 jobs it claims to have saved or created so far. That's a pretty costly stimulus, a government Ponzi scheme of printing money and so robbing those who hold previously printed money, then flinging the new money about in order to cover up the sorry effects of the government’s own prior malfeasance and stupidity.
Each buyer of the 690,000 vehicles that were sold during the “Cash for Clunkers program” (gov. propaganda here) received a government subsidy of $3,500 - $4,500, at a total cost to the taxpayer of $3 billion. But since the majority of these beneficiaries would have bought their cars anyway, the 125,000 who were actually induced by the government to buy cost the taxpayer $24,000 each.
Fraud in the “$8000 ‘stimulus’ to each new home buyer” program is currently assessed at $500 million. Thousands of such $8,000 tax credits have been issued to illegal aliens, children, and people who had not bought a house – the latter including at least 53 IRS [Income Tax Bureau] employees. That’s what happens when a government rather than the free market mechanism dispenses money.
Obama has announced a plan to send 78 million American seniors a check for $250 each. That’s a paltry 19.5 billion dollars. In Detroit, thousands line up for “Obama money,” that they believe is a personal gift from The One. In Tampa Bay, millions are wasted to subsidize beauty school tuition for beauticians for whom there are no jobs. Maybe that’s the ultimate Monkey Business haircut.
As if this weren’t enough, the lunatics in the House of Representatives write a 2000+ page bill that nobody has read and pass it at 23:00 on a Saturday night. They propose to spend another $1.2 trillion on health care for the 12.5% of Mexico’s population (3) that prefers free American doctors, in a reform that would actually worsen everything that’s already bad in the American healthcare system (4), explode U.S. debt, increases taxes, and kill jobs. Two Saturdays later, the Senate gives its stamp of approval, in a wheeling-dealing process that involves buying one senator’s vote with a $300 million bribe to Louisiana, twenty times the amount of the original Louisiana Purchase.
And since this is being too niggardly with the taxpayer’s money, Democrat Snatchers in the Senate push through a Climate Change bill that will cost at least $3.6 trillion, such estimates always proven 20 years later to have been too hopeful by a factor of eight.
But they are just getting warmed up. “After flurry of stimulus spending, questionable projects pile up,” reports the Washington Examiner. The “projects” range from $300,000 for a GPS-equipped helicopter to hunt for radioactive rabbit excrement, to $800,000 for the John Murtha Airport in Johnstown, Pa. that serves 20 passengers a day. Democratic Congressman Murtha deserves his name on an airport because he is a crook of such staggering proportions that even The Huffington Post – no foe of Democrats – gives him his own Web page.
While all this is going on, in a brave experiment to disprove the unfashionable “guns–or-butter” maxim , the U.S. wastes $11 billion a month to build the unbuildable nations of Iraq and Afghanistan [total wasted in Iraq alone: $53 billion, so far], promises to double its foreign aid to $50 billion, to initiate hush money to Third World kleptocracies at [a big part of] $100 billion per year, and generally does everything that the speed of its Bureau of Engraving and Printing presses -- 8,000 sheets of paper money per hour – makes possible.
This is madness for the ages, stuff for future historians of civilizational collapse. And it’s not economic ignoramuses who are doing this. Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, was a professor of Economics at Princeton University. Timothy Geithner, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, has an M.A. in economics. Paul Krugman, who habitually criticizes these two for not spending enough, is the 2008 Nobel laureate in economics. Even President George W. Bush, who started this insanity in earnest, has an MBA from Harvard.
The unfolding disaster is tied in part to false economic models of credentialed “experts,” full of the particular arrogance of people who have read 10,000 books but never milked a cow. Like the medieval alchemists, the Greenspan-Bernankes serving Snatcher State still look for the philosopher’s stone – and find it in John Maynard Keynes’s theory that government meddling and deficit spending is not the leaden hobble that a 9-year-old with a piggy bank would recognize, but pure gold.
Pure gold it is. Since gold is an insurance against the government’s follies and depredations, in the first 10 months of the Obama presidency the price of gold went up by 37%.
The fatal conceit of learned socialist bunglers is personified in Dr. – in history, of all things -- Gordon Brown. As the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, between 1999 and 2002 Brown sold 60% of Great Britain’s gold reserves at an average price of $276 an ounce. He had actually managed to drive the price to its lowest in 25 years, still called "Brown Bottom," by announcing his intentions in advance.
By 1 December 2009, gold had risen by 335% and stood at $1200 an ounce. And Dr. Brown, having managed to trash Great Britain in many other ways since, is now its Prime Minister.
Full of grandiose ideas to redeem whitey and uplift the world, among Brown’s other flashes of brilliance has been his effort to get the West’s then-solvent countries to give away much of their gold, via the IMF, to relieve Third World debt. Since this particular outflow to the Third World did not work out, Brown with other Labour leaders have since done their best to destroy Great Britain via a demographic inflow from the Third World.
The gross mismanagement of the West’s real assets by big business leaders has been far exceeded by the gross mismanagement of the West’s economies and societies by political leaders and bureaucrats. This starts with their Keynesian conviction that they know how to manage the economy. Friedrich von Hayek called it “the fatal conceit." The scope of this term ought to be enlarged to include also social capital, i.e. common ethnic roots, cultural consensus, shared norms of behavior and the resulting social trust – for these invaluable social assets have been similarly destroyed by the fatally mad ruling elites.
The 1st Great Depression was not a failure of capitalism but a failure of the leftists elites to understand the nature of both capitalism and their own limitations (5). History’s reproach to the foolish government tinkerers may be deduced by comparing the “Panic of 1920” with the “Panic of 1929.” The first one subsided quickly after President Harding’s government left things alone except for cutting taxes and spending. But the Panic of 1929, followed by much government fiddling, tampering and burning huge sums of money, lasted for the better part of two decades and stopped only because of World War 2.
Government meddling, bailing out and “stimulating” is pulling the world straight into the second Great Depression through a fake, “stimulated recovery,” as though there is no lesson to be drawn from the first one. However, the government’s essential incompetence is a Harpo clown issue, and we have covered that already. But Barko and Sarko, the one a sinister destroyer, the other a Body Snatcher lunatic, are stacked on top of the Harpo bumbler.
Barko, waster
It takes the two meanings of “to waste” to describe what the leftoid American regime is doing to the country it loves to hate. For it’s a wipeout, a gigantic destruction by profligate mega-squandering.
What separates the wasting of the Barko socialists from that of the faux Sarko conservatives (like Nicolas Sarkozy) is speed, quantity, and intent.
The Barkos wreak accelerated destruction with intelligent purposefulness in order to collapse Western society. Their playbook has been authored by Antonio Gramsci, Herbert Marcuse, Saul Alinsky, even a convicted thief, Robert Creamer, a darling of Chicago-style “gangsta-progressives.” Barkos even have a conspiratorial script, the Cloward – Piven Strategy.
The Sarkos, on the other hand, destroy incrementally, with benign intent -- a mixture of bleeding heart liberalism and stupidity. They hew to John Maynard Keynes, Big Business, and lefto-Christian dhimmo-bishops like Nick Baines or Godfried Danneels. There are conspiracies attributed to this side also, such as the “Bilderbergs” and other names given to a behind-the-curtain group of powerful string-pulling bankers.
In the United States, George W. Bush was the last Sarko in the White House, and there are Republican Sarkos serving now in the U.S. Congress. But as the country is struggling with its biggest crisis since World War 2, it is firmly in the grip of Barack and the Barko Party.
As if some of the finest financial minds of the United States (e.g. James Grant, here ) have not warned of courting disaster, as though millions have not voiced their outrage in thousands of Tea Parties, Barko, like a windup thieving magpie, goes forth. As of 8 December, there are new Obama plans to “spend our way out of this recession."
Even as voices of warning and dire prediction intensify, the Fed’s Ben Bernanke and U.S. Treasury’s Tim Geithner are intensifying their actions that ignore and defy the warnings. Even as lone Congressmen sound the alarm about the evil circus they witness daily on the job, a new 2500-page Omnibus spending bill is making its way through the Capitol like a tasty rat through a python’s practiced colon. The bill, putting the match to the paltry sum of $446 billion, includes 5,200 earmarks for things like a $17 million gift to Ireland and $3 million for bike racks in Washington DC.
And the Senate is hard at work to “clear away” a Republican filibuster of a $1.1 trillion end-of-year spending bill rewarding most federal agencies with generous budget boosts and funding such Barko staples as abortions and hard-drug needles. As well, the barking mad party in Congress under Barko’s baton is pulling out all stops to ram through what will be one of the main anchors of Socialist America: the health care “reform” with its grossly underestimated price tag of $1.2 trillion.
The same government that wants to mismanage the $2.3 trillion (annual spending) healthcare industry, also drives hard to control the carbon emissions of the American economy – which means, really, to control the American economy. This, after having taken over much of the American auto, banking and insurance industries already. And that’s the government that has just agreed to pay $3.4 Billion to settle a lawsuit relative to its mismanagement of the revenue in the American Indian trust fund.
Not by coincidence, the same crazed Leviathian that has just driven the U.S. mortgage market and the world’s economy with it to implosion, continues to subsidize mortgages for people who do not qualify for loans by prudent banking criteria. U.S. Federal Housing Administration has guaranteed 37 % of all residential mortgage loans in 2009. At least 20% of this $725 billion mortgage portfolio will end up in default and another bailout by the U.S. taxpayer.
7.2 million jobs have been lost in America since recession began. The official unemployment rate, at 10.2%, is the highest in 26 years. But even the government admits that the true unemployment rate, including workers who have given up looking for work, is 17.5%. 22% is the truthful rate, per Shadow Government Statistics.
The only area where employment is booming is Washington, DC. At 6.2%, it has the lowest unemployment rate of all large American cities. The two million federal employees, including 25,000 new hires just since December 2008, have recently gotten a 2% wage increase. Over 10,000 of them -- an increase of 450% in just two years -- make more than $170,000 per year.
In this sense, the Barko regime has mounted a coup d'état in which the état is the instigator and beneficiary of the coup. But there is far more to it. It shows in the urgency and simultaneity of the unprecedented spending on very large society-transforming projects, any one of which alone would be perilous to America’s finances and social viability.
All of the spending iterated above has been initiated by the government of a country amidst the greatest economic crisis in 70 years, while fighting two hot wars and three cold ones, reeling at home from a shattered social and cultural consensus, and crippled by the breakdown of such bedrock institutions as public education that educates, and civil service that serves.
It’s this time that the Barko regime has chosen for smashing and rebuilding the largest sector of the American economy, healthcare. It’s this time they have chosen for closing Guantanamo and holding trials for Al Qaeda jihadis in New York. The idea is not just to burn another quarter billion for the trials and the attendant security, but also to destroy, through the judicial discovery process, the clandestine capabilities of America’s security apparatus.
It’s this time too, early next year, that they have chosen to ram through Amnesty for 15 -20 million illegal immigrants. 60% of those are semi-literate Mestizos and 5% are jihadis-in-waiting. And 15 million translates into at least 60 million through gradual “family reunification” over just 20 years. It’s this kind of strength in diversity that America is wanting so much.
All Body Snatchers who have access to a microphone crow about this coming epiphany, but the most instructive gloating comes from Janet Napolitano. In a typical inverse reality mode of Snatcher State, Ms. Napolitano is in charge of domestic security for the United States, tasked among others with protecting its borders and enforcing its immigration laws. “Timing is everything in the arts of war or politics”, said Ms. Napolitano in her speech on the blessings of busting the United States for good with a demographic bomb too, on top of all the other heavy petards.
The art of war – if only the foggy “conservatives” had a clue.
It’s within the same time bracket that the Barko people chose to unleash the Cap-and-Trade economic catastrophe on their country, under the risible pretext that their failure to do so would lead to a catastrophe. It’s in this time bracket that Mr. Obama chose to appoint an Afrocentric Black Communist, Van Jones, as “Green Jobs” Czar, and a Socialist International operative, Carol Browner, as “Energy and Climate Change” Czar. And that confluence of Third-worldism, socialism and climate change hokum provides the clue as to what the monetary bonfire of hokum stimulus is about too.
Mikhail Gorbachev, no stranger to Trotskyite thinking, has reportedly said that the threat of environmental crisis will be the “international disaster key” that will unlock the ‘New World Order’ (6). But even without Gorbachev’s decryption, that key is on plain view every day during the United Nations-staged Copenhagen climate commedia dell'arte.
The idea is to transfer wealth from the rich to the poor – on a scale undreamt of even by Karl Marx himself. All in the name of equality. No longer the equality of a German coal-mine owner and a German coal miner, but the equality of a German surgeon and a Gambian porter. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need, globally. Or, to paraphrase Charles Krauthammer, taxing hard-working citizens of Western democracies in order to fill the treasuries of Third World kleptocracies.
This is the biggest heist in the history of the world, and the Holy Grail of socialists everywhere, not the least at Socialist International. And the United States is the one obstreperous territory that has stood athwart the road to this progressive progress, starting with George W. Bush’s refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol.
That’s why the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize went to Barack Hussein Obama. Thorbjørn Jagland, who presided over this travesty, had been, among his other socialist posts, a vice president of the Socialist International. And Barko with his crew steer America’s ship now, with an intention that presidential candidate Obama hinted to the knowing so vividly.
America’s backbone is its middle class of mainly white, Christian anti-socialists. The last such backbone remaining in the world, with the possible exception of Australia. Crush it, and you have shattered the last obstacle standing before The New World Order. Break it, and you have changed the course of history as profoundly as the French Revolution has, in the same Jacobin direction.
That’s what the spending has been all about, and that’s why they stuffed so many back-breaking projects into the same impossible time frame. That’s why Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s majordomo, said that no serious crisis should go to waste.
And that’s why the next chapter in our contrarian cogitations will bear the title Requiescat in pace. The key to ending this nightmare is not in putting one’s electoral faith in a Sarko to replace a Barko while Harpo is running around in the background, but in recognizing that the whole enterprise is a mad circus decayed beyond redemption. The only true choice left is to get up and walk out of the circus tent.
Previous articles in this series can be found here.
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(1) The basic analogy reverts to Part 1, where we cited the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In the film, alien “Body Snatchers” produce giant legume Pods that replace living people while appearing to be identical to them. From the Pods develop the new Body Snatchers who cultivate further Pods etc.
Snatcher State, per this central metaphor, is a state governed by an elite that seems to be so crazed and indifferent to Earthly reality as if it had come from outside our galaxy.
(2) Monkey Business is the metaphor used in Part 13(1) and taken from the Marx Brothers film, “Monkey Business,” including its “haircut” scene.
(3) See map.
(4) See assessment by the Dean of Harvard Medical School.
(5) Space does not permit for summarizing the proof here, but it may be found, among others, in Milton Friedman and Anna J. Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960, Princeton University Press, 1963 (more here) and in Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression. And Prof. Walter Williams has made the point that until the 1st Great Depression, all financial crises since 1787 had subsided quickly due to no governmental intervention in the economy.
(6) Quoted in Marilyn Brannan, “A Special Report: The Wildlands Project Unleashes Its War On Mankind,” Monetary & Economic Review, 1996, p. 5.