The “Telenovela” (soap opera) in Washington DC has gone from lousy to terrible over the past few days. Perhaps many of our leaders in politics, business, economics and both political parties really want to see what happens when the debt ceiling is not raised and we continue the government shutdown for perhaps a month or two. The well-being and sanity of more than 80% of Americans do not matter to our criminal oligarchy that is conducting a prolonged sociopathic experiment on the Nation.
The best outcome discussed recently by many in DC was merely a temporary extension “fix” that would run until January 2014 – another effort to “kick the can down the road.” However many Republicans and Democrats are of so many conflicting minds on how the Federal government should operate, what spending and taxing should be, and what laws to enforce.
It’s not just a civil war between Republican conservatives and Tea Party radicals, but there are many destructive distractions across the political spectrum and involving the oligarchs who buy our elections and try to run the global economy and its political systems. We are faced with a false and a pre-ordained choice between Tea Party Lunacy and the self-serving duopoly of the Republicans/ Democrats who only serve their puppet masters.
As an advocate of Monetary Realism or Sovereignty (aka Modern Monetary Theory – MMT) my views – along with most other proponents – are ignored, ridiculed and banished from the public debate by Republicans, Democrats and our ruling criminal oligarchy. Why? MMT strips away all the lies, frauds, deceptions and crimes that our leaders have used to obfuscate facts and reality. Thus most people mindlessly accept the debt-based private money creation system that is just another human fabrication to permit control by a small number of wealthy people over the rest of humanity.
The U.S. Federal “debt” is not the same as private mortgages, student and car loans, credit cards, or even the debts of lesser nations and political subdivisions. All money is created from nothing or “thin air” except that our politicians around the globe have shirked their duty to responsibly increase the money supply without outsourcing the process to various private banking entities – legal fictions that are created by government. Therefore when the Treasury creates new money it has to go thru a convoluted process of having the Federal Reserve (a private banking cabal serving as our Private National Bank) create debt first. However the Federal Reserve remits all its profits to the US Treasury from interest paid on U.S. debt issued by the US Treasury.
The Fed can cancel or buy unlimited amounts of Treasury Bonds and make loans to member banks and other global financial institutions on whatever amounts and terms it deems appropriate. Our national debt is not vicariously “owed” by individual Americans or taxpayers. It exists principally to provide a safe investment for foreign nations, individuals, corporations, financial institutions, banks, pension plans, federal agencies, state governments and municipalities. It is an accounting entry when tax receipts are less than spending. When one redeems a T-Bill, one can only get dollars in return (or a dollar-denominated credit to a bank account.)
The pending vote (or inaction) over raising the nation’s debt limit is a fabricated debate whether Congress will voluntarily increase the nation’s money supply and the globe’s reserve currency. It is also about whether Congress will pay for spending it has already passed and incurred. The U.S. dollar is the essential grease that powers the world’s inter-connected economic and financial systems. To those who believe that we are “broke,” or “can’t spend what we don’t have,” and the U.S. debt is “unsustainable,” you brain is full of “crapola” or you are just spewing lies on behalf of the criminal oligarchy.
Many Republicans rant incessantly about controlling spending on entitlements (i.e. social security, Medicare, all domestic discretionary spending that benefit more than 80% of Americans but not the 1% criminal oligarchs) but they never complain about a bloated, wasteful and over-extended military and security state whose current budgets should be reduced by more than 50%. The annual federal “deficits” are actually shrinking rapidly (due to lower spending and higher tax revenues) and are one-third the size of those maintained during the Reagan Presidency when the “deficit was big enough to take care of itself.” Looking back at U.S. history since 1945, after every multi-year period of Federal spending cuts, the nation falls into a recession and only increased Federal “deficit” spending pulls us out. This is better understood by realizing Federal Debt is just the increase in the overall money supply by another name.
The globe’s ruling elite and interconnected global banking cartels will always get their money supplied from various central banks and most banks will continue to create their own money by making loans completely unrelated to the reserves or fixed assets they have. It’s just that many people in the U.S. will see their small investments tank, many more jobs will be eliminated, and the available amount of money for basic essentials will shrink. There is an over-arching goal behind this cruel, inhumane, and unethical experiment but it will be covered in a future post.
As a non-partisan outsider not engaged in false equivalencies, Republicans were principally at fault for creating this crisis but if no sane resolution can come out of paralyzed and gridlocked Washington DC, then responsibility and blame will transfer to President Obama. As I said in prior posts, and as it has been argued in many other Internet opinion blogs, the President can use the Constitution to eliminate this impasse – and he can print high-value platinum coins, and order actions by the U.S. Treasury to change accounting methods to avoid and eliminate this crisis.
If a Congressional failure to act (more of an act of economic sabotage rising to the level of treasonous terrorism) goes unanswered, then the President has to act in order to avert national damage in the event of this financial emergency. If the President does nothing and sheepishly sits by while chaos ensues, then he should be impeached for willfully destroying the economy, ignoring his duties under the constitution, and for being a paid servant of the criminal oligarchy.
I was never a fan of the Affordable Care Act (aka “Obamacare”) when it passed 3 years ago. It probably should have been implemented immediately. It should also have contained a public option. The Democratic Party (being the center/left servants of the same oligarchy that the right/far-right Republicans serve) made so many mistakes in the process that they practically guaranteed the ascendency of the Tea Party. I believe that Obamacare will not bend the Federal or nation’s health insurance cost curve and it will be a disjointed mess across 50 states.
One does not need to try to defund Obamacare to see that it will not significantly improve a sector of American society that eats up 11% of the GDP to fraud, waste, duplicity, marketing and high private sector executive salaries. However the pervasive fanaticism, bigotry and delusions of many Republicans seem to coalesce into a fierce opposition to an idea previously championed by conservative think tanks. The hypocrisy would be entertaining if it were not so dangerous to the nation.
But what do Republicans and our criminal oligarchy propose as an alternative to Obamacare? Nothing – not Medicare for all – and certainly not any viable alternative that the majority of Americans would welcome. Instead, they want to return to the status quo ante where personal wealth principally determined the healthcare you could afford, and simultaneously make Medicare a block grant to states – where that money in over half the states will not go towards the healthcare of their residents but for tax cuts for their ultra-wealthy residents who fund state-wide elections.
Corruption across all levels of government, and in most areas of private business, has been running rampant for decades in the U.S. – and it has only gotten worse since 2008. Actually, sociopathic and psychopathic individuals are behind all the criminality in our public and private sectors – and the most influential total less than 10,000 individuals. We don’t prosecute the obvious crimes of banks, financial speculators, and the well-connected oligarchy. We have devolved into a lawless, criminal nation that may no longer deserve a functioning Federal government – since many of our politicians do not care whether large sections of government operate well or even cease to exist – so long as the big federal contracts keep going to their major campaign contributors.
For the intentionally delusion and willfully ignorant among the American people who keep up the stupid positivism and belief in the nation’s long-defunct Exceptionalism – I say please: “Just shut up.” We are watching the unraveling of global status quo into some unpredictable mess that will resemble feudalism of the past – and it took centuries to escape its grasp. This time is slightly different because humanity is a global enterprise. The current global ecosystem is changing rapidly and we can’t agree on what human behavioral changes will lessen its negative impacts on human survivability.
If the global criminal elite hope to escape the many disasters that will consume human life on this planet, they better find a way to permanently live in outer space or find another habitable planet – and fast. Many people cling to the false beliefs of endless human and technological progress. Those delusions will be shattered when those myths will be destroyed during the next few decades. The preventable and intentional shattering of the U.S. and the global economy over the next few months will be small events in the great scheme of things.
I would like to point out that my family might be directly impacted by the actions of Congress and the President over the next few weeks and months. For the past 3 years since I turned 50, I have only worked part-time assisting a few small business clients. Our family’s regular and principle income comes from my wife who has worked for a major Federal contractor for over 5 years.
In her job, my spouse answers telephone calls (in both Spanish and English) from the general public with respect to Medicare supplemental insurance enrollment; providers of medical equipment, Medicare fraud and reimbursement claims, and other questions that would have been handled directly by HHS employees had those duties not been outsourced to her company. Her company also provides online and direct customer support for the new marketplaces of the Affordable Care Act. It also provides customer support with respect to Federal student loans and passport applications. Perhaps the general public should not have such assistance since many could just read the indecipherable internet pages.
My spouse and many millions of Americans who are directly dependent upon Federal spending may lose their jobs. Getting new employment in a dying economy that is only supported by Federal Reserve qualitative easing, smoke, mirrors, fraudulent accounting, hope and delusions, has been, is and will be very difficult. Fortunately we only have one teenage son and we don’t have any large debts (auto, student, credit card or mortgage). But paying for rent, utilities, gas, insurance, food and other essentials would be a challenge with limited savings and no income.
Perhaps the arch-conservative shibboleth to the pleas of many unemployed Americans will move from the dismissive “get a job dammit” to the more honest “die dammit die.” I only hope that the upcoming collapse will be widespread enough to negatively affect most of the sociopaths and psychopaths who run this country’s corrupt joint venture in big government and big corporations.
Submitted on 10/15/13 by Marc Pascal, ranting from sunny and mild Phoenix, AZ. Readers can excoriate me directly at [email protected].
Just remember the NSA, DHS, FBI, CIA and other spy agencies closely monitor this email account and my TMV submissions. I’m looking forward to an indefinite all-expense-paid vacation on the southern coast of Cuba.
Again, here’s my list my favorite MMT blog sites that every TMV reader should explore. I should also compliment my fellow TMV blogger Robert Coutinho for also trying to educate people on MMT. Time, facts and reality will prove us correct, but it may be too late for the rest of humanity.
• MICHAEL HUDSON (http://michael-hudson.com)
• MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY by Rodger Malcolm Mitchell (http://mythfighter.com)
• NAKED CAPITALISM is probably one of the best aggregator site of many different blogs and news sources with many posts written & edited by Yves Smith & Lambert Strether, and it strongly features MMT contributors (http://www.nakedcapitalism.com)
• NEW ECONOMIC PERSPECTIVES is the MMT site for the professors at the University of Missouri – Kansas City (http://neweconomicperspectives.org) including Michael Hudson.
• PRAGMATIC CAPITALISM is edited by Cullen Roche (http://pragcap.com) of Orcam Financial Group in San Diego, CA.
• Social Science Research Network (http://www.ssrn.com) has a link to Mr. Roche’s well-written paper explaining Monetary Realism (AKA MMT) at this link: (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1905625)