A Brief Statement of the Facts

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The entire debt economy was forced upon civilization from the top down. It was done in order to deliver humanity into the hands of history’s worst villains. Financialization has been the core of the neoliberal strategy. Inducing your intended victim’s indenture can be just as much an aggressive plot against him as crafting a gun with which to physically kill him. (Of course, they’ve made and used plenty of physical weapons as well.) This liquidation phase of neoliberalism is war by other means. It is vicious war by criminal elites upon the people. It is class war; it is civil war. The goal, intent, and procedure are veritably totalitarian.

 

The whole bubble-crash-bailout-austerity-feudal enslavement process is a planned strategy for the complete looting of nations and the imposition of tyranny upon them.

 

We the people must respond in kind:

 

We owe nothing. On the contrary, only the existence of the society built by people who work ever enabled finance extractors and other leeches to exist at all. So they were already our creatures even before the crash they inflicted upon us and the bailouts they stole from us. The latter have only cinched it once and for all. Through the bailouts we the people own the banksters and their political lackeys. We own them, we own their banks, we own their corporations, we own every cent any of them stole on a personal level, we own it all. They owe us everything they have. They must repay it all upon demand.

 

Then there’s their systematic assault upon our jobs, upon the real economy, upon the safety net we paid for, upon civil society itself. There’s their intentional crashing of the economy, and the systematic robbery of trillions for which they used this crash as the pretext. The restitution they owe for these crimes is beyond tally. Here again, they owe us everything they have, and vastly more. They must repay it all upon demand.  

 

The banksters and corporatists are chattel of we the people. They’ve stolen so much that if we put them all in chains tomorrow, it would take a million years for them to work off their debt to us. It’s they who owe such a monumental debt to the people of Greece, not the other way around. What’s true for Greece is true for all other countries – Latvia, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Italy, and on up to the Britain and America. All nations.

 

To recap:

 

1. They were never anything but parasites upon us in the first place.

 

2. They intentionally crashed the economy (by blowing up a bubble and then picking their moment to puncture it, using the allowed collapse of Lehman as the political pretext for the Bailout).

 

3. Although they forced the Bailout upon us, nevertheless our money was stolen for it, so the Bailout means we the people are now the formal owners of the banks, in addition to how we already morally owned them.

 

4. Meanwhile the banksters have engaged in a monumental criminal conspiracy against our economies and polities. The induced crash, stolen bailouts, and austerity assaults comprise the climactic phase of this long arc of crime.

 

The debt they owe us is literally infinite. We owe them nothing.

 

This is the simple, wholesome, true consciousness all of humanity must develop, if we intend to continue as human beings at all, instead of being terminally reduced to the most wretched servitude.

 

All of humanity is standing tall in Syntagma Square.

Land Scandal Community Education: Ideas Toward An Outline

 

A few days ago I broached the idea of community lectures on the Land Scandal, to describe it in detail and placing it in the broad context of Wall Street’s crimes, the Bailout, and the destruction of democracy and the real economy. These lectures could be for the benefit of mortgage holders, the community at large, and local governments.

 

I haven’t yet worked out the exact details for such a presentation, and since I’m not a tech guy I don’t personally know how to give it the whole powerpoint-type treatment, although I assume that would be more effective.

 

I’ve compiled hundreds of links on every aspect of the subject, mostly from Naked Capitalism. I’ve been in the process of arranging them by subject and chronology as if into a book. (There’s also the many posts I’ve written on the subject.) My basic idea would be to distill an accessible, popularized presentation from all this material. It should be comprehensive and easy to understand. The lecturer must also master sufficient detail to be able to answer most questions. We’d have to try to anticipate what the most common questions (both sincere and phony/hostile) would be. Looking at comment threads, perhaps at MSM outlets, seems like the obvious place to do such research.

 

Here’s some of the basic topics to cover:

 

* How the mortgage holder has a perfect right to challenge his current servicer or anyone who would foreclose.

 

* How the forecloser probably has no legal right to foreclose.

 

* How his documents are possibly fraudulent.

 

* The details of each of these: Servicer fraud, how the servicer seeks to put people into default, robo-signing of lost note affidavits, direct forgery, forged allonges, the fact that MERS has no standing to foreclose, etc.

 

* How all this violates venerable real estate law, which is a bastion of social stability and local control.

 

* How the banks and both parties in Congress are conspiring to legalize these crimes and further assault federalism in the process. This would be a key point – any bill you see in Congress will be part of this assault on behalf of the banks. The audience should be ready to swarm their reps like enraged hornets.

 

This could be placed in the context of:

 

* The nature of the housing bubble.

 

* How predatory lending was a premeditated fraud on the part of lenders who knew they were telling lies about a bubble. Also how the federal government collaborated in this. (Although lower-level governments did as well, there it may be better to go more with a “bad apple” approach. After all, we want to work with local governments and if possible take power at that level. So there’s no point in extending the systemic crime accusation to that level.) How all mortgages since the late 90s were fraudulently induced by the same banksters who were systematically destroying the real economy. (From here, to audience taste, one could give a primer on globalization itself, placing the mortgage bubble in that context.)

 

* How the banks intentionally crashed the economy in 2008.

 

* The basics of the Bailout. (How the TARP was just a tiny part of the Bailout, and how the Bailout is the ongoing and permanent priority of all federal government policy.)

 

* How by now the banks and government are indistinguishable.

 

While the main focus of each presentation would be Foreclosuregate in itself, the description of the broader context could be scaled depending on the context and the receptivity of the audience. I expect people would be interested in it.

 

Then there’s this basic point:

 

* Why did the banks blow up the bubble? Securitization. Primer on securitization. What are MBS?

 

* The reason for the convoluted originator-sponsor-depositor-trust conveyance. How there never was any reason for it which was good for the real economy, only good for the banksters and bad for us.

 

* How the banks then systematically failed to convey the notes. The reasons they failed to honor their own system (so they could belatedly assign failed loans to tranches; so they could sell the same loan multiple times; so they could engage in massive evasion of recording fees and taxes).

 

I haven’t figured out yet how to tie together in one simple package for novices the fraud “how” of the foreclosuregate basics with the fraud “why” of the MBS scam. Those are the two essential parts and are intertwined, but also seem like two different threads of presenting the ideas. So we need to figure that out.   

 

* How many if not all of the MBS are therefore fraudulent, void, null.

 

* How this means the banks are insolvent. (Even beyond the way the Bailout has always been a Ponzi scheme, the Fed and Treasury simply building a Tower of Babel of debt ever higher.)

 

In all of this, while it shouldn’t be too hard to find audience agreement on the malevolence of the banks and government, the tricky part is going to be convincing them not to also bash fellow debtors. This needs to be done with tact. The lecturer must not be haughty and broadcast how stupid debtor-bashing is. Presenters need to explain clearly:

 

* How we’re all victims of this massive fraud which was propagated by our own government and media. (Was it also propagandized in schools? I don’t know, not having been there lately. What were high school personal finance classes saying about asset prices and using one’s house as an investment during the decade starting in the latter 90s?)

 

* How those who fight foreclosure are not the profligate deadbeats of bankster propaganda, but are overwhelmingly either the victims of servicer fraud, are just flat out being wrongfully foreclosed upon, are trying to protect their home while filing for bankruptcy, or have been faithfully adhering to bank and/or government directives on how to apply for a modification, and are now being betrayed by that scam process.

 

In everything, the lecture should present the best examples we can find, selecting for clear-cut cases of abuse against what everyone would agree were normal, unassuming middle class types. Where it comes to wrongful foreclosure we have a vast selection available.

 

In everything, the right tone should be derived from the mood of the audience itself. The presenters should be prepared to be more or less passionate, more or less appealing to emotion, more or less radical in the indictments and prescriptions. For now the default tone should be restrained and matter-of-fact.

 

Finally, what is to be done?

 

* How people must be aware of the question, Where’s My Note in the Chain of Conveyance?

 

And the moment the servicer begins the foreclosure process, or there’s any dispute with the servicer whatsoever: Show Me the Note!

 

* Walking away (for non-recourse states), how it’s a simple contractual option. How the banks, other corporations, and the rich do it all the time. How the results are not as dire as system propaganda claims. (This should only be discussed sparingly, mostly in response to audience questions. After all, our goal isn’t for communities to continue to disintegrate, but for them to recohere. If people are willing to stop paying, our goal should be to convince them that they can still stay in the house and remain committed to the community, if that’s what they’d prefer to do. They shouldn’t let fear of the banks get in the way of that. Here we truly have nothing to fear but fear itself.)

 

* The tactics of seeking a mod. How one has to reject bank directives to miss payments and so on (that’s a trap they lay for us). How one has to reply immediately with a credible threat to stop paying permanently, whether one walks away or not.  

 

* As for the broader idea of mass Jubilation in Place, that a critical mass or any significant number in a community can stop paying the mortgage, stay in the house, keep paying the property tax, and remain committed to the community, I don’t know if many people are receptive to this idea yet. So for the time being it’s probably not a key part of the presentation, but something which could be suggested if a particular audience seemed like it might be receptive.

 

 

So there’s some basic ideas on what the presentation could contain, and how it could be laid out. Next I’ll work on a detailed outline. Then each item on the outline could be further fleshed out - basic explanation, talking points, rhetorical points, politically effective examples, recommended links, etc. Does anyone have ideas to add?

We Have A (Fascist) Command Economy

 

1. I mean that in a precise sense. The economic definition of fascism, which is roughly synonymous with corporatism, is a command economy which maintains private rent extractions. (This is separate from other aspects of classical fascism – political authoritarianism, ideological obscurantism, censorship, destruction of civil liberties, tribalism, racism, military aggression. But as we’re seeing, most of these definitely follow from the economic aspect, and all are likely to follow in the end.)

 

2. Given that necessary part of the definition, there can be two manifestations of this command economy. It may be corporatized toward an ideological goal, as in the case of Nazism. In this case the rentiers are kept because they’re judged to be the most effective vehicle to achieve certain practical goals, e.g. fast rearmament in Hitler’s case. Or, the corporatization may be done for the sake of maximizing the extractions themselves. The already classic case is modern neoliberalism. In this case, the rentiers prefer to dispense with the full fascist phenomenon for as long as they can, since classical fascism generally means the thugs take over the operation, while the “legitimate businessmen” become the junior partners. Today’s corporatists want to maintain control of their thugs, and anyway there’s no need to go all the way to full fascism in the absence of any real leftist movement.

 

So it’s a fist/glove relationship, although which is the fist and which is the glove varies with the system. The Nazi Four Year Plan was based on building political prestige through a jobs program while the thing was really geared toward rearmament and war. (When Hitler was told about Keynes’ ideas, he grasped the essence immediately. To paraphrase, ”It’s all propaganda. The government makes a show of force toward the economy, this causes the people to believe in the government and therefore the economy, and this actually makes the economy strong.” This wasn’t really classical Keynes, which was supposed to function in the context of liberal democracy, if capitalism weren’t actually totalitarian. But of course it is, and Hitler was thus an early exponent of Samuelson-Friedman-Krugman bastard Keynes.)

 

Neoliberalism flips this relationship over. State, party, war are all meant to serve as accoutrements of profiteering and greed fundamentalism. It’s robbery for its own sake, and everything else is meant to be instrumental toward this.

 

3. Examples.

 

*The Bailout. The big banks are permanently insolvent, and all government policy boils down to stealing from the people to hand the loot over to the banks. The banksters are then supposed to directly steal as much as possible in the form of “bonuses” and other “compensation”, as well as swindle, speculate, gamble, wage economic war on currencies and governments,  and commit any and every other financial crime they can think of. They’re not supposed to hold anything back. This is the most profound and evil Permanent War the US government wants to enshrine.

 

*The military wars of aggression. This is the Permanent War proper. The wars are launched with public money and resources. The main purpose of the wars is to convey stolen public money to an innumerable menagerie of corporate rackets. Weapons contractors are only the beginning. Beyond that, the Permanent War’s goals are to directly aggrandize big government, quell dissent, provide pretexts for further assaults on civil liberties, and keep the phony “war on terror” going as a political astroturf.

 

*The health racket bailout. Congress artificially commodified health care by propping up zombie “insurance” rackets. They did this first with an antitrust exemption which was meant to shield them from any market competition. Now this bailout, assisted by a corrupt judiciary, is trying to eliminate market competition in the form of non-participation. The government’s command goal is to maximize the forced market for the worthless Stamp, the mandated “insurance” policy, while stripping all cost controls and restrictions on it.

 

(The favorite lie of these corrupt judges and other system hacks, that “Congress didn’t create this market”, is one of the most brazen direct lies we’ve heard in recent times.)

 

*Food. The government is indirectly but inexorably trying to repress and strangle all competition for corporatized food.

 

*“Austerity”. Gut public interest spending and public services, take the money freed up and hand it over to the rich and to big corporations.

 

*Privatization. For decades now, governments at all levels have engaged in massive control fraud, simply handing over public property to private criminals for pennies on the dollar. (Of course the federal government has led the way.) The corrupt officials involved are paid off in direct bribes, quasi-direct bribes (bribery laundered as “campaign contributions”), and most of all, lucrative revolving door sinecures. This is simply corruption, bribery and embezzlement. It’s a capital crime.

 

(The commodification of education falls into this category.)

 

4. Here’s the command pattern.

 

A. The government borrows and/or prints (i.e. credits accounts), and hands the money directly or indirectly to corporations.

 

B. The government austeritizes and hands over the loot.

 

C. Bogus government programs (e.g. the Obama stimulus, or employer tax credits) are really just corporate loot conveyances.

 

D. The government is now planning to raise taxes on the non-rich. The VAT is one example often bruited. Such regressive levies are then meant to be handed over to the corporations and the rich. The health Stamp mandate is one such tax. Obama, the Democrats, and the Republicans now openly call it a tax.

 

E. Austerity and privatization are direct robbery. The Bailout-inflicted loss of interest income to pensioners and other savers is indirect robbery.

 

F. The eventual goal is to buy up all the land as well. (Foreclosuregate is a critical development. The people are still on the land. We could always morally seize it. It’s now clear we can legally seize it as well, even according to the banksters’ own rigged law. This blunder of the banks is a one-time opportunity. Our choice can be to stop paying, stay on the land, Jubilate in Place, and as industrial agriculture fails, we can work our own land as our own bosses. Or the other option is to meekly depart, let the banks take it all, let all land revert to the equivalent of REO, and end up working it as indentured debt slaves. Which of these outcomes we deserve will be demonstrated by the choice we make.)

 

G. Eventually the dollar collapses, hyperinflates, whatever. Or maybe the system can somehow maintain it, with the public owing all the debt. However it works, the rich and the corporations end up with all the real assets.

 

We worked for every cent that exists.

 

They stole every cent they have, and want to steal every cent still outstanding.

 

But if we let them steal the rest, then I guess Ayn Rand would be proven right, and they really were entitled after all.

 

So that’s the goal of neoliberalism. That’s the nature and the goal of today’s command economy. I think we can see why the term “fascist” would also be appropriate for it.

The Federalism of Republicans and Democrats

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First the federal government collaborated with the Wall Street banksters to systematically destroy the real economy, culminating in the intentional crash. Then, by prearrangement, this federal government embraked upon a Bailout which has stolen over $14 trillion to hand it over to the banksters, and there’s no end in sight to the robbery. Among the victims are the mass permanent unemployed, 20% of the workforce and counting. The intentionally destroyed jobs will never come back for as long as this system exists. On the contrary, it will continue until ALL jobs are destroyed. (First they came for the blue collar workers, and the white collar workers and “professionals” did nothing, but uh oh! Now it looks like they’re coming for you too!) Among the victims are also the states, who were forced to borrow money to pay unemployment benefits from the same government which caused the unemployment. And now this same federal government, which can print the money at will, instead plans to bill the dying states for the interest. They’re gonna break our legs.

 

This is intentional, forced starvation. The federal government wants to crush the states completely. It’s an intermediate stage toward the totalitarian debt indenture which is the end goal of this central government.

 

A sane state would get out now. We now know that becoming a parasite on the federal welfare train was always a suicidal luxury. And now we face the fact that nothing which comes from Washington is anything but poison. The states should stop taking from the central government, stop remitting to it, renounce odious debts to it, and go their own way.

 

What else can one do in the face of such a monstrous structure which has such an openly vicious loanshark attitude? There’s no way anyone in Congress doesn’t know how pro-cyclical, anti-stimulative, depressive it is for the government sovereign in its own currency to demand interest payments from lower-level governments which are not currency-sovereign. Everyone in Congress knows that such “austerity” is purely destructive, and that’s what they intend for it to be. Economically, politically, democratically, and humanly they want nothing but scorched earth. They want nothing but devastation and despair.

 

These are history’s most evil criminals. They are hideous beyond the power of words to express. That’s both Washington parties, Republican and Democrat. They are both nothing but criminal enterprises. They are proper subjects for RICO.

 

At the new Nuremburg, we must indict not only all Republican and Democratic leaders as capital larcenists and criminals against humanity. We must also indict the two parties themselves as criminal organizations, just as the First Nuremburg indicted and convicted the Nazi party, the SS, and other organizations.

 

In the meantime, all citizens must recognize these criminals for what they are. Since there’s nothing further justice can do at the moment, we must shun them as vile beyond tolerability.

Smugman

 

In light of Paul Krugman’s recent pro-corporate proclamation, where he sneers that we should just lie back and enjoy corporate tyranny, that to want to fight it is “so sixties” anyway, I thought I’d ask a few questions about him of those who still believe in him.

 

The contention is that he’s a reformist, and even among those who reject reformism there’s a residual affection for him. Everything he says is, on its face, reformist at best. But as I’ve traced in many posts, I think he’s actually a pro-bank, pro-austerity manipulator who only poses as a citizen. Others think his pro-bank aspects are the pose. If he’s really a citizen advocate, that’s the secret. Others think they can detect this citizen advocacy in him, but it seems to me they can never adequately explain it. My explanation for what I think is a scam is that it’s precisely because Krugman has such (fraudulent) progressive credibility that he can astroturf better by posing as a real progressive, even though he’s not really that even in his pose.

 

But here’s my questions (versions of this can apply to many others as well):

 

1. You think Krugman is secretly on our side, and that if he had the power he’d come out in open opposition to the system. But he thinks he lacks that power, so he tries to change from within, tries to nudge, tries to persuade, to convince. “I joined the Party because I hoped to be a moderating influence from within.” You think he’s an appeaser, and you support him in that even if you reject it in others.

 

2. For the sake of argument, let’s say that’s true. But we know for a fact that appeasement of a criminal aggressor doesn’t work. It’s been tried innumerable times throughout history, and has failed every time. So even if that’s Krugman’s real mindset (I doubt it, but I grant it’s possible), it’s a pointless mindset. And when he explicitly rejects class war as being the enemy’s motive, it’s an objectively harmful, malicious mindset.

 

3. Krugman may possibly be that dumb, but why should any of us? So even if that is his mindset and strategy, why would anyone support him in it?

 

4. Why oppose my criticism of him? If Krugman is who you think he is, then my criticism would fall into the “make him do it” category. Because it’s clear that if Krugman really were on our side, the best thing he could do would be to come out in open opposition.

 

5. But again, I don’t believe that’s what he really is. I think he’s on their side, playing his role, which is make some of their worst crimes look “progressively” palatable. So I’m not trying to “make him do it”. I’m trying to convince people that Krugman is not our secret friend, but our enemy.

 

But he can prove me wrong any time he pleases.

Guns, Butter, and Bonuses (Money, Deficits, And MMT) 1 of 2

 

As we sink into economic depression, everywhere we hear the deficit and public debt crisis alarms summoning us to cut spending, raise taxes (on the non-rich, while those for the rich are cut further), “sacrifice”. This sacrifice is never to be undertaken by those who have already monopolized the vast majority of the wealth of the country. The top 1% of the rich hoard one third of America’s wealth. The top 10% has extracted two thirds. Yet all the calls for “austerity” fall on the lower cohorts, and the lower on the wealth and income scale one is, the more onerous the burden. This is as clear as class war and civil war can get short of the actual shooting.

 

The question, as in every other case where then non-rich act against their own interests, is why are so many people going along with this scam that there’s such a thing as a “deficit problem”? It’s manifest that no one among the elites actually believes this. Everyone, without exception, of whatever nominal politics, implicitly agrees that this government, sovereign in its own currency, spending in a Depression economy, can spend as much as it wants, at will.

 

The Bailout, the wars, the Pentagon’s obscene budget, Big Ag subsidies, corporate welfare in general, prove this.

 

So the only question is, will the government spend at will to further enrich and empower the parasites and criminals, or will it spend to help the productive people?

 

The only, indirect way in which deficit spending destroys the real economy is that corporatist government spending further empowers the criminals to steal yet more real wealth from the productive people, and it imposes the opportunity cost of spending foregone which could have benefited the people as we sink into an economic Depression.

 

It’s not really an opportunity cost, though, since that implies a trade-off had to be made. The government could easily spend on guns, bank bonuses, and butter. It could loot on behalf of the corporations at the same time that it spends to restore to the people (“trickles back down”) some of the wealth which was stolen from them. But the spending on guns and bonuses and the refusal to spend on butter are all part of the same class war strategy. As is the whole deficit terrorist line of propaganda.

 

MMT educators stress the accounting identity involved here. In a closed system where the government runs a sovereign currency, a government deficit or surplus has to equal the private sector surplus or deficit. Adding globalization spreads the accounts among many governments and national private sectors, but the globe itself is still closed. (Indeed viewing globalization as a de facto One World Government in terms of MMT can help highlight the class unity of the global elites and the vicious war they wage on all the world’s peoples.)

 

The best MMT resources include Naked Capitalism, Warren Mosler, Corrente, Kansas City, and the Billy Blog.

 

So here’s the right way to look at this identity: If we let the public sector = A, and the private sector equal B, and any surplus on one side must be matched by a deficit on the other side, by accounting identity we have A = B. The real question isn’t the “is A sustainable?” of the deficit alarmists. It’s very clear that every single elite and flack, no exceptions, implicitly claims that deficits in A are no problem at all where A is corporatist spending and B is corporate hoarding and the ratholes of the rich. It’s only to the extent that A still includes any public interest spending whatsoever that they suddenly go into deficit shock mode.

 

So let’s join this battle but make the terms explicit. Everyone agrees deficits are no problem, and only tactically tells lies in a particular situation (where they want to impose “austerity”). So clearly there are actually two kinds of A = B. There’s A2 as corporatist spending, with the surpluses of B made up of corporate hoarding (let’s call that C); and there’s A1 as public interest spending, where the B surplus could eventually become savings on the part of the people.

 

So the question becomes, given that we all act as if A is unlimited, will we let the criminals continue to make the identity be A2 = C, or will we compel the restoration of some legitimacy and rule of law by forcing it back toward A1 = B?

 

So activists can leave aside the “is A sustainable?” question as moot. Instead we say, “for whatever A, and no matter what the posterity of A, the real fight is to smash the A2 = C paradigm, and compel the A1 = B.” That’s given the current political circumstance. As I’ll get to in part 2, the real goal is a healthy economy where the velocity of money would be such that A and B would always be close to equal, with the decentralized money supply always just a little out front of productive capacity, which would always be fully engaged.

 

For this post, I want to discuss further the reformist nature of MMT and its explicit prescriptions. It’s reformist because it’s based on continued large-scale taxation in the sovereign currency administered by a central government. It recognizes that under our status quo the private banks create money out of thin air, at best in anticipation of deposits. They do not lend multiples of existing deposits, the way the popular misconception has it. MMT states the politically incorrect obvious: Governments could do the same exact thing, and do it far more efficiently. The banks produce nothing but merely erect a toll booth and drag a chain across the river. The government could directly produce the same fiat money the banks do, but wipe out all the middlemen, purge all the rents, and render the money creation and distribution far more rational, efficient, and fair.

 

We see how apologists for the banksters have no problem with the most profligate spending out of thin air on every kind of bailout and bonus and boondoggle, as long as the money creation out of thin air is channeled through the banks. But they throw a fiscal conservative fit over any spending which might benefit the people. So here the fact that private banks create money out of thin air is a dirty little secret everyone agrees to keep quiet, and no one sees as dangerous. But it’s a scandal if someone suggests the government sovereign in its own currency can do the same thing based on actual economic production.

 

MMTers just want to do as Alinsky said, “make them live up to their own rules”. The government can freely and openly act according to the exact same principles and practices which it and the banks currently act upon surreptitiously. The difference being that actual stimulus could possibly help reform and restore the productive economy, while bailouts, war, the Pentagon, and all other forms of corporate welfare are purely destructive spending, just cannibalizing what’s left of the principal. The banks don’t manage the money supply toward economic health and a fair distribution. They manage it only toward stealing as much as possible. Pure robbery.

 

The is antithetical to the standard view that the elite parasites create wealth. The fact is that the productive people create ALL wealth, and a legitimate government would create money to reflect that. A legitimate government would do so for the benefit of productivity and prosperity. This means the money supply should always reflect the capacity of the real economy, and should especially be a vector reflecting productive potential.

 

An anti-sovereign rogue government, on the other hand, alienates its money sovereignty to banks and even to globalization cadres. It does so for the benefit of parasites and criminals, to put money creation and management in their hands. In this case the criminals hijack the natural fiat money creation to financialize the economy, and/or to artificially restrict the money supply, as in the case of a gold standard (more on that in Part 2).

 

The truth is:

 

1. Money is created out of thin air. This creation may or may not be based on the productive capacity of the real economy. The money may or may not be deployed for the benefit of the real economy, as opposed to thrown down rent-extraction ratholes while the real economy depresses and dies. So there’s two kinds of accounting identities, the legitimate, benevolent A1 = B, and the hijacked, destructive A2 = C.

 

2. There’s no natural limit on rational, effective A1 deficit spending so long as there’s capacity underutilization and unemployment.

 

3. We do in fact have profligate thin-air money creation and rampant deficit spending, but it’s irrational and ineffective spending. It’s simply the government embezzling from the people and acting as corporate bagman, conveying the loot to private racketeers.

 

The fact that all this spending is taking place with little objection from the “fiscal conservatives” proves that all their fear-mongering about Social Security and other social spending is a lie.

 

4. So the rational, moral, and practical course of action is to end ALL corporate welfare and instead create the money and spend it on a real jobs program and a real infrastructure transition to the post-oil age. That’s MMT-style reformism.

 

The fact that the fiscal terrorists in the media and think tanks get everything exactly backwards proves their malevolent agenda. They’re enemies of the people.

 

In Part 2 I’ll discuss that further, and explore the real possibilities of this reform agenda.

Krugman: Austerity-Lite

 

I don’t intend to start in again on the pernicious Paul Krugman, and I’m not going to write another long post on the likes of him.

 

I just wanted to point out another example of the standard Krugman ploy, this time in his post, Why I’m Soft on Sales Taxes.

 

Consider (as Krugman invites us to) a country like Sweden or Denmark which started out with a more socialistic mindset, always maintained a strong safety net, and always had consumption taxes as a major part of the revenue mix.

 

There’s obviously no comparison between that and imposing a massive, alien sales tax on a country where the safety net is being shredded, and where the mentality is a Hobbesian shooting gallery. Under those circumstances such a tax would be viciously regressive. Yet Krugman is now taking the lead in calling for such taxes.

 

This is the same scam Thugman pulled when he was astroturfing for the health racket bailout, another reactionary austerity measure, when he claimed that the “exchanges” had something in common with the systems of Switzerland and the Netherlands.

 

But again, this is a vicious lie. Such comparisons aren’t even on the same planet, let alone in the ballpark. But here’s Krugman trotting out the same lie, this time as part of the austerity-lite initiative exemplified by his own death panel proposal and the Rivlin/Domenici counterproposal to Obama’s Star Chamber plan. The goal here is to get reactionary ”austerity” enacted by making it look reasonable by comparison to the Obama commission.

 

Thugman actually has the nerve to tell what he has to know is a criminal lie:

 

All of which says that if I can trade a somewhat regressive VAT for guarantees of decent retirement and universal health care, I’ll take it.

 

He knows damn well this is not the intent of any VAT proposal from the elites, and will not be its effect. He knows damn well any such revenue will go right down the rathole. He’s a despicable, criminal liar.

 

We need to be clear, that by now ALL taxes on the non-rich are purely predatory. Every cent of taxation on the non-rich is simply stolen from us and redistributed upward to the banksters and corporations. We need to become neo-Norquists, presenting a united front intoning an absolute NO to all tax increases for the non-rich.

 

This obviously includes all new regressive taxes and all regressive increases. We have to oppose these Krugman taxes.

 

Once and for all the people need to eradicate two equally pernicious ideas: We have one mob who wants to destroy all non-violent aspects of government in order to liberate the corporations. We have another, even more stupid, who thinks increasing the size and power of a corporatist government will somehow do anything other than further empower the corporations and further impoverish the people.

 

We need to reject both sides of this evil coin. We need to recognize the corporate tyranny and the government tyranny as the same tyranny. The corporations are completely dependent upon the government’s violence, overt as well as implicit, and they own the government.

 

So one part of the strategy has to be to starve government toward the goal of starving the corporations. This means, among other things, forcing it to continue borrowing instead of taxing. This will accelerate the government’s financial collapse, and that in turn will deal a mortal blow to the corporate parasite.

 

So read our lips. No Taxes for the Non-Rich. 

Who Said It? Bob Altemeyer.

 

OK, I hope this was worth the guessing game and the wait, and that the discussion of what kind of person would write something like that was worthwhile.

 

The answer is Bob Altemeyer, author of The Authoritarians, available free online here. (I apologize for sticking the answer in the title. Even we filthy peasant rebels, if we’re bloggers, must bow to the dictates of the all-mighty search engine.)

 

The book is very interesting. It details and documents Altemeyer’s development of the Right Wing Authoritarian (RWA) scale. This is a measure of conformity to system “authority”. It’s not ideology-specific. Instead, Altemeyer defines “right wing” authoritarianism as submissiveness toward constituted structures and the willingness to be their active tool. He gives a good example – during the Cold War, the flag-waving American patriot and the Russian Communist party member were likely to be the same kind of right wing authoritarian type.

 

So what’s the most obvious example of this today? It’s clearly how Obama’s cultists are every bit as stupidly and aggressively tribal as Bush partisans were, and on behalf of the exact same policies, on democratic* political participation, the economy, banks, corporations, transparency, the wars, civil liberties, energy policy, and even liberal social issues like abortion and gay rights.

 

[*From here on I'm going to dispense with the "small-d" disclaimer and assume readers will understand what I mean based on whether or not I capitalize the word. I'll be extra-vigilant to avoid typos there.]

 

What’s most amazing is how the liberals and “progressives” claim to support Obama and the Democrats based on a belief that he’s doing the opposite of what he obviously really is doing. Bush supporters may have supported very stupid things, but at least they were less often wrong on a basic factual level about what they were supporting. They wanted escalating war and got it. Obama supporters support a president who is also escalating the war, but claim to believe he’s winding it down, and many of them are probably ignorant enough that they do believe this. The RWA phenomenon doesn’t get more typical than this. (And how characteristic of liberals – most of those who are pro-war are too cowardly to openly want escalation, and those who in their moods are anti-war are still too cowardly to demand full immediate withdrawal, because of some unarticulated but implicitly horrible consequences which would allegedly ensue. No, they want a gradual winding down. That gives their RWA trait full room to range. If Obama says we withdraw now, that’s great. If he says it’ll take years, that’s great. If he says we’ll be there for a hundred years, which is in fact what he has implicitly been saying, that’s great too.)

 

So guess who is himself one of these RWA cultists? After all his decades of studying the phenomenon, Altemeyer himself is completely un-self-aware of how his entire world view is simply derived from Democrat and corporate propaganda, evidently going back to his student days.

 

I’ll reproduce the short exchange, which can be found here. (I think it runs onto the next page. I haven’t read the entire thread since then to see if anyone else challenges him on the same point.)

 

I saw how Altemeyer had written a note on the tea partiers as RWAs, which is insightful as usual because he’s talking about Republicans, his partisan enemy. So I asked if he was going to write a similar note on the Obama cultists. He starts out denying there’s such a thing as an Obama cult. (It’s also funny how he says, “I read two liberal blogs and two conservative blogs”, and names the Huffington Post.)

 

Knowing there was a problem, I expanded my question to include himself as a possible cultist.

 

Here’s the full exchange:

 

Russ
04/23/10 at 05:06 PM

Comments:

Are you planning on also writing a note on the Democratic RWA followers who persist in believing Obama and the Democrats are “progressives” even as they continue and in most cases escalate Bush/Cheney policies on the Bailout, the war and war crimes, the assault on civil liberties, and corporatism in general, just to name a few?

—————-

Bob Altemeyer Email

05/11/10 at 11:46 AM

Comments:
Hey, I got here in only three tries!

To Michael: Yes, putting the Global Change Game on-line would be wonderful, if it could be done right. But I doubt anyone is interested in investing the time and money it would take, and running the thing would probably be a beast.

To Russ: Well, if somebody shows me the studies that demonstrate the Democratic RWA followers supporting these things, while they condemned Bush/Cheney for doing the same things, I’ll write that note. But I read two conservative blogs and two liberal blogs each day, and both TPM and (especially) Huffington Post have been at least as persistent at pointing out when Obama continues Bush policies as Matt Drudge and Politico have been. Moreso, in fact. Which fits into my findings rather well. Anybody who expects liberals to march together to the same drum, compared to the way high RWAs insist on group loyalty, is probably going to be proved quite wrong.

(For the record, I personally supported TARP as necessary, and the war in Afghanistan. As my wife will tell you, I am not much of a progressive.)

———————–

Russ
05/20/10 at 10:01 AM

Comments:
Bob says:

Quote:
“For the record, I personally supported TARP as necessary, and the war in Afghanistan.”

Out of your own expertise, or because you were told so by your betters, and never mind the evidence?

Looks like you better retake the RWA follower test yourself.

How about assassinations?

———————-

Bob Altemeyer Email

05/20/10 at 03:12 PM

Comments:

To Russ: Well, your comment’s a bit ad hominem, but I’ll answer it as best I can.

In a world of ever-advancing knowledge, one can’t know a lot about everything. So you do have to listen to those who have expertise. In some fields (economics would sure be one) the experts often disagree, and the wise non-expert makes sure he listens to the differing opinions.

Now as for TARP, I have some background in economics. I took two years of econ as an undergraduate business major, including a memorable semester of macroeconomic theory from an anti-Keynesian young turk. I also had a semester course in corporate finance. So I probably had some sort of a handle on the crisis that hit the American financial sector in the summer of 2008. I believed that the economy would plunge into a deep depression if the major banks failed and credit virtually disappeared. It was difficult to imagine where the dominoes would stop falling as one sector after another collapsed. And I haven’t heard anyone who has criticized TARP acknowledge what would have happened if the government had not stepped in.

In the case of TARP, I’ve only heard of one economist who said the government should not step in. The experts seemed virtually unanimous, and what they said made sense to me. It was also true that the Bush administration, including the secretary of the treasury, and the Democratic nominee, Barrack Obama, and his economic advisers agreed TARP had to happen. True, most of the Republicans in Congress voted against it, but their reasons seemed short-sighted to me. I didn’t like the idea of bailing out the banks any more than Sen. McConnell did. But I thought it was more important to keep the economy from collapsing.

I think you’ll find, by the way, that a lot of the TARP loans have already been paid back, and in one way or another, most of the government investment will return to the treasury.

As for Afghanistan, it was a rogue state under the Taliban that was the breeding ground for terrorist attacks around the world, including 9/11. I knew both the British and the Soviets had come to grief fighting wars in Afghanistan, and I knew the power of the war lords in the countryside and the refuges available in Pakistan would make the military mission difficult. But I believed the Taliban had to be defeated in their home base, and I still believe that today, although the problems with Karzai remind me more and more of Vietnam. I also feel we owe something to people in Afghanistan, especially the women there who have become educated,
to stay and see the mission to its close.)

You suggested that my beliefs came from “what I was told by my bettors, never mind the evidence.” I can’t even think whose opinion I cared about regarding Afghanistan. I mean, everybody knew where the terrorists were being trained, and where Osama bin Laden was based. You’ll have to tell me about the evidence I ignored.

I’ve told you why I thought as I did. Maybe you could tell me what and why you believe in these matters.

 

At that point I was frankly amazed and gave up on the exchange. It was a surprise to realize how unused I am to talking to total ignoramuses. I know how to discuss with fellow informed citizens, and how to argue with liars, but not how to tell it like it is to people who know it like it ain’t.

 

I should have sent the link to The Truth About the Bailout, although that doesn’t include stuff like the basics on the TARP being only one part of the Bailout and so on.

 

So I thought that was an interesting case study in how rampant and insidious the cult-think is, that even a commenter who is known specifically for analyzing this kind of tribalism is such a tribalist himself. (I meant to post this earlier but it kind of fell between the cushions and I forgot about it.)

 

So I hope people found this interesting.

Question For Readers

 

I’m going to quote somebody, and I’m interested in what people’s impression is of the quote and the person who wrote it.

 

I’ll reveal who it is and give a link afterward, but first I want to see what people think before they know who it is. (It’s from May, BTW).

Now as for TARP, I have some background in economics. I took two years of econ as an undergraduate business major, including a memorable semester of macroeconomic theory from an anti-Keynesian young turk. I also had a semester course in corporate finance. So I probably had some sort of a handle on the crisis that hit the American financial sector in the summer of 2008. I believed that the economy would plunge into a deep depression if the major banks failed and credit virtually disappeared. It was difficult to imagine where the dominoes would stop falling as one sector after another collapsed. And I haven’t heard anyone who has criticized TARP acknowledge what would have happened if the government had not stepped in.

In the case of TARP, I’ve only heard of one economist who said the government should not step in. The experts seemed virtually unanimous, and what they said made sense to me. It was also true that the Bush administration, including the secretary of the treasury, and the Democratic nominee, Barrack Obama, and his economic advisers agreed TARP had to happen. True, most of the Republicans in Congress voted against it, but their reasons seemed short-sighted to me. I didn’t like the idea of bailing out the banks any more than Sen. McConnell did. But I thought it was more important to keep the economy from collapsing.

I think you’ll find, by the way, that a lot of the TARP loans have already been paid back, and in one way or another, most of the government investment will return to the treasury.

Bailout Lies – Corporate Paper Version

 

The NYT had a piece yesterday about another crime of the Bailout. Since 2008 the government has been stealing taxpayer money to prop up the corporate paper market. The lie was that without this bailout this essential market would collapse, you won’t have an economy, smoking crater, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria, etc., etc.

 

Instead, as any honest observer could have predicted, the program has simply been used as a looting binge by big corporations. The NYT piece has economists calling this “rational”. It quotes a more honest corporate flack calling it “opportunistic borrowing”. Another commenter says corporations will use it to cut jobs. It is indeed a windfall. It proves that this aspect of the Bailout, like every other, was never needed or intended to help the American people, but only to enable corporate looting. Like with everything else this government does, the intent is to loot the people.

 

And as usual the NYT’s intent is to whitewash it. The piece is actually a good example of how we can get the truth out of it as long as we ignore the propaganda. Here’s a good summary of the truth slathered with lies:

 

As many households and small businesses are being turned away by bank loan officers, large corporations are borrowing vast sums of money for next to nothing — simply because they can.

Companies like Microsoft are raising billions of dollars by issuing bonds at ultra-low interest rates, but few of them are actually spending the money on new factories, equipment or jobs. Instead, they are stockpiling the cash until the economy improves.

The development presents something of a chicken-and-egg situation: Corporations keep saving, waiting for the economy to perk up — but the economy is unlikely to perk up if corporations keep saving.

This situation underscores the limits of Washington policy makers’ power to stimulate the economy. The Federal Reserve has held official interest rates near zero for almost two years, which allows corporations to sell bonds with only slightly higher returns — even below 1 percent. But most companies are not doing what the easy monetary policy was intended to get them to do: invest and create jobs.

The Fed’s low rates have in fact hurt many Americans, especially retirees whose incomes from savings have fallen substantially. Big companies like Johnson & Johnson, PepsiCo and I.B.M. seem to have been among the major beneficiaries……

That is part of what has become the great question of this long, jobless recovery: When will corporate America start to feel confident enough to put its cash to work, building factories and putting some of the nation’s 14.9 million unemployed to work?

Businesses are holding on to their protective cash cushions, worried perhaps that the economy could slip back into recession or at least grow too lethargically to make an investment worthwhile.

The nation’s corporations will be strong, well capitalized and ready to act aggressively when executives finally decide it is time to expand their businesses……

In addition, many of the new machines and computers may be replacing older machines companies put off retiring in the recession. Businesses are playing catch-up, and little expansion is occurring.

“They may actually be using this new investment to be more efficient and cut jobs,” said Michael Gapen, an economist at Barclays Capital. “The mix of signals right now is still telling corporations to sit tight and wait.”

 

It’s a lie. On its face it’s obvious that they’re doing exactly what the government intended, because if the government didn’t intend this, why are they allowing it?

 

Why isn’t Steve Ballmer under arrest? If the government props up cheap corporate paper on the premise that the money will be productively invested, if that’s the intent, then anyone borrowing money under the program is at least implicitly affirming that he’ll use it for immediate investment.

 

If he instead hoards it, that’s a criminal fraud. So why aren’t Steve Ballmer and the rest on trial? Why is taxpayer money still being handed out under these circumstances?

 

Simple: No part of the Bailout, including the corporate paper backstop, ever had any purpose but robbery. That’s the one and only intent of this criminal government and of both criminal Washington parties.