[Majorityrights News] Trump will ‘arm Ukraine to the teeth’ if Putin won’t negotiate ceasefire Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 12 November 2024 16:20.
[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
Home ownership has been called “the quintessential American dream.” Yet today less than 65% of American homes are owner occupied, and more than 50% of the equity in those homes is owned by the banks. Compare China, where, despite facing one of the most expensive real estate markets in the world, a whopping 90% of families can afford to own their homes.
Over the last decade, American wages have stagnated and U.S. productivity has consistently been outpaced by China’s. The U.S. government has responded by engaging in a trade war and imposing stiff tariffs in order to penalize China for what the White House deems unfair trade practices. China’s industries are said to be propped up by the state and to have significantly lower labor costs, allowing them to dump cheap products on the U.S. market, causing prices to fall and forcing U.S. companies out of business. The message to middle America is that Chinese labor costs are low because their workers are being exploited in slave-like conditions at poverty-level wages.
But if that’s true, how is it that the great majority of Chinese families own homes?
Ellen Brown is an attorney, chairman of the Public Banking Institute; author of twelve books including “Web of Debt” and “The Public Bank Solution.”
… 90% of families in the country own their home, giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other liens. On top of this, north of 20% of urban households own more than one home.
Due to their communist legacy, what they get for their money is not actually ownership in perpetuity but a long-term leasehold, and the quality of the construction may be poor. But the question posed here is, how can Chinese families afford the price tag for these homes, in a country where the average income is only one-seventh that in the United States?
The Misleading Disparity Between U.S. and Chinese Incomes
Some commentators explain the phenomenon by pointing to cultural differences. The Chinese are inveterate savers, with household savings rates that are more than double those in the U.S.; and they devote as much as 74% of their money to housing. Under China’s earlier one-child policy, many families had only one heir, who tended to be male; and home ownership was a requirement to score a wife. Families would therefore pool their resources to make sure their sole heir was equipped for the competition. Homes would be purchased either with large down payments or without financing at all. Financing through banks at compound interest rates doubles the cost of a typical mortgage, so sidestepping the banks cuts the cost of housing in half.
Those factors alone, however, cannot explain the difference in home ownership rates between the two countries. The average middle-class U.S. family could not afford to buy a home outright for their oldest heir even if they did pool their money. Americans would be savers if they could, but they have other bills to pay. And therein lies a major difference between Chinese and American family wealth: In China, the cost of living is significantly lower. The Chinese government subsidizes not only its industries but its families—with educational, medical and transportation subsidies.
According to a 2017 HSBC fact sheet, 70% of Chinese millennials (ages 19 to 36) already own their own homes. American young people cannot afford to buy homes because they are saddled with student debt, a millstone that now averages $37,000 per student and will be carried an average of 20 years before it is paid off. A recent survey found that 80% of American workers are living paycheck to paycheck. Another found that 60% of U.S. millennials could not come up with $500 to cover their tax bills.
In China, by contrast, student debt is virtually nonexistent. Heavy government subsidies have made higher education cheap enough that students can work their way through college with a part-time job. Health care is also subsidized by the government, with a state-run health insurance program similar to Canada’s. The program doesn’t cover everything, but medical costs are still substantially lower than in the U.S. Public transportation, too, is quite affordable in China, and it is fast, efficient and ubiquitous.
The U.S. federal debt has more than doubled since the 2008 financial crisis, shooting up from $9.4 trillion in mid-2008 to over $22 trillion in April 2019. The debt is never paid off. The government just keeps paying the interest on it, and interest rates are rising.
In 2018, the Fed announced plans to raise rates by 2020 to “normal” levels — a fed funds target of 3.375 percent — and to sell about $1.5 trillion in federal securities at the rate of $50 billion monthly, further growing the mountain of federal debt on the market. When the Fed holds government securities, it returns the interest to the government after deducting its costs; but the private buyers of these securities will be pocketing the interest, adding to the taxpayers’ bill.
In fact it is the interest, not the debt itself, that is the problem with a burgeoning federal debt. The principal just gets rolled over from year to year. But the interest must be paid to private bondholders annually by the taxpayers and constitutes one of the biggest items in the federal budget. Currently the Fed’s plans for “quantitative tightening” are on hold; but assuming it follows through with them, projections are that by 2027 U.S. taxpayers will owe $1 trillion annually just in interest on the federal debt. That is enough to fund President Donald Trump’s trillion-dollar infrastructure plan every year, and it is a direct transfer of wealth from the middle class to the wealthy investors holding most of the bonds.
Where will this money come from? Crippling taxes, wholesale privatization of public assets, and elimination of social services will not be sufficient to cover the bill.
Bondholder Debt Is Unnecessary
The irony is that the United States does not need to carry a debt to bondholders at all. It has been financially sovereign ever since President Franklin D. Roosevelt took the dollar off the gold standard domestically in 1933. This was recognized by Beardsley Ruml, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, in a 1945 presentation before the American Bar Association titled “Taxes for Revenue Are Obsolete.”
“The necessity for government to tax in order to maintain both its independence and its solvency is true for state and local governments,” he said, “but it is not true for a national government.” The government was now at liberty to spend as needed to meet its budget, drawing on credit issued by its own central bank. It could do this until price inflation indicated a weakened purchasing power of the currency.
Then, and only then, would the government need to levy taxes — not to fund the budget but to counteract inflation by contracting the money supply. The principal purpose of taxes, said Ruml, was “the maintenance of a dollar which has stable purchasing power over the years. Sometimes this purpose is stated as ‘the avoidance of inflation.’”
The government could be funded without taxes by drawing on credit from its own central bank; and since there was no longer a need for gold to cover the loan, the central bank would not have to borrow. It could just create the money on its books. This insight is a basic tenet of Modern Monetary Theory: the government does not need to borrow or tax, at least until prices are driven up. It can just create the money it needs. The government could create money by issuing it directly; or by borrowing it directly from the central bank, which would create the money on its books; or by taking a perpetual overdraft on the Treasury’s account at the central bank, which would have the same effect.
The “Power Revolution” — Transferring the “Money Power” to the Banks
The Treasury could do that in theory, but some laws would need to be changed. Currently the federal government is not allowed to borrow directly from the Fed and is required to have the money in its account before spending it. After the dollar went off the gold standard in 1933, Congress could have had the Fed just print money and lend it to the government, cutting the banks out. But Wall Street lobbied for an amendment to the Federal Reserve Act, forbidding the Fed to buy bonds directly from the Treasury as it had done in the past.
The Treasury can borrow from itself by transferring money from “intragovernmental accounts” — Social Security and other trust funds that are under the auspices of the Treasury and have a surplus – but these funds do not include the Federal Reserve, which can lend to the government only by buying federal securities from bond dealers. The Fed is considered independent of the government. Its website states, “The Federal Reserve’s holdings of Treasury securities are categorized as ‘held by the public,’ because they are not in government accounts.”
Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage, left, reacts as results are announced at the counting center for the European Elections for South East England region, in Southampton, England, Sunday, May 26, 2019. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant)
LONDON (AP): Britain’s governing Conservative Party was all but wiped out in European Parliament election as voters sick of the country’s stalled European Union exit flocked to uncompromisingly pro-Brexit or pro-EU parties.
The main opposition Labour Party also faced a drubbing in a vote that upended the traditional order of British politics and plunged the country into even more Brexit uncertainty. The big winners were the newly founded Brexit Party led by veteran anti-EU campaigner Nigel Farage and the strongly pro-European Liberal Democrats.
With results announced early Monday for all of England and Wales, the Brexit Party had won 28 of the 73 British EU seats up for grabs and almost a third of the votes. The Liberal Democrats took about 20% of the vote and 15 seats — up from only one at the last EU election in 2014.
Labour came third with 10 seats, followed by the Greens with seven. The ruling Conservatives were in fifth place with just three EU seats and under 10% of the vote.
Scotland and Northern Ireland are due to announce their results later.
Farage’s Brexit Party was one of several nationalist and populist parties making gains across the continent in an election that saw erosion of support for the traditionally dominant political parties.
Conservative Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt said it was a “painful result” and warned there was an “existential risk to our party unless we now come together and get Brexit done.”
The results reflect an electorate deeply divided over Britain’s 2016 decision to leave the EU, but united in anger at the two long-dominant parties, the Conservatives and Labour, who have brought the Brexit process to deadlock.
Britain is participating in the EU election because it is still a member of the bloc, but the lawmakers it elects will only sit in the European Parliament until the country leaves the EU, which is currently scheduled for Oct. 31.
Farage’s Brexit Party was officially launched in April and has only one policy: for Britain to leave the EU as soon as possible, even without a divorce agreement in place.
Farage said his party’s performance was “a massive message” for the Conservatives and Labour, and he said it should be given a role in future negotiations with the EU.
“If we don’t leave on Oct. 31, then the scores you have seen for the Brexit Party today will be repeated in a general election — and we are getting ready for it,” said Farage.
But the election leaves Britain’s EU exit ever more uncertain, with both Brexiteers and pro-EU “remainers” able to claim strong support. Labour and the Conservatives, who in different ways each sought a compromise Brexit, were hammered. The result raises the likelihood of a chaotic “no deal” exit from the EU — but also of a new referendum that could reverse the decision to leave.
The Conservatives were punished for failing to take the country out of the EU on March 29 as promised, a failure that led Prime Minister Theresa May to announce Friday that she is stepping down from leading the party on June 7. Britain’s new prime minister will be whoever wins the Conservative party leadership race to replace her.
The favorites, including ex-Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab and former Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, have vowed to leave the EU on Oct. 31 even if there is no deal in place.
Most businesses and economists think that would cause economic turmoil and plunge Britain into recession. But many Conservatives think embracing a no-deal Brexit may be the only way to win back voters from Farage’s party.
Labour was punished for a fence-sitting Brexit policy that saw the party dither over whether to support a new referendum that could halt Brexit. Labour foreign affairs spokeswoman Emily Thornberry said the party needed to adopt a clearer pro-EU stance.
“There should be a (new Brexit) referendum and we should campaign to remain,” she said.
As a Remain voter to begin with, Theresa May’s Prime Ministership looked more and more like a grand filibuster to obstruct Brexit indefinitely. And, as Allister Heath said over at the Daily Telegraph, 22 May 2019:
Theresa May at the top nearly 3 years
As prime minister, following David Cameron
6 years before that, as home secretary
Failed to win 2017 general election outright, but stayed PM
Remainvoter in the 2016 EU referendum
Brexit dominated her time at 10 Downing Street. (PA)
There may be a chance of a Tory-Brexit Party pact as some point, but zero chance the supporters of Mrs May’s deal or her allies will be spared the full force of Nigel Farage’s Party.
The reality is that nobody who believes in Brexit can possibly vote for Mrs. May’s deal. There is no longer any excuse, no longer any room for doubt. Mrs. May’s latest version is an admission that the established parties will never allow us to leave the E.U.
It is an attempt to entrench the status-quo, the symbol of a broken West Minster stuck on a doom-loop.
In its denial of democracy and its decision to put process above substance, it is also a provocation.
It tells Brexiteers that they will only get change if they elect new MP’s from new parties; many will oblige, keen to usher-in fresh, more responsive politics
Mrs May became emotional as she concluded her announcement.
Theresa May has said she will quit as Conservative leader on 7 June, paving the way for a contest to decide a new prime minister. In an emotional statement, she said she had done her best to deliver Brexit and it was a matter of “deep regret” that she had been unable to do so.
Mrs May said she would continue to serve as PM while a Conservative leadership contest takes place.
The party said it hoped a new leader could be in place by the end of July. It means Mrs May will still be prime minister when US President Donald Trump makes his state visit to the UK at the start of June.
Mrs May announced she would step down as Tory leader on 7 June and had agreed with the chairman of Tory backbenchers that a leadership contest should begin the following week.
On Friday, Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt became the latest MP to say that he would run for the party leadership, joining Boris Johnson, Esther McVey and Rory Stewart, who had already confirmed their intentions. More than a dozen others are believed to be seriously considering entering the contest.
The prime minister has faced a backlash from her MPs against her latest Brexit plan, which included concessions aimed at attracting cross-party support.
Andrea Leadsom quit as Commons leader on Wednesday saying she no longer believed the government’s approach would “deliver on the referendum result”.
Mrs May met Home Secretary Sajid Javid and Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt at Downing Street on Thursday where they are understood to have expressed their concerns about her proposed withdrawal bill.
In her statement on Friday, she said she had done “everything I can” to convince MPs to support the withdrawal deal she had negotiated with the European Union but it was now in the “best interests of the country for a new prime minister to lead that effort”. She added that, in order to deliver Brexit, her successor would have to build agreement in Parliament.
“Such a consensus can only be reached if those on all sides of the debate are willing to compromise,” she said.
Mrs May’s voice shook as she ended her speech saying: “I will shortly leave the job that it has been the honour of my life to hold. The second female prime minister, but certainly not the last.”
“I do so with no ill will, but with enormous and enduring gratitude to have had the opportunity to serve the country I love.”
“Because of the insane austerity in Brussels, hundreds of children are DYING in Greece…
I do not care to have the accounts in place and the cemeteries full, I want for every Italian to be able to afford to found a family with a stable job…
Jonathan Portes is a Jewish economist and a big fan of mass immigration. In collaboration with the Jewish immigration minister Barbara Roche, he was central to New Labour’s successful conspiracy to open Britain’s borders to Eastern Europe and the Third World. The conspiracy was very bad for Labour’s traditional supporters in the White working-class, but very good for the rich Jewish businessmen who funded Tony Blair and dictated New Labour’s policies.
Inflammatory nonsense
But while Portes (pronounced “Port-iz”) believes in open borders, he also believes in closed mouths. In other words, he’s a big fan of censorship and doesn’t like Whites discussing racial differences and the effects of mass immigration. When the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton was sacked from a government committee for alleged anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and racism, Portes welcomed his departure and condemned him for peddling “inflammatory nonsense,” “tabloid-level ignorance and straightforward falsity.” He then went on to peddle some inflammatory nonsense of his own when he praised the heavily Jewish “Race Relations Act of 1968,” claiming that the Act “outlawed direct discrimination in housing or employment, as exemplified by signs saying ‘No blacks, no dogs, no Irish’.”
“More Blacks, More Dogs, More Irish”: SJWs exploit an urban myth
That’s how hate-filled the White English were in the 1950s and ’60s, you see: when they were offering houses or rooms for rent, they put up signs saying “No blacks, no dogs, no Irish.” Thousands of signs up and down the land. Well, hundreds, anyway. Well, they were a common sight. So common, in fact, that there’s no solid proof that they ever existed. The Irish Studies Centre (ISC) at London Metropolitan University (LMU) has a single photograph of “somewhat uncertain” “provenance” donated in the 1980s. And when the academic Steve Bruce was researching the topic in the 1990s, he “tried without success to find one and had to fake one for a book cover.” Writing in 2015, Bruce issued a “plea to Guardian readers. If “No Irish” signs were as common as is asserted, there should be plenty of them remaining in private collections, local archives and the like. … Can we please see some?” No, we can’t. Instead, we need to have faith. Dr Tony Murray, Director of the ISC at LMU, says that: “Ample evidence exists in numerous oral history interviews with both Caribbean and Irish migrants that such signs existed well into the 60s.”
An urban myth
No, that’s not “ample evidence”: it’s anecdotage. I don’t believe that such signs ever existed. They’re an urban myth peddled by people who, because they hate the English, want to believe that the English are haters. Yes, there is solid proof that English people put up signs saying “no coloureds” and “no West Indians.” But I don’t think such signs were proof of “hate.” Blacks are much more likely to be bad tenants than Whites are. Everyone who has dealings with Blacks learns this. For example, the BBC exposed non-White Asian landlords in 2013 for “discriminating” against Black tenants. Back in the 1950s, the notorious Peter Rachman (1919–62) installed violent and noisy Blacks to drive White tenants out of houses he wanted to buy or convert into flats. That’s how the English language acquired the handy word “Rachmanism,” meaning “the exploitation and intimidation of tenants by unscrupulous landlords.”
Peter Rachman, an unscrupulous Jew from Poland
That definition is from the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, which describes Rachman as a “London landlord.” In fact, he was a Jew from Poland, part of the post-war influx of Eastern European Jews that also brought us the mega-fraudster Robert Maxwell (1923-91), a Jew from Czechoslovakia whose real name was Binyamin Hoch. It’s remarkable how the tiny Jewish community have supplied the world with so many financial crooks and confidence tricksters like Rachman and Hoch — compare Bernie Madoff and Michael Milken in the United States. But if you do remark this pattern, you’ll be in serious trouble. Noticing racial patterns is strictly forbidden in the intellectual Flatland of the modern West and in Britain there are now strict laws against signs like “no coloureds” and “no West Indians.” And who can we thank for these laws, which ended the right of free association and free control of private property? It was Jews like Anthony Lester and Jim Rose, who “founded the Runnymede Trust to combat racial prejudice and promote policies for overcoming racial discrimination and disadvantage.”
Predation was ended by expulsion
I described the work of the Runnymede Trust in “Barons of Bullshit.” It has an Orwellian name, because Runnymede was where, in popular legend, freedom-loving barons forced tyrannical King John to sign Magna Carta and grant his subjects protection against the monarchy and its allies. As Francis Carr Begbie has pointed out at the Occidental Observer, when the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta was celebrated in 2015, there was no mention of “two crucial paragraphs” in the charter that sought to protect gentiles against “the Jews” and their financial wiles. Patterns of Jewish predation were obvious in Britain many centuries ago, but they abruptly ended in 1290. That was when King Edward I issued an Edict of Expulsion against Britain’s Jews and they had to depart for the European mainland.
Most settled in Spain, Germany, Poland and Itlay (Venice, of course, had its own Jewish Ghetto).
The edict was not overturned until 1656.
Edward’s Edict: Jews were expelled in 1290
Jonathan Portes and other Jews would call Edward I a “hater.” I’d call him a pattern-recognizer who acted for the benefit of his White Christian subjects. But the English monarchy was briefly toppled in the seventeenth century by Oliver Cromwell, who allowed Jews back into Britain. When Jews came back, so did Jewish predation, as Charles Dickens noted when he created the Jewish master-thief Fagin in Oliver Twist (1838). I’ve also argued that Dickens created a Jewish villain in the poison-dwarf Quilp of The Old Curiosity Shop (1840) and that M.R. James attacked both Jews and Cromwell in “The Uncommon Prayer-Book” (1921). Dickens himself said: “Fagin in Oliver Twist is a Jew, because it unfortunately was true of the time to which that story refers, that that class of criminal almost invariably was a Jew.”
That’s more hate, Portes and other Jews would say. I’d say it’s more pattern-recognition. Dickens was a genius because he was so good at recognizing social, psychological and cultural patterns and then re-creating them in his stories, often embellished or exaggerated for comic or satiric effect. The Jewish genius, by contrast, is for creating seductive ideological patterns that aren’t based on reality even as they pretend to offer deep insights into reality. Jewish ideologues like Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Franz Boas were masters of smoke-and-mirrors, and their seductive ideologies all contributed to the egalitarian cult that rules the modern West.
As public banking gains momentum across the country, policymakers in California and Washington state are vying to form the nation’s second state-owned bank, following in the footsteps of the highly successful Bank of North Dakota, founded in 1919. The race is extremely close, with state bank bills now passing their first round of committee hearings in both states’ senates.
In California, the story begins in 2011, when then-Assemblyman Ben Hueso filed his first bill to explore the creation of a state bank. The bill, which was for a blue-ribbon committee to do a feasibility study, sailed through both legislative houses and seemed to be a go. That is, until Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed it, not on grounds that he disapproved of the concept, but because he said we did not need another blue-ribbon committee. The state had a banking committee that could review the matter in-house. Needless to say, nothing was heard of the proposal after that.
So when now-Sen. Hueso filed SB 528 earlier this year, he went straight for setting up a state bank. The details could be worked out during the two to three years it would take to get a master account from the Federal Reserve, by a commission drawn from in-house staff that had access to the data and understood the issues.
“If you invest your tuppence wisely in the bank, safe and sound,
Soon that tuppence safely invested in the bank will compound,
And you’ll achieve that sense of conquest as your affluence expands
In the hands of the directors who invest as propriety demands.”
— “Mary Poppins,” 1964
When “Mary Poppins” was made into a movie in 1964, Mr. Banks’ advice to his son was sound. The banks were then paying more than 5% interest on deposits, enough to double young Michael’s investment every 14 years.
Now, however, the average savings account pays only 0.10% annually—that’s one-tenth of 1%—and many of the country’s biggest banks pay less than that. If you were to put $5,000 in a regular Bank of America savings account (paying 0.01%) today, in a year you would have collected only 50 cents in interest.
That’s true for most of us, but banks themselves are earning 2.4% on their deposits at the Federal Reserve. These deposits, called “excess reserves,” include the reserves the banks got from our deposits, and on which they are paying almost nothing; and unlike with our deposits, there is no $250,000 cap on the sums banks can stash at the Fed amassing interest. A whopping $1.5 trillion in reserves are now sitting in Fed reserve accounts. The Fed rebates its profits to the government after deducting its costs, and interest paid to banks is one of those costs. That means we, the taxpayers, are paying $36 billion annually to private banks for the privilege of parking their excess reserves at one of the most secure banks in the world—parking them, rather than lending them out.
The banks are getting these outsize returns while taking absolutely no risk, because the Fed, as “lender of last resort,” cannot go bankrupt. This is not true for other depositors, including large institutions such as the pension funds that hold our retirement money.
Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage, left, reacts as results are announced at the counting center for the European Elections for South East England region, in Southampton, England, Sunday, May 26, 2019. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant)
Without children, Italians have no future.
Michael Levine-Clark / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Theresa May at the top nearly 3 years
“More blacks, more dogs and more Irish.”
