[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.
As alarm bells sound over the advancing destruction of the environment, a variety of Green New Deal proposals have appeared in the U.S. and Europe, along with some interesting academic debates about how to fund them. Monetary policy, normally relegated to obscure academic tomes and bureaucratic meetings behind closed doors, has suddenly taken center stage.
The 14-page proposal for a Green New Deal submitted to the U.S. House of Representatives by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., does not actually mention Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), but that is the approach currently capturing the attention of the media—and taking most of the heat. The concept is good: Abundance can be ours without worrying about taxes or debt, at least until we hit full productive capacity. But, as with most theories, the devil is in the details.
MMT advocates say the government does not need to collect taxes before it spends. It actually creates new money in the process of spending it; and there is plenty of room in the economy for public spending before demand outstrips supply, driving up prices.
Critics, however, insist this is not true. The government is not allowed to spend before it has the money in its account, and the money must come from tax revenues or bond sales.
In a 2013 treatise called “Modern Monetary Theory 101: A Reply to Critics,” MMT academics concede this point. But they write, “These constraints do not change the end result.” And here the argument gets a bit technical. Their reasoning is that “the Fed is the monopoly supplier of CB currency [central bank reserves], Treasury spends by using CB currency, and since the Treasury obtained CB currency by taxing and issuing treasuries, CB currency must be injected before taxes and bond offerings can occur.”
The counterargument, made by American Monetary Institute (AMI) researchers, among others, is that the central bank is not the monopoly supplier of dollars. The vast majority of the dollars circulating in the United States are created, not by the government, but by private banks when they make loans. The Fed accommodates this process by supplying central bank currency (bank reserves) as needed, and this bank-created money can be taxed or borrowed by the Treasury before a single dollar is spent by Congress. The AMI researchers contend, “All bank reserves are originally created by the Fed for banks. Government expenditure merely transfers (previous) bank reserves back to banks.” As the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis puts it, “federal deficits do not require that the Federal Reserve purchase more government securities; therefore, federal deficits, per se, need not lead to increases in bank reserves or the money supply.”
What federal deficits do increase is the federal debt; and while the debt itself can be rolled over from year to year (as it virtually always is), the exponentially growing interest tab is one of those mandatory budget items that taxpayers must pay. Predictions are that in the next decade, interest alone could add $1 trillion to the annual bill, an unsustainable tax burden.
To fund a project as massive as the Green New Deal, we need a mechanism that involves neither raising taxes nor adding to the federal debt; and such a mechanism is proposed in the U.S. Green New Deal itself—a network of public banks. While little discussed in the U.S. media, that alternative is being debated in Europe, where Green New Deal proposals have been on the table since 2008. European economists have had more time to think these initiatives through, and they are less hampered by labels like “socialist” and “capitalist,” which have long been integrated into their multi-party systems.
A Decade of Gestation in Europe
The first Green New Deal proposal was published in 2008 by the New Economics Foundation on behalf of the Green New Deal Group in the U.K. The latest debate is between proponents of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25), led by former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, and French economist Thomas Piketty, author of the best-selling “Capital in the 21st Century.” Piketty recommends funding a European Green New Deal by raising taxes, while Varoufakis favors a system of public green banks.
“Ex-Mercenary CEO Erik Prince Admits To Trump Tower Meet With Don Jr., Saudi Emissary”
9 Mar 2019: Erik Prince, former head of mercenary business Blackwater, revealed in a bombshell interview Friday that he attended a meeting in Trump Tower with Donald Trump Jr. and a representative of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to discuss “Iran policy” during the presidential campaign.
The interview marked the first time Prince has publicly acknowledged such a meeting. Prince said in congressional testimony in 2017 that he had no “official” or “unofficial” role in the campaign — other than a “yard sign” and writing “papers” — according to the transcript of his testimony before the House intelligence committee. Nor did he mention the meeting in his testimony, according to transcripts.
The New York Times reported last year that Prince organized the 2016 meeting at Trump Tower with Donald Trump’s eldest son and Lebanese-American businessman George Nader. Nader revealed at the meeting that the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia wanted to aid Trump in his bid for the presidency, according to the newspaper.
The meeting also reportedly included now-top White House aide Stephen Miller and Israeli social media expert Joel Zamel.
The August meeting is yet another secret huddle with a representative of foreign governments that may have provided illegal international aid to sway the American election. Just months earlier Donald Jr. and the president’s son-in-law and now senior White House aide Jared Kushner met at Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer connected to the Kremlin.
Prince, brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, acknowledged the meeting in an on-camera interview on Al Jazeera’s “Head to Head” aired Friday (above).
Asked by host Mehdi Hasan why he didn’t reveal the meeting in his congressional testimony, Prince insisted he had. When his actual response was read back to him, he suggested the transcript was “wrong,” drawing titters from the interview audience.
He later also insisted that “not all of the discussion that day was transcribed.”
Head to Head@AJHeadtoHead
Erik Prince responds that the U.S. Congress “got the transcript wrong” when asked why he didn’t tell the House Intel Committee about an Aug 2016 meeting he attended at Trump Tower. @Mehdirhasan goes ‘head to head’ with Erik Prince NOW @AJEnglish.
9:25 PM - Mar 8, 2019
A lawyer for Trump’s son confirmed to the Times after its story that “prior to the 2016 election, Donald Trump Jr. recalls a meeting with Erik Prince, George Nader and another individual who may be Joel Zamel.”
The Trump administration later harshly cracked down on Iran, terminating American participation in the international nuclear pact with the nation over the strenuous objections of Europe and Iran — and pleasing the Saudis and gulf allies.
The existence of the Trump Tower meeting — and what may have been discussed or promised — raises questions about the president’s confounding lack of action against Saudi Arabia after the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, which American intelligence officials determined was ordered by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Kushner met with the crown prince and other officials in Saudi Arabia earlier this week. Against all protocol, American embassy staffers told The Daily Beast that they were shut out of meetings and were not provided details of what had been discussed. The private huddles followed revelations that the president ordered Kushner to be given top-level security clearance over the objections of the FBI.
Hasan also challenged Prince’s description of Iraqis in his memoir as “barbarians.” Prince responded that he had no problem calling terrorists barbarians. But Hasan pointed out Prince’s team had not been sent to “liberate” terrorists but Iraqi civilians.
I asked Blackwater founder Erik Prince about calling Iraqis “barbarians” and about the murder & manslaughter that happened on his watch in Iraq.
You should really listen to his replies. (Watch the whole @AJHeadtoHead with him this Friday on @AJEnglish)
Blackwater employees opened fire in a crowded square in Baghdad in 2007, killing 17 Iraqi civilians and seriously wounding 20 others. Three guards were convicted in 2014 of 14 manslaughter charges, and another of murder in an American court.
Cohen was sentenced in December to three years in prison for his role in making illegal hush-money payments to two women to help Trump in 2016 in violation of campaign laws, and for lying to Congress about a proposed Trump Tower project in Russia.
Michael Cohen, U.S. President Donald Trump’s former personal attorney, once said he would take a bullet for Trump, who called his former close confidante a “Rat” on Twitter in mid-December.
Posted by DanielS on Tuesday, 19 February 2019 06:25.
Los Angeles, which way have you gone, Western man?
Well, Trump certainly did deliver on his promise - to Israel, to undo the Iran Deal.
But with Trump’s failure to deliver on his promise for an effective Mexican border wall, in fact, delivering more amnesty, Ecce Lux and Dennis Dale have an interesting but alarming discussion about the change in America’s demographics, from the transformation of Los Angeles into Tijuana north, to the transformation of a segment of young Whites into irredeemable anti-White, “anti-fa.”
Dennis Dale, Ecce Lux and a guest discuss this collapse of America’s demographic balance and ways of life - the implications: with Ecce Lux having witnessed the transformation to what is now an advanced stage in Los Angeles, he warns that “most Americans don’t realize how F-d they are.”
In truth, I was seeing an advanced stage of demographic horror and destruction in Newark, New Jersey back in the 1960s. It was just as much of a nightmare that White people could “rationalize” their way around it and go into denial about the clear, catastrophic implications. I could not understand how Whites could not see the clear augury of how F-d they were going to be…
Ecce Lux renders intelligent description of the change and his visceral response, but he doesn’t get some basic matters yet. That probably results from his having only come to the struggle recently. We need to talk to him here. I tried with Dennis Dale and am still open to him but maybe you can’t teach an older dog new tricks.
Ecce Lux seems open to the DNA Nations. As soon as I finally have time (should be this week) to finish a summary audio on the philosophy being espoused here (by me, anyway), I will begin working on implementation.
The essence of Slavery is that someone else controls the value of our production.
Under Capitalism, people depending on a wage (the 90/99%), typically consume only about 10% of the value of their own production. The entire System is geared to sucking up our production with unearned income: Usury, Landlordism, Speculation, high prices of Monopoly.
In Capitalism, this was achieved by first driving the common people off their ancestral lands by systematically destroying the abundant money systems of the medieval era by forcing Gold Standards everywhere.
This caused a deflation that first savaged the countryside.
In this way, the People lost their means of independence and were forced to work for others for a living, in the cities. Instead of being independent farmers and craftsmen, they were demoted to wage slavery.
By giving him a wage, immediately a large chunk of the value of the worker’s production is taken by the shareholder. The value of the worker’s production is always much higher than his wage.
With Multinationals, profits and shareholder dividends are typically higher than the cost for labor. More than half of the workers’ production is taken by the owners of the company.
Broken
They get away with this because Capital is kept artificially scarce, both through Cartels and through the artificial scarcity of money. In this way, Labor is oppressed, forcing them into low wages and humiliating conditions. With a decent monetary system, not Capital, but Labor would be the scarce factor of production, and men would be either self-employed or co-owner in larger corporations.
The worker receives his wage, and the remaining value of his production is next sucked up with scientific precision.
A wage slave making $2000 per month has a budget something like this: $300 for the State $700 for the Landlord $100 for Energy $200 for ‘health’ ‘care’ $150 for Transportation $50 for Telecom Total: $1500
What remains, $500, about a quarter, is to eat and try to live a life. A fraction of what 40 hours work produced, at least $4000 worth.
The beauty of the System is, that when wages rise, prices, debts (and associated usurious cost), rents, rise along, sucking up the extra purchasing power.
The residual wealth that the Middle Class retains during booms is disowned a little later with the inevitably following crunch, forcing them into liquidation at depressed prices.
Free Markets, Right?! Supply and demand! All good and dandy, we think. Fair enough. We use stuff, so we pay.
But when we take a closer look at where all this money ends up, it transpires that all supply chains we depend on (energy, automotive industry, telecom, ‘health’ ‘care’) are dominated by massive International Cartels.
Cartels keep supply low, and prices high, so a lot of their profits are unearned income, not really related to their production, but to their market power. They use this to keep competitors out, and the Capitalist’s core value is ‘Competition is Sin’ (John D. Rockefeller).
LANDLORDISM
What is more, a great many people are enslaved by Landlordism, which is a vicious Tyranny, first established by the Sword, later overtaken by mortgages, the Money Power’s method of disowning the Landed Aristocracy.
Landlordism is pure parasitism, and all the Land is owned by a really very small group of mostly very old families. For instance: all the homeowners in Britain combined own only 6% of the Land. All the rest is in the hands of a minute percentage of the population. Many of the main Landholders go back all the way to William the Conqueror.
Filthy rich
Usury massively raises all these prices. As we know, Usury is about 40% of prices we pay for all goods and services: cost for capital passed on by the supplier.
This includes the land we live on, and on which we are utterly dependent. In fact, Usury actually QUADRUPLES Landlordism´s rents.
But this is not the only way International Finance profits from everything: they also have a decisive stake in most of the Transnationals that dominate the supply chains we are completely dependent upon. Only 20% of Transnationals (there are about 40,000 of them) are independently owned.
CONCLUSION
In the past, people enslaved in the mines and the sweatshops, say late 19th century Britain, they were even forced by their employers to do their groceries in factory owned shops that charged outrageous prices.
We think we have outgrown this. It’s really time to think again: all that has happened is that Capital (Finance) has upped their game. Local shops on factory compounds are now international supermarket chains. But they are owned by the same people and serve the exact same purpose: reclaiming capital’s losses to wages, usurping our production.
People even go so far as to say ‘Capitalism has lifted people out of poverty’! What is so insane about this, is that a man, in 1694, worked about 15 weeks per year on his own farm. Then with the ascent of Capitalism, two centuries later, he worked 80 hours per week in some soul-crushing ‘job’, and it was still not enough: his wife and his kids had to work too, just to pay for the rent and some potatoes.
Anthony Migchels
Even today, we work at least twice as much as three centuries ago.
The most galling of it all is that people claim ‘freedom’ because once every four years they get to give what remains of their power away to some Kleptocrat insider with ‘democratic elections’.
This is the reality of Capitalism, which is centred around International Finance and its Usury (Banking).
No solution to all this is thinkable, without the end of Usury by interest-free credit for the People.
Los Angeles, which way have you gone, Western man?
Abolished
Broken
Filthy rich
Anthony Migchels