Mitchell’s laws:
●The more federal budgets are cut and taxes increased, the weaker an economy becomes.
●Austerity is the government’s method for widening the gap between rich and poor, which leads to civil disorder.
●Until the 99% understand the need for federal deficits, the upper 1% will rule.
●To survive long term, a monetarily non-sovereign government must have a positive balance of payments.
●Those, who do not understand the differences between Monetary Sovereignty and monetary non-sovereignty, do not understand economics.
●The penalty for ignorance is slavery.
●Everything in economics devolves to motive.
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Nothing is funnier — or sadder — than a “serious” article that completely misses the point.
New Republic
Financial Reform Is Being Dismantled. Why Doesn’t President Obama Seem to Care?
By Jeff Connaughton, 3/21/13President Obama wants to consign the financial crisis to the past and delegate the implementation of financial reform to others in his administration. But he needs to get personally involved. Why? Because Senator Carl Levin’s recent hearing on the JP Morgan Whale showed that nothing has changed at the largest banks or the bank regulatory agencies since the run up to the financial crisis.
The sad humor of this is that Mr. Obama IS personally involved. In fact, he is the perpetrator. Mr. Connaughton seems to believe that Mr. Obama really wants the banksters to reform themselves, but somehow is too busy or too distracted to take on the chore.
Total nonsense.
Mr. Obama has been bought and paid for by the upper .1% income group, whose primary purpose is to widen the income/wealth gap between the rich and the rest of us.
Obama rose to classic Chicago political stardom by doing what classic Chicago politicians do: Obey rich. He has been “Clintonized” by promises of lucrative speeches and other money-making events for him and his family, plus a huge Obama library, plus a fawning legacy, courtesy of media owned by the wealthy.
In the early months of 2012—two years after passage of the Dodd-Frank Act—JP Morgan acted deceptively, regulators remained clueless, and investors were the last to know about the true magnitude of the bank’s $6.2 billion in losses. Nevertheless, Republicans and some Democrats in Congress are today working to repeal reforms.
Think. Why would this be? And why doesn’t President Obama “understand” it?
Senator Levin issued a statement Tuesday saying, “It is incredible that less than a week after new JP Morgan Whale hearings detailed how the bank’s London office piled up risk, hid losses, and dodged regulatory oversight, that some House members are again supporting the weakening of derivative safeguards.”
“You’re putting the taxpayers on the hook,” said Representative Collin Peterson of Minnesota, the panel’s top Democrat, at the mark up. “This could come back to haunt you.”
“Putting taxpayers on the hook?” While literally untrue – taxpayers do not pay for federal spending – the idea of putting the private sector on the hook is exactly what the .1% bribes our politicians to do. Does anyone seriously accept the notion the entire Obama administration is unaware of all this and is unable even to say anything about it, much less do something to stop it?
Are we expected to visualize our poor powerless President, huddled fearfully under his desk, praying that Republicans and other criminals somehow will find God, begin to exhibit morality and start to support the middle class?
Is it too soon for President Obama to care? After all, it’s just one committee in the House. But this is precisely how momentum developed for passage of the JOBS Act, which loosened securities regulations for small companies, and which former securities regulators had harshly condemned during congressional consideration. The White House sat silent.
How could this monstrous criminal activity have escaped Obama’s notice? Ah, ’tis a true mystery.
In yet another disappointment to those who care about preventing securities fraud, President Obama signed the JOBS Act, even over the (belated and weak) objection of his own SEC Chairman.
It’s yet another disappointment to those deluded innocents who actually believe President Obama wants to close the income/wealth gap. This is the same Obama who has promised for years, to cut Social Security, and who recently raised FICA, the most regressive tax in U.S. history — all to widen the gap. And now they expect him to care about the middle class?
If Wall Street proponents succeed in passing this wave of Dodd-Frank “fix it” bills, more will follow. Wall Street reform is a legacy issue for the president. Does he really want a derivative deregulation bill to reach his desk in the coming months?
Yes, he does, and he will leap to sign it. Legacy, aka “history,” is written by the rich and powerful. What we see is a mutual back scratching arrangement, whereby Obama gives the rich what they want, and later the rich will give him what he wants: Money, historical admiration and that big library in Chicago.
Unfortunately, President Obama has always been a delegator on Wall Street reform issues. In his first term, he picked disciples of Bob Rubin such as Larry Summers and Tim Geithner to implement policy, then sat back and watched.</blockquote.
And why did he specifically select two notorious incompetents, Summers and Geithner? Because he knew they would do exactly as they did, i.e. implement policies to crush the middle class, while rewarding the criminal .1%.
This was no accident of delegation. It was the plan.
After passage of Dodd-Frank, President Obama has done little to support the regulatory agencies charged with its implementation. He doesn’t seem to care that even his own Attorney General believe that Dodd-Frank didn’t end Too Big to Fail.
Now that the second term is here, and a new Treasury Secretary is in place, this is a good moment to see whether we can expect more than President Obama’s bank-friendly, first-term policies.
Republicans will continue to push for what Wall Street wants, Democrats will sign on in growing numbers, Dodd-Frank will crumble bit by bit (even as regulators struggle to implement the original Act), and the Wall Street fundraising and lobbying machine will win again.
And Obama will get his bribes: His library, his speaking engagements, his hobnobbing with the rich and famous and his legacy.
The title of Mr. Connaughton’s article should have been: “Banks are being robbed. Why doesn’t Butch Cassidy seem to care, and why don’t I understand what’s happening?”
Meanwhile, may we please see the merciful end to articles assuming President Obama is a liberal who really has the best interests of the middle class at heart, and is being thwarted by the conservative Republicans?
Obama is more conservative Republican than Reagan was.
Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty====================================================================================================================================================
Nine Steps to Prosperity:
1. Eliminate FICA (Click here)
2. Medicare — parts A, B & D — for everyone
3. Send every American citizen an annual check for $5,000 or give every state $5,000 per capita (Click here)
4. Long-term nursing care for everyone
5. Free education (including post-grad) for everyone
6. Salary for attending school (Click here)
7. Eliminate corporate taxes
8. Increase the standard income tax deduction annually
9. Increase federal spending on the myriad initiatives that benefit America’s 99%
No nation can tax itself into prosperity, nor grow without money growth. Monetary Sovereignty: Cutting federal deficits to grow the economy is like applying leeches to cure anemia. Two key equations in economics:
Federal Deficits – Net Imports = Net Private Savings
Gross Domestic Product = Federal Spending + Private Investment and Consumption – Net Imports#MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY
#Monetary Sovereignty - Mitchell 
Still don’t think Obama is being bribed? Read this:
The word is “BRIBED.” Keep it in mind if ever you are puzzled about Obama’s actions.
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Obama could properly be referred to as a monomaniac (fixated on a single idea) as seen in that most prescient of studies of the American character, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. We are all passengers on the Pequod and Ahab as captain of the ship (as Obama is captain of the country), is driving us all to certain doom:
“Now, in his heart, Ahab had some glimpse of this, namely; all my means are sane, my motive and my object mad. Yet without power to kill, or change, or shun the fact; he likewise knew that to mankind he did long dissemble; in some sort, did still.”
Obama knows full well what he is doing in his mad quest for riches, but lies (i.e., dissembles) to the masses about it lest they rise up and stop him in his tracks.
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Never underestimate the American public’s insistence on slavery via self-deception. Even if Obama were ten times worse than he is now, average Americans would still believe that Obama is a saint who is simply misguided.
This illness increases with austerity, since self-deception and withdrawal into dream worlds increase with poverty. The epidemic is now so widespread that many MMT morons believe that all bankers, rich people, and politicians are misguided saints.
It’s a kind of Stockholm syndrome, and it’s disgusting. The more Obama crushes the masses, the more the masses lick his boots.
(That’s why I call average Americans peasants. It is THEY who maintain their misery, yet they blame everything on the rich.)
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POPULIST MORONS
An article in The Nation magazine condemns Paul’s Ryan’s latest budget proposal because Ryan’s scheme is based on austerity, rather than job creation.
The article instead praises the “Back-To-Work” budget proposed by the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
The latter is better because it would dramatically increase taxes, thereby, “BALANCING THE BUDGET far more efficiently and effectively than does Ryan’s budget.”
It would reduce the federal deficit by $4.4 trillion over the next 10 years, thereby “stimulating job creation.”
Got that? A balanced budget is a “rejection of austerity.”
The Nation is a typical “progressive” magazine that survives on elitist funding. It clothes a pro-austerity message in a “pro-job” wrapper, in order to make the peasants think that someone cares about them. That way, the peasants submit to more austerity.
Generally speaking, left-wing “progressives” are more cement-headed than right-wing elitists. It is easy to debunk calls for spending cuts. However, try convincing left-wing “progressives” that increased federal taxes help no one, and that a balanced federal budget is suicide. The latter clowns are as elitist as anyone in the right wing, and even more self-righteous. They are the first to scream, “Hyperinflation!” when you cite the facts of Monetary Sovereignty.
The article says, “The final budget that comes out of Congress will be a compromise.”
Yes, a compromise between two methods of execution…
Death by spending cuts, or death by increased taxes on the middle and lower classes. The latter is the “progressive” way to the slaughterhouse.
http://www.thenation.com/blog/173464/americans-want-back-work-alternative-ryans-austerity-scheme
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“Obama is a more conservative Republican than Reagan”. Mark Levin would dispute that statement. It is a funny comment, but you have a point. Who has done more for Wall Street than Obama? Reagan did not hestitate to increase the debt, but Obama is terrified by it. Both parties say they do not want the sequester, and they could easily reverse them, but neither party considers it. Obama pretends that his liberal agenda is being thwarted by the Republicans, when he is actually very content to play along.
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did anyone say “bribery?”
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This is all part of the Obama legacy. His supporters have given up on telling us he is honest, and now say he is no more dishonest than previous Presidents.
His has devolved into a failed Presidency.
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i don’t blame obama, or any president. i blame the economic system.
if you have a monetary economy and you allow people to earn as much money as they can (and hold on to it), then, eventually, you will have the situation we have now–an extremely small group of people who “subvert” the system for their own benefit and to everyone else’s demise.
if you have a system wherein it’s basically every-man-for-himself then, eventually, “corruption” will no longer be the aberration, but the norm.
of course, “individuals” will continually push the bar on corruption, but it’s the corrupt system itself that conditions people to be corrupt in the first place.
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One would like to think that Connaughton was being a bit tongue-in-cheek. He is the author of The Payoff: Why Wall Street Always Wins, which is required reading, and which shows in some operational detail the rot in the system that Mr. Mitchell talks about.
On the other hand, “one would like to think” lots of things: market mechanisms determine optimum results, Democrats are Democrats, a majority of white people are not overwhelmingly motivated by racism, Obama is not the .1%’s Manchurian candidate, etc. That most American faith, the faith in the power of positive thinking, is killing us.
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