Twitter: @rodgermitchell; Search #monetarysovereignty
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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 ultimately 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, and the motive is the gap.
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Our best and brightest attend Ivy League schools, and after these privileged few receive the finest education America has to offer, they stride out into a grateful world thereby to lead us to higher peaks of glory.
Right?
William Deresiewicz taught in Yale’s vaunted English department for 10 years. In the half-decade since, he has been writing about higher education, most notably in The American Scholar, where two of his essays, “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education” and “Solitude and Leadership,” garnered the kind of attention that suggests that he’d hit not a raw nerve but a diseased organ.
Now comes his book, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life.
The numbers he cites are damning. For example, 36 percent of Princeton’s class of 2011 went into finance alone, while the twin sirens of finance and consulting claimed about half of Harvard’s class of 2010.
Deresiewicz thinks of Johnny Harvard and his buddies in the Ancient Eight: A “great university dedicated to liberty of thought and action” has become, little more than a funnel into the junior ranks of Goldman Sachs.
While the English major is becoming an extinct species, economics, conversely, is as popular as beer, topping all majors at Harvard, Dartmouth, Princeton and Penn.
In what Deresiewicz calls “a stunning convergence,” it was the top major at 26 of the nation’s top 40 universities and colleges. Deresiewicz thinks of Johnny Harvard and his buddies in the Ancient Eight. To say the least, Stover’s “great university dedicated to liberty of thought and action” has become, in this telling, little more than a funnel into the junior ranks of Goldman Sachs.
What is this experienced, Ivy League professor telling us? My take is:
1. Our future leaders, the captains of America in training, are learning little of morality, poverty, compassion, history or the arts. They are learning greed, negligence, avarice and arrogance.
2. They also are learning the affluent .1% version of economics, aka the “Big Lie.”
They are learning that the federal government “can’t afford” social programs, and that “we’re broke.” They are learning that if you simply want success, it will come to you, so if you are poor, it’s your own fault.
They are learning that if the government provides benefits to those lower on the income/wealth/power scale, this only encourages sloth, while benefits to the upper .1% are earned and well deserved.
They are learning that “makers” are the people who take high salaries at the top of big companies, while “takers” are the people who actually make things, in a wonderful and convenient reversal of fact.
Why this skew toward unproductive wealth? Kenneth Griffin, a stock trader, recently gave Harvard $150 million. It was barely a blip in Harvard’s total endowment fund, which stands at $30 Billion., Yale’s is at “only” $21 Billion. Brown is a relative pauper with just $3 Billion.
What kind of people made these outsized funds possible? The poor and middle-income contributors? And given these numbers, is it any wonder that Ivy League schools — the clout kings of American education — teach selfishness, gluttony and disdain for the less financially advantaged?
Thus, does American greatness fall, not because of enemies without, and not because of dreaded refugees coming to our shores, but because of the failure of our schools — a failure orchestrated by the princes of plenty.
When this ship sinks, our captains will be first to the lifeboats, where safe and dry, they will swear there is no room for us.
Ask an immigrant.
Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty
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Ten Steps to Prosperity:
1. Eliminate FICA (Click here)
2. Federally funded Medicare — parts A, B & D plus long term nursing care — for everyone (Click here)
3. Provide an Economic Bonus to every man, woman and child in America, and/or every state a per capita Economic Bonus. (Click here) Or institute a reverse income tax.
4. Free education (including post-grad) for everyone. Click here
5. Salary for attending school (Click here)
6. Eliminate corporate taxes (Click here)
7. Increase the standard income tax deduction annually
8. Tax the very rich (.1%) more, with higher, progressive tax rates on all forms of income. (Click here)
9. Federal ownership of all banks (Click here)
10. Increase federal spending on the myriad initiatives that benefit America’s 99% (Click here)
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10 Steps to Economic Misery: (Click here:)
1. Maintain or increase the FICA tax..
2. Spread the myth Social Security, Medicare and the U.S. government are insolvent.
3. Cut federal employment in the military, post office, other federal agencies.
4. Broaden the income tax base so more lower income people will pay.
5. Cut financial assistance to the states.
6. Spread the myth federal taxes pay for federal spending.
7. Allow banks to trade for their own accounts; save them when their investments go sour.
8. Never prosecute any banker for criminal activity.
9. Nominate arch conservatives to the Supreme Court.
10. Reduce the federal deficit and debt
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:
1. Federal Deficits – Net Imports = Net Private Savings
2. Gross Domestic Product = Federal Spending + Private Investment and Consumption – Net Imports
THE RECESSION CLOCK
Vertical gray bars mark recessions.
As the federal deficit growth lines drop, we approach recession, which will be cured only when the growth lines rise. Increasing federal deficit growth (aka “stimulus”) is necessary for long-term economic growth.
#MONETARYSOVEREIGNTY
#Monetary Sovereignty - Mitchell 
Very well stated. Amen, brother Rodger.
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I’ll second that.
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@RMM: Your website is a great resource. I wish I could download your blog site as a book.
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[1] I cite three statements from that Newsweek article above…
“36 percent of Princeton’s class of 2011 went into finance alone, while the twin sirens of finance and consulting claimed about half of Harvard’s class of 2010.”
“Harvard has become little more than a funnel into the junior ranks of Goldman Sachs.”
“Economics is as popular as beer, topping all majors at Harvard, Dartmouth, Princeton and Penn State.”
RESPONSE:
This is more proof that the real economy (earning money by producing and selling goods and services) is now separate from the financial economy (making money from money).
Everyone in the real economy keeps getting poorer. Everyone in the financial economy keeps getting richer.
Everyone in the real economy is a slave to everyone in the financial economy.
When did financial capitalism eclipse industrial capitalism? I choose late 1982 as the tipping point. Here is my reasoning, based on a quick check of the web site “Trading Economics”…
From World War II until 1960 the USA had a middle class, and a positive balance of trade.
From 1960 to 1970 the USA’s balance of trade was about even (that is, it was balanced, or zero).
During the 1970s the USA’s balance of trade flipped back and forth between the red and the black.
In late 1982 the USA’s balance of trade took a sharp swing into the red. There was a brief return to the black in late 1991, but since then, the USA has had a huge trade deficit, up to $2.1 trillion in 2006. Much of this trade deficit stems from the process of moving US manufacturing and R&D overseas.
The USA’s trade deficit presents no fiscal problem to the US government, since the government has full Monetary Sovereignty. Foreigners send us good and services. We credit their bank accounts in dollars.
Nonetheless, I propose that the USA’s trade deficit is largely what killed the USA’s middle class.
Reason: When the USA allowed its trade deficit to become gigantic (the largest in the world), the USA sacrificed its industrial capitalism in favor of financial capitalism. The center of the action moved from manufacturing and hard technology to making money from money. Meanwhile the real economy was left to rot, taking down the middle class with it.
Thus we see the Newsweek observations above.
[2] Rodger says, “Our future leaders, the captains of America in training, are learning little of morality, poverty, compassion, history or the arts. They are learning greed, negligence, avarice and arrogance.”
Yes, because they strictly focus on making money from money. Only “inferior” people care about others, or dream of making the world a better place. Only “inferior” people seek to contribute something positive to society.
These “inferior” people are “takers.”
In reality, the “superior” people (the “makers”) are selfish little parasites that crawl from Ivy League colleges over to Wall Street, where they beg to be admitted into the Temple of Greed. If they are lucky, they are chosen to attend an initiation ceremony at this or that financial firm.
The initiation ceremony consists of a private banquet where novitiates must dress up in sexually suggestive costumes, and then stand in front of a room full of people, where they are perversely degraded and humiliated. (I’m not exaggerating.) It’s exactly like “hazing” at a college fraternity, only here they seek to enter a Wall Street fraternity.
After their initiation and humiliation, they are allowed into the temple, where they must scrub the toilets and mop the floors. That is, they must endure years of 14-hour days doing drudgery work for the temple elders. This is a “refining” process designed to weed out anyone with a hint of a moral conscience, and anyone who is not obsessed with making money from money.
Eventually, if they are “strong” enough (i.e. if they are sufficiently greedy, and sufficiently contemptuous of regular people), they are finally given their own office. They graduate from a physical sewer into a moral and political sewer. Then they can concentrate on getting rich at the expense of society.
They definitely understand the Big Lie, since they know that money is created by crediting accounts. They see it a thousand times a day.
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“…..is it any wonder that Ivy League schools — the clout kings of American education — teach selfishness, gluttony and disdain for the less financially advantaged?
I would rename Ivy league the Ayn Rand league or I’m Very Yesterday.
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