Twitter: @rodgermitchell; Search #monetarysovereignty
Facebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Mitchell’s laws:
●Liberals think the purpose of government is to protect the poor and powerless from the rich and powerful. Conservatives think the purpose of government is to protect the rich and powerful from the poor and powerless.
●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.
●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.
●Everything in economics devolves to motive, and the motive is the Gap.
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This past May, we published, “PRIVATIZATION: The Road to Perdition in the United States of Koch.”
It described the Libertarian / Tea Party / Republican Koch Brothers, the too-big-to-jail billionaire, world-class polluters and law-breakers. The description was in general terms, focusing mostly on the phony drives for privatization concocted by crooked politicians.
Now, we have a more detailed look at how the Kochs have purchased three political parties — Libertarian, Tea and Republican — and the minds of millions of voters.
Here are some excerpts. I urge you to read the entire article. You may have trouble believing the depths of the chicanery, so keep an open mind:
Rolling Stone
Inside the Koch Brothers’ Toxic EmpireThe Kochs are our homegrown oligarchs; they’ve cornered the market on Republican politics and are nakedly attempting to buy Congress and the White House.
The Kochs have been aided and abetted by the right wing Supreme Court, which tells us that money is the same as speech, and in the immortal words of Justice Scalia, ” . . . the more speech, the better.”
Koch Industries’s troubled legal history – including a trail of congressional investigations, Department of Justice consent decrees, civil lawsuits and felony convictions, combine to cast an unwelcome spotlight on the toxic empire whose profits finance the modern GOP.
Under the nearly five-decade reign of CEO Charles Koch, the company has paid out record civil and criminal environmental penalties. And in 1999, a jury handed down to Koch’s pipeline company what was then the largest wrongful-death judgment of its type in U.S. history, resulting from the explosion of a defective pipeline that incinerated a pair of Texas teenagers.
Yes, yes, I know. Before the brainwashed apologists for right wing excesses bombard us with “There are bad Democrats, too,” let me say that I know of no people with the record of lying, cheating, stealing, fraud, unimaginable greed and blatant attempts to control the politics of America, as the Kochs.
If the apologists for criminality know of someone with a worse record, please do this: Read the entire article, then tell me of anyone to equal what you read, and detail their criminality.
Only three companies rank among the top 30 polluters of America’s air, water and climate: ExxonMobil, American Electric Power and Koch Industries. Thanks in part to its 2005 purchase of paper-mill giant Georgia-Pacific, Koch Industries dumps more pollutants into the nation’s waterways than General Electric and International Paper combined.
The cost is borne by communities in cities like Port Arthur, Texas, where a Koch-owned facility produces as much as 2 billion pounds of petrochemicals every year. In March, Koch signed a consent decree with the Department of Justice requiring it to spend more than $40 million to bring this plant into compliance with the Clean Air Act.
Imagine you being fined $5 for polluting the air and water of millions of people, while you earn millions for doing it. That seems to be what fines mean to the Kochs.
In a recent acquisition, Koch bought Frac-Chem, a top provider of hydraulic fracturing chemicals to drillers. Thanks to the Bush administration’s anti-regulatory agenda – which Koch Industries helped craft – Frac-Chem’s chemical cocktails, injected deep under the nation’s aquifers, are almost entirely exempt from the Safe Drinking Water Act.
This is a test of your logic: Why would the Bush administration give the Kochs a free pass to pollute drinking water?
Denser, dirtier and cheaper than coal, petcoke is the dregs of tar-sands refining. U.S. coal plants are largely forbidden from burning petcoke, but it can be profitably shipped to countries with lax pollution laws like Mexico and China. One of the firm’s subsidiaries, Koch Carbon, is expanding its Chicago terminal operations to receive up to 11 million tons of petcoke for global export.
Koch’s thinking is crystallized in a manifesto Charles wrote for the Libertarian Review in the 1970s, recently unearthed by Schulman, titled “The Business Community: Resisting Regulation.”
Charles lays out principles that gird today’s Tea Party movement. Referring to regulation as “totalitarian,” the 41-year-old Charles claimed business leaders had been “hoodwinked” by the notion that regulation is “in the public interest.”
He advocated the “barest possible obedience” to regulation and implored, “Do not cooperate voluntarily, instead, resist whenever and to whatever extent you legally can in the name of justice.”
If you’re like you and me, you have to obey the law. But, if you’re richer than God, you can resist the law, even be convicted of criminal activity, and never spend a day in jail.
Money isn’t bribery; it’s speech. Ask Justice Scalia.
Bill Koch called Charles and David, “the biggest crooks in the oil industry.”
A Senate committee investigating Koch business with Native Americans would describe Koch Oil tactics as “grand larceny.” The Senate committee concluded that over the course of three years Koch “pilfered” $31 million in Native oil.
Stealing is one crime. Destroying the environment is another. But:
Richard Fink, head of Koch Company’s Public Sector and the longtime mastermind of the Koch brothers’ political empire, confessed to The Wichita Eagle in 1994 that Koch could not compete if it actually had to pay for the damage it did to the environment.
Now you know the definition of “compete.”
And be sure to read the section describing how two teenagers, Danielle Smalley and Jason Stone were burned to death by a an explosion in a Koch pipeline — a pipeline that never should have been opened.
Bill Koch said: “Koch Industries has a philosophy that profits are above everything else.” A former Koch manager, Kenoth Whitstine, testified to incidents in which Koch Industries placed profits over public safety.
As one supervisor had told him, regulatory fines “usually didn’t amount to much.” When Whitstine said he was concerned that unsafe pipelines could cause a deadly accident, another manager said that it was more profitable for the company to risk litigation than to repair faulty equipment. The company could “pay off a lawsuit from an incident and still be money ahead.”
What is a human life worth compared with profits? Ask the Koch brothers.
Now nearing 80 – owning a large chunk of the Alberta tar sands and using his billions to transform the modern Republican Party into a protection racket for Koch Industries’ profits – Charles Koch is not about to see the light.
Nor does the CEO of one of America’s most toxic firms have any notion of slowing down. He has made it clear that he has no retirement plans: “I’m going to ride my bicycle till I fall off.”
So long as the punishment costs less than the criminal profits, and there never is jail time involved, a criminal has no reason to stop.
Their political network helped finance the Tea Party and powers today’s GOP.
Koch-affiliated organizations raised some $400 million during the 2012 election, and aim to spend another $290 million to elect Republicans in this year’s midterms.
So far in this cycle, Koch-backed entities have bought 44,000 political ads to boost Republican efforts to take back the Senate.
Now, think about it. Why are people convicted of polluting your air and water, people responsible for the deaths of American children — why are people of that ilk happy to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to elect Republicans?
Is it for your benefit? Will helping the Kochs grow richer and more powerful benefit you and your family?
How did the Kochs get so rich and the rest of you get so poor?
The Kochs are riding your bicycle — and you’re happy to let them.
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 and here)
10. Increase federal spending on the myriad initiatives that benefit America’s 99% (Click here)
The Ten Steps will add dollars to the economy, stimulate the economy, and narrow the income/wealth/power Gap between the rich and the rest.
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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.
1. A growing economy requires a growing supply of dollars (GDP=Federal Spending + Non-federal Spending + Net Exports)
2. All deficit spending grows the supply of dollars
3. The limit to federal deficit spending is an inflation that cannot be cured with interest rate control.
4. The limit to non-federal deficit spending is the ability to borrow.
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 
“How did the Kochs get so rich and the rest of you get so poor?”
I’ll thank the government that we voted into power for that. A mostly democrat government by the way. Republicans? These are nothing but a bunch of charlatans that call themselves conservatives, but are willing to spend the people’s money on making a select few happy for the sake of their own career.
Face it Rodger, being responsible is not going to get you elected. Spending to make a chosen few – will.
Why do you think our labor laws are union friendly despite all these so called conservatives? Why do you think we have a bunch of social programs despite all these right wing “nut jobs” in power. I’ll tell you why.. because they are no conservatives – that’s why.
I’m not sure I’m ready to dump the libertarians next to the Tea Party and the GOP – which pretty much equate to the democrats. I mean, Christie in New Jersey is probably more liberal than Reid.
I’m puzzled that we’ve gotten as far as we have in terms of technology and overall economic growth – we sure have gotten alot stupider as a society. And quite honestly, when Hilary wins – we deserve to get queen/king stupid at that stage.
I don’t know the Koch’s motives – but one thing I can tell you is that the wealthy benefit from a growing economy. This nonsense about the gap is just that – nonsense.
We have much more rich people today than we did 100 years ago, 200 years ago, etc.. and the reason for that is simple – there is more wealth to be had. So the Koch’s have a higher chance of getting even more wealthier if more wealth is created – and they know that. Isn’t that a believable motive? Why not?
Anyway, I love the way you spin this Rodger, “look, the democrats are thieves, but the conservatives are worst”… Amazing that anyone with an IQ over 10 would believe this, but I’m sure you have many followers.
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You don’t know the Koch’s motives??? What was it you said about people with an IQ over 10?
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Lets be careful please, although the Koch’s call themselves libertarians they are anything but!!
They use the state for their own purposes, they use regulations to shield their companies from competition and wrong doing, they gain advantage through tax breaks and pay off politicians to get those tax breaks and favorable regulations.
They may call themselves libertarians and they may have hijacked the tea party but what they do is diametrically opposed to what actual libertarians stand for.
This is called Crony Capitalism, they are As rolling stone oligarchs!
Also lets not confuse what the Koch’s do with privatization or free markets because again it is anything but.
So please don’t just throw out labels because it sounds good and please understand the labels you are using before you toss them out. I am sure you would not want people going around saying that MS can be summed up as that the government can just give people money and every one will be happy and live happily ever after, no one will ever have to work or do anything again…
Anyway I find it interesting, Rodger that you talk about the 1%, like the Koch’s and how they buy off politicians to widen the gap… yet (….and I have not read this in any post and I admit I have only read recent posts so if you have talked about it and I missed it my apologies but maybe you can address this from an MS standpoint)….you seem to put all the responsibility on the 1% and not one ounce on the government ie..the politicians/bureaucrats etc.. as it they were totally blameless… why is that??
For you it is always the politicians being bought off. Do you think the government and politicians are blameless here or that they are solely the pawns in the larger game of the 1% or do you think they are not part of the 1%??
It seems that your sole solution to everything is for the government to spend money on it but with that spending the government becomes more powerful, with more regulations the government becomes ever more powerful, with more programs the government becomes ever more powerful and it also becomes more open to corruption.
And MS never seems to talk about this aspect of it all….Why is that??
The government can and does do good things and MS can advocate for doing good things…ie..your nine steps, at the very least, the intent of the 9 steps is good, but there is also the flip side and this is the flip side of the MS coin.
A government the size of ours with the power it has, its ability to create money at the level it does, regulate as it does, spend as it does and so on.. is ripe for the taking and the abusing it is not just by the %1 but by politicians and bureaucrat, they also need to be held accountable.
Yet as I mentioned you never seem to hold the government accountable it is always the %1 and yet it seems like this is lost on you… that MS or the idea of MS helps to enable all of this.
Or at the least MS not used correctly helps enable this just.
It helps enable the government to spy on US, to undermine through executive order or outright means our constitutional rights, it enables the militarization of our police forces and all the bad that come with it and it allows our government through our foreign policy to maintain basically an empire and to wage wars of aggression that end making a mess of the world….and I could go on.
Now you might say that if they follow your nine steps that this would not happen but that assumes those in charge will follow those 9 Steps or something similar and that the power will not corrupt or that they will be good politicians but and I hate to tell you not everyone is a saint some are but a lot are not!
So maybe would would like to address this from a MS perspective??
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Wow!
Perhaps this one paragraph of yours sums it up:
1. (My “solution to everything”?) Look at the 10 Steps (not 9 Steps) and tell me with which one you disagree.
2. Governments do not become more powerful by spending or by growing larger. That is a myth spread by the Libertarians, Tea Party and Republicans.
That little mayor and sheriff of Podunkville have more power over the lives of their citizens than does the President of the United States.
State and county governments are, as a group, far more crooked than is the federal government.
Often, governments exercise their power over the poor and weak by withholding spending — as the federal government is doing now. Most increases in federal spending would benefit the poor more than the rich (See the 10 Steps), thus empowering the poor.
But, by reducing the deficit, the federal government exercises its power to widen the gap between the rich and the rest.
3. I don’t assume those in charge will follow the 10 Steps. In fact, I assume they will continue to resist following the 10 Steps. Why? They are bribed to resist. So far as I can see, most politicians have two goals: To stay in office as long as possible, and to receive lucrative jobs when they leave office.
To achieve both goals, they rely on the rich.
4. I blame the politicians. I blame them for accepting bribes and doing the bidding of the rich. There are a few — very few — politicians who don’t. Elizabeth Warren is one.
If she runs for President, I’ll vote for her.
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My apologies for saying 9 steps when it is 10 steps.
Also my apologies, at least 5 involve direct spending while 3 are tax cuts/eliminating taxes and 2 I am not sure exactly where they would be classified, for one at least did not follow the link to find out exactly what it entailed.
However I hope you would forgive me for getting the impression that spending is your sole solution. Outside of tax cuts, talking about austerity in some form or another, in the last number of posts along with one or two that have caught my attention that are listed in the left margin, all involve direct spending.
For example there is a post on student loans and how to pay for education. It calls for direct spending which is fine since it is part of your 10 steps.
There is also a post about Ebola part of which argues (although it does not directly say it) that direct federal spending should have been more for more research. Another on Kansas (actually I think it was in the comments section on a different post) basically calls for the federal government to bail out Kansas and then there was a post that caught my eye on the NSA.
Even though you think the NSA was not accomplishing anything you were ok with the government continuing to spend billions on the agency…and there are more ..so again I hope you forgive me for getting that impression.
For Item 4, I appreciate you saying that however it seems that you don’t view the politicians as part of the 1%, which I do. You seem to think…and please correct me if I am wrong, that they are just a pawn’s in the game when they are in fact active participants and although you blame them for doing the bidding of the rich you don’t blame them for being part of the game, being part of the rich/of the 1% and in some cases being the ones doing the bidding rather than just accepting the bids.
Totally agree with #3
For #2 I disagree with and it is not really a myth, except by trying to spin which I know the left often does. In any case I was not really talking about the relative size. Yes a smaller government can be just as corrupt as a larger one and even more so because it is more personal and it is not just overt corruption we are talking about here. In any case two wrongs don’t make a right.
Also what do you think is enabling that little mayor, allowing him to do what he is doing. It is things like asset forfeiture and direct support from the federal government in terms of equipment and training and all that support from the governments ability to spend. If the government did not have the ability to spend, no one would bother!
Things like the NSA, the wars, the spying and the enabling of the Koch brothers, all of it comes about because the government is able to confer benefits either through direct spending or through favorable tax codes or regulations all in one way or another derives from the ability to spend and all of which adds to government power.
So can you really sit there and say that as the government is smaller and less powerful than it was 40 yrs ago or 100 yrs ago. Can you really say that spending is less than it was 10 yrs ago, 30 yrs ago or 100 yrs ago??
Moving on…
As for #1 what items do I disagree with, I would actually have to look at them to see what the details are for example I don’t know if your proposal for free education would mean that the money would be sent directly to the school, to the state or the individual and if there would be any restrictions what education would qualify etc. If I get a chance I will start taking a look at them.
What I would say is I think you need to go all the way in one direction or the other, that is…take healthcare for example (I know this is not your proposal but I am throwing this out there as an example) that we would either have to move toward universal health care (which would not be my choice) or to a actual free market approach. Being in the middle like we are with Obama care is just going to make things worse, maybe not right away but in time it will.
Or for you proposal to increase the standard deduction, again without following the link and knowing the specifics, I think a more comprehensive approach needs to be done…a more comprehensive to approach to simplify taxes all around rather than just tinkering with them and I personally would like to see taxes done away on all income including dividends..but that is neither here nor there.
One other comment, I am not sure how much your aware of possible unintended consequences that might arise from your policies. Again I have not looked at them and no one can know all the outcomes that may occur from a policy but one should at least be aware that there will be unintended consequences from what they are proposing and I get the feeling that you may not even be aware that there will be some which may require further government meddling further on down the line.
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Phew!
Too much to respond to, so I’ll just bottom line:
The biggest problem facing our economy is the growing gap between the rich and the rest. Most federal deficit spending helps close the gap.
A growing economy requires a growing supply of dollars.. Deficit spending grows the supply of dollars, thus helping to grow the economy.
That said, the vast majority of dollars are created by private banks, so a direct relationship between federal deficits and economic growth is not always apparent.
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“Phew! …Too much to respond to, so I’ll just bottom line:”
Plus I probably have a few mangled sentences which you may be scratching your head over trying to figure out….
My point is that whether or not it is true..for this post I am not arguing one way or another…that deficit spending closes the gap …not all spending is good!!
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This Week In Crazy
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”… with more programs the government becomes ever more powerful…”
Hobbs defined power as the present means of achieving a future apparent good. I see nothing wrong with power but I do with interference that denies future apparent good.
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