–The best article yet re. the Presidential race

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Mitchell’s laws:
•Those, who do not understand the differences between Monetary Sovereignty and monetary non-sovereignty, do not understand economics.
•Any monetarily NON-sovereign government — be it city, county, state or nation — that runs an ongoing trade deficit, eventually will run out of money.
•The more federal budgets are cut and taxes increased, the weaker an economy becomes. .
•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 single most important problem in economics is the Gap between rich and poor.
•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.
•Everything in economics devolves to motive, and the motive is the Gap between the rich and the rest..

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It’s early, and so far the lead challengers are Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. That will change, especially on the Republican side, but here is the best article yet, about these three hopefuls.

I didn’t write it. I wish I had. Anis Shivani did.

I’ll give you a few choice paragraphs, but you should read entire article: Fascist Trump, Neoliberal Hillary, and Progressive Bernie: Three Contrasting Performance Styles

Here are a few of Mr. Shivani’s comments about Donald Trump:

Trump’s entire spiel is centered around how they–the immigrants, foreign countries like China and Mexico–have screwed us out of the wealth and prosperity we deserve, and how he, the duly elected strongman will outwit and outmuscle these wily powers.

Trump is a continuous stream-of-consciousness articulator of all the ignorant resentments–against uppity women and gays and African Americans and Hispanics and Asians, against Germany and Japan and Korea whom we still “protect” at great cost without getting anything in return, against Middle Eastern countries whom we strengthen and support at the cost of our only ally Israel.

Trump’s spiel is a compilation of every uninformed, simplistic, and delusional component of the conspiratorial narrative of grievance held by “real” Americans against those who are said to have falsely appropriated the label “American” for themselves.

Trump, like all the ignorant demagogues preceding him, claims that he will clean up this mess and separate the true Americans from the phonies.

For Trump, as for all his fascist predecessors, it is democracy itself which gets in the way of achieving greatness, performing those heroic deeds, for which the tired, weakened, aggrieved nation of true patriots yearns.

It is democracy itself which must be circumvented and sidelined. Except in the case of Trump, it is not Middle Eastern domination or the end to terror worldwide that he’s after, but simply negotiating better deals with China and Mexico.

Consider the originator of fascism, Mussolini, and notice the remarkable similarities between his and Trump’s performances: the same supercilious mockery of democrats, journalists, liberals, human rights campaigners, do-gooders; the same puerile postures and gestures, hard to imagine on a national stage except that it is actually happening; the same denial of past history and present circumstances in favor of creating a brand-new reality in accordance with the wishes of the adoring masses; the same preening self-admiration as the hero who alone embodies the wishes of the outwitted, outmaneuvered, outgunned people and will lead them to salvation; the same identification of nation with leader, until Mussolini (or Trump) becomes the nation, until the nation is unimaginable without him as its singular reincarnation.

In short, Trump is a nascent fascist, and the people who cheer for him are the same people who cheered for Hitler and Mussolini — the haters, the bigots, the morally depraved and mentally weak, the blamers and finger pointers, the useless additions to a raving crowd — people who want to believe that making America great requires, in some unexplained way, ripping 11 million men, women and children from their homes and shipping them out of the country.

And now a few of Mr. Shivani’s comments about Hillary Clinton:

Hillary wants to continue the necessary segregation between real and fake Americans as assiduously as Trump–Hillary wants to give a chance at a better school, a bigger home, an entrepreneurial venture, a path forward in the professional world.

Except that Hillary is not actually going to do a single thing for them; as she has explained in campaign speeches, these are the (righteous) folks who “fought their way back” on their own and pulled themselves up by the bootstraps during the economic crisis.

They’re not the ones who needed to be bailed out from unsustainable mortgage or student loan debt–Bernie’s people–they are the ones who made it. Every one of the people in her (introductory campaign) commercial smacks of liberal virtue, having paid their dues and followed every little rule on the path to success.

(She uses) the same empty rhetoric about “fighting” for the middle-class and wanting to be the president of “all” Americans, not just “the few.” She even wants to work across the aisle to keep us “safe” from terror, that’s one of her four fights; and there’s even “reinventing government.”

She who, along with her husband, jettisoned core Democratic principles such as single-payer health care, gave in to right-wing discourse on every single social policy, and gutted the New Deal and Great Society consensus on education, taxes, budgets, welfare, immigration, telecommunications, crime, banking, and trade, now wants to “fight” on behalf of the very people whose decimation is associated with Clintonism even more than with Reaganism.

And she offers not a single policy prescription of substance, besides platitudes about rewarding hard work and playing by the rules (just as her husband did).

Had she not left such a complete vacuum of policy and failed to address the real economic misery out there, there would have been no opening for Trump or other extremists.

In short, Clinton is a go-along, do-nothing, riding on her name, and with no ideas for helping those who need help or for growing the economy or for strengthening America or for doing anything else positive you can think of.

Her message: “If you work hard or marry well (for instance, marry a President), you will do fine. But if you are poor, it’s because you are lazy, so don’t ask me to help you, because helping you only will make you lazier.”

And finally, a few of Mr. Shivani’s comments about Bernie Sanders:

Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, offers specific policies–not just rhetoric–on each and every economic and social crisis that Hillary mentions and then sidelines in fuzzy words.

Before Clintonism demolished core Democratic principles, as in the endorsement of privatized health care, rather than the single-payer Medicare-type health care Bernie advocates, all of Bernie’s prescriptions used to be mainstream liberal aspirations.

He wants free higher education (which more or less used to be the case anyway for most students before rapid tuition inflation put paid to that in the last generation or two), a $15 minimum wage (already that figure is becoming outdated), and Medicare for all.

While I regret the element of economic nationalism that has crept into progressive thinking and feel sorry about the loss of faith in trade and globalization and openness in favor of a hunkered-down protectionism, this is something that infects the entire left, and is a legacy of the flawed inception of globalization in the Clinton years.

The only way to find our way back is to make ours a more humane society, with exactly the kind of redistribution downward that Bernie is talking about, so that a freer, more open, more trusting world can once again emerge on the horizon.

In that sense, I have total empathy with Bernie and his rhetoric (compared with) the perverted economic nationalism of Trump, rooted in white supremacy and a xenophobic victimization that has no basis in reality given our unparalleled national wealth and resources.

So there we have it, the style we need and deserve (Bernie’s, offering not just hollow words that have had all the meaning rubbed out of them after a generation of Clinton-Bush-Obama neoliberalism, but real solutions for real problems), versus Trump’s inverted populism, or fascism if you like to use that language (imagine every sane proposal offered by Bernie turned on its head, so it becomes a privatized, ruthless, brutal policy benefiting the rich even more than they already do, because after all we can all aspire to become rich like Trump).

O.K., it’s a commercial for Bernie Sanders, but a commercial with a great deal of fundamental truth: Donald Trump IS a rich fascist, whose empathy is for people like him, the rich, and who sneers at the poor and middle class, all of whom are “losers.”

Hillary Clinton IS a phony, who admires those who have “made it,” but will do absolutely nothing for those who need the government’s helping hand, because really, how much will they pay her for speeches?

Bernie Sanders IS a liberal who will lift the bottom and middle, and close the Gap between the rich and the rest.

I always felt Joe Biden’s entry into the race was imminent once Hillary persisted in her vacuous campaign–running on a platform of absolutely nothing substantive.

The establishment narrative has it that Biden is the Democratic party’s insurance policy in case Hillary implodes due to scandal.

But I rather think that Hillary desperately wants Biden in the race–just as the Clintons injected Wesley Clark as the attack dog in the 2004 campaign to scramble the equation and put Howard Dean on the defensive and eventually doom him–because she has no capacity to go one-on-one in debates against Bernie.

I suspect Trump will see his numbers decline, as people grow tired of the same old entertainment, and in a fit of desperation, Trump either will join the Republicans or create his own political party, which will be called “TRUMP” in great big letters.

I don’t know who the Republicans will nominate — the entire crop is lame — but my WAG (Wild Ass Guess) is Marco Rubio, who has as much qualification to be President as I have to be Pope — but he’s a Latino, and if you add Latinos to bigots and the selfish religious (religion and its love of God now having been turned on its head to personify mean, cruel selfishness and hatred), you can get quite a few votes.

I suspect Clinton will receive the Democratic nomination from the Powers That Be, because she is a charter member of the club, not for any plans, ideas, goals or leadership, as she has none.

Personally, I wish Elizabeth Warren were running, but caring about the poor, the unempowered and the needy is not stylish in today’s “me-first, me-last, me-only” environment.

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

Recessions come after the blue line drops below zero.

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