–The single biggest reason labor unions struggle.

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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American labor unions should enjoy the sympathy and backing of the American public. Unions are “for” the common worker, “for” higher wages, “for” better working conditions and “against” the rich. What could be wrong with that?

Why then, has union membership declined?

Bureau of Labor Statistics
In 2012, the union membership rate–the percent of wage and salary workers who were members of a union–was 11.3 percent, down from 11.8 percent in 2011. The number of wage and salary workers belonging to unions, at 14.4 million, also declined over the year.

In 1983, the first year for which comparable union data are available, the union membership rate was 20.1 percent, and there were 17.7 million union workers.

Many reasons have been offered for this decline, not the least of which has been notorious, rampant greed and dishonesty among union leadership. Additionally:

Why Has Union Membership Declined?
UC Berkeley’s Claude Fischer

-American workers did not need to organize because they flourished without unions;
-American workers were divided by ethnicity and race in ways European workers were not;
-employers in the United States were unusually powerful … and got governments to crack down on unions (the notorious cases involve state governors using the National Guard to break strikes);
-the American dream of self-employment distracted workers;
-the American electoral system prevented a labor party from growing;
-Americans’ individualism led them to reject collective action;
-Unions face critical “free-rider” problems if membership is totally voluntary. For example, I could benefit from the union’s effort to improve working conditions at my workplace without paying dues

There may be one reason that transcends all. The reason is hinted at in the following excerpts from a post on the AFL-CIO’s own blog.

How Corporations Use Offshore Havens to Avoid Paying Their Taxes
04/24/2013 Kenneth Quinnell

Current laws in the United States allow corporations to use offshore havens to avoid paying their taxes and, if it’s up to many in Washington, the problem will only grow larger.

Tax laws encourage the offshoring of America’s jobs, which has led to the hollowing out of the middle class.

The United States has the third-lowest effective corporate tax burden in the world. Corporate taxation as a share of total tax revenue was 26.4% in 1950 and was down to 7.4% in 2010.
Personal income, Social Security and Medicare taxes were 51.4% of total tax revenue in 1950, now they are up to 83.4%.

Congress is now proposing lowering corporate taxes even more.

See the problem? Rather than demanding reductions in domestic taxes, AFL-CIO believes all corporations – including those organizations that hire and pay union members’ salaries – should pay more taxes.

If AFL-CIO is saying federal tax laws are bad, I agree. If AFL-CIO is saying people pay too high a percentage of their income in taxes, I also agree. But will raising domestic taxes make American businesses more competitive, or encourage American businesses to hire more people, or increase union membership, or benefit union members? No.

Historically, unions have favored employee inefficiency as a way to increase payrolls. (One example: Unions in Chicago’s convention center, McCormick Place, demanded even the most trivial tasks be performed by union members, then charged exorbitant rates. Only when conventions threatened to go elsewhere, did the unions relent.)

McCormick Place union deal reap rewards: Trade show, hotel work
Chicago Sun Times
Fran Spielman, City Hall Reporter

Newly-negotiated union concessions at McCormick Place paid quick dividends on Friday when a major trade show locked in for 2013 and 2015, and a major hotel chain authorized $125 million in renovations.

The union concessions will create an “exhibitors bill of rights” that lets show managers and exhibitors set up their own booths with simple tools.

Exhibitors also can drive and unload their own vehicles at McCormick Place, and union work can be done by two-person crews instead of the old three-person minimum.

The overall result: More work for union members, and not just in the convention center.

For understandable, historical reasons, unions indoctrinate their membership to be anti-business. The focus has been on maximizing employment and wages, rather than on increasing business health, which as a result. would help maximize employment.

It’s as though there were the belief, “the more difficult we make life for businesses, the more people they will hire.”

Not that businesses are innocent. On the contrary, unions exist because businesses exploited workers. But unions are fighting a losing battle.

In this Supreme Court, “Citizens United” world, where corporations have the same rights as people, and can bribe politicians as much as they wish, business simply has too much money and firepower for the unions.

The salvation of the union movement will be in adopting a willingness to help American business be more competitive, rather than asking all business to pay higher taxes, and hoping that will result in salary increases.

Better that the unions should demonstrate their value to businesses by standing shoulder to shoulder with them, and demanding that Congress reduce or eliminate business taxes.

No, cooperation won’t guarantee all businesses will become union-friendly. But cooperation will be more productive than contention for both sides. Unions should assist in efforts to make union members better trained, more willing, more productive workers, rather than exhibiting a “do-the-least, demand-the-most” attitude.

Unions should reward the union-friendly companies and save the contention for those individual companies that truly deserve it. American unions need healthy American companies. The union leaders should ask, “What are we doing, and what can we do, to nourish the goose that lays our golden eggs?”

Message to unions: If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. And; you can’t beat ‘em. So, learn Monetary Sovereignty and learn the reasons WHY federal business taxes and personal taxes can and should be cut.

Learn how to feed the goose so the goose can feed you.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty

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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

Is this the end of austerity and the beginning of “We always knew it”?

HOW MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY BEGAN
Sometime in 1993, for reasons unknown, the words of a former teacher — I believe a high school teacher — rose to my conscious memory: “All money is debt.” Perhaps way back then, I had been reading about America’s “unsustainable” debt growth as being a “ticking time bomb.”

I recall wondering why, if debt growth really were unsustainable and a ticking time bomb, how were we able to sustain it for so many years, and why hadn’t that old bomb exploded by now. The mystery would be explained if my teacher were correct, that indeed, all money is debt.

Money is sustainable and surely not a ticking time bomb.

So I thought and thought — for three years I thought –and jotted down my thoughts. By 1996, those jottings turned into a book titled, “THE ULTIMATE AMERICA — UNLIMITED POWER AND TOTAL CONTROL.

The book’s final words were:

I wrote the Ultimate America, because I believe the country is in danger of making the most terrible mistake of its economic life — the drive toward a balanced budget. My hope is that you will see the same danger I do, and will contact your friends, relatives and especially your representatives in Congress, to help them see the danger, too.

If enough of us understand the problems and the solutions, our precious country may be saved. That is what I believe.

It was my original writing on Monetary Sovereignty, though I didn’t use the term at that time. What I see now as predictable, I wasn’t able to find a publisher. So I self-published and sent free copies of the book to everyone in Congress and to hundreds of media writers and business people.

Back then, I believed the truth alone would save America. I didn’t yet understand the motive.

A year later, I edited THE ULTIMATE AMERICA, and the result was FREE MONEY, PLAN FOR PROSPERITY. It ends with these words:

A growing economy must have a growing supply of money.
The federal government is the only U.S. entity that can create an unlimited amount of money.
Therefore, the federal government can and should end its borrowing and taxing, and very simply, create the money needed to grow our economy.

By 2009, realizing that a few thousand books would not make a dent in the public’s mindset, I began this blog, trying to reach more people with the message.

As FREE MONEY also couldn’t find a publisher, I again had decided to self-publish, and in addition to giving copies away, sell it on Amazon. In 2010, someone at the University of Missouri, Kansas City bought and read FREE MONEY. I was invited to speak before one of Randy Wray’s classes. You can read the full text of the talk, here.

I flew down there, gave the talk, and only later that evening, at dinner with Randy and others, did I discover I was not alone. I never had heard of Warren Mosler’s Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), and sincerely believed my talk would be ill-received. I was shocked that people actually agreed with me, a rare experience.

In short, my invention had been preceded.

By 2010, though I agreed with virtually all of MMT’s economic descriptions, and most of its recommendations, I began to discover enough differences (especially regarding the need for taxes, the prevention of inflation and the cure for unemployment) that I decided to differentiate my “invention” by giving it the name, “Monetary Sovereignty” (MS).

WHERE WE ARE NOW

For many years, I had agreed with MMT that the problem we faced was one of ignorance, and if only we could phrase our beliefs in ever simple enough terms, politicians, economists, the media and the people eventually would “get it.”

Though we were right about the people — theirs really is a problem of ignorance — it was a great conceit on my part to believe that of the President of the United States, every member of Congress, every member of the Counsel of Economic Advisers, every mainstream economist and media writer — every single one of them — not one was bright enough to understand what I understood: The clear and obvious facts of Monetary Sovereignty and the disaster of austerity.

Even were I vain enough to believe I’m smarter than most of them, I knew no one should think of himself as smarter than everyone. No, it couldn’t be ignorance that separated those who understood MS from those who seemingly didn’t.

It couldn’t be ignorance that had virtually everyone claiming the debt and deficit were too large and that by some magical mathematics, austerity would grow our economy. It had to be something else.

I asked myself, “Who benefits from austerity,” and the answer came: The upper .1% income group — the super rich — benefits, because deficit reduction invariably involves reducing programs that benefit the middle- and lower-income classes.

The rich are not rich because the have a lot of money. They are rich because they have a lot more money than the rest of us.

It is the gap that makes them rich. Without the gap, no one would be rich, and the wider the gap, the richer the rich are.

It instantly became clear that the super-rich were bribing the politicians (via campaign contributions and promises of lucrative employment, later), the media (via ownership) and the economists (via contributions to universities, ownership of the publications in which economists needed to publish and lucrative employment).

The rich were bribing all the opinion-makers, who in turn were brainwashing to public into believing that something that never worked, and by definition cannot work, somehow not only worked but was necessary and prudent.

Early this year, I began to discuss this bribery (which was amplified by the right-wing, Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United decision), and ever so slowly, ever so tentatively and reluctantly, MMT writers have begun to join in.

I also wrote how the media, the economists and the politicians eventually would tell the world that austerity is a bad idea, and how they knew it all the time.

And it has begun:

Washington Post
Austerity doctrine is exposed as flimflam
By Katrina vanden Heuvel, Published: April 23

The austerity claque got it wrong. And the harsh bill is being paid by millions of Americans and millions more in Europe in jobs lost, homes foreclosed, families split apart, hopes crushed.

They can’t repay the costs of their folly. We don’t really need an apology. But could they at least get out of the way so we could get on with the jobs programs that we should have undertaken years ago?

Austerity has been tried and found wanting in practice. Instead of expansion and growth, Europe has been driven back into recession. With Britain’s credit rating downgraded, its economy contracting, its unemployment rolls soaring, its debts rising, three years of rosy forecasts shredded, Tory Chancellor George Osborne’s tears at the lavish funeral for Margaret Thatcher may well have been for the burial of his own reputation.

The IMF, once a bastion of austerity economics, has admitted its errors, warning that austerity is now sabotaging recovery.

So, will the “Fix the Debt” austerity claque, the Republican Tea Party Caucus and McConnell get out of the way so the president and Democrats can pass jobs programs to put people to work?

Don’t count on it. As the case for austerity was eviscerated, Simpson and Bowles came out with yet another austerity plan, once more calling for urgent reforms to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits in order to avoid economic collapse.

Sadly, austerity’s reign of misery continues, even as it has been demolished in theory and practice. We will be freed of austerity’s grip only when those in power return to common sense, fact-based politics and when we hear much more from the unemployed and the immiserated and much less from bankers and their favored economists.

Welcome, Katrina. Hope you don’t get fired.

And then there’s this lift from the previous post’s comments:

Austerity as a bridge to nowhere
By Eugene Robinson, Published: May 7, 2012

Economic austerity is a dangerous, self-defeating intellectual fad. Perhaps I should say that’s what it was, given Sunday’s election results in Europe. Perhaps I should also say good riddance.

Voters in France, Greece and even Germany — a hotbed of the austerity cult — told their political leaders, in no uncertain terms, that boosting economic growth is more important than cutting government spending. Here in the United States, I hope that Democrats, at least, were paying attention; I fear that the addled ideologues who control the Republican Party will never get the message.

One obviously bad option would have been to withdraw from the euro, default on a mountain of debt and slowly climb back from a deep economic depression. Officials in Athens decided to go with a worse option — stay with the euro, impose draconian austerity, muzzle anyone who utters the word “default” — that also sent the country into a deep economic depression with no apparent way out.

What? Could it be that some columnists, chafing under the iron rule of their publishers, actually are ready to speak the truth? (Although withdrawing from the euro would not require default, the truth is here. Right?) Well, sort of:

That loud chorus of “Duh!” you just heard came from the many leading economists who have been screaming at political leaders for years now that we’ll never cut our way out of this economic slump and instead must grow our way out. It is obvious that deficits, debt loads and entitlement spending have to be brought under control — but equally obvious that the necessary adjustments should be made when the economy is going great guns, not when it’s gasping for air.

It’s the TRUTH that is gasping for air. Suddenly “many leading economists” have been saying it “for years now.” (“Many” means about half dozen, mostly from UMKC. I’ve been saying it for almost 20 years, but my voice has been a tiny squeak, while standing next to a roaring jet engine built by Koch, Peterson et al.)

We seem to have arrived at the segue where:
1. Austerity is good and necessary
2. No, wait. Austerity is good, but it’s bad right now. It’ll be good later.
3. No, wait. Austerity is bad today and bad tomorrow, and we always knew it.

Someone tell Obama. He’s still stuck at #1.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty

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#MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY

The Plan: How the rich intentionally poison you, your children and your unborn generations

What if you learned the upper .1% income group – the world’s super-rich – had entered a chemical into the economy that will degrade your physical and mental abilities – and not just yours, but your children’s your grandchildren’s — innocents not yet born?

All your future generations are being made physically and mentally weaker. The rich alone have the antidote, so they are not affected. The Plan: To increase the super-rich’s power over you, making you and all your descendants permanently impaired slaves.

Would this make you angry?

Incredibly, it’s happening, and that “chemical” is called “austerity.”

On April 10th, we published: Epigenetics: How Today’s Austerity Can Degrade Humanity, Forever

Shortly after that article was posted, we read this:

Cost of cuts: Austerity’s toxic genetic legacy
by Andy Coghlan, NewScientist.

Here are a few, pertinent excerpts:

From financial breakdown in Portugal to the UK’s so-called bedroom tax, the harsh effects of austerity measures are hitting people in ways unseen in decades.

New insights into how genes linked with disease are triggered in times of stress suggest that we should be paying attention to the long-term effects of austerity on our health.

The more immediate health impacts of economic cuts — suicides in Europe have soared since the financial crash in 2008. Likewise, the incidence of mental health disorders has increased in countries worst hit by debt crises, such as Greece and Spain.

Greece has also seen a surge in HIV infections among intravenous drug users, from about 15 per year before 2010 to 314 in 2012. Some people in Greece are even suspected of purposefully infecting themselves with HIV to obtain healthcare otherwise unavailable as a result of budget cuts.

Austerity, which everywhere is imposed and defended by the rich, has led to suicide and self-mutilation, while the people, in their ignorance, defend austerity as necessary and even therapeutic.

But there are more subtle, and just as concerning, effects on health. Psychological stress leads to long-lasting changes in genes that trigger chronic inflammation (which) can raise the risk of heart attacks, depression and even cancer.

Our genes may be partly responsible for links between financial crises and health,” says George Slavich of the University of California at Los Angeles, a co-author of the review (Clinical Psychological Science, doi.org/k4f). A 2006 study in the Netherlands covering the years 1815 to 2000 showed that generations born during recessions have abnormally high rates of early death.

During stressful events, the brain and other parts of the central nervous system flood the body with stress hormones such as cortisol. These activate cell surface receptors that instruct the cell to switch on genes that stoke inflammation.

There is more and more research showing the effects of prenatal stress on the long-term development of children. It’s likely that if people are feeling more stressed because of austerity, unemployment and so on, it will have a damaging effect on the next generation.

It is very likely that austerity can have persistent effects across generations,” (says) Isabelle Mansuy of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, who has previously demonstrated that the effects of stress can be passed down through three generations of mice.

Austerity is no accident. It is deliberate. It is The Plan by the upper .1% to create a permanent underclass, an everlasting breed of menials, who obediently will do as they are told, because they neither have the wit nor the means to do otherwise.

The Plan: Force people to labor endlessly, by reducing and delaying their retirement funds. Force people to plead for medical care, by reducing health care options. Force children into brain and body-damaging starvation by reducing aids to the impoverished.

Make the people come, with begging cups in hand, and they will do and believe anything and everything they are told.

Look around you. Access to Social Security slowly is being delayed from 65 years to who knows when? Access to healthcare is diminished as underpaid doctors switch to boutique plans, requiring uninsured annual payments.

Medicare supplemental plans have become more expensive. Unemployment and homelessness have become the norm. The costs of college education have grown. The quality of basic public education is disgraceful. Only the rich are immune.

And while austerity has had no historical benefit anywhere in the world, the people believe what the rich tell them, and even argue for more and more deprivation.

Keeping privatisation in check appears vital. David Stuckler at the University of Oxford says that death rates increased significantly during a period of rapid mass privatisation in Russia in the 1990s. Half of all factories were privatised practically overnight and death rates doubled as a result of unemployment and heavy drinking. In Belarus, where privatisation was implemented more gradually, death rates edged up only slightly.

Stuckler says that the paths chosen by Iceland, Finland and Sweden may demonstrate a healthier way of dealing with an economic crisis.

Unlike many other countries, their governments decided to let banks fail post-2008, rather than bailing them out. They then nationalised all of them, restricting the banks’ risky investment activities. They also retained all health and welfare budgets, as opposed to cutting them back, and introduced schemes to retrain and redeploy sacked workers.

The “small government” myth is part of The Plan. Brainwashing has induced the populace to believe the private sector is better at everything than the public sector. So people are left to purchase from private industry, what the government easily could and should give them: Health care, financial security, food, basic housing, education, anti-poverty measures. By using the epithet, “socialism,” to describe every government effort, the rich have convinced the populace to reject needed benefits.

And then there are taxes. FICA is a monster, regressive, 15% tax on middle-income salaries — only up to $113,700 for 2013. The rich not only don’t notice such a tax, but they don’t receive salaries at high tax rates. They receive capital gains, dividends and interest at sheltered rates. Who devised the tax code? The rich.

Austerity, by destroying an economy, causes greater deficits, which in turn cause an increasing call for more austerity, in an endless economic death spiral. Austerity is no secret. Its negative effects are not hidden from you. I have no special inside knowledge that allows me to reveal all this to you. The damage is obvious, plain to see everywhere in the world.

Meanwhile the U.S., which never can run short of dollars, and so has no need whatsoever for deficit cutting, has implemented austerity. The super-rich bribe Congress, bribe the President, own the newspapers, own the TV stations, and financially support the universities and college professors, so that all tell you austerity is needed — more and ever more austerity.

If you accept this, it is you who are complicit in the super-rich’s enslavement of your progeny. It is you who have given consent to The Plan.

If poisoning your children and grandchildren doesn’t make you angry, what will?

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty

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#MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY

–Why this treachery from AARP, the “protector of the elderly”?

An Email we just received from AARP (the insurance broker that passes itself off as the voice for the upper age groups) contained this:

Now that President Obama has sent his 2014 budget proposal to Congress, three blueprints for the nation’s fiscal future are on the table.

Here are the three (and only three) plans AARP says are “on the table:”

See anything missing?

Right, AARP doesn’t even mention the possibility of debt increases.

Why doesn’t AARP acknowledge that federal debt reduction (aka “austerity”) always is economically destructive, and has been destructive everywhere in the world it has been tried, and is especially destructive of AARP’s membership, the elderly?

Why doesn’t AARP mention that austerity has failed in Greece, failed in Italy, failed in Cyprus, failed all over the eurozone, even failed in Scotland and England, failed everywhere — and is failing in the U.S.?

Why doesn’t AARP discuss the damage caused by removing dollars from the economy? Why do they simply parrot the upper .1%’s mantra that the federal government debt is “unsustainable” and the government must “live within its means.”

Why doesn’t AARP acknowledged the differences between Monetary Sovereignty and monetary non-sovereignty?

Why doesn’t AARP tell its members the truth — that austerity has failed and always must fail, because austerity removes dollars from an economy, which causes recessions and depressions?

Why doesn’t AARP tell its members that the upper .1% income group wants austerity to punish the lower income groups, widening the gap between the rich and the rest.

Why? Because AARP is a big insurance brokerage, owned, controlled and funded by the rich, whose primary goal is to widen that gap, which gives them more power over the middle and lower-classes.

AARP does not represent the elderly. It represents the very rich.

The .1% have bought the Senate, bought the House, bought Obama, bought many so-called “think tanks” and lobbyists. They own much of the media and are buying more. (The Kochs reportedly are trying to buy the Chicago Tribune’s stable of papers).

The rich own AARP, too.

In years to come, when all the “Whys” have been asked and answered, AARP will be remembered for its treachery.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty

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#MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY

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