–How austerity could kill you and your family: Bird flu

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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Several posts in this blog (“You never will know what you have lost” I, II, III and IV) have described the many invisible costs to you and your loved ones of deficit reduction (aka “austerity).

An article in the May 6, 2013 issue of NewScientist Magazine, tells how one bit of deficit reduction could kill you. Here are a few excerpts:

Why we are sitting ducks for China’s bird flu
by Debora MacKenzie

The Strategic Health Operations Centre (SHOC) at the World Health Organization in Geneva is like a war room for diseases. On a screen I could see a count of flu cases, now topping 100 – more in two months than the long-feared H5N1 bird flu racks up in two years.

Last week WHO flu chief Keiji Fukuda described H7N9 as “an unusually dangerous virus for humans” and “definitely one of the most lethal influenza viruses we have seen so far“.

H7N9 is a blend of bird flu viruses that has acquired a few mutations adapting it to infect people. The worry now is that as H7N9 sporadically infects people, it might be acquiring the mutations it needs to go on the rampage.

Maybe we’ll get lucky and find that H7N9 can’t acquire those mutations and cut loose in mammals. But if it can, killing and vaccinating poultry and preventing human infections won’t stop a pandemic strain emerging. It will only slow it down.

When that happens, we will need vaccine.

Oh dear. In the 2009 pandemic, vaccine arrived too late in the US to reach many people in the second wave – and many countries got none at all. Luckily, that flu was relatively mild.

Most vaccine is still made by growing flu virus laboriously in chicken eggs, which takes six months – if you’re lucky. A few new factories that grow virus in cell cultures instead can expand production more readily, but are no quicker.

And commercial factories won’t switch from ordinary flu vaccine to H7N9 until a pandemic is imminent. By then it will be too late.

As for antiviral drugs, normal supply doesn’t meet pandemic demand and cannot be ramped up quickly. The US ran short this year just from worse-than-usual winter flu.

What does this have to do with deficit reduction? Read on:

There are several promising new technologies able to churn out vast quantities of pandemic vaccine quickly. But R&D funding has been limited. Only one is licensed, and for ordinary flu, not pandemic. It has one small manufacturing plant. None of the rest has even had a large-scale trial of its vaccines in people.

The U.S. government, which has the unlimited ability to create its sovereign currency, the dollar, instead intentionally and for no good reason, has cut back on dollar production. One of the first things to go: Research and development that your save your life and the lives of your loved ones.

It could have been so different. After H5N1 appeared in 2004, or after the 2009 pandemic, we could have launched a major global programme to develop and test those technologies, modelled on the government-private sector partnerships that develop treatments for other unprofitable diseases such as TB. We didn’t.

Why didn’t we? I’ll give you the answer in one word: Money — or the lack thereof.

Maybe if we start now, and slow the virus down, we will have enough time. Chances are low, but if we don’t even try they are zero.

As it stands, the WHO’s top brass will watch any H7N9 pandemic unfold from the SHOC. Information will flood in; body counts will mount. Governments will be told that their demands for vaccines and drugs cannot be met. The SHOC will issue declarations, hold briefings, organise research, tell people to wash their hands and stay home. Mostly, though, it will just watch helplessly.

Buy the magazine and read the article in full. These few excerpts do not convey the full horror of what we face.

You may die. Your parents may die. Your brothers and sisters may die. Your children may die. The world’s economies may die. All you know may wither and die. Unnecessarily die.

So, remind me again: Why exactly are you more afraid of deficits than of you and your loved ones dying?

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:
1. Federal Deficits – Net Imports = Net Private Savings
2. Gross Domestic Product = Federal Spending + Private Investment and Consumption – Net Imports

#MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY

–How the rich brainwash the rest, in America and in Texas

After each of the following articles, we ask you a question. Can you achieve a perfect Texas score?

CPSC Sues Star Networks USA Over Hazardous, High-Powered Magnetic Balls and Cubes

Magnets that attract through the walls of intestines result in progressive tissue injury. Such conditions can lead to infection, sepsis, and death.

There are regulations against selling these dangerous balls. But, the regulations failed to prevent their sale and serious resultant human damage. Shall we eliminate these burdensome regulations?

Salmonella Outbreak Linked to Las Vegas Restaurant

The outbreak was linked to Firefly, a tapas restaurant. Health officials say the restaurant will remain closed until the investigation is complete. The restaurant was also cited for more than 40 health violations.

Health regulations failed to prevent the spread of salmonella. Shall we eliminate such burdensome regulations?

Compounding pharmacy death toll continues to rise

Now at 51 dead across the country, the latest fatality related to the New England Compounding Center occurred in Florida in the past week.

Although senators soon began studying changes to federal law, fierce opposition from the compounding industry killed those reform attempts.

Current regulations failed. Shall we soften the burdensome regulations already in place?

How Wells Fargo Cheated Its Customers

In a harshly worded decision issued late Tuesday afternoon, a federal judge in California ruled that Wells Fargo deliberately manipulated customer transactions in order to trigger overdraft fees. The bank was ordered to pay $230 million in restitution.

Regulation failed to prevent rampant bank cheating. Are banks too heavily regulated?

Stampede at packed Chicago nightclub leaves 21 dead

At least 21 people were killed and 57 injured in the stampede early Monday at the crowded E2 nightclub. As many as 500 people were crammed into the second-floor club when someone sprayed Mace or pepper spray to quell a fight about 2 a.m.

A judge had ordered the owners to close their second-floor club last July because of safety violations, including failure to provide enough exits.

Regulations failed to prevent nightclub deaths and injuries. Should those burdensome regulations be eliminated?

Whalen Furniture to Pay $725,000 Civil Penalty for Failing to Report Defective Children’s Beds

Toddler Died When Lid of Bed’s Toy Chest Fell on Him

Regulation failed. Is this a case of over-regulation?

Parents of Kids Killed in Pool Drain Accidents Outraged By Federal Rethink of Safety Law

The mother of a six-year-old who died in 2007, sent an angry letter to the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) after that agency recently voted to interpret the 2007 Pool Safety Act to no longer require back-up anti-entrapment systems in as many as 150,000 public and hotel pools and hot tubs.

In one horrific instance, four adult men were unable to pull a young girl from the grasp of a deadly drain. Swimmers can die from drowning or evisceration.

Should swimming pools be deregulated?

All of the above describe illegal acts by businesses, cutting corners to make an extra buck. All of the above describe failures of regulation, that resulted in deaths and serious illness. Is the solution to eliminate regulations? Does corporate profit trump the lives and health of ordinary people?

If you live in Texas, your answer is, “Yes.”

After Plant Explosion, Texas Remains Wary of Regulation

Asked about the disaster, Governor Rick. Perry responded that more government intervention and increased spending on safety inspections would not have prevented what has become one of the nation’s worst industrial accidents in decades.

Last month’s devastating blast did little to shake local skepticism of government regulations. Tommy Muska, the mayor, echoed Governor Perry in the view that tougher zoning or fire safety rules would not have saved his town. “Monday morning quarterbacking,” he said.

“Monday morning quarterbacking” also known as “learning from your mistakes,” is a process apparently alien in Texas.

Texas is the only state that does not require companies to contribute to workers’ compensation coverage. It boasts the largest city in the country, Houston, with no zoning laws. It does not have a state fire code, and it prohibits smaller counties from having such codes.

But Texas has also had the nation’s highest number of workplace fatalities — more than 400 annually — for much of the past decade. Fires and explosions at Texas’ more than 1,300 chemical and industrial plants have cost as much in property damage as those in all the other states combined for the five years ending in May 2012.

Compared with Illinois, which has the nation’s second-largest number of high-risk sites, more than 950, but tighter fire and safety rules, Texas had more than three times the number of accidents, four times the number of injuries and deaths, and 300 times the property damage costs.

In order to appease business, Texas is willing to sacrifice workers’ lives. The rich have been able to convince voters that “real” Texans shouldn’t ask for help from the government (unless it’s tax breaks for the wealthy).

In Texas, it’s a matter of pride to be ground under by the upper .1% income group.

“The Wild West approach to protecting public health and safety is what you get when you give companies too much economic freedom and not enough responsibility and accountability,” said Thomas O. McGarity, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law and an expert on regulation.

Since the accident, some state lawmakers began calling for increased workplace safety inspections to be paid for by businesses. Fire officials are pressing for stricter zoning rules to keep residences farther away from dangerous industrial sites. But those efforts face strong resistance.

Chuck DeVore, the vice president of policy at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative study group, said that the wrong response to the explosion would be for the state to hire more “battalions of government regulators who are deployed into industry and presume to know more about running the factory than the people who own the factory and work there every day.”

See, it’s like this. Factory owners know more than regulators, so regulations should be eliminated. We can trust those factory owners to protect workers and customers. Right?

Texas is dotted by more than 700 fertilizer depots. A fire code would have required frequent inspections by fire marshals who might have prohibited the plant’s owner from storing the fertilizer just hundreds of feet from a school, a hospital, a railroad and other public buildings.

A fire code also would probably have mandated sprinklers and forbidden the storage of ammonium nitrate near combustible materials. (Investigators say the fertilizer was stored in a largely wooden building near piles of seed, one possible factor in the fire.)

Ah, who cares about schools, hospitals, railroads and the public. There’s money to be made, and regulations just get in the way.

From the freewheeling days of independent oilmen known as wildcatters to the 2012 presidential race, in which President Obama lost Texas by nearly 1.3 million votes, the state’s pro-business, limited-government mantra has been a vital part of its identity.

That is particularly true in the countryside. “In rural Texas,” said Stephen T. Hendrick, the engineer for McLennan County, where the explosion occurred, “no one votes for regulations.”

The upper .1% income group has brainwashed the lower 99.9% into believing benefits like Social Security, Medicare et al should be reduced. But the Texas rich take it even further. Here, the upper .1% has brainwashed the population into believing the Texas myth of self-sufficiency.

Enriching business owners at the cost of ordinary people’s lives and health – that is a sign of Texas manhood. Regulations are for sissies, not for real cowboys. Money and bullets is all the regulation they need.

In America, and especially in Texas, the unnecessary deaths, sicknesses and misery of ordinary people are no burden. Government is the real burden. Cut Social Security. Cut Medicare. Cut aid to the poor and the middle classes. Cut regulations that protect ordinary people.

Ask any rich businessman.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty

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#MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY

–Shame and greed: The ongoing legacy of a President. Another voice heard.

After you’ve read this, Barack Obama and the Chicago way, read this: Obama Did It for the Money, Posted on May 7, 2013, By Robert Scheer

Here are a few excerpts from Mr. Sheer’s right-on-target article:

The love fest between Barack Obama and his top fundraiser Penny Pritzker that has led to her being nominated as Commerce secretary would not be so unseemly if they both just confessed that they did it for the money. Her money, not his, financed his rise to the White House from less promising days back in Chicago.

“Without Penny Pritzker, it is unlikely that Barack Obama ever would have been elected to the United States Senate or the presidency,” according to a gushing New York Times report. “When she first backed him during his 2004 Senate run, she was No. 152 on the Forbes list of the wealthiest Americans. He was a long-shot candidate who needed her support and imprimatur. Mr. Obama and Ms. Pritzker grew close, sometimes spending weekends with their families at her summer home.”

The billionaire heir to part of the Hyatt Hotels fortune, has long been first off an avaricious capitalist, and if she backed Obama, it wasn’t for his looks. (She) and her family had acquired the Superior Bank with the help of $600 million in tax credits.

Pritzker assured its employees: “Our commitment to subprime has never been stronger.” Two months later, the bank was pronounced insolvent.

Sounds like a perfect Obama appointment for Commerce secretary — a tax avoider with a history of screwing the “little people.” Not that Obama was bribed or anything . . .

In the midst of the continuing cycle of misery brought on by the chicanery of the financial community two key Cabinet positions dealing with business practices will likely be occupied by people who specialized in those financial rip-offs.

For Pritzker, as with the confirmation of Lew, the fix is in.

Memo to my dear MMT brothers, at long last, please come right out and say it: “Barack Obama has been bribed to widen the gap between the rich and the rest. That is why he raised FICA and wants to cut Social Security and other programs that benefit the people.”

Pritzker was queried about avoiding the sort of taxes most ordinary folks are obligated to pay, and she replied in writing: “I am a beneficiary of some non-U.S. situs trusts which were established about 50 years ago (when I was a child). . . “

Penny does her best Sergeant Schultz impersonation, “I see nothing; I know nothing.”

It’s payback time, and even normally progressive Democrats like Pritzker’s home state Sen. Dick Durbin are prepared to roll over. Treating the appointment of billionaire Pritzker as a victory for women everywhere, the senator said she’d “broken through the glass ceiling with her extraordinary intelligence and business acumen.”

Right. She got rich because of business acumen . . . acquired when she “was a child.”

The next time someone tells you the deficit or debt must be reduced, or Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc. etc. are “unsustainable,” just look at them pityingly, and say, “I see you have been brainwashed into believing the U.S. government, which originally created the dollar from thin air, and has passed all the laws that make the dollar possible, now can run short of dollars. How sad for you.”

Let’s just keep it simple: The President, Congress, the media and the mainstream economists have been bribed by the rich to cut benefits to the middle- and lower classes, so as to widen the income gap.

Let’s stop assuming they simply are honest but stupid. They are crooks, cruelly destroying the lives or ordinary families.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty

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#MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY

–Is he taking bribes or is he merely ignorant?

We’ve preached that some (most?) Congressmen are crooks on the payroll of the upper .1% income group, which is why they keep trying to cut the federal spending that benefits the 99.9%. Austerity widens the gap between the rich and the rest, and the wider the gap, the richer they are.

Yet, surely at least some in Congress merely are ignorant of economics, but it’s difficult to identify which, because essentially the crooks and the ignorant say the same things.

Here is the full text of a press release from Congressman Scott Rigell. You decide whether this guy is a bribed crook or simply ignorant:

Kaylin.Minton@mail.house.gov
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(202) 225-4215

Rigell Backs Bill to Tie Member Pay to Debt Default
On Washington’s fiscal gamemanship: ‘I’m over it‘

Washington, D.C. – Consistent with his efforts to right our country’s finances, reform Congress, and lead by example, today Congressman Scott Rigell (VA-02) cosponsored H.R. 1884 the ‘Stop Pay for Members’ Act, bipartisan legislation that would stop congressional pay if the United States defaults on the national debt. The bill would also prevent retroactive pay.

At this stage, I would say Rigel is crooked, because his “bet” is safe. There is no way our Monetarily Sovereign, United States government, which created the dollar, is sovereign over the dollar, and can create as many or as few dollars as it wishes, ever could be forced to default on any debt, no matter how large.

Further, the current, so-called “debt” is nothing more than the balance of deposits in T-security accounts at the Federal Reserve Bank. To pay them all off, the government would transfer dollars from these accounts to the holders’ checking accounts.

The only risk in Rigel’s bill is that the right-wing debt nuts could refuse to allow this payout, although logically they should welcome it, as it would eliminate all debt. But of course, logic is not the strong suit for the debt nuts, so maybe Rigel is onto something.

“Our debt threatens the very foundation of our Republic. Washington has been playing too close to the train tracks with our national credit rating, and frankly, I’m over it,” said Rigell, a fiscal conservative who has spent much of his time in Washington trying to put the nation on a sound fiscal path. “It’s time to hold Washington politicians accountable for this fiscal mess.”

Typical, ignorant political ranting, that does not accept the fact that the U.S. government is sovereign over the dollar. The government, having created the dollar from nothing, and having created all the laws and rules governing the dollar, can do anything it wishes with the dollar.

If Congress wished, it could make the dollar equal three euros, two potatoes and one partridge in a pear tree. So how is the “very foundation of our Republic” threatened by a debt the federal government has the power to pay off this afternoon?

And as for the “fiscal mess, that’s just a demonstration of Congressional BS. They are like doctors who falsely tell us we have cancer, then struggle heroically to cure the nonexistent “mess” they invented.

So far, Rigell is mouthing the Peterson, Koch line, which still leaves him in the “crook” category.

Rigell is also a co-sponsor of the ‘No Budget, No Pay’ Act which prevents Members of Congress from receiving pay for each day they fail to pass a Budget and all Appropriations bills after Oct. 1st, and earlier this year introduced the ‘Lead by Example’ Act which prevents Members of Congress from receiving matching contributions to their Thrift Savings Plan (TSP) – a federal employee retirement savings plan – if the deficit is not reduced from the previous year.

This is a little chancier. Though the deficit has fallen the past two years, this bodes ill for the U.S. economy. As soon as deficit reduction (austerity) again causes a recession (see graph below), the government will have to stimulate with more deficit spending, the solution it always must use.

At that time, Congress would not receive their free contributions from the government. Ordinarily, this would move Rigel from the “crook” category to the “ignorant” category, but for one reality: No way would Congress ever pass such a bill, and Rigel knows it.

So he simply could be engaging in some political posturing to appear honest, which would keep him in the “crook” category.

Rigell, widely known as a congressional reformer, also returns 15% of his congressional salary to pay down our debt – donations which will total more than $100,000 by the end of his second term. He also declines all federal health and retirement benefits and has self-imposed a limit of no more than six terms in the House.

Well, that seems to settle it. If this guy is willing to pay our Monetarily Sovereign government — a government with the unlimited power to create dollars — “more than $100,00,” and decline all federal health and retirement benefits, he must be massively ignorant.

Or is this a part of his con? Is $100,000+ a small price for convincing voters he’s honest and should be re-elected? I let you call this one.

Sadly, either crooked or ignorant, Rigel fosters the view that the middle- and lower-income groups have too much money, and should receive less from the government, thereby widening the gap between the rich and the rest.

So either way, he’s a menace, who should be voted out of office.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty

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#MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY

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