–How your lords (Yes, you have lords) use myths to rule you.

Mitchell’s laws:
●The more 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.
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All living things are created with some indifference to the plight of other living things. It is “nature, red in tooth and claw.” It is a fundamental of evolution, in which the stronger survive at the expense of the weaker.

Cat owners, who have seen their cute, fluffy, lovable pets cruelly toy with an already maimed mouse, have seen it. Our innocent children are known for cruelty and indifference. Bullying is the common example. Street gangs take it to extremes with shootings, stabbings and other sadistic acts. Adults do it too – the crime syndicates, the drug cartels — they specialize in cruelty and indifference as intimidation techniques or just for pleasure.

But they are exceptions, right? If you could push a button that would bring you a hundred million dollars, but cause a dozen unknown Asians to die prematurely, would you push that button? Think before you answer. Being honest, would you?

The executives of the tobacco companies, push that button every day, and have done so for years. As do executives of pharmaceutical companies. Wall Street executives too, push that button, except their victims die of poverty, not disease. The upper 1% push that button with seldom a thought.

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” said Lord Acton. The murderer and torturer have power over their victims. The rich have power over the poor. The knowing have power over the ignorant. The murderer, the torturer, the rich and the knowing are corrupted by their power.

It benefits the abuser that the abused not know how to end the injustice, or even to recognize it. Ignorance is the ally of the powerful. Why did a German soldier murder his Jewish neighbor, a neighbor with whom he previously had friendly relations? The soldier was taught by his leaders, the ignorance that the Jews are evil.

Why today, do Syrian soldiers, themselves part of the poor and middle “99%,” kill their Syrian “99%” neighbors? The soldiers have been taught the ignorance that their neighbors are evil. The 99% are both the abused and the abusers, and all do the bidding of the 1%, via ignorance of the truth.

And so it is in America (and elsewhere), that the minority in power keeps the underclass ignorant. Here, it is done with the Big Lie, that the federal government cannot afford to provide benefits to those who need them, but instead must extract taxes from those who ill can afford them:

— the federal government cannot afford Medicare for all
— the federal government cannot afford more generous Social Security
— the federal government cannot afford to operate without taxation

And if a member of an underclass protests correctly that the government indeed can afford these things – and without extracting taxes — he then is told:

–the federal government is just like him, and must remain within strict financial budgets
–and it must balance its budget against tax income.
–and he is a fool to believe otherwise.

And with these myths, the upper 1% income group rules.

Think of religion. A group is taught certain myths: There is one God or there are many gods, and these gods demand obedience. High priests or shamans dictate what God says the followers must do, and inevitably these rules involve sacrifices – human, animal, financial, time or effort.

Enduring these sacrifices provides the psychological benefit of knowing one has done the “right thing” as defined by the religious leaders. Attending church services, reciting pre-written prayers, donating money, keeping kosher, building cathedrals, circumcision, abstinence, sexual practices, prescribed garments, travel to Mecca – all are sacrifices dictated by religions. Fail to sacrifice, and you will be punished, with hell and ostracism, even torture and murder.

It is sacrifice that gives religion its power. Forcing people to do what they would not otherwise do, and depriving them of what they otherwise would desire, is what builds dominance and obedience. Power comes from teaching that those, who do not share these believes and sacrifices, are evil.

Once the populace has been brainwashed, only minimum further effort by the high priests, is necessary to enforce compliance. After Germans were brainwashed into believing Jews and others were evil, Hitler and his acolytes didn’t have to do the killing. The people did it themselves, willingly and with relish.

Similarly, convincing people that to pay taxes, to suffer insufficient health-care insurance, to live on minimal retirement funds, go hungry and homeless – all build the dominance of the 1% over the 99%. The victims come to believe that yes, they must sacrifice, and however much they sacrifice, it never will be enough.

Today, the American people, and indeed people throughout the world, have been taught by the 1% that sacrifice, not only is necessary, not only is beneficial, but is morally good – and always insufficient.

Every culture has a version of “the ant and the grasshopper,” in which hard work and struggle are virtues unto themselves, while ease and comfort are immoral. By combining that belief with the cynicism of “There is no such thing as a free lunch,” the 1% has created a perfect scenario in which the 99% are made to believe Monetary Sovereignty not only is too easy and too obvious, but morally wrong.

Tell someone that he should not have to pay federal taxes, should not have to pay for health care and should not suffer from minimal retirement benefits, that person likely will respond to this good news with anger and sarcasm. “Life cannot be that easy (except of course, for the 1%). There must be good reasons why we have been sacrificing our wealth and our health. There cannot be a free lunch.”

The 1% are accustomed to life being easy. The 99% are uncomfortable with that notion.

And just as religious piety often is strongest among the least educated, so too is the belief among the least economically knowledgeable that it is normal and right for the 1% to have life handed to them, while the 99% must strive and suffer for their meager reward. Thus, the populace accepts the austerity that punishes them for the sin of not being wealthy, and rejects the facts of Monetary Sovereignty.

It’s a religious thing – belief triumphs over fact, ignorance over knowledge. Myths can be far more powerful than rationality. That is how your lords rule 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

–Congratulations Yahoo Finance on publishing the dopiest poll of the year.

There is ignorant. There is stupid. And then there is Yahoo Finance and Chris Nichols. I didn’t see Part I, but I assume it was as silly as Part II is:

Here’s Your Chance: You Fix the Economy, Part II
By Chris Nichols | The Exchange – Fri, Oct 26, 2012

The best way for the federal government to balance the budget is through a combination of spending cuts and increased taxes, more than half of the voters in an informal Yahoo! Finance poll said Thursday.

With 10,283 total responses to the question, 52% said some combination of those two actions would be preferred to the other choices provided. However, 41% of respondents wanted to only cut spending in order to balance the budget, making for a very strong second-place showing.

With those two options making up 93% of the total vote, you can see quickly how readers feel about raising taxes alone as the preferred course of action. Our poll ran the same day that a group of corporate CEOs called on Congress to implement tax hikes and lower spending to tackle the nation’s budget deficit.

The question was one of seven we asked readers in a bid to get a sense of what they believe the government should do to improve its financial standing.

Notice that the poll directs voters to determine the best way to balance the budget, not the best way to grow the economy.

Now, if you really want to know the best way to grow the economy, the answer definitely is NOT to balance the budget, but rather to grow the deficit. But, by assuming the answer is to balance the budget, Yahoo Finance and Chris Nichols perpetuate the ignorance of the American voters.

Unfortunately (or fortunately?), when Americans vote for candidates who promise to reduce the deficit, thereby assuring another recession, these poor, ignorant souls will be hung by their own petards. They either will pay higher taxes (aka eliminating “loopholes” or “broadening the tax base”) or they will receive lower Social Security and Medicare benefits. Talk about pulling the switch on your own electric chair . . .

Anyway, if it weren’t for the fact that my own children and grandchildren will be injured, I might take a perverse delight in seeing the 99% cause their own suffering — especially when these are the folks who get angry at me when I tell them that reducing the dollar supply hurts the economy.

So, Chris Nichols, for your next survey, I suggest this question: What is the best way to effect world starvation: Destroy all the crops or poison all the water?

World starvation is as good a goal as balancing the budget.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty

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#MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY

–You never will know what you have lost: IV

This is the fourth in a series of posts titled, “You never will know what you have lost” (Part I, Part II and Part III) Each post describes the invisible, but real costs of federal deficit reduction, aka “austerity.”

Since austerity never has benefited any Monetarily Sovereign nation that has tried it – 100% record of abject failure, often culminating in economic disaster – it is amazing that people still believe in it. But that is exactly what our own government is trying, now.

The first of the posts contained these paragraphs:

The list goes on and on: The lame who might have walked. The blind who might have seen. The children who might have given to America. The tornadoes and hurricanes and earthquakes that might have been foreseen.

The money that investors might have saved. The inventions never invented. The recessions and depressions that might have been avoided. The wars that might have been won or prevented. The life-saving drugs that might have been developed. The people who might not have died too soon. The beauty never created. The ideas lost. The better world that might have been.

You never will know.

Day by day, we die the death of a thousand invisible cuts, at the hands of people who know not what they do. Like doctors who treat anemia by bleeding the patient with leeches, they bleed the economy of its blood, its dollars, in the name of frugality.

And yet again:

The October 20, 2012 issue of NewScientist magazine contained a short article titled, “Hurricane threat deepens.”

The world really is getting stormier. Climate change is making hurricanes more severe, according to a new study of their effects on the US.

Aslak Grinsted of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, analysed storm surges due to hurricanes dating back to 1923, as measured by six US tide gauges. He found a clear upward trend. If it continues, the average number of hurricanes to hit the US each year will almost double by 2100 compared to 1923, and big storms like Hurricane Katrina will become more common.

Extreme weather already costs US insurers huge sums – some $32 billion in 2011.

Much damage can be mitigated and lives saved, if we have accurate prediction of hurricane paths, storm surges, rainfall and wind speeds.

New York Times
U.S. Satellite Plans Falter, Imperiling Data on Storms
By John H. Cushman, Jr.
Published: October 26, 2012

WASHINGTON — The United States is facing a year or more without crucial satellites that provide invaluable data for predicting storm tracks, a result of years of mismanagement, lack of financing and delays in launching replacements, according to several recent official reviews.

The looming gap in satellite coverage, which some experts view as almost certain within the next few years, could result in shaky forecasts about storms like Hurricane Sandy, which is expected to hit the East Coast early next week.

All this week, forecasters have been relying on such satellites for almost all the data needed to narrow down what were at first widely divergent computer models of what Hurricane Sandy would do next: hit the coast, or veer away into the open ocean?

Experiments show that without this kind of satellite data, forecasters would have underestimated by half the huge blizzard that hit Washington in 2010.

“We cannot afford to lose any enhancement that allows us to accurately forecast any weather event coming our way,” said Craig J. Craft, commissioner of emergency management for Nassau County on Long Island, where the great hurricane of 1938 killed hundreds.

On Thursday, Mr. Craft was seeking more precise forecasts for Sandy and gearing up for possible evacuations of hospitals and nursing homes, as were ordered before Tropical Storm Irene last year. “Without accurate forecasts it is hard to know when to pull that trigger,” he said.

Experts have grown increasingly alarmed in the past two years because the existing polar satellites are nearing or beyond their life expectancies, and the launch of the next replacement, known as J.P.S.S.-1, has slipped to 2017, probably too late to avoid a coverage gap of at least a year.

For now, the agency is running on a stopgap bill that allows it to redirect money from other projects to the polar satellites. In approving it, Congress demanded a plan by next week showing how NOAA intended to stay on schedule and within a strict limit — about $900 million a year.

“NOAA does not have a policy to effect consistent and reliable cost estimates,” the Commerce inspector general said. The outside review team said it could not tell “if the current $12.9 billion is high, low, or exactly correct.”

The program’s problems began a decade ago with an effort to merge military and civilian weather satellites into a single project. After its cost doubled and its schedule slipped five years, that project was sundered by the Obama administration.

The false belief the federal government is limited in its ability to spend dollars, once again will cause property damage and loss of life. That is an absolute certainty.

How much more property will be damaged? How many more lives will be lost? You never will know. Meanwhile, the Republicans and Democrats debate, not about whether we should undergo austerity, nor even how severe a misguided austerity should be, but rather what form of austerity we should face — tax increases or spending cuts.

Austerity is a foregone conclusion, never debated. What kind, is the only question. There are harsh penalties for economic ignorance. How harsh? How many lost lives? How much property unnecessarily damaged?

You never will know.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty

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#MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY

–The single biggest issue in the coming Presidential election

You may hate or love Obama or Romney. You may feel the nation is headed in the right or wrong direction. You may feel it’s time for a change, or to stay the course. These are the generalities of the coming election.

Many specific issues are involved – abortion, minimum wage, stem cell research, gay marriage, the deficit, taxes and tax rates, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, the military, immigration, gun control.

Though Mitt Romney has stood on two sides of most issues, he has been consistent about one issue, and it is the most important one. It encompasses all of the above, and more: The makeup of the Supreme Court.

Contrary to the hopes of the Founding Fathers, the Supreme Court is the most politically extreme of the three government branches. The other two, the Legislative and the Executive, are forced to be less politically extreme, because their members repeatedly must answer to an electorate that tends nearer to the middle. But the Supreme Court answers to no one.

Conservative Scholars Bullish That A Romney Supreme Court Could Reverse Longstanding Liberal Jurisprudence
Sahil Kapur, October 26, 2012

Liberal-leaning Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 79, and Steven Breyer, 74, are likely candidates for retirement during a Romney administration, the GOP nominee has vowed to appoint staunch conservatives.

Over time, if a robust five-vote conservative bloc prevails on the court for years, the right would have the potential opportunity to reverse nearly a century of progressive jurisprudence.

Roger Pilon, director of the libertarian Cato Institute’s Center for Constitutional Studies and a member of the Federalist Society, told TPM that one more solid conservative vote would pave the way for “fundamental shifts on the Court” toward “a revival of greater protection for economic liberty and a direct assault on the modern regulatory state.”

Translation: The extreme right wing favors business protection over consumer protection, wealth protection over personal protection.

“If Romney were to appoint [conservative] justices and lower court judges, then we would see greater protection for economic liberty and greater scrutiny for regulation — whether they be environmental regulations, regulations for property rights, regulations for affirmative action, regulations of all sorts,” Pilon said.

Pilon says. “I expect that a Romney-appointed court would be more sympathetic to efforts to change the Medicare and Medicaid [and Social Security] programs because they’d come from that school of thought that says government has limited power.” It also means the Court would seek to narrow the berth for Washington to “engage in the kind of expansive programs like we saw with Obamacare and Dodd-Frank [financial regulatory reform],” he says.

Translation: Cut Medicare, cut Social Security, cut Medicaid, cut every social program that benefits the lower and middle classes, and cut out all those messy, consumer-protecting regulations designed to keep banks and big business from stealing.

Randy Barnett, a constitutional law professor at Georgetown University [is] hopeful that a more conservative Court could cut away at regulatory measures and adopt a “this far and no further” approach to federal authority, to thwart further expansion of the social safety net . . . . mentioning elements of Obamacare, Dodd-Frank and environmental regulations as targets that conservatives are already building cases against.

. . . the staunchest legal conservatives hope a fifth vote might lead to the eradication or restructuring of programs like Medicare and Social Security. . .

Translation: The losers: The lower- and middle-classes. The winners: The wealthiest 1%.

Tim Jost, a liberal law professor at Washington & Lee University, warns that . . . conservatives could scale back the federal government’s authority to compel states to participate in federal-state partnerships like Medicaid and . . . they could also curtail the Supremacy Clause to prevent low-income Americans from suing if they are denied government [Medicaid] benefits under the law. . .

Jost continued. “The Affordable Care Act survived by one vote, and four in the dissent were willing to get rid of all of it. Four members of the court have shown that they’re perfectly happy to get rid of pretty major progressive initiatives if they disagree with them.”

Roe v. Wade . . .survives now on a fragile 5-4 margin, which would likely flip if Ginsburg, Breyer or even Kennedy were to be replaced by a down-the-line-conservative justice.

“Women’s access to abortion is likely to be significantly curtailed under a Romney court,” said Adam Winkler, a constitutional law professor at UCLA School of Law.

And the expansion of gay rights would likely hit a wall, Winkler adds, perhaps ending same sex marriage advocates’ hope that the Court will strike down the Defense of Marriage Act.

Translation: Though conservative justices are proud of their role as Constitutional originalists (when convenient), the nation may well be surprised that being an originalist means taking the nation back to 1789. As with Taliban-style religious originalists, Constitutional originalists will return us to the dark ages of imperial law.

Romney could also meaningfully impact the Court, even without replacing liberal justices, if aging conservatives like Antonin Scalia, 76, and Anthony Kennedy, also 76, were to retire. Replacing them with younger conservatives would tilt the balance of the court for decades to come, likely solidifying the right-wing consensus on issues like campaign finance, affirmative action, civil rights and gun rights.

Cato’s Pilon believes that replacing one liberal justice with a conservative could pave the way for a slow return to the Lochner Era — when the Supreme Court invalidated minimum wage and child labor laws as unconstitutional.

“The court could find Social Security unconstitutional tomorrow, and that would be a good thing . . .”

Translation: For the extreme right wing, finding Social Security unconstitutional is a “good thing,” because the program provides no real benefit to the rich, but primarily helps the lower and middle classes.

A Romney Supreme Court Would Change The Constitution Without Amending It
By Ian Millhiser on Oct 11, 2012

*Eliminating The Right To An Abortion

*Judges For Sale: Romney named Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Thomas and Alito as his models should he be allowed to pick new judges. All four said the Supreme Court should have done nothing when a wealthy coal baron payed $3 million to place a sympathetic justice on the West Virginia Supreme Court. That justice then cast the key vote to overrule a $50 million verdict against the coal baron’s company. Romney may even want his justices to go much further in permitting the very wealthy to buy elections — he previously endorsed allowing billionaires to give unlimited sums of money directly to his campaign.

*Government In The Bedroom: Only five of the Supreme Court’s current justices joined the landmark Lawrence v. Texas decision, which struck down Texas’ “sodomy” laws

To quote from “Romney Poses Greatest Danger to the Supreme Court” by Earl Ofari Hutchinson, “Romney flatly said that the judge that he longed to have on the current court is Robert Bork. Bork’s rabid, fringe, and at times borderline zany views and interpretation of judicial and constitutional law were so repulsive that his nomination to the court by President Reagan in 1987 was virtually DOA during the confirmation hearings.”

In summary, Romney’s extreme right wing supporters wish to follow a 1789 interpretation of the Constitution, a document written when consumer protections and individual rights were less important than a strict “Talibanesque” rule of law favoring the wealthiest and most powerful.

In four or eight years, Obama and Romney will be gone. But the Supreme Court justices will rule us for decades.

And that is the single biggest issue in the coming Presidential election.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty

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#MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY

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