–The seeming irony of self interest.

Twitter: @rodgermitchell; Search #monetarysovereignty
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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 ultimately 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, and the motive is the gap.
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Has it ever occurred to you, that many of the people who preach most loudly about sin, later are discovered to have committed that very sin? What was their motive?

Consider the hundreds (thousands?) of priests who have raped young boys. What were these priests saying during their sermons? Is this irony, or self interest?

Consider the politicians who have campaigned mightily against the “sin” of being gay, and who later were found to be gay. Why did they feel the need to campaign against gays? Is this irony, or self interest?

Hitler considered the “master race” to be tall and blond, while he himself was of modest height and dark haired. Why essentially, did he preach against himself? Was this irony, or self interest?

“Irony” (or self interest) is everywhere in politics.

Hatred of Jews is common among Christians. Yet Christ is said to have lived and died a Jew, as did all his disciples. Why have so many Christians persecuted Jews, whose religion was the religion of their Lord? Is this irony, or self interest?

The most religious, bible thumping, right wing followers of Christ also seem to be the harshest anti-gay, anti-brown, anti-black, anti-poor, anti-contraceptive, hate-filled people — exactly the opposite of the compassion for all people, that Christ taught. Is this irony, or self interest?

Ghandi said, “I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ.” What did he mean?

My beliefs:
–Those priests became priests in order to conceal heir dark desires. It was self interest.
–The same was true of the anti-gay politicians. Hiding their “gayness” was self interest.
–Hitler is more complicated:

Undoubtedly Hitler grew up with a very strong Oedipus Complex.

Thwarted in normal emotional relationship with his parents, since he hated his father, his energy took extraordinary outlets. He tried at first to retreat into dreams, to compensate for the unhappiness of his actual life by creating an imaginary world of happiness and success.

His will to be utterly different from his father made him wish to be an artist. He was overcome by his yearnings to fulfill the great historical mission that life, in the person of his mother, promised him.

Ever since, all through his career, he has been subconsciously proving to his dead father his right to independence, success, and power.

Every leader needs an enemy to blame and followers to flatter.

Hitler needed to assure the German people they were not at fault for Germany’s WWI defeat (it was the Jews), and they actually were superior (blond Aryan)to other people. Naturally, the Germans were ready to believe him.

All these thoughts have been swirling, as I read about the latest, right-wing billionaires who wish to remake America into an orthodox Christian nation: no, not the Kochs, the Wilks brothers.

They’ve embraced both the anti-government politics of the Koch brothers and the religious right’s anti-gay, anti-choice cultural warfare.

The Wilks brothers belong to Pastors and Pews, an organization connected to Christian-nation extremist David Lane, who wants to make the Bible a primary public school textbook.

Dan Wilks said, (we need to) “bring the Bible back into the school, and start teaching our kids at a younger age.” Adds brother Farris: “They’re being taught the other ideas, the gay agenda, every day out in the world so we have to stand up and explain to them that that’s not real, that’s not proper, it’s not right.”

The brothers’ worldview seems to draw heavily on the teachings of a church founded by their father, which combines Biblical literalism with a heavy emphasis on the Old Testament.

According to church doctrine, abortion is “murder,” including when it ends pregnancies resulting from rape and incest.

And homosexuality is “a serious crime — a very grievous sin.”

Farris is a pastor of the church. In his sermons, he decries “socialism” and argues that the Bible was grounded in the free market.

He urges congregants not to vote for candidates who promise “free this, free that,” saying “Yahweh never intended for us as a people to be afraid and reliant on government.”

He has suggested that the melting of the icecaps might be punishment for sin.

For the Kochs and the Wilks, there is no irony. They use religion for their self interest.

Above all, rich men want control. Preaching a religion provides that control, specifically if the religion happens to be the one religion they happen to be born to. As a preacher, you alone have the right to judge others, to speak with the authority of God about who is good and who is evil.

Naturally, you are good.

Because followers need to visualize “evil,” there need to be scapegoats. Jews, immigrants, gays and the poor will do nicely.

Jews are traditional; 2,000 years of bigotry have established their value as scapegoats.

Despite our being a nation of immigrants, our domestic dictators always have used the false “they-are-taking-our-jobs” excuse to despise them. Browns, blacks and gays are “different” (from white straights), and women should “know their place (which is to take orders from men).

But there is more to it than that. Rich men tend toward anti-government, because the government does three things they abhor: Taxes, spends and legislates.

The government levies taxes the rich spend much of their time trying to minimize. And government spending benefits the poor and middle-income groups more than the rich, thus closing the GAP between the rich and the rest.

To the rich, the GAP is vital. If there were no GAP, no one would be rich, and the larger the GAP, the richer they are.

Government tells the rich their factories must reduce pollution, which causes global warming. The rich do not like being told.

To the rich, any government program is “socialism” or “communism,” if the program aids the poor. (A government program of privatization, which aids the rich, is fine.)

Yes, worst of all, from the standpoint of the rich, the government creates laws, and by their very nature, laws keep people from doing whatever they feel like doing — the opposite of what the rich want.

The rich do not want people, especially people elected by browns, blacks, Jews and gays, telling them what they can and cannot do. In their world, they do the telling and everyone else does the bowing, scraping and says, “Yes, sir. You’re right, sir.”

So the rich spread the BIG LIE that the deficit is too high, and that the poor and the immigrants are “takers,” while they, the rich, are the “makers.” And this all comes from the word of God.

Essentially, this is what they preach to the masses: “You are good, god-fearing people. It’s not your fault that the system works against you. It’s the fault of the government. It’s the fault of immigrants who take your jobs. It’s the fault of the “food stamp mamas,” who cheat the system. It’s the fault of loose women.”

Bigotry has worked before in America. Consider the “yellow peril.”

In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act made the Chinese the first nationality specifically banned from immigrating to this country. Labor leader Samuel Gompers argued, “The superior whites had to exclude the inferior Asiatics, by law, or, if necessary, by force of arms.”

From 1854 to 1874, a California law prevented Chinese from testifying in court against white men. The 1879 California constitution denied suffrage to all “natives of China, idiots, and insane persons.”

As economist Thomas Sowell points out in “Ethnic America”: “It was made a misdemeanor to carry baskets suspended on a pole across the shoulder-the way the Chinese delivered.”

(Then there was) Executive Order 9066 by which President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered more than 110,000 of Japanese ancestry interned in 10 camps.

The incarceration was upheld by the Supreme Court and endorsed by such opinion-molders as the Los Angeles Times, which editorialized: “A viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is born-so a Japanese-American, born of Japanese parents, grows up to be a Japanese, not an American.”

In 1980, presidential candidate John Connally warned the Japanese they had “better be prepared to sit on the docks of Yokohama in your little Datsuns and your little Toyotas while you stare at your own little television sets and eat your mandarin oranges, because we’ve had all we’re going to take!”

Two years later, Walter Mondale was echoing Connally: “We’ve been running up the white flag, when we should be running up the American flag!… What do we want our kids to do? Sweep up around Japanese computers?”

Around the 40th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, former Se. Howard Baker pointed out “two facts”: “First, we’re still at war with Japan. Second, we’re losing.”

Yes, bigotry works for the power-hungry. It worked in Germany. It has worked in America. It is working in the Mid-east. And it is working for our “religious” right wing.

There always will be foolish people who believe their bad fortune is someone else’s fault, and if they join the bullies, they won’t be beaten any more.

Then, after they give their energy, money and allegiance they find themselves oppressed by their “saviors,” because the rich never are satisfied.

And that is the true irony.

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. Increase federal spending on the myriad initiatives that benefit America’s 99% (Click here)
9. Federal ownership of all banks (Click here)
10. Tax the very rich (.1%) more, with higher, progressive tax rates on all forms of income. (Click here)

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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.
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

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 lines rise. Federal deficit growth is absolutely, positively necessary for economic growth. Period.

#MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY