Monday, August 29, 2016

Helping Veterans

In my little town of Brunswick, I have two sets of friends who are both trying to help Veterans. This post is a stub:

  1. Building Veterans: [http://www.buildingveterans.org/index.html]
  2. http://www.uswaterwarriors.org/

And outside of Brunswick I've made indirect contact with other veterans groups trying to help Veterans. One of them is trying to get hemp legalized again as the industrial super-product it was before it was lumped in with Marijuana and outlawed.

http://www.growingwarriors.org/

I'm putting these links here so I can find them quickly. If you want to help veterans, there are lots of vets and their groups who need your help. A lot of vets don't need anyone's economic help. Many just need us to love them. As a Navy Brat, I know this first hand. I'm also trying to help some other folks, so these links are also for reference:

A Sustainable Economic Policy III

Management for the Public Good

The 19th century economist Henry George, articulated the principles of commonwealth public policy in 1890:

"With respect to monopolies other than the monopoly on land, we hold that where free competition becomes impossible, as in telegraphs, railroads, water and gas supplies, etc., such business becomes a proper social function, which should be controlled and managed by and for the whole people concerned, through their proper government, local, state or national, as may be." [[Paragraph 11 Georgist Plank]

Proper Government

By "proper government", one must understand that local, state and national government all have "proper" roles in regulation and operation of the kinds of goods and systems that tend to become monopolized. Certainly healthcare, most of our infrastructure of all kinds, and many other public goods risk being mismanaged and tyrannically managed when managed of and for private cabals (corporations) -- especially when they involve public monies (bills of credit/paper money) and government function. The record shows a little more than risk, more like severe threat that private management leads to monopoly and exploitation.

These attributes apply to all our national infrastructures to one degree or another: Banks, Healthcare, Defense, Communication, Transportation and Energy. They all require that the US manage them in the public interest. And ignoring Georgist principles has led to these public goods being allowed to become monopolies run for the private, separate Interest.

Saturday, August 27, 2016

A Sustainable Economic Policy II

Asserting Sovereignty over our finances

To have a sustainable economic policy for the USA, we have to assert sovereignty over our finances. Warren Mosler writes:

"the government’s interest is the public interest. The government is there to provide for the general welfare, and there is no correlation between this interest and a position of surplus or deficit, nor of indebtedness, in the government’s books." [Galbraith/Mosler]

Mosler is talking about the Federal portion of our Federated Government. Of course, such a correlation is IMPOSED on subsidiary governments, as if they were subjects rather than coequal and vital parts of a sovereign entity. In the United States, local government is relegated to the role of competing for funds as if it were just another private enterprise, and has almost zero sovereignty over it's own finances and this hamstrings it's efforts to pursue the public interest. States are under less constraint, largely because of their relationship with the Federal Government, but they too deal with internal, external and artificial constraints that oppress their ability to serve the Public Interest.

Yet:

"the government is sovereign. This fact gives to government authority that households and firms do not have. In particular, government has the power to tax and to issue money. The power to tax means that government does not need to sell products, and the power to issue currency means that it can make purchases by emitting IOUs. [Galbraith/Mosler]

And to be fully functional a Federated Democratic Republic should extend the benefits and privileges of that power to the whole of the country, including its parts, as well as to be able to exercise it for itself. Henry George Recommended in the 1880s that the money power be exclusively with Government [On Greenbacks]

"the power to issue money is a valuable privilege which, to secure the best circulating medium and to put all citizens on a footing of equality, ought to be retained by the general government, and to be permitted to no one else, either individual or corporation. The greenbackers, who have insisted that national bank notes should not be permitted, and that all money should be the direct issue of the government , are in the right." [Greenbacks]

At the very least our Federal Reserve should be an agency of the Government rather than protecting bankers. Unfortunately our pirates have had more influence on the Government than reformers.

Current System Privatizes Rule over Money

While this is true, Around the world centralized financial centers give responsibility to local government and then impose artificial constraints on their power to deliver service by stripping this IOU money power from them, or by privately taxing it by imposing artificial compounding interest, fees, penalties. Instead our system gives the power to emit IOUs, collect interest on them, and essentially put a lien on public and private property, to privateering banks. Essentially the International banks, through exercising this power over the money supply, act as if they were pirates. This infuriates both left and right, and it is a main driver of worldwide economic inequity. But something can be done about it if folks can avoid the over drama. This system is an outgrowth of feudalism, international chaos, warfare, trade and colonialism and of Private Government. To fix it requires an assertion of Governance in the public interest. It is not the product of diabolical conspiracies. To fix a thing one must understand it.

A Sustainable Economic Policy I

The Problem

I was reading someone calling for Quantitative Easing, but Quantitative easing has little effect on the economy. The Banks will only loan to folks who aren't underwater, owing more than they are worth -- and to folks who have the surety to provide something the bank can take if the business fails. The term for an economy that is over-leveraged is a "liquidity trap." Quantitative easing is a waste of public money when banks won't lend to the people the Fed claims it intends to be helping. We saw that in 2009-2012 when the banks foreclosed like crazy on ordinary people -- and bought each other out -- instead of helping those people get a job.

  1. To borrow money on the credit of the United States
  2. To regulate Commerce
  3. To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin,

Emitting bills of credit (money) is a power implied from the power to borrow money and the prohibition of that power to the States in Section 10. Rather than our country passing a constitution to make that power explicit, the USA has let the courts define whether the Federal Government can print money, and the result has been a 200 year fight, which is ongoing. The Federal Reserve is the latest "Missouri Compromise" on this subject in the battle between centralizing bankers and local financial interests. At this point the centralizing bankers have pretty much won their war and thus we have the Fed, which does a dance between a which privatizes and privateers on the ability to "emit bills of credit" as money and to which Congress has delegated almost all the powers just listed.

Wednesday, August 24, 2016

Smoketown Cats

The Cats in Smoketown love to cat around.
Though if you make the right sounds
they'll eventually come around.
 
Smoketown cats fight and play.
They wander and they stray.
And then when they've been up all night,
they sleep all day.
 
You don't own a Smoketown cat.
It owns you.
And if you think you own your house.
Odds are your cat thinks it has first dibs.
 
Smoketown Cats tolerate you,
depending on what you do.
As long as you give them food and water.
And attention!
When they demand it!
They will let you pet them.
 
If your Smoketown cat has wandered away.
That is just it going its way.
A Cat has a territory, but it must patrol.
A Smoketown Cat has to have a home,
But it has to explore, it has to roam.
It might make you angry.
It ought to make you pray.
That it is catting around somewhere safely.
And that he makes it home.
 
A Smoketown cat knows where to go.
And will return when it wants to.
If you have a smoketown cat.
And it wanders away,
It will probably come back
If nothing else for a kitty snack.
and someone to scratch its back.
And ease its anxiety
so it can nap in peace.
 

Chris Holte (Note Smoketown is the real name of Brunswick, Md)

Sunday, August 21, 2016

Pyramids of fear cannot withstand the winds that blow

It's an event if you are ready,
a disaster if you are not.
You are never really ready enough,
So you deal with what you've got.
 
Japan gets typhoons
Here they call them hurricanes.
Tornadoes, direcho's, storms
They are a cost of living on land and breathing air.
 
Anything built can decay and fail.
Man-made disasters result from man.
We have to find a way to reach the arrogant.
Who stand astride pyramids held up by people
Who are oppressed and full of fear.
 
So hear the words of the Lord of Time
Those who rule with fear commit an awful crime.
That dooms them like some ancient pharaoh
Pyramids built of fear cannot withstand the winds that blow
 
Channeled by Christopher H. Holte

Friday, August 19, 2016

Lies Have Wings

Lies have wings.
But truth is a tortoise
Ever chasing the rumors let loose by the loose.
And those who would fight lies
seem armed with spitballs and rubber bands.
As much as I've come to understand.
Poisonous myths poison us all
 
Yet old lies become legends
Our story tellers take lies and fashion myths and parables.
If horses could fly, and no one would die,
then the entertainment would be harmless and free
But the cost of grown people telling lies
is too much for me.

Christopher H. Holte