Month: July 2012

Posted this on my favorite website in the whole world.  This is in part an experiment.  Still, I thought it reasonably cogent, so I decided to post here as well.

As things exist today, banks are the only entities in the Unites States legally allowed to create money.  There are three means of money creation: the Discount Window of the Federal Reserve; the Open Market Operations capacity of the Federal Reserve; and the use of banks of fractional reserve banking. (Note: physical money is only a small percentage of the total in circulation, so the details don’t matter, but the net is that the paper money is first created electronically, and that is therefore its principle form; you will note as well that your dollar says “Federal Reserve Note”.)

The Federal Reserve is a private corporation with no government oversight which is owned and controlled by invitation-only banks.  The details of who has been allowed to buy the non-transferable stocks which comprise the ownership of this corporation are secret, but member banks certainly include Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, and the Bank of America.

Anyone able to create money possesses, intrinsically, the ability to make claims on our collected wealth without contributing anything of economic value.  Bill Gates had to make the PC viable.  Warren Buffett had to invest in successful corporations, who used his money to further their own success, with all the hiring of employees, investment in communities, and other benefits that flow from any business success.

Banks do not do this. 

Discount Window: the way it works now is the Fed can simply gift anyone it wants as much money as it wants for as long as it wants for as little interest as it feels like charging, which is seemingly zero.  In 2008, it created some $12 trillion.  Much of this was paid back, but let us posit that some small number, let us say $500 billion, was not.  That is money that was gifted to banks around the world, which at some point–slowly or quickly, now or ten years from now–will cause a decrease in the value of our money.  It will damage the economic well being of ordinary citizens.

Open Market Operations: the Fed can buy securities in any quantity from anyone, which can include buying foreign currencies.  Again: this power has been given to a handful of bankers whose activities are completely secret.  This is ludicrous.  Bank robbers might get $10,000 in a successful robbery.  The Fed can grant its members hundreds of BILLIONS.

Fractional Reserve banking: this is what was covered at that site.  Banks are allowed by law to loan out up to 90% of their deposits.  Since this causes money to circulate that would otherwise have been in a vault, it is inflationary.  It is also money that was created in the process of making the loan.  They write a check for a house, but in theory still owe you your deposit back.  This ability, too, is intrinsically predatory.

If we consider that the dollar has lost 95% of its value since the founding of the Fed–and that it steadily INCREASED in value after Jackson broke Biddle until the founding of the Fed–then it becomes obvious that that lost value has gone to those who created the money that caused the inflation.

Logically, then, there should be twenty times more wealth out there.  Houses should cost a quarter what they do.  Work weeks should be 20 hours.  There should be no unemployment.  healthcare should be within easy reach of all citizens.

There is no more important issue for the left and the right to coalesce around.  BOTH Obama and Romney are taking HUGE donations from Fed member banks, and thus NEITHER should be looked to to make the slightest difference.

There is no more important political task, therefore, than creating a generalized awareness as to how our system actually works, and working to change it.

It occurred to me that Obamacare is not about the implementation of a policy, but rather of a principle.  Logical people would ask: how can we provide the best quality healthcare to the most people at the lowest cost, while maximizing freedom of choice? This is a good question.  It is not the question that was asked.

The question that was asked was “how can we ensure that all Americans get the same level of healthcare.”  As I have said before, you can be equal both in poverty and wealth, and since socialism doesn’t work, the default outcome is poverty.

But the word validation keeps popping in my head.  I feel–and this is just an intuition–that the importance of Obamacare is not that it will work.  Nobody serious expects it to work.  What is important is that those who passed and supported it get to say “I am the sort of person who works for equality”.  This is the sine qua non of the Socialist non-ethos, the Socialist mire.  Equality–which amounts practically to conformity/uniformity–is the only value of those incapable of qualitative expression.

I’ve dealt with these topics multiple places, and so will leave it there, but wanted to make that point.

This is from last year.  Debt has increased since then, obviously. 

I will add as well that this accounting does not reflect money which SHOULD be set aside to fund our national pension system, aka Social Security and Medicare, both of which have depended virtually since their inception on others peoples money, and both of which in my understanding are ALREADY spending more than they can take from the paychecks of working stiffs like me.  To pay for the Baby Boomers we should be collecting TRILLIONS more than we are.  It is something on the order of $3 Trillion a year.   Given that even before these numbers are added in we are ALREADY running a huge deficit, there is very simply NO WAY to keep all the promises that have been made.  No tax increase will cover this, and as we approach 100% taxation on the American people, obviously, we will wreck the economy.

 So, here is the good news.  The real story is much worse than this:

U.S. Tax revenue: $2,170,000,000,000

* Fed budget: $3,820,000,000,000

* New debt: $ 1,650,000,000,000

* National debt: $14,271,000,000,000

* Recent budget cuts: $ 38,500,000,000

Let’s now remove 8 zeros and pretend it’s a household budget:

* Annual family income: $21,700

* Money the family spent: $38,200

* New debt on the credit card: $16,500

* Outstanding balance on the credit card: $142,710

* Total budget cuts: $385

Got It ?????

Looking, I see that masochism is just introjected sadism.  Sadism is just introjected masochism, which is to say an internalized compass that seeks failure and pain, and rejects the life and light that ought properly to flow through all of us.

I am listening to the audiobook “Born To Run”, and the point has been made that perhaps the superlative achievement of elite athletes is excellence combined with heartfelt joy.  In fact, joy in motion is what LEADS to true excellence.  In my own terms, excellence without joy is heartless and mechanical.

We were all born to be happy.  I truly believe this.  ALL of us, no matter how troubled and traumatized, have this capacity. Our two choices are to feed our light, or extinguish it.

I would like to submit as fact the superficially paradoxical claim that there exist no greater barrier to the full integration of persons of mixed African descent into our common economic life than the charge of racism.

Put simply: anyone who wants to claim that black people carry any responsibility for their own failures is a racist.  Anyone who wants to make general claims that, say, the South Side of Chicago is a full scale clusterfuck is called a racist.  Anyone who wants to make greater demands of black people is called a racist.

This claim does not to protect anyone, certainly not poor persons of African descent.  No censorship of valid criticism does anything but keep it hidden, and solutions farther than ever.

I want to be clear: the black middle class was coming into being FASTER in the early 60’s, than after the race riots, Civil Rights Act, and War on Poverty.  It was not enabled by all of that: it was RETARDED.  You don’t teach people responsibility by teaching them to game a system.  You don’t build respect by demanding special favors.

At all times I have multiple projects in terms of dealing substantively and in a mature way with various issues.  I believe I am going to make my next one “The black experience in America: a white perspective.”

OF COURSE this title alone will make people mad.  But not, I don’t think, anyone who ACTUALLY cares about black people.

Among other things, I want to point out that most black people ought properly to be understood the same way the rest of us are.  For example, as Nigerian-Irish-Scottish, or Ivory Coast-English-French.  You can readily recognize actual Africans, as their ancestors were not raped by white people. Whether we want this to be the case or not is irrelevant: it IS the case.  For all I know, some of my ancestors came into being through violence also. 

The overlay I want to put on this is the psychology of trauma.  Nobody–certainly not me–wants to deny a history of massive injustice and related psychological reactions.  What I want to point out is that if we treat the history of racism as a history of trauma, then the way black people and white people have gone about rectifying it has been psychologically stupid.  The reality, in my view, is that while real people were hurt, that those wounds have been USED by power mongers for their own self aggrandizement.

I literally look at the election of Barack Obama as a REvictimization of black Americans.  He not only never had any intention of paying them any but rhetorical attention, but further doesn’t CARE if his policies aggravate their already bad conditions.  Was it the black President or the “racist” cop who helped Prof. Gates down the stairs?  The cop, of course.  He saw Gates as a person.  Obama just sees people as cardboard cutouts, who are either allies or enemies. 

And what does he want, anyway?  A feeling.  The feeling of power, which is the same need that drove racism in this country.  Obama is no different, in his own way, from Bull Connor.  If he could set fire hoses and dogs on Republicans and Fox News, he would.  Likewise with any black people who dared defy him.

I think it can be taken as axiomatic that any function to which money flows, which could be otherwise directed, serves a market function.  Period.  The only question worth asking is: what is the nature of this market, and does it lead to the most efficient use of scarce goods and resources in the service first of alleviating want, and then liberating leisure.

What function do the poor serve?  They provide a coherent morality to those who otherwise are lacking one.  The poor are of particular use to the post-religious, who see in “rectifying” economic and social inequality a reason for being.

Logically, though–and I’ve said this many times many ways–a religion of “helping” people requires people to help.  If the people to help dry up, there must necessarily be a crisis of meaning.

This is why it is not only proper to question the motives of do-gooders, but NECESSARY for those pursuing coherent, qualitatively rich moralities.

All morality–which is to say all purpose–must reside with the individual, first.  One must be capable of finding ones way alone on a desert island.  Only then can one be counted on to tell the difference between their own need to be a rescuer, and the objective necessities of others.

We all need meaning more than food, although of course we need food too.  America has fed the poor.  What we have not done is create a reasonable likelihood they will ever emerge from dependence.

One could, in fact, make the case that the poor provide leftists with a charity of their own: projects to work on, which will never cease as long as the focus is on the alleged intent (as long as “compassion” and “empathy”–both of course here badly abused as words) are invoked in the “journey”.

It takes a lot of effort to make me dislike people on a sustained basis, but it is not hard with Krugman.  I want to be clear: his problem is not that he is stupid, arrogant, or wrong.  The problem is that he is a de facto apologist for ALL the abuses of power with which we are increasingly surrounded, and he cannot NOT know this.  That makes him a collaborator in a terror he knows is coming, when an unholy cabal of left wingers and banking elites will reduce our freedoms to the merest shred possible, a level wholly incompatible with human dignity.  These people are more or less open about their aims, so this is scarcely conspiracy.

Recently, I saw him in a debate in Spain, and he had three talking points, all of them willfully disingenous.

1) Economic “stimulus” was supposed to increase interest rates.  It didn’t, ergo sane economists are wrong.  This is stupid: all the Central Banks are keeping the key rates far below what they would be if market forces dictated them; and in any event, people are completely terrified about the future, so they are not borrowing or spending, meaning that the amount of money which could be in circulation that would cause interest rate spikes simply isn’t there.

2) Related: Sane economists claimed that “stimulus” approaches–including of course the $700 billion or more granted superlarge banks by St. Bernanke–would lead to inflation. It hasn’t, therefore he is right.  This, again, is willfully disingenuous.  If you study the basic process of money creation, the OVERWHELMING amount of money in circulation is neither created by central banks nor spent by the government.  It is money created as a result of the fractional reserve system.  This system is only inflationary when people are borrowing a lot of money.  People are not borrowing money, so the simple fact is that we won’t see price inflation UNTIL we get confidence again.  At the rate we are going, that may be five years or more out.

3) “Austerity” measures aren’t working.  Bullshit.  First off, most governments consider anything other than constant INCREASES in spending to be “austerity”.  In America, we cut some .02% of planned INCREASES, and the Left was claiming old people would be subsisting on cut rate Chinese dog food.  Nearly all of Europe was like this.  They cut some amount so small as to be functionally invisible–certainly relative to the massive SPENDING increases Krugman and his ilk have managed to get us to undertake–then six months later clowns like Krugman–who are quite willing to wait a decade for so-called stimulus packages to “work”–are calling them failures.

It takes time to get into difficulties, and time to get out.  He knows this.  He is just a de facto Eichman, greasing the rails to our shared enslavement.  He deserves contempt, nothing else.

If you have not heard of this book, you likely will soon.  They had an entire table at my local Barnes and Noble dedicated to it.  It is a book about sadomasochism, or what I think the connoisseurs prefer to call BDSM (Bondage/Domination/Sadism/Masochism) .  He ties her up. They do weird sexual things.  There is always, apparently, an implied threat that he might REALLY hurt her, but he never does.  My understandings on this come from here: http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?type=&id=724&fulltext=1&media=

As he notes in there, this is really just a mainstreaming of the S & M already somewhat implied by the vampire/human relationship in Twilight.  He loves her, but there is always a tension between his desire for her blood, and his ability to control that particular form of lust.

I have likely said this before, but I can’t remember: my take on BDSM is that it is a logical answer to a bad question.  The bad question is “How can I create a temporary illusion of meaning and identity?”

I don’t doubt that the people who do it more than once on purpose get something out of it.  I don’t doubt that it feels like a roller coaster ride–which is also intended to facilitate acute discomfort and fear–and leaves a suitably close feeling to catharsis.

But, and this point is critical, it is not in my view actually CATHARTIC.  It is a substitute for mourning, not mourning itself.  Mourning must be specific.

As I believe I have mentioned somewhere, I am currently reading (concurrently with Ferguson’s Ascent of Money), Trauma and Recovery.  One point she makes there is that the  treatment for traumas, in terms of dealing with hyperarousal and intrusive (unwanted thoughts) symptoms, is walking back through the trauma in detail, complete with feeling, and particularly somatic sensations.  What I found interesting, is that EACH trauma that stands out as separate for the victim ought ideally to be processed separately.  They cannot each stand in for the other.  I had come to this conclusion six months or so ago independently, but found it interesting that I was apparently correct.

BDSM does not do this.  In fact, it strikes me as a somewhat addictive but artificial substitute for it.

Our national malady, I am slowly coming to believe–and this is perhaps a disease of modernity (which for my purposes could more or less be conflated with Scientism and Socialism) generally–is that we have lost the ability to mourn, as individuals, and particularly as groups.

We are fed, indirectly in most cases, the idea from an early age that life is supposed to be easy; that if we just solve technical problems x,y, and z, then there will be no more suffering, no more aging, no more CHANGE that we don’t want.  This is a fool’s hope, and one that, now, is CAUSING a huge increase in suffering.

We are not meant to live forever on this planet.  We are not meant to be able to avoid loss. We are meant to learn how to DEAL with these things by attaching ourselves to a transcendant joy, and detaching ourselves from all that is mutable.

But if you are an atheist, this is hard.  And if you are an atheist and believe that suffering is anomalous and to be resented and rejected, then it is IMPOSSIBLE.

I think most of us from a common sense perspective view BDSM as mentally ill, as transgressive in a way that cannot possibly be fully rationalized.  In a sense, this is true, but my method and my aim is not oriented around creating dichotomous relations between people and ideas.  We always exist on a continuum with others; we all have the capacity both to enjoy the loss of our freedom, and to enjoy inflicting it on others.

As I know I have said before, the best way of living is, in my view, to take large pleasures in simple things.  If you do that, then you will quite unable to understand how people reach a level of emotional decay that they NEED this sort of stimulation.

Watch this video.  Doesn’t it make you happy?  This is what most of us miss, if we are honest: the straightforward, if occasional, expression of sheer pleasure in living and movement.

Our elites are increasingly dominated, though, by the simple desire for power.  Consider this book What would Machiavelli do?

For family/work balance, and healthy outside interests, are substituted work, weird sex, booze, and golf.  This is satire, but it described well the environment of the company I worked at when I first read it.

I lay in bed sometimes, and think “maybe we should assassinate some bankers”.  You know, the usual suspects in the Federal  Reserve mafia.  Then I think: where has that ever worked for a general improvement?  Answer: nowhere.  The methods dictate the results, which will be a different tyranny than the one before, but no less odious.

Our only way forward is education, which includes not just factual knowledge, but increasingly cultivating the ability to feel both positive and negative emotions, to be emotionally well and intelligent, and to work with those around us in what will hopefully be many widening circles to gradually engulf the human race in a form of life worth living, and in which this sort of pain has no place, because there is no need for it.

A poor workman blames his tools; a poor teacher blames his students.

I may well have seen this somewhere, but I can’t remember.  It seems too obvious not to have been said by someone.

I will add, though, that what the black community in this country needs is teachers: not school teachers, but people who can show how to live with dignity, how to climb the economic ladder, how to live in respect for one another.  These people need to be black, not white.  Asking for help of white people in fighting this fight is tantamount to declaring insuperable weakness.  Weakness is not the problem: having weakness constantly rationalized for them is the problem.  More: being told that they DESERVE a respite from the problems of life because of something that happened long ago.

It is truly a great tragedy that since their last great leader, Martin Luther King, Jr., they have been led down the path of demanding more and more for less and less, to the detriment of all but the fork-tongued devils enriching themselves immensely from this process, of all races.

With friends like those, who needs enemies?

I think it can be posited that anyone who is unable to regularly use their freedom to generate positive feelings, will on some level come to resent freedom as a burden, and–unconsciously–seek out defining boundaries provided by a creed, a myth, or a person or group.

I look at all the horror of the 20th Century, and cannot but be struck by how UNNECESSARY it all was.  As far as that goes, most of the violence and terror of human history were likewise unnecessary.

The defining characteristic, I think, of the rejection of freedom is the rejection of time, of gradual change.  All a “revolution” was–in France, in Russia, in China, in Cambodia, in Vietnam–was an effort to transpose a new static image in the stead of the old static image.  Instead of a “class structure”–in reality, of course, endlessly complex, and filled with benefits for all involved on many levels–you have, supposedly, NO class structure.  That one set of autocrats was replaced by another is normally lost in this analysis.

But always: cartoons, there on the page.  Motionless, even if evocative.  Unreal, even if they feel larger than life.

I read that in some quarters Marxism is on the rise again.  How?  Why?  To the extent anything Marx wrote was non-cartoonish, it was falsified by history. His “science” was manifestly wrong.

What is his allure?  He pacifies the free, in the hope that they will one day be relieved of the burdens of truth-telling and choice.