Jim Kavanagh: Why Modern Monetary Theory is a fake meme b.s. lie! Exposed!

The_Polemicist Sorry, I do not see how any of this directly addresses the basic principles of MMT as I laid hem out. As I said, they describe the workings of a fiat currency withing the domain of the monetary sovereign. The question of how things work in the international realm, and the role of the dollar as de facto reserve currency of the world (now under threat, as your Canadian speaker correctly notes), is very important and required other considerations that I did not go into. I noted this in my second endnote You seem to think something I've said here ignores or contra dicts other left analyses of American financial and military.imperialism, and you seem to be angry at me for that (or for some other reason). You were very quick to brand me a "fascist fake." (Does that still stand?) if you take a look at the many articles on this site where I've talked about Syria, Palestine, etc. you'd see that I'm not trying to hide from or deflect radical critiques. (To answer your question: No I haven't read that book.)   The_Polemicist So I found your previous two comments marked as "spam" and held from posting in my Disqus account.. i did not know Disqus (the comment system I use) was doing this. in fact, weren't the comments (at least one of them) previously posted? Disqus seems to have decide after the fact to remove them! I found a bunch of comments on different posts, going back seven months, that had been held back as spam because of some Disqus algorithm, I guess. I think their algorithm may have changed regarding that. I thought i had set Disqus to post without moderation. My policy has been to keep comment to be freewheeling, since I can always delete obviously irrelevant spam or personal attacks myself. Anyway, thanks for reading and posting, and I'm glad you made me look into this.. The_Polemicist I did not censor or remove any oomment on this post. I don't think I've ever removed any comment from any post. I remember your name and am surprised myself that there doesn't seem to be a comment from you below. I'll have to look into my Disqus account. (Disqus is the comment system I use.)

Wow you censored my comments? I'm gonna tell Counterpunch you're a fascist fake! Here a Canadian Billionaire completely corroborates what I said about the U.S. dollar   It's a petrodollar based on u.s. military strength. Michael E. Hudson points this out as well. I did a third of my undergraduate degree in economics. Luckily I double posted my comments elsewhere! haha. Hilarious. I'm gonna expose you now as a fake!

The Polemicist Jim Kavanagh censored my comments on his MMT blog!! Hilarious. I'm exposing him now as a fake. First he didn't respond. Nothing. So I posted a stronger comment and he censored my first comment and the 2nd one!

 it's trillions for sure - new research says at least 3 trillions missing - could be 12 trillion maybe. For example the real cost of war doesn't include all the future medical costs for injuries, etc. plus interest on debt. But yeah no one audits the military just like no one audits the FED. so yeah I suppose the actual black budget aircraft is hundreds of billions. Then there's Continuity of Government - the underground cities set up by Cheney and Rumsfeld under Reagan. Having "national sacrifice zones" somehow - I mean the military has huge open burn pits that cause heinous deaths for the soldiers. The military elite could care less about protecting anything - it's a huge "racket" as smedley Butler admitted after his military career. Money is the ultimate technology and the value of money is enforced by the military - that was the case for the Chinese who created the first paper money empire - and still true today.

voidisyinyang voidisyinyang 3 days ago

I posted this comment on someone promoting the MMT b.s. and, of course, no response! He responded to other comments. http://www.thepolemicist.net/2018/01/behind-money-curtain-left-take-on-taxes.html#disqus_thread So for MMT to "work" as you envision it then we need a North Dakota Bank only for the U.S. right? Like what Lincoln did to fund the civil war? My understanding is the Fed can not raise interest rates much since then it could not afford to pay the interest on the t-notes that foreign countries buy/invest into the Fed. In other words because the Fed debt is so high - with how many trillions printed after the 2008 collapse? - now it is the end of the U.S. empire ...and other countries instead are working to free themselves from U.S. dollars as the global Petrodollar currency. And so going back to Lincoln - since the military contractors are in each congressional district - to spread out their lobbying influence for all politicians - I don't see how our debt spending would not go to the military as it has since Lincoln. Bernie says he wants to hold military spending to 50% of the budget - but this includes the debt payments. So yeah I don't see how "MMT" can have any ground since it would have to get around the Fed - and of course the Fed is situated in a global international finance elite, as the LIBOR scandal exposed. Anthony Sutton exposed this as well - the military industrial complex of the U.S. is not nationalistic but controlled by a global elite banking system that financed both sides of wars. So the Soviets were funded by Wall St., just as the Nazis were funded by Wall St. and the Brit bankers, of course, wanted to get the U.S. into the war, etc.

You have correctly summed up the "meme" of MMT and this meme is complete b.s. Why do people eat it? Because money is the ultimate technology and people desperately want technology to save us. So if you read the comments on that link - people keep pointing out that the MMT meme conflates the Fed with the government. This is why I referenced the North Dakota Bank - which is a government bank that invests with no interest - loans. But did that turn North Dakota into some sustainability paradise? haha. To sum up the problem of MMT in one term: "Debt deflation" as economics professor Michael E. Hudson calls it. monetary policy has to be tied to the purchase of treasury notes which are government IOUs - bonds. So basically the U.S. has a secret deal with OPEC - or most of OPEC - to invest their profits back into the US Wall St and banks - while requiring sales of oil in U.S. dollars. In other words - if Saudi Arabia requires u.S. dollars for its oil - what's it gonna do with a foreign currency? Invest it in the U.S. - which means Saudi Arabia controls the U.S. - it's called the U.S. Petrodollar. It was set up by Kissinger - because the Vietnam War was too expensive for the FED and so the U.S. desperately needed a new form of value for the dollar. so the dollar was decoupled from the gold standard and Kissinger propped up the dollar based on the value of oil. Which is of course maintained by U.S. genocide wars - called the Carter Doctrine by the Trilateral Commission. So then as Chomsky points out - Germany and Japan are controlled by the U.S. having monopoly control of their oil supplies via U.S. dollars. But in terms of trade deficits - the reason we have them so high is because we also require that China, Japan and Germany then buy U.S. treasury bonds. So about a third of U.S. debt is owned by other countries - and then a third is for social security. But the real reason social security is going bankrupt is because Reagan began raiding social security in order to double the military spending - thereby vastly increasing the debt. And not just social security got raided - Catherine Austin Fitts exposed how HUD got raided and other federal agencies get their budgets raided to prop up a bloated military budget that is not even audited. Keep in mind that the U.S. also relies on CIA drug dealing to bring in about $1 trillion a year in hard cash - to prop up the economy. So the political parties are completely controlled by the hard cash of CIA drug money. Then the CIA creates money laundering banks - Carter's Trilateral administration was part of BCCI - which was a CIA bank set up in the middle east - with global drug-military laundering. Then the CIA setup another bank in Australia to launder all the drug money out of the Golden Triangle. Also the collapse of the banks in the 1980s - the Thrift banks - that was a CIA raiding of those S & L banks. And so the Fed Bailout of trillions of dollars after 2008 - to prop up other banks around the globe - was literally the biggest theft of money in world history - the whole thing was staged, as the film" The Big Short" revealed - but also a great doc expose on it - is Charles - what's his name?  Ferguson

voidisyinyang voidisyinyang 3 days ago

Yeah that doc is called "Inside Job" - it's on youtube if you dig for it. It interviews all the economic professors and exposes how they are completely controlled by the big banks to lie about the economy. O.K. and there is a great animation expose on the FED - on youtube.

voidisyinyang voidisyinyang 3 days ago

Kissinger sits on China's national petroleum board of directors.

voidisyinyang voidisyinyang 3 days ago

This is also the real reason the U.S. is invading Iran - because like Saudi Arabia, the Rockefellers use to control Iran's oil money via a CIA coup in 1953. Similarly with Venezuela - U.S. wants the oil. Libya was setting up an independent currency as was Iraq. China is trying to set up buying oil without dollars, etc.

The_Polemicist

BTW, to address the substance of your comments (at least in part), I'm well aware of the how petrodollar has worked (not sure of its future), and I agree with you that it's been an important underlying element of our foreign policy. I don't think any of that impinges on or refutes MMT (of which Michael Hudson is a proponent). it's another, parallel story

 How many Noam Chomsky books have you read? I wrote a paper in 1998 for my graduate school course on, based on Chomsky's analysis, that the U.S. would invade Iraq again as genocide and that the sanctions were genocide because of three structural factors: To promote weapon sales. 2) to keep monopoly control of the oil sales to Germany and Japan, etc. 3) to prop up the Petrodollar.

We now have 900 military bases in other countries, the military has trillions in "lost" spending and has raided other budgets for secret black budget money, we just voted in a huge military increase of $70 billion.

How can you ignore that the U.S. is an oil empire ever since we took over oil control of the middle east from the British or at least shared it? The 1953 CIA coup of Iran was so Rockefellers could get Iranian oil money - which they did for a long time and still want it back.

So how is this a "parallel story"? It's the backbone of the U.S. economy, as Chomsky points out, Western science research is funded by military money and then given off to the "private sector" to hold up the fake news about a "free market democratic freedom." This is how money works - ever since China printed paper money - the first do to so, and enforced its value with the military, as Professor Jack Weatherford details in his book titled "The History of Money" - have you read it?

 O.K. you say focus on the domestic economy? You realize the U.S. was founded as a slave colony? Have you read the work of Gerald Horne or seen his CSPAN talks? He points out that the U.S. is much like Rhodesia was against Zimbabwe - the British was outlawing slavery and the U.S. needed to maintain slavery and did not like the British taxing slavery. That was the real motive for the U.S. "revolution." The Constitution has a "Commerce Clause" which means the U.S. federal government overrides any state or local laws to ban or revoke corporations if any of their business cross states lines. So for example there was a "Family Farm Law" in South Dakota. A buddy of my dad's was a Federal District Judge and so we had dinner with him the night before he heard the arguments. His mind was already made up because he subscribes to the corporate economics of the fake "free market" ideology - from the American Enterprise Institute and the Federalist Society, etc. Which is to say if Cargill, the largest private corporation in the world, wants to own farms directly, then no law can stop it from doing so, even if it doesn't "live on the land" as the family farm law required. And similarly Cargill dominates food supplies on 100 countries through the U.S. "Food for Peace" plan - which means to "dump" food in other countries - like in Somalia at 1/6th the local farmer price - thereby undermining local sovereignty. And so as the Rockefellers - who helped Cargill survive the Depression - and Kissinger - they state - what is more important "food or oil"? If you control a countries food supply than you control their domestic oil as well. And so the reason 1 million Mexican farmers fled into the U.S. as economic refugees is because Cargill dumped corn into Mexico, after NAFTA. So the WTO was created out of Bretton Woods and the IMF and World Bank have set up a system whereby foreign countries need to pay back their loans in "hard currency" meaning U.S. dollars - and therefore have to export monoculture that is destroying their ecology - or export other "primitive accumulation" extraction - raping Mother Nature. Which is to say a country can not just pay back their international loans by printing money can they? Obviously not.

"most international loans to governments require repayment in dollars or some other hard currency"

So you say the dollar is a "domestic" currency? I don't think so. The U.S. Central Bank has always been dominated by foreign banking interests.
Wiki:

As ratification in early 1781 of the Articles of Confederation had extended to Congress the sovereign power to generate bills of credit, it passed later that year an ordinance to incorporate a privately subscribed national bank following in the footsteps of the Bank of England. However, it was thwarted in fulfilling its intended role as a nationwide central bank due to objections of "alarming foreign influence and fictitious credit," favoritism to foreigners and unfair policies against less corrupt state banks issuing their own notes, such that Pennsylvania's legislature repealed its charter to operate within the Commonwealth in 1785.

First Bank of US:

it was partly owned by foreigners, who shared in its profits. Also, it was not solely responsible for the country's supply of bank notes. It was responsible for only 20% of the currency supply; state banks accounted for the rest.

federally issued Treasury Notes to create credit as the government struggled to finance the War of 1812

So from the get-go the Central Bank has been driven by War financing. Can you give me any reason why it would be any different? The first wars were to expand the U.S. empire - against sovereign native indigenous nations.

The U.S. domestic economy has always been controlled by the elite - John Jay and James Madison and Alexander Hamilton all emphasized that the wealthy needed to rule as a minority against the masses.

Even after the revolutionary war - soldiers were not paid and then when taxes were levied on alcohol - a riot occurred.

The National Banking Act of 1863, besides providing loans in the Civil War effort of the Union,

So that's the THIRD federal bank - again driven by war profits for the elite.

After that corporations were declared legal persons and so the "free market" was officially fascist - or as Bertram Gross calls it "friendly fascism."

The Gold Standard was dropped, as I point out and the Canadian Banker points out - because of War debt spending. So you keep saying "fiat currency" - but what does Fiat literally mean? "Let it be done." O.K. talk is cheap. Money is backed up in value by military force - it always has been - since the Chinese and now the U.S. spends more on our military than the rest of the world combined - when you consider all the weapons we export and all the secret money that disappears from the rest of the government.

So there is no "fiat" currency - a government gets its money by enforcement tax payments (legal thuggery) or by getting loans from rich people who used to have private armies to enforce their interest payments - going back to the Knights Templar.

For example in the Amazon - Cargill built an illegal soy bean storage elevator - and Brazil tried to ban it - a judge ruled against it. Cargill could care less and is backed by the U.S. and the World Bank. So then Cargill said - grow as much soybeans as you can and we will give you money for them. Guess what? Soon soybeans became an official currency in the Amazon! Soybeans were as good as gold in the Amazon. Soybeans were literally money.

So that's "fiat currency" - it's not just printing something willy-nilly - it has to be backed by military force.

 http://www.academia.edu/5244158/ECONOMIC_PRINCIPLES_Seven_Ideas_for_Thinking_..._About_Almost_Anything

The purchase system has its beginnings when Henry II (1133–1189) relieved the landed class of a medieval tradition introduced by William the Conqueror which required landowners to supply theKing with knights for 40 days of the year. Instead, Henry II began a form of taxation with which he hired mercenary companies. The modern commercial connotation of the word “company”, in part,reflects the commercial nature of these armies. In addition to pay, the companies received a fraction of the plunder of war, including any ransom from captured prisoners and contributions for protected property. Shares in these companies were determined by the capital investment of its members andwere tradable. The purchase of shares by active soldiers was the institutional forerunner of the formal purchase of commissions, which fully developed in the 17th century. Initially these corporations were composed mostly of foreigners.http://www.academia.edu/5244158/EC...
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• voidisyinyang The_Polemicist • 37 minutes ago

  When it came time for Canada to settle its western frontier the new country faced a similar problem, only this time the threat was not Mexicans or Indians, rather it was Americans moving north. Selling the land to private interests would not improve the Canadian claim to sovereignty on the prairies if there were no guns to back it up. Thus the Canadian government adopted the identical homesteading laws the U.S. had used to settle their frontier. By providing an incentive to settlers to “rush” to the prairies and stay to improve the land, the area was populated by Canadians who quite naturally kept the Americans out.