The following is a reprint of my article originally published on The Examiner . Â For a verbal explanation, I suggest, " Podcast: understanding US economic crime, obvious solutions to unleash trillions ". See also my comprehensive academic paper: " Open proposal to US higher education: end unlawful war, oligarchy economics with education ".
Nobel economist Paul Krugman wrote the US economy is "doomed," Obama "clueless," and summarizes his analysis of President Obama's economic leadership with simply:
Oh. My. God.
Mr. Krugman joins a growing list of characteristically dry economic experts expanding the margins of their self-expression to communicate to Americans that kleptocratic parasites have destroyed the US economy.
The good news is that the solutions are obvious, available right now, and elegantly simple to understand and implement.
Let's start with understanding these solutions, provide a snapshot to professional economists' horror of our economic destruction, and close with PuppetGov's 8-minute video, "America's controlled economic implosion" to add visual and artistic dimension to our understanding.
This multi-trillion dollar topic is of crucial importance to understand if you seek an economic future above that of a debt-peon for your progeny and you. Literally, you have nothing more valuable to do with your time and attention.
Solutions:
Fortunately, the structural solutions to our crisis are simple and obvious:
- Reclaiming over $1 trillion in annual public benefits from ending banks creating bank credit as debt for our monetary system, and enacting monetary reform for public-created money for the direct payment of public goods and services. This idea was supported by 86% of teaching economic professors in the Great Depression, and by many of America's brightest historical minds . Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman was among the supporters, envisioning less inflation than our current monetary system.
- Paying our $12 trillion national debt easily and without inflation as new money is created as the banks' ability to create credit from nothing is slowed. The savings of the annual interest payment to taxpayers is over $400 billion every year.
- Full employment . The government becomes the employer of last resort for infrastructure improvement that returns more than the cost of the projects, and thereby lowing prices.
- 2% mortgages, 6% credit cards, 5% interest paid on deposits from state-owned banks (and here for current progress in states).
- Invest our promise of 0.7% of GNI to fully fund the UN Millennium Goals of ending poverty once and for all. I worked on these goals for over 20 years; the goals are structurally sound but the UN and leading nations are not serious about helping these people. The goals will save a million children's lives every month while reducing population growth, easing environmental pressure, and removing motivation for violence.
- A Truth and Reconciliation process would have us discover other areas of suppressed economic breakthroughs, likely including pollution-free energy generation.
As a professional teacher of economics, my experience is that the above information is best communicated with a visual aid, such as through the video Money as Debt in my article on monetary reform and/or Zeitgeist Addendum .
The solvable problems:
Over four million Americans lost jobs in 2009, with December adding 85,000 and January 2010 seeing no improvement to this unnecessary economic and social tragedy. Unemployment is falsely claimed at 10%; it doesn't count those forced into part-time jobs and those "discouraged" who do not regularly submit new job applications. Including those categories is how unemployment was measured in the Great Depression. Adding those categories today puts unemployment at 22%; worse than all years of the Great Depression except for 1932 and 1933 at 24.9% and 23.6%.
I wrote on this topic in November 2009, including statistics of staggering US poverty, and the empty policy of only symbolic help and rhetoric from government who could end the financial crisis with relative ease, as the above links explain and document. After the first year of the Obama administration, the provided "stimulus package" only stimulated higher unemployment.
The solvable problems center around economic policy that creates protected parasites that collect unregulated and illegal gambling profits on the way up (the FBI reported 80% of the subprime mortgage fraud came from lenders), subsidized losses through "bailouts" on the way down, and then celebrate with unprecedented bonuses to themselves while publicly claiming to be doing "God's work." Future bailouts get guaranteed in advance without questions while the symbolic program to help struggling homeowners has not yet been launched .
Professional politicians, economists, and leading journalists are voicing their disgust in unprecedented harsh terms.
The leading problems and analysis:
The leading problems and analysis:
The US Senate called US banking practices the "new Enron," parasitizing $2-$4 trillion from Americans every year (a staggering $20,000 to $40,000 per household on average).
The US military admits to "losing" ~25% of their annual budget. What the firearms are we really buying with these contrived and endless wars against ideologies?
The US taxpayers are transferring TRILLIONS of their dollars to the financial elites under the political cover of a legalized "bailout" to socialize their gambling losses.
MIT's Simon Johnson, former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, wrote in The Quiet Coup that the US economy is managed by short-sighted oligarchs typical of "banana republics."
Chris Hedges and David Cay Johnston, with Pulitzers in 2002 and 2001 respectively, write that American taxpayers are on the road to permanent serfdom under a police state from oligarchs' "rapacious looting" and their purchase of a politically-protected luxurious lifestyle and business style at the expense of the exploited slave-labor class the American public has become (Hedges: " Resist or Become Serfs ," "Wall Street will be back for more," and Johnston: "Free Lunch").
William Black, the senior government regulator of the S&L crisis, who Economics Nobel Laureate George Akerlof hailed as the world's leading expert for understanding how the banking and financial oligarchs loot the public, was interviewed by 30+ Emmy-winning journalist Bill Moyers. Black poignantly labeled the bailout as "criminal fraud" and "the entire strategy is to keep people from getting the fact," and that the Bush and Obama Administrations are blatantly breaking the law by refusing to enforce bank insolvency laws. Interview Transcript; Black's book: The best way to rob a bank is to own one: how corporate executives and politicians looted the S&L industry.
Former Assistant Secretary to the Treasurer and Wall Street Journal Editor Paul Craig Roberts blasts government disinformation on employment statistics, calling the US an oligarchy ruled by banksters, with warmongers, war criminals, and "whores" in government looting America into serfdom.
Bank bailout overseer and Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren called the so-called "bailout" as "unaccountable" by design, and created with conscious intent to reward banks' "reckless gambling" by having every intention to always bail them out.
Renowned futurist Gerald Celente calls the transfer of taxpayer wealth to "fascist oligarchs" as "financial rape" and "mafia economics."
Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz and eminent economist Jeffrey Sachs run the numbers of the current so-called bailout plan and point out the unprecedented transfer of wealth from taxpayers to oligarchs. Stiglitz calls it a cheap substitute for capitalism that only has banks and inside investors win while taxpayers fund their winnings. Sachs calls our so-called bailout an unnecessary transfer of wealth that will become worse than we imagine as it sets the stage for further insider manipulations.
Catherine Austin Fitts, former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and President of Solari, and Vladimir Yuri, author of one of the most comprehensive and insightful economics papers I've read, "Fractional Reserve Banking as Economic Parasitism: A Scientific, Mathematical & Historical Expose, Critique, and Manifesto," write specifically in emphasis of parasitism as the defining concept in modern US economics.
Chair of the Economics Department of George Mason University (ranked 8th in the world for political economy by econphd.net), Donald J. Boudreaux, concludes in his economic analysis that US politicians in their economic policy act like pimps who supply taxpayers' services as enslaved prostitutes to corporate customers who lust after the taxpayers' money.
The most-read author for monetary reform, Ellen Brown, provides all the information anyone could possibly need to criminally indict Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner from his work as President of the New York Fed in funneling our tax money to pay 100% of Goldman Sachs' gambling losses through AIG.
And please remember that a year ago Harvard's Economics Department shamefully admitted that very few economists, including their own faculty, saw the economic crisis coming, understood it, or could prescribe a long-term solution.
Importantly, despite the logic of monetary reform, historical performance and agreement of our many of our brightest minds, failure of our current system, so-called "mainstream" media will not bring these ideas sharply into focus. Indeed, evidence is strong that these very ideas are suppressed by corporate media as a logical strategy of financial oligarchs to remain undetected as parasites.
Therefore, dear reader, it seems up to us to take leadership in demanding these obvious and simple solutions be implemented. Remember when you told yourself that you'd be a competent citizen working for the good of the team? Here's your opportunity, citizen.
So there you have a summary of my contribution to a brighter future in the creation of money, goods, and services: economics. The crimes we endure are transparent, the solutions obvious, the possibilities such as suppressed energy breakthroughs are unimaginably bright. I invite you to embrace our current disturbing present and optimize your unique, beautiful and powerful expressions to help build our bright future.
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