Corruption never backs down - As long as the fraudulent Citizens United Supreme Court decisions are allowed to stand, fascism stands just within the outer hallways of our system of government
I kept thinking of DeSantis while I was reading your piece today. When corporations begin responding to their customers that are in opposition to illiberal policies, politicians turn to taking away those corporate benefits to keep corporations inline, DeSantis vs Disney for example.
The problem with having "conspiracy theories" become synonymous with "crack pot ideas," is that there are real conspiracies out there, and it's easy to sweep them under the rug and out of serious public consideration by labeling them as "conspiracy theories." I'd be willing to bet my meager life savings that you are spot on with this one, Thom!
Inflation is not a problem if wages and salaries are properly indexed and Idon’t mean the farce that is called the Consumer Price Index or CPI. The CPI was constructed as a snow job,toplacate Americans, but it is based on things that the average American does not buy, or if they do it is a once in a lifetime or every 10 years purchase, like homes.
The classic definition of inflation is too much money chasing too few goods, while we may have problems with the supply, we don’t’ have too much money, in fact we don’t have enough money, that is why prices are rising.
Another way of describing inflation is printing press money.
The only examples of printing press money are third world countries and the German hyper inflation of 1933
America does not have printing press money and hasn’t since the revolution when continentals were printed, and even then they really didn’t overprint the continental, the truth is that the Bank of England had been printing continentals to destroy the economy, the scheme was caught when British wagon was caught carrying trunks of Continentals.
America has what is called a fractional reserve system, unintelligible mumbo jump to most, but in reality it is debt money system, wherein all money in existence is created by banks in response to a demand for debt, and by debt I mean private (even credit cards and mortgage), corporate, institutional and most importantly government.
Congress yearly passes a bill which authorizes the government to go into debt. The Dept of the Treasury, then prints out U.S. Government bonds and bills which it sells to the Association of Primary Dealers in Government Securities (APDIGS), which was, in 2984, a list of investment bankers, and overseas investors (primarly central banks, but also sovereign funds like the Saudis).
The list of APDIGS was winnoned in the too big to fail banking crisis of 2009, and the winner was, ding ding, GoldmanSachs, and guess which bank , the Fed Chairman and Sec Treasury usually comes from?
So here is how it works. The Fed sets the interest rate at which member banks can borrow from the Fed, and it sets the reserve base.
The reserve base is the dollar amount of demand deposits (checking accounts), government bonds, and now (since Trump) corporate bonds a bank must hold in their account (they used to have the reserves in their vault, but now it is all digital).
If the reserve base is 10% then the bank, like Bank of America, can front or loan out $100, of which $90 is nothing more than a book keeping entry, before digital money (and I don’t mean crypto, because I carry $20 in my wallet, that is growing fungus, as all of my transactions are via debit or credit card.
In fact I hardly use my check book anymore, I use bill pay or autopay.
So the bank actually creates $90 basically out of thin air, it is a book keeping entry, and the book keeping is double entry.
When the debt is paid off, or as you pay it down, the principal of the debt is wiped off the books (double entry bookkeeping) therefore money does not hang around forever.
While the act of indebtedness creates money, it does not create the money to pay the interest on the debt.
The populace as a whole winds up chasing it’s own tail trying to catch up, and pay the debt with non existing money.
Visualize this. There are 11 ofus living on this island. I own a printing press, and a barrel full of rocks painted gold. I tell you that these rocks have value, and based on the value of the rocks I will be able to print money to facilitate commerce, It is not very convenient bartering sheep for carpentry skills.
I convince the ten other persons to borrow money, but as I am assuming a risk, I must charge them all interest of 10%, So I loan each of them $100, at years end I am owed $1100. I think that you are seeing the problem.
Not all them are successful they end the year with what they started, $100 each, but none of them can repay the interest, without taking a hit, and I have agreed to spread the initial loan out over a period of years..
Using my printing press, I hire one of them as sheriff, and his job is to dispossess the people who can’t repay the loan and interest.
Claiming to be a good guy, I loan them the money, to repay the loan installment plus interest, this time I demand collateral,they have to sign over their property to me if they can’t make loan payments.
The inevitable happens, without being given directions, the debtors figured out that the only way to make loan payments (which includes the interest which was not created at the moment of debt) is to raise prices, raising prices doesn’t work, especially if the good was not vital, and the service could be deferred, so they reduce the quality and quantity. The carpenter uses less nails, cheaper wood, the confectioner makes smaller candy bars and sells them at the same prices, he eventually raised the prices as well.
And there is your inflation. Contrary to belief, the banks fear inflation. The citizen can repay loans with chaep money. During the German Hyper inflation of 1933, A factory worker could walk out of the factory, and pay off the mortgage of his home with an hours worth of work. The banks have gotten around that by the use of Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARMS), and even if they sell their loans, they still make money, because the only risk they had, was the amount of the reserve they held to make the loan, the excess (the $90) was a book keeping entry that is written off, and they even get the benefit of charging you for refinancing if that is the choice that you made.
On the other hand , banks love deflation, because now they can obtain real wealth (property), simply because the debtor was in default. And since financial institutions are not flesh and blood people, that have to eat, keep warm, dry they can sit on real assets for years, until the market recovers and then sell it a huge profit.
The problem is that there is, a purposeful?, deficit in our language which results in conflating the various causes of price increases into the word inflation.
When in fact there is no inflation, just price gouging.
Remember inflation is too much money chasing too few goods, or an oversupply of money aka printing press money.
We do not have printing press money, Although the fred does print money, the printed money is the small change. It is sold to the Fed at the cost of printing, and put into circulation by member banks to fulfill the demand for paper money, In the modern era, it is street vendors and drug dealers that use paper money and coins. Even casino’s have gone paperless, except for drug dealers and crooks who exchange paper for plastic cards or chips at the cashierwindow.
We keep forgetting that 'The Enemy' is not 'Them' but 'US', the Baby Boomer generation who has allowed this sequence of events to play out while we busied ourselves with a a short-sighted, selfish life style.
We are responsible for every single vote, as well as the absence of our presence at school board meetings, city council meetings and re-electing all the Kings and Queens who have been sitting in Washington, D.C at a rate over 90% during the last 50 years.
We are responsible for allowing these legislators to look the other way as global and national corporations bough but all their smaller competitors, including all our independent media.
We are responsible for allowing them to conduct this endless war with soldiers who need a job, and corporations who need to manufacture a rain of destruction in all our neighbors' back yards.
And now it's Harvest Time. Or, it's time to call their bluffs and simply begin the steady elimination of sitting senators, representatives, nationally and at state levels, and from both parties, till we have created a trustworthy climate of representative, service minded legislators who KNOW they have a brief time to do what we, the voters have suggested are our priorities as a community. Who knows they will be heading BACK HOME AGAIN after their first and only term.
It's simple, STOP VOTING FOR ANY INCUMBENT POLITICIAN! And, perhaps consider what Braver Angels are doing to bridge our differences and TALK WITH THE PEOPLE WE DISAGREE WITH instead of calling them names. https://braverangels.org/
Mr. Hartman's research for this article is impeccable, and it's worth noticing that the single most damaging vote was just that: ONE VOTE in 1978.
Perhaps we should try to visualize what we could do together if we focused on JUST DOING GOOD. Some of the world's youngest thinkers are quietly suggesting just that: https://whatweowethefuture.com/
As one of the very few males left in K-12 education I can't even begin to tell you how powerful and moving it is to help our children know they may be able to get an education without becoming debt slaves to a Wall Street engineered nightmare. Or, to tell young people that we will work together to make sure they will have a trustworthy, well-funded healthcare system as well as a solid Social Security system that isn't allowed to be privatized by Wall Street Equity Funds. https://www.edutopia.org/male-teacher-shortage
Thank you, Mr. Hartman, for provoking us to think.
Mr. Hartman's citations:
We all know how Supreme Court decisions like Citizens United have let corporations legally corrupt our nation’s politicians. But what if the flow of corruption is working both ways, and some of our politicians are also calling the tune that some corporations — and even foreign governments — are playing to with regard to our economy and other issues?
Prior to 1978 it would have been a felony in 31 states for a corporation to pour money into advertising to swing a state ballot initiative election.
That was the year the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision so unprecedented that Republican Chief Justice Rehnquist himself wrote a dissent calling it out, Justice Lewis Powell ruled in Boston v Bellotti that laws preventing corporations from campaigning like that was an unconstitutional violation of their right, as persons, to free speech protections under the First Amendment.
Prior to 2010 it would have been a felony for an officer or employee of a corporation to call up a member of Congress or other politician and offer money with only the thinnest of hints that they’d like specific legislation to come about.
But in the 5-4 Citizens United decision that dissenters saw as a direct assault on the integrity of American democracy, the five Republican appointees on the Court ruled that both corporate and billionaire free speech rights were so expansive that their ruling struck down most political bribery laws in the United States.
Thus, today a corporate CEO or lobbyist can offer a member of Congress money with one hand and a proposed piece of legislation with the other without fear of being held to account.
Mark me down in the greed and gouging column for now. However, anything is possible when a congressional member has no moral compass, and some have proven they don't.
What is damn near impossible is to communicate freely. That's why every foreign trip taken by Reps and Senators should have open accessible records and the media involved. Nancy's trips have had that, but you can't say the same about Rand Paul or the other Senators that went to Russia.
It's likely the FBI, CIA, and NSA systems are as stifling as they are claimed to be regarding communications. That would make this scenario pretty hard, but if they (or their operative) have a face to face under false pretenses, let the circus begin!
The current crop of leaders are not smart enough to tell corporations what to do... Consulting firms have been telling these monopolies they can jack up prices anytime they want.
Biden is doing more to break up big companies than any President since Johnson and Kennedy... Corporations are not quivering in the corner, they are just cashing in those big checks. Make no mistake, corporations have the power, not our law makers.
Ian Flemming wrote “when something happens once it’s happenstance; twice it’s coincidence; three times it's a plot”. To this Malcolm Nance has added his Nance dictum “Coincidence takes a lot of planning”.
This “Report” lists a number of “coincidences” which invite us to connect the dots which reveals a definite pattern. Does it have validity? No question! Thom has not fallen down a conspiratorial rabbit hole.
Malcolm Nance's book "The Plot to Betray America" lists numerous connections-- between the Trump Organization, the Trump Election Committee, and the Trump Administration as a single entity, with Putin, Russian oligarchs, and Russian Intelligence assisting and leading to Trump's election-- to support Thom's theory even before the current Biden administration.
When you combine the cultish MEGA movement with the slavish adherence of Republican politicians to Trumpism it does not seem unreasonable to assume that a Republican takeover of Congress 1n 2022 and the White House in 2024 would complete a Putin takeover of the US without a missal being launched.
Inflation, crime, and other election "distractions" are cyclical and temporary issues; a GOP takeover of government would be much longer lasting and institutionalized because the mechanism of democracy--namely VOTING will be toothless leaving us with a one-party system where dissent is......see Putin's Russia.
Since the end of WWII the Soviet Union was seen as "the enemy". With its collapse there was hope of possible reconciliation and harmonious coexistence. However, Putin's dream of reestablishing the Soviet Union renders those hopes fanciful.
Are we on the verge of creating one of histories greatest ironies and becoming like the enemy who represents all that we once said we are not? Will we, like those great philosophers Calvin and Hobbes, say "We have met the enemy, and it is us!"?
God help us all. It makes more sense than all the other explanations we’ve been given. Many of them were certainly lies.
And the timing, the timing of all of this is very interesting .
And , I believe ,
very telling.
Thank you , Thom Hartmann for a very timely ,worthwhile,consideration.
The corruption continues.
I kept thinking of DeSantis while I was reading your piece today. When corporations begin responding to their customers that are in opposition to illiberal policies, politicians turn to taking away those corporate benefits to keep corporations inline, DeSantis vs Disney for example.
The problem with having "conspiracy theories" become synonymous with "crack pot ideas," is that there are real conspiracies out there, and it's easy to sweep them under the rug and out of serious public consideration by labeling them as "conspiracy theories." I'd be willing to bet my meager life savings that you are spot on with this one, Thom!
Just a theory perhaps, but worth looking into. As simple as one of the cardinal rules of journalism - follow the money. Appreciate your honesty Thom.
A ray of hope. Billionaires only have one vote same as the middle class and working poor. Corporations have no vote.
We the people scare the hell out of them and they make it difficult and discouraging to vote because our vote matters.
Be democracy awareness and get a Stars and Stripes Möbius ribbon to show your faith in the majority decisions of our fellow citizens.
🇺🇸♾
Iwish to speak about inflation.
Inflation is not a problem if wages and salaries are properly indexed and Idon’t mean the farce that is called the Consumer Price Index or CPI. The CPI was constructed as a snow job,toplacate Americans, but it is based on things that the average American does not buy, or if they do it is a once in a lifetime or every 10 years purchase, like homes.
The classic definition of inflation is too much money chasing too few goods, while we may have problems with the supply, we don’t’ have too much money, in fact we don’t have enough money, that is why prices are rising.
Another way of describing inflation is printing press money.
The only examples of printing press money are third world countries and the German hyper inflation of 1933
America does not have printing press money and hasn’t since the revolution when continentals were printed, and even then they really didn’t overprint the continental, the truth is that the Bank of England had been printing continentals to destroy the economy, the scheme was caught when British wagon was caught carrying trunks of Continentals.
America has what is called a fractional reserve system, unintelligible mumbo jump to most, but in reality it is debt money system, wherein all money in existence is created by banks in response to a demand for debt, and by debt I mean private (even credit cards and mortgage), corporate, institutional and most importantly government.
Congress yearly passes a bill which authorizes the government to go into debt. The Dept of the Treasury, then prints out U.S. Government bonds and bills which it sells to the Association of Primary Dealers in Government Securities (APDIGS), which was, in 2984, a list of investment bankers, and overseas investors (primarly central banks, but also sovereign funds like the Saudis).
The list of APDIGS was winnoned in the too big to fail banking crisis of 2009, and the winner was, ding ding, GoldmanSachs, and guess which bank , the Fed Chairman and Sec Treasury usually comes from?
So here is how it works. The Fed sets the interest rate at which member banks can borrow from the Fed, and it sets the reserve base.
The reserve base is the dollar amount of demand deposits (checking accounts), government bonds, and now (since Trump) corporate bonds a bank must hold in their account (they used to have the reserves in their vault, but now it is all digital).
If the reserve base is 10% then the bank, like Bank of America, can front or loan out $100, of which $90 is nothing more than a book keeping entry, before digital money (and I don’t mean crypto, because I carry $20 in my wallet, that is growing fungus, as all of my transactions are via debit or credit card.
In fact I hardly use my check book anymore, I use bill pay or autopay.
So the bank actually creates $90 basically out of thin air, it is a book keeping entry, and the book keeping is double entry.
When the debt is paid off, or as you pay it down, the principal of the debt is wiped off the books (double entry bookkeeping) therefore money does not hang around forever.
While the act of indebtedness creates money, it does not create the money to pay the interest on the debt.
The populace as a whole winds up chasing it’s own tail trying to catch up, and pay the debt with non existing money.
Visualize this. There are 11 ofus living on this island. I own a printing press, and a barrel full of rocks painted gold. I tell you that these rocks have value, and based on the value of the rocks I will be able to print money to facilitate commerce, It is not very convenient bartering sheep for carpentry skills.
I convince the ten other persons to borrow money, but as I am assuming a risk, I must charge them all interest of 10%, So I loan each of them $100, at years end I am owed $1100. I think that you are seeing the problem.
Not all them are successful they end the year with what they started, $100 each, but none of them can repay the interest, without taking a hit, and I have agreed to spread the initial loan out over a period of years..
Using my printing press, I hire one of them as sheriff, and his job is to dispossess the people who can’t repay the loan and interest.
Claiming to be a good guy, I loan them the money, to repay the loan installment plus interest, this time I demand collateral,they have to sign over their property to me if they can’t make loan payments.
The inevitable happens, without being given directions, the debtors figured out that the only way to make loan payments (which includes the interest which was not created at the moment of debt) is to raise prices, raising prices doesn’t work, especially if the good was not vital, and the service could be deferred, so they reduce the quality and quantity. The carpenter uses less nails, cheaper wood, the confectioner makes smaller candy bars and sells them at the same prices, he eventually raised the prices as well.
And there is your inflation. Contrary to belief, the banks fear inflation. The citizen can repay loans with chaep money. During the German Hyper inflation of 1933, A factory worker could walk out of the factory, and pay off the mortgage of his home with an hours worth of work. The banks have gotten around that by the use of Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARMS), and even if they sell their loans, they still make money, because the only risk they had, was the amount of the reserve they held to make the loan, the excess (the $90) was a book keeping entry that is written off, and they even get the benefit of charging you for refinancing if that is the choice that you made.
On the other hand , banks love deflation, because now they can obtain real wealth (property), simply because the debtor was in default. And since financial institutions are not flesh and blood people, that have to eat, keep warm, dry they can sit on real assets for years, until the market recovers and then sell it a huge profit.
The problem is that there is, a purposeful?, deficit in our language which results in conflating the various causes of price increases into the word inflation.
When in fact there is no inflation, just price gouging.
Remember inflation is too much money chasing too few goods, or an oversupply of money aka printing press money.
We do not have printing press money, Although the fred does print money, the printed money is the small change. It is sold to the Fed at the cost of printing, and put into circulation by member banks to fulfill the demand for paper money, In the modern era, it is street vendors and drug dealers that use paper money and coins. Even casino’s have gone paperless, except for drug dealers and crooks who exchange paper for plastic cards or chips at the cashierwindow.
We keep forgetting that 'The Enemy' is not 'Them' but 'US', the Baby Boomer generation who has allowed this sequence of events to play out while we busied ourselves with a a short-sighted, selfish life style.
We are responsible for every single vote, as well as the absence of our presence at school board meetings, city council meetings and re-electing all the Kings and Queens who have been sitting in Washington, D.C at a rate over 90% during the last 50 years.
We are responsible for allowing these legislators to look the other way as global and national corporations bough but all their smaller competitors, including all our independent media.
We are responsible for allowing them to conduct this endless war with soldiers who need a job, and corporations who need to manufacture a rain of destruction in all our neighbors' back yards.
And now it's Harvest Time. Or, it's time to call their bluffs and simply begin the steady elimination of sitting senators, representatives, nationally and at state levels, and from both parties, till we have created a trustworthy climate of representative, service minded legislators who KNOW they have a brief time to do what we, the voters have suggested are our priorities as a community. Who knows they will be heading BACK HOME AGAIN after their first and only term.
All our faith-based history, and all our studies of cultures that have collapsed suggest that 'power corrupts even good people. https://www.acton.org/pub/religion-liberty/volume-2-number-6/power-corrupts
It's simple, STOP VOTING FOR ANY INCUMBENT POLITICIAN! And, perhaps consider what Braver Angels are doing to bridge our differences and TALK WITH THE PEOPLE WE DISAGREE WITH instead of calling them names. https://braverangels.org/
Mr. Hartman's research for this article is impeccable, and it's worth noticing that the single most damaging vote was just that: ONE VOTE in 1978.
Perhaps we should try to visualize what we could do together if we focused on JUST DOING GOOD. Some of the world's youngest thinkers are quietly suggesting just that: https://whatweowethefuture.com/
As one of the very few males left in K-12 education I can't even begin to tell you how powerful and moving it is to help our children know they may be able to get an education without becoming debt slaves to a Wall Street engineered nightmare. Or, to tell young people that we will work together to make sure they will have a trustworthy, well-funded healthcare system as well as a solid Social Security system that isn't allowed to be privatized by Wall Street Equity Funds. https://www.edutopia.org/male-teacher-shortage
Thank you, Mr. Hartman, for provoking us to think.
Mr. Hartman's citations:
We all know how Supreme Court decisions like Citizens United have let corporations legally corrupt our nation’s politicians. But what if the flow of corruption is working both ways, and some of our politicians are also calling the tune that some corporations — and even foreign governments — are playing to with regard to our economy and other issues?
Prior to 1978 it would have been a felony in 31 states for a corporation to pour money into advertising to swing a state ballot initiative election.
That was the year the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision so unprecedented that Republican Chief Justice Rehnquist himself wrote a dissent calling it out, Justice Lewis Powell ruled in Boston v Bellotti that laws preventing corporations from campaigning like that was an unconstitutional violation of their right, as persons, to free speech protections under the First Amendment.
Prior to 2010 it would have been a felony for an officer or employee of a corporation to call up a member of Congress or other politician and offer money with only the thinnest of hints that they’d like specific legislation to come about.
But in the 5-4 Citizens United decision that dissenters saw as a direct assault on the integrity of American democracy, the five Republican appointees on the Court ruled that both corporate and billionaire free speech rights were so expansive that their ruling struck down most political bribery laws in the United States.
Thus, today a corporate CEO or lobbyist can offer a member of Congress money with one hand and a proposed piece of legislation with the other without fear of being held to account.
Mark me down in the greed and gouging column for now. However, anything is possible when a congressional member has no moral compass, and some have proven they don't.
What is damn near impossible is to communicate freely. That's why every foreign trip taken by Reps and Senators should have open accessible records and the media involved. Nancy's trips have had that, but you can't say the same about Rand Paul or the other Senators that went to Russia.
It's likely the FBI, CIA, and NSA systems are as stifling as they are claimed to be regarding communications. That would make this scenario pretty hard, but if they (or their operative) have a face to face under false pretenses, let the circus begin!
"Corruption Never Sleeps" reminds me of 'Michael Douglas' from his "Wall Street" sequel.
The current crop of leaders are not smart enough to tell corporations what to do... Consulting firms have been telling these monopolies they can jack up prices anytime they want.
Biden is doing more to break up big companies than any President since Johnson and Kennedy... Corporations are not quivering in the corner, they are just cashing in those big checks. Make no mistake, corporations have the power, not our law makers.
Ian Flemming wrote “when something happens once it’s happenstance; twice it’s coincidence; three times it's a plot”. To this Malcolm Nance has added his Nance dictum “Coincidence takes a lot of planning”.
This “Report” lists a number of “coincidences” which invite us to connect the dots which reveals a definite pattern. Does it have validity? No question! Thom has not fallen down a conspiratorial rabbit hole.
Malcolm Nance's book "The Plot to Betray America" lists numerous connections-- between the Trump Organization, the Trump Election Committee, and the Trump Administration as a single entity, with Putin, Russian oligarchs, and Russian Intelligence assisting and leading to Trump's election-- to support Thom's theory even before the current Biden administration.
When you combine the cultish MEGA movement with the slavish adherence of Republican politicians to Trumpism it does not seem unreasonable to assume that a Republican takeover of Congress 1n 2022 and the White House in 2024 would complete a Putin takeover of the US without a missal being launched.
Inflation, crime, and other election "distractions" are cyclical and temporary issues; a GOP takeover of government would be much longer lasting and institutionalized because the mechanism of democracy--namely VOTING will be toothless leaving us with a one-party system where dissent is......see Putin's Russia.
Since the end of WWII the Soviet Union was seen as "the enemy". With its collapse there was hope of possible reconciliation and harmonious coexistence. However, Putin's dream of reestablishing the Soviet Union renders those hopes fanciful.
Are we on the verge of creating one of histories greatest ironies and becoming like the enemy who represents all that we once said we are not? Will we, like those great philosophers Calvin and Hobbes, say "We have met the enemy, and it is us!"?