Economists have long known this yet the narrative among the democratic socialist movement and mainstream media is that white men are causing it. As if we all sit in our cushy glass offices looking for ways to keep women from coming up through the glass ceiling. The facts are women don’t grow up wanting to be auto mechanics, plumbers, welders or any job that gets their hands dirty or could break a nail. On top of that, they usually end up having children that distract them from their careers an almost never go into the same line of work they went to college for. Many little girls grow up wanting to be sexy vocalists, actresses or dancers and of course Hollywood and the music industry are there to take advantage of them with promises of wealth a grandeur. Most of us white guys have wives and daughters.
Month: February 2019
Crony Capitalism; a discussion
What is Crony Capitalism vs Real Capitalism
A discussion between economists Russ Roberts and Michael Munger.
Stagging War
Very evil people in government positions of power have been staging events to precipitate wars for perhaps longer then we know and they are never punished. Even some of the Presidents of the United States have been involved. War is perhaps the single biggest business in our world and they have all been stagged, since at least the U. S. Civil War for primarily one purpose. The manufacturing and sale of products and supplies of war to the governments and they are using your tax dollars to do it. As an example, if you don’t think the oil companies and refineries have a vested interest in selling jet fuel to the governments of the world, you must be one of their shareholders.
War Is A Racket
If you have not seen the video, it shows that every war since the 1898 Spanish America War including WWI and WWII were started by either false stories and/or criminal activities and events done by those in our own government to make it look as if we have been aggressed upon. Even the Civil War was precipitated by wealthy special interest and with the Union military antagonizing the south into defending itself. The first shots fired by the south were in self- defense.
Why? War is very profitable for those who make weapons and the supplies even things like food for the soldiers. Over 139 million military combatants have lost their lives in just the 20th century, of course, most of them certainly not the children of those profiting from the wars. They are of course at Harward or Yale with college deferments.
Tennesee To Allow Gold and Silver Coin?
I have read reports like the one in the below link and then I never see or hear anything again. If true, it is good to see a State standing up for both sound money policy and States rights.
The Constitution is very clear in the mandate that no state shall make “any Thing” but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of Debts. Of course, the States are also prohibited from coining their own money in the same clause, under Article I, section 10, so the States have been Constitutionally remiss in allowing and use of printed or digitized paper money since 1933 when FDR unlawfully confiscated gold from the Citizens via Presidential Executive Order 6102 when signed it on April 5, 1933.
Those who allowed FDR to unlawfully abrogated the Constitution also enacted a law that “any entity that made a profit on the transfer of silver bullion, had to pay a full 50% of that profit as a tax. The Silver Tax Act was imposed in 1934 and lasted until 1963, also stifling the use of silver.
This is a little of the history: http://www.moonlightmint.com/bailout.htm
In reality, our nations monetary system had been unlawfully overthrown and the central bankers, with their privately owned and administered Federal Reserve Bank of the United States was now firmly in control of the monopoly powers granted to them in the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, when the bank was granted its Charter.
This is perhaps the greatest of the unlawful abrogations of our Consitution but there have been many others. Sadly, the Judiciary as they are bound to do by Oath, have been also illegally remiss in upholding the Constitution of the United States. Go figure, Attorneys willing to sell their souls for power and privilege.
FYI: In order to satisfy the legitimacy of his actions, FDR had declared the State of Emergency predicated on the Great Depression, the one that we now can prove was exacerbated by the very same Central banking interests that were behind FDR’s actions. In 1911 these same interests met at Jekyll Island, GA at the then owned hunting estate of J.P. Morgan, to plan and implement the Federal Reserve Act, the 16 Amendment, and the Revenue Tax Act of 1913 all giving greater power to our ever-expanding centralized Federal government. The non-fiction book The Creature from Jekyll Island by Ed Griffin details the meeting and FDRs other traitorous actions.
If you think these actions were done to protect the interests of the American people, you should keep voting Democrat and Republican because you deserve their continuous lies. If Donald Trump was really interested in Making America Great Again, he would be calling for the abolition of the Federal Reserve Bank and Income tax es on labor as those like former Congressman Dr. Ron Paul and others have done.
Just one example: Eugene Meyer, the then Chairman of the Federal Reserve bought the Washington Post out of Bankruptcy in 1933 for pennies on the dollar, after Wapo had defaulted on their loans which the very bankers had given them.
Does the recent home and commercial property foreclosure epidemic now make more sense? They lent $Billion to people who could afford the loans as long as the economy was strong, then they stopped lending money to slow down the economy and millions defaulted on their loans. These banking interests have been exacerbating the naturally occurring recession/recovery cycles using their monopoly powers through the controls of interest rates, bank reserved requirement, and the money supply. They can then buy up the assets for pennies on the dollar and it’s now paper or digitally created money that they can literally print on demand so if they do take a loss, it’s simply digits on their computers.
Now banks like J.P. Morgan are buying up millions in silver and gold contracts, using the same digital money the bankers create out of thin air.
The Hidden Secrets of Money
With over 3 million YouTube views, The Hidden Secrets of Money by economist Mike Maloney is a video series that I highly recommend to you, your family and friends. Debi and I just finished Episode 9 and she said, everyone needs to watch this. So please watch it and spread it all over the world because even though it focuses on the U.S. and our monetary system, it is applicable to every country in the world.
KARL MARX: THE GREATEST INTELLECTUAL FRAUD OF THE 19TH AND 20TH CENTURIES
Like many people, this author is full of himself, surely thinkings he is an intellectual with great skills in logic. He is a good author but left me asking numerous unanswered questions. His name is David Mikics and is also a prolific author on mainly the topic of Jews and Judaism. This is why it is worth reading. As you will understand from their own words, they are and have been highly involved in “revolutionizing” the world for their perceived well being under the guise of God’s will. By reading the comments, as amusing as the article, you will find they are “know it alls” that agree on little, relying on religion to give them the truth, rather than logic and wisdom and even disagreeing on much of that.
Religion surely plays an essential role in our world and it provides us great things and achievements but thinking it is impervious to imperfections or even downright evil at times, as the Roman Catholic Priests and other religious groups have shown us, is a fool’s errand.
https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/135073/marx-sperber-mikics
At 15, sitting in the public library in suburban Atlanta, I eagerly drank in every word of Isaac Deutscher’s monumental three-volume biography of Leon Trotsky. Glossing over Trotsky’s ruthlessness, Deutscher extolled instead his unmatched courage and humane feeling for the masses. A few years later, back in the Northeast for college at NYU, I kibitzed with the Sparticists who hawked their crude newspaper outside Bobst Library. It was 1979, close to the tail end of the old Radical Left, when the Rosenbergs were still innocent. My college girlfriend was a red-diaper baby, the daughter of communists. Soon I learned all there was to know about the battles between Alcove One (Trotskyist) and Alcove Two (Stalinist) at the CCNY cafeteria in the 1930s. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were my favorite power couple. I got a work-study job at the People’s Coffee Counter at NYU Law School and even invented its motto: “You have nothing to lose but your change.”
In short, I was a teenage Red. I was no idiot: I didn’t believe a revolution was coming to the shores of America. But I basked nostalgically in what I foolishly thought was the glorious past of Trotskyite Bolshevism.
It took only a few more years before I became disillusioned with the radical slogans. Maybe it was Jesse Jackson announcing at a rally in the early 1980s that he had been to Cuba and knew that it was a true democracy. Or Edward Said, whose hostility to Israel troubled me, writing that the Marxist state of South Yemen was a model for the Middle East. But I also learned something else about Trotsky: During the Bolsheviks’ war on the peasantry, he was responsible for the deaths of millions of human beings. In the end, that was all that mattered.
Thoughts of my youthful enthusiasm for Marxism came back to me recently after seeing the U.K. Telegraph headline “I Want to Save the Capitalism my Father Hated.” The story concerned the clean-cut, rapidly rising Ed Miliband, who won the struggle with his brother David to become the head of Britain’s Labour Party and who might well become the country’s first Jewish Prime Minister since Disraeli. The brothers’ father, Ralph Miliband, was a renowned Marxist and Jewish refugee from the Nazis; he is buried a stone’s throw from Karl Marx in London’s Highgate Cemetery. Ed Miliband practices a mellower approach to capitalism. “The free market working properly” was Miliband’s version of what is to be done in his interview with the Telegraph. But, Miliband added, socialism will never die: It is “a tale that never ends.”
Miliband’s wish to cling to the vestiges of Marxism even as he extolls the free market is not unusual in our recession-plagued moment. Nicolas Sarkozy had himself been photographed reading Capital in the aftermath of the crash, and countless professors in the humanities and social sciences (though not, of course, countless economists) fly their Marxist colors proudly, even if they would never dream of abolishing private ownership or markets. In the rarified world of academic jargon, Marxism plays its role in an intellectual picnic that includes poststructuralist thinkers of every stripe. Being a classroom Marxist means talking about the uncanny character of the commodity form or the phantomlike digital age, tossing in a few scattered lines from Badiou and Žižek, and suggesting that our recent, world-shaking financial crisis proves the “relevance” of Marx—without explaining what makes Marx’s outdated economic theories and their accompanying intellectual apparatus relevant to the tremors of 21st-century capitalism. We might do better, instead, to begin at the beginning.
***
While anti-communist socialists far outnumbered communists among American Jews in the first half of the 20th century, it is also true that Jews embraced communism like no other ethnic or religious group in the country. The CUNY political scientist Jack Jacobs, who is editing a volume for Cambridge University Press based on last year’s YIVO conference on Jews and the Left, told me, “After the war, in 1949, the American Communist Party”—which probably numbered less than 50,000 members—“may have been as much as 50 percent Jewish.” What better way is there to understand the appeal of radical politics for Jews than to go back to the original Jewish leftist, Karl Marx? In an impressive new biography, the historian Jonathan Sperber focuses on Marx as a 19th-century thinker, a man of his time and place; and one of Sperber’s concerns is necessarily Marx’s Jewishness.
Strictly speaking, of course, Marx was not a Jew: His parents were converts to Protestantism, and he declared his atheism from an early age. In the infamous essay he wrote when he was 25, “On the Jewish Question,” Marx declared that society must be freed from Judaism, which he identified with capitalism: a huckstering entrepreneurial worship of the false god, money. At the same time, Marx advocated that Jews be granted civil rights—so that they could then be divested of their Jewishness and become fully assimilated. Marx’s letters are strewn with derogatory references to Jews; though Sperber tries to make the case that Marx “took a certain perverse pride” in his Jewish ancestry, he can’t muster much supporting evidence. What we see instead are a series of slurs that today would certainly be called anti-Semitic.
Sperber provides an affecting portrait of Marx the man, who was a devoted and enthusiastic father: With one of his daughters on his shoulders, he would play “cavalry” on Hampstead Heath, running to and fro. He was devastated for years by the death of his son Edgar at age 8. But Marx’s habits as polemicist and political organizer have decidedly less appeal. His writing style was a calamity: full of sometimes puerile vehemence, he heaped scorn on his opponents, inaugurating the long Marxist tradition of mercilessly deriding anyone with incorrect opinions. Marx displayed particular contempt for the high-living, dandyish Ferdinand Lassalle, a fellow socialist also of Jewish origin. In a letter to Engels, Marx mocked Lassalle, who supposedly had African ancestry, as a repulsive “combination of Jewry and Germanism with the negroid basic substance”; “the pushiness of this lad is also nigger-like,” he added. In Marx’s pamphlets, mudslinging abounds: His opponents are generally idiots, traitors, and scoundrels, but these heavy-handed insults tend to make us doubt Marx himself, since he relies so much on vituperation instead of reasoned argument.
Marx failed as a theorist too. As Sperber argues, Marx’s effort to derive the market price of goods from their value, the labor that went into them, was a vestige of the 19th-century economic theories of David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill (both of them arch-capitalists). By the time Marx died, economists had already given up trying to relate price to value and were beginning to understand that value was a chimera. With the growing dominance of technology, it had become impossible to locate value in the time required to produce goods, as Marx, following Ricardo and Mill, had tried to do. Machines can make products incredibly fast; but these products aren’t worth any less than if workers had spent days toiling at them, as Marx’s theory suggests.
Finally, Marx was a failure as a prophet, in spite of the fact that he inspired revolutions that changed the course of history. His essential idea, influenced by Ricardo, was that capitalism would become less and less profitable and that its downward spiral toward the abyss of deflation—lower prices, lower profits—would be followed by worldwide revolution. Instead, capitalism has become vastly more profitable.
It’s important to remember that American communism was hardly a classroom sport. Like today’s al-Qaida agents, communists were sworn to overthrow the government on behalf of a foreign enemy in order to usher in a millennial moment of radical social transformation. Yet memories of Jewish communism in America usually come wrapped in the warm, rosy glow of the good old days, when passionate solidarity reigned. In The Romance of American Communism, Vivian Gornick interviewed a hundred veterans of the party, many of them Jews. She quotes Sarah Gordon, who describes communist politics as “rich, warm, energetic, an exciting thickness in which our lives were wrapped. … in us and in all like us lay the exciting, changing world.” “The Party was everything,” garment worker Ben Saltzman told Gornick. “If I died I would have willed everything I had to the Party. I would have left my wife if necessary.” One hears the hard edge of fanaticism in such statements, combined with the softness of a towering naïveté, the sentimental and dangerous belief that if one wills something like the greatness of the Soviet Union to be true, then it must be true. Gornick discounts the insidiousness of all of this, intent on seeing only good will and suffering in the impoverished, aging men and women she interviewed. Suffer they did, but they were nevertheless blind.
American communists did some good, particularly when they fought for racial justice. But they did much more bad: David Greenglass and the Rosenbergs helped bring the world close to atomic Armageddon and gave the Soviet Union, as a nuclear-armed power, the might to subject millions to its tyranny. It’s hard to reconcile the Rosenbergs’ treacherous deeds with the tributes to comradeship and humanity that Gornick gleaned from her interviews. A large majority of Jews chose socialism or liberalism over communism, and they ought to be praised for the suspicion that is a necessary part of democratic responsibility, their refusal to give in to Soviet propaganda. Sperber, for his part, is unable to explain why Marx was so appealing to Lenin and Trotsky, Stalin and Mao—and why his ideas became the basis for a terrifying new social order.
***
In his biography of Marx, Isaiah Berlin singled out one of this radical thinker’s central ideas: that the inner convictions we take to be the ground of moral and religious truth are in fact illusions, myths that need to be demolished so that humanity can be freed from its chains. Our beliefs about right and wrong cannot be taken at face value, Marx argued, because we have been duped into them by our historical circumstances. So, Marx in his March 1850 Address to the Communist League exhorted his followers to “force the democrats to carry out their current terrorist phrases.” Speaking of “so-called excesses” like “the people’s revenge on hated individuals,” he proclaimed that the workers “must not just tolerate such excesses but take over the leadership of them.”
Berlin emphasized an aspect of Marx that Sperber largely overlooks: his endorsement of revolutionary violence as a way to push history forward. In Marx’s view, history is an inexorable process that cannot be resisted or denied; but it also must be helped along. In its full-fledged version, the Marxist dialectic is a powerful intellectual toolkit for justifying oppression, since whatever the party leaders decide to do expresses the will of history itself.For communist Jews, being Red was a way of asserting their radical difference, rather than their right to belong in American society.
It is striking that popular culture and the universities alike are fixated on Jewish communism instead of Jewish socialism, reversing the actual historical record, in which socialists early on triumphed over their communist rivals. New York’s most influential Yiddish daily, the Forward, was at the heart of the storm. “At the very beginning the Forward was reluctant to criticize the Soviet government, even though they were at war with the local Communists in New York,” commented historian Daniel Soyer, co-author of The Emerging Metropolis: New York Jews in the Age of Immigration, in an interview. “They saw the Red Army and the Soviets as a bulwark against anti-Semitism.” But by 1922 the split between the socialist Forward and the Communist Party was complete. Jewish communists even tried, without success, to prevent Abraham Cahan, the Forward’s anti-Bolshevist editor, from being allowed to visit the Soviet Union in 1927. A Russian Yiddish paper, Emes, lambasted the Forward as a “strikebreaking daily”: They called Cahan’s paper a brothel with a mezuzah on its door, the mezuzah being its hollow professions of leftist faith. “One thing Cahan said was that the Soviets had gotten it backwards,” Soyer remarked to me. “Socialism was supposed to abolish poverty, but the Russians had abolished wealth instead.”
As the ’20s went on, the prestige of the communist movement declined drastically among American Jews. “In 1929 the Communists just looked ridiculous,” Tony Michels, author of A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York, told me in an interview, “when they first condemned the Arab riots in Palestine, and then basically supported them, all on orders from Moscow. They were thoroughly discredited, and there was so much hostility to the Communists, it almost put the Communist paper, the Frayhayt, out of business.”
During the Popular Front period of the 1930s, the Communist Party USA famously adopted as its slogan “Communism is twentieth-century Americanism.” But for communist Jews, being Red was a way of asserting their radical difference, rather than their right to belong in American society. The party card they carried signaled their disagreement with American racism and American conformity, with the white picket fences that excluded the downtrodden, the ethnic others. Tragically, such a statement of protest meant loyalty to a totalitarian foreign power and to a leadership that manipulated and abused them as a matter of course.
In the 21st century, with communism long dead, Jews still want to express their difference from mainstream America. But they rarely choose revolutionary politics as their means of expression. Instead, religious observance, commitment to Israel, and work for social justice are the main ways that Jews proclaim their identity. Rather than looking backward with yearning toward a true Red past, Jews should rejoice that most of us were free from the illusion that warped so many minds and lives and that America was spared what so many other countries had to endure: the coming to pass of Marx’s vision.
Curing inequity; a reality or illusion
The push to cure social inequities has been going on for thousands of years. Slavery was practiced on just about every continent including castration as a means to quell any rebellion. Females have always been much easier to enslave as most women are weaker than most men but they have fought back with other weapons such as poisons and seduction.
How and what have we as human beings done to alter this. We have had to hold knives to King’s throats, hang them, overthrow their armies, pirate their ships and face the hangman’s noose, the guillotine, being staked to flames of fire, more recently the firing squad and unimaginable types of torture when they failed. Our founding fathers took great risks to overthrow their governments and the American, French and British revolutions triggered others around the world to revolt against their governments.
Now we are acquiescing our rights for the alleged public good and a couple of centuries of liberty and greater equity are being reversed. Are we still being misled into believing democracy will cure human inequities?
I have not read this book, but it is surely one of great interest.
The Great Leveler;
Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century
Jurists 4 Justice; a key to civil society 