We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Monday, September 6, 2021

Posts that I especially recommend for Monday, September 6, 2021

Note: Monday (Aug. 30) after I completed my posts, I watched on TV the tennis matches at the US Open. I realized how much I enjoyed watching tennis matches by expert players. So, I decided to wait until the 13th of September to take off on my road trips east from my home in southern Minnesota. I will go as far as New York state and possibly up into Vermont and across to Massachusetts.

I won't patronize any businesses that require papers to prove that I have been vaccinated because I haven't been. (I have enjoyed the longest streak of good health that I can remember, that is, outside of my balance problems I experienced in April.) Thus, I can't visit people in Nova Scotia and I won't go into New York City because authorities in both places require proof of vaccination.

Wednesday I received an email from someone who is living in Albuquerque (New Mexico) who has followed my website for over six years! However, I'm not going in that direction. But I could use more volunteers of regular readers of my website to meet along the way to the east coast. Hopefully, more will respond (goatmeal36@yahoo.com) before the 13th of September. I want to meet some of my regular readers over coffee, tea, or beer to get acquainted with them.

  • Jerome Powell’s Quest for Economic Stability is Destabilizing by Richard M. Ebeling from American Institute for Economic Research. My reaction: A capitalist economy has always lurched from economic depression from one to another. But this time the Fed, a privately held (mostly by New York bankers) is discouraging banks from lending, and over-heating the economy. This policy will result in the inevitability for a major crash eventually--argues Ebeling.
Why has there not been the expected general price inflation from such a huge increase in the money supply through the banking system? Because the Federal Reserve has been paying banks not to fully lend the loanable reserves at their disposal. As a result, as of July 2021, banks were holding “excess reserves,” (that is, reserves above the minimum Federal Reserve rules require banks to hold against possible cash withdrawals by their depositors), of around $3.9 trillion, upon which the Federal Reserve pays those banks an interest rate of 0.15 percent. In other words, 63 percent of the Monetary Base is being held off the active loan market.
 
This leads him to this conclusion:

When the Fed chairman cautiously suggests that the American central bankers are not sure what they are going to do, it is because they cannot do what they say they want to do. By trying to pursue their declared goals through the monetary and interest rate policy tools at their disposal, they are, in fact, continuing to imbalance and wrongly “twist” the real economy in ways that will result in the instability, and the eventual [deep] recession and likely price inflation they say they wish to prevent. [my insertion]
 
I think the ruling capitalist class, which owns the Federal Reserve (in charge of our economy), is more concerned about other major capitalists who are paying back loans they've received via "printing money" from the Fed than from the real economy. In the past, a traditional capitalist economy of booms and busts are always driven by capitalist's lust for profits (and power) by lending money from the Fed and other sources. But I think this time the directors of the ruling class (ensconced in the Fed and the Council on Foreign Relations) are so concerned by debts of major capitalists that such policies are "twisted" to maintain the solvency of their corporations and banks. Could there be an added motivation for this policy: their desire to create the eventual inflation of ordinary goods to justify and rationalize their digitization of money?
In the 20 years since the September 11 attacks, the United States government has spent more than $21 trillion at home and overseas on militaristic policies that led to the creation of a vast surveillance apparatus, worsened mass incarceration, intensified the war on immigrant communities, and caused incalculable human suffering in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and elsewhere.
There is no greater hypocrisy than the deceitful lies of imperialist propaganda. One of the most damaging, since it rests on 20 years of destructive war and occupation, is that the U.S. war on Afghanistan was about liberating Afghan women.
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