JustThinking.us

 Speaking of art.

Watch below as Banksy's "Girl With A Balloon" shreds in the frame having just sold for 1.04 million pounds at Sotheby's, London.

EPIC !!!

We've been saving this one for months.

Seventy seven years ago today, four teenage boys Marcel Ravidat, Jacques Marsal, Georges Agnel, and Simon Coencas followed their dog, Robot (seriously ... Robot ... if you can believe Wikipedia) into a narrow cave near Montignac, France and discovered the Lascaux Cave Drawings.

Click on the photo below for just the coolest video/interactive tour of the cave and it's thought to be 17,000 year old drawings.

You can noodle around this fine site in French, English, German, Spanish, or all of the above.

Way super, double highly recommended.

Building 7 goes down.

Can you say, "Controlled demolition"?

We knew you could.

Click below in order to .....

From History.com

On September 10, 1897, a 25-year-old London taxi driver named George Smith becomes the first person ever arrested for drunk driving after slamming his cab into a building. Smith later pled guilty and was fined 25 shillings.

As an aside, Smith's maternal great, great grandfather John Smith suffered the first ever known arrest for soliciting the services of a prostitute.

Think it through.

Keeping with the theme of the weekend.

This is Jamo Thomas with his Northern Soul classic ... probably.

I am occasionally corrected on just what exactly is a Northern Soul classic, and what is not.

I Spy For The FBI.

I wonder who thought that punctuation marks might be a good theme for a set design?

On this day in history, 1949 ... ok, ok, yesterday actually, The FBI decided that Frederic March, John Garfield, Paul Muni, Paul Robson and Edward G. Robinson ... among others, were all members of the American Communist Party. 

To quote Edward G. Robinson on the matter.

The FBI report relied largely on accusations made by “confidential informants".

Both Walt Disney and Ronald Reagan testified before the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee and identified colleagues within the entertainment industry as "communists'.

Congress would later cite 10 Hollywood writers and directors for contempt for refusing to divulge their political sympathies or name others who might be communists. The “Hollywood Ten,” as they came to be known, were later convicted and sent to prison for varying terms. 

Eventually, more than 300 artists were blacklisted by the studios including Charlie Chaplain, who had openly supported the Soviet Union during WWII.

Chaplain chose to return to England to work and subsequently had his re-entry permit revoked by US Attonrney General, James McGranary.

He never returned to this country.

Dalton Trumbo, proud member of the Hollywood Ten, admitted member of the Communist Party and passionate anti-war activist was later quoted as follows,

In an effort to give you a feel for the tone of the times, click the image below for one of my all time favorite movies,

I Was A Communist For The FBI.

Starring the extraordinarily hardboiled Frank Lovejoy as Pittsburgh steel worker, Matt Cvetic in this billed as true story.

Or click on the image below for the subsequant radio program with the same title starring Dana Andrews that ran during the early 50's at the height of McCarthyism, and the second "Red Scare".

The more things change ...

First, the good news.

According to the Federal Reserve's Flow Of Funds report for the first quarter of 2018, the net worth of US households rose above $100 trillion for the first time ever, hitting a new all time high of $100.8 trillion.

Now, for the bad news.

As always, you can click on any of the charts below to link up with the reference article from which this piece was taken.

Your oligarchy at work.

If you take a minute to understand how our money is created, the perversity and corruption in our system will become clear. And, when I say system, I mean our monetary system to be sure, but also our entire system of government as it functions today. Oh, and not just our system, everybody's system, as you will see below.

Most of our money starts out in life as debt. When the Federal Government of the United States of America decides that it needs money that it otherwise does not have, it issues debt ….. bonds.  Those bonds are sold at auction by the Treasury Department.  Much if not most all of these bonds are purchased by a group of twenty or so large, mostly Wall Street banks designated by The Federal Reserve Bank as "Primary Dealers".

As always, click on the map above to see the source information. although because I don't know the collection date for the map, the source info from the CIA Factbook might be different.

It certainly won't be improved.

Interestingly, The Federal Reserve Bank or "The Fed" as it is commonly known is not an agency of the Federal Government of the United States of America as one would reasonably expect by virtue of it's name.  It rather is a privately held institution, owned in large part by ..... wait for it ..... the "Primary Dealers.  The Federal Reserve Bank adds or subtracts money from the economy by trading government bonds with the "Primary Dealers", mostly always at a profit to the "Primary Dealers". 

Purchasing bonds from the "Primary Dealers" injects cash into the economy as the Federal Reserve simply makes a journal entry into it’s own computer system for it's own account, and in so doing it deposits a sum of money which did not exist one instant before and thus some number of billions of dollars of new money is born out of thin air.  It only dies when the Fed subsequently sells those bonds back into the economy, thus drawing cash out of the economy, or when the government pays that money back by redeeming it's previously issued bonds.  In other words, that money is for the most part immortal. 

The Federal Government of the United States of America then pays the interest on this debt out of tax revenue.

Lately the Federal Reserve Bank has on occasion been buying the bonds back from the "Primary Dealers" the very next day following their original purchase by the "Primary Dealers" from the Treasury Department.  This enables these preferred banks to buy the next batch of new bonds and then subsequently resell them to the Federal Reserve Bank at another profit whenever the Federal Government of the United States of America again decides that it needs to spend some money that it does not have.  Usually, that would be tomorrow.

This practice is the nuts and bolts process commonly referred to as "Monetizing The Debt".

Here is where it gets real interesting ..... at least to me.  Congress is empowered by the Constitution to “coin” money without ever having to fool around with The Fed, issuing bonds, debt or making interest payments. U.S. Constitution - Article 1 Section 8 begins as follows: The Congress shall have Power To ….. some stuff you should probably take the time to read ….. Clause 5, “Coin Money, regulate the Value thereof” ….. and then some other stuff you should probably also take the time to read.”  Congress punted on that right with the passage of The Federal Reserve Act of 1913, which Act created The Federal Reserve Bank as a privately held institution.

Were the Federal Government of the United States of America or any other nation in the world for that matter, to simply make it's own entry into it’s own account at it's own bank, rather than the privately owned institution that it now banks with, there would be no debt, no sale of bonds and no need to pay any subsequent interest payments out of tax receipts.

There most certainly would be instances of inflation, which would most certainly be underreported by a legion of governmental economists kept on the payroll, in one way or another, for purposes of massaging numbers in an effort to obscure the true rate of inflation in a cynical effort to evade accountability to the American people.  BUT ..... how is any of that different from what we have today?

The hidden benefit here is of course that there would be no insider profits to be had for the "Primary Dealers”.  Which profits they are presently using for the purchase of among other things, legislation that suits their own special interests, largely to the detriment of the American people.  That last part there is just my opinion.

Were we to simply cut out the middle man by chartering a bank that is wholly owned by the American people through the Federal Government of the United States of America and let it give birth to it's own money, a lot of our problems, most notably our debt, would become a whole lot more manageable.

Doesn't that strike you as an ever so much better approach?  It certainly worked for Andrew Jackson.

Imho.

As always, click the image below for a trip to a decent but mildly opinianated little piece on the issue.

As an aside,

The last sentence of the above article reads,

"In 1974, President Gerald Ford signed legislation that permitted Americans again to own gold bullion."

It should have been followed by the following,

"And in so doing, realiized a tidy little profit for the federal government of the United States of America."

Not entirely sure what "recover real value" means in the above chart.

Thought about it for a minute.

Decided I just didn't care.