Robert F. Kennedy’s Blind Spot
Robert F. Kennedy should be elected President. His dedication and accomplishments over recent decades doing the work Presidents should have done at the intersection of the environment, the economy and democracy, are nothing short of astonishing. In that sense he is already the President in many ways, fighting to protect citizens and their livelihoods from the uncaring industrial juggernaut of corporate capitalism that has strayed so far from what he calls "free market capitalism." He points out that government agencies have been captured through "a series of mechanisms." He calls the polluters, "the incumbents" and notes that nature is our community’s infrastructure that "can’t be reduced to private ownership."
Robert was born and raised as a member of an elite family and I find it remarkable that he was instilled with such a good set of moral values. A testament to Ethyl Kennedy perhaps. As a lawyer he has gone after polluters who are destroying livelihoods, communities, and our planetary life support system. If capitalists were all like Robert Kennedy we would be living in a better world, no doubt. But that is not our reality, nor will it ever be under our current debt-based monetary system, and this brings me to Robert’s blind spot.
In my article, The Persistent Blind Spot, I write that capitalism is wrongly and self-servingly conflated with "free enterprise" and "free markets" which by the very nature of the system we call capitalism are not allowed to be free. Instead, they are in debt to the banking system that extracts profits from their production via interest. So, "free market capitalism" is an oxymoron, capitalism is debt slavery and the control of markets. The enterprises and the markets have been dominated by monopolies for over 140 years all owned by those who own the banking industry. Free enterprise is the source of the good that capitalism claims, and it is the good which we should liberate. That "series of mechanisms" used by the "incumbents" to capture government agencies is MONEY. Money is also used to control public policy as Congress is so easily bought. Money is the governing factor.
For free enterprise to flourish we need free markets, and this means changing the monetary system from a private enterprise seeking to maximize private profits by controlling markets to a public system seeking to maximize public benefit as its first use. A monetary system that does not create all the money as interest bearing debt, enslaving people, industry, and governments, to endless debt, but one that creates debt-free permanently circulating public asset money. This is what the Greenbacks were.
How did they affect the economy? Abraham Lincoln’s economic advisor, Henry Carey, described the U.S. economy once Greenbacks were in full circulation:
… for the first time, too, in the history of the world, there has been presented a community in which nearly all business was done for cash, and in which debt has scarcely an existence … there has been a large and general diminution of the rate of interest … traders have therefore become more independent of the capitalist, while the country at large has become more independent of the ‘wealthy capitalists’ of Europe.
This was money issued into the bottom of the economy, the productive economy where we all live and work, where it can fill and truly "lift all boats", not into the speculative economy at the top where the wealthy play and trickles down only to fill and sink boats. We don’t have Greenbacks today because of the private capture of our monetary system and public policy.
Robert talks about the power of those in high places making bad decisions and how the law has made it so that bad decisions are mandated. The critical leverage point for changing the entire exploitive and polluting economic system is changing the law regarding the creation of money. That is his blind spot.
Just as we all are, Robert was indoctrinated with the idea that how money is spent is what really matters. This has created neural pathways, very well-established lines of thought. How money is created does not matter because it is not even mentioned much less discussed. How could that not matter? What is the 'first cause' of money? Not only how is it created but by whom, for what, and why? These questions will lead to the questions of how should money be created, by whom, for what and why?
I think we all have an all-knowing subconscious, so we have the information in our library, we’ve just not constructed the neural pathways required to bring it into our conscious mind. Spending time studying and contemplating this monetary viewpoint will sharpen our perspective on reality and open a world of possibility that will literally change our lives.
Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks.
— Lord Acton 1834–1902
