The Powell Memo, as most of you here probably know, was a manifesto written by former Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell that suggested the need for a grassroots corporate and political alliance to get their agenda ingrained into the minds of the populace and passed in the political system. Recently Steve Keen’s IDEA website suggested that we need a new Powell Memo on the economy, and this mine.

The Powell Memo was written in a time before the present dominating corporate Financial monopoly was apparent. Thus its suggested business and political agenda appeared enlightened, especially to businesses whose bankruptcy rate even in normal times is upward of 90%. What Powell and virtually no one else realized back then was that a monopoly on the creation of Finance’s “product” of Debt has historically always been the key problematic factor in the instability of the economy. The structural monopoly of private Banking and the paradigmatic monopoly of Debt ONLY are the economic system’s deepest and most unresolved problems. Finance’s monopolies ARE the problem….for both every other business model and for virtually every individual in the nation’s economy. Therefore businesses and individuals must ally themselves with each other to fight Finance’s monopoly.

What is the most basic interest that unites businesses with individuals? It is enough income in the hands of the individual to continually purchase the businesses products or services. In other words sufficient actually available individual income to make the entire system to flow freely through time.  

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Structural balance is important, very important, but structural reform will not balance an idea, a paradigm. Therefore businesses and individuals must cooperate together to bring about both structural reform and a new balancing paradigm as well.

Private Banking is an unbalanced monopoly business model. Public Banking is the obvious and correct business model to structurally balance Private Banking’s monopoly business model.

So, leaving aside for the moment the particular reasons why debt builds up, what is the correct and best idea/paradigm to balance Finance’s monopoly paradigm of Debt ONLY? Well, debt is an obligation to pay back a loan, and in a system that does not require the continual build up of Debt it is a legitimate obligation to enforce. In fact even with a new balancing paradigm this obligation to repay Debt…will still be a legitimate obligation. The problem of course is that the current paradigm of Debt ONLY results in the continual build up of Debt routinely, historically and inevitably. This has been recorded throughout the history of economics as David Graeber has studiously shown in his book Debt: The First 5000 years. So if Debt builds up SYSTEMICALLY to unrepayable levels as a matter of course what is the counter to payment of Debt and what are the policies to effectively stop that build up? To pay a debt one must have available income to do so. So enough available income at all times to live a normal and generally satisfactory life in an age of incredible productive abundance, and to pay off one’s debts as well on an individual level is what will most basically make the economic system as a whole stable, and that also means by definition that THE SYSTEM’S most basic problem actually is the failure to generate enough available individual income to live a decent life and pay off their debts as well, and the way to remedy that is to GIVE, to GIFT the individual a supplement to the income they make as work for pay, and even if they do not make any income from work for pay. Integrating Gifting as an idea and as policy into the economic system is the idea, the paradigm that will effectively balance the paradigm of Debt ONLY.

Okay, what is it about the idea of monetary Gifting that makes it the idea that will counter the idea of Debt ONLY? Debt is an obligation….Gifting balances and pays off debt…and yet there is no obligation to repay a gift. And there is no additional economic or monetary cost associated with a gift that would naturally have to be passed on to the consumer either. So Gifting is an effective way to pay off “unrepayable” debt that currently systemically and inherently builds up, and an economically efficient and sound idea as well.

Okay, what is it about Debt that makes it a humanly difficult and problematic idea in the current system? Debt has economic power over the individual and Debt inevitably builds up so that means the system of Debt ONLY has power over the individual. Are systems made FOR Man, or is Man made FOR systems? I don’t think too many of you would say the latter, but that is the nature of the current system. And what would change that SYSTEM (not individually or anecdotally) that inherently and inevitably builds up Debt so it cannot be paid off? AN ADDITIONAL AND UNIVERSALLY DISTRIBUTED SUPPLEMENTARY GIFT OF INCOME DIRECTLY TO THE INDIVIDUAL.

Okay, if injecting money into the system initiates and re-initiates the scarcity of total individual incomes in ratio to total costs and so total prices, how is this reality ever going to be resolved? The answer of course is to Gift the individual DIRECTLY. Gifting directly to the individual creates an immediate and costless increase in total individual income. So it fixes the deepest reason the system is unstable immediately and continuously…because it is does not go through the system first.

Now that fixes the systemic problem for the individual…but it still doesn’t resolve the tendency of the system ITSELF to continue creating the original instability. For that to be remedied you have to periodically and macro-economically equate the total costs of consumption and the total costs of production with a discount on prices at the point where all costs for each product and/or service are terminally summed, and that is at the point of retail sale.

What are each businesses/business model’s retail product? (Cont.)

Finally, it is essential to understand the difference between individual actions or inaction’s regarding indebtedness…and the systemic realities regarding Debt and its inevitable build up. In other words it is inevitable that some people will over borrow and also that some may not borrow at all, and/or a very few may make enough money not to be required to borrow either, but no matter these inevitable individual occurrences…the SYSTEM will still build up debt to “unrepayable” levels!!!!!!