Thursday, April 12, 2012

Hero Crime Fighter

Bill Black is my hero action figure crime fighter.  I truly admire this guy.  He is the antidote to all the crap and fraud going on in the financial world.

Pink Slime and Green Slime.  The Green Slim being the odoriferous, toxic, sickening financial adulteration being inflicted on the world by the financial scam artists.  What it is and how they do it is described by Bill Black in comparison with how the Pink Slime meat product has been foisted upon us.

Read this: "Green Slime Drives Our Financial Crises" Bill is a true slime fighter, not just in his honesty to call slime what it is: Slime.  And the merchants of slime what they are: Crooks.

Comparing Pink Slime to Green Slime is true genius.

Bill Black you are an awesome hero. 

Sunday, April 8, 2012

Treasury Services

JP Morgan role in NavyCash is a Treasury Service. 

The Federal Reserve offers a Treasury Service to the the US Government.  Major financial institutions all seem to offer a category of financial service called Treasury Service at a level that places this service among the primary categories of Asset Management, Commercial Banking, Investment Bank, Private Banking, Security Services and Treasury Services.  All the categorically big things that financial institutions do.

These  are the Treasury Services offered by JP Morgan.  I expect that the generic offerings of all the other competing financial institutions are generically the same.  Treasury Services are all about cash management.  Receipts and payments and maintenance of cash holdings in that pot that exists between receipt and payment where cash exists as some form of actual currency or conversion to a cash currency equivalent liquid asset that is not the cash of any sovereign nation by quickly or instantly, convertible to any form of sovereign money.

Cash as real money cash in a treasury pot does not do much so it would be my expectation that (real) cash management holdings objectives would ideally be zero.  Converting real cash receipt to some form of money making paper upon receipt and converting it back to real cash only at the instant that a payment in real cash has to be made.  Beyond receipts and payment the management service of "real cash" is obviously where the financial institution providing the service makes its money.

In the current digital computer environment I wonder how soon cash into a customer Treasury Service account changes into some kind of liquid paper.  Likewise, how quickly it converts back to cash for payment.  The cash converted to liquid paper in the customer account goes somewhere after it buys "liquid paper something" to be converted again by the receiver because they find little value in holding real cash as real cash.  I expect there is arbitrage and fees at the exchange point.  Must be something in it for someone.

How much (if anything) is the monetary value of the thing being received and payed out of the customer's Treasury Service account really a sovereign currency and how much is it equivalent paper that does not even have to undergo a transition in order tto be a form of payment made from the customer Treasury Service account?

All medium of exchange in the real world, especially when it is a financial product or derivative in the financial trading world is likely not to be solely and strictly a sovereign currency of some country?  That is a big question.  In my money scheme (a digital, serialized denominated currency that is a record upon which ownership changes, not an account where the money in it changes) all transactions would be done in that medium of exchange.  Trades of things for things, like barter, even if the thing bartered was a paper representation of something of claimed value would be outside of the money accounting system.

Saturday, April 7, 2012

EagleCash, EZpay and NavyCash

I was a Supply Officer in the navy.  During my first assignment in Vietnam we used Military Payment Certificates.  MPC.  That is the military cash that was used in Vietnam and it is described here.  MPC was used instead of US Dollars to keep currency used by the military separate from local currency. 

Keeping currency separated worked about as well as keeping military personnel separate from the local population.  In order to maintain separation a new issue of MPC was made periodically.  The link describing MPC discusses that process.

I was not assigned as a disbursing officer in Danang.  It took all the junior Supply Officers available in Danang regardless of their duties to pay all the navy personnel every payday.  I was given a bag of money every payday, a .45 and a Disbursing Clerk assistant to pay at a designated site.  I was not given transportation to the site and my DK and I had to hitch hike a ride carrying hundreds of thousands of dollars of MPC!  We came back with navy pay chits that together with the remaining MPC had to equal the original total amount of MPC that I was given and had signed for.

If I could not account for all the MPC originally given to me and signed for then I was personally responsible for the loss.  Prior to signing for it I counted it all to verify that it was there.  One payday I counted it all but neglected to sign for it before leaving making the disbursing officer that gave it to remain personally responsible for all the MPC given to me.  He came looking for me with his .45 a pen and and a receipt to be signed for what I had!

On the day that a new issue of MPC was made it took the entire day to retire the old MPC and give sailors an equal amount of new MPC issue making the old issue worthless.  The local Vietnamese possessed MPC (although it was not allowed) and were stuck with the loss if they could not somehow get it into the hands of an American authorized to exchange it for the new issue MPC.  Security was tight on that day to avoid this.  I expect that security often failed!

The old days of shipboard disbursing that I had been trained for are long gone as is the ship that I served on off Vietnam subsequent to my in country tour.

The military now uses a card system to handle cash not only in foreign places but in general military personnel cash transactions.  That system is called EZcash, EaglePay which is described here.  The navy version is called NavyCash and is described here.  They are all generic Stored Cash Card systems which are described here.

The NavyCash system is a JPMorgan-owned commercial system operated on behalf of the United States Government for the express use of Navy / Marine Cash Cardholders and other authorized users.   Log in to the system for authorized users is this .com web site.  

The JPMorgan office administering/contact point for the NavyCash system is located at a Tampa Airport PO Box address.

Friday, April 6, 2012

Stop the Money - I Want to Get Off

The movement of money.  It moves from pot to pot, hand to hand, account to account.

Stop the movement of money.  Make the accounts that money relates to move, not money.  To make sure that money does not move give money, each unique unit of money, whatever we choose that to be, a unique identity.  One that is not shared with any other unit of money:  A serial number.  Just like a dollar bill.

A dollar bill is a physical thing.  I have some in my pocket.  The bills I have in my pocket, totaling $275 were in the pocket of a guy out in Eastern Oregon a couple days ago.  He gave them to a friend that went to Portland with a load of scrap metal.  On the way back the friend picked up some foam panels I had put on Craigs list.  He gave me the $275 and some of that is already in the hands of someone else because I gave it to them in exchange for something.

Physical money, dollar bills, move around.  There is a web site; Where is George? that tracks where money moves to.  People enter serial numbers of dollar bills on a web site and then look to see where they are seen again by others posting serial numbers to the web site.  Fun with money.  When I was in 5th or 6th grade I wrote a story about the travels of a coin.  I did a great amount of research several years ago as to where the billions in hundred dollar bills lost in Iraq had gone.  They all went somewhere.  Do you think they went up in smoke?  Used to light cigars?   They are in fact somewhere today.  I have all the possible serial numbers for the tons of hundred dollar bills that were shipped there.  I even found a few those serial numbers on bills at banks in a military town in the USA.  A base that specializes in intelligence.  It only took exchanging 20 one hundred dollar bills at various banks in town to find them.  I explained to tellers what I was doing and why.   Often they would thumb through stacks of hundred dollar bills and only give me, in exchange for my 100 dollar bill, the ones that began with CB.  That is the identifier code of the NY Fed Reserve Bank that is the beginning of all the serialized bills sent to Iraq.  One bill I found had Arabic writing on it.  The local military base also has connections to government contractors in Iraq.  Money moves around.  How and why can be very interesting if the money system is structured to give that information.

Most of the bills sent to Iraq are still moving around today.  If you have a hundred dollar bill starting with the letters CB from the early 2000 issues it is likely that it came to you, somehow, via Iraq.  They are being replaced so gradually the evidence is disappearing.  Faster, I think as new issues of bills are made.  More than necessary to replace old worm out ones because the intent is replace even the old good ones with remaining service life with new issues that are more secure.  Just my guess but the Treasury produces reports by serial number ranges of all new paper currency issued.  Not hard to check.

Money moves around.  Physical movement.  Digital money moves around.  Digital money is not physical money, it is virtual money.  It moves from account to account.  The degital money has no serial numbers.  The account number/Name of Account Holder is its identity.  Money is a lump sum in the account.  The account is the static record.  Money moves in and out.

Virtual money is not physically constrained to be handed from one to another to establish ownership in either a pocket or an account.  It can be fixed in place.  It should be fixed in place.  I think that it must be fixed in place and let the owner/possessor change as a result of transactions.

We don't know where all that money, tons of hundred dollar bills sent to Iraq is now.  It was Iraq's money, not belonging to the USA but we gave them their money in the form of US currency.  We also spent it for them and where we spent it, or otherwise appropriated it and for what reasons has not been accounted for.

It is unfortunate that we did not send them the serial numbers of digital hundred dollar bills on a computer at the New York Federal Reserve associated with the country code of Iraq.  The stipulation of spending their money would be that they could only "spend it" by transferring it to another account at the fed or a US bank. it could be a US account of a foreign entity.  The US dollars could be converted to foreign currency but the US dollars themselves would still be in the USA in the account of whoever sold the foreign currency that it was traded for.  The serialized digital dollars would never be allowed to leave the USA.  Total traceability, total accounting history.  We would know where every single serialized bill was.

There should be no such thing as virtual, digital US Dollars on a computer in  a foreign country.  American dollars are American dollars always in the USA on some bank or virtual dollar holding computer unless they are paper bills.

Digital, serialized, denominated dollars do not move.  They do not even move out of the USA.  The possessor/owner  of the US Dollars may be any financial entity anywhere in the world but the dollars are always in the USA.

What would a system like that look like?

World money.

All here in the USA



This is how the USA can dominate the world.  Or be dominated if someone else does it and the world prefers to use their static record money as the medium of exchange.

What if China did that.  Wouldn't that be a kicker?  A communist country, or at least it was, outmaneuvering us financially!

China would simply say to everyone:  If you want to buy our stuff, you have to do it with our money.  Just open an account in the Peoples Bank of China.  Convert your money to China dollars.  They will always remain in China.  You can spend them here or anywhere in the world.  Transfer of ownership (spending) cann only be done with those that also have money in our bank.  We will do all the money accounting for you.

The Imperial Yankee Dollar dies.  No longer the world's reserve currency.  By popular choice of where the world chooses to put its money. 

That is why we have the biggest, badest cop in the world.  To protect our money.  That is why China could never do this and the only reason they could not:  We would use force to prevent it but how could we really conduct that kind of financial war with no window dressing to cover up what it is really all about.

Thursday, April 5, 2012

Money as a Bridge

I wrote the following in response to this.

Building Bridges to Cash.  Excellent idea but maybe it takes a whole new way of looking at what we denote as money that is profoundly and fundamentally different. Looking at it differently:  Cash itself is the bridge not something that the bridge gets to.

Money used to move, long ago, from hand to hand.  Now it moves primarily from account to account.  From the name of one owner/possessor to another.  The amount transferred is variable.  The account number of the possessor is fixed.  A single owner or financial entity may have many accounts or pots of money.

Money flows from pot to pot. It originally moved physically because it was a physical medium with physical constraints. Now it moves conceptually, digitally, but our thinking about money is still constrained to thinking about it in terms of physical movement in the process of what money does; paying and receiving.

What if the digital record of money was the fixed primary central record of a serialized unit of denominated money that never changed.  Only the name of the possessor of that unit changed as a function of payment/receipt transactions. The number of money units with the same owner's name associated to them would be variable.

This is not a new concept.  It applies to the gold stored by the Federal Reserve in New York.  Some gold stored there is owned by other countries.  When it transfers to a different owner country only the name on the gold changes.  Venezuela recently decided not to play this game and shipped all of their gold home.  They decided it was safer there than here.

This is the big change:  Digital, serialized, denominated units of money do not flow.  They are static records.  The record entity, a uniquely serialized dollar, once created, exists forever.  It never goes anywhere.  All that record needs to "know" is the current owner (financial entity account number) and an accounting history reference link to the last owner and date of change.  A network and access device connects us to our money. 

It is a completely different concept of what money "does" as far as movement.  It is like a bridge.  Not a bridge to nowhere but a bridge that goes nowhere.  A bridge that remains fixed in position in order to facilitate conveyance of value as the medium of exchange to "carry" an associated thing of value from an owner on one side to a new owner on the other side.

Don't build a bridge to cash.  Make digital cash the bridge.

It is a different way of looking at it just like not raising the bridge but lowering the water.  Which "thing" is fixed and which is variable makes all the difference.

This is a rule of information as well as a rule of the universe:  The building block of a physical or conceptual structure is what a thing is, not what it does.  Once that is established then its function, what it does, can be just about anything.  It works for energy.  It works for social structure.  The fundamental thing of our political structure is our unique vote.  We established the fixed thing.  We control what it does. (Unless the vote is "fixed" then someone else controls what it does).

Once upon a time money was what money did.  The physical existence of money was locked and bound to what it did.  There was a fork in the road where what money is in terms of a physical thing (cash) separated from what it did.  The physical thing called money became conceptual (we still have a physical vestige).  We, as beings that (in the majority) focus primarily on what things do rather than what things are, continued to focus on what money does not what it is.  We still do.  We have lost sight and control of what money is and the fact that those that design and control what money is. A few have the power to determine to great extent what money is and therefore what it does.

Money should be this as a thing:  A perpetual, static, digital, uniquely serialized and denominated central record of unit value that relates to variable financial entity ownership.

That is what money should be as the building block of a monetary system. Real money.  Not a functional derivative of a balance sheet representation of debt.  If we establish the building block of what money is then money can do what money does.  What money does is economics.  Debt is one of the things that money does but in the current system that is also what money is.  That should not be what money is.  Currently money exists only as a representation of debt until the existence of that money is extinguished by debt repayment. It is a hell of a way to build a railroad when the tracks to get where you want to go are always coming into and going out of existence.  Good for the track business as long as you have all the tracks in the world or ability to create them at the push of a button.

Money should not flow, move, come and go or ever die.  A bridge does not move from one side to the other.  It sure helps us get where we are going. It is a big change to make to stop the movement of money and simply let everything we do with it move.  Look at it that way and a whole new system emerges.

Wednesday, April 4, 2012

My Head Hurts

My head hurts like a hangover.  Not from what I drank but from what I attempted to red this morning.  Attempted to read:  I could not even get past the words that were used much less understand the concepts that were being discussed here:  This is the link.  Get it?  I just said This is the link.  There I said it again.  I could say it over and over but if you don't get the idea that you have to click on the words, that they are a hyperlink to what I am talking about, you just do not get what I am talking about. 

When I labored through the link I kept thinking that I feel exactly like the reader that does not get the idea that they have to click on the link to know what the meaning of "this is the link" is.  They will never get it.  I read the link. I still do not get it.  Halfway through all the comments some guy says he makes earnest attempts to understand it all but his head hurts too.

I am with him!

I defy anyone to read and understand the link.  Edward Harrison attempts to bring together what all the big players in economics are saying.  He tries to establish some common ground they can all agree on for the purpose of making some progress on understanding economics and the situation.  I get that the focus is all on credit and its role in economics and the knobs and dials of credit creation, expansion, contraction who does what, cause and effects. 

Some commenters go outside the credit box and say that there should not be a debt based money system in the first place based on usury.  The last comment, at least the last comment at the time that I read it was that the entire system is a fraudulent scam.  Others also touched on it as being a scheme to benefit the 1% in a transfer of wealth. 

This was the beginning of the last comment made by jsmith:

This debate is akin to watching Doris Kearns Goodwin or Chuck Todd describe politics in our day and age of inverted totalitarianism aka neofascism: it bears no resemblance to reality and attempts to make it appear that the system we are living under can somehow be explained outside of ideas of theft, fraud and criminality. 

I am sure that any comment beyond that would be anti climactic.  It is an appropriate end to the discussion about how many fairies can dance on the head of a pin.

Since none of what they talk about makes sense to me beyond the fact that it is all based on a false foundation of what money is and that means debt, I throw out to the trash heap all their ideas and complicated discussions that only serve to divert and subvert to perpetuate some facade of legitimacy to a corrupt money system.

I struggle to understand what they are saying at the link.  To see some kind of a legitimate system that is worth all their discussion.  They must be so  much smarter than me.  I just do not get it.  I cannot "click" on their "link" that would take me to what they are talking about.  It makes me feel like a victim that should be blaming myself for being a victim of my failure to understand it.  I have tried but it is all BS to me.  BS that tries to masquerade as something that really works to the benefit of everyone.

I reject it all.  Throw it all out.  Serialize and denominate every last dollar that is called high power money.  Make it the fixed central record around which all the other variables change.  That is what money is.  Again, for total emphasis:  That is what money is.  Control the amount in circulation based on objectives of non-inflation and full employment.  Separate what money is from what money does then let money do what it does.  What it does is all the decisions that the users of money choose to do with it under rules of the game established by law regarding what is permitted to be done with it and what is not and accounting controls to assure that rules are followed. 

Separate real money, serialized, denominated digital dollars from financial paper that is called money or some kind of money equivalent that was only traded for money but is not real money, only paper with value expressed in terms of dollars because they could be traded for dollars on some type of regulated exchange.

Simple building block: Money.  Like a gene an atom, a unit of energy, a letter in the alphabet, a note in the musical scale, a digit in a number based system.  The lowest fundamental unit building block.  Establish what that thing is and then it will do what it was intended to do.

What a thing is and what a thing does. That is all there is in our fundamentally binary world that is all that the thing does.  That is where I stand.  That is where I drive the stake in the ground and tie myself to it to stand my ground on the matter of money.  Nothing else will work. 

All else fails.

There is no need to click on the link word "Is"  in order to get its expanded meaning in more words than one.   Is......Is!  I can get that!

Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Thoughts Implement Visions

God bless the people that created this.  Bless the person that looked at the mobility problem faced by paraplegics, used their heads to think about it and came up with this elegant solution.  A solution that enhances quality of physical life at a fundamental level.  Do that and quality of life at higher levels is potentially enhanced.  What a wonderful device.

The video demonstrates the simplicity of the concept.  A totally different approach that is so obviously better.  To manage the weight and movement from the front and bring it to a standing position.  Technology made this solution possible.  The wheel chair was the best solution for a hundred years.  It would go on being the best solution unless someone saw the what could be done.  The writing on the wall.  Then they took the simple thought and implemented it.  Its time had come.

So often we go on living with the devices and concepts that have served us for so long.  They become the norm and the standard solution.  That is the way it was done.  All of a sudden it is a whole new ball game with a paradigm shift.  A different vision leading to a different solution.

The sequence of pictures depicting the evolution of man through stages of evolution from ape to humanoid is a common vehicle to express evolutions (and regressions!) of man in terms of other abilities or traits.  In my mind I can see the transition of pictures from a person in a wheel chair to standing mobility.  That is wonderful.  Especially since it does not happen gradually.  For a person in this position it could happen in a day.  A new position.


Iron lungs once confined people to be enclosed in cylinders below their neck that caused the lungs to expand and contract as a result of constant air pressure change within the chamber.  The technical advancement of positive pressure ventilation is now the norm.  For the few that require negative pressute ventilation today, biphasic cuirass ventilation is the now the norm.

I have a friend whose profession is helping people breathe.  What a wonderful thing to do.  Ironically, this wonderful thing is necessary in many cases because the needed assistance is due to a poor life style choice, not as a result of a life choosing a condition for them.  To compound that, her skill is unemployed because the money for it is not their.  The money is not their because it is channeled to other uses that are so often the perverted dreams of greed and power.  What both ends of this spectrum have in common is a 1% and a 99% relationship.  How often things are dedicated to a 1%.  How tragically often it is the wrong 1%. 

Another friend blesses her food with thoughts of gratitude and recognition of all those that somehow were related to the long process of bring the meal before her to the table.  Hundreds of people directly.  Thousands indirectly.  At the most indirect level I suppose it could be said that it took all of us.  Even the 1% GD Banksters that run the money system that made all the efforts to bring food to the table financially possible with a medium of exchange.

God Bless those people that brought a device to a paraplegic that enabled them to regain a degree of mobility that, before someone had a spark of vision to see, was only the dream of someone confined to a chair with wheels with dreams equivalent to flying like a bird.  God bless that one person that had the spark of vision to see it.

Thoughts do indeed become things.  As outlandish as my thoughts about a new monetary system are I do believe that it is a vision that in some part, some aspect, could be a game changer for the whole world.

This I believe: A clearer way of perceiving problems and creating solutions to them using our ability to create conceptual structures using our brains and object orientation approaches to organizing information and extracting knowledge from it will contribute to conceptual paradigm shifts and implementation of those shifts to create a better quality of life for us all. 

In short:  We were made to be better.  We were given the means to do it.  We can do it.

It is just a matter of seeing visions, using our not just our heads but our devine nature to see in our heads, maybe in the negative sense simply not being afraid to dream of something better.  That what we have is good enough.  That the world is what it is and we can't do much about it.

I am learning the chords on the guitar to "Over the Rainbow".  I love IZ's version.  It has special meaning to me as does Kona and Ironman where dreams came true.  The person that gave me the dream was my partner in fulfilling it.  They chords are simple: C, E minor, F, G.  More could be tossed into and in between but essentially that is it.  Simple but look how beautifully IZ put it all together for us.  He took an old song and made it fly over the rainbow again.


This link: "Over the Rainbow" is the song of possibilities as well as realities.  One person dreamed of mobility.  Another person made that dream come true.  Some say love is the glue of the universe.  Rainbows are an excellent way of showing the vision.