The Thanksgiving Conversation about Money

© by Mark Dempsey

If you think politics and religion are taboo Thanksgiving conversations, try talking about money! Talking about money with a Thanksgiving dinner attendee annoyed and confused him, especially when telling him government is not funded by taxes or borrowing.

The idea that taxpayers, or lenders-to-government are the source of the money in Federal spending is illogical. Where do people who pay taxes or lend to government get the dollars with which to do those things? The government must spend dollars out into the economy before they’re available to retrieve with taxes or borrowing. It’s “spend, then tax,” not “tax and spend.”

This means government is the only fiscally unconstrained player in the economy. It can spend as much as it wants, and buy anything for sale in its currency. This is true for any government with a sovereign, fiat currency and a floating exchange rate.

It’s also impossible for such governments to be involuntarily insolvent. They can’t go bankrupt because they can make the means of repaying their debts by creating more money. What about Greece? No sovereign currency! They cannot make Drachma any more, and must get their currency--the euro--from the European Central Bank. Bond markets knew this, too. Greek bond yields went through the roof to account for this risk while bonds from sovereign currency issuers (dollar, pound, yen) remained available at record low interest rates.

An objection to the above is “Why have any taxes, then, if the government does not need the tax revenue?” The answer to that is that taxpayers need dollars to pay taxes. Taxes make the money valuable. They do not fund the government. Don’t take my word for it, though, read an essay from Beardsly Ruml, chairman of the New York Fed, written in 1946 entitled Taxes for Revenue are Obsolete..

But don’t we have a National ‘Debt,’ though? Yes, but that is more like bank debt than household debt. Dollars, even commodity-backed dollars, are a form of IOU--“I owe you a lump of gold” in the case of gold-backed currency. An IOU doubles as an asset when you have a bank account. Your checking or savings account is your asset….but what is it to the bank? Answer: It’s the money they owe you. It’s a liability, a debt, an IOU.

When you write a check, you assign a portion of the bank’s debt to the payee. Currency amounts to checks made out to “cash” in fixed amounts, and not just bonds, the interest-bearing obligations equivalent to savings accounts, but dollars too appear on the books of the Federal Reserve--the Fed is our central bank--as a liability. So technically, government IOUs are what we use to conduct the economy’s business, not necessarily a sign that we have lent anything to the government.

That term--“National 'Debt'”--is just another name for the dollar financial assets circulating in the economy. The total amount of currency, T-bills/Treasury bonds, bank reserves, etc. in circulation equal, to the penny, the amount of National 'Debt'. That’s not exotic economics, it’s double-entry bookkeeping.

You might ask “OK, the government owes us something for a dollar IOU. What is it?” The answer--besides “another dollar”--is that the government owes you relief from a dollar’s worth of an inevitable liability: taxes. Taxes make the money valuable, they don’t provision the Federal Government. The fact that the government is a currency creator, not, a currency user like households (and state and local governments) makes all the difference.

The final objection: “B..but if you just print money, you’ll get [gasp!][hyper-]inflation!” Theoretically, that’s possible, but in reality, it’s just hypothetical. Theoretically, government, with its unlimited access to dollars, could bid up prices, competing with the private sector for finite goods and services, and it could always win the bid. That’s one reason plutocrats fear effective government. Their money can’t protect them from government action.

Could the Treasury issue a few trillion-dollar coins and deposit them in the Federal Reserve to balance that National “debt”? Answer: Yes, and legally, too. Where’s the bidding war, though? No inflation would result from trillion-dollar coin deposits.

Could the government offer a Job Guarantee, employing all the unemployed. Government buys surplus cheese, why not surplus labor? Would that cause inflation? Who else is bidding for the unemployed? Answer: no one. So no bidding or inflation for a Job Guarantee, either.

Historically, the inflation-producing bidding war never happens. The Koch-funded Cato institute’s study of 56 hyperinflations throughout history discovered that none of them originated with the central bank printing too much money. The hyperinflationary episodes typically began with a shortage--like the oil shortage that produced 1970’s U.S. inflation--and a balance of payments problem magnifies the problem.

Wiemar Germany first lost their industrial heartland (the Ruhr) to French occupation, and then experienced a shortage of goods. World War I reparations added to their international balance of payments problems, and these led to hyperinflation. Zimbabwe witnessed the exodus of their colonial, Rhodesian farmers, and was unable to continue producing enough food to feed itself. The shortage of food, and the need to import it was what started the hyperinflation, not the Zimbabwe central bank’s printing press.

As a counter-example, according to its own audit, the Federal Reserve extended $16 - $29 trillion in credit to the financial sector to cure the frauds brought to light in 2007-8. If just issuing money caused inflation there would be an enormous surge in that time frame, but no such surge appears in the Consumer Price Index (government), or MIT’s Billion Price Index (semi-private), or even in Shadowstats (private) inflation index. These trillions retired financial obligations rather than bidding for goods or services.

Artificial spending limits--austerity--justified by promoting inflation fears is the friend of creditors. It produces deflationary public policy, which means creditors are repaid with more valuable dollars when they lend. Inflation favors borrowers.

Whenever the U.S. has succumbed to the deflationary siren song of “Fiscal Responsibility™” borrowers suffer. In U.S. monetary history, since 1776, there have been seven major reductions of National 'Debt'--the last being the Clinton surplus. The time preceding that occurred in 1929. Andrew Jackson's administration even paid off the entire “debt” in 1835.

What correlates 100% with such “debt” reductions? A Great-Depression-sized hole in the economy, including the Great Recession, the Great Depression, and the Panic of 1837.

A history buff acquaintance disputed this account. He said the Panic of 1837 happened because Andy Jackson stole the Indian lands in the Southeastern U.S. The Supreme Court sided with the Indians, but Jackson ignored the ruling. After the genocidal Trail of Tears cleared out the Indians, the cotton plantations began farming the newly vacant land, borrowing massively to buy slaves. The resulting cotton surplus made the price of cotton plunge, despite the fact that they warehoused 60% of that crop. Then the plantations defaulted on their loans, and the typical depression scenario of asset forfeitures and foreclosures began.

But look at what the “Debt” payoff did: it withdrew dollars from the economy, impairing peoples’ savings. When time came for the plantations to pay their debts, they not only didn't get the expected cotton income, they didn’t have the savings to compensate for that shortfall. The “Panic of 1837” ensued.

An economy is a complex system. It’s hard to assign causality, but the 100% correlation of these “Debt” paydowns with Great Depressions is certainly suggestive. All of the headlines saying “Economy improves despite National ‘Debt’ increase” continue to promote ignorance of the connection, and the economic capabilities of government spending, but now you know what’s really far more likely to be one root cause of these massive downturns: reductions in National ‘Debt.’

So why all the publicity about government shortfalls? Just this week, for one example, McClatchy news reminded us that Social Security is out of money! Notice, incidentally that we weren’t out of money for $16 - $29 trillion in financial sector bailout, and could have paid off everyone’s mortgage for only $9 trillion. When it comes to bank bailouts or wars in the Middle East, we have plenty of money. But for social safety nets, somehow we’re fresh out.

Why? Two words: “Labor Discipline.” The message is that you had better take whatever crappy job is on offer, or your household will be unable to pay its debts, and will suffer the indignities of poverty, even homelessness and starvation. If you are extra ornery, we’ll incarcerate you! We may even replace you with robots and artificial intelligence!

But the truth is that people are more productive when motivated by their own interests rather than threats driving them to desperation. There is plenty of work to do--although not all of it is profitable. Among those unprofitable activities are things like raising our children, caring for our elderly, or observing environmental impacts. These could all be jobs. A Job Guarantee is not just possible, but would make a world where civility would be far more common, and dog-eat-dog capitalists would have to treat labor with respect.

The good news is that our biggest task is changing our minds. The bad news is that we’re reluctant to even consider something outside the conventional narrative that says currency creators like government are just exactly like currency users like households.

I’d even suggest that a population not reduced to desperate measures simply to survive is more likely to be generous with civil rights and tolerance, never mind mobilizing the economy to deal with really big problems like global warming. Whether prosperity or tolerance came first may be a chicken-and-egg problem, but the idea that they are not intertwined is absurd. “Labor discipline” includes immiserating and dividing the population into squabbling tribes of debt peons that are easy to dominate...er, I mean "govern."

H.G. Wells once said that civilization is a race between education and catastrophe. Whether we will experience more Thanksgiving gratitude depends largely on whether we learn our lesson before catastrophe wins the race.

Update: Stephanie Kelton (a Modern Money Theory economist) agrees in Huffingtonpost.

Keb Mo's tribute to Johnny Cash: Folsom Prison Blues

Everything You Thought You Knew About Western Civilization Is Wrong: A Review of Michael Hudson’s New Book, And Forgive Them Their Debts

Posted on November 16, 2018

By John Siman

To say that Michael Hudson’s new book And Forgive Them Their Debts: Lending, Foreclosure, and Redemption from Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year (ISLET 2018) is profound is an understatement on the order of saying that the Mariana Trench is deep. To grasp his central argument is so alien to our modern way of thinking about civilization and barbarism that Hudson quite matter-of-factly agreed with me that the book is, to the extent that it will be understood, “earth-shattering” in both intent and effect. Over the past three decades, Hudson gleaned (under the auspices of Harvard’s Peabody Museum) and then synthesized the scholarship of American and British and French and German and Soviet assyriologists (spelled with a lower-case a to denote collectively all who study the various civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia, which include Sumer, the Akkadian Empire, Ebla, Babylonia, et al., as well as Assyria with a capital A). Hudson demonstrates that we, twenty-first century globalists, have been morally blinded by a dark legacy of some twenty-eight centuries of decontextualized history. This has left us, for all practical purposes, utterly ignorant of the corrective civilizational model that is needed to save ourselves from tottering into bleak neo-feudal barbarism.

This corrective model actually existed and flourished in the economic functioning of Mesopotamian societies during the third and second millennia B.C. It can be termed Clean Slate amnesty, a term Hudson uses to embrace the essential function of what was called amargi andníg-si-sáin Sumerian, andurārumand mīšarumin Akkadian (the language of Babylonia), šudūtu andkirenzi in Hurrian, para tarnumarin Hittite, and deror(דְּרוֹר) in Hebrew: It is the necessary and periodic erasure of the debts of small farmers — necessary because such farmers are, in any society in which interest on loans is calculated, inevitably subject to being impoverished, then stripped of their property, and finally reduced to servitude (including the sexual servitude of daughters and wives) by their creditors, creditors. The latter inevitably seek to effect the terminal polarization of society into an oligarchy of predatory creditors cannibalizing a sinking underclass mired in irreversible debt peonage. Hudson writes: “That is what creditors really wanted: Not merely the interest as such, but the collateral — whatever economic assets debtors possessed, from their labor to their property, ending up with their lives” (p. 50).

And such polarization is, by Hudson’s definition, barbarism. For what is the most basic condition of civilization, Hudson asks, other than societal organization that effects lasting “balance” by keeping “everybody above the break-even level”?

“Mesopotamian societies were not interested in equality,” he told me, “but they were civilized. And they possessed the financial sophistication to understand that, since interest on loans increases exponentially, while economic growth at best follows an S-curve. This means that debtors will, if not protected by a central authority, end up becoming permanent bondservants to their creditors. So Mesopotamian kings regularly rescued debtors who were getting crushed by their debts. They knew that they needed to do this. Again and again, century after century, they proclaimed Clean Slate Amnesties.”

Hudson also writes: “By liberating distressed individuals who had fallen into debt bondage, and returning to cultivators the lands they had forfeited for debt or sold under economic duress, these royal acts maintained a free peasantry willing to fight for its land and work on public building projects and canals…. By clearing away the buildup of personal debts, rulers saved society from the social chaos that would have resulted from personal insolvency, debt bondage, and military defection” (p. 3).

Marx and Engels never made such an argument (nor did Adam Smith for that matter). Hudson points out that they knew nothing of these ancient Mesopotamian societies. No one did back then. Almost all of the various kinds of assyriologists completed their archaeological excavations and philological analyses during the twentieth century. In other words, this book could not have been written until someone digested the relevant parts of the vast body of this recent scholarship. And this someone is Michael Hudson.

So let us reconsider Hudson’s fundamental insight in more vivid terms. In ancient Mesopotamian societies it was understood that freedom was preserved by protecting debtors. In what we call Western Civilization, that is, in the plethora of societies that have followed the flowering of the Greek poleis beginning in the eighth century B.C., just the opposite, with only one major exception (Hudson describes the tenth-century A.D. Byzantine Empire of Romanos Lecapenus), has been the case: For us freedom has been understood to sanction the ability of creditors to demand payment from debtors without restraint or oversight. This is the freedom to cannibalize society. This is the freedom to enslave. This is, in the end, the freedom proclaimed by the Chicago School and the mainstream of American economists. And so Hudson emphasizes that our Western notion of freedom has been, for some twenty-eight centuries now, Orwellianin the most literal sense of the word: War is Peace • Freedom is Slavery• Ignorance is Strength. He writes: “A constant dynamic of history has been the drive by financial elites to centralize control in their own hands and manage the economy in predatory, extractive ways. Their ostensible freedom is at the expense of the governing authority and the economy at large. As such, it is the opposite of liberty as conceived in Sumerian times” (p. 266).

And our Orwellian, our neoliberal notion of unrestricted freedom for the creditor dooms us at the very outset of any quest we undertake for a just economic order. Any and every revolution that we wage, no matter how righteous in its conception, is destined to fail.

And we are so doomed, Hudson says, because we have been morally blinded by twenty-eight centuries of deracinated, or as he says, decontextualized history. The true roots of Western Civilization lie not in the Greek poleis that lacked royal oversight to cancel debts, but in the Bronze Age Mesopotamian societies that understood how life, liberty and land would be cyclically restored to debtors again and again. But, in the eighth century B.C., along with the alphabet coming from the Near East to the Greeks, so came the concept of calculating interest on loans. This concept of exponentially-increasing interest was adopted by the Greeks — and subsequently by the Romans — without the balancing concept of Clean Slate amnesty.

So it was inevitable that, over the centuries of Greek and Roman history, increasing numbers of small farmers became irredeemably indebted and lost their land. It likewise was inevitable that their creditors amassed huge land holdings and established themselves in parasitic oligarchies. This innate tendency to social polarization arising from debt unforgiveness is the original and incurable curse on our post-eighth-century-B.C. Western Civilization, the lurid birthmark that cannot be washed away or excised. In this context Hudson quotes the classicist Moses Finley to great effect: “…. debt was a deliberate device on the part of the creditor to obtain more dependent labor rather than a device for enrichment through interest.” Likewise he quotes Tim Cornell: “The purpose of the ‘loan,’ which was secured on the person of the debtor, was precisely to create a state of bondage”(p. 52 — Hudson earlier made this point in two colloquium volumes he edited as part of his Harvard project: Debt and Economic Renewal in the Ancient Near East, and Labor in the Ancient World).

Hudson is able to explain that the long decline and fall of Rome begins not, as Gibbon had it, with the death of Marcus Aurelius, the last of the five good emperors, in A.D. 180, but four centuries earlier, following Hannibal’s devastation of the Italian countryside during the Second Punic War (218-201 B.C.). After that war the small farmers of Italy never recovered their land, which was systematically swallowed up by the prædia(note the etymological connection with predatory), the latifundia, the great oligarchic estates: latifundia Italiam (“the great estates destroyed Italy”), as Pliny the Elder observed. But among modern scholars, as Hudson points out, “Arnold Toynbee is almost alone in emphasizing the role of debt in concentrating Roman wealth and property ownership” (p. xviii) — and thus in explaining the decline of the Roman Empire.

“Arnold Toynbee,” Hudson writes, “described Rome’s patrician idea of ‘freedom’ or ‘liberty’ as limited to oligarchic freedom from kings or civic bodies powerful enough to check creditor power to indebt and impoverish the citizenry at large. ‘The patrician  aristocracy’s monopoly of office after the eclipse of the monarchy [Hudson quotes from Toynbee’s book Hannibal’s Legacy] had been used by the patricians as a weapon for maintaining their hold on the lion’s share of the country’s economic assets; and the plebeian majority of the Roman citizen-body had striven to gain access to public office as a means to securing more equitable distribution of property and a restraint on the oppression of debtors by creditors.’ The latter attempt failed,” Hudson observes, “and European and Western civilization is still living with the aftermath” (p. 262).

Because Hudson brings into focus the big picture, the pulsing sweep of Western history over millennia, he is able to describe the economic chasm between ancient Mesopotamian civilization and the later Western societies that begins with Greece and Rome: “Early in this century [i.e. the scholarly consensus until the 1970s] Mesopotamia’s debt cancellations were understood to be like Solon’s seisachtheia of 594 B.C. freeing the Athenian citizens from debt bondage. But Near Eastern royal proclamations were grounded in a different social-philosophical context from Greek reforms aiming to replace landed creditor aristocracies with democracy. The demands of the Greek and Roman populace for debt cancellation can rightly be called revolutionary[italics mine], but Sumerian and Babylonian demands were based on a conservative tradition grounded in rituals of renewing the calendrical cosmos and its periodicities in good order. The Mesopotamian idea of reform had ‘no notion [Hudson is quoting Dominique Charpin’s book Hammurabi of Babylonhere] of what we would call social progress. Instead, the measures the king instituted under his mīšarum were measures to bring back the original order [italics mine]. The rules of the game had not been changed, but everyone had been dealt a new hand of cards’” (p. 133). Contrast the Greeks and Romans: “Classical Antiquity,” Hudson writes, “replaced the cyclical idea of time and social renewal with that of linear time. Economic polarization became irreversible, not merely temporary”  (p. xxv). In other words: “The idea of linear progress, in the form of irreversible debt and property transfers, has replaced the Bronze Age tradition of cyclical renewal” (p. 7).

After all these centuries, we remain ignorant of the fact that deep in the roots of our civilization is contained the corrective model of cyclical return – what Dominique Charpin calls the “restoration of order” (p. xix). We continue to inundate ourselves with a billion variations of the sales pitch to borrow and borrow, the exhortation to put more and more on credit, because, you know, the future’s so bright I gotta wear shades.

Nowhere, Hudson shows, is it more evident that we are blinded by a deracinated, by a decontextualizedunderstanding of our history than in our ignorance of the career of Jesus. Hence the title of the book: And Forgive Them Their Debts and the cover illustration of Jesus flogging the moneylenders — the creditors who do not forgive debts — in the Temple. For centuries English-speakers have recited the Lord’s Prayer with the assumption that they were merely asking for the forgiveness of their trespasses, their theological sins: “… and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us….” is the translation presented in the Revised Standard Version of the Bible. What is lost in translation is the fact that Jesus came “to preach the gospel to the poor … to preach the acceptable Year of the Lord”: He came, that is, to proclaim a Jubilee Year, a restoration of deror for debtors: He came to institute a Clean Slate Amnesty (which is what Hebrew דְּרוֹר connotes in this context).

So consider the passage from the Lord’s Prayer literally: … καὶ ἄφες ἡμῖν τὰ ὀφειλήματα ἡμῶν: “… and send away (ἄφες) for us our debts (ὀφειλήματα).” The Latin translation is not only grammatically identical to the Greek, but also shows the Greek word ὀφειλήματα revealingly translated as debita: … et dimitte nobis debita nostra: “… and discharge (dimitte) for us our debts (debita).” There was consequently, on the part of the creditor class, a most pressing and practical reason to have Jesus put to death: He was demanding that they restore the property they had rapaciously taken from their debtors. And after His death there was likewise a most pressing and practical reason to have His Jubilee proclamation of a Clean Slate Amnesty made toothless, that is to say, made merely theological: So the rich could continue to oppress the poor, forever and ever. Amen.

Just as this is a profound book, it is so densely written that it is profoundly difficult to read. I took six days, which included six or so hours of delightful and enlightening conversation with the author himself, to get through it. I often availed myself of David Graeber’s book Debt: The First 5,000 Years when I struggled to follow some of Hudson’s arguments. (Graeber and Hudson have been friends, Hudson told me, for ten years, and Graeber, when writing Debt; The First 5,000 Years, relied on Hudson’s scholarship for his account of ancient Mesopotamian economics, cf. p. xxiii). I have written this review as synopsis of the book in order to provide some help to other readers: I cannot emphasize too much that this book is indeed earth-shattering, but much intellectual labor is required to digest it.

ADDENDUM: Moral Hazard

When I sent a draft of my review to a friend last night, he emailed me back with this question:

— Wouldn’t debt cancellations just take away any incentive for people to pay back loans and, thus, take away the incentive to give loans? People who haven’t heard the argument before and then read your review will probably be skeptical at first.

Here is Michael Hudson’s response:

— Creditors argue that if you forgive debts for a class of debtors – say, student loans – that there will be some “free riders,” and that people will expect to have bad loans written off. This is called a “moral hazard,” as if debt writedowns are a hazard to the economy, and hence, immoral.

This is a typical example of Orwellian doublespeak engineered by public relations factotums for bondholders and banks. The real hazard to every economy is the tendency for debts to grow beyond the ability of debtors to pay. The first defaulters are victims of junk mortgages and student debtors, but by far the largest victims are countries borrowing from the IMF in currency “stabilization” (that is economic destabilization) programs.

It is moral for creditors to have to bear the risk (“hazard”) of making bad loans, defined as those that the debtor cannot pay without losing property, status or becoming insolvent. A bad international loan to a government is one that the government cannot pay except by imposing austerity on the economy to a degree that output falls, labor is obliged to emigrate to find employment, capital investment declines, and governments are forced to pay creditors by privatizing and selling off the public domain to monopolists.

The analogy in Bronze Age Babylonia was a flight of debtors from the land. Today from Greece to Ukraine, it is a flight of skilled labor and young labor to find work abroad.

No debtor – whether a class of debtors such as students or victims of predatory junk mortgages, or an entire government and national economy – should be obliged to go on the road to and economic suicide and self-destruction in order to pay creditors. The definition of statehood – and hence, international law – should be to put one’s national solvency and self-determination above foreign financial attacks. Ceding financial control should be viewed as a form of warfare, which countries have a legal right to resist as “odious debt” under moral international law.

The basic moral financial principal should be that creditors should bear the hazard for making bad loans that the debtor couldn’t pay — like the IMF loans to Argentina and Greece. The moral hazard is their putting creditor demands over the economy’s survival.

A primer: How to Vote In The Midterms

From Carey Wedler, whose Anti-Media pages have been banned from Facebook & Twitter...

Modern Money Theory, for Beginners

L. Randall Wray 'splains it...

Futurist Tony Seba: Why Energy and Transportation Will Be Obsolete in 2030

His Olso talk draws some surprising conclusions:

That $15/hr minimum wage in Seattle

Economists reverse claims that $15 Seattle minimum wage hurt workers, admit it was largely beneficial https://t.co/ObdCM0DQGk pic.twitter.com/pDBw2YHcfc

— Boing Boing (@BoingBoing) November 3, 2018

...Update: Raising wages also reduces recidivism.

Reality! What a Concept!

This TED talk...

"Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality"... is an indication that, in the area of consciousness, science has finally caught up to Buddha, and other Hindu scholars, or for that matter to the 1965 work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (The Phenomenology of Perception) in observing that life is a narrative first, and fact only later.

The optical cortex, for one example, gets only 10% of its nerve input from the optical nerve (the eyes). Memory and language dominate the remaining 90% of its connections.

The "reality" we hallucinate bears the same relationship to actual reality that the desktop on your computer has to what's actually going on in the central processor, disk and memory.

The Cult of Vengeance Strikes Again

(c) by Mark Dempsey

The "liberal" McClatchy newspapers (among them the Sacramento Bee) publish the maunderings of Hoover institute scholar Victor David Hansen, whose latest break from shooing kids off his lawn reminds us that When laws are not enforced, anarchy follows. Hansen's point, replete with classical citations ("as 17th-century British statesman George Savile famously put it: 'Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen.'"), is that punishment, not any noble sentiments, is what keeps society from descending into some post-apocalyptic hellhole of stolen horses and assaulted womenfolk.

Unfortunately for Hansen, facts say otherwise. Whether you consult either absolute numbers or per-capita incarceration rates, the U.S. has experimented with punishment as a preventive for decades now, incarcerating and punishing more people than any other nation on earth. The U.S. imprisons people at roughly five times the world's average per-capita incarceration rate, seven times more than demographically identical Canada. So...is the U.S. seven times safer than Canada? No. Canada's crime rate is insignificantly different than the U.S.

So punishment (alone) does not prevent crime. It does not even scare addicts straight. Medical treatment for addiction (i.e. rehab) has a far higher success rate, and is one seventh the cost of imprisoning addicts.

Hansen makes his cult-of-vengeance point to condemn the caravan of "illegal alien" Hondurans walking north through Mexico now. Vengeful punishment is not the only possible response, incidentally, the population of Mexico has welcomed that caravan with food and shelter.

Our Central American neighbors do not want to steal our jobs or devour our grandchildren. Among other things, they are responding to the climate disaster U.S. carbon emissions have imposed on them, and to the military, political and economic attacks we have visited on those south of our borders for literally centuries. Just between 1798 and 1994, the U.S. was responsible for 41 changes of government for those Southern neighbors.

Not only was Iran/Contra a domestic scandal in service to a proxy war in Nicaragua, the World Court convicted the U.S. of state-sponsored terrorism when it illegally mined Nicaraguan harbors. Ronald Reagan famously asked the President of Mexico to endorse overthrowing the elected Nicaraguan government because, despite being in one of the hemisphere's poorest nations, Nicaragua was a threat to the U.S. The Mexican President responded that he would be happy to support his friend Ronald if there was any way he could do so without being laughed out of office.

The U.S. has not only been deporting gangs from its neighborhoods to Honduras, it has tolerated a Honduran military's coup against a democratically-elected government. Foreign aid sanctions are supposed to follow such undemocratic actions, but such sanctions were set aside thanks to then-Secretary-of-State Hillary Clinton, and President Obama.

Perhaps the worst of U.S. refugee-producing actions is the policy embodied in NAFTA. One might suspect sending a lot of subsidized Iowa corn south would put a lot of subsistence Mexican corn farmers out of business. Sure, corn is only arguably the most important food crop in the world, and those Mexican farmers were keeping the diversity and disease-resistance of the corn genome alive, but they weren't making any money for Monsanto, darn it!

In the wake of NAFTA real, inflation adjusted median income in Mexico declined 34%. In U.S. history, the Great Depression produced that kind of decline...and the Okies' migration followed.

In the time-honored tradition of blaming the victim, depraved bigots like Hansen distort this story as something with which we should condemn these refugees. Mexico's example of hospitality is a superior reaction though, and one that makes fewer enemies, and distorts the real story far less.

Meanwhile, law-and-order guys like Hansen seem to reserve punishment only for the poor and vulnerable. The powerful get impunity and arbitration, not strict law enforcement.