Post by Brad on Dec 29, 2014 7:35:43 GMT -5
(Note: Though this is posted by a board administrator, it represents the opinion of the person in the by-line.)
Money Power for the Green Economy
by Howard Switzer
"Money power" is what 8th president, Martin van Buren, called the power to issue money, a privilege which also bestows great political power. How and who issues the money is what our Revolutionary War was fought over when the colonists paper money systems were outlawed by the Bank of England controlled British government. It remained an issue at the Constitutional Convention.
The Constitution was to devise a way to avoid authoritarian rule, which we had just fought a war to defeat. The Separation of Powers and the Bill of Rights seemed to do that but did not. The private financial interests of the day lobbied hard to prevent the nation from being able to issue its own paper money. This was strange since it was that very power, established by the first Continental Congress to issue the Continental currency, which was spent into the economy interest free that funded the revolution. You may have heard the Continentals were a failure but you may not have read that England had flooded the colonies with counterfeits in an attempt to make them worthless. In the end, by not clearly defining the nation's monetary system, a back door was created in the Constitution that allowed the private financial interests to enter and establish an authoritarian government. While the Founding Fathers had managed to keep authoritarianism out politically and religiously they had allowed it to sneak in monetarily! James Madison joined Jefferson in opposing the actions of the first U.S Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, to charter a National Bank modeled after the privately owned Bank of England which gave good reason for Thomas Jefferson to say, “I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.” It remained a major political issue for 140 years. Today, after decades of misdirection, confusion and suppression of the history of money, much public education on this issue is required.
One of the misconceptions about money is that it has to be a commodity or be backed by one. This view of money has always favored the bankers but as Aristotle noted, “Money exists by law, not by nature.” In other words, money is an abstraction, a social agreement. Money should be a public utility but today ALL money is created by the private banking system with the stroke of a computer key, based on a promise to repay when an individual, business or government borrows money from the banking system. And while the principle is created, the money needed to pay the interest is not. This means that the money to pay the interest needs to come from money created when someone else borrowed money: an individual, business or government. Such a system can never grow fast enough to pay all the interest and even more so when it is compounded; that is, interest paid on interest. Thus we have the boom and bust cycle, recessions and depressions, and a lot of very bad behavior as a result.
The system generates predatory competition, a demand for constant economic growth, short term thinking and a devastating concentration of wealth into the hands of only a few. This is because the interest paid to the banks goes to their largest depositors, often the bankers themselves, who then get to decide which loans are made and which are not, giving them a unique advantage in the market place and further exacerbating the problem. In the excellent movie, ‘The Cradle Will Rock,’ based on the 1937 musical by Marc Blitzstein, there is a scene where some industrial magnate like J.P. Morgan is bragging at a party among clinking Champagne glasses and cigar smoke that, “You can’t beat our system; we get paid to be rich.”
The late Margrit Kennedy, noted that interest is embedded in the cost of everything we buy: as much as 45% of the price we pay for goods and services is interest. If you look at a chart of interest flows across all income brackets you will see that 99% of us pay tribute to the top 1% via interest to use their money. Because big money translates into power it is easy to see why the system has been difficult to change and why it is so very important to change in order to fund the Green Economy.
The GP plank on reforming the monetary system was based on the work of Stephen Zarlenga and the American Monetary Institute, with the help of long time Greens Dee Berry and Ben Kjelsus. It was further developed as policy, going through the rigorous legislative legal review, and emerged as The National Emergency Employment Defense Act, the NEED Act, HR2990, courageously introduced to Congress by Dennis Kucinich in 2010. It is the first plank of the Green Party Platform to have been made into an actual bill in Congress. For the first 140 years of this nation’s history monetary policy was the primary political issue and the Green Party is uniquely poised to make it a primary issue again as Howie Hawkins is scheduled to speak at the 11th Annual International Monetary Reform conference in Chicago next September. I hope many Greens will attend.
A nation without economic sovereignty really has no sovereignty. What sovereignty is there in allowing a private cabal of financiers to create all a nation's money at interest? None! It has in fact enslaved every nation on earth as every nation is beholden to their private central banking authority. The basic issues are these: Should money be for the private profit of a few or a public utility for everyone? Should it create massive debt or public equity? This issue is about reclaiming the sovereignty of our nation, a nation in which all people, being created equal, and having certain unalienable rights, are sovereign.
We have an opportunity to revive our national politics, by uniting honest people from all political persuasions to reclaim our national economic sovereignty. This is a critical component of our nation’s political education and needs to be shared broadly. It is an issue that can help people rise above the shallow issues, petty divisions and smoke screens to see the real culprit behind our nation’s troubles, the wizards behind the curtain, those with their hands on the levers of the Money Power.
There are those who say the government can’t be trusted who seem to believe it is an entity with a will. However, government is a tool, a tool that can build or tear down, a dangerous tool in the wrong hands. Ours was meant to be the tool of a free nation not the tool of just a few large financial corporations. This issue is about returning the Money Power to the people of the United States. I believe this can be a key leverage point with which to create a shift in power. Let’s push for the NEED Act. It will help us reclaim democracy and enable our nation to fund the Green New Deal.
You can read the GP Platform here: www.gp.org/what-we-believe/our-platform/17-platform/41-iv-economic-justice-and-sustainability#MonetaryReform
You can read The Need Act, HR2990, here: www.monetary.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/HR-2990.pdf
Please check out the list of further reading below:
www.monetary.org/lostscienceofmoney.html
archive.org/stream/usmoneyvscorpora00croz#page/n7/mode/2up
www.monetary.org/review-of-robert-de-fremerys-rights-vs-privileges/2010/12
archive.org/stream/historyofmonetar00delmuoft#page/n5/mode/2up
Money Power for the Green Economy
by Howard Switzer
"Money power" is what 8th president, Martin van Buren, called the power to issue money, a privilege which also bestows great political power. How and who issues the money is what our Revolutionary War was fought over when the colonists paper money systems were outlawed by the Bank of England controlled British government. It remained an issue at the Constitutional Convention.
The Constitution was to devise a way to avoid authoritarian rule, which we had just fought a war to defeat. The Separation of Powers and the Bill of Rights seemed to do that but did not. The private financial interests of the day lobbied hard to prevent the nation from being able to issue its own paper money. This was strange since it was that very power, established by the first Continental Congress to issue the Continental currency, which was spent into the economy interest free that funded the revolution. You may have heard the Continentals were a failure but you may not have read that England had flooded the colonies with counterfeits in an attempt to make them worthless. In the end, by not clearly defining the nation's monetary system, a back door was created in the Constitution that allowed the private financial interests to enter and establish an authoritarian government. While the Founding Fathers had managed to keep authoritarianism out politically and religiously they had allowed it to sneak in monetarily! James Madison joined Jefferson in opposing the actions of the first U.S Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, to charter a National Bank modeled after the privately owned Bank of England which gave good reason for Thomas Jefferson to say, “I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.” It remained a major political issue for 140 years. Today, after decades of misdirection, confusion and suppression of the history of money, much public education on this issue is required.
One of the misconceptions about money is that it has to be a commodity or be backed by one. This view of money has always favored the bankers but as Aristotle noted, “Money exists by law, not by nature.” In other words, money is an abstraction, a social agreement. Money should be a public utility but today ALL money is created by the private banking system with the stroke of a computer key, based on a promise to repay when an individual, business or government borrows money from the banking system. And while the principle is created, the money needed to pay the interest is not. This means that the money to pay the interest needs to come from money created when someone else borrowed money: an individual, business or government. Such a system can never grow fast enough to pay all the interest and even more so when it is compounded; that is, interest paid on interest. Thus we have the boom and bust cycle, recessions and depressions, and a lot of very bad behavior as a result.
The system generates predatory competition, a demand for constant economic growth, short term thinking and a devastating concentration of wealth into the hands of only a few. This is because the interest paid to the banks goes to their largest depositors, often the bankers themselves, who then get to decide which loans are made and which are not, giving them a unique advantage in the market place and further exacerbating the problem. In the excellent movie, ‘The Cradle Will Rock,’ based on the 1937 musical by Marc Blitzstein, there is a scene where some industrial magnate like J.P. Morgan is bragging at a party among clinking Champagne glasses and cigar smoke that, “You can’t beat our system; we get paid to be rich.”
The late Margrit Kennedy, noted that interest is embedded in the cost of everything we buy: as much as 45% of the price we pay for goods and services is interest. If you look at a chart of interest flows across all income brackets you will see that 99% of us pay tribute to the top 1% via interest to use their money. Because big money translates into power it is easy to see why the system has been difficult to change and why it is so very important to change in order to fund the Green Economy.
The GP plank on reforming the monetary system was based on the work of Stephen Zarlenga and the American Monetary Institute, with the help of long time Greens Dee Berry and Ben Kjelsus. It was further developed as policy, going through the rigorous legislative legal review, and emerged as The National Emergency Employment Defense Act, the NEED Act, HR2990, courageously introduced to Congress by Dennis Kucinich in 2010. It is the first plank of the Green Party Platform to have been made into an actual bill in Congress. For the first 140 years of this nation’s history monetary policy was the primary political issue and the Green Party is uniquely poised to make it a primary issue again as Howie Hawkins is scheduled to speak at the 11th Annual International Monetary Reform conference in Chicago next September. I hope many Greens will attend.
A nation without economic sovereignty really has no sovereignty. What sovereignty is there in allowing a private cabal of financiers to create all a nation's money at interest? None! It has in fact enslaved every nation on earth as every nation is beholden to their private central banking authority. The basic issues are these: Should money be for the private profit of a few or a public utility for everyone? Should it create massive debt or public equity? This issue is about reclaiming the sovereignty of our nation, a nation in which all people, being created equal, and having certain unalienable rights, are sovereign.
We have an opportunity to revive our national politics, by uniting honest people from all political persuasions to reclaim our national economic sovereignty. This is a critical component of our nation’s political education and needs to be shared broadly. It is an issue that can help people rise above the shallow issues, petty divisions and smoke screens to see the real culprit behind our nation’s troubles, the wizards behind the curtain, those with their hands on the levers of the Money Power.
There are those who say the government can’t be trusted who seem to believe it is an entity with a will. However, government is a tool, a tool that can build or tear down, a dangerous tool in the wrong hands. Ours was meant to be the tool of a free nation not the tool of just a few large financial corporations. This issue is about returning the Money Power to the people of the United States. I believe this can be a key leverage point with which to create a shift in power. Let’s push for the NEED Act. It will help us reclaim democracy and enable our nation to fund the Green New Deal.
You can read the GP Platform here: www.gp.org/what-we-believe/our-platform/17-platform/41-iv-economic-justice-and-sustainability#MonetaryReform
You can read The Need Act, HR2990, here: www.monetary.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/HR-2990.pdf
Please check out the list of further reading below:
www.monetary.org/lostscienceofmoney.html
archive.org/stream/usmoneyvscorpora00croz#page/n7/mode/2up
www.monetary.org/review-of-robert-de-fremerys-rights-vs-privileges/2010/12
archive.org/stream/historyofmonetar00delmuoft#page/n5/mode/2up