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Reviewing Ellen Brown's "Web of Debt:" Part V
By Stephen Lendman (about the author) Page 2 of 4 page(s)
Check out these sites for more information:
-- ithacahours.com;
-- madisonhours.org;
-- communitycurrency.org; and
-- geog.le.ac.uk/ijccr.
The main drawback to these systems is they're small, local, and fail to address the greater problem - "the mammoth debt spider that is sucking the lifeblood from the national economy" and our well-being. Solving that requires national currency reform - returning money creation power to the people who own it from bankers who stole it.
Goldbugs v. Greenbackers
In 1896 at the Democratic National Convention, William Jennings Byran railed against Goldbugs and their moneyed interests backers in support of Greenbacker farmers and laborers saying: "You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold." The arguments went like this:
-- Bankers claimed gold was a stable medium of exchange; "sound" or "honest" money in relatively fixed supply that couldn't be inflated by irresponsible governments out of proportion to the demand for goods and services;
-- Greenbackers called scarcity a drawback letting governments condone "dishonest" money through fractional reserve banking; they'd be harmed too many previous times not to know it; also, during the 1850s Gold Rush, its supply and consumer prices rose sharply, did again from 1917 - 1920, and during the 1970s when gold rose from $40 an ounce to $800 and inflation along with it.
The debate still continues, but today's goldbugs are money reformers, not bankers who have it all going their way so why change.
As a medium of exchange, gold has serious drawbacks. In the Great Depression, it left the country, exacerbating deflation that caused the money supply and demand to contract. Another problem is that productivity is linked to its availability, but more practical matters are also relevant like needing gold bars for large purchases, something avoided by paper, checkbook and electronic money.
In the 1990s, Harvey Barnard proposed a new currency reform idea that included a national sales tax in lieu of the federal income tax with the aim of zero inflation and a stable economy. The National Economic Stabilization and Recovery Act (NESARA) he called it. His idea was for the government to issue currency in three forms - standard silver coins, standard gold ones, and Treasury credit notes or Greenbacks. Treasury notes would replace Federal Reserve ones with the Federal Reserve abolished.
NESARA was never introduced in Congress and might work if enacted. But why bother when the central problem is more simply addressed by returning money creation power to the government as the Constitution mandates. Paper currency isn't the problem. A private banking cartel controlling it is what's at issue to fix. By doing it, "the water of a free-flowing money supply can transform an arid desert of debt into the green abundance envisioned by our forefathers." It's there for the taking by simply "eliminating the financial parasite that is draining our abundance away," and there's nothing complicated about doing it.
The Federal Debt
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