OpEdNews - Page 2 of Article: What We Must Do to Fix the Economic Crisis

For thousands of years, kings, priests, priest-kings and rulers of all stripes and colors have built and maintained their power and control though a few closely guarded secrets about money, land titles, wealth, natural resources, labor and the relationships between them. These "secrets" are maintained today, and are kept obscured, buried, under mountains of superficial data, statistics, mathematical formulas, and outright mumbo-jumbo that passes for "economics" in all of the major schools of modern economic thought. The biggest secret has been the deliberate deceptions about money – it's nature, origin, purpose, and destiny.

Here is the core of that secret: money is not gold, silver, platinum, metals, gems, paper, ink, or anything else of tangible value. These are all forms of wealth, not money. They are not the same thing. Wealth and money are two different things entirely. The deception is, was and will always be, that they are the same thing. In particular, gold and silver have been sold to us as "real money". By whom? Those who own or control much of the gold and silver, and always have – the bankers and financiers.

[Jesus well understood this simple fact when his righteous indignation at the prostitution of the Temple at Jerusalem by the "moneychangers" (bankers) rose to the sole forceful action on record. He drove the "moneychangers" from His Father's Temple. This is a powerful clue about the role the abuse of money plays in our world. We should heed it.]

The truth about money, in part, is that it is not a commodity like gold or silver, or other forms of wealth, goods, or services. Money is not something that can be found in nature, or the natural, tangible world.

In truth, money is a concept founded in law and social custom. It is an abstraction. It is a social creation that can and should be used by societies and economies for the highest and greatest good of its people. Please reread and ponder this all-important concept and allow it to sink in. It is not a new idea. Aristotle wrote about it, as did others in antiquity.

Do you realize the vast difference between this concept of money as a social tool for the exchanging of goods and services and the common definitions in use today? If you do you are one of a very small minority who know the truth. More importantly the creation and distribution, as well as the regulation of the value of money, is now almost completely a private enterprise rather than a government (social) power. Additionally, the creation of money is a very profitable monopoly granted to bankers by the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. This money-monopoly essentially loans money into existence at usurious interest rates, usurping the money-creation powers granted to congress by our US Constitution: Article 1, Section 8.

Nearly all of the world's money (about 97%) now comes into existence by and through the process of private loans – private lenders loaning us (governments, corporations, private citizens) at compound interest something they did not have before they loaned it into existence. Think about this for a moment. It is literally and undeniably true.

Stated another way, money should be thought of as no more than a simple accounting entry – a debit or credit in a bank account, or debit or credit card account, except that it should bear absolutely no burden of interest, much less compound interest that can add up to far more than the original amount.

Yet banks charge interest on "loans" of money which are created out of nothing but the promissory note itself. This act of money creation is so outrageous that it "repels the mind" as renowned economist John Kenneth Galbraith on observed. Banks are not now lending money that is theirs, or their depositors. They are lending money because it is created through the bookkeeping entry of making the loan.

There are many excellent resources one can study to better understand the ways money now comes into being, and who benefits (profits) and who pays or bears the burden. They will be listed at the end of this article and I highly recommend reading or viewing the books or videos.

For now it is important to understand that we now have an unsustainable system of private money creation for an enormous profit to the elite few, where we should have a non-profit system of money creation that is run for and by the people, or the people's duly elected representative governments.

Governments on all levels, federal, state, and municipal, are borrowing privately created money, and repaying two or three times the borrowed amount over time what they could and should be creating at no cost to themselves or their citizens.

This corrupt system works exactly like an enormous "Ponzi Scheme". If you have been following, or learning from, the current new stories of the Bernie Madoff "scandals", you should be familiar with the term, Ponzi Scheme. Still, few people actually understand the mechanic's of a "Ponzi Scheme" or fully comprehend what separates that form of complex fraud from a legitimate investment. In short, a Ponzi Scheme is a kind of "pyramid scheme" designed to enrich the early investors, those at the top of the pyramid, from the funds coming into the pyramid from new "investors" (victims) later. Little or no real product or valuable service is produced. Money is only transferred from new investors (victims) to earlier ones, so as to give the appearances of profitability.

Can you comprehend the tax savings that could be realized if all the interest on the national, state, or municipal debts could be erased? Can you not comprehend that there are tens and even hundreds of trillions of dollars in debts worldwide that are essentially the result of an international monetary Ponzi Scheme?

In more concrete terms, the responsibility of money and credit creation must be transferred back to the people – meaning the public sector – from the private domain that usurped it in 1913 with the passage of the Federal Reserve Act. Governments need not borrow the money they need for roads, bridges, and other public infrastructure. They have the constitutional and moral right to create that money and spend it into existence directly, eliminating the unnecessary middleman, the bankers.

It means that money should be created in the proper ratios and amounts needed to keep the wheels of real production moving. The real economy is the production of goods and services. The earth's God-given (Created) resources and land added to creative labor equals real production.

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