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General News    H3'ed 5/31/13

Ellen Brown Interview Transcript Part II: Public Banking-- the Bottom Up Solution to a Lot of Economic Ills

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Ellen Brown:   I'm just saying that we could go back to the way it was.  Pennsylvania had the original public banking model.  At that time, the government actually literally created the money by printing up little paper receipts, and that's what money was: the Colonial Script.  The government printed up these little receipts which were basically IOU's from the government: basically, "We acknowledge that you have done work for the government, and so we're going to pay you with this little paper receipt." 

 

They printed up a bunch of  receipts, and most of it they lent into the economy through their own public banks.  They lent it to the farmers at 5% interest.  Then all that money would come back to the government, plus the 5%.  And where did the 5% come from?  The government spent some money on roads, and bridges, and all the things a government spends on.  So the government both spent and lent the money of the government, which were these little paper receipts. 

 

But nowadays, we don't allow the government to issue money: all we allow the government to do is to borrow.  What it does is it borrows from -- when it originally writes checks, it pays out by writing checks on its account with the Federal Reserve.  So really, in effect, it has an overdraft with the Federal Reserve.  Now, we require it to balance its books, because everybody thinks, "Well, I have to balance my books.  I can't keep going heavily into debt, and so the government should too."  So we make the government actually issue bonds and get the money back, and levy taxes, and all that stuff. 

 

But you could just wait to levy the taxes until prices go up, which shows that you've hit your limit for putting money into the economy.  Right now there is not enough money in the actual circulating economy to stimulate the economy.  In other words, there is not enough demand: what causes businesses to hire more people and make more product is demand.  So the first thing you need is to get money into people's pockets so they can get out there and start spending. 

 

What I would do for starters is use that quantitative easing to buy up all the student debt and rip it up.  You'd essentially put a trillion dollars into the pockets of students. Now, those people shop.  They'll go out into the stores and buy things.  They'll buy houses, they're young people starting a family, starting a business.  They buy all kinds of stuff; they buy cars, they buy electronics.  Somehow you need to get the money into the pockets of the people, but /

 

Rob Kall:   So wait.  Let me just discuss this a little bit further with you.  Just ending student debt would help the economy.  How would that work?  Could you go into a little more detail on that?

 

Ellen Brown:   If the students had their debts written off, instead of trying to pay on these debts that are crippling them -- my son, for example, has a $44,000 debt from his college.  He's got a Master's Degree in Economics.  So he's paying down; monthly, he pays on that debt.  I'm not worried about him because he actually has a job, but a lot of people don't' have a job.  Anyway, if you made it so that they didn't have to pay to the government on their student loan, they could spend that money instead on the things that they need.  "They'd just go out and shop more," is the point.  They would have more money to spend into the economy.

 

Rob Kall:   Even your son: at $44,000, he's probably spending hundreds of dollars a month that's going to banks that he could be spending on the economy.

 

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Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect, connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.

Check out his platform at RobKall.com

He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity

He's given talks and workshops to Fortune 500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful people on his Bottom Up Radio Show, and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and opinion sites, OpEdNews.com

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Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, (more...)
 

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