By Richard C. Cook

© 2008 by Richard C. Cook.

From the article originally published in New Dawn Magazine No. 122 (Sept.-Oct. 2010). www.newdawnmagazine.com Click Here

Part I: Christianity and the Scientific/Technological Era; Did the Spiritual Revolution of the 20th Century Leave Christianity Behind?; Reaction of the Controllers of Society; The British Petroleum Debacle as Signature Event; Crackdown and Prophecies; My Own Spiritual Search.

Christianity and the Scientific/Technological Era

The Christian churches have not been particularly effective in reconciling themselves to the modern materialistic epoch of science and technology which may appear to make many of their doctrines quaint and out-of-date. An example is the longstanding debate over human evolution vs. creationism, where fundamentalist Christians make their point using accounts in Genesis that are obviously written in a kind of metaphysical shorthand rather than being completely literal.

Understanding the meaning of this shorthand, along with other scriptures written millennia ago, requires a key which this article will attempt to clarify. The Christian revelation may then be seen in a different light through its more “esoteric” interpretations. “Esoteric” in this sense means the act of seeing things more through the eyes of the soul than through outward rituals and doctrines.

Without such a key, how else can Christians effectively address the danger that the technological revolution, whatever its benefits, may continue the march it embarked upon during much of the 20th century of destroying the world that Christianity helped fashion over the previous two millennia?

Two technological innovations in particular have produced both immense progress and tragic turmoil in the landscape of the secularist modern world. One was the transformation of industrial production by application of electricity, the latest phase being the cybernetic revolution. The other was exploitation of the huge deposits of coal and reservoirs of petroleum in the Earth’s crust and the total dependence of the world’s economy on the burning of fossil fuels. A third innovation, space travel, will be explored in Part III.

For now let us simply look at the fact that the world that electricity, coal, and oil have created has provided the material support for enormous growth of the human population—now approaching seven billion, but at the cost of out-of-control consumption of resources and the pollution that has resulted. Control of these resources is also the basis of most of the world’s wealth.

Many thought that technological advances had the potential to free us from the drudgery of working so hard for a living—the famous “leisure dividend.” Among the logical results should have been a renaissance in the arts and a surge in our ability to devote more time to spiritual pursuits. Both have happened to a degree.

But the Christian churches might have been expected to take more advantage of such an opportunity by strenuously promoting the widest possible distribution of the economic bounty technology makes possible. Unfortunately they have not. Instead this bounty has passed increasingly under the control of the rich and powerful.

The churches have been upstaged, not only when faced with technological progress, but also on the spiritual level. For instance, most of them never got comfortable with the idea of a New Age marking the transition from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius. They also seemed taken by surprise by the major shift in “spiritual geography” that took place during the early to mid-20^th century, when the immense concentration of esoteric knowledge that was harbored and hidden in Tibet and India for millennia seemed to radiate outward.

Did the Spiritual Revolution of the 20^th Century Leave Christianity Behind?

Starting with the appearance of Swami Vivekananda at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, a number of Eastern spiritual figures traveled to Christianity’s Western turf to transmit a different order of ideas. These included such now-familiar names as Swami Yogananda, Hazrat Inayat Khan, Meher Baba, Krishnamurti, Shivabalayogi, Chögyam Trungpa, the Dalai Lama, and many others.

The Theosophical movement, founded by Madame Blavatsky (1831-1891) in New York City in 1875, was an important attempt to integrate Eastern pathways into the consciousness of the West. Theosophy became a major force, not only in the West, but also in India, where Annie Besant (1847-1933), an Englishwoman of Irish descent, led the movement after Blavatsky’s death. Paul Brunton (1898-1981), a British journalist who traveled to India and recorded the teachings of the sage of Arunachala, Sri Ramana Maharshi, made a notable contribution, as did other Westerners like him who searched in the East.

Many of the Western followers of the Eastern masters gained in enlightenment. Together they created a lexicon, published books, founded schools and study groups, and introduced an array of meditation and other spiritual techniques, including Yoga, that today are deeply embedded into our mentality and culture.

Many Christians more advanced in their thinking did in fact welcome the Eastern revelations, starting with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and other New England transcendentalists over a century-and-a-half ago. Also deeply influenced was American poet Walt Whitman.

The era also saw movements among some Western Christians toward greater consciousness, including the Quakers, Unitarians, Christian Scientists, and proponents of Unity and New Thought. And many of the mainstream churches have also been affected positively, though perhaps to a lesser degree. Also becoming a spiritual force by the mid-20^th century were Alcoholics Anonymous and subsequent “twelve-step” programs with a strong Christian orientation but open to Eastern ideas.

Reaction of the Controllers of Society

But in the face of this broad spiritual awakening, there was a reaction by the controllers of society, who seemingly have not wanted humanity to become more happy, joyous, and free unless it produces a profit. Worse, the benefits of science and technology have often been woefully perverted, putting spiritually-minded people of all persuasions on the defensive.

We see, for instance, that the “knowledge explosion,” resulting from exponential growth in the power of electronic communications, has opened a gateway to the inner world of thought and consciousness never before accessible to such large numbers of people. An individual living today has almost immediate access to the sum total of recorded information from the beginning of history. The technological factor, which can be dated to Gutenberg’s first printed Bible in 1454-55, has aided immeasurably in the diffusion of spiritual knowledge.

But how effectively can a person utilize and gain from that knowledge when the waters of enlightenment have been fouled by horrendous displays of greed, selfishness, and aggression resulting from the use of technology to produce ever more horrible weapons of war? Technology has polluted the Earth so much that whole species of flora and fauna are being wiped out and has diverted an ever-increasing portion of the world’s wealth into the hands of the rich who own the banks and corporations that control the global economy.

For the wealthy elite, the expansion of consciousness has meant refining the techniques of controlling or neutralizing individual awareness through propaganda or mass-media indoctrination expertly targeted at producing in the psyche of people such emotions as greed and fear. Does addiction to TV and video games produce greater consciousness or its opposite? Such pastimes lock people in to habitual patterns of brain waves that make perception of spiritual reality impossible.

And even with communism supposedly defeated, what of the massive national bureaucracies instituted to manage every aspect of modern life, with their mountains of paperwork, forms, accounting systems, tax documents, licensing, and regulations? What of the layers of national, state, and local governments, each with their own  overlapping codes of law that grow by the day?

What of the growing reach of the modern police state with high-tech surveillance methodologies, stun guns, arsenals of sophisticated weapons, and SWAT teams always on alert? And it’s all paid for by the public through taxes or by overhead on the cost-of-living. Do these things enhance or destroy the freedom of the human spirit, human dignity, or human self-respect?

Here neither the Christian churches nor their New Age counterparts have been particularly helpful in calling out or rolling back these excesses. Many spiritual professionals find it safer to support the dominant military-political-financial paradigm, or at least to acquiesce in it.

Within the churches, many are bound to rituals whose origins few have effectively translated into modern relevance. Others may be uneasy about the drift of events in the world at large but, while trying to uphold their spiritual ideals, lack clarity and conviction.

Others may only be able to counsel their flock on how to endure pain and suffering. Others pray for peace in the world but with what result?

Within the Catholic Church, the search for expanded spiritual experience among both the priesthood and laity that grew out of Vatican II under Pope John XXIII was attacked by reactionaries from within. So was the Catholic liberation theology movement that appeared most strongly in Central America, where the priesthood joined with impoverished peasants in demanding land reforms. Priests, nuns, and lay leaders were murdered by death squads.

The Catholic Church today has retreated from both its liberalizing tendencies and concerns with social justice and is reverting to strict doctrinal interpretations and “safe” social issues such as the anti-abortion crusade. On the Protestant side, many evangelicals have also become vehemently conservative, viewing as inspired by “the devil” anything not conforming to their literalist interpretations of scripture.

The more liberal churches doubt that such a thing as “the devil” even exists, as do most New Age advocates. Psychologists with a spiritual outlook identify the devil as a projection of our own separate, competitive egos that we dare not see and accept.

So we project it onto another, often a person of a different race, religion, or political persuasion. When the ego is in charge of religion, little can be expected but more anger, violence and confusion. It’s the same for Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, or whatever.

The god of the given religion, personifying the frustrations of the faithful,  may then be seen as angry and vindictive, even one who demands outright warfare between its adherents and whoever the outsiders are perceived to be. How can peace on Earth ever be possible unless our idea of God changes?

The British Petroleum Debacle as Signature Event

A recent example of the way science and technology have failed and religion gropes for an answer is the British Petroleum oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Through the horrendous pollution and destruction of the natural environment that has taken place, America’s Bible Belt South, base of the Republican Party for decades, has been threatened economically, socially, and ecologically.

The BP tragedy shows that no matter how much money you have or how powerful you think you are, no one, including the elite, can negate the Law of Unintended Consequences or the Law of Cause and Effect.

One of the world’s largest and most profitable and powerful companies, BP is as much an American corporation as a British one. It has played a major role in U.S. politics through the lavishing of campaign contributions on Democrats and Republicans alike. BP supplies a huge amount of the petroleum products that fuel American military operations worldwide.

Since the 1954 overthrow by the CIA and MI-6 of the elected government of Iran that was in the process of nationalizing BP—then called the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company—has relied on the military might of the Anglo-American empire to keep the world safe for its business interests.

Ironically, there are credible published reports that the U.S. government knew about and pressured BP to conduct these particular drilling operations in the Gulf for purposes related to current war plans against Iran. The on-line Wayne Madsen Report, an authoritative source based on news leaks from intelligence insiders, says the government influenced BP to shift drilling operations to the Macondo site in the Mississippi Canyon off the coast of Louisiana, because the enormous size of the oil deposits could supply American needs if, during an attack on Iran, the Strait of Hormuz were closed to oil traffic.

No doubt many Christian churches, as well as the Vatican Bank, are investors in BP or related companies that provide support to the war machine. Few that I am aware of have taken a public stance against the possibility of war with Iran. Large numbers of American churchgoers serve in the armed forces or work for military contractors, so are obliged to go along with official policy, whether or not they have reservations.

The point the oil gusher illustrates is that side-by-side with growing spiritual awareness among ordinary people, the world seemingly is becoming both more and less conscious at the same time. While more people are waking up to their spiritual potential, those who remain asleep at the helm are becoming more desperate to hold on to what they perceive as control.

This control is maintained by economic leverage carried out by those in power against the larger populace. The world at large has a deeply divided mind over being in thrall to the controllers while conditions are getting worse for so many people. So the world is in a constant state of tension that is increasingly becoming unbearable.

Crackdown and Prophecies

When officialdom began to notice over the past several decades that an epochal change of consciousness was underway, they cracked down. For instance, the idea of a New Age became trivialized as a component of pop culture not to be taken seriously.

The concept of the Age of Aquarius became a song in the platitudinous Broadway musical Hair only after being shorn of its revolutionary implications. The creative burst that manifested in the popular music of the 1960s and 1970s by artists such as Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, John Lennon, Donovan, and many others dried up after official corporatism took over and shifted the focus within the music industry to the depression, triviality, and nihilism so evident today.

While the appearance of hallucinogenic drugs had opened the eyes of many young people to a new way of seeing the world, their overuse, along with a flood of opiates and other addictive substances, crippled the minds of many. Allegations persist and evidence has been presented that the drug abuse that has devastated so many people over the past two generations has been in part a covert “psy ops” attack and/or money-raising scheme by Western intelligence agencies. A similar attack was the way right-wing think tanks and pro-corporate institutions like the Rockefeller, Ford, and Carnegie foundations gained dominance in publishing and higher education and rooted out writers and teachers unwilling to parrot the party line of the corporatocracy.

There is even a published account that the greatest and most ancient of Tibetan monasteries, one that survived the Chinese takeover, was destroyed and its monks murdered through an assault by covert operatives in the early 1990s. It is said this monastery was the inspiration for the rumor that somewhere in the heart of Asia was a place of peace and harmony under a higher form of law, the place known in legend as “Shangri-La.” Persons familiar with its destruction say the event had been prophesied and that once it took place, the end of our so-called civilization became assured.

What we may be seeing, though, is the Butterfly Effect, where infinitesimal changes in consciousness produce major outcomes. Many believe this is about to happen.

Many, myself included, have written of the “end of the age.” A Google search on “Armageddon” brings 12 million entries. Hundreds of internet websites, and a huge number of books, are devoted to attempts to define the changes to come.

Many of these speak of UFOs or the coming to Earth of extraterrestrials. Such possibilities will be evaluated in Part III of this article. The point for now is that the end of our age, if it happens, also implies a new beginning, as indicated by the ancient spiritual symbol of the ouroboros, the snake swallowing its tail.

Among Native Americans, the recurring live births of white buffalo calves are fulfillments of their own prophecies of an end and a new beginning. The predictions of doom implied by the termination of the Mayan calendar on December 21, 2012, have inspired books, articles, and motion pictures. Though the Mayan elders themselves say much of the hype is the fantasies of non-native popularizers, they still affirm something profound is going on.

Another auspicious event may be the unexplained appearance of gigantic crop circles based on extremely abstract principles of higher mathematics such as the Julia or Mandelbrot sets. I also spent several years working with a guru from India, who said it is common knowledge that the Kalki Avatar, the 10^th incarnation of Vishnu, has been born in India and resides there incognito, preparing for his mission. And in the U.S., a recent poll indicated that an astonishing 40 percent of those asked said they believe the Second Coming of Christ will take place within the next half-century.

My Own Spiritual Search

Is there a deeper spiritual meaning to such prophecies that are accessible to us today? If so, how can we find it? And can Westerners find truth within the traditional Christian religion?

The existence and importance of the hidden aspects of Christianity have been a major preoccupation in my life, since, as a boy growing up in Michigan, I imbibed the soothing peace in a basement chapel in the Episcopal Church my family attended.

In my twenties my life was transformed by the teachings of P.D. Ouspensky (1878-1947) and G.I. Gurdjieff (1866?-1949) in a group in Washington, D.C. Ouspensky was a Russian esoteric philosopher and Gurdjieff a Greek-Armenian spiritual master. Just as World War I was breaking out, Ouspensky met Gurdjieff in Moscow, where the latter was teaching a system of ideas based on his travels through Eastern Europe, Egypt, the Near-East, and Central Asia.

Gurdjieff called his system The Work and used the term “esoteric Christianity” to describe it. In his writings, Gurdjieff describes periodic visits to Earth from highly-conscious beings from other parts of the Universe whose job is to oversee and assist with situations arising here, though sometimes the “help” has unexpected consequences.

From there I studied under a Sufi master named Abdullah Dougan, reading the Koran and other teachings of Islam, and learned much from the practical study of Buddhism, Hinduism, Yoga, Taoism, and Native American lore. I then spent almost a decade learning and practicing meditation with gurus from India, including the beloved figure we called “Swamiji.”

But I was yearning to return “home,” always having felt that my spiritual ideal was Jesus. He was not, however, the Jesus of the Christian churches, most of which seemed too stuffy, superficial, conventional, dogmatic, and gloomy for my tastes.

At times I toyed with the idea of attending a seminary and becoming a minister but couldn’t face a curriculum heavy on church history, ritual, and doctrine. For I was, and will always remain, a spiritual seeker at heart.

Over the years I consistently fought off temptations to dabble in the occult or in magic, especially after a potentially disastrous encounter with an ouija board. I was helped by warnings from my Sufi teacher about how easily aspirants could fall under the influence of malignant spirits he called “goaffadh birds,” entities that he said were known as “djinn” in Islam.

Eventually, after a series of personal crises involving a divorce and retirement from a career spent working for the federal government, I began to think and write without restraint. New horizons opened. I became a student of a teaching called “The Infinite Way” that was created by an American spiritual master, Joel Goldsmith.

This teaching, which saw Jesus Christ as “The Master,” turned much of my thinking around on what constituted perception and reality. I saw clearly, as Goldsmith pointed out, that nothing we perceive that does not have the Law of God maintaining it can possibly be real. This included poverty and physical illness.

Goldsmith (1892-1964) was born to a non-practicing Jewish family in New York City and become a Christian Science practitioner. The founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910), had been driven to a deeper consideration of Christ’s teaching through her puzzlement that the ancient art of spiritual healing had seemingly become lost. Thanks to her, spiritual healing is now practiced as a regular discipline in the West, despite mainstream attempts to ridicule or suppress it.

Joel Goldsmith took the practice to deeper levels, which he described in his books and  tapes, including The Art of Spiritual Healing, Practicing the Presence, and The Thunder of Silence.

In 2009 I married a woman who was a lifelong churchgoer and had been part of the Charismatic movement during the 1970s. Her father was a church deacon. She was, like me, still searching.

As I wrote about economic and monetary matters and published books on the space shuttle Challenger disaster and the economic crash of 2008-9, my wife and I embarked on an intensive study of the ancient Jewish sect of the Essenes and the teachings of Edgar Cayce. We were initiated into the Order of Melchizedek, founded by a group based on knowledge derived from the near-death experiences of an American named Tom Sawyer, described in the book What Tom Sawyer Learned By Dying by Sydney Saylor Farr.

My wife and I now attend church every Sunday, where visions of Jesus come to me regularly. This has helped me to see that whatever its shortcomings, the quiet and modest local church devoted to worship, the liturgy, spiritual music, and good works has been the one institution keeping many communities throughout the Western world somewhat safe and sane through the ages.

This is particularly so today for churches that have started contemplative prayer groups or that recognize and encourage that sort of prayer and meditation. The touchstone for authenticity seems whether a church fosters the attainment of individual inner peace through the “still small voice.” If so, it is working for truth.

One day, my wife came across a book in a used bookstore that introduced us to one of the most profound sources of human spiritual evolution I had yet encountered, through a teaching that claims to date from the time of Atlantis. This book, entitled The Children of the Law of One and the Lost Teachings of Atlantis, provided some crucial links.

Finally, we encountered what may be one of the mother lodes of esoteric knowledge that is transforming the world in preparation for the truly incredible changes in world consciousness that we are confident are about to occur. As a spiritual master told me, “You have no idea of the spiritual forces at work today.”

Conclusion

This concludes Part I of this article. I intend to devote Part II to a concise account that explains, as best I can, how esoteric Christianity interprets the history of man. This is essential, because, as Gurdjieff pointed out, only if we have authentic information about humanity’s past, can we live meaningfully in the present.

But the account of the past the esoteric teachers offer is much different from many of the notions of “official” academic or religious thinking. The scope of this difference is often staggering. Finally, Part III will identify what I feel to be the “mother lode” and elaborate on its implications. I invite you to stay with me on this journey.

Richard C. Cook is a former U.S. federal government analyst, now a writer on contemporary spiritual, economic, and political issues. His books can be ordered from his website at www.richardccook.com.

The work of prophetic thinkers like Rudolf Steiner makes clear that the history of humanity proceeds through the evolution of consciousness, where changes take place in the psyche of people well in advance of their outward manifestations. Thus an understanding of what is happening before our eyes is never simple, nor can it be taken at face value. Discernment requires a level of knowledge that can only be achieved through study and insight.

But only an approach that penetrates deeply into human nature allows us to see the real inner causes of events. Such causes can be positive or negative, constructive or destructive. It is the genius and dilemma of man that we can choose which influences we serve. As Steiner prophesied almost a century ago, we appear today to be at a pivotal point where how we make such choices can determine the fate of the world.

It is perfectly clear that we are living in an era of technological achievement that, historically speaking, began just a short time ago. Steiner said what today is accepted as a truism: that the present era arose from discoveries in the 15^th century that marked the beginning of the Renaissance, when the intellect of Western man became able systematically to apply the scientific method to phenomena of motion and matter.

The invention that made all else possible was operational by the 1450s: the printing press, first made practical by Johannes Gutenberg of Germany. Over the next four-and-a-half centuries, until the dawn of the 20^th, technology surged in every field, but exploded with the near-simultaneous harnessing of electricity and the widespread exploitation of fossil fuels.

The latest phase took place long after Steiner’s death: the use of electrical impulses for high-speed data processing, such that computers are rapidly taking over the human workload. With only slight exaggeration, it can be said that humans are needed less all the time, except to program the computers and keep them humming or to carry out the leftover menial labor that machines cannot yet perform.

The unsolved problem lies in the fact that no one knows how, with declining need for employment, to continue to deliver purchasing power to the jobless masses that businesses require for them to purchase the products which machines can increasingly manufacture on their own. Until now, such purchasing power was delivered through debt-based money creation—consumer lending, mortgages against inflated home prices, etc. The collapse of this system is the cause of the current global recession and has set the stage for the huge disruptions that may come next.

Not all nations have been equal participants in the forging of the modern world that is now in crisis. The best at it have been the British and Americans, whose hegemony was established through several centuries of ruthless empire-building, followed by two world wars during which their Eurasian rivals—mainly Germany, Japan, and the Ottoman Empire—were smashed.

The Anglo-American combination, now with America supplying the muscle, is intertwined with a powerful Zionist element centered in the state of Israel but aligned with dominant domestic influences. What can accurately be called the Anglo-American-Zionist Empire is reaching today for total global domination.

The Asian nations of Japan, India, and even the somewhat restless China, have largely been incorporated into the imperial order. Latin America has long been within the American sphere of influence, and Africa is being re-colonized commercially. The Islamic world has been under imperial attack since Britain and France dismembered the Ottoman Empire after 1918.

Only the enigmatic Russians seem to stand today on the outside looking in, their nation oddly still alive and increasingly powerful after the furious financial assault from the West, leading to the “collapse” of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. This took place when a fall in world oil prices was engineered, causing the Soviet Union to lose access to hard currency.

How have the Anglo-American-Zionists come so far in what is historically such a short period of time? Two features stand out.

The first is state violence: the absolute lack of restraint in the use of weapons of destruction against non-English-speaking peoples, including the ships of war natural to seafarers and genius in the invention and utilization of guns, bombs, airplanes, and missiles. They also pioneered nuclear weapons, which only they have used against a live enemy.

The second is financialization: their ability to generate vast amounts of money through a banking system unrestrained by law, custom, or conscience, one that exercises the power to capitalize phenomenal economic and institutional growth. The basis for this power is a symbiotic relationship between big banking and big government, whereby the former can create money literally out of nothing and charge interest for its use, while loaning the latter sufficient funds to wage its wars and keep the domestic population docile and dependent through spending on social welfare programs.

The impetus for the U.S. government to spend huge amounts of fiat money for financial system bailouts, economic stimuli, etc., skyrocketed after the collapse of the housing bubble in 2007-8. The collapse led to the ongoing worldwide recession which is not and cannot be overcome through conventional means such as Keynesian deficit spending.

The rest of the world has failed to keep up with Anglo-American-Zionist proficiency and were overthrown in the wars cited above. The primary regions that might have challenged the Empire were continental Europe, with its strong historical investment in the rules and procedures of law and government, and Asia, with its spiritual traditions unsuited to unbridled commerce and warfare.

The Anglo-American-Zionists have had no such constraints, ever since King Henry VIII’s epochal break with the Roman Catholic Church in the first half of the 16^th century for reasons related to his six successive marriages.

This eliminated the chief obstacle in the Western world—a unified Catholic Europe—to the elevation of greed for gain to the status of a socially-approved imperative for action. The title of the celebrated book published in 1904 by German sociologist Max Weber—The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism—documented the link, if not the identical psychological sources, of the two ideologies.

The Reformation came at a key moment of history, when the technological age was receiving its formative definition. With the Reformation having a geographic base in Great Britain and Northern Europe, the rulers in those regions were able to form lasting alliances with powerful banking families who now were entirely free of the traditional Catholic opposition to usury.

Oddly, Martin Luther also was strongly against usury and other predatory trade practices but did not prevail. With the Reformation, religion as a factor in defining the morality of economics was swept away. The symbol of what now transpired was the Bank of England, established in 1694 with the aid of bankers who had come over from the Netherlands with William of Orange at the time of the Glorious Revolution.

Thus did trade and commerce backed by military might take over the world, with Great Britain at the helm. The industrial revolution made that nation a manufacturing powerhouse as well. When Britain’s power declined, the U.S. was able to step in by rescuing the “Mother Country” from destruction during World Wars I and II.

After World War II, especially with the creation of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank assuring the replacement of the pound with the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, the U.S. maneuvered itself into the driver’s seat. But it was the same Empire, with the same aims and characteristics.

Rudolf Steiner wrote extensively about the three major elements of human life that throughout history have contributed to a balanced and sane existence whenever it could be found. His core idea was known as the Threefold Social Order.

The first element is the economic, defined as the production and distribution of commodities, which obviously prevails today as the controlling force for most societal action.

The second is the legal/governmental, where, says Steiner, the rule of law should have as its first priority the protection of human rights and of fairness and competition in manufacturing and trade.

The third is the spiritual/intellectual/cultural, allowing for the free development of individual human capabilities.

Each of these elements, said Steiner, should function independently within their own spheres. The economic sector should not try to control the government or spiritual institutions, government should not operate businesses, and the spiritual/intellectual/cultural sector, including education at all levels, should be free to propose principles and ideals for the economy and government to implement.

Unfortunately, this model has failed to be observed or even noticed by the vested interests that profit from social paralysis and breakdown.

People today are seeing their rights disappear, not only among nations over which the Anglo-American-Zionists rule politically or commercially, but even among their own domestic populations. The alliance between big banking and the government leaderships it controls throttles the legislatures and the courts where human rights should be defined and protected. Documents like the Magna Carta, the U.S. Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights have been shredded. The legal profession, which should be the social guardian of human rights, sells itself to the highest bidder or acts as the prosecutor for the corporate-owned imperial state.

In the area of spiritual/intellectual/cultural life, we see the increasing standardization of government-run school systems and the suppression of all non-collectivist ideas. We see domination of higher education by corporate-sponsored foundations and think tanks, the co-optation of churches by political players who support the Empire’s wars, and the push for Zionist interests in every policy area. The dumbing-down of the population by financier-owned media have turned the population into the “sheeple.” Such half-human, frightened, and heavily-medicated creatures are fit only for zombie-like obedience to the imperatives of consumerism and militarism.

The importance to human life of efficient economic development, especially given the current world population, cannot and should not be denied. But the problem is not economic development per se. The machine is here to stay. Nor need we be too sentimentally concerned about the rate of consumption, as economic output is naturally self-limiting based on resource availability.

Waste and abuse have their own built-in consequences if people are ignorant enough to brush them aside, and we all have choices in this regard. Perhaps of greater concern should be engineered scarcity, where corporations limit availability of goods and services to root out competition and fix prices.

Even more serious, Steiner wrote, is the lack of balance among the three major aspects of human endeavor, causing the destruction of human dignity and decency everywhere. If anything, conditions have gotten worse since Steiner’s day.

It is the lack of balance that is pathological. It invites control of society by people completely unsuited to exercise it, due to their level of immaturity and lack of truly human qualities. In fact, many of those in charge of the Anglo-American-Zionist Empire seem anti-human in character and have been that way for a very long time. One could even hypothesize, as did Steiner, that many of them are sociopathic or even demonically-possessed.

Steiner pointed out in lectures from the early 1920s that in Great Britain and America these possessed people were managing affairs from behind the scenes through secret societies. From this observation we recognize such organizations contemporary with Steiner as the Round Table and the Society of the Elect, founded in Great Britain by Cecil Rhodes and Lord Nathan Rothschild, and the Council on Foreign Relations, established in the U.S. after World War I by Colonel Edward M. House using Morgan and Rockefeller money. House, we recall, was the power behind the throne during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, practically becoming Wilson’s “familiar spirit.”

The trajectory the Empire embarked upon almost a century ago has not changed. Today the denouement is at hand. The present situation, unless sufficient numbers of people wake up to the way in which they must act immediately to ensure a balanced social order, including at least some of the controllers themselves, can end only in catastrophe, which Steiner in his writings foresaw.

In my opinion, there are four ways this possible catastrophe could come about–alone or in combination.

One is a third world war, where Russia, China, Iran, and/or other nations would make a stand against the obliteration of what remains of world culture by the Empire.

The second could be a violent worldwide revolution of the masses against all forms of economic injustice.

The third would involve a comprehensive enslavement of mankind by the imperial controllers, using advanced technological means to suppress all remaining vestiges of free thought and independent action.

The fourth may be a widespread collapse resulting in breakdown of economic systems, social anarchy, disintegration of infrastructure, and return to primitive conditions.

The elite of the Empire clearly prefer the third option and are rapidly moving toward it. But they are also well-advanced in preparing for numbers one and two. Number four is more problematical. We see those with available resources now stockpiling supplies, purchasing country property, creating arsenals of weapons, etc. Big business and big government have drawn up elaborate contingency plans, with the military prepared to institute martial law.

Many people, including so-called progressives, make the mistake of believing a fifth option lies in more control of economic, legal, and cultural matters, including education, by government. This puts them at odds with so-called conservatives, who want to reduce government funding for programs that benefit the lower- and middle-income sectors, while augmenting spending on the police and military.

Rudolf Steiner was an opponent of socialism, which as an economic system has been thoroughly discredited. It should also be clear that government involvement in any economic activity means more entrenched bureaucracy, standardization, taxes, court action, accounting overhead, forms, paperwork, police power, and stifling of innovation and initiative.

These are complicated issues, but my own view is that looking to government to rescue us is a historical dead-end and is often just an excuse for the controllers to extend their power. Many believe this is the hidden meaning of the Barack Obama phenomenon.

How else to explain how this unknown Chicago politician with a murky background came out of nowhere to attain the heights of power by repeating a one-word slogan: “Change”? Much of his campaign funding came from the financial sector that benefited when he continued Bush administration programs to bail them out after the crisis of October 2008.

The one major area where I believe government should do an about-face would be to break the monopoly held by big finance on the creation of money out of thin air which they then exploit by lending at interest. This government-chartered privilege is the bedrock of elite control.

I have written about the ways this system should be reformed, including facilitation of mutual credit clearing exchanges and acceptance of local currencies in payment of taxes. But the best way for governments to combine greater human freedom with concrete economic benefits may be through an international basic income guarantee as a means of promoting human dignity while introducing much-needed consumer purchasing power.

Fortunately for humanity, the hellish materialistic ideology that the Empire espouses, from which the tragedies of the 20^th and early 21^st centuries have proceeded, may be peaking. Today, increasing numbers of people have grown to feel that their being consists of more than their physical bodies or than the mere sum of their lives, in Steiner’s words, “between birth and death.”

The masses worldwide increasingly do not want war and oppose economic exploitation. It may therefore be hoped that what is now unfolding is close to the last wave of the horrible disturbances that take place between epochs.

Thus my own view is that a sixth option exists, which is divine revelation arising in a universe where the loving Creator in which a majority of mankind believes does not abandon His children. It would appear, from many indications, that the revelation Steiner forecast is already in progress. But for individuals to benefit, they must seek and find it, as it does not announce itself on billboards or in infomercials.

Steiner spoke of this revelation as a Second Coming of Christ in the Etheric. I believe this revelation is reflected in the proliferation of teachings and movements that focus on individuals entering within themselves through prayer or meditation in search of inner peace or consolation.

This new revelation may be working its way in the world in very practical ways, but always starting with changes in the psyche. Gradually a new attitude can come alive to displace a viewpoint where people worship the idols of their imagination—money, houses, bodily adornment, the people they want to posses—rather than observe the holy injunctions central to all religions to love God and to love their neighbor as themselves.

The new revelation shows up wherever people are aspiring to assure that what is produced in the area of economics does not belong just to the money-masters but to all people.

It would show itself when the world of law and government minds its own business except to assure equal rights for all, along with fairness and competition in the marketplace.

It manifests through spiritual, intellectual, and cultural striving, where the highest goal is unfettered individual expression of Self- and God-consciousness.

Again, according to Steiner, it is the spiritual sector that should give guidance to the economic and legal ones. Someday it will. A sign this is happening is the rapid growth of instantaneous communication through the internet. Whether spiritual revelation can prevent more disasters from taking place remains to be seen and may depend on how many individuals eschew despair and choose to respond to the signs of the times in new and positive ways.

The world is indeed changing, in ways different from what the imperialists have planned. They may try to wreck the world to prevent these changes, but it won’t work. As Steiner and other prophetic thinkers made clear, at-one-ment is here and now. Nothing else in fact has ever really existed.

Richard C. Cook is a former federal government analyst who writes on public policy issues. His website is www.richardccook.com. His latest book is “We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform.” He is preparing major article two-part article to appear this fall in New Dawn magazine on “Esoteric Christianity and the World Crisis.”

While skeptics mockingly point out that the “end of the world” has been prophesized over and over again for centuries with nothing happening—the latest being Y2K, they say, and another likely bust coming up when the calendar hits 2012—it’s obvious that mankind faces an increasingly unsustainable future.

The world’s economic, technological, agricultural, and political systems are breaking down. While the causes are debated, it’s certain that the human assault on the natural world has wiped out vast numbers of species and polluted the land, the air, and the oceans. After the past 100 years of history, with two world wars and low-grade but vicious warfare going on almost continuously somewhere in the world since World War II ended, it seems impossible for human beings to live together in a state of harmony either among ourselves or with the planet we call home.

Are we at “the end of the age?”

In social life, the overriding characteristic of our era is the increasing division in the world between haves and have-nots, masters and slaves, controllers and controlled, rich and poor. The power of the wealthiest class of people has never been so great. The weapons of mass destruction they–and the armed forces who work for them–monopolize have the force to destroy the earth many times over.

Teachings of peace, tolerance, charity, which have always received lip service, lack efficacy. Such teachings increasingly count for nothing. Organized religion, done in by its own transgressions and lack of transformative potency, rarely even attempts to make a stand for justice or persuade nations to forego war.

The people at the very top of the heap have been those Western financial magnates, especially from the Anglo-American-Zionist empire and the European Union, who control banking, industry, investment, and credit. The world is run by an international financial elite and their subordinates in government, corporations, academia, the military, and the media. This elite have plunged billions of people and the nations they inhabit into astronomical levels of debt. They are the controllers who live off the fat of the land, skimming the cream of science and industry through usury on money they create out of thin air through financial monopolies granted or at least tolerated by the politicians whose strings they pull. No longer leaders of the popular will, the political classes of all Western nations, most particularly the United States, are servants of private financial and corporate interests.

The controllers realize how tenuous stability has become. So they seem to have embarked on a worldwide consolidation of power, using every tool available from the fields of electronic surveillance and social engineering to enhance their dominance. Nations not entirely under their control, such as Russia and China, are tagged as adversaries and surrounded with military bases. The controllers are suspected of having vowed among themselves that the existing world population of almost seven billion human beings cannot be allowed to continue. A large portion of the human herd must be culled, an action that now appears to be underway with the world’s resources increasingly passing into the hands of centralized financial interests.

But this will not necessarily fend off the even larger disaster that threatens mankind. For the controllers themselves also inhabit the earth. No man is an island. What threatens the least of God’s creatures threatens them as well.

The perspective of the controllers is therefore incomplete. What it leaves out are human freedom, aspiration, and spirituality. It also leaves out nature and nature’s laws. Further, it leaves out God, whatever we mean by that word, still knowing that there is “something” or “someone” who is the ultimate creative force. Perhaps these most materialistic elements of humanity are not quite as sharp as they think they are in trying to erect a fortress against the universe in order to save themselves.

For instance, they have not yet found a way to negate the law of cause and effect: “As ye sow, so shall ye reap.” An example is the BP oil catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico caused by negligence in addressing pre-existent problems in a manner reminiscent of the space shuttle Challenger disaster of 1986. Both events exposed the pride of man as mere dust. Disasters may also be lying in wait due to genetically-modified seeds laced with pesticides where crop failures or the appearance of super-resistant insects could lead to mass starvation.

The controllers desire to rule from their glitzy world capitals of glass and steel while maintaining “safe” suburban, rural, or island palaces and retreats. Many, though not all, are the physical or spiritual descendents of those who rejected God by rejecting Jesus Christ 2,000 years ago, though according to some traditions their genealogy may be much older. Though the Christian churches offer many confusing and contradictory interpretations, it was Jesus Christ who prophesized the end of the age and sought to prepare mankind for it. Christianity is first and foremost an eschatological religion, especially as it hearkens back to such Old Testament prophets as Isaiah.

But in recognizing that the size of the human population is an overriding issue, shouldn’t we ask why are so many people alive on earth at this time? Where have they come from? Is it simply a result of improved sanitation, more productive farming methods, or the reduction in infant mortality? Or is there a hidden cause? The planet today resembles a train station at rush hour. Perhaps for the sake of discussion we should look at it from a somewhat mystical perspective. Should we consider, for instance, that the huge increase in the world’s population has taken place because all the human souls from the last several thousand years of history have been allowed to incarnate in order to give them one final chance to develop spiritually and move on to higher planes of being?

It could also be that a side-effect of the large earth population has been the emergence of the critical mass of information that has led in turn to exponential growth in science, technology, and economic productivity, the latest phase being the cybernetic revolution. Has man, in his vanity, attributed this apparent progress to his own stellar qualities, while failing to guard against the temptations deriving therefrom and their potential for binding him to the material plane? Perhaps man has surrendered his soul through a Faustian bargain based ultimately on the illusion which science promotes of someday attaining physical, as opposed to spiritual, immortality. In his delusion, man has viewed the earth as his true home rather than a place to reside temporarily for learning, experience, and eventual transcendence. The great parable of modern man may have been Goethe’s Faust, published in 1808 and prefiguring the spiritual crisis of the modern age.

We should note well the fact that due to social and political upheaval, combined with modern methods of communication, every person alive has been exposed to teachings of spiritual evolution, not just from Christianity, but from other religions such as Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism, as well as spiritual teachings such as yoga that cross religious lines. All have taught that our true home is in the spiritual realms, not in the rounds of earthly life and death. (Judaism is excluded from this list, as there are so many different Jewish sects, including so-called “secular Judaism,” that it is difficult to isolate a specific teaching on spiritual development.)

Why else have we seen in the past century so many enlightened teachings coming from all parts of the world, existing side-by-side with organized political, financial, and military horror? Doesn’t it seem that each and every soul on the planet is being tested? As indicated above, perhaps each of us is being given one last opportunity to attain enlightenment before the curtain comes down and the theater is closed for the season. This may be one way to look at the concept of the “end times.”

So what are we waiting for? Shouldn’t we be coming together to work in every way possible for the furtherance of truth and the enhancement of being? Shouldn’t we be creating centers of light to prepare ourselves and each other whatever lies ahead? Indeed, some are. But are we doing enough?

Time appears to be running out, with dire changes having already begun. Who knows, maybe there is only a year or two remaining of relative freedom of movement before the controllers reveal their deep affinity with the dark side by setting up what seems to be their planned world dictatorship, world government, and world currency. They have learned how to manufacture crises and disasters, such as 9/11, as a means of seizing more power. The signs that they are springing the trap will be the increased bureaucratization of all aspects of life, wartime measures like rationing and transportation checkpoints, centralization of financial institutions, control of populations through un- and under-employment, elimination of freedom of speech on the internet, and continued growth of computerized systems containing personal identifying information. As has happened before, the majority of people will likely be so sick of the rising tide of chaos the controllers have helped engineer they will willingly trade their autonomy for the shackles of totalitarian order.

To accomplish their ends, won’t the controllers also try to stamp out the last vestiges of spirituality on earth? They have already attacked many spiritual teachers and movements since the epochal change of consciousness that emerged in the 1960s. The rebellious flower children were seduced by dangerous drugs developed and distributed by covert operatives. Other examples were the engineered reaction within the Catholic Church against Vatican II and the liberation theology movement, as well as the takeover of Protestant Christianity by Zionists among the Evangelicals. A friend points out that militant Zionists also took over and subverted the Reform movement within Judaism. And it has been the Western intelligence agencies, going back over a century, who helped create radical Islam in order to declare the Middle East a base of “terrorism” so that war against the Islamic world could be rationalized and their oil resources seized.

The controllers engineered these and other reactions because the only way they can rule is to eliminate the naturally-occurring hope of free individuals for a higher level of consciousness and a more humane world. Other methods include mind control through TV programming and the continued dumbing-down of the population through an educational system now based entirely on learning by rote and government-mandated standardized tests. As 1984 and Brave New World showed to previous generations and the cynical manipulation of political reporting by Murdoch-owned Fox News indicates today, the masses are easy to control. Fox News is doing it by co-opting the Tea Party movement and goading it into a phony rebellion that ignores the real issues of elite control. All these elements hide the fact that it is the controllers who are the real terrorists in the world today.

Now embedded microchips, along with automated administration of pharmaceuticals to individuals by nanotechnology, appear to be on the way. The first step toward the microchip in the U.S. could be the national ID card as proposed by U.S. Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) in connection with immigration reform. According to published reports, the card Schumer proposes would contain a person’s social security number, along with biometric data such as retinal scans and fingerprints. Such a card could easily be expanded to include credit and criminal history, DNA sequences, and medical history, all linked to a central database.

As cited in Politico, Sen. Schumer has stated his belief that “Hashem”–Hebrew for “the Name”–has appointed him the guardian of the state of Israel within the U.S. Senate. He has also spoken of himself as a potential presidential candidate. As events move forward, particularly with politicians like Schumer on the rise, many seemingly innocent people will be faced with difficult decisions of whether, and how far, to “get along by going along.”

But whoever accepts the chip, it is said, will wear the “mark of the beast”—by choice, because the conscience within will have cried out against it. The post-World War II Nuremburg trials established that no one is innocent because they were simply following orders, a ruling that should apply to victims as well as perpetrators. Of course “the chip” can take many forms, making self-deception and rationalization easy.

Yet God is not mocked. Every human being on the planet has a God-given conscience which allows us to distinguish between right and wrong–if we listen to our conscience. Some say we have an individual guardian angel who is the guide to our conscience. How many of us seek the counsel of this guide?

And is the time also at hand that the “earth changes” which have been prophesied will manifest on an increasingly vast scale? How will the planet cleanse itself? It has been prophesied, for instance, by Edgar Cayce and others that as part of this cleansing, New York and Connecticut will one day be under water. Such predictions seem less preposterous today than 60 years ago, now that scientists are discussing the increased potential for extreme climatic events through alterations in the earth’s magnetic field or in connection with earth temperature changes.

Without a doubt, the time must also come when the United States will no longer exist in anything resembling its present form. How can a nation as heedless, violent, prurient, complacent, and materialistic as this one possibly continue on its present course when the earth is purged of falsehood? How can objective justice tolerate a nation that sadistically tortures prisoners of war and routinely kills civilians with unmanned drone strikes halfway around the world?

G.I. Gurdjieff was a spiritual master from the Caucasus who studied in the most remote parts of Asia and spent his mature years teaching pupils in France. In the 1920s he visited the U.S., spending most of his time in New York. He reportedly said, “America will rot before it ripens.” The causes, he intimated, would be America’s obsession with “dollar business,” its diet of processed foods, and its dissipated lifestyle. 

Gurdjieff was right. Regarding “dollar business,” today’s “Big Six”–J.P. Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley–are the most rotten and corrupt institutions on the globe. They have sold America down the river by creating and destroying gigantic investment bubbles, feasting on massive bailouts paid for by taxpayers, and spending the last two generations shipping workers’ jobs to low-paying foreign labor markets. Then they turn around and use America and its passive population as the world’s policeman to protect their investments.

Just as bad are international institutions like the International Monetary Fund, the Bank of International Settlements, and the European Central Bank, as well as national central banks like the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, the Deutsche Bundesbank, etc. While Hitler allegedly killed millions, the world’s bankers make life or death decisions that affect billions. They do it through control of the money spigot, which gives them power over every business and industry in the world that utilizes any form of credit. And credit is as essential to most businesses as breathing is to a human being.

When the dust settles, will there still be communities of human survivors in America? That may depend on the Americans themselves and how successful they are at reclaiming their freedom. Whatever survivors there are may be spiritually-minded and will of necessity live close to nature. But the scale and appearance of any future civilization is an unknown. Europe’s future could be as tenuous. Maybe Russia, China, and selected locations in Latin America, Asia, or Africa will do better. We don’t yet know.

What we should know is that the time is up for humanity. We have had our chance to decide what we value, whether service to a false conception of a separate self or service to God and neighbor. Now we are likely to find out for certain what measure of truth we have imbibed and incorporated into our being during many lifetimes.

The testing has come, but it has been foreseen for a long time. The Master came two millennia ago and showed the way. Why do we think someone else is coming now to save us? We were given the tools and the time to learn how to use them. Now we have no more excuses.

Rather than promote war, conflict, and conquest, anyone with a genuine spiritual sense will do everything possible to encourage peace, justice, and harmony among peoples and nations. Nevertheless, the “end of the age” seems imminent. As the Shivapuri Baba said, as recorded in the book Long Pilgrimage by John Bennett (Dawn Horse Press, 1983), “We are at the end of a 6,000 year cycle.”

We should strive not to be confused or complacent. It is time now for individuals to make a decision on where they want to be for the challenges ahead, with whom they want to spend their time, and exactly how they intend to devote their energy and commitment. The best advice is to choose wisely and choose well but not to wait any longer.

Jesus said: “Ye know not the day or the hour.” So why do we wake up every morning still thinking we know what the day will bring? In fact we do not know. The processes we are looking at herein could take a day, a year, or a century. So what is to be done? Following are some suggestions:

• Find a teacher or group that can guide you to spiritual enlightenment and where you can help others do the same.
• Teach yourself to act considerately to all those around you, including people you consider “evil.”
• Start viewing the natural world as alive and conscious, not an inert mass of dead matter.
• Get out of debt, get off the grid, and learn to live with only what you really need of a material nature.
• Learn to love work and do that work with reverence and gratitude.
• Stop watching TV; instead watch your health and diet.
• Develop your mental, emotional, and manual skills.
• Be honest with yourself and others.
• Refuse the “chip,” no matter what.
• Never stop learning.
• Grow food.
• Laugh a lot.
• Be at peace.
• Be happy.

Richard C. Cook is a writer on public policy issues. His website is www.richardccook.com. Sources for this article include the teachings of Edgar Cayce, G.I. Gurdjieff, P.D. Ouspensky, Abdullah Dougan, Jon Peniel, Omna Last, and many others.

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Review of Video on “People’s Economics”

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“This is a six-part professional-quality video that is over two hours in length. Each part consists of a lecture by Richard C. Cook on the economic crisis and its solution. This is the most in-depth and complete critique of our debt-based monetary system ever made. The video concludes with a complete program of reform based on the draft American Monetary Act, implementation of a Greenback-type currency, and a citizens’ dividend/basic income guarantee. The material is deeply rooted in the history of American public finance and the author’s experience of 21 years as a U.S Treasury Department analyst. His recommendations would replace the existing financial system, which mainly serves the interests of the financial oligarchy, with a new monetary system that would serve the needs of “We the People” and our producing economy. It would also replace Federal Reserve Notes with a new system of United States currency.”

“Credit as a Public Utility:

The Solution to the Economic Crisis”

A Video in Six Parts

Written and Produced by Richard C. Cook

©2009 by Richard C. Cook. All Rights Reserved.

Part One of Six Parts: Credit As A Public Utility: The Solution to the Economic Crisis

“Our Early Political Leaders Warned Us Against the Banking Interests”

Early U.S. statesmen, such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Andrew Jackson worked to free the nation from control by the bankers who had been behind the establishment of the First and Second Banks of the United States. During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln implemented a true democratic currency by spending Greenbacks directly into circulation without borrowing from the banks. These measures allowed the U.S. to develop for much of the 19th century largely free from bankers’ control. By the end of the century, this had changed, and the bankers were taking over. Click Here

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3468056684550176104

Part Two of Six Parts: Credit As A Public Utility: The Solution to the Economic Crisis

“The Federal Reserve System: The Bankers Take Over”

President Lincoln’s Greenback system worked but was undermined and replaced by the financiers who got Congress to pass the National Banking Acts of 1863 and 1864, then the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. The United States now became a nation dominated by the financial elite, the banks, and a debt-based monetary system. Consequently, the 20th Century was one of constant cycles of inflation and deflation resulting in the economic chaos we see today.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7247440563842157664

Part Three of Six Parts: Credit As A Public Utility: The Solution to the Economic Crisis

“The Collapse of the Financial System”

The collapse we are seeing today began in the financial system, not the producing economy. The crisis started with the housing bubble which the Federal Reserve created by cutting interest rates and then brought own by raising them. The trigger of the 2008 bank meltdown was refusal by European banks to purchase any more “toxic” U.S. debt based on mortgages and sold as securities. Now, with the decline in equity values, the burden of debt in our economy has grown even larger. Thus a renewal of bank lending will not solve the problem, while the economic stimulus program of the Obama administration is likewise insufficient to restore economic health.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2586504549221421168

Part Four of Six Parts: Credit As A Public Utility: The Solution to the Economic Crisis

“What is Credit and Who Should Control It?”

Fractional reserve banking is the process by which banks create credit out of thin air. But despite abuses of the system, credit is still a crucial part of modern economics. An enlightened concept of governance would view credit as a public utility. This means that government must take back the control of credit from the private financiers.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4061589997977265938

Part Five of Six Parts: Credit As A Public Utility: The Solution to the Economic Crisis

“The Gap Between Prices and Income”

One of the most important and least understood concepts in modern economics is the existence of a gap between prices and purchasing power. This gap results when a portion of prices must be set aside as business and private savings. The money is then used by the financial system for lending and speculation. Keynesian economics takes control of some of the savings through government deficit spending but is still a compromise with control of the economy by the financiers. In fact Keynesian economics has helped cause the collapsing debt pyramid. A better system would be to provide consumers with a National Dividend as a way to monetize the continuous appreciation of the producing economy.

videoplay?docid=3035089455833762689

Part Six of Six Parts: Credit As A Public Utility: The Solution to the Economic Crisis

“The Greenback and National Dividend Solutions”

The U.S. should convert to a system where the money supply is created by the federal government by being spent into circulation without government borrowing or taxation as was done with the Greenbacks. The Federal Reserve should no longer be a bank of issue. Additionally, a National Dividend should be paid directly to the people. The “Cook Plan” calls for the initial distribution of vouchers in the amount of $1,000 a month plus a new system of community savings banks. Greenbacks combined with a National Dividend will create a non-inflationary democratic currency and transform the economy of the United States.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2945437690287937254

From Globalization To Re-Localization

By Megan Quinn Bachman

23 April, 2010
Ecowatch Journal http://www.countercurrents.org/bachman230410.htm

Using less, cutting back, saving resources, conserving energy, reducing impact—such actions, though vital responses to our planetary peril, conjure up images of a strictly proscribed and rather austere future.

When our only goal is minimizing consumption, it’s easy to imagine the imposition of draconian government measures—ones where every energy-consuming action is monitored, controlled and limited. For some, this approach is tolerable as long as it forestalls dangerous climate changes. For others, a centralized, authoritarian “dictatorship of sustainability” is a worse fate yet.

If a singular focus on cutting carbon dioxide is mistaken, what then, is the environmental movement to do? Thankfully we can save the planet while strengthening autonomy of our communities by re-localizing vital goods and services.

By meeting our most essential needs closer to home our communities will be more resilient in the face of global economic and ecological shocks. Being more self-sufficient means we will be less dependent upon centralized, energy-intensive industrial infrastructure and energy-devouring long-distance transport.

In this way, individuals and communities will also be more sustainable and more in control of their destiny, and less at the mercy of manipulated global commodity prices, corrupt CEOs, inept politicians and marauding Wall Street bankers.

But how exactly do we re-localize our economies after several decades of fast-growing economic globalization fueled by cheap energy, easy credit and mushrooming debt? According to economist and author Michael Shuman, it is by creating more locally owned, import-substituting businesses in our towns.

At a workshop in my community of Yellow Springs, Ohio last year, we designed a host of new business opportunities, including a local delivery company, small business loan fund, venture capital fund, energy services company, local farm and garden cooperative, business incubator and wellness center. These local businesses would help to keep money circulating within the community, instead of flowing from it.

While all import-substituting businesses reduce the transportation energy used to deliver goods and services, some more specifically cut energy consumption, like a renewable energy cooperative. In the Austrian town of Gussing, a council decision ordering all public buildings to stop using fossil fuels led to the development of 50 new renewable energy businesses, now employing more than 1,000 people while dramatically cutting its carbon dioxide generation by 90 percent.

In the midst of a global financial crisis, calls to re-localize finance are gaining ground. One recent example is the “Move Your Money” campaign, which is aimed at encouraging those banking at those too-big-to-fail Wall Street banks to move their accounts to community banks and credit unions.

According to its website (www.moveyourmoney.info), “Community banks are typically more conservative about how they manage their money, they’re more closely connected to the people and businesses who live near them, and they’re more inclined to make loans they know will get paid back.”

So instead of investing in the global economic growth system which is undermining its own ability to continue by devastating the natural environment on which we depend, we could be investing locally in the people, businesses and technologies that directly sustain us and will sustain generations to come through import-substituting businesses.

Re-localization has another benefit as well. Instead of a restricted and hapless low-consumption future, we can have a happier healthier existence as we fill our lives with valued relationships instead of valued possessions.

In fact, the last few decades focus on wealth accumulation has come at the expense of close, fulfilling relationships. Today we have less intimacy with our friends in addition to having fewer friends. A study done in the U.S. and published in the American Sociological Review showed that from 1980 to 2004 the number of “close confidants” people had had dropped from three to two and the number of people without any close confidants has more than doubled.

Re-localization is about finding a more sustainable way to provide for our needs as a global industrial system based upon diminishing finite fossil fuels crumbles in the 21st Century. It’s about building community so that “when things get hard,” as deep ecologist Joanna Macy has said, “we won’t, in fear, turn on each other.”

Apocalyptic scenarios of either a devastated planet or an authoritarian world government both disintegrate in the face of neighbors growing food for one another.

Megan Quinn Bachman, a freelance environmental writer, speaker and consultant, writes from Yellow Springs, Ohio. She can be reached at megan@ecowatch.org

Following is the Dedication:

“This book is dedicated to the memory of Jefferson Jackson, Lincoln, and those venerable Americans who opposed economic slavery and foreign domination, and who taught that the Government should use Constitutional money for the common welfare of all Americans. It is dedicated to their followers who oppose today’s economic slavery (boom-bust economy and State Socialism) and who oppose foreign domination (America-Last [groups] … giving America away) as well as to those who believe that their servants in the nation’s Capitol should support the Constitution in its entirety—including that section which gives to Congress the power to issue money and regulate its value.”

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• Un- and under-employment remains high–officially over 17 percent, not including people who have given up looking for work.
• The cost to create (or save) jobs has been ludicrously high. Estimates of what it has cost the federal government–meaning the taxpayer–to create a single job range from $70,000 to $500,000, depending on whether bailouts lavished on the failed banking system are included.
• While Wall Street rakes in record profits and the stock market creeps back  with the DJIA now approaching 11,000, the rest of the economy is sputtering. Public service jobs at the state and local level, including teacher positions, are disappearing like shredded newspaper in a blast furnace. The best the Obama administration can come up with for the next phase is some extremely convoluted encouragement for more bank lending to small businesses, even though these businesses are operating in an environment of crippled consumer demand that may last for years to come.
• The two economic sectors that are reasonably “strong”–the military and health care–are essentially non-productive. The military uses Keynesian deficit-spending to support its gargantuan job base, while the health care industry feasts at the public trough through the ever-increasing cost of Medicare and other spending programs. But like the bailouts and stimulus, it’s being done by both sectors with borrowed or printed money through marketing of Treasury bonds whose value becomes more precarious by the day.
• What stimulus there is has been is coming to an end as the Federal Reserve reduces “quantitative easing” and the Obama administration launches its bipartisan deficit reduction commission.

Many commentators have said, as a joke, that it would have been cheaper if the government had just printed the money and given it away. But such an approach would not be a joke at all. It would be enlightened public policy.

The real joke is that in a technological age job-creation is a completely wrong approach to distributing consumer purchasing power, because the world does not need everyone to have a job in order to produce what is needed for the population to live a decent, comfortable life. This is the great fallacy of Keynesian economics, which aims at full employment and endless economic growth.

Not only does the fruitless quest for a full-employment economy put the entire population under the most brutal forms of financial and psychological stress, it also erodes the value of a constantly inflating currency and puts entirely too much money in the hands of the big banking and government institutions which spend it for their own aggrandizement on financial bubbles and wars.

America is the most wasteful, bloated, materialistic, and violent culture on the planet precisely because the economic treadmill we are racing along moves constantly faster all the time. This treadmill has been created on purpose by the only people who benefit from it–the ones at the very top of the heap.

The solution is simple though paradoxical: sufficient numbers of adult persons should be given enough money to purchase the necessities of life without having to work at all.

This is so because the benefits of technology have brought us to the point where distribution of purchasing power without reference to labor is the most efficient and least wasteful economic model available. The borrowed or printed federal dollars currently lavished on the banks, the armed forces, and the government bureaucracies that implement stimulus programs would be much more efficiently spent if simply given away.

Call it a basic income guarantee or a national dividend or whatever you like and pay for however much of it you want to through fair taxation of the obscenely wealthy–it really doesn’t matter. You could even establish an optional retirement age of 40 or 45. The important thing is that such a program would recognize that with productivity as high as it is today, too many workers get in each other’s way. Those who don’t have to work shouldn’t be required to do so. Instead, they can create, do volunteer service, or work at low-paying jobs that are still socially desirable such as teaching or the arts.

An adjunct to such a program would be to provide local producers’ cooperatives the legal authority to create credit on their own either by utilizing the national currency or by use of trading credits that not only would circulate locally but could also be used to pay taxes. Such legislation at the national level would free small business from bank usury much more effectively than current government proposals and create more jobs.

Today’s economic crisis is actually the mismanagement of nature’s bounty in an age where technology has solved the problem of scarcity if it is properly viewed as the heritage of all mankind, not the cartel of financiers, corporate oligarchs, military strongmen, and politicians who have the world at the throat in order to safeguard their own wealth and power. Instead they should relax their grip and realize that they too would benefit from a world where all could breathe freely in an economic environment of peace, dignity, and sharing.

Believe me, it could happen and someday probably will.

Richard C. Cook writes on public policy issues. His website is www.richardccook.com

The small nation of Iceland–population 320,000–can’t produce much of anything that is in demand in the international markets. During the 60s and 70s Icelandic Airlines had a pretty good business running the cheapest flights you could find between the US and Europe, but that is long in the past. They do catch fish out of the dwindling North Atlantic fisheries, and tourists show up who appreciate the stunning natural beauty of  a landscape with geysers, hot springs, and an abundance of wilderness hiking. But that’s about it.

Technologically the Icelanders are highly competent, which helps them produce sufficient geothermal and hydroelectric energy to produce their own electricity.

During the worldwide explosion of high finance, particularly during the early to mid-2000s, they became investors, applying their skills as robust ex-Vikings to working the world’s financial markets. By big-time borrowing from European banks, including British ones, they were able to leverage their credit into substantial stock and bond holdings. Iceland was once one of Europe’s poorest nations, but now it began to feel and act rich.

Unfortunately, when the world’s financial system tanked in 2008-2009, Iceland fell hard and fast. The investors lost not only their shirts but also their thermal underwear, and their creditors–led again by Britain–found them in default. With the banks going, well—bankrupt–and the Icelandic government taking them over, the creditors naturally looked to the government to make good on the nation’s debts. The government approached the International Monetary Fund for bailout loans, with the IMF, as is its wont, expecting them to raise taxes and cut public services in order to free up money.

Since Iceland is not part of the EU, they have a certain ability to resist and to tell Britain et.al. “up yours,” and that is pretty much where it stands. Economically they are back to pondering how to support what had become one of the most prosperous lifestyles in the world, since fish and tourism don’t quite do it for a modern state. Iceland is also looking to the other Nordic nations for financial help and is trying to get outsider oil companies to search its territorial waters for petroleum deposits.

Nothing can hide the fact that Iceland remains in serious financial trouble with its sovereignty deeply compromised. The Icelanders have also become something of heroes to progressives who like to see someone stiffing the international bankers, or at least wanting to. But nothing can change the fact that Iceland is an object lesson in what can happen to a nation that hangs its prosperity and its future on a financial bubble.

Every bubble ends in rubble. At least Iceland now has a chance to look within to its own human and natural resources for salvation.

Richard E. COOK

NEWPORT NEWS – Mr. Richard Edward Cook, of Newport News, passed away at 4:40 p.m., Thursday, Feb. 4, 2010, at Riverside Hospital after a short illness. He was 86 years old.
Mr. Cook was born on Jan. 7, 1924, in Oklahoma City, Okla. His mother was Carolyn Hill of Kingfisher, Okla., and his father was Frederick Cook of Tioga, Texas.
Mr. Cook grew up in the American West, spending much of his school years in Los Angeles, Seeley Lake and Missoula, Mont. During World War II, he served with the Seabees on Attu Island in the Aleutians and in San Francisco. Upon discharge, he was married in San Francisco to Marjorie Virginia Peilow of Missoula, Mont. They had four children.
Mr. Cook graduated from the University of Montana, in 1949, with a degree in chemistry. From 1950-1960, he worked as a lab chemist for the Dow Chemical Company, Saran Division, in Midland, Mich. He and the family relocated to Williamsburg, Va., in 1960, where he worked as a production superintendent for the Dow-Badische Corporation. After leaving there, he worked for Satterwhite Industries in Toano. He retired in 1986.
Mr. Cook was a self-possessed individual who touched many lives. He was an avid golfer, fisherman, gardener, reader, card player, letter writer, and sports fan. He particularly enjoyed literature on American and English history and the Old West. He enjoyed traveling to visit his children and grandchildren, and was a familiar figure on the Hampton Roads golf links well into his 70s.
Mr. Cook was preceded in death by his daughter, Barbara; and his second wife, Thelma.
He is survived by his former wife, Marjorie of Williamsburg; his longtime companion, Frances Hedin; his son, Richard Carlton Cook of Hyattsville, Md.; his daughters, Sandra Lee Hutton of Lanexa, Va., and Christine Anne Dunbar of Vienna, Va.; 13 grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.
Arrangements are with the Cremation Society of Virginia.
A memorial service is planned for 11 a.m. Saturday, March 20, at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church in Williamsburg, where Mr. Cook was a member at the founding of the church in 1964. Following the service will be a reception for friends and family.
The family requests that any donations be made in Mr. Cook’s memory to the Intensive Care Unit at Riverside Hospital.

. . . In reviewing the conflicts which have taken place between different interests in the United States and the policy pursued since the adoption of our present form of Government, we find nothing that has produced such deep-seated evil as the course of legislation in relation to the currency. The Constitution of the United States unquestionably intended to secure to the people a circulating medium of gold and silver. But the establishment of a national bank by Congress, with the privilege of issuing paper money receivable in the payment of the public dues, and the unfortunate course of legislation in the several States upon the same subject, drove from general circulation the constitutional currency and substituted one of paper in its place.

It was not easy for men engaged in the ordinary pursuits of business, whose attention had not been particularly drawn to the subject, to foresee all the consequences of a currency exclusively of paper, and we ought not on that account to be surprised at the facility with which laws were obtained to carry into effect the paper system. Honest and even enlightened men are sometimes misled by the specious and plausible statements of the designing. But experience has now proved the mischiefs and dangers of a paper currency, and it rests with you to determine whether the proper remedy shall be applied.

The paper system being founded on public confidence and having of itself no intrinsic value, it is liable to great and sudden fluctuations, thereby rendering property insecure and the wages of labor unsteady and uncertain. The corporations which create the paper money cannot be relied upon to keep the circulating medium uniform in amount. In times of prosperity, when confidence is high, they are tempted by the prospect of gain or by the influence of those who hope to profit by it to extend their issues of paper beyond the bounds of discretion and the reasonable demands of business; and when these issues have been pushed on from day to day, until public confidence is at length shaken, then a reaction takes place, and they immediately withdraw the credits they have given, suddenly curtail their issues, and produce an unexpected and ruinous contraction of the circulating medium, which is felt by the whole community. The banks by this means save themselves, and the mischievous consequences of their imprudence or cupidity are visited upon the public. Nor does the evil stop here. These ebbs and flows in the currency and these indiscreet extensions of credit naturally engender a spirit of speculation injurious to the habits and character of the people. We have already seen its effects in the wild spirit of speculation in the public lands and various kinds of stock which within the last year or two seized upon such a multitude of our citizens and threatened to pervade all classes of society and to withdraw their attention from the sober pursuits of honest industry. It is not by encouraging this spirit that we shall best preserve public virtue and promote the true interests of our country; but if your currency continues as exclusively paper as it now is, it will foster this eager desire to amass wealth without labor; it will multiply the number of dependents on bank accommodations and bank favors; the temptation to obtain money at any sacrifice will become stronger and stronger, and inevitably lead to corruption, which will find its way into your public councils and destroy at no distant day the purity of your Government. Some of the evils which arise from this system of paper press with peculiar hardship upon the class of society least able to bear it. A portion of this currency frequently becomes depreciated or worthless, and all of it is easily counterfeited in such a manner as to require peculiar skill and much experience to distinguish the counterfeit from the genuine note. These frauds are most generally perpetrated in the smaller notes, which are used in the daily transactions of ordinary business, and the losses occasioned by them are commonly thrown upon the laboring classes of society, whose situation and pursuits put it out of their power to guard themselves from these impositions, and whose daily wages are necessary for their subsistence. It is the duty of every government so to regulate its currency as to protect this numerous class, as far as practicable, from the impositions of avarice and fraud. It is more especially the duty of the United States, where the Government is emphatically the Government of the people, and where this respectable portion of our citizens are so proudly distinguished from the laboring classes of all other nations by their independent spirit, their love of liberty, their intelligence, and their high tone of moral character. Their industry in peace is the source of our wealth and their bravery in war has covered us with glory; and the Government of the United States will but ill discharge its duties if it leaves them a prey to such dishonest impositions. Yet it is evident that their interests can not be effectually protected unless silver and gold are restored to circulation.

These views alone of the paper currency are sufficient to call for immediate reform; but there is another consideration which should still more strongly press it upon your attention.

Recent events have proved that the paper-money system of this country may be used as an engine to undermine your free institutions, and that those who desire to engross all power in the hands of the few and to govern by corruption or force are aware of its power and prepared to employ it. Your banks now furnish your only circulating medium, and money is plenty or scarce according to the quantity of notes issued by them. While they have capitals not greatly disproportioned to each other, they are competitors in business, and no one of them can exercise dominion over the rest; and although in the present state of the currency these banks may and do operate injuriously upon the habits of business, the pecuniary concerns, and the moral tone of society, yet, from their number and dispersed situation, they can not combine for the purposes of political influence, and whatever may be the dispositions of some of them their power of mischief must necessarily be confined to a narrow space and felt only in their immediate neighborhoods.

But when the charter for the Bank of the United States was obtained from Congress it perfected the schemes of the paper system and gave to its advocates the position they have struggled to obtain from the commencement of the Federal Government to the present hour. The immense capital and peculiar privileges bestowed upon it enabled it to exercise despotic sway over the other banks in every part of the country. From its superior strength it could seriously injure, if not destroy, the business of any one of them which might incur its resentment; and it openly claimed for itself the power of regulating the currency throughout the United States. In other words, it asserted (and it undoubtedly possessed) the power to make money plenty or scarce at its pleasure, at any time and in any quarter of the Union, by controlling the issues of other banks and permitting an expansion or compelling a general contraction of the circulating medium, according to its own will. The other banking institutions were sensible of its strength, and they soon generally became its obedient instruments, ready at all times to execute its mandates; and with the banks necessarily went also that numerous class of persons in our commercial cities who depend altogether on bank credits for their solvency and means of business, and who are therefore obliged, for their own safety, to propitiate the favor of the money power by distinguished zeal and devotion in its service. The result of the ill-advised legislation which established this great monopoly was to concentrate the whole moneyed power of the Union, with its boundless means of corruption and its numerous dependents, under the direction and command of one acknowledged head, thus organizing this particular interest as one body and securing to it unity and concert of action throughout the United States, and enabling it to bring forward upon any occasion its entire and undivided strength to support or defeat any measure of the Government. In the hands of this formidable power, thus perfectly organized, was also placed unlimited dominion over the amount of the circulating medium, giving it the power to regulate the value of property and the fruits of labor in every quarter of the Union, and to bestow prosperity or bring ruin upon any city or section of the country as might best comport with its own interest or policy.

We are not left to conjecture how the moneyed power, thus organized and with such a weapon in its hands, would be likely to use it. The distress and alarm which pervaded and agitated the whole country when the Bank of the United States waged war upon the people in order to compel them to submit to its demands can not yet be forgotten. The ruthless and unsparing temper with which whole cities and communities were oppressed, individuals impoverished and ruined, and a scene of cheerful prosperity suddenly changed into one of gloom and despondency ought to be indelibly impressed on the memory of the people of the United States. If such was its power in a time of peace, what would it not have been in a season of war, with an enemy at your doors? No nation but the freemen of the United States could have come out victorious from such a contest; yet, if you had not conquered, the Government would have passed from the hands of the many to the hands of the few, and this organized money power from its secret conclave would have dictated the choice of your highest officers and compelled you to make peace or war, as best suited their own wishes. The forms of your Government might for a time have remained, but its living spirit would have departed from it.

The distress and sufferings inflicted on the people by the bank are some of the fruits of that system of policy which is continually striving to enlarge the authority of the Federal Government beyond the limits fixed by the Constitution. The powers enumerated in that instrument do not confer on Congress the right to establish such a corporation as the Bank of the United States, and the evil consequences which followed may warn us of the danger of departing from the true rule of construction and of permitting temporary circumstances or the hope of better promoting the public welfare to influence in any degree our decisions upon the extent of the authority of the General Government. Let us abide by the Constitution as it is written, or amend it in the constitutional mode if it is found to be defective.

The severe lessons of experience will, I doubt not, be sufficient to prevent Congress from again chartering such a monopoly, even if the Constitution did not present an insuperable objection to it. But you must remember, my fellow-citizens, that eternal vigilance by the people is the price of liberty, and that you must pay the price if you wish to secure the blessing. It behooves you, therefore, to be watchful in your States as well as in the Federal Government. The power which the moneyed interest can exercise, when concentrated under a single head and with our present system of currency, was sufficiently demonstrated in the struggle made by the Bank of the United States. Defeated in the General Government, tho same class of intriguers and politicians will now resort to the States and endeavor to obtain there the same organization which they failed to perpetuate in the Union; and with specious and deceitful plans of public advantages and State interests and State pride they will endeavor to establish in the different States one moneyed institution with overgrown capital and exclusive privileges sufficient to enable it to control the operations of the other banks. Such an institution will be pregnant with the same evils produced by the Bank of the United States, although its sphere of action is more confined, and in the State in which it is chartered the money power will be able to embody its whole strength and to move together with undivided force to accomplish any object it may wish to attain. You have already had abundant evidence of its power to inflict injury upon the agricultural, mechanical, and laboring classes of society, and over those whose engagements in trade or speculation render them dependent on bank facilities the dominion of the State monopoly will be absolute and their obedience unlimited. With such a bank and a paper currency the money power would in a few years govern the State and control its measures, and if a sufficient number of States can be induced to create such establishments the time will soon come when it will again take the field against the United States and succeed in perfecting and perpetuating its organization by a charter from Congress.

It is one of the serious evils of our present system of banking that it enables one class of society–and that by no means a numerous one–by its control over the currency, to act injuriously upon the interests of all the others and to exercise more than its just proportion of influence in political affairs. The agricultural, the mechanical, and the laboring classes have little or no share in the direction of the great moneyed corporations, and from their habits and the nature of their pursuits they are incapable of forming extensive combinations to act together with united force. Such concert of action may sometimes be produced in a single city or in a small district of country by means of personal communications with each other, but they have no regular or active correspondence with those who are engaged in similar pursuits in distant places; they have but little patronage to give to the press, and exercise but a small share of influence over it; they have no crowd of dependents about them who hope to grow rich without labor by their countenance and favor, and who are therefore always ready to execute their wishes. The planter, the farmer, the mechanic, and the laborer all know that their success depends upon their own industry and economy, and that they must not expect to become suddenly rich by the fruits of their toil. Yet these classes of society form the great body of the people of the United States; they are the bone and sinew of the country–men who love liberty and desire nothing but equal rights and equal laws, and who, moreover, hold the great mass of our national wealth, although it is distributed in moderate amounts among the millions of freemen who possess it. But with overwhelming numbers and wealth on their side they are in constant danger of losing their fair influence in the Government, and with difficulty maintain their just rights against the incessant efforts daily made to encroach upon them. The mischief springs from the power which the moneyed interest derives from a paper currency which they are able to control, from the multitude of corporations with exclusive privileges which they have succeeded in obtaining in the different States, and which are employed altogether for their benefit; and unless you become more watchful in your States and check this spirit of monopoly and thirst for exclusive privileges you will in the end find that the most important powers of Government have been given or bartered away, and the control over your dearest interests has passed into the hands of these corporations.

The paper-money system and its natural associations–monopoly and exclusive privileges–have already struck their roots too deep in the soil, and it will require all your efforts to check its further growth and to eradicate the evil. The men who profit by the abuses and desire to perpetuate them will continue to besiege the halls of legislation in the General Government as well as in the States, and will seek by every artifice to mislead and deceive the public servants. It is to yourselves that you must look for safety and the means of guarding and perpetuating your free institutions. In your hands is rightfully placed the sovereignty of the country, and to you everyone placed in authority is ultimately responsible. It is always in your power to see that the wishes of the people are carried into faithful execution, and their will, when once made known, must sooner or later be obeyed; and while the people remain, as I trust they ever will, uncorrupted and incorruptible, and continue watchful and jealous of their rights, the Government is safe, and the cause of freedom will continue to triumph over all its enemies.

But it will require steady and persevering exertions on your part to rid yourselves of the iniquities and mischiefs of the paper system and to check the spirit of monopoly and other abuses which have sprung up with it, and of which it is the main support. So many interests are united to resist all reform on this subject that you must not hope the conflict will be a short one nor success easy. My humble efforts have not been spared during my administration of the Government to restore the constitutional currency of gold and silver, and something, I trust, has been done toward the accomplishment of this most desirable object; but enough yet remains to require all your energy and perseverance. The power, however, is in your hands, and the remedy must and will be applied if you determine upon it….

Yes, the distinction between earned and unearned wealth is indeed critical. And yes, I agree with your identification of monopoly control of resources as being at the root of the problem.

Of course the chief monopoly is that of creation of money which governments share with the international banking oligarchy. It is through the monopoly of money-creation that the oligarchs and militarists gain hegemony. Keynesian economics was the stroke of genius by which unlimited wealth could be funneled into the hands of the war-mongers with the bankers reaping the profits.

This is the paradigm by which the West functions. As time goes on and the superstructure becomes evermore shaky, the further are the extremes to which the ruling class must go to maintain power. Every other value, whether economic or cultural, is sacrificed to the mechanisms of control. These mechanisms are increasingly operated by outright criminals of the Mafia type.

I would say that at least half the population of the developed Western nations see through this facade and a higher proportion of the rest of the world. The control is facilitated by all vested interests including the churches. For all established churches, the individual human person is a sheep to be sheared. The churches are allowed to exist only because they serve the interests of the oligarchs so well.

There is always a trade-off, of course, because enough of the sheep must be kept alive to purchase the output of the rulers’ factories, whether located in China, Indonesia, or elsewhere. So there always have to be concessions in order to still provide the sheep with basic sustenance. Too much provender, of course, and the sheep get uppity, so to speak, and expect more.

The current balancing act being carried out by the Obama administration in trying to engineer a “soft landing” after the explosion of the recent financial bubbles, is a good example of trying to keep enough of the sheep on the plantation to permit the wheels to keep turning. Their true colors are shown by the president’s plan to freeze Social Security and other individual benefits, thereby subjecting individual income to the ravages of inflation, while allowing spending for the military, “homeland security,” interest on the national debt, etc., to grow without limit. (Note: It is not clear whether the desired cuts to individual benefits will come from the freeze cited by President Obama in his January 27 state-of-the-union speech or from his proposed budget commission to be convened to reduce the federal deficit.)

Having said all that, it is clear that Russia is the fly in the ointment, having rediscovered, under Putin, the ability of the state to harness resources for the good of society while utilizing the power of autocratic government to protect the people from the oligarchic wolves. The same goes to some extent for China and India and to those Latin American republics, including Venezuela and Brazil, that are inching off the plantation.

All this is laying the scenario for World War III, with the Russian nuclear deterrent playing the key role in keeping the Western wolf-states at bay. At a certain point, of course, the shifting snow-pack turns into an avalanche. Such an event is obviously coming.

Meanwhile, there is no chance that anyone within the West can make the slightest degree of difference by directly attacking the ruling oligarchy. They are protected with the greatest police-military power ever seen. What can be done against people who can perpetrate events like 9/11, surreptitiously blow up whole cities, as evidently was done in Haiti, or illegally track down and assassinate anyone anywhere who gets under their skin?

Better, perhaps, just to lead a quiet life until things blow over, especially since open rebellion is so easily diverted into frauds like the tea-party phenomenon.

One saving grace for the U.S. is that there is still a semblance of the Second Amendment so that people, if they are careful, can still arm and protect themselves to some extent. And they can start to grow their own food, as many are starting to do. Books on topics like “urban homesteading” are becoming best-sellers.

Someday mankind will wake up and see the truth, which is that the earth was made equally free for all. It is essential for a few people to understand this and carry the torch into the future. But there is likely to be a huge calamity in the meantime that will bring down the whole despicable superstructure. Though it often seems otherwise, “Crime does not pay.” The law of Karma comes from a higher level and cannot be repealed, even by the CIA, the Israelis, or the U.S. Congress.

In any case, we shall see.

It’s nonsense for anyone to say that the crash of 2008 had not been foreseen. A number of analysts, myself included, were predicting a crash by mid-2007. Actually, it was apparent that a serious decline would take place by the end of 2005 when the U.S. economy was still dependent on housing for half its growth over a year after the Federal Reserve had begun to raise interest rates. By early 2008 the economy was officially in a recession, though I actually dated it to December 2006 when the money supply measured by M1 became stagnant. That meant that consumer spending wasn’t even keeping up with inflation.

Now, over the last year, the recession has begun to bottom out due to the huge quantities of credit injected by the Federal Reserve into the failed banking system and by the relatively undersized economic stimulus asked for by President Obama and approved by Congress. A “recovery” has been declared, with stock prices making up for about half their previous losses, even though the official (and understated) unemployment rate is not likely to fall below 9.5-10 percent for the foreseeable future.

The current uptick has been projected by some analysts to continue through May-June 2010, when we will be in danger of another downturn that could be quite serious. Obviously the Democrats will be doing what they can to bolster confidence, at least until the 2010 Congressional elections.

The Republicans, with the victory of their candidate Scott Brown in the race for the late Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in Massachusetts, are jubilant, even though they have absolutely nothing to offer as an alternative. How soon we forget that it was Republican policies, starting with Reaganomics and ending with the George W. Bush catastrophe, that has been the prelude to where we are today.

The prognosis for the U.S. economy is dim. From a larger perspective, we are at the end of the era of Keynesian economics, when the government thought all it had to do was run up more debt to stimulate the economy. When you add to that a generation of outsourcing of manufacturing jobs abroad, completely irresponsible and out-of-control behavior by the financial industry, and the cancerous growth of the military-intelligence-industrial complex and their pet wars, you have all the signs of an empire in precipitous decline.

For those who are habitually against everything the government does, I’d like to say that there are actually a few caring and intelligent people in authority these days who don’t want to see the total collapse of the U.S. as a nation, an economy, and a society. The U.S. remains the world’s largest consumer economy and the dollar the predominant currency. But the rest of the world has caught up. The Anglo-American Empire is seeing the sunset, and the choice now to be made is whether it will end peacefully or in a bang.

We can all hope for a peaceable conclusion, though it will take patience and hard work for the U.S. even to become a functioning economy on the same level as the rest of the world’s developed nations. So we can hope that the “soft landing” will work. But we still have a gigantic debt load to deal with, amounting to $60 trillion from all sources–business, government, and consumer.

We also have a gutted manufacturing sector, the huge overhead of a bloated financial industry (and their obscene bonuses), bankrupt governments at all levels, and way too many people with no real work to do like lawyers, health insurance executives, national security analysts, financial and educational bureaucrats, etc.

The short and simple answer is that we have to rebuild our economy, and our lives, from the bottom-up. We have to relearn how to do manual work like what we have mainly been asking immigrants to do for the last couple of decades. We should rebuild our local farming sector and get rid of bloated monstrosities like Monsanto. We should launch a major assault on the automobile culture and begin to revitalize cities and towns so that people can bike or walk to work or take public transportation.

It will not be easy to do these things. It may not even be possible. We have forgotten how to work because we have wanted our money to “work for us.” But that money, which only ever existed on paper, is gone. Our population is aging and not too healthy, making care of the sick and dying the only growth industry. And the young people who come out of our schools have few practical skills with which to earn a living. This must change too.

And what of investment capital? Loans are harder than ever to get. The small business sector, which could be an economic engine, is in dismal shape with lack of credit, high costs, and weakened markets for their products. Half of all new small businesses fail within one to two years of start-up.

Some say that a nation armed to the teeth and under this much pressure is likely to start a really big war out of frustration and not knowing what else to do. In other words, roll the dice. But World War II ended a long time ago. Since then, except for Vietnam, we have had our way bullying small nations. But that era has ended too. We won’t be able to do to China, Russia, and India what we did to Iraq and are trying to do to Afghanistan.

World War III would be a really bad choice. What we should do instead is take a positive attitude and sit down together and figure out ways to work our way out of this mess. But it will take a heap of humility, leadership, and willingness to face the pain of starting over again. But it could also be an adventure. After all, nation-building should begin at home.

The U.S. currently is at risk. We see it in personal and business bankruptcies and foreclosures. One result can be a high rate of inflation in certain products like food or gasoline, even while asset prices, as with homes and stocks, are going down. The question is now whether the “recovery” that is underway can be sustained or will there be another crash like there was in late 2008 to early 2009.

Forecasters are projecting this recovery to last until June 2010 but are foreseeing slippage at that point. Investors at this time are still putting money into the stock market and getting out of dollars. By June, the U.S. government had better come up with a strategy for real economic growth–which means jobs–or we will likely see the “double-dip” recession many have predicted. Personally I see no way growth can be sustained unless the national debt burden shrinks. This can only be done through an orderly process of debt forgiveness, a resurgence of economic production, or a default that could be catastrophic.

Is there any way people and localities can protect themselves? The best way, in my opinion, is to put our resources, including our time and labor, into producing something of value in the real physical economy. Since most people’s largest asset is their homes, home maintenance and repair might work. It won’t make you rich, but it could put food on the table.

Speaking of food, growing it is another option. In many locations, there is a greater demand for locally-produced food than there are producers to meet that demand. In a couple of months it will be time to start planting this year’s garden. People could get together as a community and make plans for gardens big enough to sell the surplus at local outdoor markets. Buying and selling products at the local level can also become an economic engine to fuel the creation of a local currency.

A strategy of local food production can also address the problem that the era of cheap food in the U.S. is coming to an end. This is happening partly because a large portion of food prices consists of the cost of the fossil fuels used in growing, harvesting, and transporting the food to market. Gasoline prices are on the rise again. This will take food prices upward as well.

Local farming, by contrast, places food production close to the end consumer. Personal health also benefits from higher quality food and from getting outdoors and becoming more physically active.

As the national economy gets worse, it’s time for people to roll up their sleeves and get to work doing for themselves what big finance, big oil, and big government can no longer do.

Yes, I think a run on the dollar is coming. A lot of people are saying this, including a man named Dmitri Orlov who recently came out with a book entitled “Reinventing Collapse” that compares the crash of the Soviet Union in the 1990s with what he believes is coming here within a short period of time. I heard that at the last meeting of the G20 the U.S. asked Russia and China if they would agree to an orderly devaluation of the dollar, and the answer was “Nyet.” So something big is likely to happen. I don’t know what it will be. A worst case scenario is a wild hyperinflation of the dollar and a total collapse of the monetary system, followed by skyrocketing gasoline prices, etc., and another Great Depression. But the Federal Reserve is too smart just to let that happen, so they will likely try in some way to keep the economy afloat while engaging in an orderly devaluation that will reduce the overall levels of debt. There are many ways to tackle this but it will require strong central planning and maybe even “monetary reform.” The possible scenarios are endless and much depends on the political will of Obama and Congress as to how much control they can exert over the financiers. I am hesitant to predict total gloom and doom, though it is certainly a possibility. One thing that could trigger it would be if the U.S. can no longer buy oil from abroad. That depends also on whether “Peak Oil” really exists or not. But clearly big changes are coming. Our country has become so fragile. Most of our population is a month away from starvation when you look at the food pipeline.

Copyright 2010 by Richard C. Cook. www.richardccook.com

The answer? Barter! Not only among individuals, but also among businesses and even with the central government. According to a study from the period by Dr. David Woodruff of MIT, “As of early 1998, 50-75 percent of exchange in industry took the form of barter…” With regard to payment of taxes, “In 1997, at least one-quarter of the revenue collected for the federal budget took a non-monetary form.”

At the time, the International Monetary Fund, which was trying hard to impose harsh neoliberal bank-centered policies on Russia, was urging Western governments to take a hard line in trying to force Russian government officials to carry out an anti-barter crackdown. The Russians resisted . Within a couple of more years the Russian economy had begun to move forward again under President Vladimir Putin.

But barter had saved the day. In his study, Woodruff advised against IMF policies, writing: “The rich countries can no longer afford the illusion that they can impose policies on Russia regardless of their domestic support. ”

Source: Dr. David Woodruff, “The Russian Barter Debate: Implications for Western Policy,” November 1998, Ponars Policy Memo 38, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Copyright 2010 by Richard C. Cook

Richard C. Cook is a former federal government analyst who writes on public policy issues. His website is www.richardccook.com.

“The UsuryFree Eye Opener is the electronic arm of the UsuryFree Network. It seeks active usuryfree creatives to help advance our mission of creating a usuryfree lifestyle for everyone on this planet. Our motto is ‘peace and plenty before 2020.’ The UsuryFree Eye Opener publishes not only articles related to the problems associated with our orthdox usury-based, debt money system but also to the solutions as offered by active usuryfree creatives – and much more for your re-education.”

One of the great advantages of local currency systems  is that they introduce real money into the economy without anyone having to pay interest charges to a bank for the privilege of money-creation. This is a revolutionary innovation that would totally tranform local, regional, and national economies if applied on a wide scale.

In fact, the use of interest-free or usury-free money would have tremendous benefits for ordinary people who now pay a significant portion of their income for bank interest. These payments occur through mortgages, car payments, credit card charges, etc., plus the hidden portion of the cost of every consumer item that derives from bank interest at various phases of the production-distribution-retail process.

So why aren’t the religious clergy in the forefront of protest against the usury-based financial system? Why aren’t they leading the movement for local non-usury-based currencies? Indeed it’s a puzzle, especially in light of the numerous injunctions against usury in the Bible.

Well, one of the writers on “The UsuryFree Eye Opener” asks the same thing in this “Letter to Mainstream Religious Clergy About Usury.” It’s well worth reading!

Click Here

The present money system has three basic evils:

a) It permits money to be issued privately, only by a limited number of persons and corporations who have bank credit, and makes such credit subject to fee. Thus it establishes credit as a privilege rather than a right, and makes it an object of profit rather than a utility to further the production and distribution of wealth. It denies to producers generally the right to issue money, thus making it impossible to expand buying power to potential producing power. This results in defeating the mass production system.

b) It permits the government to issue unbacked money. The only way the government could back its money issues would be to go into the production of goods and services; and this would compete with private business. Thus the problem offers the two horns of a dilemma, both of which lead to socialization. If it backs its money issues with goods and services (and there is no other way it can be backed), it executes a frontal attack on private enterprise. If it issues money without backing it (as it is doing), it executes a flank attack on private business through inflation – since to issue money without creating equivalent values is to inflate.

c) It permits ambitious or designing or fanatical men who are in control of government to light the fires of war, threatening the lives and fortunes of untold millions. This terrible power lies solely in the political money system since armaments spring from money and money springs from government fiat, whereas it should spring only from the fiat of the people who would thus hold the veto power.

Entire text of Private Enterprise Money may be found at Click Here

So is the recession ending? The professional cheerleaders from Wall Street think so, now that the Dow-Jones has surged past 10,500. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke is also cautiously optimistic as the Fed begins to dismantle some of the emergency bailout programs it had implemented to help save the financial system from total collapse after the meltdown of 2008.

How did the apparent turnaround come to pass? Pearlstein notes: “My best guess is that the current upswings in economic output, confidence and financial asset prices are largely a reflection of the extraordinary fiscal and monetary juice provided by Treasury and the Federal Reserve, along with the natural rebound that occurs after a collapse in consumer and business spending like that which occurred in the first half of 2009.”

There is in fact a consensus among commentators that it’s been government money that has made the difference. But the government money has all come from borrowing. It’s why the national debt rose from about $9.5 trillion to almost $12 trillion in a little more than a year. Interest on the debt now approaches $400 billion a year.

But the debt can’t continue growing at such a rate. President Barack Obama has already said that with the emergency behind us the federal deficit must start to come down. The reason Congress is about to pass such a terribly flawed health care bill is that the Congressional Budget Office estimates that it will reduce federal health care costs by forcing millions of uninsured people into the private insurance system, cutting back on Medicare, and imposing a five percent tax surcharge on the wealthy.

So what is the economic engine that will keep the economy on track? Pearlstein dismisses all four of the most likely possibilities.

He says that consumer spending, with unemployment staying high, will not come back, writing, “It’s hard to see how American consumers can again become the engines of the U.S. or global economies.”

On more government spending, he says, “that’s also hard to imagine. State and local governments, in fact, are still cutting back spending in response to falling tax revenue, and there’s no political consensus for running up bigger federal deficits than we are running now.”

Another possible source of growth is new investment, but the economy is already built to overcapacity in many sectors, “including excess hotel rooms, airplanes, office buildings, shopping malls, cargo ships, aluminum smelters and the like.” Regarding another housing boom, forget it. Pearlstein writes, “…with 5 million vacant apartments and another wave of home foreclosures on the horizon, don’t count on the housing sector to lead the way out of this recession.”

Finally, there is trade. But even though the U.S. trade deficit has come down, its persistence “reflects a fundamental reality not likely to change anytime soon: We no longer produce much of what we like to consume, and cannot make up the difference with exports because of trade barriers and an overvalued currency.”

So what is left?

Here Pearlstein returns to a focus on investment by noting that American consumers have started to save again and that during the downturn businesses saved money by living with aging production equipment, physical plant, and computer systems. He comes out in favor of tax breaks for business to encourage investment, along with new government expenditures for infrastructure such as “basic research, clean-energy development and expanded public higher education.” These things, he says, will create new jobs which in turn should lead to more consumer purchasing power.

The trouble is, Pearlstein already dismissed the investment and public expenditure alternatives earlier in his analysis as being insufficient. More government debt could also lead to high levels of inflation and further devaluation of the dollar. Inflation caused by government and central bank “printing of money” kills enterprise at every level.

Pearlstein fails even to mention the severe constriction of bank lending to businesses that has made conditions much worse for the small business sector where half of all start-ups already fail within a year. Business giants can take refuge in their cash reserves, but even they cannot grow if consumers can’t buy more of their products.

Pearlstein’s prescriptions are mainly platitudes. Let’s be frank: without small business and the revitalization of local and regional economies, a real recovery cannot take place, and an unemployment rate that has terrorized the middle class with loss of jobs, incomes, savings, and health care cannot be overcome.

What is the answer then? It’s one that Pearlstein and the Washington Post, being in the mainstream of economic commentary, dare not mention: it’s local currency systems that alone can fill the gap left by the collapse of public finance due to debt and the failure of the banking system to function at all levels of the economy and not just for the benefit of the super-rich global capitalists.

If the federal government announced that it would begin to accept local currencies in payment of taxes, and state and local governments did the same, we would see an economic miracle that would astound the world.

Copyright 2010 by Richard C. Cook

Richard C. Cook is a former government analyst who writes on public policy issues. His website is www.richardccook.com. His new book is “We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform.”

In 1848 Whitman was a delegate to the founding convention of the Free Soil Party. During the Civil War he worked as a nurse in Union military hospitals and held several government jobs, including interviewing Confederate prisoners for pardons. Some of his greatest poems came from his war experiences, including his famous elegy upon the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, “Oh Captain! My Captain!” His great collection of poems, Leaves of Grass, was self-published. He died a national hero in 1892 in Camden, New Jersey, where thousands of people came to pay their respects. Contrary to the opinion of some, he was not a homosexual.

Whitman has always been viewed as a poet of the people, in contrast to the pretentious dandies from academia who have controlled official American culture for much of our history. He wrote of workmen, farmers, sailors, soldiers, lovers, criminals, and prostitutes. He was a hero to the Beatniks of the 1950s who tried to rediscover an authentic American voice in the streets and on the roads and highways of this great land. The spirit of Whitman was surely present through the rebellion of the 1960s, when America’s young men and women rose up and fought the Establishment to stop the Vietnam War and bring civil rights to racial minorities.

The Establishment fought back with a vengeance and, through the most egregious betrayal in history, reduced the world’s greatest industrial democracy to the pathetic shadow of its former self we are today.

The first thing the Establishment did was destroy the industrial job base by shipping millions of good jobs to China and other Third World nations, where slave laborers could be forced to churn out consumer products at a fraction of the cost of similar work done by American workers.

Acting through the CIA and organized crime, the Establishment flooded the cities and college campuses with illegal drugs in order to rot the minds and souls of our youth.

They dumbed down education to the point where young people who graduate today know little and can do less of a practical nature. Vocational training is dead. A high school graduate is worth virtually nothing in the job market, and most college graduates are semi-literate and self-absorbed, without any real backbone, skills,  or initiative. Many high school and college graduates are drug addicts or alcoholics.

They turned the economy over to thieves from Wall Street and created a military machine that turns youth into murderers and assassins whose job it is to conquer the world for the fat cats of global capital.

They ruined the arts, literature, and music through crass commercialization, making it almost impossible for any real original creativity to be produced or communicated. The one bright light in this darkness is the internet, which is  being threatened by commercial suppression of freedom of expression by the ambitions of big communications companies. Thank goodness too for the rare creative genius like Michael Moore who has the courage to hold up a mirror to this deeply diseased society.

Then they wrecked people’s health with processed food and constant inducements to a sedentary lifestyle while pumping us full of dangerous vaccines and prescription drugs. They drummed it into everyone’s head that we are basically weak, ill, helpless creatures who can only survive by taking pills and making constant trips to doctors, hospitals, and clinics.

They induced us to fight over our possessions and freedoms in law courts with the aid of greedy lawyers in front of rapacious judges who have built up the largest prison population in the world.

They pulled money and credit out of the inner cities and rural areas leaving those segments of the nation and their populations to rot.

The list could go on and on and on.

Today we are in the midst of not just a recession but a terminal depression. Getting the banks to lend again so people can buy homes at what are still over-inflated prices or so they might compete with immigrants to get construction jobs through building of more useless office buildings or military bases is not a recovery. The “greening of America” is a myth. There is no resurgence of alternative energy investment or new public infrastructure apart from a few highway projects.

American family farming is practically dead and is under a new assault from speculators who are undercutting prices and forcing foreclosures. The local manufacturing sector never came back after the calamitous decline produced by the Paul Volcker recession of 1979-1983, when interest rates were deliberately raised to over 20 percent to kill off family-owned businesses so that global corporations could step in and take over. Since then we had the “Reagan Revolution” when the banks took over the economy, the Clinton dot.com bubble of the 1990s which crashed in 2000,  and the George W. Bush/Alan Greenspan housing bubble which blew up in 2008. Now Main Street lies shattered and shuttered as a result of the crimes and treacheries of the last 30 years.

True, there is a rebellion brewing, including a monetary reform movement that has attacked the power of the Federal Reserve, as well as a few progressive voices that call for a much larger economic “stimulus” than the Obama administration has seen fit to implement.

But is there any practical plan on the part of either political party or organized movement to restore America to what it once was–a place where ordinary people could live, work, learn, and flourish? The answer is a resounding “No.” Not a chance. And “Change You Can Believe In” hasn’t changed a thing. All it has done has been to produce another financial bubble, this time using huge amounts of public debt through the sale of U.S. Treasury bonds. Business is not growing and jobs are not coming back. The only thing that has gone up has been the meeting of military recruitment quotas.

This latest bubble will fail too, because money created through lending to float the prices of assets is not wealth. Rather wealth consists of goods and services produced by labor applied to natural resources. Those who provide the labor must be recompensed fairly.

So what is to be done? The answer is that nothing can or will be done, if by that you mean whether a political savior is going to come along to rescue our nation and its people from destruction.

In fact, what they are planning is to continue to throttle and enslave us with a predatory financial establishment and a military policy that is preparing the groundwork for World War III. The war will be fought with American troops against Russia and China, after which China will take over as the world’s policeman while this country disappears from the face of the earth. It’s the ultimate plan of the New World Order, the ones American politicians, financiers, military leaders, and academics bow down to.

It is time for each and every individual who values his or her own life along with the creative potential of the human spirit to begin to work with others to create a new nation and world. The government isn’t going to do it for us. Please believe me. This is not a system that can be reformed. It is a system that must be replaced. And it must be replaced by the ordinary working men and women who have been crushed, used, and abused during the past ugly half-century.

Americans, get to work. Call your friends and family together today and begin to figure out what to do. Start with 15 minutes of prayer and meditation. You will be shown the way from within yourselves. My own view is that setting up local currency systems, as many communities are now doing, is a good place to start.

Copyright 2009 by Richard C. Cook

Richard C. Cook is a former federal government analyst who writes on public policy issues. His website is www.richardccook.com. His latest book is We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform (Tendril Press, 2009).

Over the last 40 years the Federal Reserve, with the acquiescence of Congress and the executive branch, has become the primary regulator of the economy. The prevailing philosophy is called monetarism, and it’s based on the raising and lowering of interest rates.

This period has been marked by the successive creation and destruction of several gigantic investment bubbles. After the Federal Reserve brought on the recession of 1979-83 by raising interest rates to over 20 percent, we had a bubble during the Reagan/G.H.W. Bush years based on business mergers and acquisitions. It was then that the fulcrum of the U.S. economy shifted from manufacturing to finance. This bubble collapsed in a recession that brought Bill Clinton to the presidency in 1992.

Then, using the strong dollar to attract foreign investment, the Federal Reserve and the Clinton administration floated the U.S. economy throughout the 1990s on what was called the dot com or “tech” bubble. This bubble collapsed in 2000-2001 with an enormous loss of asset value to U.S. and foreign investors, including massive loss of pension funds.

In 2000 George W. Bush became president. Instead of taking steps to rebuild the U.S. manufacturing economy, the Federal Reserve under Chairman Alan Greenspan slashed interest rates and removed the regulatory controls, resulting in a huge inflation of home prices through the housing bubble. Cash entering the economy through mortgage lending was the economic engine for the Bush presidency. Taxes from the housing bubble paid for much of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.

Other investment bubbles in equities, hedge funds, derivatives, and commodities also took off. All this collapsed in the financial crash of October 2008. Now, President Barack Obama is trying to restart the U.S. economy by a huge infusion of federal government money through the largest increase in the national debt since World War II.

The policy of creating economic growth through credit bubbles is speculation-based and highly inflationary. It’s why the U.S. dollar has lost 85 percent of its value since 1965. But credit will have to be tightened soon, and the federal deficit will have to be reduced to keep the value of the dollar from declining further. This is likely to lead to a very weak recovery from the current recession and will leave households, businesses, and government at all levels still deeply in debt if not bankrupt.

So Congressman Paul is saying, quite logically, that the Federal Reserve needs to be attacked in its very ability to create these destructive inflationary bubbles. The Free Competition in Currency Act would attempt to do this by introducing gold and silver as a legal currency along with Federal Reserve Notes.

Unfortunately, there is not enough gold and silver in existence to fund the monetary requirements of modern economies. Trying to restore a metallic currency that never really existed in sufficient quantity since this nation was founded would only replace control of the economy by the banking system with control by gold and silver speculators.

Congressman Paul’s solution is largely ideology-driven to satisfy his libertarian constituency. That’s why legislation like this which has no chance of passing and wouldn’t work if it were implemented is more a political protest than a genuine attempt to solve the problem.

A metallic-based currency, one of whose purposes is to uphold the value of money due to its scarcity, is based on a flawed concept. Money, even based on gold and silver, does not derive its value from being scarce nor is an abundance of money itself inflationary.

Actually, money should exist in sufficient quantity and availability to move all the legitimate trade that is waiting to be moved. Money is a medium of exchange and should be nothing more than that. When used by the banking system for wanton speculation, as money is today, it’s an abuse. But to artificially restrict the availability of money when people need it to trade and earn a living is also an abuse.

The underlying purpose of the proposed Free Competition in Currency Act is actually to support the private minting of metallic coinage such as the “Liberty Dollar” and free such coinage from the sales and capital gains taxes that reduce its value. But a serious proposal to make privately-minted money usable in trade should also standardize its gold and silver content and fix its value, which this legislation fails to do. Therefore the only value of the Act would be to give the Liberty Dollar special privileges as an investment option.

Nevertheless, something must be done about the disastrous state of monetary policy, and none of the current proposals to restructure the financial regulatory system or reform the Federal Reserve would address the underlying issue of the inflationary nature of a monetary system based on federal government debt, financial speculation, and the supremacy of banking over the manufacturing sector.

A better solution would be to look at the dozens of local currency systems that are springing up around the nation, as private cooperatives begin to print and distribute their own local currencies. These currencies do what money is supposed to do. They act as a medium of exchange that monetizes the labor and resources of localities and regions.

These currencies consist of alternative paper notes and computer entries. As this movement continues, it is conceivable that someday different currencies could begin to be knitted together by computer databases and networks, so that their value would reach across jurisdictional lines and become a new type of national or even international monetary supply.

This is what governments should be promoting, Think what would happen if first cities, then states, then the federal government began to accept these currencies in payment of taxes, fees, or utility bills. Such currencies would be based on the value of production within the economy and very well could replace Federal Reserve Notes in many instances.

This is already happening in business bartering networks and with the use of other forms of value, such as airline frequent flyer miles, exchanged in trade. Of course the same thing is happening in many other parts of the world. Local currencies owned and distributed by producer cooperatives rather than dictatorial central banks allied with central governments deeply in debt may very well be the wave of the future.

Of course local currencies take us in the opposite direction of the tyranny of the international financiers and their desire to consolidate world currencies into the handful they can effectively control. Congressman Ron Paul is to be commended in challenging the legitimacy of the Federal Reserve money monopoly and getting people to look in the direction of a monetary system that serves rather than impoverishes us.

© 2009 by Richard C. Cook

Richard C. Cook is a former federal government analyst who writes on public policy issues. His website is www.richardccook.com. His latest book is “We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform.”

• The crisis of 2008-2009 exposed the U.S. financial system as being unstable, subject to abuse, and tending to favor the rich while putting everyone else deeper into debt.
• The housing bubble was based on the biggest credit inflation in history. It raised the prices of homes to unprecedented levels but created the deepest recession in a generation when it collapsed. $6 trillion in wealth has now simply disappeared.
• Meanwhile, unregulated global capitalism continues to concentrate wealth, outsource jobs to the cheapest possible labor markets, accelerate U.S. unemployment, and destroy local and regional economies.
• Even if the recession results in a modest recovery, it is likely to be of the “jobless” variety, or else jobs at low wages, with the U.S. still the most wasteful, resource-intensive, debt-oriented economy in history. A budget for war expenditures of almost $1 trillion doesn’t help.
• Steps toward recovery are being fueled by enormous increases in the national debt due to federal budget deficits now over $1.4 trillion a year, with the U.S. economy carrying a total debt load of $200,000 for every man, woman, and child in the nation.
• The huge debts of government at all levels, combined with reliance on government employment as a Keynesian economic driver, have raised the total government tax and fee burden (federal/state/local) to up to 40-50% of an individual’s income.
• The “elephant in the room” is the debt-based monetary system run by the Federal Reserve, which since its inception in 1913 has based the U.S. money supply almost entirely on bank lending, including lending to government for its deficits. The Federal Reserve Act gave the banking system the incredible privilege of creating money out of thin air and charging interest for its use. The federal government now pays the banking system, trust funds, and investors, including foreign governments, almost $400 billion a year just for interest.
• When you add it up, interest and taxes today probably consume over half the entire U.S. gross domestic product.
• Final elimination of the gold standard in 1971 removed any objective measure of the value of Federal Reserve currency. Since then, the dollar has lost 85 percent of its value. Despite the rhetoric, government and Fed policies inflate the currency in order to pay off debt with dollars of less value.
• Some members of Congress are trying to rein in the Fed, but so far with little success. Numerous proposals for monetary reform are coming from all quarters, but the power of the Fed and banking system in favor of maintaining the status quo is enormous.
• With the power wielded by the privileges of big banking, combined with big government and its Keynesian deficit-based financial system, we have completely forgotten that time in our history when money was viewed as a medium of exchange for producers of goods and services. Prior to 1913, the creation and use of money was much less centralized and mainly served the marketplace.
• The true purpose and meaning of money was rediscovered during the Great Depression when many businesses and local jurisdictions produced their own money in the form of scrip. Scrip is actually a more stable form of currency than bank-created fiat money where people are forced to accept the fiat money as legal tender. Also stable is the use of self-generated “trading units” by trade exchanges acting as producer currency coops. This is how the commercial “bartering” networks work.
• Today a similar movement to the scrip of the 1930s has begun through the creation and use of legal alternative currencies. Today, though, we have computerized databases to facilitate trading. This movement may be our best immediate hope of achieving a semblance of real economic democracy and restoring local/regional economic sustainability.
  

© 2009 by Richard C. Cook

Richard C. Cook is a former federal government analyst who writes on public policy issues. His website is www.richardccook.com. His latest book is “We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform.”

This elite has been around since the nation began, becoming increasingly dominant as the 19^th century progressed. A key date was passage of the National Banking Act of 1863, when the system was put into place whereby federal government debt was used to collateralize bank lending. Since then we’ve paid the freight through our taxes for bank control of the economy. The final nails in the coffin came with the passage of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.

In 1929 the bankers plunged the nation into the Great Depression by constricting the money supply. With Franklin D. Roosevelt as president, the nation struggled through the decade of the 1930s but did not pull out of the Depression until the industrial explosion during World War II.

After the war came the Golden Age of the U.S. economy, when the working man, protected by strong labor unions, became a true partner in the prosperity of the industrial age. That era lasted a full generation. The bankers were largely spectators as Americans led the world in exports, standard of living, science and space exploration, and every measure of health, longevity, and culture.

Roosevelt had kept the bankers subservient to the interests of the economy at large. The Federal Reserve was part of the New Deal team, and interest rates were held at historic lows despite a large federal deficit. One main impact was the huge increase in home ownership. After World War II, the G.I. Bill allowed home ownership to grow further and millions of veterans to attend college. The influx of educated graduates led to productivity growth and the emergence of new high-tech industries.

But the bankers were laying their plans. In the early 1950s they got the government to agree to allow the Federal Reserve to escape its subservience to the U.S. Treasury Department and set interest rates on its own. Rates rose throughout the 1950s and 1960s. By the time of the interest rate hikes of 1968, the economy was slowing down. Both federal budget and trade deficits were beginning to replace the post-war surpluses. High interest rates were the likely cause.

In 1971, President Richard Nixon removed the dollar’s gold peg, allowing the huge inflation resulting from oil price increases that the international bankers engineered through control of U.S. foreign policy when Henry Kissinger was national security adviser and secretary of state. Nixon’s opening to China resulted in early agreements, also overseen by banking interests, to begin to transfer U.S. industry to overseas producers like China which had cheap labor costs.

By the mid-1970s, the U.S. had been taken over by a behind the scenes coup-d’etat that included events in 1963 when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by a conspiracy that could only have been instigated by the highest levels of world financial control. In the election of 1976, David Rockefeller succeeded in placing fellow Trilateral Commission member Jimmy Carter in the White House, but Carter upset the banking community, thoroughly Zionist in orientation, by working toward peace in the Middle East and elsewhere.

I was working in the Carter White House in 1979-80. Unbeknownst to the president, Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, another Rockefeller protégé, suddenly raised interest rates to fight the inflation the bankers had caused by the OPEC oil price deals, and plunged the nation into recession. Carter was made to look weak and uninformed and was defeated in the election of 1980 by Republican candidate Ronald Reagan. It was through the “Reagan Revolution” that the regulatory controls over the banking industry were lifted, mainly in allowing the banks to use their fractional reserve privileges in making mortgage loans.

Volcker’s recession shattered American manufacturing and hastened the flight of jobs abroad. Under the “Reagan Doctrine,” the U.S. military embarked on an unprecedented mission of world conquest by attacking one small nation at a time, starting with Nicaragua. Global capitalism was also on the march, with the U.S. armed forces its own private police force. With the invasion of Iraq under George H.W. Bush in 1991, mainland Asia was revealed as the principle target.

The economy was floated by productivity gains through computer automation and a huge sell-off of assets through the merger-acquisition bubble of the late 1980s which ended in a recession. This resulted in the defeat of Bush by Bill Clinton in the election of 1992. Clinton was able to create another bubble through a strong dollar policy that attracted foreign capital.

The dot-com bubble that resulted lasted all the way through to the crash of December 2000. Meanwhile, the U.S. Air Force led the way in the destruction of the sovereign state of Yugoslavia, whereby the international bankers took over the resource wealth of the entire Balkan region, and the U.S. military gained forward bases for further incursions into Asia.

Do we need to say that none of this was ever voted on by the American electorate? But they bought into it nevertheless, both with their silence and through participation in a generally favorable job market in the emerging service occupations, particularly finance.

By the time George W. Bush was inaugurated president in January 2001, the U.S. was facing a disaster. $4 trillion in wealth had vanished when the dot.com bubble collapsed. NAFTA caused even more American manufacturing jobs to disappear abroad. The Neocons who were moving into key jobs in the Pentagon knew they would soon have new wars to fight in the Middle East, with invasion plans for Afghanistan and Iraq ready to be pulled off the shelf.

But the U.S. had no economic engine available to generate the tax revenues Bush would need for the planned wars. At this moment Chairman Alan Greenspan of the Federal Reserve stepped in. Over a two year period from 2001-2003 the Fed lowered interest rates by over 500 basis points. Meanwhile, the federal government removed all regulatory controls on mortgage lending, and the housing bubble was on. $4 trillion in new home loans were pumped into the economy, much of it through subprime loans borrowers could not afford.

The Fed began to put on the brakes in 2003, but the mighty work of re-floating a moribund economy had been accomplished. By late 2006 another recession loomed, but it would take two more years before the crisis of October 2008 brought the entire system down.

The impact on the job market was immediate and profound. By the time Barack Obama was elected president in November 2008, the U.S. was mired in seemingly endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the worst recession since the Great Depression was picking up speed. In order to prevent total disaster, the Bush administration ended its eight years of catastrophic misrule with a flourish, by allocating over $700 billion in financial system bailouts to cover the bad loans the banks had been making since Greenspan gave the housing bubble the green light.

It is now November 2009. Since Barack Obama was inaugurated in January, unemployment has soared from 7.9 percent to 10.2 percent. A few hundred billion dollars were allocated for “stimulus” purposes, but most of that went to pay unemployment benefits and to keep state and local governments from laying off more employees.

A fraction has been distributed for highway improvements, but largely through the bank bailouts the federal deficit has been running at an annual rate of $1.5 trillion, by far the largest in history, with the national debt now topping $12 trillion. Ironically, those Americans who still have productive jobs continue to grow in efficiency, with productivity up over five percent in the last year.

So much federal money has been spent that the Obama administration has been struggling to make its health care proposals budget-neutral through a raft of new taxes, fees, and penalties, and by announcing in recent days that the government’ first priority must now shift to deficit reduction. The word “austerity” has been mentioned for the first time since the Carter administration. Yet Congress voted $655 billion in military expenditures to continue fighting in the Middle East. A U.S. military attack on Iran, possibly in conjunction with Israel, would surprise no one.

So where do we now stand?

At present, the Federal Reserve is trying to prevent a total economic collapse. Interest rates are near-zero, to the chagrin of foreign investors in U.S. Treasury securities, and close to half of new Treasury debt instruments have been bought by the Federal Reserve itself as a way of providing free money for federal government expenditures.

But the U.S. economy shows no signs of coming back, with no economic driver emerging that could bring it back. For all the talk about alternative energy, there has been no significant growth of any home-grown industry that could possibly make up so much lost ground in either the short or the long-term.

The industries in the U.S. that are holding up are the military, including arms exports, universities that are attracting large numbers of students from abroad, especially China, and health care, especially for the aging baby boomer population. But the war industry produces nothing with a long-term economic benefit, and health care exists mainly to treat sick people, not produce anything new.

None of this provides a foundation that can bring about a restoration of prosperity to 300 million people when the jobs of making articles of consumption are increasingly scarce. On top of everything else, since government inevitably looks to its own requirements first, the total tax burden continues to increase to the point where the average employee now pays close to 50 percent of his or her income on taxes of all types, including federal and state income taxes, real estate taxes, payroll taxes, excise taxes, government fees, etc. Plus the cost of utilities continues to rise steadily and threatens to skyrocket if cap-and-trade legislation is passed.

The Obama administration has no plans to deal with any of this. They have projected a budget for 15 years hence that shows the budget deficit decreasing and tax revenues going way up, but it is all lies. They have no roadmap for getting us there and no plans for following the roadmap if it portrayed a realistic goal. And yet the U.S. military is still trying to conquer Asia. It is madness.

And it is madness because the big decisions are not made by the U.S., by Congress, or by the Obama administration. The U.S. has, for half-a-century, been marching to the tune played by the international financial elite, and this fact did not change with the election of 2008. The financiers have put the people of this nation $57 trillion in debt, according to the latest reports, counting debt at the federal, state, business, and household levels. Interest alone on this debt is over $3 trillion of a GDP of $14 trillion. Failure of our political leadership to deal with this tragedy over the past three decades is nothing less than treason.

But then again, at some point the decision was made that the U.S. and its population would be discarded by history, the economic status of the nation reduced to a shadow of what it once was, but that its military machine would be used for the financial elite’s takeover of the world until it is replaced by that of some other nation. All indications are that the next country up to bat as military enforcer for the financiers is China.

There you have it. That, in my opinion, is the past, present, and future of this nation in a nutshell. Great evils have been done in the world in the last century, and there is nothing anyone can do about it.

Except…. and that’s what each person caught up in these travesties must decide. What are you going to do about it?

In mulling over this question, it would be wise to recognize that the dominance of the financial elite has largely been exercised through their control of the international monetary system based on bank lending and government debt. Therefore it’s through the monetary system that change can and must be made.

The progressives are wrong to think the government should go deeper in debt to create more jobs. This will just create an even deeper hole of debt future generations will have to crawl out of.

Rather the key is monetary reform, whether at the local or national levels. People have lost control of their ability to earn a living. But change could be accomplished through sovereign control by people and nations of the monetary means of exchange.

This control has been stolen. It is time to take it back. One way would be for the federal government to make a relief payment to each adult of $1,000 a month until the crisis lifted. This money could be earmarked for goods and services produced within the U.S. and used to capitalize a new series of community development banks. I have called this the “Cook Plan.”

The plan could be funded through direct payment from a Treasury relief account without new taxes or government borrowing. The payments would be balanced on the credit side by GDP growth or be used by individuals to pay off debt. It would be direct government spending as was done with Greenbacks before and after the Civil War without significant inflation.

Another method increasingly being used within the U.S. today is local and regional credit clearing exchanges and the use of local currencies or “scrip.” Use of such currencies could be enhanced by legislation at the state and federal levels allowing these currencies to be used for payment of taxes and government fees as well as payment of mortgages and other forms of bank debt. The credit clearing exchanges could be organized as private non-profit regional currency co-operatives similar to credit unions.

These would be immediate emergency measures. In the longer run, sovereign control of money and credit must be returned to the public commons and treated as public utilities. This does not mean exclusive government control to replace bank control. As stated previously, it would be done in partnership between government and private trade exchanges. Nor does it mean government takeover of business, industry, or the banking system, though all should be regulated for the common good and fairly taxed.

This program would lead to a new monetary paradigm where money and credit would be available by, as, when, and where needed, to facilitate trade between and among legitimate producers of goods and services. In this way trade and commerce will come to serve human freedom, not diminish it as is done with today’s dysfunctional partnership between big government trillions of dollars in debt and big finance with the entire world in hock.

Such a change would be a true populist revolution.

© 2009 by Richard C. Cook

Richard C. Cook is a former federal analyst who writes on public policy issues. He is an advisor to the American Monetary Institute on its model monetary reform legislation soon to be introduced in Congress. His latest book is We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform. His website is www.richardccook.com.

Even if the stock market can be shored up by more government borrowing for “stimulus” spending, it’s a temporary reprieve, because nothing can bring back the consumer purchasing power that was lost when the banks stopped pumping money into the economy through out-of-control mortgage lending. We simply no longer have the job base for people to earn the income they need to live.

The underlying cause of the crisis is in fact the debt-based monetary system, whereby the U.S. ruling class long ago sold out our nation and its people to the international banking cartel of which the Rockefeller and Morgan interests have been the chief representatives for over a century. It was lending on a previously unheard of scale for overpriced assets to people and businesses unable to repay that created the bubbles that burst in 2008, not only in the housing market but also in such areas as commercial real estate, equities, commodities, and derivatives. It was an explosion that reverberated throughout the world.

The Obama administration’s response to the crisis has been to print Treasury bonds both for the financial system bailouts and the sputtering Keynesian stimulus that so far has gone substantially into military infrastructure. This bond bubble is what I have referred to as “Obama’s Last Picture Show.” http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12512

Government debt is fundamentally inflationary. For a generation, the U.S. dollar has been inflating at an increasing rate, with the economy being kept in a growth posture by selling our debt instruments abroad or allowing foreigners holding dollars to purchase property and other assets on our own soil. The website EconomyinCrisis.org reports that in 2007, the most recent year for which data are available, “foreign entities spent $267.8 billion to acquire or establish U.S. businesses.” http://www.economyincrisis.org/articles/show/2801

Foreigners are spending their dollars as fast as possible, because they are now plummeting in value. It’s increasingly clear that sooner rather than later, the dollar will be dumped by foreign purchasers of bonds, particularly China, and possibly even the oil-producing nations.

These nations know full well that bonds denominated in dollars can never be completely repaid, even if the bonds can be rolled over into fresh debt. It’s this dynamic that is dragging the U.S. economy to the cliff, because real economic growth stopped long ago when our manufacturing jobs were exported. This is because most of the growth since Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980 has been only on paper through financial bubbles. This included the dot.com bubble of the Clinton years that blew up in 2000-2001.

Now, after the Treasury bond bubble of 2009, there is nothing left in America to inflate. With so many jobs gone, the American family home was the last thing of value we owned.

So the air is going out of the tires. Americans who are struggling to work for a living are passive spectators as their jobs, savings, health insurance, pensions, and homes continue to erode in value or even disappear. Last Sunday the Washington Post reported a massive crisis in state and local government pensions. Reporter David Cho wrote, “The financial crisis has blown a hole in the rosy forecasts of pension funds that cover teachers, police officers and other government employees, casting into doubt as never before whether these public systems will be able to keep their promises to future generations of retirees.”

So what, if anything, can be done about it?

Well, the first thing an intelligent physician does is diagnose the disease. Thomas Greco, in his new book The End of Money and the Future of Civilization (Chelsea Green: 2009) , outlines the increasingly familiar story of how things got so bad, and he tells it as well as anyone has ever done. His style is precise and sometimes academic. Behind it, though, is a passion for truth and the type of rock-solid integrity that refuses to sugar-coat a very bitter pill.

More than that, Greco writes about how to change what has gone wrong. His credentials as an engineer, college professor, author, and consultant are impeccable. His book is among the most important written in this decade. It is truly a book that can alter the world and, if taken seriously, give large numbers of people a practical way to survive the gathering catastrophe.

But unlike most commentators, what Greco offers is not another phony prescription for what the financiers and government should do for us, whether through “restarting” lending or another round of stimulus spending. Rather it’s what we should do for ourselves, and could do much better, if we understood what to do and if big banking and big government just got out of the way.

As I said, at the root is the monetary system, whose failure cannot be understood without a history lesson. So Greco writes about the struggle between banking and democracy that took place in the 1790s when the ink on our new national constitution was barely dry.

It was Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the treasury, who compromised the new nation, through what he admitted was “corruption,” by giving the wealthy speculators in Revolutionary War bonds the benefit of federally-sponsored redemption and then by establishing the First Bank of the United States. This early drift toward elitist rule was opposed by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and others who figured in the creation of what later became the Democratic Party.

Greco writes: “While Jefferson favored a stronger union than that which emerged under the Articles of Confederation, he was vehemently opposed to the reconstruction of monarchic government on the American continent.” Hamilton had said frankly that the British monarchy was the best system of government known to man. Part of the monarchic system was the Bank of England, which Hamilton copied when setting up the First Bank.

But Jefferson, who repudiated Hamilton’s elitist platform, was elected president in what was then called “The Revolution of 1800.” Congress refused to renew the Bank’s charter by a single vote when it was up for renewal in 1811.

But the Second Bank of the United States was chartered in 1816 due to the government debt left behind from the War of 1812 against Great Britain. Thus was set up what became known as the “Bank War.”

It was President Andrew Jackson who dethroned the bankers from power by pulling government funds out of the Second Bank in 1833. Greco writes that in Jackson’s view: “The ‘Bank War’ was a contest for rulership—would the United States be governed by the people through their elected president and representatives, or by an unelected financial elite through their central bank instrument?”

The modern takeover began in earnest during the Civil War when Congress passed the National Banking Acts in 1863-64 which mandated use of government bonds as bank lending reserves, thereby creating a direct linkage between bank profits and the debt the government was starting to load on the shoulders of taxpayers.

The nation’s fate was sealed with the passage of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913. The deal was that the bankers would control the currency, and thereby the nation’s economy, while the government would be provided with an unlimited amount of inflated dollars to fight its wars.

The bookkeeper’s trick of creating money out of thin air, charging interest for its use, then forcing it down the throats of weaker nations by threat of violence, is what has allowed the Anglo-American empire, since the founding of the Bank of England in 1696, gradually to conquer the world. Though President Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act into law, he saw what that action meant. Greco cites Wilson as writing: “There has come about an extraordinary and very sinister concentration in the control of business in the country… The great monopoly in this country is the monopoly of big credits.”

Among other ill effects, the system has ruined the value of the currency. The inflation caused by large issues of bank-created loans is seized upon by the government which goes along because inflation reduces the cost of its deficits. Investors buy Treasury bonds denominated in Federal Reserve Notes then watch their value evaporate over time. In fact Federal Reserve Notes have lost over 95 percent of their value since they were first introduced.

Moreover, it’s additional inflation caused by bank-generated interest that drives up the costs of goods and services, forcing everyone in the economy to try to defend themselves by raising their prices to the max. Greco spells this out too, which almost every economist in the world, with the exception perhaps of Australia’s James Cumes, overlooks.

Bank interest has other tragic effects. It was high interest rates, for instance, that destroyed the Idaho potato industry. A farmer from that region told me at a conference a few years ago that when interest rates skyrocketed in the early 1980s, he asked the president of one of the Federal Reserve Banks why they did it. The answer was they were “ordered” to raise interest rates by the international banking system.

Make no mistake, it’s the banking system, facilitated by the Fed, not unwary borrowers, who brought on the collapse of 2008.

Now, in 2009, the bankers, mainly those in the U.S., have so shattered the world economy by debt mounted on debt that there may be no reprieve except the creation of a slave society based on rule by the rich over the masses of whatever peons should happen to survive the downturn and its tragic effects on employment, health, the food and water supply, and even our ability to cope with climate change.

The political establishment, expressing itself in pronouncements by organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations, see a future, not of economic democracy or increased financial pluralism, but consolidation of world currencies into a small number overseen at the top by the world’s financial oligarchy. Citing the writings of Benn Steil, the CFR’s Director of International Economics, Greco writes: “The ostensible plan is to reduce global exchange media to three—one each for Europe, the Americas, and Asia. One might reasonably suppose that at a later stage, those three would be combined into one currency also under the control of the global banking elite.”

Greco concludes: “The New World Order is upon us.”

With ample justification, he even goes apocalyptic, citing The Book of Revelation in demonstrating the import on a spiritual plane of the elitist takeover: And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. (Revelation 13: 16-17)

But is it really the end, or is there a new world waiting to be born? Greco thinks so. He speaks of the end of an era when unlimited economic growth fed by massive influxes of debt-based money is no longer sustainable. He writes: “That our global civilization cannot continue on its current path seems evident… But I think our collective consciousness is beginning to change. We are becoming aware of limits and are reaching that part of our evolutionary program that says, ‘Stop!’”

Part of the awareness of how to stop must focus on the institutions responsible for the crisis. Greco praises Ron Paul for calling out the Federal Reserve in the 2008 presidential campaign. He cites a statement Paul made to Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan in a 2004 hearing where Paul told Greenspan that the power of the Fed “challenges the whole concept of freedom and liberty and sound money.” Thus Paul and other monetary reformers, though largely ignored by the mainstream media and political establishment, have made it clear that change must start with what really lies at the bottom of elite control: how money is made and who makes it.

Unfortunately, few progressive economists, including Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, and Robert Reich comprehend the monetary causes of today’s disasters. Instead of demanding reforms that would make money the proper servant of a sustainable economy, most call for more stimulus spending; i.e., more government debt, along with “reform” of a financial system that is corrupt down to its very DNA.

So do we really need the bankers’ fake currency, today backed by nothing but a federal deficit of $12 trillion and growing by the day?

Greco says we don’t, and this is what his book about. But it’s not about doing without the necessities of life, or heading for the hills with a gun and backpack. Nor is it about important efforts at macro-level monetary reform like those of the American Monetary Institute, Congressman Dennis Kucinich, or advocates for a basic income guarantee. Rather it’s about individuals, groups, and communities taking control of the monetary system at the grassroots level and creating an entirely new basis for trade than bank-owed debt.

Greco writes about “a new paradigm approach to the exchange function.” The solution, he says, “is to provide interest-free credit to producers within the process of mutual credit clearing. That is the process of offsetting purchases against sales within an association of merchants, manufacturers, and workers. It will eventually include everyone who buys and sells, or makes and receives disbursements of any kind.”

Greco is one of the world’s leading experts in describing alternative or complementary currencies. These are self-regulating systems that facilitate “reciprocal exchange,” not using government legal tender but which are still allowed under the currency laws so long as taxes are not evaded.

Greco discusses the large and growing worldwide “LETS” movement—Local Exchange Trading Systems, like the Ithaca HOURS system in Ithaca, New York. He describes the Swiss WIR Bank, the longest-running credit clearing system in the world, with over 70,000 members. He writes about the national and international barter exchanges that involve over 400,000 businesses trading at an annual level of $10 billion.

Greco also describes the world-famous Mondragon Cooperatives from the Basque region of Northern Spain. Started by a Roman Catholic priest in 1941, the Mondragon system, he says, is “the hub of what is probably the most successful and progressive social cooperative economy in modern history.”

He also tells the inspiring story of the Argentine trading clubs—the trueques—which, when used with “provincial bonds” issued by regional governments, rescued that country during the 2001 economic collapse brought on by the collusion between the Argentine government and the International Monetary Fund.

Credit clearing is not new. Greco traces it to the medieval European fairs. These exchanges are like banking clearing houses. The world’s largest is the automated clearing house—ACH—operated by the Federal Reserve.

But as Greco points out: “The clearing process need not be restricted to banks; it can be applied directly to transactions between buyers and sellers of goods and services. The LETS systems that have proliferated in communities around the world use the credit clearing process, as do commercial trade exchanges. Credit clearing systems are, in essence, clearing houses—but their members are businesses and individuals instead of banks.”

Alternative currency and trading systems, says Greco, are the wave of the future. Even though most only mount up to partial local successes, they show what can be done. Greco likens these efforts to the Wright Brothers’ first flight that covered 120 feet. They show, he says, that the potential exists for local, regional, then national and international money-free exchanges that eventually could be joined by a single web-based trading platform. This could eventually get rid of the corruption of debt-money altogether.

Chapter 16 of the book is about “A Regional Economic Development Plan Based on Credit Clearing” that shows the potential. Greco writes, “The credit clearing exchange is the key element that enables a community to develop a sustainable economy under local control and to maintain a high standard of living and quality of life.”

This would be a real revolution. What can governments do to help? Perhaps only by removing, as Greco recommends, the privileged position of bank debt-money as legal tender. Instead, let bank money compete with market-based alternative currencies and credit exchanges, if it can.

Greco’s book is a how-to-do-it manual that updates and expands on his previous books, Money and Debt: A Solution to the Global Crisis, New Money for Healthy Communities, and Money: Understanding and Creating Alternatives to Legal Tender. Greco also operates a website that offers advice and support to worthwhile community initiatives. Click Here

My own view is that no one should wait to see who takes the lead in creating the monetary and credit-clearing systems of the future. The time is now. There is no more reason to delay. If the people of the world do not join together in this kind of action, they can likely kiss their economic future and perhaps their livelihoods good-bye. The controllers of the world, those with the big money, the ones who run the banking systems, who own the global corporations, and who finance politicians like Obama, the Bushes, and the Clintons, are now poised in their blindness to extinguish the light of democracy on the planet for good.

Greco is implying that the power of the elite is not only dated but illusory. Thus the way to proceed is not just to oppose them. If they are opposed, they’ll do what they always do, which is to roll out the SWAT teams, the military in the streets, the tear gas, the sound cannon, the concentration camps, the Patriot Acts, the torture chambers, because that is all they know, and it’s what they do best.

The money monopoly translates into a monopoly on violence on an ascending scale. We know that the U.S. sells more weapons abroad than any other nation, and we know that it is war above all that makes the bankers rich.

So let them have their weapons and wars. With all due respect to those brave enough to protest, it’s time for people simply to walk away and set up their own economic and monetary systems as a prelude to a rebirth of humanity as ethical beings in sustainable communities of choice.

The keys, says Greco, are simple: “Promote the establishment of private complementary exchange systems—and use them. Buy from your friends and neighbors wherever possible. Contribute your time, energy, and money to whatever moves things in the right direction.”

Greco also recommends that the unit of exchange for alternative currencies be based on the value of commodities—not necessarily gold or silver, which bankers and governments manipulate, but those commodities readily available within a trading system. State and local governments should do everything possible to protect, encourage, nourish, and participate in these systems.

The irony is that what may appear on the surface to be technical changes in how the exchange of goods and services takes place can have such profound effects. The answer is that systems of exchange reflect entirely different perceptions of the world. Bank-money exchange reflects and creates a system of elite control and human slavery. Reciprocal credit exchange reflects and creates a democratic system on a level monetary playing field.

The difference points to the fact that such reform is, above all, a spiritual endeavor. Thomas Greco has devoted decades to this quest and is one of its foremost visionaries. In an Epilogue he writes: “We will either learn to put aside sectarian differences, to recognize all life as one life, to cooperate in sharing earth’s bounty, and yield control to a higher power—or we will find ourselves embroiled in ever-more destructive conflicts that will leave the planet in ruins and avail only the meanest form of existence for the few, if any, who survive.”

It’s a vision we can all strive to embrace.

Copyright 2009 by Richard C. Cook

Therefore each of us must adopt an attitude of giving in relation to all other men. This attitude must include activities involving the economic life of individuals, nations, and the world. Economics is not just a search for efficiency or profits.

Such are among the lessons to be derived from Pope Benedict XVI’s recent encyclical, Caritas In Veritate, “Charity in Truth.” The Pope writes, “Charity in truth places man before the astonishing experience of gift. Gratuitousness is present in our lives in many different forms, which often go unrecognized because of a purely consumerist and utilitarian view of life. The human being is made for gift, which expresses and makes present his transcendent dimension.”

This remarkable document, which should be studied by every caring person, was published in June 2009. It has not been reviewed nearly as widely as it should, no doubt because most commentators regard it as a Catholic document of interest only to those within the Catholic Church.

This is a profound mistake. In recent decades, the Catholic Popes, especially Pope John XXIII (1958-1963) and Pope John Paul II (1978-2005), have boldly taken on the role of providing spiritual guidance to the entire world that includes matters pertaining to economics. True, the Catholic Church has often not taken a sufficient stand for economic and social justice to satisfy many critics, but the fact is that the Church’s position has generally been one in favor of economic democracy, fairer distribution of the earth’s bounty, and an ethical dimension to political and economic decisions. This is in stark contrast to the wantonness whereby the world’s richest people, institutions, and nations have increasingly lorded it over everyone else as the reach of globalism has accelerated.

Pope Benedict’s Caritas In Veritate is in the modern tradition of Catholic social commentary. It is long–about 30,000 words. It must be read slowly and carefully. It lack specifics about the reforms the Pope says are needed. But it contains truth. It points out that man does not live by bread alone–that economic imperatives must take second place to what the Pope calls “integral human development.” Returning to the concept of life as a gift, the Pope writes that, “Truth, and the love which it reveals, cannot be produced: they can only be received as a gift.”

Thus to become fully human requires man to be cognizant of his relationship to the source of Truth. This is the Absolute–God. This realization must be reflected in the world through a deep and abiding sense of responsibility of human beings toward each other. It leads to what the Pope calls “solidarity” among people, including relations between developed and underdeveloped nations and among social groupings within particular nations. Pope Benedict also points out that where globalization has shattered the ability and will power of nations to regulate economic life for the common good, a resurgence of such efforts at the level of the nation-state can and must be made. He does not view globalization as replacing nations or eliminating democracy, a word he uses favorably numerous times.

Caritas In Veritate is a vitally important contribution to making the world in the technological age a fit vehicle for human development, with technology being more than just a toy which disguises its ability to be abused as a weapon for further economic exploitation.

Here is another excerpt:

“Love in truth — caritas in veritate — is a great challenge for the Church in a world that is becoming progressively and pervasively globalized. The risk for our time is that the de facto interdependence of people and nations is not matched by ethical interaction of consciences and minds that would give rise to truly human development. Only in charity, illumined by the light of reason and faith, is it possible to pursue development goals that possess a more humane and humanizing value. The sharing of goods and resources, from which authentic development proceeds, is not guaranteed by merely technical progress and relationships of utility, but by the potential of love that overcomes evil with good (cf. Rom 12:21), opening up the path towards reciprocity of consciences and liberties.”

The Pope speaks of the Church, but what he is saying contains a message for all of mankind. If taken seriously, the encyclical is potentially revolutionary. Its message is diametrically opposite to that of the “New World Order” espoused by the international financial elite as their primary method of enslaving mankind to a secular ideology of materialism. The Pope implies, by stating that “the environment is God’s gift to everyone,” that the materialistic ideology is rooted in the evil of the privatization of resources that really should belong to the public commons. He also mentions the traditional Catholic position on debt by stating that, “The weakest members of society should be helped to defend themselves against usury,” though he does not get specific enough to question the fact that the world monetary system is collapsing because it is based on the creation of money through bank lending.

Some conservative Catholic commentators in the U.S. are very upset about the publication of the encyclical due to its progressive tenor. For them, as well as many Protestant fundamentalists, religion seems almost an excuse for the ongoing Western military crusade for world conquest so evident in the Middle East. Some go so far as to ridicule the encyclical as really being a product of a liberal faction in Rome’s Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and therefore subject to dismissal in its entirety as a fantasy of dreamers.

After all, Pope Benedict, formerly head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the successor organization to the Inquisition, was himself supposed to be a theological conservative. On the other hand, perhaps theological conservatism and economic justice really are interrelated. Perhaps theological conservatism is not the same thing as Western militaristic ethno-centrism.

Perhaps Pope Benedict means what he says, and that he and the Church intend to be separating themselves as clearly as the encyclical seems to do from the prevailing trends of world events in the age of globalism. Could the encyclical even be a sign that “Old Europe” is decisively separating itself from the face the Anglo-American military-financial-intelligence colossus has presented to the world over the past decade with its wars, invasions, and threats against such nations as Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and even Russia?

Only time will tell. As it reads, Caritas In Veritate sounds a lot like Jesus chasing the money changers from the temple.

To read Caritas In Veritate on the Vatican’s website Click Here

Copyright 2009 by Richard C. Cook. Published on the internet at Global Research.

Richard C. Cook is author of We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform. His website is at http://www.richardccook.com/

This question has many theoretical answers but only one practical one–it’s to get what we want.

So the question really is what do we want.

And what we want depends on what kind of person we are.

If we are greedy, violent, and selfish, we will do many underhanded and dishonest things to get money. This will include creating a monetary system where whatever government we are living under will allow us to accumulate more and more wealth to our advantage and to the disadvantage of our neighbor. One good way to accomplish this is through a private banking system that creates money through lending it at interest.

If we are kind, altruistic, generous, and loving, we will create a monetary system that will allow each member of the community to create, produce, acquire what they need to live, provide for the future, prepare the way for the next generation, etc. This can be accomplished through various democratic methods such as government infrastructure investment, guaranteed education and health care, a basic income guarantee or citizens’ dividend, low-interest lending for beneficial purposes, etc.

In fact it is the duty of any responsible government to provide a medium of exchange for all citizens to use in the trading of goods and services as well as monetary “tickets” for everyone to use in gaining access to the benefits of the societal commons–land, resources, utilities, etc.

A monetary system that benefits mainly the controllers of society leads to the theft of the societal commons by the few to the detriment of everyone else.

The problem is that most people live at such a low level of consciousness that the higher purposes of life are overwhelmed by base motives. This is what most urgently needs to change.

The question is always the same–how to finance the National Dividend, which would be somewhere in the range of $2-$3.5T U.S., depending on whether it is taxed and if there is an allowance for children.

To be brief, blunt, and brutal–the government would print it and give it away. When people stop swooning, you explain to them that of course all Western governments–esp. the U.S.–do this anyway by rolling over central bank debt.

Yes, they do pay it off– through inflation. But much of the inflation is due to interest paid to the banking system for the privilege of solvency.

If the idea of printing it and giving it away is politically unacceptable, then you can have the government sell “dividend bonds” to the central bank, which bonds are kept in a vault somewhere, with the bank distributing the dividend. Or it can be done through the Treasury.

The only difference from current practice is that with the National Dividend, you give the money directly to the people rather than routing it through the government or the banks; today the government spends much of it on the horror of the military-industrial complex; banks skim the cream through interest on lending.

With a National Dividend paid directly to the people, this money immediately goes into circulation at the local level and produces many more jobs and much more economic growth than through the other routes. So it becomes, in practice, self-financing. It also pays down debt, reduces net interest payments, and results in more savings than at present.

What I call “The Cook Plan” calls for the dividend to be paid via vouchers which are then deposited in a network of community savings banks to capitalize low-interest lending at the local level for individuals, students, small businesses, and family farms.

This program would shift money creation from bank lending to local income, thereby overcoming the constant tendency for jobs to disappear due to technological innovation.

From the standpoint of economic theory, the dividend monetizes national savings which occur chiefly through corporate retained earnings. Today that savings is largely eaten up by interest. So the banks get rich while everyone else becomes poor.

Total debt in the U.S. today is around $60 trillion. If interest is 4% that’s $2.4T out of a $14T GDP. $2.4T is a figure curiously almost identical to my proposed National Dividend.

The story was Hansel and Gretel, one of the classics of European folk culture. It was a nicely illustrated edition. A majority of the pupils in the class were Hispanic. The rest were black, with one white girl.

But the story transcends time and culture. Most of the pupils were attentive, though some were recent immigrants who still barely spoke English and didn’t seem quite “present.” I had been to the class before, so some of the little girls came up to hug me. In general it was a cheerful atmosphere.

Hansel and Gretel is quite a gruesome tale. In it, the family is starving, and the mother persuades the father to take Hansel and Gretel into the forest and leave them. They make their way to a house made of gingerbread and candy owned by a witch. The witch decides to fatten up Hansel and eat him, but Gretel tricks the old lady into getting inside a cooking stove to check the temperature. Gretel slams the door shut, the witch burns up, then, after helping themselves to the witch’s collection of jewels and gold coins, the children find their way back home. Their mother has died, but they and their father now are able to live in a degree of comfort “happily ever after.”

All the old fairy tales are symbolic, so naturally, as a monetary reformer, I view the witch with her treasures as a symbol of how the peasants of olden days regarded the money lenders who fattened themselves through usury while the people starved.

In the language of fairy tales and parables, fire symbolizes knowledge. Symbolically, then, Gretel figured out how the witch had gained the power to lord it over everyone else so that honest men like her father could not survive. Using her knowledge, Gretel gave the witch what was coming to her, so that truth and justice prevailed in the end.

Today, if enough people had the knowledge of how the bank-run debt-based monetary system ripped them off and kept all of society in bondage, while the lords of finance cavorted in their candy houses, the system would change very quickly.

If this seems like a fantasy, please read my book We Hold These Truths: the Hope of Monetary Reform, where I described Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings as a monetary parable. In that particular chapter I likened the Ring of Power to compound interest. When Frodo, the little hobbit, throws the ring into the fire of Mt. Doom, the illegitimate power of the evil Sauron, who stands for the financiers, is destroyed forever. The symbolism of fire is similar to that found in Hansel and Gretel.

Of course being in a kindergarten class reminded me of the book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten by Robert Fulghum. It’s true. Taped to a cupboard door in my wife’s classroom are sayings like, “How May I Help You,” “Excuse Me,” and “Thank You.”

Maybe if the international bankers, who seem to be on an endless crusade to enslave mankind through putting everyone deeper into debt, followed such simple rules of courtesy, and really did try to help humanity have a better life, the world would be a far different place. [Published on the internet at Global Research]

But no one knows how many people the earth could support because we don’t have an economic system that provides a fair distribution of resources. Countries like the U.S. are choking on a surplus of goods and services. Elsewhere in the world people are starving.

The problem with the world economy does not lie on the side of production. Modern technology is an incredible dynamo of productivity. The worldwide auto industry, for instance, is capable of producing far more cars than can be sold.

Today’s economic downturn is not happening because of a failure of production. It is happening because of a failure of consumption. This points to a fundamental flaw in the system of distribution. It really indicates a failure of the monetary system. We are in this recession because consumers in the U.S. and elsewhere don’t have money to buy what they want or need. Their ability to buy is decreasing because unemployment is rising.

What had fueled the economic expansion that preceded the current recession was bank lending–debt. But lending and debt have a limit. When people can no longer pay off their loans they can no longer buy things, so they quit spending. The economy then contracts. Governments try to prime the pump by encouraging more production and more lending. This is the rationale for supply-side economics. But it’s crazy to try to get people to produce more when we don’t have enough money to buy what we need.

The answer is to introduce consumer purchasing power without requiring people to borrow. It’s literally to give away money at the level of individuals and families. If we had an international authority such as the U.N. which gave every person on earth sufficient money to provide themselves and their loved ones with a subsistence living–food, shelter, clothing, and transportation–this money would then feed into the economy at the grassroots level. The production system would find entirely new sources of markets. Corporations would find the outlets for their products they lack, and the economic system would begin to move into equilibrium. I believe that such a system applied worldwide could support the present population with room to spare.

Where would the money come from to do this? It would be invented out of thin air the way banks do today. Except instead of being loaned at high rates of interest so the financiers can prosper at the expense of everyone else, it would be given directly to people. The U.S. government is in the process of giving $6 trillion to the financial industry to restart lending. It should and could be given to citizens and taxpayers instead.

Don’t believe me? Let’s try it and see.

Nor does the figure reflect the plight of those whose earnings are insufficient for the necessities of life, don’t allow for adequate health care, etc. The federal minimum wage of $6.55 an hour provides a person with annual income of $13,654, placing the person above the federal policy level of $10,830. But this assumes the person is paid for a full 2080 hours a year, can find an affordable room or apartment, has no unusual expenses, and probably drives an old used car. We all know that a person or family in such circumstances is barely surviving. Yet the number in the U.S. and around the world who are in such straits, or worse, is growing.

We are conditioned to think that the only way the growing number of people without sufficient job-related income can improve their lot is through more or better jobs or government relief programs, preferably temporary. The exceptions are the elderly on Social Security who may or may not have supplementary retirement income, or unique categories of people such as the permanently disabled, etc.

The issues are complex, but what should be examined is whether income policy should be based on the presumption that employment and income security are inextricably linked. In a technological society, worker productivity is constantly increasing. This means that employment is becoming more and more unreliable as a means of income generation.

The answer is to pay people a “productivity dividend.” Society as a whole should benefit from the impact of technology, not just those who own businesses, including the financiers who control the monetary system that allows business to function.

In my “Cook Plan” the productivity dividend becomes a $1,000 a month payment to any person who applies. This would serve as a basic income guarantee for everyone while supplementing earned income for those who do work. Those who do not work could enroll in job retraining, perform volunteer work, or retire earlier than is presently allowed.

Yes, in a sense we would be paying people not to work. But with an income they would still be consumers, so would support the rest of the population with jobs. It’s the way to channel the benefits of a modern economy for the benefit of all. If we can pay $6 trillion to bail out the financial system so they can put people deeper into debt we can afford to pay a basic income guarantee.

Attending the briefings were congressional staffers and members of the public. Zarlenga was introduced by Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), who has spoken in favor of wholesale reform of the monetary system on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. Kucinich is also sponsor of H.R. 7260, the “Transparency in the Creation of Wealth Act of 2008.” This act would require the Federal Reserve to resume reporting on the quantity of M3 in the economy (mega-money accessible only to large financial institutions), along with several other economic indicators it now keeps to itself, such as total credit market debt and the holding of Federal Reserve notes by foreign interests.

Stephen Zarlenga is author of The Lost Science of Money (American Monetary Institute, 2002), a monumental 736-page book that shows how money has served socially beneficial purposes throughout history only when created by governments as an instrument of law and not as the private preserve of the rich.

Hugh Downs, an unusually well-informed media personality with a strong social conscience, said of The Lost Science of Money, that it “has some stunning historical vistas of the whole concept of media of exchange.” Renowned progressive economist Dr. Michael Hudson said, “The history of money is critical to understanding the greatest problem the third millennium will face. Stephen Zarlenga’s Lost Science of Money provides the needed background for seeing the basic structural issues at work.”

Since Zarlenga published The Lost Science of Money, the American Monetary Institute has grown, with chapters in Boston, New York, Chicago, Iowa, Seattle, and other locations. He conducts an annual monetary reform conference at Roosevelt University in Chicago and has a busy travel and speaking schedule. He has addressed audiences at the U.S. Treasury Department in Washington, D.C., and the British House of Lords in London.

The American Monetary Act may be viewed and downloaded from the AMI website Click Here. The main thrust of the act is to replace the bank-centered debt-based monetary system with the direct creation of money by the federal government which would spend it into circulation as was done with the Greenbacks of the latter part of the 19^th century.

The money would be spent on all types of legislated government requirements but would focus on infrastructure improvements, including education and health care. The act not only would create a new monetary supply denominated in U.S. Treasury notes, but would rebuild our job base which has been outsourced to other nations by the globalist corporations and big financial interests.

The critical role of the Greenbacks in U.S. history has been distorted and downplayed by the establishment interests that control the writing of history textbooks. The Greenbacks originated during the Civil War when the government printed and spent them to meet wartime needs. Contrary to mythology, the Greenbacks were not inflationary. They continued to serve as a key part of the nation’s monetary supply into the early 20^th century. As late as 1900 they formed a third of the nation’s circulating currency, with coinage, along with gold and silver certificates, forming another third, and national bank notes the remainder.

Later the value of both the Greenbacks and metallic-based currency were destroyed by the inflation caused by the introduction of Federal Reserve Notes after the approval of the Federal Reserve System by Congress in 1913. From that point on, the creation of money in the U.S. became a monopoly of the private banking system. This led to the Great Depression when the banking system crashed the economy through its deflationary policies.

The nation recovered from the Depression through the New Deal and the adoption of Keynesian economic policies during and after World War II. But now, in the early years of the 21^st Century, the financial system again has collapsed through the gigantic speculative bubbles of the last 30 years. The Bush-Obama bailouts that are costing taxpayers trillions of dollars are benefiting the financial controllers but are not doing anywhere near enough for the producing economy. Even though officials are starting to forecast an economic recovery, there is every indication it will be another “jobless” recovery like the one from 2002-2005.

The American Monetary Act would put a stop to the travesties of the bank-controlled monetary system that has wrecked what was once the world’s greatest industrial democracy. In addition to reintroducing the Greenbacks, the act would eliminate fractional reserve banking by requiring banks to borrow money from the U.S. Treasury to bring their cash reserves up to the level of their lending portfolio rather than allowing them to continue to create money “out of thin air.” The banks would no longer be able to create trillions of dollars of credit, backed by nothing, which they use to fuel the speculative equities, hedge fund, and derivative markets.

The act also contains a provision for a citizens’ dividend through direct payment of cash to individuals. While it does not authorize a dividend at the level Stephen Shafarman and I have proposed in our respective books, Peaceful, Positive Revolution and We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform, it is a major step in the right direction. In what I have called the “Cook Plan” I advocate a dividend of $12,000 a year per capita for adults who apply with the money, once spent, being used to capitalize a new network of community savings banks.

With the 2008-2009 collapse of the financial system, the deep recession we are now suffering through, and the injustice of the government’s bank bailouts currently being administered by Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, millions of people in the U.S. and around the world have had enough of government policies that enrich the financial oligarchy and destroy the livelihood of everyone else. The world today is headed for a dark age of debt-slavery and ruinous poverty for much of the world’s population, including working people in the U.S.

The only way a catastrophe can be averted is for mankind to wake up and demand the creation of a new monetary system where money and credit are treated as a public utility. This means that money and credit should serve the needs of the producing economy while assuring a decent living and sufficient income for everyone.

To reach this goal, it is counterproductive for people simply to complain about what is happening or support half-measures like the call to embrace a gold standard. Any attempt to impose a new gold standard would play into the hands of those who control the gold; i.e., the bankers. Creating a new gold standard appears to be the objective of movements like “End-the-Fed.”

The key is not whether money is backed by gold or any other commodity but whether it serves the needs of real people, allows the trade and productivity of the nation to move, restores our job base, and supports consumer purchasing power. The American Monetary Act would meet these objectives. With the financial disasters of the last two years, millions of people realize the system is rigged against them. Jobs and savings continue to disappear while debt and the power of the banking millionaires increase. The time for Congress to act is now. [Published on the internet at Dandelion Salad, Global Research After Downing Street, and Cyrano\'s Showcase]

Since I began to write on economics and monetary policy I have argued that we should abolish our bank-centered, debt-based monetary system and replace it with a system where credit is viewed as a public utility. This would lead to money controlled by the people’s elected government and issued both for common needs, such as education, health care and infrastructure, and as a citizens’ dividend reflecting our fair share in the bounty of our producing economy.

With such reforms a decent living could be assured for everyone on the planet. But neither this nor any other reform would be the cause of our prosperity. Rather good public policy can only be a reflection of the goodness, faith, honesty, commitment and trust of the virtues that lie within the hearts and souls of “We the People.” From an economic standpoint, the monetary system should reflect the productivity of the economy, its ability to produce goods and services, and the need to move those goods and services in trade. But even this productivity originates with the creative spark within ourselves.

If we manifest positive qualities, we will naturally create systems and institutions that assure our sustenance. If, on the other hand, we are selfish, mean-spirited, and wracked with greed and fear, we will create dysfunctional systems and institutions like many of those we are afflicted with today. We will create a world where the biggest and most ornate building in town is a bank run by officers and shareholders who make their living through usury and debt-extortion. Surrounding the bank will be a police station, a prison, and a military base. The finest homes in town will belong to the executives of these institutions. The rest of the population will be ranked according to their usefulness to the system with an unemployed underclass available to fight society’s wars.

But if we want the world to change, we all need to work at being better and more complete and balanced people. Only then will we have a right to hold others to account. And I do mean work. We need to find those qualities within ourselves that reflect light, peace, harmony, and love, then bring them to birth through action. As Jesus said, we need to “love our neighbor as ourselves.” But he also drove the money-changers from the temple. He stood for both peace and justice.

Who then is this “ourselves”? It is who we really are. Our primal being. It is that naked sense of peace and goodness that comes from living in the Now, as Eckhart Tolle describes it. That is where our real prosperity comes from. The feeling of happiness just to BE, not lost in regret for the past or worry about the future, is what counts on a day-to-day basis. When we experience this state, we will want others to experience it also. Then the world will change once and for all. Then we will have Heaven on earth. Economic and monetary reform will then take place naturally without any kind of struggle. Credit viewed as a public utility will be part of any such reform because it corresponds to natural law, the law Jefferson referred to when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. Another key aspect of natural law is that human beings can only reach their potential in an environment of social, political, and economic freedom.

Some readers do not like spiritual references when reading about economics. If it bothers you, I apologize, and I in no way intend to demean the numerous good works of secular humanists. My own personal belief system is similar to our Deist Founding Fathers’: man is above all a spiritual being, not just a thinking animal. Of course we must all continue to promote social and economic reform so people will understand there is a better path to justice, and not be discouraged or seduced by the antics of the evildoers.

Here’s a quote from Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now: “For example, many people are waiting for prosperity. It cannot come in the future. When you honor, acknowledge, and fully accept your present reality—where you are, who you are, what you are doing right now—when you fully accept what you have got, you are grateful for what you have got, grateful for what is, grateful for Being. Gratitude for the present moment and the fullness of life now is true prosperity. It cannot come in the future. Then, in time, that prosperity manifests for you in various ways.” (p. 86-87)

“Cook has a background of service in the U.S. administration, including as a government analyst in the Treasury Department, from which he retired in January 2007. This has given him a valuable ‘insider’s view’ of the economy, but his interest in the money system was started with his reading in 1979-80 of articles on Social Credit, the movement based on the ideas of Major C.H. Douglas, published in the 1920s in The New Age by its editor A.R. Orage.

“This convinced him of the basic flaw in the money system, of a chronic shortage of purchasing power ‘compensated’ by mushrooming levels of debt and eased by price-inflation (which reduces the real value of outstanding debts), leading to the multiple problems now climaxing. To remedy this, he identified the need for National Dividends/Basic Income to distribute to everyone their entitlement to the abundance now potentially available (and so giving them economic security) along with price-subsidies, funded with new money.

“A valuable addition to the literature on the current hot topic.”

Extract from a review by Brian Leslie, editor “Sustainable Economics,” February 2009.

The show was about two white mice. Pinky was a gangly nutcase who talked like the Walt Disney character Goofy, with a similar personality. The Brain was this little conniving, scowling kind of guy who woke up every morning with his latest plan to take over the world.

Each episode of “Pinky and The Brain” showed how The Brain tried and failed on a given day to implement his nefarious intent. Sometimes he would try to get elected as president of the U.S. or stage a military coup or put something in the drinking water so the people would obey his will, or whatever.

In other words, “Pinky and The Brain” was not far from the truth! Today we have a cabal of financiers centered mainly in London and New York who have been trying to take over the world for the last 500 years. One term for this conspiracy is the New World Order.

With today’s worldwide economic crash, the plan is moving to its latter stages. The cabal works through the world financial system, with the world’s central banks like the Bank of England and Federal Reserve playing major roles and the Bank of International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, at the top. They maintain control by assuring that every bit of currency used in the world derives at some point through a debt owed to a bank. That’s why it’s called a debt-based monetary system.

The alternative is to treat credit as a public utility, not the private property of the banking system. I explain how to do this in my new book, We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform (Tendril Press, 2009). The book is an edited version of articles published on the internet from January 2007 through January 2008 and is a compendium of ideas from the growing monetary reform movement that is the only hope for real economic democracy in a world that is falling to pieces. [Published on the internet at After Downing Street]

Article on Dandelion Salad Website