“We Hold These Truths”
by Richard C. Cook
“We hold these truths to be
self-evident, that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable rights,
that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit
of happiness.”
The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776
For the last nine months the
author has been publishing essays on economic and
monetary reform on Global Research and other
websites. The essays have evoked a worldwide
response, translation into a number of languages,
and a readership in the tens of thousands. “We Hold
These Truths” is the concluding article of the
series.
The author took on this project
after retiring after thirty-two years in the field
of public policy and finance. Following graduation
from the College of William and Mary in 1970, he
worked for the federal government and taught
history. He spent over twenty years with the U.S.
Treasury Department where his experience was
practical rather than academic. His basic thesis is
that we have today a tragically escalating danger to
democracy and world peace which stems from a flawed
monetary system that is essentially a centuries-old
relic.
In 1913, the nation’s private
bankers, allied with those of Great Britain and
continental Europe, gained nearly complete control
of the monetary supply of the U.S. They did this
through passage by Congress of the Federal Reserve
Act of 1913. The immediate result was massive
inflation and a huge increase in the national debt
through bank financing of World War I.
There then followed the
prosperity of the industrial growth of the 1920s
until the bursting of a speculative bubble and
contraction of the money supply brought on the Great
Depression. The Depression ended, not by any action
by the banks or the initiative of the private
sector, but through massive government spending on
social programs followed by expenditures for World
War II.
After the war, the U.S.
remained the world’s greatest industrial power until
the 1970s. Since then, the policy known as
monetarism has prevailed, by which the private
financial interests reasserted the predominance they
had lost during and after the New Deal.
Today those interests reign
supreme. The difference is that while at the start
of the Depression the financiers exerted their power
by making money scarce, they have adapted to
circumstances and now accomplish the same ends by
inflating it out of recognition. Meanwhile, U.S.
manufacturing has been replaced by the rise of the
“service economy,” with reliance on worldwide
“dollar hegemony” backed by military power to
finance our trade and fiscal deficits.
An economy subservient to
monetarism administered at the top by the Federal
Reserve System is one that is based on financial
bubbles and an escalating pyramid of debt.
Consumers, businesses, and government at all levels
are drowning in so much debt that the only people
making any money are those who operate the financial
sector and control the global corporations.
The profits of private
financial interests in 2006 exceeded $500 billion in
an economy with a GDP of $13 trillion. The ill
effects of this drag on the economy cannot be
overestimated. While the financial sector has
prospered, even through the recent crisis marked by
Federal Reserve bailouts of floundering investors,
the producing economy of working men and women has
been in recession for over a year and is bogged down
in a stagflation reminiscent of the 1970s.
The author’s primary
recommendation is to replace a Federal Reserve
controlled by private finance with a new structure
centered around the creation of a democratic
currency, one based on recognition of credit as a
public utility. Such a system could be created by
using the best ideas of monetary reformers from
American history, elsewhere around the world, and
past practices such as issuance of the Greenbacks in
Civil War days and low-cost credit made available
during the New Deal.
If applied worldwide, such
reforms could remove many of the causes of the
economic and social distress that have made the last
century, though prosperous for a minority, among the
most destructive in human history. To achieve the
potential offered to mankind by today’s era of
science and technology applied to production, the
program described herein is among the most
far-reaching ever presented.
What We Must
Do Today
“Life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness” are, or should be, the fruits of
democracy. But the political democracy
as defined by the Declaration of Independence has
not been achieved, because economic
democracy for the masses remains a distant dream.
The attainment of real economic democracy is the
next task for the human race in a world on the brink
of destruction.
In the midst of the most
productive world economy in history, the U.S. and
much of the world today are in crisis, with stagnant
or falling incomes, rising prices, collapse of
societal purchasing power, persistent poverty, and
skyrocketing debt. Many experts are predicting a
worldwide economic depression, as people with money
mobilize their institutions, armies, and police
forces to protect themselves inside their gated
communities and “green zones.”
No one in an official capacity
has provided a convincing explanation of what is
really going on in the world economy. In the West,
we have been deceived for generations by the notion
that economics is a science that operates under
fixed laws that can be modeled mathematically by
specialists trained in “neoclassical” methods. Many
economists, especially those associated with the
“Chicago School,” bow at the mention of “market
forces,” assuming they are somehow “real,” though
existing beyond the reach of human will and
direction.
None of this is true. There are
no such things as the “laws” assumed by the
neoclassicists, as even Nobel laureates are starting
to recognize. See, for instance, “There is No
Invisible Hand” by Dr. Joseph Stiglitz, The
Guardian, December 20, 2002. The concept of an
Invisible Hand guiding market forces was invented by
English writers of the pre-industrial age to explain
supply-and-demand in a village economy. It gained
ideological force because it was a convenient way to
fight Marxism and keep government from interfering
with the growing power of finance capitalism during
the nineteenth century.
Of course there are plenty of
habits and conventions, myths and prejudices in the
way modern economies function. But the “laws” are
the ones created by governments controlled by
powerful people who work the levers of legalized
influence to augment their wealth through
legislative favor. Behind all the rhetoric about
“markets” are a host of government-granted
monopolies and cartels, especially those engaged in
the lending of money, the trading of oil, and the
manufacture of weapons. The most egregious and
harmful monopoly of all is the banking monopoly that
controls the Federal Reserve System.
Again, the laws of the economic
system are man-made. In some cases, the laws may
provide benefits to those who work for a living, but
in most cases not. What we forget is that any of
these laws can be changed and that many of them now
should and must be changed.
Besides, haven’t we learned by
now that what has aptly been called “market
fundamentalism” is really shorthand for the
totalitarianism of money? It’s a fact that long ago
control of economic life in the U.S. and other
Western nations was turned over to a monetary elite
who control both industry and resources through the
issuance of credit that originates from the
privilege of centrally-controlled fractional reserve
banking.
Through this system, the people
of the world, even in prosperous nations, have been
reduced to the status of debt-slaves. This vestige
of the financial system of the Middle Ages allows
banks to produce credit “out of thin air” and lend
it at a profit. Similar systems exist in communist
nations like China. The only difference is that the
central bank there is controlled by the government
and the ruling party elite.
Within the U.S., the banks lend
to consumers, businesses, investors, speculators,
and to federal, state, and local governments. Under
the banking laws, they generate this credit against
a small “reserve base” consisting of customer
deposits, government debt, and overnight deposits
from corporations and government agencies known as
repurchase agreements, or “repos.” The size of these
deposits, along with lending potential based on
them, has exploded over the last two decades in the
era of electronic funds transfer.
The dependence of economic life
on debt has assured that there has been a steady
flow of wealth from the producing economy of goods
and services into the financial web which surrounds
it. Debt from lending at interest grows at an
exponential rate. This is especially the case today
when the banks rule the economy through the system
of monetarism, where the money supply is regulated
by the raising and lowering of interest rates. This
is in fact a system of institutionalized usury.
Within the U.S., where the
public and private infrastructures have been
stripped through privatization, outsourcing,
mergers, and acquisitions, every period of economic
growth in the last generation has been largely a
bank-created bubble. Each time a bubble bursts the
financiers gain more wealth by buying assets at
bankruptcy prices. The latest was the housing
bubble, and we have started to see the bursting of
an even larger bubble consisting of securities and
investment funds. In fact, the financiers have
already been taking advantage of the broad monetary
collapse by purchasing bargain stocks through the
fluctuations of the stock market.
Control of wealth by high
finance is the main reason the bounty of science and
technology has not assured a better life to the
majority of the people of the world.
Despite the power of industrial
processes which have the capability of providing a
decent living to everyone in the world—contrary to
the myth of global overpopulation—the world still
lives under the illusion of scarcity. This tends to
justify the senseless struggle for wealth and
control of resources. But it’s one of the most
glaring examples of the condition of mass hypnotism
that has weighed humanity down throughout the ages.
Ethically, the illusion of
scarcity leads to the law of the jungle, survival of
the fittest, the fight for dominance and supremacy.
“Economic man,” whether capitalist or communist,
still lives at the animal or sub-human level. The
higher laws of human ethics, including the
injunction to “love our neighbors as ourselves,”
have been ignored. But they need not be forgotten if
we wake up to the fact that we have it in our power
to live in a much different and better world.
The present situation is just
as harmful to the wealthy and powerful who hold
their fellow men in bondage as it is to the debtors
they oppress, for the rich as well are deprived of
the benefits of living in a world where human being
are free, happy, generous, and productive. Also, the
system harms everyone through the gross
over-consumption and waste needed to maximize
profits, as well as through potentially catastrophic
pollution.
The solution to the problem
that cries out around the world for recognition is
monetary reform based on principles of economic
democracy. But such reform must include the
realization that science and technology long ago
removed the need for everyone on the planet to work
all the time just to survive. Humanity, through its
work and sacrifice, has earned the “leisure”
dividend that reformers have talked about for over a
century but which has yet to be realized.
Research shows that the U.S.
actually had a balanced and reasonable approach to
monetary matters for much of its history. The
thirteen American colonies built a dynamic
pre-industrial economy without the presence of a
single bank. Throughout the nineteenth century, we
developed the most powerful economy on earth without
a large national debt. Our economy was largely
capitalized by the availability of land, the capital
markets, and retained corporate earnings. Money came
into circulation by minting of gold and silver
coins, government distribution of gold and silver
certificates, Greenbacks that had been spent into
circulation by the government during the Civil War,
and a modest amount of bank money used to support
commerce.
It took the efforts and
sacrifice of the organized labor movement and even
the threat of revolution, but by the year 1900,
workers in the U.S. and Europe had begun to share in
the bounty. Much of the world was at peace after a
century of economic development, and it seemed to
many that mankind stood on the threshold of epochal
breakthroughs in prosperity and cooperation. Today
in 2007, where people’s spirits have been crushed by
decades of war, social and interpersonal conflict,
and the economic rat race, we have no appreciation
at all of the sense of excitement and optimism
abroad in the world around the turn of the twentieth
century. Even in history books, this spirit has
seldom been captured, with the 965-page volume by
historian Page Smith entitled The Rise of
Industrial America the rare exception.
But by 1914 a world war had
begun. The completely unanticipated horror and
devastation of this conflict shattered an entire
generation. It led to a century of war, economic
turmoil, and psychic alienation that continues in
full force today. In the U.S., the shift to an age
of upheaval was marked by a crucial turning point
which took place when Congress gave away its
constitutional authority over money to a small group
of private bankers known as “the Money Trust”
through enactment of the Federal Reserve Act of
1913.
It happened on December 23,
1913, when most of Congress had left Washington,
D.C., for the Christmas recess. The plans for the
Federal Reserve System had been drawn up by a
committee of politicians and financiers, including
bankers imported from Europe to explain to the
Americans how these sorts of things were done.
Informed people had always known that a central bank
controlled by financial interests was the road to
economic tyranny, which was why both the First and
Second Banks of the United States had been
discontinued long ago and why the nation had
operated without a central bank since the 1830s.
Congressman Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr., (D-MN),
father of the future aviator, called the Federal
Reserve Act “the worst legislative crime of the
ages.” But the Money Trust prevailed.
The Sixteenth Amendment to the
Constitution, which had been passed earlier in 1913,
created an income tax that would be needed to pay
the interest on the national debt that the
financiers knew would soar into the stratosphere
once the Federal Reserve System had been
implemented. It was a fact that throughout history,
central banks, government debt, and excessive
military spending had gone hand-in-hand. Not
accidentally, the Federal Reserve Act marked the
beginning of the tragic century of world conflict
that still afflicts us.
We in the U.S. now need to
reclaim our monetary system as an institution of
democracy before our government and those of the
great Asian land powers make the fatal error of
igniting yet another world conflagration. The war in
Iraq and the ongoing U.S. military conquest to
control Middle Eastern oil and shore up the sliding
dollar are just another episode in a sad, familiar
story. Whether we do it now or in the midst of the
rubble of our civilization, we must remove the
central monetary controllers from their stranglehold
over the economy as the first step in a return to
social, political, and economic sanity.
A lifetime of involvement in
public finance with the federal government has led
the author to call for one basic reform to move in
the direction of accomplishing this objective. In
order to start redressing the damage that began in
1913, we should now abolish the privately-controlled
Federal Reserve as a bank of issue and re-establish
constitutional control of credit as a public
utility.
Public creation of credit
should be reflected in two basic policies: 1) direct
issuance of credit to citizens through a basic
income guarantee, a periodic National Dividend, and
low-interest bank lending; and 2) direct spending by
government for essential services—i.e., restoring
the Greenback last seen in Civil War days and the
decades following—combined with public low-interest
financing of infrastructure investment.
Taking these steps would allow
us to reduce much of the onerous burden of taxation
at the federal, state, and municipal levels. It
would also create a money supply which is properly
independent of the banking system. Under a system of
economic democracy, banks would have a role, but
only in facilitating commerce. They would not create
money through debt, and they would not dictate
economic decisions based exclusively on pecuniary
values.
At this point a note of
clarification is in order. There are many people
today who advocate a return to the gold standard but
who are confused about the definition of “fiat
money.” There are actually different types of “fiat
money.” The debt-based credit created by the Federal
Reserve System, often called “fiat money,” is not
money at all. It is simply temporary credit with a
lien against it for repayment with interest. But
real “fiat money,” like the Civil War Greenbacks or
the American colonial paper currency, was true
democratic money that was spent into circulation by
government and was never inflationary in and of
itself. Rather it allowed commerce to expand and
people to prosper.
This type of fiat money created
at the grassroots level to generate citizen
purchasing power is actually the key to economic
democracy in the modern industrial era. The question
of assuring purchasing power to the masses of
citizens is the key economic issue of the industrial
age, though it was not recognized as susceptible of
correction by national governments until the onset
of what came to be called Keynesian economics during
the Great Depression.
But Keynesian economics—leading
to the hybrid known as the welfare state—was only a
partial solution and was largely abandoned upon the
arrival in the 1980s of the conservative ideologies
associated with “Reaganism” in the U.S. and
“Thatcherism” in Great Britain. These were really
throwbacks to pre-industrial economic thinking,
where it was assumed that additional “supply” would
generate the purchasing power necessary to consume
it—hence the term “supply-side economics.” In fact,
it was the economics of the medieval manor brought
back to life in the space age, with a good deal of
bitterness thrown in when it didn’t work.
The results are what we see
today—an escalating economic disaster where, under
the monetarist system, the shortage of purchasing
power is imperfectly met by bank lending at a level
that ultimately bankrupts consumers, businesses, and
government alike.
Instead, what the author is
advocating it the issuance of grassroots credit
through a basic income guarantee, a National
Dividend, and low-cost bank lending, combined with
self-financed government infrastructure programs
that would reflect the necessary role of government
in supplying the deficit in purchasing power to the
economy. This would correct the flaws in Keynesian
economics by removing government deficit spending
and high levels of taxation from the credit
equation.
More details on this program
are provided by the author’s Global Research
articles, particularly the ones entitled “An
Emergency Program of Monetary Reform for the U.S.”
(April 26, 2007) and “Monetary Reform and How a
National Monetary System Should Work” (May 11,
2007). These articles rely heavily on the Social
Credit ideas of British engineer C.H. Douglas
(1879-1952). Douglas, like Keynes, identified the
chronic gap between prices and purchasing power as
the central problem in economics, a gap whose
existence had been denied by the early industrial
“classical” economists such as Mill, Malthus, and
Ricardo.
The existence of the gap
between prices and purchasing power had been
identified by Keynes as the central problem in
economics in his landmark work, The General
Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money,
published in 1935. Keynes knew that the underlying
cause of the Great Depression was the fact that an
industrial economy generated insufficient income
through wages, salaries, and dividends for society
to pay the prices firms had to charge for their
output in order to secure sufficient retained
earnings. A substantial level of reinvestment is an
absolute necessity for firms operating in an
industrial economy because of the depreciation of
the physical plant and access to resources, also
known as entropy.
Keynes recommended that governments commit to
deficit spending through borrowing as a means by
which society could fill the price-purchasing power
gap. But Douglas saw this as an imperfect solution
which would only add to the economy’s overall debt
burden. Instead he advocated the simple expedient of
a direct government payment to individuals through
both a National Dividend and price subsidies. The
National Dividend would be a payment against a book
entry based on the overall appreciation of the value
of the economy over time and, reflecting growth of
societal wealth, one which would be non-inflationary
and generated without recourse to taxation or
borrowing. Douglas’s ideas were repressed through
opposition by British and U.S. financiers who quite
willing to support the Keynesian solution because
government borrowing played into their hands.
Since World War II, the U.S.
economy, the strongest in the world, has been a
battleground between Keynesianism and monetarism,
though the struggle has borne a certain resemblance
to the fight to the death between the tyrannosaurus
and triceratops of popular movie fare in that it’s
really a struggle between two outmoded dinosaurs.
Thus we have not been able to
do without massive amounts of government deficit
spending, with monetarism meanwhile working to
generate huge amounts of debt at relatively high
interest rates compared to the New Deal era.
Economic growth, which Keynesian economics relied on
to stay ahead of the debt curve, has not been able
to keep pace since the 1970s.
Today’s bankrupt monstrosity is
the result. The solution is to do today what should
have been done in the 1930s, which is to implement
economic democracy, with Douglas’s Social Credit
ideas a starting point. It’s the whole package of
reforms which the author has come to refer to as
“credit administered as a public utility.”
Reform
Recommendations
The articles compiled in the
Global Research essays referenced above contain
numerous recommendations for actions that would
restore the issuance and management of credit as a
public utility under the commonwealth of American
citizens which is recognized by the U.S.
Constitution as the ultimate governing authority.
That is what is meant by “We the People.” Credit
administered as a public utility would reflect the
discoveries of C.H. Douglas and other reformers and
is the single most important principle that must be
understood for economic democracy to become a
reality either in the U.S. or the rest of the world.
The monetary system that rules
the world today mainly benefits the financial
controllers because credit is defined by law as
their property. The principle of administering
credit as a public utility, as it properly should be
in a democracy, would change this. People who want
to escape the status of debt-slavery should think
about this principle, talk about it, and then
implement it, remembering that every democratic
culture in history has been based on the ability of
the individual to create economic value without
being under the total control of someone in power
over him.
That ability still existed in
the U.S. and other places around the globe until
early in the twentieth century. Over the course of
the last hundred years, it has been completely taken
away through the twin atheistic collectivisms of
finance capitalism and communism. These are really
two sides of the same coin, for the banker and the
commissar are both financial dictators living under
the materialistic delusion.
Following is a comprehensive
list of reforms that would restore the ability of
economic self-direction at the citizen level within
the U.S. The recommendations are divided into
immediate, near-term, and long-term actions.
Note that monetary reform will
make possible a large number of additional economic
and political changes, including a transformation of
the military posture of the U.S., since we no longer
will have to fight the rest of humanity to
compensate for our monetary weaknesses. Monetary
reform would also make available the tools to deal
with the scourge of over-consumption and resource
waste that exist because of the need to artificially
inflate the GDP in order to pay down the societal
debt burden.
Immediate
·
Abolish the Federal Reserve as a bank
of issue and reconstitute it as a financial
processing bureau servicing the public and private
financial sectors under the authority of the U.S.
Treasury Department.
·
Place all U.S. monetary operations
under a Monetary Control Board that shall operate as
a federal regulatory agency under the administrative
supervision of the Secretary of the Treasury.
·
Abolish Federal Reserve open market
operations by authorizing credit directly issued by
the U.S. Treasury as collateral for all U.S. bank
lending.
·
Restore private banking operations in
the U.S. to the “real bills” doctrine and abolish
all lending for financial asset and securities
speculation.
·
Outlaw hedge funds.
·
Replace all Federal Reserve notes by
U.S. Treasury certificates.
·
Place the entire U.S. national debt
under bankruptcy reorganization.
·
Authorize the executive branch to
begin direct Greenback-type funding of selected
operational programs.
·
Establish a self-collateralized
Federal Infrastructure Bank to lend to state and
local governments for long-term projects at zero
percent interest.
·
Restore the pre-2005 federal personal
bankruptcy law.
·
Utilize an off-budget national credit
account to issue an annual guaranteed basic income
to all legal U.S. residents in the amount of $10,000
per adult and $5,000 per dependent child.
·
Establish a National Price Commission
to work toward a system-wide fair pricing policy for
the U.S.
·
Freeze budgets and hiring for all
federal government agencies, including the military
and all contractors.
Near-Term
- Adopt as a primary
monetary goal the backing of our currency with
domestic production within the physical economy
rather than the “print, loan, charge, and spend”
policy of bank-centered monetarism.
- Extend the authority of
the Securities and Exchange Commission to
investigate and eliminate predatory financial
practices within U.S. capital markets that are
destructive to U.S. industry, infrastructure,
and labor.
- Use the findings of the
National Price Commission to establish an annual
National Dividend that provides citizens with
their rightful benefits accruing from the
appreciation of national productive capacity
through the application of science and
technology to productive processes. The National
Dividend shall utilize the amount of the
guaranteed basic income as a floor in
calculating benefits and shall consist in both
direct payments to citizens and pricing
subsidies for products sold in U.S. markets.
- Establish a new federal
agency to oversee and regulate mortgage funding,
assure low-interest lending for housing, and
protect the housing markets from predatory
financial practices including the inflation and
deflation of housing bubbles.
- Assure funding and
legislative support to implement
energy-conservation actions such as those
contained in the 2005 report of the Rocky
Mountain Institute entitled, “Winning the
Oil End-Game: Innovation for Profits, Jobs, and
Security.”
- Provide increased federal
R&D funding for new energy technologies.
- Provide funding for free
college-level education for all U.S. citizens.
- Reverse privatization of
public utilities and re-regulate on a fair-price
basis.
- Protect and extend union
collective bargaining rights.
- Restore public service
requirements for media broadcasting.
- Establish public funding
for all U.S. elections along with mandatory free
air time for political candidates.
- Depoliticize all agencies
of the executive branch from undue corporate
influence in decision-making and establish new
and meaningful programs of public access and
participation.
- Establish federal support
mechanisms allowing community banks to provide
low-interest loans at one percent interest to
small businesses and consumers.
- Utilize a federal-state
partnership to establish a series of ten
regional mega-universities within the United
States to serve both U.S. and international
student audiences.
- Reconstitute the federal
budget by eliminating programs supplanted by the
guaranteed basic income, utilization of direct
Greenback-type funding where appropriate, and
selective users’ fees.
- Eliminate
collateralization of private sector banking with
federal debt securities. Emergency borrowing by
the federal government will take place only
through direct sale of Treasury bonds, not
through the banking system.
- Eliminate all federal,
state, and municipal income taxes and replace to
the extent needed with a national sales tax.
- Establish a mandatory
annual income ceiling for individuals and
corporations.
- Establish a mandatory
national building and zoning code that provides
for affordable housing, use of renewable energy
resources, and expanded mass transit.
- Recreate and revitalize
the nation’s railroads.
- Establish a system of
single-payer universal health care that draws
heavily on concepts of lifestyle and prevention.
- Establish meaningful
programs of center city renewal to transform
“death zones” into vibrant centers of urban
culture.
- Abolish the International
Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade
Organization, and the North American Free Trade
Association and replace them with an
international monetary authority under the U.N.
whose function is to regulate international
currency exchange to the mutual benefit of all
parties.
- Place all outstanding
loans by the IMF and World Bank under bankruptcy
reorganization.
- Support models of
sustainable economic development among
developing countries.
- Begin the withdrawal of
U.S. military forces from overseas bases.
- Outlaw all covert warfare
carried out by U.S. government agencies.
- Eliminate all military
programs of domestic surveillance and all
overseas surveillance, detention, and torture
contrary to established international law.
- Reduce U.S. arms sales
abroad to essential defense requirements.
- Eliminate all U.S. funding
of mercenary or contractor military forces.
- Reconstitute the CIA and
NSA as supporters of a defensive military
posture and depoliticize their operations in
order to assure accurate professional
data-gathering and analysis.
- Reconstitute the State
Department as an agency to support the
democratic aspirations of the people of the
world.
Long-Term
- Eliminate the entire U.S.
national debt.
- Carry out a general
demilitarization of American culture.
- Reduce the military budget
by elimination of wars of “choice,” abandonment
of “full spectrum dominance,” and restoration of
a military devoted to defense of the U.S.
- Work with the nations of
the world on establishing democratic economic
systems based on utilization of credit as a
public utility in accordance with U.S.
constitutional traditions.
- Undertake reclamation and
desalination programs to bring water supplies to
drought-stricken areas.
- Accomplish a permanent
long-term conversion to renewable energy
sources, including water-fueled hydrogen cells
suitable to provide all power needs for homes
and businesses.
- Refocus the U.S. space
program on activities that support space science
and the economic development of space resources.
The Last
Tyranny
One final recommendation could
be made, which would be to restore to our citizens
the money they have been forced to borrow during
their lifetimes while forgoing the benefits of a
National Dividend which could have been implemented
decades ago. At a current estimated value of over
$12,000 per year, the lifetime amount that should be
paid to each citizen by the banking system would
average around $500,000 per adult in today’s
dollars. This figure represents the amount of debt
we have had to incur, not including interest, due to
a flawed financial system.
As monetary reformers of the
past have affirmed, a program like this represents a
spiritual vision. It cannot be achieved by moving
pieces around on an economic or political
chessboard. It requires a new way of looking at
humanity—as individuals, who, like oneself or one’s
family or one’s nation or those of one’s religion,
also have a right to a life of economic security.
But this program is not Utopian. We would still have
to work, plan, and make wise decisions. But
distribution of the bounty of the earth would become
much more fair and equitable.
Of course no one can say how
much more time must pass before such a program could
be implemented. The illusion of scarcity has society
in its grip. Will it take another world war, likely
a nuclear one, to get us to wake up? A revolution?
Catastrophes from pollution or global warming? Or
perhaps a combination. One thing is certain. If the
U.S. political leadership so desired, they could
remove the financiers from their position of control
tomorrow.
For now, however, enlightened
individuals must do the best they can to acquire and
maintain a positive perspective and be prepared for
the time when conditions ripen. Measures such as
getting out of debt, creating local currency/barter
systems, growing our own food, forming conscious
communities, starting small businesses, and
acquiring manual skills are some of the economic
actions people can take to protect themselves.
Just realize that someday
monetary reform based on control of credit as a
public utility will be recognized as the most
fundamental requirement of economic democracy and
will be implemented. It’s been said that the tyranny
of money is “the last tyranny.”
Copyright 2007 by Richard C.
Cook. Permission granted to reprint with
attribution.
Richard C. Cook is a retired
federal analyst, whose career included service with
the U.S. Civil Service Commission, the Food and Drug
Administration, the Carter White House, and NASA,
followed by twenty-one years with the U.S. Treasury
Department. His articles on monetary reform,
economics, and space policy have appeared on Global
Research, Economy in Crisis, Dissident Voice,
Atlantic Free Press, and elsewhere. He is the author
of “Challenger Revealed: An Insider’s Account of How
the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest
Tragedy of the Space Age.” His website
is at
http://www.richardccook.com .
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