From Private Enterprise Money by E.C. Riegel (pub. 1944) 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 […]
Steven Pearlstein, business columnist for the Washington Post, published a column on January 6 entitled, “Recession Over? Not Unless We Make a Major Shift.” The problem is that the “major shift” Pearlstein writes about won’t solve the problem even if it takes place. So is the recession ending? The professional cheerleaders from Wall Street think […]
If you want to get an idea of what America once was like, read the poems of Walt Whitman. Whitman was born in Long Island in 1819 and grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y. His family was poor, but even though he left school at the age of 11 he gave himself an education by reading […]
While Congressman Ron Paul’s Free Competition in Currency Act is not a workable proposal, it points to a deeply serious problem with the Federal Reserve System that must be faced if the U.S. economy is to have a future. Over the last 40 years the Federal Reserve, with the acquiescence of Congress and the executive […]
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 […]
The United States does not control its own destiny. Rather it is controlled by an international financial elite, of which the American branch works out of big New York banks like J.P. Morgan Chase, Wall Street investment firms such as Goldman Sachs, and the Federal Reserve System. They in turn control the White House, Congress, […]
What is the purpose of money? 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 […]
Response to a Reader: 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 […]
This morning I went to a nearby urban public school to read a story to the kindergarten class my wife teaches. 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, […]
On Thursday, April 23, 2009, Stephen Zarlenga, director of the American Monetary Institute (AMI), delivered two briefings on Capitol Hill on the American Monetary Act that AMI drafted and that may be introduced as legislation during the current congressional session. This single measure has the potential of bringing together the tens of millions of people […]