Who Has The Money And The Power

Credit: Flickr/Liz West. CC Past 2.0.

The world today is controlled by a small elite grouping that has been increasingly concentrating power and wealth in their own easily. There are many observable facets to this power structure, including the military security complex that President Eisenhower warned against, the fossil fuel interests, and the neoconservatives and others that are promoting US hegemony effectually the globe, but the most powerful and overarching forcefulness is the 'money power' that controls money, banking, and finance worldwide. It is articulate that those who control the creation and allocation of money through the cyberbanking organisation are able to command virtually every other aspect of guild.

What tin be washed to plow the tide? How can we empower ourselves to assert our desires for a more fair, humane and peaceful world order? I believe that the greatest possibility of bringing about the desired changes lies in economic and political innovation and restructuring.

The monopolization of credit.

I came to realize many years ago that the chief machinery by which people are controlled is the organisation of money, banking, and finance. The power elite accept long known this and have used information technology to enrich themselves and consolidate their grip. Though nosotros take information technology for granted, coin has become an utter necessity for surviving in the modern world. But unlike water, air, nutrient, and energy, coin is not a natural substance—it is a homo contrivance, and information technology has been contrived in such a way every bit to centralize power and concentrate wealth.

Coin today is essentially credit, and the control of our commonage credit has been monopolized in the hands of a cartel comprised of huge private banks with the complicity of politicians who control key governments. This collusive arrangement between bankers and politicians disempowers people, businesses, and communities and enables the super-class to utilise centralized control mechanisms to their own advantage and purpose. It misallocates credit, making it both scarce and expensive for the productive private sector while enabling central governments to circumvent, by deficit spending, the natural limits imposed by its revenue streams of taxes and fees. Thus, there is virtually no limit to the amounts that are lavished on the mechanism of state of war and domination.

In today'south world, banks get to lend our commonage credit back to us and accuse interest for it, while central governments get to spend more than they earn in overt tax revenues by relying on the banking organization to monetize authorities debts as needed. These two parasitic drains on the economy—interest and the inflationary monetization of government debts—create a growth imperative that is destroying the environment, shredding the social cloth, and creating e'er greater disparities of income and wealth.

How tin can coin power exist confronted?

Fortunately,we the people have in our hands the means of our own liberation: the power to classify our credit directly without the utilize of banks or political coin. How to assert that power is the theme of my virtually recent book,The End of Coin and the Future of Civilization.

Over the years at that place has been a long parade of reformers who wish to take the power to create money away from banks. This is an admirable objective that I wholeheartedly endorse. But the alternatives they propose have been to revert to commodity money like golden (which has proven to exist inadequate), or transfer the ability to outcome money to central regime—what I call the "greenback solution," which harks dorsum to Abraham Lincoln's scheme for financing the Ceremonious State of war. That proposal calls for the federal government to bypass the Federal Reserve and the banks by issuing a national currency directly into circulation from the Treasury. At first glance this may seem similar a good idea, but it has many shortcomings.

Offset of all, the greenback solution does non propose to end the money monopoly but merely to put it under new management: it's a gross mirage to think that the Treasury is, or might go, independent of the interests that now control the Federal Reserve and the major banks. Consider the fact that near recent Treasury Secretaries have been quondam executives of Goldman Sachs, the well-nigh powerful financial establishment in the state. Information technology is naïve to expect that they will serve the common practiced rather than the money power that has spawned them.

Second, key planning of complex economical factors has been shown to exist unworkable. That is especially truthful with regard to money. Neither the Fed nor the Treasury is qualified to decide what kind of money—and how much—is necessary for the economy to function smoothly. The issuance and command of credit should exist decentralized into the easily of the producers of needed appurtenances and services so that the supply of money automatically rises and falls in accord with the quantity of goods and services that are bachelor to exist bought and sold. If individual currencies and credit clearing exchanges are allowed to grow without interference from vested interests, their superiority volition quickly become apparent.

3rd, the greenback solution does zero to eliminate deficit spending and inflation, which are enabled by legal tender laws. Equally long as political currencies are legally forced to circulate at face up value, the abusive issuance of money, the debasement of the national currency, and the centralization of ability will continue. All government programs, including social programs and the military budget, ought to be funded past legitimate government revenues, non past the underhanded means of budgetary debasement.

Centralized command of credit money and the imposition of legal tender laws enable the hidden tax that is calledinflation.Salmon P. Chase, who as Lincoln's Treasury Secretary presided over the issuance of greenbacks, argued later as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court that the issuance of greenback currency was unconstitutional and exceeded the powers of the federal authorities. "The legal tender quality is only valuable for the purposes of dishonesty" every bit he put it. Finally, the political process has been so thoroughly corrupted and taken over past the power elite that political approaches to solving the money problem have virtually no adventure of success.

Towards more effective ways of empowerment.

Business people, farmers, professionals, and others who are engaged in productive enterprise are clamoring to gain admission to credit, but they neglect to recognize that it'southward already in their collective hands. Under present arrangements we give our credit to the banks, and so beg them to lend some of it back to u.s.a. and pay them interest for the 'privilege.' Only there is no practiced reason for credit to be monopolized in this way. Businesses routinely offer credit to one another when they deliver goods and services and let some period of time for payment to exist fabricated. This practice can be extended and organized on a multilateral basis.

The real solution to the problem lies in creating new structures for allocating credit that are based on the legitimate needs and the resource of businesses, workers, and country and local governments. Competition in currency can transcend the dysfunctions inherent in the present centralized organization and ensure that there volition be sufficient amounts of dissimilar media of exchange to enable all desirable trades. Competing currencies will likewise ensure that political currencies similar the dollar cannot be abused without losing patronage in the market. We demand to promote theseparation of money from the countryby deploying exchange mechanisms thatdecentralize and democratize the control of credit.

Money is first and foremost a medium for facilitating the substitution of goods and services and other forms of existent value, merely the exchange function can be finer and efficiently provided exterior the banking system and without the employ of conventional political money. This is already being done through credit clearing exchanges and through the issuance of private currencies or vouchers past businesses that produce valuable appurtenances and services. Both approaches take the capacity to provide exchange media that can besides be used by the full general public to mediate all fashion of transactions.

Is there whatever applied possibility of organizing producers on a sufficiently large scale to achieve this? Yep, considering this approach is far more practical and empowering than whatsoever other currently on offer. Improvements in the human being condition have always stemmed from the creativity, industriousness, and goodwill of people. A cooperative and compassionate, club can sally from the creation of exchange alternatives that are based on voluntary, free-market place, and community-based initiatives that enable people to transcend the coin monopoly and the war machine.

This process begins at the local level past utilizing the credit of local producers to mediate the exchange of goods and services that are locally produced or sold. At that place are many examples of successful individual currencies that have been circulated in diverse times and places. Whatever they are called—vouchers,scrip,credits,certificates orcoupons—audio private and community currencies tin be spent into circulation past whatsoever trusted producer or reseller who is gear up, willing, and able to reciprocate by redeeming the equivalent amount as payment for existent value,i.e. the goods or services that are their normal stock in trade and are in regular demand. In that location is nothing mysterious or complicated almost this procedure.

The substitution of goods and services is likewise enabled on a moneyless basis by using a procedure of straight 'credit clearing' among buyers and sellers. This is already being done past scores of commercial merchandise exchanges (sometimes called 'castling' exchanges) that accept been operating successfully around the world for more than than forty years. These commercial credit circles, comprised of thousands of businesses of all kinds, presently mediate an estimated 20 to 30 billion dollars' worth of trades annually, and these numbers continue to grow.

Every bit operational improvements are made and credit direction procedures become standardized, these exchanges could exist networked together to realize the vast potential of moneyless credit clearing arrangements. In this emerging worldwide web of commutation,members of each local circle or node are known and classify credit to one another based on their reputation and power to provide valuable goods and services. Thus nosotros tin eventually take an contained system of non-budgetary payment in which credit is locally controlled but globally useful.

It is essential and entirely feasible that we reduce our dependence on the banking system and conventional political monies. Through the deployment of innovative mechanisms of exchange like private currencies and credit immigration networks, individuals, businesses and communities can empower themselves economically and politically to build a gild that is free, fair, prosperous and peaceful.

A longer version of this article is available here.

Source: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/transformation/confronting-money-power-elite/

Posted by: nelsontherip.blogspot.com