Richard Clark
OpEd News
All of our money comes from debt to private banks — banks that try to make it look like governments are at fault for their countries falling so heavily into debt. The truth is that banks take the profits that could have been used to better maintain the society if only the people’s money was issued by governments through state-owned banks, as was the case, for a time, in both Australia and the US.
What private banks have set up is actually the world’s largest pyramid scheme, in which new people must always be going into debt in order that others obtain the currency they need to function within the economy. Within such a system, total indebtedness must continue to increase in order to provide the money that people need in an ever more productive society.
We need a grass-roots money-reform movement to take banking away from private interests and put it back in the hands of government — initially at the state level and eventually at the federal level too. Indeed, North Dakota has very profitably run a state-owned bank for nearly a century, and not coincidentally is the only state in the union that has survived the recent recession unscathed, with the lowest unemployment rate in the country. And now there are five other states that are in the process of passing legislation that will pave the way for state-owned and state-managed banks. Quite naturally, however, banksters are spending big bucks to try and stop this movement — they don’t want to lose all those billions of dollars of easy profits that would suddenly be transferred over to the citizenry as a whole, were it no longer siphoned off by banksters.
During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln had his government issue a new currency called Greenbacks, but after he was assassinated the banksters saw to it that this practice, so very costly to them, was stopped.
Sometime later, farmers and factory workers banded together and formed a movement of monetary reform. Thousands joined it and in 1894 they marched from Ohio to Washington, D.C., to popularize their cause and to petition Congress to go back to Lincoln’s greenback system of federally issued currency, which they thought should replace the private bank-issued currency to which the country had regrettably returned after Lincoln’s tragic death.
This struggle, between whether the private banks would continue to issue all money, or whether the government would once again take over this responsibility (thereby greatly increasing the money supply while also capturing all the profits to be made from interest on bank loans), was a major issue of the day and was even represented in a fable originating at that time — the Wizard of Oz, in which the Tin Man represented the factory workers of the country, and the Scarecrow represented the farmers. And so it was that in the fable the two of them marched off together to the capitol to seek redress for their grievances from a little man — the wizard — who operated behind a curtain, twisting knobs on secret machines that almost no one understood or even knew existed — a metaphor for the mysteries of fractional reserve banking and the various scams and pyramid schemes that bankers have long used to separate the rest of us from huge sums of our hard-earned money. (And then they have the gall to claim that it’s the government’s fault for being so heavily in debt — when, if the government were the one to issue our currency, it could never be in debt.
Be the first to comment on "How we can take stolen profits back from banksters"