Stephen Zarlenga’s Address to Occupy Together

This article is Mr. Zarlenga’s address to be delivered to the patriotic demonstrators occupying various locations in the Midwest and the Northeast in Fall 2011.

Thank you for being here – for this opportunity, and for reminding the world that our nation is on an unjust path of destruction.

We are here protesting the financial rape of our people. We are here protesting the financial rape of our nation. Is that specific and focused enough?

A battle has raged for centuries to control the money system – to dominate society through the money power.

Over time whoever controls the money system controls the nation. They can use that power to grab great wealth, but even more importantly it gives them power over the direction of society- what gets funded and what gets neglected. Will the power be used to repair bridges and levees protecting our cities and providing needed employment; or be channeled into destructive speculation – real estate and Wall Street bubbles and warfare as the banks have usually done?

The money system is society’s greatest dispenser of justice or injustice. A good one supports the creation of values for life. A bad one gives privileges to the few and disadvantages to everyone else. It obscenely concentrates wealth, causing social strife, warfare and a constellation of bad outcomes, including most of the social ills you intend to reform.

Because great power is exercised through the money system, power-hungry elements since ancient times pursued the political ambition to dominate through the money power. Societies must periodically cleanse and reform corrupted systems like ours. The main weapon in this battle is manipulation of language and thought- definitions are heavy artillery. Those benefiting from the corruption fund university economics departments to finance “professionals” (we call them economists) to promote their interests through obscure theories. That’s how this corrupt system has continued for so long, despite its repeated miserable results!

In a word, our money system has been privatized. It promotes its controllers, not the society! Monetary reform, not mere regulation, is urgently needed now. Financial abuses are pervasive and self-evident. Dominant companies focus on usury, not production. Most of our citizens are being ripped off.

Reform is based on an understanding that the nature of money is not a commodity; that money and credit are two very different things. That money is a national issue.
Define money as a commodity – as wealth – then the wealthy will control not only their assets, but the money system itself. Define money as credit, as our present system does, then the bankers will control the system, and just look at the horrible and deadly results! Define money properly as an abstract legal power, as Article I, § 8 of our Constitution does, and control over money can be brought under our system of checks and balances.
Centuries of experience and decades of research that comprise my book, The Lost Science of Money, show what is needed. Chapters 1 to 23 present historical case studies of the use and misuse of money from ancient times to the present. Chapter 24 applies those case studies to reform the present system. In 2004 the AMI began putting those rules into a law. Fifteen rewrites later, it is published as the American Monetary Act.

In 2005 Congressman Dennis Kucinich of Ohio began working on it. A month ago, he and Congressman John Conyers of Michigan introduced it into the United States House of Representatives as the National Emergency Employment Defense (NEED) Act of 2011, HR 2990. It has all the monetary reforms of our American Monetary Act:

First, it dismantles the Federal Reserve System and incorporates it into the US Treasury, where people think it is now.

Second, it removes the accounting privilege banks now have to loan their interest bearing debt into circulation by decisively ending the fractional reserve system. All serious monetary reformers know that to have real reform, we must end the fractional reserve system! The banks no longer create what we use for money.

Third, Congress creates and spends money into circulation for infrastructure, health care and education, starting with the $2.2 trillion the civil engineers tell us we need over the next 5 years.

Inflation is avoided because infrastructure and real goods and services come into existence.

Over 7 million new jobs are created!

That’s it folks. Read it! Tell your friends about it. Make suggestions to improve it if you can.

Additionally, the NEED Act will:
Limit interest rates to 8% including all fees.
End compound interest.
Pay off the National debt as it comes due.
Let the 50 states decide where one fourth of the new money goes each year through per capita federal grants.
Pay a tax-free dividend to every citizen.
Now, imagine if, instead of giving $3 trillion to the banks, they had given it to our people – that’s $10,000 for every American man, woman and child. The recession would be over.

Friends, get yourselves and your representatives out of the banker’s “trick bag.”
Get your Congressman to co-sponsor it!
Ask your national and local leaders to support the NEED Act of 2011, HR 2990!
Thank you!

Edited by Jules Brouillet
Zarlenga is director of the American Monetary Institute and author of The Lost Science of Money. Meet him at The 8th Annual AMI Monetary Reform Conference! Brouillet is a researcher for the American Monetary Institute.

Make Monetary Reform Happen Now!

Dear Friends of the American Monetary Institute,

We now face a major opportunity. Across the country, thousands of Americans, young and old, are demonstrating around the Federal Reserve Banks of Chicago, Dallas, and Boston; Wall Street in NY and in ever more places.

Our 7th Annual AMI Monetary Reform Conference in Chicago was our best yet!  The high energy of our speakers and our participants was “electric.”  Due to the immediacy of action, our conference report will be made available in November.  At the closing of our conference, we asked all attendees to us submit to us a one page plan of what they personally intend to do for monetary reform over the next year.  We ask you to respond with your one page action plans to us, if you have not yet done so.

After the conference ended, Jules Brouillet went to the demonstrations in DC for a week, and then New York for another week.  This is his report:

“Bob Poteat, my mother Carol, and I had great success in advancing monetary reform in Washington.  On my first day in DC, Bob Poteat, Jamie Walton, and I met with Congressman Dennis Kucinich, who described how he would explain to the public our money system in short episodes through his Youtube channel.

Over the following week, Bob, Carol, and I passed out hundreds of flyers to all sorts of people including the protesters at the State Department Keystone XL Pipeline Project public discussion, gave interviews, built support for HR 2990 on the Occupy Freedom Plaza economic democracy working group, marched with Occupy DC onto the US Chamber of Commerce, the IMF, the White House, and the Fed, and lobbied a handful of Congresspeople on the Act.  We saw how the Occupy DC folks are non-hierarchical yet exceptionally self-organized, completely democratic and transparent, and have committed their lives to both their daily success and a better future for all of us.  Their practice of direct democracy by consensus, their complete dedication to nonviolence, their tenacity to overcome all obstacles whether personal or external, is revolutionary, both conceptually and in practice.

During my week in New York, Sue and I spent our energy on getting our message out to the occupiers and the visitors, many of whom were quite unaware of the significance of the juxtaposition of their Zucotti Park encampment with the New York Federal Reserve.  Our flyers and my “Monetary Reform Now!  Do you want Banks to create money for private profit? No? HR 2990 of 2011, Support NEED Act!” sign (courtesy of my mom) were a huge success.  I sat in on the Alternative Economy working group for Occupy Wall Street, who agreed to pass out The Need for Monetary Reform at their table!  Based on my experience of how much we could accomplish in a short time, it is imperative that we all attend the Occupy Together protests now to inform the activists, who will in turn inform the public!”

It is time for each and every one of us to get involved on a personal level.  We need you to do the following:

We are now distributing our flyers for HR 2990 (Print them here) and advocating for monetary reform at rallies nationwide.  Our conference attendees distributed them to Occupy Chicago, Greg Coleridge is handing them out in Cleveland, Bob Poteat is passing them out in both Washington state now.  If your local group holds a daily General Assembly, contact one of the organizers to join their “alternative economy working group.”  The question is, “Can Kucinich Money Bill Provide Focal Point for Protests?” We must respond “Yes!” not with words, but through action!

Send us your reports by email on your successes and informative experiences at the rallies.

Organize people to recruit local leaders for monetary reform and pressure your Congresspersons to cosponsor HR 2990.

Read this truly excellent letter to the editor from John Howell of Athens, OH.  In your own words, write letters to your local newspapers and political blogs!

The American Monetary Institute’s campaign for monetary reform must kick into high gear to pass HR 2990.  That can only be made possible through your continued financial support.  As we currently need a full-time secretary, it would be wonderful if each of you, personal finances permitting, mailed us in this form to set up an automatic $25 (or more) donation per month!  If you would like to contribute in another way, those alternative contribution options are listed here.

We are in great need of your financial support.  We could get so much more done here at the AMI office if everybody gave a little more!

 

Warm regards to you and good luck! Remember this is a non-partisan activity!

 

 

Stephen Zarlenga
AMI

MAJOR, HISTORIC PROGRESS BEING MADE

Dear Friends of the American Monetary Institute,

IMPORTANT MONETARY NEWS ALERT:   MAJOR, HISTORIC PROGRESS WAS MADE TODAY BY CONGRESSMAN DENNIS KUCINICH.

On Wednesday September 21st Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio, 10th District) took a crucial and heroic step to resolve our growing financial crisis and achieve a just and sustainable money system for our nation by introducing the National Emergency Employment Defense Act of 2011, abbreviated NEED. Read his announcement.

While the bill focuses on our nation’s unemployment crisis, the remedy proposed contains all  of the essential monetary measures being proposed by the American Monetary Institute in the American Monetary Act. These are what decades of research and centuries of experience have shown to be necessary to end the economic crisis in a just and sustainable way, and place the U.S. money system under our constitutional checks and balances. Yes, it can be done!

By the way, there is still time for you to join the AMI Seventh Annual AMI Monetary Reform Conference (Sept. 29-Oct. 2) in Chicago and participate in our preliminary conversation of how best to move forward. To be a part of this remarkable moment in history, you can register for the conference at http://www.monetary.org/2011schedule.html or by phone at 224-805-2200.  The conference registration, at $395 per person, ends on Friday!  To register after the deadline, there is an additional charge of $100 to process the registration.   Go to http://www.monetary.org/2011conference.html to register.

Warm regards to all,
Stephen Zarlenga
AMI

Part II: How the Economists Facilitated the Crisis and Must Now Be Held Accountable

Read the story here!

Stephen Zarlenga

How the Economists Facilitated the Crisis and Must Now Be Held Accountable

Read the story here!

Stephen Zarlenga

Kucinich bill addresses Fed Reserve

Jim McGurrin

Published in the Modesto Bee on May 10th, 2011.

In response to “We spend on wars but not people” (April 28, Letters): Someone has already asked and answered her questions, and addressed her suggestion. He is Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich who in December introduced into Congress HR 6550, the NEED Act.

Almost 100 years ago, the money-creating prerogative of government was surrendered to an “independent” quasi-government agency known as the Federal Reserve when Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act. We have had a century to witness the Fed’s many false promises and failures. HR 6550 would place the Fed clearly within the Treasury Department, making it answerable to the president.

Money would no longer originate as debt, but would be paid into existence by the government, in return for goods and services, primarily infrastructure. I believe the bill reflects Kucinich’s thorough understanding of the debt money system under which we labor. It offers a real hope of replacing it with one that is honest, understandable, constitutional and not based on massive government debt. It deserves our support.

McGurrin is a land surveyor from Central California.

Creating an Interest- and Debt- Free Money System

Stephen Zarlenga

Director, American Monetary Institute

Monday, April 11, 7:00 PM

Cleveland Friends Meeting / Peace House

10916 Magnolia Ave., University Circle, Cleveland

Zarlenga will discuss how the public can regain control of our money system.

Our money system is run by financial institutions, not We the People. The vast majority of money in our society is created as debt (via loans) by banks and other financial institutions that must be repaid with interest when it could be created debt- and interest-free by the government as stipulated in the Constitution. A federal bill introduced by Rep. Dennis Kucinich would “democratize” our money system and in the process reduce US debt and create jobs (re)building our nation’s infrastructure. Zarlenga will discuss the status of the Kucinich bill in the new Congress and what we can do to help raise awareness about it.

Text of Kucinich bill in last Congress here

SPONSORED BY THE AMERICAN FRIENDS SERVICE COMMITTEE

AND CLEVELAND COMMITTEE ON CORPORATONS, LAW &

DEMOCRACY

More information, 330-928-2301, gcoleridge@afsc.org

FREE Community Forum

Print the flyer for this event

The Federal Budget Through The Looking Glass

Jules Brouillet

On February 13^th Speaker of the House John Boehner addressed a letter to President Obama touting tax cuts, deregulation, and reduced government spending as solutions to reinvigorate the economy.  To it he attached a statement signed by 150 economists denouncing conventional use of fiscal policy during a recession, “To support real economic growth and support the creation of private-sector jobs, immediate action is needed to rein in federal spending.”  If federal spending creates both public-sector and private-sector jobs, how can federal austerity augment job creation?

It can’t.

John Boehner’s House plan for the federal budget includes spending cuts on low-income education and nutrition programs, food inspection services, clean energy development, Social Security disability payments, environmental protection, municipal fire department grants, Amtrak, the Clean Water Revolving Fund, the National Park Service, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.  According to the Economic Policy Institute, this budget would reduce the federal deficit by 4% at the price of 700,000 American jobs.  Boehner’s response to these employment projections was, “So be it.”

In contrast, President Obama’s budget prioritizes certain items including passenger rail development and federal student aid while axing others such as the Corps of Engineers civil works program and offshore drilling oversight and regulation.  His plan would reduce the federal deficit more compassionately than the House Republicans’ scorched earth policy.  Yet both budgets operate under the same flawed assumption: ultimately the government’s budget must be balanced like that of a business or a household.

The government’s faulty understanding of its powers can be traced to fundamental flaws in economic thinking.  A group of French economics students formed the Post-Autistic Economics Movement in 2000, rejecting the unscientific basis of mainstream economics.  Yet 11 years later the uncontested fundamental criticisms of their profession remain ignored in the United States.  The censorship of this central debate is a tragic disservice to America.

Domestic critics of economics include columnist Paul Krugman.  He writes, “As I see it, the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth.”  Commenting on the ascendant philosophy of neoclassical economics, Krugman says “…if you start from the assumption that people are perfectly rational and markets are perfectly efficient, you have to conclude that unemployment is voluntary and recessions are desirable.”  A cult is defined as, “A system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular object.”  Modern economics, dominated by a cult of market purists, was crowned as the naked emperor of the social sciences following its abject failure to merely predict the impending financial crisis of 2008.

Macroeconomic models take the present economic system as an indisputable given.  Their studies, their conclusions, their thoughts remain uncritical; the predominant attitude of the profession is that there is no credible alternative to our system of capitalism.  Dr. Charles Lindblom noted, “We uncritically accept what the market provides.  For American social science it is a scandal that it remains silent on so great an issue.”  Orthodox economic thinking stops Americans short of seriously reconsidering the merits of maintaining a system that has privatized their sovereign economic power.  Our economic liberty has been shackled to the privately owned Federal Reserve System.

Americans’ misunderstanding of the nature of the Federal Reserve leads to confusion over the arguments for federal austerity wielded in the debate over the 2012 federal budget.  If the federal government originates money, what keeps it from printing the money to pay off the national debt rather than strangle governmental spending?  Our government is limited to creating a minimal portion of our money supply as coinage.  It would be highly impractical to mint $14 trillion in coinage to pay off the national debt.  The rest of the money supply is loaned into existence by the privately controlled Federal Reserve and the private banking system.  As long as money originates as debt there will never be enough specie to pay off public and private debts.  This is the economic system economists have accepted without question; they have not produced any credible solutions for paying off the national debt.  Yet despite the economists’ confusion a credible solution has been proposed in Congress.

America is blessed to have a member of Congress championing a sound solution to the budget crisis in Washington. Representative Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) introduced HR 6550, the National Employment Emergency Defense (NEED) Act last December.  The bill will do the following:

1. Nationalize the Federal Reserve.
2. Create all new money through a democratic process.  The fractional reserve requirement for banks will be raised to 100%, eliminating their ability to create money.
3. Spend new money into existence through a national infrastructure program.  By spending money on real items including roads, schools, and hospitals, we can reach full employment without suffering from inflation.

These important reforms will align the mechanics of the monetary system with the public’s understanding of it.  The Federal Reserve will become a public agency, the government will create money, and banks will keep our money in their vaults.  Our inflationary credit-created money will be replaced by a sound currency.  The federal debt will be paid off as it comes due.  It is change we can believe in.

Is this what the Federal Reserve recommends to America?  This February Chairman Ben Bernanke reported to the House, “To put the budget on a sustainable trajectory, policy actions—either reductions in spending, increases in revenues, or some combination of the two—will have to be taken to close these primary budget gaps.”  Closed economic thinking has captured our highest minds.  Our central bank will not produce a decent solution nor acknowledge Representative Kucinich’s enlightened reform.

Why has the 2012 budget debate been limited to preserving certain essential government services versus across-the-board budget cuts, excluding Dennis Kucinich’s sensible alternative?  Without insider Congressional information, one must look to history for circumstantial evidence.  In 1892 the US Bankers’ Magazine explained to its members, “The question of tariff reform must be urged through the organization known as the Democratic Party, and the question of protection with the reciprocity must be forced to view through the Republican Party…By thus dividing voters, we can get them to expend their energies in fighting over questions of no importance to us, except as teachers to the common herd.”  Has America been fooled again?

Working people operate and understand the economy better than economists.  Productive people do far more for economic growth than our banks.  Thinking people can govern their country far more intelligently than most of their Congresspersons.  The people must restore economic democracy through Representative Dennis Kucinich’s NEED Act.  Until Dennis’ solution becomes law a second Great Depression will forced upon ordinary people by a profoundly undemocratic economic system.

Brouillet is a researcher for the American Monetary Institute.

Discussion Guidelines for the AMI Blog

Many of the comments on the blog entries over the past few months have been well-received here at AMI.  Unfortunately, many other comments that were submitted with good intentions have been too confusing or too long or misleading to be included.  We’d like to make this blog a leader in raising internal blogging standards.  We provide this guide to help you write comments that add to rather than detract from our blog entries.

• Discuss the post.  This is not a space to plug your magic solution the world’s problems.
• For the sake of space, don’t post an entire book or model constitution that you wrote.  Keep it to less than 200 words.
• Educate yourself about monetary history and monetary reform before you judge it but don’t write jargon.
• Base your arguments on verifiable facts and reason rather than prejudices and generalized notions; don’t lead readers down false trails.
• Have positive faith in the democratic process even if you lack faith in Democratic officeholders.
• Provide constructive dialogue and criticism; not name-calling.
• No negative attitudes, like “I have given up completely on humanity’s future.”  That’s an unhealthy and dangerous form of surrender.

We hope this doesn’t put you off.  We really want your participation.  Your participation is an important part of moving forward.

Stephen Zarlenga

PS If you have any questions about these guidelines you can post them as comments to this entry.

Create Jobs and Improve the Economy through Public Control of Our Money System

Stephen Zarlenga and Greg Coleridge

Jobs and the debt are chronic problems requiring fundamental solutions rather than piecemeal approaches. A bill providing just such fundamental solutions- the National Emergency Defense (NEED) Act by US Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Oh) – already introduced at the end of the 111^th session of Congress – will be reintroduced soon. Americans would be wise to rally behind it.

While the bill focuses on the unemployment crisis, it contains three essential monetary measures proposed by the American Monetary Institute in the American Monetary Act (AMA). The AMA’s recommendations are based on decades of research and centuries of experience, are designed to end the current fiscal crisis in a just and sustainable way, and are aimed to place the U.S. money system under our constitutional system of checks and balances.

The three essential measures of the NEED Act include:

1. Moving the mostly private Federal Reserve System under the US Treasury Department. The Fed would no longer be a virtual fourth branch of government, unaccountable to the public. Their important financial research functions would continue. But the Fed would no longer make unilateral monetary policy decisions beyond the reach of We the People.
2. Making the power to issue money a public function – bypassing the current system which invited the careless and risky lending that led to the global economic crisis. The US Government would be authorized to issue dollars debt free. This power would replace the current undemocratic and unstable “fractional reserve” system in which money is created as debt through loans by financial corporations who lend many more times what they possess. Banks would no longer have this privilege to create our money supply!
3. Enabling the US government to use its money power — creating and spending money into circulation – to address pressing infrastructure needs such as repairing our crumbling roads, bridges, rails and highways.  The government also would be enabled to invest in health care and education. These projects would provide a huge numbers of jobs without going into debt and having to repay interest on debt to financial institutions.  Economist Kaoru Yamaguchi’s computer model has shown that a public-based money system and spending government money on jobs fixing our infrastructure is the best form of economic growth.

The irony is that these three provisions would institutionalize what most Americans falsely believe already exists: That the Federal Reserve is public. That banks only loan money that they possess. That the government creates our money. Wrong on all counts.

Decades of distortion and deception can be remedied by this bill.

Public control of money is not a new practice. The American colonists issued “”Continentals” and the Lincoln administration “Greenbacks” to fund the Revolutionary and Civil Wars respectively – all debt and interest free. More than 200 prominent economists during the Great Depression of the 1930s developed and endorsed “The Chicago Plan” – which declared that only the government should create money – to address that crisis.

Ask your US representative to cosponsor the NEED Act when it is reintroduced. Ask your two US Senators to contact Rep. Kucinich about becoming a Senate sponsor. Last year’s bill can be read at

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c111:H.R.6550:

This bill alone cannot solve all our current economic problems. But it will end the private/corporate control of what should profoundly be a public democratic function of any society – issuing the nation’s money.  Maybe more importantly, the Act will serve as a beacon of hope to a beleaguered citizenry who are seeking long term solutions to unemployment, debt, crumbling infrastructure, and need to take power over their lives and their society.

Zarlenga is Director of the American Monetary Institute and author of The Lost Science of Money. Coleridge is Director of the Northeast Ohio American Friends Service Committee.