Read this bill of economic rights
and weep. Then recall that Government
first prints money in order to spend it.
It then taxes us in order to recover that money in whole or in part. It is never the other way around.
Thus it follows that the government
could underwrite the bill of rights while also optimizing the spending as best
it can.
The most effective way to recover
the cash through taxation happens to be a universal value added tax system in
which all exceptions expire at the rate of ten percent per year until finished
as we did with the free trade exemptions between Canada
and the USA
The USA
needs to also split VAT revenues with the States and to also dump obvious
regional costs onto the States to manage as we have done successfully in Canada
The bottom line is that every
citizen has a sane economic life in front of him with no threat of destitution hanging
unnecessarily over his head.
I would go much further and apply
decentralized central banking authority to at least the state level, even the
municipal level and perhaps even to the mere community level based on a
community enterprise. I believe that
this would work wonderfully and harness human energies fully.
Time for an Economic Bill of Rights
By Ellen Brown
URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=27611
November 11, 2011
Henry Ford said, “It is well enough that the people of the nation
do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe
there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”
We are beginning to understand, and Occupy Wall Street
We are beginning to understand that our money is created, not by the
government, but by banks. Many authorities have confirmed this,
including theFederal Reserve itself. The only money the
government creates today are coins, which compose less than one ten-thousandth
of the money supply. Federal Reserve Notes, or dollar bills, are issued by
Federal Reserve Banks, all twelve of which are owned by the private banks in
their district. Most of our money comes into circulation as bank
loans, and it comes with an interest charge attached.
According to Margrit Kennedy, a German researcher who has studied this
issue extensively, interest now composes 40% of the cost of everything we buy. We don’t
see it on the sales slips, but interest is exacted at every stage of
production. Suppliers need to take out loans to pay for labor and
materials, before they have a product to sell.
For government projects, Kennedy found that the average cost of interest is 50%. If the
government owned the banks, it could keep the interest and get these projects
at half price. That means governments—state and federal—could double
the number of projects they could afford, without costing the taxpayers a
single penny more than we are paying now.
This opens up exciting possibilities. Federal and state
governments could fund all sorts of things we think we can’t afford now, simply
by owning their own banks. They could fund
something Franklin D. Roosevelt and Martin Luther King dreamt of—an
Economic Bill of Rights.
A Vision for Tomorrow
In his first inaugural address in 1933, Roosevelt
criticized the sort of near-sighted Wall Street greed that precipitated the
Great Depression. He said, “They
only know the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no
vision, and where there is no vision the people perish.”
Roosevelt’s own vision reached its sharpest focus in 1944, when he
called for a Second Bill of Rights. He said:
This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its
present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights
. . . . They were our rights to life and liberty.
As our nation has grown in size and stature,
however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved
inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.
He then enumerated the economic rights he thought
needed to be added to the Bill of Rights. They included:
The right to a job;
The right to earn enough to pay for food and
clothing;
The right of businessmen to be free of unfair
competition and domination by monopolies;
The right to a decent home;
The right to adequate medical care and the
opportunity to enjoy good health;
The right to adequate protection from the economic
fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
The right to a good education.
Times have changed since the first Bill of Rights was added to the
Constitution in 1791. When the country was founded, people could
stake out some land, build a house on it, farm it, and be
self-sufficient. The Great Depression saw people turned out of their
homes and living in the streets—a phenomenon we are seeing again
today. Few people now own their own homes. Even if you
have signed a mortgage, you will be in debt peonage to the bank for 30 years or
so before you can claim the home as your own.
Health needs have changed too. In 1791, foods were natural
and nutrient-rich, and outdoor exercise was built into the
lifestyle. Degenerative diseases such as cancer and heart disease
were rare. Today, health insurance for some people can cost as much
as rent.
Then there are college loans, which collectively now exceed a
trillion dollars, more even than credit card debt. Students are
coming out of universities not just without jobs but carrying a debt of $20,000
or so on their backs. For medical students and other post-graduate
students, it can be $100,000 or more. Again, that’s as much as a
mortgage, with no house to show for it. The justification for
incurring these debts was supposed to be that the students would get better
jobs when they graduated, but now jobs are scarce.
After World War II, the G.I. Bill provided returning servicemen with
free college tuition, as well as cheap home loans and business
loans. It was called “the G.I. Bill of Rights.” Studies
have shown that the G.I. Bill paid for itself seven times over and is one of
the most lucrative investments the government ever made.
The government could do that again—without increasing taxes or the
federal debt. It could do it by recovering the power to create money
from Wall Street and the financial services industry, which now claim a
whopping 40% of everything we buy.
An Updated Constitution for a New Millennium
Banks acquired the power to create money by default, when Congress
declined to claim it at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. The
Constitution says only that “Congress shall have the power to coin money [and] regulate the
power thereof.” The Founders left out not just paper money but
checkbook money, credit card money, money market funds, and other forms of
exchange that make up the money supply today. All of them are created
by private financial institutions, and they all come into the economy as loans
with interest attached.
Governments—state and federal—could bypass the interest tab by setting
up their own publicly-owned banks. Banking would become a public
utility, a tool for promoting productivity and trade rather than for extracting
wealth from the debtor class.
Congress could go further: it could reclaim the power to issue money
from the banks and fund its budget directly. It could do this, in
fact, without changing any laws. Congress is empowered to “coin
money,” and the Constitution sets no limit on the face amount of the
coins. Congress could issue a few one-trillion dollar coins, deposit
them in an account, and start writing checks.
The Fed’s own figures show that the money supply
has shrunk by $3 trillion since 2008. That sum could be spent into the
economy without inflating prices. Three trillion dollars could go a
long way toward providing the jobs and social services necessary to fulfill an
Economic Bill of Rights. Guaranteeing employment to anyone willing and
able to work would increase GDP, allowing the money supply to expand even
further without inflating prices, since supply and demand would increase
together.
Modernizing the Bill of Rights
As Bob
Dylan said, “The times they are a’changin’.” Revolutionary times
call for revolutionary solutions and an updated social contract. Apple and Microsoft update their
programs every year. We are trying to fit a highly complex modern
monetary scheme into a constitutional framework that is 200 years old.
After President Roosevelt died in 1945, his vision for an Economic Bill
of Rights was kept alive by Martin Luther King. “True compassion,”
King declared, “is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that
an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”
MLK too has now passed away, but his vision has been carried on by a
variety of money reform groups. The government as “employer of last
resort,” guaranteeing a living wage to anyone who wants to work, is a basic
platform of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). An MMT website declares that by “[e]nding the enormous unearned profits acquired by
the means of the privatization of our sovereign currency. . . [i]t is possible
to have truly full employment without causing inflation.”
What was sufficient for a simple agrarian economy does not provide an
adequate framework for freedom and democracy today. We need an
Economic Bill of Rights, and we need to end the privatization of the national
currency. Only when the
privilege of creating the national money supply is returned to the people can
we have a government that is truly of the people, by the people and for the
people.
Ellen Brown is an attorney and president of the Public Banking Institute, http://PublicBankingInstitute.org. In Web of Debt, her latest of eleven books, she shows how a private cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back. Her websites are http://WebofDebt.com and http://EllenBrown.com.
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