Carl Herman – Since 2009 I’ve been a Socratic voice for monetary and banking reforms to ~2,000 Advanced Placement Macroeconomics teachers on our discussion listserve. The status over the last six years is an occasional positive response, with a total of perhaps ten teachers in at least mild agreement, and occasional negative responses that I end with a few polite yet direct Socratic questions that demonstrate no substantiation to the negative argument. None of the negative ones or other colleagues follow-up with good questions to learn, only two have communicated to me privately in partnership, and zero colleagues have joined my voice on the listserve in any way pointing to reforms or admonishing colleagues to look at the game-changing data.
This experience mirrors my 18 years of work with ending poverty: we ended all arguments that poverty is somehow necessary, created enough force to have two UN summits for heads of state, and then ongoingly receive corporate media/government lies of omission and commission from “official leaders” as the current system continues. The general public is mired in disinformation.
My current philosophy is my role is simply to provide choice, at least for this part of our work for Earth to become the lovely place we all know it can be.
My respectful conclusion from my own experience for your consideration: no progress is possible until the current system is recognized as literally criminal, and ended with public demand for arrests in OBVIOUS crimes centering in war and money, and OBVIOUS lies to yearly kill millions, harm billions, and loot trillions (four-part article series with videos on arrests as the obvious citizen response).
8-minute video from PuppetGov: Why resistance is essential:
I think it’s helpful to communicate this ongoing reality check of public receptivity among people with academic training and professional experience in a key area for reform; in this case for monetary and banking reform (last update from February, 2015). I was previously removed from the AP US Government listserve in 2012 for contrasting the US Constitution with US policies in wars, torture, extrajudicial assassinations, and removal of Constitutionally guaranteed rights.
My latest attempt to my AP Econ colleagues in response to discussion on Greece, with hyperlinks to them for full documentation. I’ll write more if I receive any discussion worthy of public attention.
Debt-Based Monetary System Mechanics
Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frederick Soddy became motivated to understand the mechanics of our “modern” monetary system from such outrageous problems such as (name omitted) and colleagues point-to with Greece. Soddy wrote books to explain money structure that I won’t get to in this lifetime; and his conclusion of the physical structure of our “modern” system:
“I thought that, as a scientific man, I ought to know something about economics. So I studied the money system for two years and could make nothing of it. Then, one day, the truth dawned on me. What I was studying was not a system, but a confidence trick.”
“Confidence trick” is what our debt-based monetary system is; devised in the US Robber-Baron age to benefit its owners (economist Tim Canova expertly documents this ownership and bank-profit priority). Soddy allied himself with leading economists of his day for monetary reform (86% of econ professors in agreement), and failure to overcome the lobbyists of the big banks (history documented here in my student assignment).
That’s the big picture: creating what we use for money as debt in a system created by and for the oligarch banks will mechanically and certainly cause increasing and tragic-comic debt. The solution is to create debt-free money for direct payment of public goods and services, with at-cost public credit (like a 5% mortgage and credit card from a state-owned bank that abundantly replaces all state taxes and abundantly funds all schools).
Back to Greece, I recommend this analysis by Ellen Brown that the system owners prefer austerity and the system’s continuance rather than Emperor’s New Clothes OBVIOUS conclusion of Soddy, the 86% of econ professors who were directly asked, Thomas Edison, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and I hope YOU, dear colleagues.
Excerpt from Ellen Brown:
“The European Central Bank threatened to turn off the liquidity that all banks – even solvent ones – need to maintain their day-to-day accounting balances. That threat was made good in the run-up to the Greek referendum, when the ECB did turn off the liquidity tap and Greek banks had to close their doors. Businesses were left without supplies and pensioners without food. How was that apparently criminal act justified?”
… First there was the derivatives scheme sold to Greece by Goldman Sachs in 2001, which nearly doubled the nation’s debt by 2005.
Then there was the bank-induced credit crisis of 2008, when the ECB coerced Greece to bail out its insolvent private banks, throwing the country itself into bankruptcy.
This was followed in late 2009 by the intentional overstatement of Greece’s debt by a Eurostat agent who was later tried criminally for it, triggering the first bailout and accompanying austerity measures.
The Greek prime minister was later replaced with an unelected technocrat, former governor of the Bank of Greece and later vice president of the ECB, who refused a debt restructuring and instead oversaw a second massive bailout and further austerity measures. An estimated 90% of the bailout money went right back into the coffers of the banks.
In December 2014, Goldman Sachs warned the Greek Parliament that central bank liquidity could be cut off if the Syriza Party were elected. When it was elected in January, the ECB made good on the threat, cutting bank liquidity to a trickle.
When Prime Minister Tsipras called a public referendum in July at which the voters rejected the brutal austerity being imposed on them, the ECB shuttered the banks.
The Greek government was thus broken Mafia-style at the knees, until it was forced to abandon its national sovereignty and watch its public treasures sold off piece by piece. Suspicious minds might infer that this was a calculated plot designed from the beginning to throw Greece’s prized assets onto the auction block, a hostile takeover and asset stripping for the benefit of those well-heeled entities in a position to purchase them, including the very banks, hedge funds and speculators instrumental in driving up Greek debt and destroying the economy.”
SF Source Washington’s Blog August 2015
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