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End of Capitalism Is Here [Video]

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brownGreg Hunter – Public banking expert and attorney Ellen Brown says, “Your life savings could be wiped out in a derivatives collapse.” Brown explains, “Nobody anticipated what happened in 2008, and that was a $700 billion bailout. Even if the FDIC tapped its Treasury line, that’s only $500 billion. So, certainly things could go wrong. Also, why are they rushing to put these things into place? They’re expecting something.” Brown goes on to point out, “They think they have avoided too-big-to-fail, but what they have actually done is formalize too-big-to-fail. I mean it’s the end of capitalism. There is no such thing as too-big-to-fail in a capitalistic society where you say certain corporations can’t fail. If you have to take the people’s money to prop them up, it’s no longer capitalism.”

http://youtu.be/2oehMznZd7w

Brown says, “Instead of treating banks like they are too-big-to-fail, treat them like public utilities. I am head of the Public Banking Institute, and what we want to do is publicly own banks. In every country, something like an average of 50% of the economy is publicly owned and 50% is privately owned. For us, the big 50% is like the military.

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100 Years Is Enough: Time To Make The Federal Reserve A Public Utility

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WebOfDebt  December 22 2013

Ellen Brown
Ellen Brown

December 23rd, 2013, marks the 100th anniversary of the Federal Reserve, warranting a review of its performance.  Has it achieved the purposes for which it was designed?

The answer depends on whose purposes we are talking about.  For the banks, the Fed has served quite well.  For the laboring masses whose populist movement prompted it, not much has changed in a century.

Thwarting Populist Demands

The Federal Reserve Act was passed in 1913 in response to a wave of bank crises, which had hit on average every six years over a period of 80 years. The resulting economic depressions triggered a populist movement for monetary reform in the 1890s.  Mary Ellen Lease, an early populist leader, said in a fiery speech that could have been written today:

Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street. The great common people of this country are slaves, and monopoly is the master. . . . Money rules . . . .Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags. The parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us. . . .

We want money, land and transportation. We want the abolition of the National Banks, and we want the power to make loans direct from the government. We want the foreclosure system wiped out.

That was what they wanted, but the Federal Reserve Act that they got was not what the populists had fought for, or what their leader William Jennings Bryan thought he was approving when he voted for it in 1913. In the stirring speech that won him the Democratic presidential nomination in 1896, Bryan insisted:

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