On May 20, 2013, Carl Gibson writes in Nation Of Change:
Despite its name, the Federal Reserve is a private corporation, unaccountable to our government and autonomous in its operation. Even though the president appoints the chairman and the board of governors, the Federal Reserve and its 12 regional branches in America’s major cities are dominated largely by Wall Street. Through the devious process of fractional reserve banking, have complete control over our monetary policy, as well as responsibility for price control and establishing long-term interest rates. It shouldn’t be any surprise to anyone that this private corporation allows Wall Street to withdraw billions of dollars at0.75% interest while homeowners and college students depend on those same banks for loans have to pay far higher rates. The buddy-buddy relationship the Federal Reserve has with Wall Street was fully revealed after the Fed’s first official audit in 2011, when the Fed’s records showed they had dished out $16 trillion in bailouts to not just US banks, but foreign banks as well. That’s a trillion dollars more than the United States’ entire GDP for 2011.
The Fed posted a whopping $77.4 billion in profit in 2011. While, to its credit, the Fed gave almost all of their profits back to the U.S. Treasury, those profits were made while buying up the same toxic mortgage-backed securities that Wall Street intentionally created to fail while enriching themselves. The Fed’s quantitative easing policy, known as QE3, is simultaneously shoveling $40 billion per week into the black hole of Wall Street’s coffers to keep buying up these worthless, obtuse financial instruments. The Fed claims that quantitative easing has helped create or save almost 2,000,000 jobs since 2008, and while that may be true, the people could probably find a much better way to spend $40 billion a month and create and save far more jobs.
Because the privately-operated Federal Reserve still has a monopoly on our money supply, the [Bank of North Dakota] BND still has to ultimately borrow money from the private banking cartel. However, the BND still supplies tens of millions of dollars to the state treasury every year that can be used for badly-needed investments in things like schools, healthcare and transportation infrastructure. Imagine if we could nationalize the Fed and our money supply, using the BND’s model for all 50 states to safely deposit their money and make low-interest loans available to everyday homeowners and small business owners! It would bring Wall Street to its knees.
Luckily, the Public Banking Institute is teaching everyone how we can make that happen at their 2013 conference at Dominican University from June 2-4 in San Rafael, California.
The concept of public banking is one that should be pursued in order to establish the institutional means to achieve access to the rights and power of property as a fundamental human right. Instead, universal access to property rights is ignored.
This is the reality of the FUTURE, unless you and I and every other human being with a desire to be someone and contribute to the betterment of society do something about it. It all comes down to what source of income will each of us gain access to and whether we will Own or Be Owned in the economic sense.
The statement “Own or Be Owned” suggests the two alternative worlds of the FUTURE. Today’s reality is that the average citizen does not own wealth-creating productive capital assets (as do the wealthy rich people in our society). To change one’s plight from that of capital-less or under-capitalized and solely dependent on a job or government welfare assistance in one form or another, citizens must share in the ownership of the money system. Most of you out there do not even know how money is created. Money is created when the Federal Reserve Bank (a central bank privately owned) loans it to banks that you have your checking account or meager savings account (if any) with, and the banks re-loan it multiple times because laws allow them to have a fraction of the amount on hand or in reserve in relation to the amount of loans they are allowed to make (fractional banking). This creates boom and bust cycles in the national economy, and empowers an elite few who really OWN America. With proposed Capital Homesteading, the Federal Reserve would serve as a “public bank” and would loan money directly to citizens, who must put it in a personal special super-IRA retirement account which would invest in dividend-paying stocks of corporations that use the money for productive, economy-growing purposes. This would empower all, instead of an elite few and eliminate fractional-reserve boom and bust. It would also provide for unlimited private sector growth, and eliminate the need for socialist welfare programs funded with tax extraction and national debt. This would back the currency with real products or goods and services and reduce the size and scope of government. As government becomes smaller because individual citizens are able to support themselves and their families living off dividend income and resulting REAL jobs, national debt would be retired and demand for taxes would shrink. The tax system would be changed to be far simpler, flatter, and fairer. And all of us would be on the path to prosperity, opportunity, and economic justice to pursue our personal desires and experiences as we become strongly independent and responsible.
Everyone reading this article is invited to visit and consider joining the Web site of the Coalition for Capital Homesteading, an advocacy group advancing the Just Third Way vision and comprehensive system reforms designed to achieve a people-empowered, market oriented, property-based approach to economic democracy at local, regional, and national levels.
What I and my colleagues at the Coalition For Capital Homesteading (http://capitalhomestead.org/) are recommending is that the Federal Reserve become a more accountable and effective engine of non-inflationary private sector growth. We are asking the President and Congress to call on the Federal Reserve to use its existing discount powers under Section 13, paragraph 2 to open up a new source of mass purchasing power through widespread worker and citizen ownership of productive capital.
Today the Federal Reserve uses its powers to monetize unsustainable government debt, bail out banks deemed “too big to fail,” and widen the gap between the top 1 percent and the bottom 99 percent. The Federal Reserve could play a more positive role, removing artificial barriers to equal citizen access to acquiring and owning productive capital wealth. By creating asset-backed money for production, supported by growth-oriented tax policies, the Federal Reserve could truly help promote shared prosperity in a market system.
Chairman Benjamin Bernanke and other members of the Federal Reserve need to wake-up and implement Section 13 paragraph 2, which directs the Federal Reserve to create credit for local banks to make loans where there isn’t enough savings in the system to finance economic growth.
I urge those interested to examine the systems logic behind the Capital Homestead Act’s tax and monetary reforms, expressed in “A New Look At Prices And Money” published in the Journal of Socio-Economics (http://www.cesj.org/binaryeconomics/price-money.html)
Sign the Petition at http://signon.org/sign/amend-the-federal-reserve.fb27?source=c.fb&r_by=3904687
Sign the Petition at http://signon.org/sign/reform-the-federal-reserve.fb23?source=c.fb&r_by=3904687
Sign the WhiteHouse.gov petition at https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/amend-federal-reserve-act/GYqvqGr6
The answers are to be found in the proposed Capital Homestead Act at http://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm and http://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm, and the Agenda of The Just Third Way Movement at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797
http://www.nationofchange.org/saving-our-economy-public-banking-1369063062
