DEGROWTH By Monetary Reform
Black & Green Wednesday Webinar
DEGROWTH By Monetary Reform: Money For the People By the People!
5:30 pm PT, 6:30 pm MT, 7:30 pm CT, 8:30 pm ET April 3rd 2024
The webinar is of NO COST but you need to REGISTER to attend. Watch the recorded video.
People are drowning in debt and suffering from inadequate health care, rising inflation, and endless wars. We must degrow the destructive economic system that enriches a financial elite at the expense of people, planet and peace. The privatized money system is unstable and wreaks havoc as it grows exponentially. The Green Party's "Greening the Dollar" initiative outlines how to scrap the Fed for a Constitutional system that circulates permanent, stable, and debt-free sovereign public money. This will allow us to grow a caring economy that nurtures what we hold dear.
Hear from:
Greg Coleridge, Move to Amend & Alliance for Just Money
Richard C. Cook, American Geopolitical Institute
Mark Young, International Movement for Monetary Reform
Fernanda Lugo, Alliance for Just Money
Howard Switzer, GPUS BMRC (moderator)
"Mayday for Money" (Join us on May 18, 2024) At the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
Our Country,
Then and Now
by Richard C. Cook
Our Country Then and Now is a new book by Richard C. Cook who also authored We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform after seeing the disastrous flaws in our monetary system controlled by private finance.
Our Country Then and Now takes us on a 400-year journey through America’s history, providing unique snapshots from African enslavement, native dispossession, financial scandals, and wars of expansion and aggression, interspersed with tales from author Richard C. Cook’s ancestry―from Puritan forebears to fighters in the American Revolutionary War and the Civil War, to Midwest Pioneer farmers and their relations with native nations.
As a former NASA whistleblower, then US Treasury analyst, Cook dwells in particular on how the financial oligarchy aggrandized itself via a fractional reserve banking system that ultimately corrupted America’s originally proclaimed democratic and egalitarian values. He addresses how the British, European, and US bankers hijacked the American monetary system by placing it under control of the Money Trust through the creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1913, how this then financed the British takedown of rival Germany, triggered the Great Depression by shipping US gold to Britain and Europe, and led to the Bretton Woods agreements, the creation of the International Monetary Fund, and the Marshall Plan, which combined to place the world’s economy under the control of the US dollar.
After World War II, the US financial oligarchs created the “national security state” headed by the CIA to rule the world through assassinations, financial thievery, and overthrow of governments. They elevated the Soviet Union into a bogeymen to justify the vast quantity of Federal Reserve “money printing” required to subsidize an out-of-control war budget and hundreds of US military bases around the world. These measures led to worldwide dollar supremacy under control of the Rockefeller dynasty, with the US National Security State―aka today’s “Deep State”―and the CIA set up to enforce the bankers’ financial hegemony that has lasted until now.
Finally Cook addresses his efforts, along with Stephen Zarlenga of the American Monetary Institute and Congressman Dennis Kucinich, that resulted in the NEED Act of 2011 intended to end the Federal Reserve, and restore democratic control over the nation’s financial system, explaining how such reforms could save the US from today’s terminal hollowed-out economy.
Living Paycheck to Paycheck
by Howard Switzer GPTN
The official narrative is that “the economy is doing great” which lands with a dull thud on the millions of Americans living paycheck to paycheck, many of them homeless and living in their cars. 50% of those who are homeless are still working, they just aren’t paid enough to both house and feed themselves. A recent article from Forbes provides some interesting statistics.
I am not up on pop culture much, but I have had younger people, assuming I was a boomer, tell me that my generation is the problem. Certainly, they are right that some members of the Silent and Boomer generations are a problem, especially if they are members of the power elite making public policy decisions. The executive arm of the ruling class is one of the tiniest of minorities. The older generations ought to be better off as they have had more time to establish themselves, but they also have the most medical bill issues. As one of those who live paycheck to paycheck, I was not surprised to learn that “nearly half (49%) of Baby Boomer respondents—who are nearing retirement or already retired—say they’re living paycheck to paycheck. That’s a higher percentage than any other generation.” Of course, those statistics are a snapshot in time and most of every generation must struggle to survive in this extractive capitalist economy. It is not a generational issue, it is a class issue, and as such, it is an economic and monetary policy issue as well.
When I was growing up there wasn’t much hype about generation groups. I had always thought I was a baby boomer, born just two weeks after the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan. However, I discovered not long ago that I was just across the line and a member of the Silent Generation. I am self-employed, living check to check, hoping I can keep doing my work and getting those checks so my wife and I can stay fed and keep a roof over our heads, hoping our health stays good and doesn’t bankrupt us and leave us on the street. Being self-employed is hard enough without being taxed but taxed we are and the penalty for being self-employed is crushing and seems to be designed to keep self-employed people working for a minimum wage. I suppose they see our being self-employed as competing somehow with their corporate monopolies. So much for their patronizing rhetoric about the entrepreneurial spirit.
Payroll.org conducted a survey in 2023 showing that 78% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, a 6% increase from the previous year. So, more than three-quarters of Americans struggle to pay little more than their monthly expenses. The picture for the younger generations is no better as we all face the economic decline of capitalism. The sad thing is they never had a chance and they may never own their own home. That is, unless the money system is changed, which would transform the economy.
