Greens for Monetary Reform

To the People of Afghanistan

A letter from the BMRC

To the people of Afghanistan:

Along with many Americans, we lament that all the money seems to have left Afghanistan together with the Americans, and $9 billion in Afghani assets have been ‘frozen’ by international financiers. In Bloomberg Business Week, 10-11-21 we learned that “Cash has absolutely vanished”.

It is cruel and immoral, just when the Afghani people must rebuild their lives, they are shut out of international commerce and deprived of circulating money. Sad for the financiers too, de-humanizing themselves by such cold blooded action. Shouldn’t Afghanistan receive reparations from the Americans rather than punishment?

We write to encourage you with an alternative to international finance, Sovereign Money.

Money is needed for people to grow and trade food, services, products and international system has cut you adrift. There are many, little mentioned historic experiments to show how governments can create money based on their own honor, and on labor and resources at hand. Two instructive examples for creating prosperity using home-made money are the 19th century US Greenbacks (Chap 17) and the 1930’s Worgl, Austrian money.

From these and other examples we learn:

• § The amount and value must be well considered, issued and protected from counterfeit by the government
• § The money must be ruled legal tender, that is, it cannot be refused for any transaction
• § It may be printed money, bank entries or both
• § It can be spent into circulation, always directly by the government, to build infrastructure, provide public services, stimulate industry, commerce and food production
• § It can be lent into circulation by the government at modest rates for those same purposes. Lending circulates it back to the government and can avoid the need to tax
• § It circulates permanently once issued.

Yours Truly,

Banking and Monetary Reform Committee (BMRC) of Green Party US

Part 5 – THE MONEY MATRIX: Education (1954-Present)

By Sue Peters

When a commercial bank makes a loan contract with a borrower, the bank CREATES the deposit in the borrower’s account.” Have you repeated this fact 15,000 times yet? Banks CREATE what we use as money. Those who control this ‘money power,’ have slowly changed the education of our children.

This control of the banks by wealthy elites goes back to the end of the 19th century, when financial-industrial cartels (2), run by names like J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, etc., used the ‘money power’ to take over the American economy. These financiers created tax-exempt foundations to shield their wealth from taxes but, more importantly, to allow it to grow and grow. Their growing wealth has been used, gradually, to change the education of our youth.

Tax-Exempt Foundations: Philanthropy as Social Engineering

The previous article in this series, THE MONEY MATRIX: Education (1914-1954), started to trace the foundation grants to organizations in the civil society. This same article described the 1954 Reece Committee Report. On page 141 of its 432 pages is:

“By manipulating society you can change not only society itself but also the people in it. Theoretically a society could be completely made over in something like 15 years – the time it takes to inculcate a new culture into a rising crop of youngsters.” (3)

Let’s follow the trail of foundation money from the Reece Committee to the present.

Reminder: What has always been education?

Always keep in mind the nature of humans, and what we want our children to experience in their growing knowledge of the world. Parents, of course, want their children to learn the three R’s — reading, writing, and arithmetic. If a child can read, write, and compute, he can do just about anything he wishes, and able to control his destiny. The child develops his intrinsic curiosity, creativity, and individual power.

Here are the words of a thinking human being, Jon Rappaport, long-time investigative reporter:

“Since the advent of organized education on the planet, there has been one way of teaching young children...until recently. Explain a new idea, produce scores of examples of that idea, and get the students to work on those examples and come up with the right answers. Subtraction, division, decimals, spelling---it all works the same basic way … The upside is, when you explain a concept to a child, and you then take him through many exercises designed to help him understand that concept, he'll achieve a victory. Then you’ll see the lights go on in his mind.” (4)

In other words, the child is developing his thinking muscle, connected to the facts presented by the teacher.

Introduction of ‘Progressive’ Education

However, the financial elites had another goal for our children—not to empower them with their intrinsic abilities as a human, thinking being—but to dumb them down.

First, let’s hear again from Jon Rappaport on the new education:

“It's a method of teaching that surrenders ground on each key concept, deserting it before it's firmly fixed in the mind of the student … It hops around from idea to idea … Not enough examples. Not enough exercises … Look at what happens when a student emerges from school with a half-baked, dumbed-down education. He can sort of read. He can sort of write. He sort of understands arithmetic. He tries to skate through the rest of his life. He fakes it.” (5)

This is cruel. But, for the financial elite, it gives them a compliant population – a population that can be manipulated, using stimulus-response techniques. And since World War II, the plan has been to gradually introduce the computer into the classroom—the perfect delivery vehicle for stimulus-response.

Technology as Brainwashing

This stimulus-response method bypasses the brain. Without using your brain, how does an individual know the truth of the world? — He doesn’t.

In 1960 the National Education Association published Teaching Machines and Programmed Learning: A Source Book, which included a chapter entitled ‘The Science of Learning and the Art of Teaching by B.F. Skinner’. The chapter included: “Once we have arranged the particular type of consequence called a reinforcement, our techniques permit us to shape the behavior of an organism almost at will … In all this work, the species of the organism has made surprisingly little difference … Comparable results have been obtained with rats, pigeons, dogs, monkeys, human children … this has been achieved by analyzing the effects of reinforcement and by designing techniques which manipulate reinforcement with considerable precision.” (6)

The next year 1961 the Foundation for Research on Human Behavior published Programmed Learning: Evolving Principles and Industrial Applications. In the section entitled “Principles of Programming” is written: “It is indeed true that this book would never have been conceived without the well-known and perhaps undying work of Professor Skinner …. It is largely through Professor Skinner’s work that all this theory and excitement about teaching machines and programmed learning has come about … through the process of reinforcement, new forms of behavior can be created with a great degree of subtlety …” (7)

From the 1960’s: Federal Funds to States

The U.S. came out of the New Deal and World War II with a greatly expanded federal government in Washington D.C.

In 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) was passed by the U.S. Congress. “This marked the end of local control …” (8) Federal funds began to flow to the states. In 1974, the Office of Education of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) created the National Diffusion Network to promote government-approved educational programs. It received Congressionally approved appropriations ranging between $8-million and $14 million per year, for 20 years.

Reagan’s Public-Private Partnerships

Early in 1981, President Reagan set up a President’s Task Force on Private Sector Initiatives in the White House which, in effect, started the ball rolling for public-private partnerships. These contracts are a merger of the private and public sectors – similar to a corporate-run state. “Membership listed on The White House letterhead read like a “Who’s Who” of individuals in government agencies, universities, tax-exempt foundations, non-governmental organizations, business, media, labor unions, and religion … William J. Baroody, Jr., president, American Enterprise Institute … Terence Cardinal Cooke, archbishop of New York … Michael S. Joyce, executive director, John M. Olin Foundation … Arthur Levitt, Jr., chairman, American Stock Exchange; Richard W. Lyman, president, Rockefeller Foundation … William C. Norris, chairman and CEO, Control Data Corporation … C. William Verity, Jr., chairman, Armco Steel, Inc … William S. White, president, C.S. Mott Foundation.” (9)

Public-private partnerships aid in the creation of unelected task forces at all government levels, transferring policymaking and implementation from the public tax-supported domain into the private or business sectors.

Project B.E.S.T. – Basic Educational Skills through Technology

In 1981, the Reagan White House supported a federal grant of $855,282 to AECT (Association for Educational Computing and Technology), a spin-off from the National Education Association (NEA), for Project BEST – Basic Educational Skills Through Technology. An explanatory brochure said: “Project BEST is a cooperative effort involving both the federal, state, and local government and the private sector in the planning and use of modern information technologies to improve the effectiveness of basic skills, teaching and learning.” In other words, this is a “private-public partnership”. The ‘private’ part is IBM, Microsoft, Apple, and the many non-profits and NGOs funded by the tax-exempt foundations.

During Reagan’s first term, a whistleblower in the U.S. Department of Education, Charlotte Iserbyt (10), leaked an internal document called “Project BEST Dissemination Design Considerations”, which said:

“What We Can Control or Manipulate? = State participation/selection process

Role of advisors
Content of program
Training of state leaders
Resource people utilized
Basic skills content areas emphasized
Perception of need to use technology”

Today

Over the decades since 1981, funding from Washington D.C. and the foundations, along with the public-private partnerships, has given control over education to centralized unelected groups. The use of technology in the classroom, along with its stimulus-response programming, has increased. Many classrooms no longer have textbooks, but only computers.

In 1984, an educator and technologist, Dr. Dustin H. Heuston, wrote: “Won’t it be wonderful when the child … can have the equivalent of the finest school in the world on that terminal and no one can get between that child and the curriculum?” (11)

SOURCES

(1) Published by: Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Capital Stock Master Report. Issued: 1/26/2006. 3 pages. In this report is reported the following:

Two Wall Street banks own three-fourths of the most powerful central bank in the world.

• (2) Peters, Susan. “DEBT DRIVES WAR AND WAR DRIVES DEBT: The Powers of Bank Credit Creation during World War I.”
  Valatie, New York: American Monetary Institute, 2019. Available at monetary.org.
• (3) United States. Congress. House. Select Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations and Comparable Organization. Final Report. Washington: U. S. Govt. Print. off., 1954. Known as the Reece Committee Report (1954 Congressional Record – 432 pp), p. 141.
• (4) Jon Rappoport, “The vaccinated sheep are being taken for a ride; how long before they jump off the train? Never?”, 2021-09-16. blog.nomorefakenews.com/2021/09/16/the-vaccinated-sheep-are-being-taken-for-a-ride
• (5) Ibid.
• (6) (Department of Audio-Visual Instruction, National Education Association: Washington, D.C., 1960), edited by A.A. Lumsdaine (program director of the American Institute for Research and professor of education at the University of California in Los Angeles) and Robert Glaser (professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh and research advisor at the American Institute for Research), p. 103.
• (7) (Foundation for Research on Human Behavior: Ann Arbor, Mich., 1961) edited by Jerome P. Lysaught.
• (8) Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America: A Chronological Paper Trail (Conscience Press: Ravenna, Ohio, 1999), p. 72.
• (9) Ibid., pp. 175-176.
• (10) Ibid., p. 170.
• (11) Ibid., p. 213

Usury, and Becoming an Activist

By Dr. Elspeth Crawford (guest writer)

Usury has been mis-defined as excessive interest, the charging of excessive interest. But usury is not about having a debate around which percentage of interest is acceptable. Usury is the earning of interest on something that did not exist before.

I have written before about what I have come to believe is a root problem undermining all our attempts to create better lives and better conditions for all who share living on our finite planet. We need Monetary Reform, a change in the way money is created and put into circulation in our economies. [This is a man-made construct, not a natural law; history shows many precedents regarding different methods of money creation.] Recently I heard/read a brilliant podcast on the same theme. I hope you who read this will also listen. The definition of usury, earning interest on something that did not previously exist, is there. Also, there is a distinction between causative injustices and derivative injustices. If the monetary system is indeed a causative injustice, from which so many other injustices derive, and if we consider how it was brought into being, we can see that well-meaning people as well as psychopathic greedy people [each of us capable of being both] sleepwalked into the creation of this dangerous destructive system that feeds derivative problems the world over. [It’s a systemic problem, we are part of it, that is why we often feel so helpless.]

How to reform/change?

We need a different image, an easily imaginable mind map of how a different money system would work. The first essential, that is indeed well on the way in many parts of the world, is that we stop giving precedence to purely rational thinking, AS IF by reasoning we could encompass ALL the elements that made up a causative story line. We can’t. See modern neuroscience, or less modern math’s logic, like Godel’s theorem, and recognize that any thinking will either be circular or move outside its initial bounds*.

Enter: UNCERTAINTY, we really do not know the future, but duh, we don’t know past nor present either. Language, and its mind-mate reasoning, does not capture all. Perception is not only limited, but it can also be false.

Enter: EMOTION, the biological response that tells us the state we are in, filtered and nuanced through nature, nurture, memory, and experience to become a present feeling.

Enter: INSTINCT, the impulse to act, to be an agent in our living.

Because these enter and affect our experience in our body knowledge, before our higher cognitive capacity gets going, thinking includes them.

ENTER: we no longer feel helpless, we can act, in humble and ordinary lives, each of us may be as a drop in the ocean, or a butterfly wing tossed in the wind, but we become part of the change. We can each make a new Money Mind Map for ourselves and share that, as widely as possible, making connections, adapting, and changing as we live it out.

HOW will I act? I cannot push your action in any direction, but I can write these posts.

As well as writing posts, I am looking more closely at where and how usury enters our lives, my life.

I have come to believe that the Monetary System where banks create money through credit/debt came into being because usury was ignored. This is, as always, about money creation, NOT about money lending, as lending means that the something lent already existed.

I can’t do much about the price of my coffee, and the amount of that price that is interest in the usurious system. I can move away from some kinds of “money” making, like share dealing. [As my income is relatively small, this is easy, I do not have spare money with which to deal.] The best I can do seems to be to support activities that are based on commons principles, or cooperative endeavors. Especially I can support community actions that do not involve money at all, see for example the “101 things to do “.

And I write to my representatives, both local and national. Apparently, they do heed what constituents say, if they hear it often enough from enough of us.

We know that psychologically complex holistic thought that includes all is difficult if not impossible. In fact, the good old Enlightenment [male] understandings, let us mistakenly believe that reason was the most powerful element in our mental armory. OOPs – neuroscience and experiential psychologies and lots of non-western and feminist thinking now puts reason in its more realistic non-hubristic place, an outcome of emotion and experience enabled by test and connection with the whole world out there. Wilfred Bion called this thinking process an “intersection with truth.“

I find that this truthful thoughtfulness (in which one is active, an agent) has many names, call it what you will: be mindful; meditate; use systems thinking, situated knowledge, reflexivity, ecological thought; heed heuristic as well as evidence-based science; use critical friends, the examined self, connect with others; be open to change, hear and bear criticism, use self.

On the debt ceiling

The most valuable history is the history we don't know.

John Kenneth Galbraith

“The problem of the modern economy is not a failure of a knowledge of economics; it's a failure of a knowledge of history.

Do not be alarmed by simplification, complexity is often a device for claiming sophistication, or for evading simple truths.

There can be few fields of human endeavor in which history counts for so little as in the world of finance. Past experience, to the extent that it is part of memory at all, is dismissed as the primitive refuge of those who do not have insight to appreciate the incredible wonders of the present.

Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, economists get busy on the proof. Their conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.”

“The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity, often a device for claiming sophistication, is used to disguise or to evade truth, not to reveal it."

“The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.”

"The solution is not to “reform” our debt-based money system, but to replace it with a system where money is created debt-free.”