Let’s Take Back Our Money

 

Our goal should be total relocalized control of money. The optimal amount of centralized (“federal”*) currency and taxes is zero. Even at this early stage we should look to pioneering projects like the Brixton pound (which can be used to pay local taxes). (We also ought to think in terms of economic relocalization in the form of co-ops. This would have many advantages which I’ll discuss in future posts, but the one I want to mention here is the possibility of bringing as much diversification and exchange as possible under the rubric of cooperative share schemes, so that the parasitic central structure would have trouble getting after us even through trying to tax barter.)

 

[* Going forward I’ll probably be using political relocalization terms like federation and federated more often, in addition to referring to the Orwellian name “federal government”. I hope context will make the difference clear enough, and at any rate I’ll try to avoid using the term federal itself except to refer to the kleptocracy, even though that’s unfair to the term. And a reminder, I hope the (vast) difference between democrat and Democrat is always clear.]

 

Before I get to my affirmative ideas on money reclamation, let me quickly dispose of some negation, what I’m not really advocating.

 

As I wrote in my MMT posts (parts one and two), I do want the knowledge to spread, that in principle deficit spending is unconstrained and beneficial where the economy is depressed. There Is No Deficit Problem. It’s a fiscal terrorist lie.

 

We know for a fact that no one among the elites who claims to care about the deficit or the debt actually does. The Bailout, the wars, the Pentagon budget, Big Ag subsidies, and corporate welfare in general, all prove this. No one thinks the government spends too much as such. (We know that corporatist spending does destroy the real economy by stealing real wealth from the productive people and further enriching and empowering the criminal parasites.)

 

Therefore, we know that all deficit terrorism, all calls for “fiscal responsibility” and spending cuts, all “austerity”, is nothing but a criminal LIE on the part of politicians, media hacks, and academic prostitutes.

 

But I’m not in fact calling for more deficit spending from the kleptocracy. It’s clear that any new spending this government undertakes will only be for further corporate welfare, police state expansion, and power aggrandizement. Obama’s corporatist “stimulus”, just a bailout by other means, proves that. (The fact that “stimulus” money was used by the TSA for the pork/police state purpose of buying totalitarian scanners from a connected crony corporation, in direct defiance of the will of Congress itself, which explicitly voted against allocating funds for the scanners, should be taken as the definitive characterization of Obama’s “stimulus”, and of what any kleptocracy spending will be like.)

 

I do say that we must resist all new taxes or increased taxes on the non-rich. These mean nothing but robbery. Every cent extracted from us, through for example a VAT, would simply be handed over to the banksters and to the likes of Chertoff-connected scanner contractors. Anyone who advocates a VAT or anything like it is simply advocating corporate robbery.

 

And I do say that we must draw a line against any further cuts to any public interest spending. If anyone sincerely thinks cuts are necessary, there are trillions in worthless bailout, war, and corporate welfare spending to cut. So there’s the only answer we ever need give. Anyone whose “deficit” plan is not 100% corporate welfare cuts and increased taxes on the rich is manifestly a liar and a criminal.

 

The watchword is clear:

 

The deficit and the debt are not a problem while there’s still unemployment. Absolutely refuse to even discuss public spending cuts.

 

No Taxes for the Non-Rich.

 

Total Austerity for the Criminals, Not One Cent More From the People.

 

So there’s the basic negative strategy for how the people should regard the central kleptocracy.

 

Affirmatively, we must take back our money sovereignty. Money is nothing but a unit of account among participants in a real economy, and is based on their productive activities. No one but the participants themselves has a right to create or exchange it. Money creation is a core feature of the people’s sovereignty. If a legitimate government existed, by definition it would directly issue money based upon the productivity of the real economy, toward the goal of the overall distributed health of this economy, and of the productive society at large. No “finance sector” would or could exist at all in a legitimate system.

 

So it follows that for a government to abdicate the money creation power to private banks, in the form of “the Fed”, is to abdicate sovereignty itself, and to become illegitimate. We know the Fed serves no legitimate purpose. The only reason it exists is to give the bankster racket its main rent extraction point, and indeed to enable the bank rackets to exist at all. Abolish the Fed, take back the money creation, and we abolish the banksters. Similarly, shadow banking serves only destructive, larcenous purposes and has no right to exist by any measure. So as political demands I support calling for the abolition of the Fed, repeal of the CFMA, and the reinstatement of one big bucket law.

 

Not that I expect the kleptocracy to actually do any such thing, but the Fed may be the most politic target, and the call to End the Fed may be a good wedge behind which to push the rest of the anti-bank, anti-“austerity”, and affirmative money sovereignty ideas.

 

The basic principle and practice of money distribution including credit must be that the community lends to itself, on collateral of future productivity. One existing blueprint for this, alas never put into practice, was Charles Macune’s sub-treasury idea. As described in Lawrence Goodwyn’s The Populist Moment:

 

Through [Macune’s] sub-treasury system, the federal government would underwrite the cooperatives by issuing greenbacks to provide credit for the farmer’s crops, creating the basis of a more flexible national currency in the process; the necessary marketing and purchasing facilities would be achieved through government-owned warehouses, or “sub-treasuries”, and through federal sub-treasury certificates paid to the farmer for his produce – credit which would remove furnishing merchants, commercial banks, and chattel mortgage companies from American agriculture. The sub-treasury “certificates” would be government-issued greenbacks, “full legal tender for all debts, public and private”…

 

In principle, this can be done at the local, state, or federal level. But I think it’s a lost cause to do more than state the possibilities for federal money creation. We should focus more practical work at the state level, where public banking is an idea on the rise.

 

North Dakota broke new ground nearly a century ago, but the true potential of publicly-owned banks remains to be explored. Nearly all of our money today is created by banks when they extend loans. We the people have given away our sovereign money-creating power to private, for-profit lending institutions, which have used it to siphon wealth from the productive economy. If we were to take that power back, we could generate the credit we need to underwrite a whole cornucopia of projects that we don’t even consider because we think we lack the “money.” We have the labor and we have the materials; we just lack the “liquidity” necessary to put them together to create products and services.

 

North Dakota provides proof of principle: State-level public banking works. Banks have been proposed in California, Washington, Michigan, Illinois, Vermont, and elsewhere.

 

This could be a big decentralizing step. The basic idea as it exists is for the state to lend for productive purposes within the state’s real economy. This could easily be ramified into something like a state subtreasury system.

 

From there the possibilities roll out to distant vistas. Perhaps the next step, or better yet a concurrent one, would be for the state to issue its own currency for use within the statewide co-op, certainly for state and local taxes. This could dovetail with a state breaking Wall Street at least within its borders by calling upon the people to Jubilate In Place: stop paying their mortgages, stay in the house, keep paying property taxes. Such an economy could largely sustain itself, and encourage collaborative efforts in other states.

 

This is to envision steps toward decentralization, anti-corporate liberation, relocalization. Of course the road from centralized kleptocracy and corporate tyranny to full relocalization and democracy is a long one.