Joe Bongiovanni

Joe Bongiovanni is a second-generation monetary reformer, Co-founder and Director of the Kettle Pond Institute (KPI) in Vermont, a Co-founder and Member of the Alliance for Just Money (AFJM) of Bloomington, IL, and a Member of the Green Party U.S. Banking and Monetary Reform Committee (BMRC).

This year Joe will be speaking on the topic of – Where Are the Economists When We NEED Them?:

Although there will be several economists speaking at the conference again this year, Joe will provide a contrast to the dedicated monetary reform work of an outstanding team of academic economists who co-authored a paper in 1939 just for the purpose of engaging the entire discipline of American economists with the topic of reforming the national money system.

The teaching tool for the talk will be – “A Program For Monetary Reform” a paper dated July 1939. The co-authors of this paper include noted progressive University of Chicago economist Dr. Paul Douglas, who later had an honored and illustrious career as a U.S. Senator representing Illinois. Another co-Author of the 1939 Program – as we call this paper here - was none other than Dr. Irving Fisher, Distinguished Professor and later Professor Emeritus at Yale University, where Fisher taught Political Economy for over 20 years. Fisher earned the first Ph.D. in Economics issued by Yale, where he graduated from traditional and classical economics to become a real thought leader in political and monetary economics. A third noted co-author was Dr. Frank D. Graham, distinguished professor of Economics and International finance at Princeton University, again a thought leader of his times in the area of international trade economics, who like many of that era finally moved to the study of monetary economics. These three authors were joined by Profs. Willford King of NYU, Earl J Hamilton of Duke University and Charles Whittlesey, also of Princeton in writing the 1939 Program.

Joe will discuss this outstanding paper for its parallels with our modern money reform proposal found in the AMI-Kucinich proposed legislation as the National Emergency Employment Defense Act (H.R. 2990 of the 112th Congress). He will also discuss why and how economists today will need to harken back to the clarity of the monetary thinking of these authors – from back in the day. This new version of the 1939 Program was prepared by Kevin McCormick, a fellow Member of the Green Party U.S. Banking and Monetary Reform Committee (read it here). Joe will tell a little story of how this modern document from 1939 came to be. View presentation slides.