Given on October 28, 2011
This article is Mr. Zarlenga’s address to be delivered to the patriotic demonstrators occupying various locations in the Midwest and the Northeast in Fall 2011.
Stephen Zarlenga Address Occupy Chicago from americanmonetaryinstitute on Vimeo.
Thank you for being here – for this opportunity, and for reminding the world that our nation is on an unjust path of destruction.
We are here protesting the financial rape of our people. We are here protesting the financial rape of our nation. Is that specific and focused enough?
A battle has raged for centuries to control the money system – to dominate society through the money power.
Over time whoever controls the money system controls the nation. They can use that power to grab great wealth, but even more importantly it gives them power over the direction of society- what gets funded and what gets neglected. Will the power be used to repair bridges and levees protecting our cities and providing needed employment; or be channeled into destructive speculation – real estate and Wall Street bubbles and warfare as the banks have usually done?
The money system is society’s greatest dispenser of justice or injustice. A good one supports the creation of values for life. A bad one gives privileges to the few and disadvantages to everyone else. It obscenely concentrates wealth, causing social strife, warfare and a constellation of bad outcomes, including most of the social ills you intend to reform.
Because great power is exercised through the money system, power-hungry elements since ancient times pursued the political ambition to dominate through the money power. Societies must periodically cleanse and reform corrupted systems like ours. The main weapon in this battle is manipulation of language and thought- definitions are heavy artillery. Those benefiting from the corruption fund university economics departments to finance “professionals” (we call them economists) to promote their interests through obscure theories. That’s how this corrupt system has continued for so long, despite its repeated miserable results!
In a word, our money system has been privatized. It promotes its controllers, not the society! Monetary reform, not mere regulation, is urgently needed now. Financial abuses are pervasive and self-evident. Dominant companies focus on usury, not production. Most of our citizens are being ripped off.
Reform is based on an understanding that the nature of money is not a commodity; that money and credit are two very different things. That money is a national issue.
Define money as a commodity – as wealth – then the wealthy will control not only their assets, but the money system itself. Define money as credit, as our present system does, then the bankers will control the system, and just look at the horrible and deadly results! Define money properly as an abstract legal power, as Article I, § 8 of our Constitution does, and control over money can be brought under our system of checks and balances.
Centuries of experience and decades of research that comprise my book, The Lost Science of Money, show what is needed. Chapters 1 to 23 present historical case studies of the use and misuse of money from ancient times to the present. Chapter 24 applies those case studies to reform the present system. In 2004 the AMI began putting those rules into a law. Fifteen rewrites later, it is published as the American Monetary Act.
In 2005 Congressman Dennis Kucinich of Ohio began working on it. A month ago, he and Congressman John Conyers of Michigan introduced it into the United States House of Representatives as the National Emergency Employment Defense (NEED) Act of 2011, HR 2990. It has all the monetary reforms of our American Monetary Act:
First, it dismantles the Federal Reserve System and incorporates it into the US Treasury, where people think it is now.
Second, it removes the accounting privilege banks now have to loan their interest bearing debt into circulation by decisively ending the fractional reserve system. All serious monetary reformers know that to have real reform, we must end the fractional reserve system! The banks no longer create what we use for money.
Third, Congress creates and spends money into circulation for infrastructure, health care and education, starting with the $2.2 trillion the civil engineers tell us we need over the next 5 years.
Inflation is avoided because infrastructure and real goods and services come into existence.
Over 7 million new jobs are created!
That’s it folks. Read it! Tell your friends about it. Make suggestions to improve it if you can.
Additionally, the NEED Act will:
Limit interest rates to 8% including all fees.
End compound interest.
Pay off the National debt as it comes due.
Let the 50 states decide where one fourth of the new money goes each year through per capita federal grants.
Pay a tax-free dividend to every citizen.
Now, imagine if, instead of giving $3 trillion to the banks, they had given it to our people – that’s $10,000 for every American man, woman and child. The recession would be over.
Friends, get yourselves and your representatives out of the banker’s “trick bag.”
Get your Congressman to co-sponsor it!
Ask your national and local leaders to support the NEED Act of 2011, HR 2990!
Thank you!
Edited by Jules Brouillet
Zarlenga is director of the American Monetary Institute and author of The Lost Science of Money. Meet him at The 8th Annual AMI Monetary Reform Conference! Brouillet is a researcher for the American Monetary Institute.
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