People, Planet & the Power of Money Project for Beginners

By Nick Egnatz

Inequality continues to widen as the billionaire class ascends while poor and working people struggle simply to exist. Artificial Intelligence (AI), largely owned and directed by concentrated wealth, threatens livelihoods across virtually every sector. Debt rules daily life — student, medical, housing — and incomes are dwarfed by the cost of basic survival.

As humanity is under an all-out assault by debt, the natural world is under an all-out assault by humanity: carbon accumulates, climate extremes intensify, waters degrade into expanding dead zones, and fossil-fuel plastics saturate ecosystems.

Spaceship Earth 101 owes its title to American economist Kenneth Boulding’s 1966 paper “The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth”. Dr. Boulding defined the American economy of the time as a cowboy economy, symbolic of the seemingly limitless American plains and associated with exploitative, reckless, violent, and unjustly romanticized behavior. In sharp contrast, he coined the term Spaceship Earth, in which Earth was viewed as a closed single spaceship, lacking unlimited resources that would allow us to extract and pollute indiscriminately. (Spaceship Earth 101, Preface)

Earth is a spaceship traveling the heavens. We are its passengers, but we are not alone. All the ecosystems and lifeforms on Spaceship Earth 101 are along for the ride with us. We depend on a healthy natural world for our very existence, and exterminating species and ecosystems is done at our own peril. Yet, as people and planet face mortal danger, we are told there is not enough money to address either inequality or to protect the very planetary systems on which civilization depends.

The Lost Science of Money, Stephen Zarlenga

In the 1980s, American businessman Stephen Zarlenga (1940-2017), sensing that something was drastically wrong with our money system, dropped out of the business world and began a deep dive into the history of money. Zarlenga began to look at early systems of money as he searched for the nature of money. Along the way, Zarlenga and colleagues founded the American Monetary Institute in 1996. Alternating between the solitude of a cabin in upstate New York and a New York City residence, which gave him access to the vast resources of the New York City Library, Zarlenga researched and wrote The Lost Science of Money – The Mythology of Money – the Story of Power. Published in English by the American Monetary Institute in 2002.

Zarlenga, in his deep dive into three and a half millennia of monetary history, discovered the true nature of money as a tool of the law for social justice – the sovereign creating public money. Today, instead of creating our money publicly to benefit the public, it is now privately created, benefiting the wealthy. Our money should exist for the benefit of the people as an extension of the Rule of Law, but today, money exists because it has been privately created as a loan (credit) by a bank. Almost our entire supply of money is privately created by banks out of thin air when they make loans. When the loans are repaid, the money created in the bank’s computer accounting system is erased. It exists only as debt, consigning our people and government to endless debt.

Within the private bank-created debt-money system, there is never enough money available for the needs of people and planet. It works as an extractive system, squeezing everything from the people and the planet, sending all the wealth to the billionaire class while enslaving the masses. The entrenched Federal Reserve System, enacted by Congress in 1913, refuses even to consider an alternative. Over the years, the vast majority of those in the economics profession have also been conditioned to refuse to consider an alternative to the bank-created debt-money system, knowing that speaking out against our present, fraudulent, dysfunctional system is almost certain to result in career suicide for them. 

Stephen Zarlenga, Father of the Monetary Reform Movement

In 2009, a Vietnam vet who had become an anti-war/social justice/environmental activist read that banks create our money when they loan it to us. It seemed like the most unfair, unjust system possible, and he couldn’t believe that it could possibly be true. So, he started to look for answers. He eventually found the American Monetary Institute online and called up the AMI’s Director. Thus, AMI Director Stephen Zarlenga and Nick Egnatz eventually became friends after meeting in person in 2011 at the Occupy Chicago protest in front of the Chicago Federal Reserve Bank.

Stephen Zarlenga did so much more for monetary reform than just helping one anti-war activist from Indiana; he began and mentored an entire movement. For 21 consecutive years beginning in 2005, the American Monetary Institute has hosted an Annual Conference on Monetary Reform. The original conferences were all in-person, held in Chicago, bringing together monetary reformers from across the country and the globe to learn and share ideas. After Stephen’s death in 2017, AMI switched to Zoom conferences. While many of us who attended miss the in-person interaction with our friends, it is balanced out by being able to easily meet with monetary reformers from across the globe. The International Movement for Monetary Reform now consists of 27 member organizations spanning the globe.

Money Creation in a Nutshell

Most of us have this basic understanding of our financial (money) system:

1. Our government creates our money.
2. Banks loan us money that has been created by our government.
3. The Federal Reserve System is a part of our government.

That is the system we naturally think makes sense. But what if that is not the system we have?

Actually:

1. Our government creates less than 1% of our money, and that comes in the form of coins. [1]          
2. Banks loan us money that they create out of thin air when they make a loan to us, charging us considerable interest for their privilege to do so. [2]
3. The 12 Federal Reserve Banks are 100% owned by the private banks in the districts that they oversee. Congress created the Federal Reserve in 1913 and has the power to direct its actions, but is timid about exerting its authority. The Federal Reserve, after paying expenses and dividends to its private bank owners, does return its profits to the U.S. Treasury. However, since 2008, interest has been paid on private banks’ reserve accounts. Since then, there have been diminishing or no profits at the Fed. On the other hand, private banks keep all the profits from creating the U.S. money supply when they make loans.

We propose a system of sovereign, publicly created money which is similar to the system which we intuitively and mistakenly think we have now:

1. Our government will create all our money.
2. Bank money creation will be decisively stopped; banks will only be allowed to loan money that has already been created.
3. The Federal Reserve System will be slimmed down and publicly administered

Such a system of sovereign, publicly created money was put into Congress in 2011 as the NEED Act (National Economic Employment Defense Act). Unfortunately, it was ignored.

Also ignored was a previous system of sovereign, publicly created money referred to as the Chicago Plan that was put forward twice by distinguished economics professors during the Great Depression in the 1930s. The Chicago Plan was sent to the mailing list of the American Economic Association of university economists. 318 university economists replied: 74% gave general approval, another 12.5% gave approval with some reservations, for a total of 86.5% approval, either general or with some reservations. And only 13.5% of the nation’s university economists responding did not want to change to a system of publicly created money in the depths of the Great Depression. [3] 

People, Planet & Power of Money Project

Stephen Zarlenga continued to mentor Nick Egnatz, encouraging him to write about monetary reform. Egnatz relates,

When Stephen Zarlenga died in 2017, it was a blow to the entire monetary reform movement. But we picked ourselves up and continued our work. A sister organization, Alliance For Just Mone was formed.

Eventually, I realized I needed to do what Stephen had wanted me to do all along: write a book on monetary reform for beginners. A book that was welcoming to those looking at monetary reform for the first time. But also, a book that could stand up to the scrutiny from the economics community that would surely come.

In 2020, I went to work writing a first draft of People, Planet & Power of Money. I hired 7 test readers to review my manuscript and provide their insight. I found a development editor who advised me to break it up into 3 shorter books. Voila, the People, Planet & Power of Money Project was born:

Money Creation 101   (2023)

History of Money 101 (2024)

Spaceship Earth 101 (2025)

They are all available from Amazon on my author’s website.

Spaceship Earth 101 is also available through other booksellers.

While the three books were originally written to be read in order, it is hardly necessary. Those most interested in history, might want to start with History of Money 101. Those interested in systems or how things work might want to start with Money Creation 101. And those interested in environmental/social equality issues and the state of our democracy will probably be best served by reading Spaceship Earth 101 first.

The 101s in the titles refer to the one economics course I took in college, Econ 101. In this course, our instructor told the class that we would skip the chapter on how money is created in the Federal Reserve System, because only a handful of people in our entire country were capable of understanding how it’s done. As a young college student, I did not have enough sense to strenuously object. Today I do. This information on how money – our nation’s very lifeblood – is created is absolutely necessary if we are to remain a functioning democracy.

Money is the one thing that we all need to simply survive in modern society. In a democracy, the knowledge of who creates and how they create our money is of utmost importance to citizens. Yet the Federal Reserve System, with hundreds of economists on its payroll, is unable to explain money creation to us truthfully. Money Creation 101 does this and more, interviewing a Federal Reserve economist and two university economists, who are all unable to correctly explain how money, our very lifeblood, is created.

A just system of money is our path forward to a more just society and a healthy, thriving planet. A continuation of an unjust system of money will yield widening inequality, along with an inability to fund the environmental needs of Spaceship Earth.

References

[1] Yamaguchi, Kaoru, Yamaguchi, Yokei, Public Money, Springer Nature, 2024, p. 23.

[2] McLeay, Michael; Radia, Amar & Thomas, Ryland of the Bank’s Monetary Analysis Directorate, “Money creation in the modern economy,” Bank of England, Quarterly Bulletin, 2014, Q1,

[3] Paul H. Douglas, University of Chicago; Irving Fisher, Yale University; Frank D. Graham, Princeton University; Earl J. Hamilton, Duke University; Willford I. King, New York University; Charles R. Whittlesey, Princeton University, “A Program for Monetary Reform,” July, 1939,