You will not be able to plug in,
turn on and cop out. You will not be able to
skip out for beer during commercials, Because
the revolution will not be televised. ...
The revolution will be live. - From
Gil Scott-Heron's 1970 hit song The
Revolution Will Not Be Televised
.
This month, the city of
Philadelphia's school system announced that it
expects to close 40 public schools next year, and
64 schools by 2017. The school district expects to
lose 40% of its current enrollment, and thousands
of experienced, qualified teachers.
But
corporate media in other cities made no mention of these
massive school closings
- nor of those in Chicago, Atlanta, or New York
City. Even in the Philadelphia media, the voices
of the parents, students and teachers who will
suffer were omitted from most accounts.
It's all about balancing the budgets of
cities that have lost revenues from the economic
downturn. Supposedly, there is simply no money for
the luxury of providing an education for the
people.
Where will those children find an
education? Where will the teachers find work?
Almost certainly in an explosion of private sector
"charter schools", where the quality of education
- from the curriculum to books to the food served
at lunch - will be sacrificed to the lowest
bidder, and teachers' salaries and benefits will
be sacrificed to the profits of the new private
owners, who will also eat up many millions of
dollars of taxpayer subsidies.
Why does
there always seem to be enough money for military
expansion, prisons, bank bailouts and tax cuts for
the wealthy, but not enough for education-or for
jobs, housing, healthcare, or old age pensions?
These are not "welfare" but are part of the social
contract for which we pay taxes and make social
security payments.
In an article reprinted
on Truthout on May 10, titled "Why Isn't Closing
40 Philadelphia Public Schools National News?",
Bruce Dixon posed this answer:
The city has a lot of poor and black
children. Our ruling classes don't want to
invest in educating these young people,
preferring instead to track into lifetimes of
insecure, low-wage labor and/or prison. Our
elites don't need a populace educated in
critical thinking. So low-cost holding tanks
that deliver standardized lessons and tests, via
computer if possible, operated by profit-making
"educational entrepreneurs" are the way to go.
"Lifetimes of insecure, low - wage
labor or prison" - this is very close to the
"indentured servitude" that was abolished along
with slavery by the 13th Amendment to the
Constitution, ratified in 1865. The freed slaves
are being recaptured by debt, beginning with the
debt of school loans, followed by credit card
debt, mortgage debt, and healthcare costs.
As was cynically observed in a document
called the Hazard Circular, allegedly circulated
by British banking interests among their American
banking counterparts in July 1862:
[S]lavery is but the owning of labor
and carries with it the care of the laborers,
while the European plan, led by England, is that
capital shall control labor by controlling
wages. This can be done by controlling the
money. The great debt that capitalists will see
to it is made out of the war, must be used as a
means to control the volume of money. ... It
will not do to allow the greenback, as it is
called, to circulate as money any length of
time, as we cannot control that. [Quoted in
Charles Lindburgh, Banking and Currency and the
Money Trust (Washington DC: National Capital
Press, 1913), page 102.]
The quotation
may be apocryphal, but it graphically conveys the
fate of our burgeoning indentured class. It also
suggests the way out: we must recapture the
control of our money and banking systems,
including the issuance of debt - free money
("greenbacks") by the government.
Meanwhile, in other unreported
news That alternative vision was put before
a conference in Philadelphia in late April that
drew delegates from all over the United States.
The theme of the first Public Banking in America
conference, held at the Quaker Friends Center on
April 28 - 29th, was that to fix the economy, we
first need to take back the "money power" - the
power to create currency and credit.
Led
by keynote speakers Gar Alperovitz and Hazel
Henderson and highlighted in an electric speech by
12-yea-old Victoria Grant, the conference was all
about solutions. [1] As summarized by OpEdNews
editor Josh Mitteldorf:
There were two visions expressed ...
The first is the very practical idea that states
and cities around America could be rescued from
insolvency if they had their own banks, instead
of relying on commercial banks to borrow money
through bonds. Tax-exempt bond issues supply
money to states and municipal governments
typically at 5 or 6% interest, while banks these
days are able to borrow from the Fed at 1/4% per
year.
The second vision is ... the
radically subversive idea that the system we
have for introducing money into the economy is a
boon for the banks, but perhaps a major drag on
our economy. Perhaps a simple, direct system of
money creation by the Treasury Dept instead of
the Fed would put an end to cycles of recession,
and create a foundation for long-term
prosperity.
Banking is a huge leech on
our economy: 40% of every dollar we spend on
goods and services - 40% of all that we create
and all we consume - is siphoned off the top as
bank interest in one form or another
(calculations of Margrit Kennedy). The US
government is in the absurd position of paying
interest to a private bank for every dollar that
is put into circulation. The Federal Reserve
system has privatized the power to create money,
which, according to the Constitution, ought to
belong to Congress alone. Presently, interest on
the national debt costs the Federal government
$500 billion in 2011, and (because of structural
deficit spending) it is the fastest - growing
portion of the Federal budget. [2]
Five hundred billion dollars could be
saved annually just by refinancing the federal
debt through our own central bank, interest-free.
This is not an off-the-wall idea but has actually
been done, very successfully.
Among other
instances, it was done in Canada from 1939 to
1974, as was detailed by the youngest and oldest
speakers at the conference, 12-year-old Victoria
Grant and former defense minister Paul Hellyer,
founder of the Canadian Action Party. Another
Canadian at the conference, Toronto councilor
Kristyn Wong-Tam, has proposed that the Toronto
city council could improve its finances by forming
its own bank.
The direct solution to the
economic crisis, urged by veteran money reformer
Bill Still, would be for the federal government to
simply create the money it needs, as the American
colonists did by printing paper scrip and Abraham
Lincoln did by printing greenbacks.
But
cities and states don't need to wait for a
deadlocked federal Congress to act. As Wong-Tam
has proposed for Toronto, they can divest their
public revenues from the too-big-to-fail banks and
put them in their own publicly owned banks. These
banks could then do what all banks do: leverage
capital, backed by deposits, into money in the
form of bank credit. [3]
This newly
created bank money would then be available for the
use of the local government interest free (since
the government would own the bank and would get
the interest back as dividends). Among other
possibilities, the money could be used to restore
the schools. This would not be an expenditure but
an investment, as illustrated by the GI Bill,
which provided education and low-interest loans
for returning servicemen after World War II. [4]
Economists have determined that for every 1944
dollar invested in the GI Bill, the country
received approximately $7 in return, through
increased economic productivity, consumer
spending, and tax revenues.
Legislation
for public banks has now been introduced in 18 US
states, on the model of the highly successful Bank
of North Dakota (BND). Elaborated on at the Public
Banking conference by Ed Sather and Rozanne
Junker, the BND is currently the country's only
state-owned bank and has been a major factor in
allowing the state to escape the recent credit
crisis. North Dakota is the only state to boast a
significant budget surplus every year since the
economic downturn of 2008.
Ellen Brown
noted that 40% of banks globally are also publicly
owned. These are largely in the BRIC scountries
(Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa),
which also escaped the credit crisis, largely
because their public banks did not rely on
derivatives and, unlike private banks, lent
counter-cyclically to cushion their economies from
the downturn.
Conference speaker Samuel
Giles proposed that even public universities could
set up their own banks, which could then leverage
university monies for the university's own use,
rather than giving those assets away to Wall
Street to be speculated with and lent back at much
higher interest rates.
Innovative
solutions for Pennsylvania Speakers Michael
Sauvante and Mike Krauss noted that efforts are
underway in several Pennsylvania and Ohio
municipalities to create public banks. One
possibility is for public banks to take an
aggressive role in ending the foreclosure crisis
by acquiring abandoned and foreclosed homes by
eminent domain. These homes could be added to the
asset base of the bank, which could extend credit
to restore them and then sell or rent them at
reasonable rates.
Krauss noted that
Philadelphia already has a strong effort underway
to create a "land bank" - a bank to acquire,
rehabilitate and create productive uses for the
city's more than 40,000 vacant properties - and
legislation (HB 1682) has been introduced in the
state legislature to enable this effort.
But the land bank proposed is not designed
to function as a depository bank that leverages
funds into credit. Rather, it would simply work
with appropriated funds or bond revenue. This is a
positive step toward addressing a real need, but
it could be enhanced by turning the land bank into
a public bank - a chartered bank having the power
to create money as credit on its books.
The efforts for developing public banks in
Pennsylvania are being led by the Pennsylvania
Project, which was a co-sponsor of the
Philadelphia conference and is supported in its
work by the Public Banking Institute and the
Center for State Innovation. The Pennsylvania
Project is creating partnerships with other
Pennsylvania public policy organizations to
introduce legislation for a state Bank of
Pennsylvania in 2013, after elections are held and
a strong foundation of support has been laid.
Revolution without bloodshed or
war We live under a tyranny today that is
just as intolerable and unjust as that in 1776,
but violent revolution is no longer an option. Our
oppressors own the military and the media, and
their Federal Emergency Management Agency camps
are waiting for us.
If change is to come,
it must be peaceful and legal, beginning with a
revolution in the minds and hearts of the people.
The message of the Public Banking in America
Conference was that we can throw off the yoke of
the financial elite by making money and credit a
public utility; and the most feasible place to
start is at the local level, with publicly - owned
banks.
Notes 1. For Ms
Grant's speech, see here. 2.
For Josh Mitteldorf's speech, see here 3. See here. 4.
See here.
For videos of some of the speakers, see
here.
More to come. The Victoria Grant video has gone
viral, approaching 700,000 hits on various
websites.
Ellen Brown is an
attorney and president of the Public Banking
Institute, PublicBankingInstitute.org.
In Web of Debt, her latest of 11 books, she
shows how a private cartel has usurped the power
to create money from the people themselves, and
how we the people can get it back. Her websites
are WebofDebt.com and
EllenBrown.com.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
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