Brown frequently shows real insight on money issues, as she does in this excellent article: but she functions within a capitalist world where critics of the system can be impaled on the sword of unemployment if they stray too far. This piece sheds a lot of light on the issuance of money and the interests that control the issuance, but it doesn't stray too far in that it accepts the prevailing ideology that we live in some sort of valid representative government. She demonstrates this by her timid or naive concluding comment regarding the Fed's rejection of the trillion dollar coin proposal. What I have a problem with is her implication that we can work through
In flatly rejecting the Treasury’s legal tender, the Fed as representative of the banks is asserting itself as outranking the elected representatives of the people. If the Fed won’t acknowledge the coins created by the government, perhaps the government needs to charter a publicly-owned bank that will.Within the article she quotes from an excellent source, Triumphant Plutocracy, whose author, Richard F. Pettigrew, served in various public offices including in Congress as a Senator and Representative for 50 years from about 1870 to 1920. He tried, along with many others who one never encounters in public education, to tell the truth about government. (Our masters in the One Percent have carefully purged certain parts of our history.) Therefore, given the above naive statements of Brown, I wonder if she read the rest of the book. Here are excerpts from Pettigrew's introduction written in 1921:
We have a chance today to end the charade of big money gridlock politics, as well as the reign of the big banks. We have the power to choose prosperity over austerity. But to do it, we must first restore the power to create money to the people.
The American people should know the truth about American public life. They have been lied to so much and hoodwinked so often that it would seem only fair for them to have at least one straight-from-the-shoulder statement concerning this government "of the people, by the people and for the people," about whose inner working the people know almost nothing.What a few people, who understand the grand money scheme hidden behind the banking consortium that named itself the Federal Reserve, do not understand is that this privatization of money issuance is an integral part of a broader privatization scheme to own all the fruits of working people and to transform all of nature into commodities. It's called capitalism, and nothing short of a revolution will change things. This is a simple fact that too few progressives are willing to face. We must stop pretending that street protests, candlelight marches, voting, and petition signing will change anything.
....
I witnessed the momentous changes and participated in them. While they were occurring I saw something else that filled me with dread. I saw the government of the United States enter into a struggle with the trusts, the railroads and the banks, and I watched while the business forces won the contest. I saw the forms of republican government decay through disuse, and I saw them betrayed by the very men who were sworn to preserve and uphold them. I saw the empire of business, with its innumerable ramifications, grow up around and above the structure of government. I watched the power over public affairs shift from the weakened structure of republican political machinery to the vigorous new business empire. .... After the authority over public affairs had been transferred to the men of business, I saw the machinery of business pass from the hands of individuals into the hands of corporations--artificial persons--created in the imagination of lawyers, and given efficacy by the sanction of the courts and of the law. When I turned to the reading of American history, I discovered that these things had been going on from the beginnings of our government, that they had grown up with it, and were an essential part of its structure. [my emphasis]
There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels…upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all! -- Mario Savio 1964