Reviewing Ellen Brown's 'Web of Debt': Part I

This is the first of several articles on Ellen Brown's superb 2007 book titled "Web of Debt," now updated in a December 2008 third edition. It tells "the shocking truth about our money system, (how it) trapped us in debt, and how we can break free." Given today's global economic crisis, it's an appropriate time to review it and urge readers to digest the entire work, easily gotten through Amazon or Brown's webofdebt.com site. Her book is a remarkable achievement - in its scope, depth, and importance.

In the forward, banker/developer Reed Simpson said:

Debt Bondage

What president Andrew Jackson called "a hydra-headed monster...." entraps entire nations in debt. Financial commentator Hans Schicht listed how:

The solution is simple but untaken. As the Constitution mandates, money-creation power must "be returned to the government and the people it represents." Imagine the possibilities:

Brown's book explains that:

Prior to the Fed's creation, the House of Morgan was dominant in contrast to the early colonists' model. Operating out of Philadelphia, the nation's first capital, it favored state-issued and loaned out money, collecting the interest, and "return(ing) it to the provincial government" in lieu of taxes.

Lincoln used the same system to finance the Civil War, after which he was assassinated and bankers reclaimed their money-issuing power. Wall Street's "silent coup (was) the passage of the (1913) Federal Reserve Act," the most destructive ever congressional legislation, thereafter extracting a huge toll amounting to permanent debt bondage with national wealth transference from the public to private bankers - with most people none the wiser.

From Gold to Federal Reserve Notes

After the 1862 Legal Tender Act was rescinded (the so-called Greenback law letting the government issue its own money), new legislation replaced it empowering bankers by making all money again interest-bearing. Here's the problem. "As long as the money supply (is an interest-bearing) debt owed back to private bankers....the nation's wealth (will) continue to be drained off into private vaults, leaving scarcity in its wake."

Dollars should belong to everyone. Early colonists invented them as "a new form of paper currency backed by the 'full faith and credit' of the people." Today, a private banking cartel issues them by "turning debt into money and demanding" due interest be paid.

Ever since, it's controlled the nation and public by entrapment in permanent debt bondage, and they do it through the Federal Reserve that's neither federal nor has reserves. It doesn't have money. It creates it with  electronic entries, any amount at any time for any purpose, the main one being to enrich its owner banks.

This body is a power unto itself, secretive, unaccountable, and independent of congressional oversight or control. It's a money-creating machine by turning debt into money, but only a small fraction of the total money supply. Individual commercial banks create most of it.

A 1960s Chicago Fed booklet (called Modern Money Mechanics) explained how - through "fractional reserve" alchemy. It states:

As for credit market debt, William Hummel (on the web site Money: What It Is, How It Works) explains that banks create only about 20% of it. The rest is by other non-bank financial institutions, including finance companies, pension and mutual funds, insurance companies, and securities dealers. They "recycle pre-existing funds, either by borrowing at a low interest rate and lending at a higher (one) or by pooling (investor) money and lending it to borrowers." In other words, just like banks, "they borrow low and lend high, pocketing the 'spread' as their profit."

But banks do more than borrow. They also "lend the deposits they acquire....by crediting the borrower's account with a new deposit." Banks thus increase total bank deposits that grow the money supply. It amounts to a sleight of hand like "magically pull(ing) money out of an empty hat."

The US "money supply is the federal debt and cannot exist without it. (To) keep money in the system, some major player has to incur substantial debt that never gets paid back; and this role is played by the federal government." It's why the nation's debt can't be repaid under a banker-controlled system. Today's size and debt service compounds the problem, around double the amount Brown cited, growing exponentially to unimaginable levels.

Colonial Paper Money - Another Way Predating the Republic's Birth

In 1691, three years before the Bank of England's creation, Massachusetts became "the first local government to issue its own paper money...." in the form of a "bill of credit bond or IOU....to pay tomorrow on a debt incurred today." This money "was backed by the full 'faith and credit' of the government."

Other colonies then did the same, some as IOUs redeemable in gold or silver or as "legal tender" money to be legally accepted to pay debts. Cotton Mather, a famous New England minister, later redefined money - not as gold or silver, but as a credit: "the credit of the whole country."

Benjamin Franklin so embraced the "new medium of exchange" that he's called "the father of paper money," then called "scrip." It made the colonies independent of British banks and let them "finance their local governments without" taxation. It was done in two ways, and most colonies used both:

Prior to this system, Pennsylvania lost "both business and residents (for) lack of available currency." With it, its population grew and commerce prospered. The "secret was in not issuing too much, and in recycling the money back to the government in the form of principal and interest on government-issued loans."

Colony-based British merchants and financiers objected strongly to Parliament. Enough so that in 1751, King George II banned new paper money issuance to force colonists to borrow it from UK bankers. In 1764, Franklin petitioned Parliament to lift the ban. In London, Bank of England directors asked him to explain colonial prosperity at a time Britain experienced rampant unemployment and poverty. It's because Colonial Scrip was issued, he stated, "our own money" with no interest owed to anyone. He added:

Having just rebelled against British taxation, colonists weren't about to let Congress tax them. Speculators took advantage and traded Continentals at discounts enough to make them worthless and give rise to the expression "not worth a Continental."

How the Government Was Persuaded to Borrow Its Own Money

John Adams once said: "there are two ways to conquer and enslave a nation. One is by the sword. The other is by debt." The latter method is stealth enough so people don't know what's happening and submit to their own bondage. Openly, nothing seems changed, yet a whole new system becomes master "in the form of debts and taxes" that people think are for their own good, not tribute to their captors. That's today's America writ large.

After the Revolutionary War, "British bankers and their Wall Street vassals" pulled it off by acquiring a controlling interest in the new United States Bank. It discredited paper scrip through rampant Continental counterfeiting and so disillusioned the Founders that they omitted mentioning paper money in the Constitution. Congress was given power to "coin money (and) regulate the value thereof, (and) to borrow money on the credit of the United States...." It left enough wiggle room for bankers to exploit to their advantage - but only because Congress and the president let them.

Alexander Hamilton bears much blame, the nation's first Treasury Secretary and Tim Geithner of his day (1789 - 1795). He argued that America needed a monetary system independent of foreign control, and that required a federal central bank - to handle war debts and create a standard form of currency. In 1791, it was created, hailed at the time as a "brilliant solution to the nation's economic straits, one that disposed of an oppressive national debt, stabilized the economy, funded the government's budget, and created confidence in the new paper dollars....It got the country up and running, but left the bank largely in private hands" - to be manipulated for private gain, much like today. Worse still, "the government ended up in debt for money it could have generated itself."

Instead, it had to pay interest on its own money in lieu of creating it interest free. Today, Hamilton is acclaimed as a model Treasury Secretary. For Jefferson, he was a "diabolical schemer, a British stooge pursuing a political agenda for his own ends." He modeled the Bank of the United States on the Bank of England against which colonists rebelled. It so angered Jefferson that he told Washington he was a traitor. It fostered a bitter feud between them with Jefferson ultimately prevailing.

Hamilton's Federalist Party disappeared after 1820 while Jefferson and Madison's Democratic-Republicans became the forerunner of today's Democrats after the party split into two factions, the Whigs no longer in existence and Jacksonians that by 1844 officially became the Democratic Party. Shamefully they veered far from Jacksonian and Jeffersonian principles.

For his part, Hamilton wasn't entirely bad. He stabilized the new economy and got the country on its feet. He restored the nation's credit, established a national currency, and made it economically independent. However, his legacy has a dark side - a "privileged class of financial middlemen (henceforth able) to siphon off a perpetual tribute in the form of interest." He delivered money power into private hands, "subservient to an elite class of oligarchical financiers," the same Wall Street types today holding the entire nation hostage - in permanent debt bondage.