100 Years Is Enough: Time to Make the Fed a Public Utility

[mother earth]

Ellen Brown is an attorney, president of the Public Banking Institute, and author of twelve books including the bestselling Web of Debt. In The Public Bank Solution, her latest book, she explores successful public banking models historically and globally

http://ellenbrown.com/2013/12/22/100-years-is-enough-time-to-make-the-fed-a-public-utility/#more-6959

100 Years Is Enough: Time to Make the Fed a Public Utility

(A few excerpts taken from Brown's Blog, must reading IMHO) Posted on December 22, 2013 by Ellen Brown

For its first half century, the Federal Reserve continued to pocket the interest on the money it issued and lent to the government. But in the 1960s, Wright Patman, Chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee, pushed to have the Fed nationalized. To avoid that result, the Fed quietly agreed to rebate its profits to the U.S. Treasury.

In The Strange Case of Richard Milhous Nixon, published in 1973, Congressman Jerry Voorhis wrote of this concession:


It was done, quite obviously, as acknowledgment that the Federal Reserve Banks were acting on the one hand as a national bank of issue, creating the nation’s money, but on the other hand charging the nation interest on its own credit—which no true national bank of issue could conceivably, or with any show of justice, dare to do.

The Treasury’s website reports the amount of interest paid on the national debt each year, going back 26 years. At the end of 2013, the total for the previous 26 years came to about $9 trillion on a federal debt of $17.25 trillion. If the government had been borrowing from its own central bank interest-free during that period, the debt would have been reduced by more than half. And that was just the interest for 26 years. The federal debt has been accumulating ever since 1835, when Andrew Jackson paid it off and vetoed the Second U.S. Bank’s renewal; and all that time it has been accruing interest. If the government had been borrowing from its central bank all along, it might have had no federal debt at all today.

In 1977, Congress gave the Fed a dual mandate, not only to maintain the stability of the currency but to promote full employment. The Fed got the mandate but not the tools, as discussed in my earlier article here.

It may be time for a new populist movement, one that demands that the power to issue money be returned to the government and the people it represents; and that the Federal Reserve be made a public utility, owned by the people and serving them. The firehose of cheap credit lavished on Wall Street needs to be re-directed to Main Street

.

-------------

Imagine that? A banking system that enriches Main St. by solving debt/taxation, budget woes, eliminates austerity, promotes growth and sustainability that actually enriches the nation as a whole, not just the 1%? Wow...how novel, a system that might actually empower this nation? Who knew....the solution has been there all along, instead we are shock doctrined to death while the new slavery replaces the old and they want this poison to go global with TPP. Why aren't we demanding the change we need is in our banking system, the Fed serves only the 1%.

Time for a new populist movement, indeed. This is why Occupy had to be squelched...it was always about this battle, from days of old, to the present. ALWAYS.

We need Congress to give a mandate to the Fed in 2014. It's time they get off their asses.

[arendt]

1. Thanks for the Web of Debt link. n/t

[mother earth]

3. Must reading, IMHO. She makes the case beautifully, real change that would transform this country.

It's not the BS of hope and change we've been spoon fed into believing "something" might actually get done.

This country is being gutted before our eyes. With TPP we are on the fast track to hell.

(Sorry, my earlier post was a repeat.)

[questionseverything]

4. i had wondered why this did not help more

from the article....Rebating the interest to the Treasury was clearly a step in the right direction. But the central bank funded very little of the federal debt. Commercial banks held a large chunk of it; and as Voorhis observed, “[w]here the commercial banks are concerned, there is no such repayment of the people’s money.” Commercial banks did not rebate the interest they collected to the government, said Voorhis, although they also “‘buy’ the bonds with newly created demand deposit entries on their books—nothing more.”

///////////////////
nationalizing the fed sounds so radical.....should we be pushing for commercial banks to "rebate"...full disclosure here,i am good with nationalizing the fed but would some "rebate" system from the commercial banks get us the same result and be easier to build a movement for?

[mother earth]

5. It is radical, and it certainly won't happen under the grip that's strangling the 99%.

However, it gives you a fuller understanding of why we are where we are.

History is repeating itself and will continue to do so until we change.

[hunter]

6. I think it's time to think beyond money...

Partly the Fed was set up to push aside the "gold is money" twits, the same twits who complain about "fiat currency" now.

After a hundred years of the Fed, I'm starting to think it's time to move beyond money. Measuring all economic activity by a single currency seems absurd to me, and by now it ought to be damned clear to everyone that huge environmental and social inequities are not accounted for even in the most "liberal" Keynesian economic systems.

Food, safe comfortable shelter, universal literacy, appropriate medical care, and freedom of speech and association ought to be the first order of any government. Anything beyond that is gravy. There are probably many ways of accomplishing such a thing without digesting every human activity down to some dollar "value."