An Economy of Our Own: Avoiding Another Jack-Ass Monetary Crisis

November 15, 2011 in MAKE ECONOMICS SEXY: Get Mad, Join Up, Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , | Leave a comment

The great feminist Andrea Dworkin put it this way in 1981. “Money speaks,” she said, “but it speaks in a male voice.” We know this better than ever since 2008. As the financial fog begins to lift on the fraud and gobbledygook of economic Wall Street and Washington, it feels a little like walking in uninvited on a jack-ass frat party. Eeee-ooooh. You actually do that?! How can anyone be so stupid??!!

Feminists aren’t the only ones to notice how male-dominated this crisis has been. Ken Hirschhorn, a trader at Long-Term Capital Management, a prominent hedge fund whose collapse in 2000 foreshadowed 2008’s melt-down, told Sheelah Kolhatkar of New York Magazine, “I don’t think greed is gender specific. But if you ask me whether Long-Term Capital Management would have blown up if there were more women involved in the decision-making process? A woman might have said, ‘Let’s not assume we’ll never be wrong.’ ”

Kolhatkar also talked to Joe Herbert, a neuroscientist who studies finance at Cambridge University. He said, “The banking crisis was caused by doing what no society ever allows, permitting young males to behave in an unregulated way. Anyone who studied neurobiology would have predicted disaster.”

The question is what to do about the reeking mess left behind. How do we prevent another monetary jack-ass crisis? Growing numbers of critics agree we cannot continue to do more of the same. But how can women make a difference?

NO GIRLS ALLOWED!

Financial headlines in September sounded an alarm about the small ranks of women in high places shrinking even further. When Sallie Krawcheck, CFO at Bank of America, left without explanation, Nathaniel Hopper at The Los Angeles Times, wrote: “Krawcheck joins a string of other top female bankers to leave the upper echelons of financial companies in recent years. Other notable exits include Heidi Miller, who in June stepped down as one of two women serving on JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s operating committee…Citigroup Inc.’s Terri Dial last year stepped down as head of the company’s consumer banking operations; former Morgan Stanley co-President Zoe Cruz resigned from the investment bank in 2007; and Lehman Brothers Chief Financial Officer Erin Callan was pushed out just before the firm collapsed.” In another corporate story in September, New Yahoo CEO, the respected and outspoken Carol Bartz, got an unprecedented surprise, fired by her board on the phone. Bartz responded to reporters with rare candor: “These people f***ed me over,” she said.

Nor do Washington women fare better. In a late-September interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, author of Confidence Men, Ron Suskind of The Washington Post, reported a “hostile environment for women” in Obama’s White House and “not just on economic matters.” Christina Romer, who stepped down as chair of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors in August of 2010, told Suskind there were alternative views (like hers), not listened to. Elizabeth Warren, head of FDIC who expected to be placed at the head of the new consumer protection agency she designed, instead got run out of town. She’s now running for the Senate from Massachusetts.

 

Overly influenced by a testosterone-ruled Wall Street, Washington appears too polarized to work and too moneyed to represent most women. Last year’s Supreme Court “United Citizens” ruling monetized speech in our political process; that’s as good an explanation as any for Occupy Wall Street’s move to give the 99 percent a voice. It is hard to discover how many women number among the protestors, but clearly many are reaching for change. (See Occupy sidebar.)

TWO WOMEN ADDRESS MONEY CREATION

While protests happen, real economic solutions for preventing another crisis are being offered by two unlikely women, neither of them economists: lawyer Ellen Brown of California and city planner Gwendolyn Hallsmith of Montpelier, Vermont. Both women propose creative and local solutions, which are exactly the kind of economics that women can most easily access. Their ideas promise a common meeting place closer to home, and big economic changes that could provide greater security and a role for revitalizing state democracies.

To introduce Brown and Hallsmith’s ideas, it’s important to understand that both women critique our current method of creating money. You may not have realized it, but none of the world’s governments now directly issues its own currency—including our U.S. dollars. Instead, a global system of central banks (like our privately owned Federal Reserve) trade in government bonds with global investment banks. (For more on this, see the September/October issue of Vermont Woman for “Dollars on the Make,” or www.gaiaeros.com/2011/10/17/the-federal-reserve-and-dollars-on-the-make/)

Government bonds create loans to our nation’s Treasury. The Treasury then authorizes the issue of Federal Reserve notes, essentially IOUs, or the dollars in your wallet. Banks also create dollars when they loan to businesses, mortgagees, states or municipalities. Dollars are created by banks and backed by the Fed – but only through debt.

The Fed would argue this is a good thing. They call it “the multiplier effect.” A bank need only hold cash (or Federal Reserve deposits) equal to about 10 percent of its total customer deposits; the rest can be loaned. Thus, each dollar soon becomes $9. However, as Charles Eisenstein recently wrote in Reality Sandwich, “[I]n the last decade various kinds of non-bank lending have skirted the margin reserve requirement through the alphabet soup of financial instruments you’ve been hearing about in the news. The result is that each dollar of original equity has been leveraged not to nine times its original value, as in traditional banking, but to 70 times or even more.”

Both Brown and Hallsmith argue this financial gaming has little to do with the real economy where you and I live. Money based on leveraged air creates a currency and financial debt-products, essentially a pile of IOUs. Everyone must pay the principal and somehow find added interest. This demands the economy constantly grow until it collapses. Periodic crashes are inevitable with this kind of scheme. Numbers grow exponentially without limit, yet the planet and human beings cannot. As Hallsmith said to me recently, “The trouble with this system is that it requires some people to lose.”

BROWN’S PUBLIC PARTNERSHIP BANKING

Ellen Brown had written a number of books about health before she wrote about our money system. Confronting a corporate healthcare industry seeking profits introduced her to economic realities here in the U.S. “There can’t be anything more inefficient,” she said in a recent interview. “You’re going to private hospitals, private doctors, using profit-seeking drug corporations, and they all have a vested interest in sickness.”

Brown’s most recent book, Web of Debt: The Shocking Truth about our Money System and How We Can Break Free, makes money an understandable subject. Her protagonist is a young girl we all know, Dorothy from Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz. Brown’s illustrations from Oz help to make monetary history and theory both readable and inspiring.

While Brown knows the history of the Federal Reserve System’s behind-closed-doors secrecy, and while she outlines long-term reforms, she is after efficiency. She envisions a more immediate way to circumvent debt. In 2011, she founded the Public Banking Institute. Its goal is to persuade states to better utilize the existing banking system for the public good.

During her research, Brown had discovered a surprising exception to the rule of Wall Street. The nation has only one state-owned bank, the Bank of North Dakota (BND), founded in 1919, about the time when the Wizard of Oz and monetary issues were both popular. BND’s existence has made all the difference to North Dakotans.

What difference exactly? The only state in the union to maintain a continuous budget surplus since the 2008 Wall Street crisis is North Dakota. While other states like Minnesota and California suffer near-bankrupt crises, and 48 states, including Vermont, suffer shortfalls, profits from BND have contributed more than $300 million to North Dakota’s state coffers during the past ten years. That’s a sizeable amount for a state with only 25,000 more people than Vermont.

Brown reported recently in The Huffington Post, “[North Dakota’s] balance sheet is so strong that it recently reduced individual income taxes and property taxes by a combined $400 million and is debating further cuts. It also has the lowest unemployment rate, lowest foreclosure rate and lowest credit card default rate in the country, and it hasn’t had a bank failure in at least the last decade.” North Dakota does produce oil, but she says a study done by the Center for State Innovation, from 2007 to 2009, revealed the BND added nearly as much money to the state’s general fund as oil and gas tax revenues did.

Brown says, “North Dakota is a conservative red state, not the sort you would expect to be engaging in government enterprise. But the conservative justification for a state-owned bank is that it preserves state sovereignty, allowing the state to be independent of Wall Street and the Feds. The BND is not a business competitor of the local banks but partners with them, helping with capital and liquidity requirements. It participates in loans, provides guarantees, and acts as a sort of mini-Fed for the state.”

Not only does the BND return its profits to the state’s general fund, it helps to build the state’s tax base by funding local businesses and the infrastructure that attracts and supports them. Brown explains. “Among other resources, it has a loan program called Flex PACE that allows a local community to provide assistance to borrowers in areas of jobs retention, technology creation, retail, small business, and essential community services. The BND also furnishes a credit line to the state itself, one that is effectively interest-free, since the state owns the bank.”

Typically, credit lines get extended in times of emergency or whenever state department budgets or municipalities face unforeseen circumstances. Vermont’s recent budget deficit and the flooding due to Hurricane Irene would be good examples. Having a credit line to the state’s own bank allows state and local governments to avoid exorbitant rates on Wall Street and answers pressures to privatize or reduce services in order to avoid downgrades from rating agencies.

STRENGTH IN LOCAL DIVERSITY

Brown’s vision is to help establish a network of state and local publicly owned banks, which can create affordable credit and provide a sustainable alternative to the current high-risk centralized private banking system on Wall Street. Such a network, she says, would act in the public interest to stabilize credit crises like our current one. It would also resist asset devaluations, build infrastructure, and fund expansion of critical industrial-productivity capacity – most importantly, education and local jobs, which could be adopted as bank mandates.

Her most recent research examines a network of state and municipal public banks in Germany. These were created in the shadow of post-World War II economic devastation and are credited with helping Germany make its remarkable recovery. In 2010, while the rest of Europe staggered, Germany reported a 3.6 percent increase in its economic growth. Its exports led the world until 2009, when China (population 1.3 billion) narrowly overtook Germany (population 82 million.) How was Germany able to do this?

Brown writes, “One overlooked key to the country’s economic dynamism is its strong public banking system, which focuses on serving the public interest rather than on maximizing private profits. After the Second World War, it was the publicly owned Landesbanks that helped family-run provincial companies get a foothold in world markets.” Municipal banks administered by state banks are all part of this system.

Thanks to growing interest in public banking, Brown’s own state of California just passed a bill to study the feasibility of a state-owned bank like North Dakota’s. California’s economy is the largest in the nation and surpasses all but eight countries. A California State Bank in the public interest would have huge influence nationally. Governor Jerry Brown vetoed the bill, preferring to use the existing legislative committees on banking, rather than establish another “blue ribbon” commission. About this Brown says, “I think it’s a good thing. Commissions are where ideas go to die. We don’t need a study, we need a public bank.”

Fourteen other states have submitted bills to create banks similar to North Dakota’s, and Brown monitors them all. You can learn more about public banking and legislative developments, and imagine its potential for the people of Vermont, at www.publicbankinginstitute.org/.

Gwendolyn Hallsmith

HALLSMITH’S NEW CURRENCIES AND LOCAL MUTUAL CREDIT

Gwendolyn Hallsmith of Montpelier has worked on environmental and sustainability issues for more than 20 years. Working with citizen-action groups and Greenpeace, she began to realize protesting wasn’t enough. “We had to have a concrete, alternative way to do things,” she said to me recently. Her books, The Key to Sustainable Cities: Meeting Human Needs, Transforming Community Systems and the workbook Taking Action for Sustainability, draw on substantial local and international work experience. At their core is the idea that systems can either integrate or disintegrate communities unaware of their power.

Hallsmith had long struggled to understand economics in her sustainability work. She came to see it as a global system only recently, while living and working overseas. “I actually lived through the currency crash in Kazakhstan,” she says. “I was still getting paid in U.S. dollars, so it didn’t have the same effect on me as it had on my neighbors. We were working closely in neighborhoods and the woman next door saw her pension – which had been enough to cover her rent and her heat and her food – become enough for a loaf of bread. It was devastating.”

Hallsmith’s most recent book, Creating Wealth: Growing Local Economies with Local Currencies, tackles economics more directly. She met her co-author for this work, the Belgian economist who helped create the Euro, Bernard Lietaer, when organizing a national sustainability conference. Lietaer objected to an imposition of a 20-minute time-limit on his talk; it would take him much longer to explain why our monetary system cannot help but undermine sustainability. Hallsmith later asked if he would explain it to her. “He paused, and I could hear him sigh,” she recalls with a laugh. Then he proposed she commit to monthly hour-long phone conversations for at least six months. She agreed.

Lietaer recently told me he believes women will be key actors in redesigning a more livable economy. “Right now the economic structure is hypermasculine,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean it has to remain that way. Women can change it.”

It was during those mentoring sessions with Lietaer that Gwen learned about money creation. “Debt-money” is their name for the dollars we take for granted as national currency. In their book, Hallsmith and Lietaer propose several currencies that could work in partnership with dollars, depending on a community’s needs. Wealth, they explain, can be created locally by developing and supporting real resources, such as small business systems, energy systems and food systems in communities, by setting up asset exchanges, electronically tracked.

One currency they discussed at a recent presentation at Montpelier’s City Hall is called a Commercial Credit Circuit, or “C3.” It confronts small business owners’ most pressing problem, cash flow. Small businesses invest in products or services, yet when a sale occurs, payment from a vendor may not come for 90 days. C3s utilize invoices, insured and tracked by a bank, as cash. The invoices can be converted to dollars whenever needed, but a supply chain paid by this currency need not wait for payment. This creates money without debt, rewarding small business initiatives. Uruguay and Brazil are already successfully using C3s; recently Uruguay even moved to accept C3s as payment of taxes.

Another business currency they discuss is the 75-year-old Swiss WIR, which means “we” in German. The WIR enables businesses to freely exchange goods and services, helping each other to thrive, instead of only competing. In 2008, the value of WIR trades among its 65,000 members amounted to $1.58 billion.

 

Creating Wealth is not an easy read from cover to cover, but its ideas can be sampled depending on your interests. Each area seems well supported by real community endeavors put into practice by Hallsmith and others. This isn’t so much economic theory as application in action. The authors discuss food currencies to support local food production and farmers, an arts currency to underwrite creative endeavors and even an educational exchange that enables young students to gain money for college tuition through tutoring younger students.

Hallsmith’s work in Montpelier has already helped to create two time banks—dollar-free exchange systems in which services are measured according to the time they take to render. The Onion River Exchange in Washington County (www.orexchange.org/) has more than 400 participants who have traded 6,000 hours of service in 75 different categories. Coordinator Allison Underhill said she couldn’t easily translate those hours into dollar amounts because the services range so widely, from legal advice to sewing, from house-painting to childcare.

The other time bank is more specific: the REACH Care Bank (www.reachvt.org/contact-us/), administered by the Coalition of Vermont Elders (COVE), allows for the exchange of eldercare services. Hallsmith, whose father is an enthusiastic new member, points out that time currencies supply difficult-to-value human connections that people need to be healthy and happy. One member’s testimonial reads, “I gained not just the hours I banked, but I also met two wonderful people.”

The underlying philosophy here counts people as assets and assumes everyone has something to offer. It redefines caring work as beyond price and still values reciprocity. Hallsmith has succeeded by valuing networks and helping others to understand systems.

Most recently she has put together a monetary policy group for Vermont intended to develop concrete recommendations for Governor Shumlin and the legislature. The committee, which includes a legislator and well-known business leaders, will explore state banking in the public interest; complementary currencies that Vermont communities might be wise to develop; the possibility of moving deposits to local Vermont banks; and financial innovations successfully used in other strapped states. Monetary reform of the Federal Reserve is another of the committee’s concerns.

Hallsmith takes the crisis in our monetary system seriously. While she values a diversity of approaches, she also works with a sharp sense of humor: “I’ve got a set of metaphors that describes different monetary strategies: Moving your money from Wall Street to a local credit union is a little like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titantic. Public banking is a way of cashing in on a portion of the Titantic’s ticket-sales, but creating local Vermont currencies? That’s like making ourselves life-rafts.”

First published by Vermont Woman, Nov-Dec 2011

See http://www.vermontwoman.com/articles/1111/monetary.shtml

LINKS TO LEARN MORE

Public Banking Institute http://publicbankinginstitute.org/

Bank of North Dakota http://www.banknd.nd.gov/

Germany’s Public Banking

http://www.opednews.com/articles/THE-PUBLIC-OPTION-IN-BANKI-by-Ellen-Brown-111014-55.html

Reach Care Bank, Montpelier http://reachvt.org/about-us/

Onion River Exchange, Montpelier www.orexchange.org/

Creating Wealth: Growing Local Economies with Local Currencies

http://www.newsociety.com/Contributors/H/Hallsmith-Gwendolyn/

The Federal Reserve and Dollars on the Make

October 17, 2011 in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

My education about money began with my high school trip to Washington, D.C., where I learned that the U.S. Mint stamps our coins and the Bureau of Engraving prints big sheets of our government’s money. But who places the order for printing those dollars? Who tells them how many to print?

If you look more closely at George Washington in your own wallet, you’ll find the explanation. You’ll also learn why there’s never enough. Your dollar bill is labeled a Federal Reserve Note. Who, or what, is the Federal Reserve?

The Fed is the U.S. central bank in charge of our monetary policy. Created by the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, the Fed is actually our third central bank; our currency was the subject of much debate until the 20th century. The Federal Reserve System now works hand in glove with the U.S. Treasury. Think of the Federal Reserve as our nation’s banker. It’s where we, the people, represented by our Treasury, deposit our tax payments to the government, and where the Treasury writes out checks to pay for government business. Simple enough.

NOT.

SIDEBAR: What does the U.S. Treasury do?

The Department of the Treasury manages federal finances, currency and coins; collects monies due to the U.S. and pays all its bills; manages Government accounts and the public debt; supervises national banks and thrift institutions; advises on domestic and international trade and tax, financial, monetary and economic policy; enforces Federal finance and tax laws; investigates  and prosecutes tax evaders, counterfeiters and forgers.

Our Treasury hasn’t always worked in tandem with a central bank. Presidents Jefferson and Jackson believed a private central bank was dangerous and worked to end them. Abraham Lincoln wanted a central bank, but issued Greenbacks directly from the Treasury to win the Civil war. Greenbackers lost later elections to supporters of the Federal Reserve Act. John F. Kennedy was the last President to issue a currency directly from the Treasury – in the form of silver certificates.

The Board of the Federal Reserve, five Governors in all, is appointed by the President for terms of 14 years. Its current chairman is Ben Bernanke. But the Federal Reserve is far more than one bank, or one board. It is a system of 12 regional banks, all privately owned, overseeing other private banks. This system serves as your bank’s banker, too.

The most powerful regional bank is the New York Federal Reserve. When the 2008 bailout was proposed late in George W. Bush’s term of office, Tim Geithner at the New York Fed sat next to then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson when those deals were cut to save Wall Street banks. Now Geithner has moved over one seat and taken Paulson’s place, while the man at his side, William Dudley, took Geithner’s place. All three men worked first with Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street investment bank often nicknamed “Government Sachs.” They call this “continuity.”

(Editor’s note: In 2008, Stephen Friedman, former chairman of Goldman Sachs, was given a waiver to chair the board of the New York Fed without giving up his job at another investment company. He was forced to resign when he made $3 million on his Goldman shares with a single insider phone call.)

The Federal Reserve describes itself as “an independent entity within the government, having both public purposes and private aspects.” It is supposed to keep bank meltdowns from happening, setting the interest rate for all the nation’s banks. It also makes money available to banks at a discount when needed. Despite its official-sounding name, the Fed’s purpose is to create a profit for its banks’ shareholders. They are in business, not government, interested in profit, not public service.

In 1997, the largest shareholders of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York were Chase Manhattan Bank, Citibank and Morgan Guaranty Trust Company. Citibank belongs to the Rockefellers, and the Morgan fortune has run Wall Street since the turn of the 20th century. J.P. Morgan is the gentleman caricatured in your Monopoly game with a mustache and monocle. Monopoly gaming continues on Wall Street. In 2000 Morgan and Chase merged into mega-big Morgan Chase. In 2008, Citibank was bought by Bank of America, growing even larger, and in 2009, another Morgan arm, Morgan Stanley, bought up Smith Barney. These are all global investment brokerage banks.

That word global matters. The New York Fed’s board works to deliver profits – most often in developing countries, not here. Yet the New York Fed enjoys a particularly close relationship with the U.S. Treasury. By contrast, the government is not a shareholder in the Federal Reserve System. The system’s complexities mask an insider setup for enhancing private fortunes. At the end of 2010, the Fed’s 12 reserve banks held $2.4 trillion in government debt, mortgage-backed securities and other investments, according to a combined financial statement it published in March 2011.

 

A BANK BY ANY OTHER NAME REMAINS A BANK

The Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury print money only after the Fed first conducts “open market operations.” This means it auctions government “securities,” a broad name for Treasury bills, notes and bonds. These are all names for “loans” of varying lengths of time, but unlike loans, bonds can be traded worldwide, a global commodity.

The Fed’s own website acknowledges the New York Fed plays “a unique role.” All the “open market operations” – the buying and selling of U.S. government securities to influence money and credit conditions in the global economy – are carried out by the New York Fed. When the U.S. Treasury decides to “intervene in the foreign exchange market, it is the New York Fed that carries out the intervention.” (Foreign exchange markets and the dollar’s devaluation was the subject of the previous article in this Vermont Woman series.)

The New York Fed conducts daily conference calls with “primary dealers” (think Goldman Sachs), after which they call in the Treasury in Washington. Then, depending on who wins the daily 10-minute auction, the Fed credits the accounts of its commercial member banks, and our Treasury agrees to pay them interest on the bonds, or money they have lent us.

Your dollar bills are literally “bills,” created as “credit.” The back side of credit is debt. Our dollars come into circulation through a global credit card minus the plastic.

“Purchasing bonds” is a fancy way of saying those “primary dealers” just arranged to broker our debt, sold to the highest bidder; in the old days, Goldman Sachs might have received a certificate of the “bond,” or an agreement that “binds” the debtor. (The word “bondage,” a form of indentured slavery, grows from the same root.) So our Treasury is held by its bonds, purchased by the highest bidder and then traded around the world. Only then can dollars be printed as “notes.” A note is another word for debt.

Am I sure about this? When I first learned about this currency sleight of hand, I didn’t believe it could be true. I would fact-check and discover in what way it was wrong. But all the economists I read, and the Federal Reserve itself, confirmed that we live with this indebted system of money creation. Money created out of debt can only be paid by expanding the economy in future, further exploiting Mother Nature on a global scale, and laboring ever more to pay back the principal, plus interest added on.

No wonder there is never “enough.”

MAYBE MONEY DOES GROW ON TREES

My initial disbelief found credibility in a similar reaction from a Texas Representative elected in 1929, the year of the Great Crash. For 40 years, Wright Patman chaired the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Banking and Currency, and for 20 of those years, he sought to repeal the Federal Reserve System. The Congressional Record of the House of Representatives (pages 7582-7583) records his September 29, 1941 speech. Compare his plain-spoken words to the mysterious mumblings of Allan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke at the Fed.

When our Federal Government, that has the exclusive power to create money, creates that money and then goes into the open market and borrows it and pays interest for the use of its own money, it occurs to me that that is going too far. I have never yet had anyone who could, through the use of logic and reason, justify the Federal Government borrowing the use of its own money… I am saying to you in all sincerity, and with all the earnestness that I possess, it is absolutely wrong for the Government to issue interest-bearing obligations. It is not only wrong: it is extravagant. It is not only extravagant, it is wasteful. It is absolutely unnecessary… I believe the time will come when people will demand that this be changed. I believe the time will come in this country when they will actually blame you and me and everyone else connected with this Congress for sitting idly by and permitting such an idiotic system to continue. I make that statement after years of study.

All of this feels shocking, but here’s something even more amazing. The money, which our banks loan out, doesn’t actually exist in a vault somewhere, as you might have assumed from the name Federal Reserve. Instead it is created on the accounting books, as a “fiat” currency. Fiat means something like Captain Picard’s command on Star Trek: “Make it so” – although banks possess no holodeck, only the power Congress has given them.

A booklet published by the Chicago Federal Reserve in the1960s, “Modern Money Mechanics,” puts it simply: “The actual process of money creation takes place primarily in banks… Banks do not really pay out loans from the money they receive as deposits. If they did this, no additional money would be created.”

Ellen Brown explains, in her wonderfully readable book Web of Debt, that contrary to popular belief, loans become deposits, rather than the reverse. You might feel like Alice in Wonderland reading this, going through the looking glass where everything is backwards. But the Fed’s own booklet says it too: “Banks can build up deposits by increasing loans… so long as they keep enough currency on hand to redeem whatever amounts the holders of deposits want to convert into currency. This unique attribute of the banking business was discovered many centuries ago. It started with goldsmiths…”

Europeans traded in gold and silver coins, Brown reveals. These were hard to transport and could be stolen unless locked up. So goldsmiths offered safes and provided paper receipts for the stored gold. These eventually came to be traded, easier to handle than cartloads of bullion. Over time, goldsmiths noticed only a few people at any one time came back to get their gold. So they began loaning it out many times over, though it wasn’t theirs, by keeping only a fraction on reserve for those who might come for it. Naturally, they got rich pretty quickly. They also got used to loaning out what wasn’t really there.

Wealthy goldsmiths soon gained legal sanction for their “fractional reserves,” becoming bankers. Bankers gained not only the right to charge interest for their issues of paper receipts for more gold than they had, but eventually a monopoly on issuing national currencies, as first happened in England in 1694.

If you’re wondering why a nation needs to “borrow” its currency, why it can’t just issue the money it needs, you’re not the first. You have, in fact, hit on a long-standing historical argument in the U.S., beginning with the Revolution, Shay’s Rebellion and the abolishment of two central banks. In the shadow of the Great Depression, just 16 years after the Federal Reserve System was installed to prevent banking crashes—unsuccessfully—Wright Patman called out a Governor of the Federal Reserve Board, Marinner Eccles. He asked him to explain how the Federal Reserve got its money.

“We created it,” Eccles answered.

“Out of what?”

“Out of the right to issue credit money…That is what our money system is. If there were no debts in our money system, there wouldn’t be any money.”

This helps throw light on that debt ceiling argument in Congress. Private fortunes and other central banks lend us “their” money and charge us interest for using our own dollars. Web of Debt author Brown explains that the federal debt hasn’t been paid off since the presidency of Andrew Jackson nearly two centuries ago. Since the Treasury no longer issues certificates backed by silver or gold or even interest-free greenbacks, our debt is really just another name for our country’s money supply. I hate saying it, but Dick Cheney may have been right when he said the federal debt doesn’t really matter – though surely it matters what we choose to go into hock for, and to whom we are bonded and owe added interest.

SIDEBAR: Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has been at the forefront of demanding more accountability from the Federal Reserve. He helped win the recent move to audit the Fed, and thanks to an amendment he added to the recent Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Protection Act, the Fed is now required to be less secretive in its “interventions,” which are handled exclusively by the New York Fed. In April, under the new rule, Sanders discovered they had bailed out the Bank of Libya: a troubling revelation in the face of our military conflict there. He said, “It is incomprehensible to me that while creditworthy small businesses in Vermont and throughout the country could not receive affordable loans, the Federal Reserve was providing tens of billions of dollars in credit to a bank that is substantially owned by the Central Bank of Libya.”

NEW IDEAS WITH OLD VALUES

Despite what my high school visit to Washington taught me, most of our currency is never printed; it’s electronically entered in banks’ accounting books. Even post-2008, few Americans understand that the Federal Reserve System is only backed by private accounting numbers and our indebtedness. Vermont’s Senator, Bernie Sanders, has begun to unveil the secrecy of this system, by demanding an audit by the Government Accountability Office; in late July, the GAO found not only the $700 billion bailout we heard about on the news, but behind the scenes what Sanders called “a jaw-breaking $16 trillion in financial assistance to some of the biggest financial institutions and corporations in the world.”

A growing number of reformists on the left and the right hold this present monetary system at least partly responsible for the upward sweep of money to a very privileged clique at the top of that economic pyramid on your dollar bill. With a currency created out of debt to the richest global fortunes, consider that eyeball looking at you as “truth in lending.” Only a pyramid scheme could create a national currency out of everlasting debt and a misnamed façade to give the public false impressions. It’s still hard to believe, I know, so go ahead and do your own fact-checking.

We’ll never know what would have happened if Wall Street had been left to fend for itself in 2008. In history, the wealthiest banks and its patrons have generally been protected by nations. A fascinating recent book, The Lords of Finance by Liaquat Ahamed, brings to life those global central bankers behind events we generally think of as political. It shows how the Great Depression grew out of World War I reparations, negotiated by financial elites in Britain, France, Germany and the U.S. These men knew each other well and often worked together, though more often they each sought to come out as the nation on top.

This biographical account of macroeconomics shows a privileged and exclusive male world where private fortunes finance nations, and where “meltdowns” and failures can bring nations to their knees with resulting violence. Its history is littered with frauds, scandals, and suicides over fortunes lost, and it becomes clear Hitler’s rhetoric could only enter the mainstream of Germany when its middle class had been decimated by punishing payments of debts too high to pay. The cost of the urge to come out “on top” did not accrue to nations’ central bankers, but to their nations’ people, who suffered hardships and the viciousness of hatred and war.

Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke’s tight relationship with Wall Street must help in those daily market operations with “primary dealers,” now grown bigger than ever with taxpayer help. We can’t know, of course, because minutes of meetings at the Fed are still not public. Until recently, Americans paid little attention, put to sleep by the mumbling drone of the Fed’s evasions. There are signs of more Americans waking up – including women with new dollar dreams to tell us about.

THIS ARTICLE FIRST APPEARED IN VERMONT WOMAN SEPT/OCTOBER 2011. 

For further reading on:

Sanders and the Fed

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-bernie-sanders/a-real-jaw-dropper-at-the_b_791091.html

The Fed’s Profits

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/23/business/economy/23fed.html?_r=2&ref=business

The New York Federal Reserve Bank and Open Market Operations

http://www.newyorkfed.org/aboutthefed/fedpoint/fed32.html

Ellen Brown’s Web of Debt

http://www.webofdebt.com/

Wright Patman

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_Patman

Liaquat Ahamed’s Lords of Finance

http://www.economist.com/node/12884939?story_id=12884939

Photos of the Fed http://www.federalreserve.gov/generalinfo/virtualtour/photos.cfm?WhichSlide=1

There’s Only One Sphere! Take Capitalism to the Max

December 6, 2009 in MAKE ECONOMICS SEXY: Love Your Life, MAKE ECONOMICS SEXY: Partnership, not Domination, MAKE ECONOMICS SEXY: Remember Gender | Leave a comment

Lately I’ve been ignoring the news, which has been way too full of reports about the “recovering” economy and Wall Street rebounding, while jobs continue to be lost. Here I was, hoping this economy might end up being murdered with an axe. But it appears an unrepentant U.S. capitalism remains here to stay, thanks to Bernanke, Geithner, and the same old privileged male players. So now I’m thinking, if you can’t beat’em, then maybe we’d best join them. America, we need to further commodify our children! This idea may be the secret to families at last gaining a little ground in a capitalist nation.

Our current economic system maintains an old 19th century myth. It continues to separate the private realm from the public realm, as if there should be a wall between them. What do I mean?  This economy faithfully separates our sacred families from the profanity of commerce, the better to avoid sullying the one thing remaining holy: our families and homes. (You know, the same American homes that were sold around the world in derivatives because our financial system was betting against them.)

Victorians of the 19th century held that men were a better fit for the profane and “public sphere” of politics and commerce. Only the fittest could survive there. Regardless of what Darwin had said about what the “fittest” actually meant, Victorian businessmen interpreted it as only “natural” to dominate by whatever ruthless measures were needed. Economic victories went to the strongest and the meanest.

Women, on the other hand, were the weaker sex and needed to be kept out of danger in the “domestic sphere.”  Too much thought in her pretty little head, and all her blood would go to her brain, instead of her womb, leading to hysteria. Doctors diagnosed any woman’s nervous condition the result of a starved uterus. Created by God to be mothers and home-makers, women might be oft-pregnant nurturers (birth control would land you in jail), yet she must remain morally impregnable. Far removed from the vile economy, women provided a safe haven for the harried worker whenever he came home. Here the children could receive proper moral guidance and social enrichment.

Thus the Victorian woman, though officially “dependent” and penniless, was persuaded, despite all appearances, that it was really her hand, not his, that rocked the world by rocking the cradle. And if you believe that, I have a big nuclear warhead I’d like to sell you—and by the way, honey, what’s for dinner?

Women’s liberation has meant so far that women have made some inroads into the male commercial sphere. Yet the domestic sphere of the USA remains stolidly separate from the commercial realm, operated by pure-hearted volunteerism. So today many middle-class homes sit largely unoccupied–except as a place to go after work or school to microwave and watch television.

Ever since the 1970s, Mom has been slaving away on the job market, same as hubby. Was it we feminists who accomplished this hideous undermining of American family life? Some claim so, but statistics clarify a larger reality. Most women went to work to keep the family nose above water. Katha Pollitt reports from A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything (the Shriver report from the Center for American Progress):

For the first time in our history, women are now 50% of the paid workforce…Four in ten moms are primary breadwinners… 80% of moms contribute a major chunk of family income.”

That’s because, since the 1970s, men and women workers as a whole have barely remained afloat in a leaky boat. Wages have not kept up with cost-of-living expenses and two workers and 80 hours of labor are now needed to cover a single mortgage payment. Elizabeth Warren reported this week in The Huffington Post what is now common knowledge. Yet what to do?  Since 1970, male wages have been static, and the working class has lost ground. About this, says Warren:

But core expenses kept going up. By the early 2000s, families were spending twice as much (adjusted for inflation) on mortgages than they did a generation ago — for a house that was, on average, only ten percent bigger and 25 years older. They also had to pay twice as much to hang on to their health insurance.

To cope, millions of families put a second parent into the workforce. But higher housing and medical costs combined with new expenses for child care, the costs of a second car to get to work and higher taxes combined to squeeze families even harder. Even with two incomes, they tightened their belts. Families today spend less than they did a generation ago on food, clothing, furniture, appliances, and other flexible purchases — but it hasn’t been enough to save them. Today’s families have spent all their income, have spent all their savings, and have gone into debt to pay for college, to cover serious medical problems, and just to stay afloat a little while longer. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elizabeth-warren/america-without-a-middle_b_377829.html

Meanwhile, a sensible 32-hour work week standard, passed by the Senate in 1939 when unions had some say, died and was deeply buried, along with big unions. To many economists, including John Maynard Keynes, shorter work weeks had seemed a logical way to address technology’s elimination of man-hours needed to produce what we need. In fact, a glut of material goods on the market had helped deepen the Depression.

Instead, technology’s dividend went to the wealthy, not to the working class. Instead, workers traded in wages for consuming, sold on technology’s wonders at home (the before-mentioned television and microwave). With wages going lower and jobs going overseas, families had to find a third service job or get a college education or increase their work hours, and that still didn’t help with disappearing health insurance benefits. Sometimes people got sick, and in the USA, we like to pretend we never were children in need of care, and will never get old. The best-managed American health insurance celebrates its “low utilization rates.”

Health maintenance became increasingly unaffordable for the middle and working class, both in time and money. Exercise, physical labor and home-cooked meals get sacrificed to fast-food and big-box consuming. http://healthyamericans.org/reports/obesity2009/ Long commutes to centralized shopping and work required maintaining not one car, but two. http://financialplan.about.com/cs/cars/a/101Car.htm

The mythical wall between private and public has contributed to our families’ impoverishment in time, health and money. “Separate spheres,” maintaining that wall betwen public and private, was a sexist  idea that was never true and today seems only truly ridiculous. Radio and TV beam into our homes with commercial messages around the clock. Everyone is already twittering and blogging and being our friend on facebook, 24/7. If we ended the old prudish division between that old commercial sphere and the even older family sphere, women (and children) might at last become more visible players in the world economy.

So let’s face it like capitalists:  Without our economically impoverished private family sphere, none of the public economic sphere could happen. The hand that rocks the cradle does rock the world—it just doesn’t follow that such a high mission should never sully itself with financial reward. By that reasoning, doctors, nuclear physicists and CEOs should also eschew high salaries.

Therefore, I propose that when anyone comes of age to get a job—or signs up in the armed services to put their lives on the line for our economic freedom and more global consuming—the parents who invested their time and their money into that individual’s healthy and socialized upbringing should get a dividend. The worker should get wages for his or her time, yes, but the worker’s family ALSO should get a dividend as a return on their long-term investment in the economy.

I didn’t come up with this idea all on my own. Marilyn Waring first noticed the skewed accounting of nations as a minister of Parliament in New Zealand and wrote about time and money in If Women Counted. http://www.amazon.com/If-Women-Counted-Feminist-Economics/dp/0062509403

An economics professor at Florida A&M University, Shirley Burggraf, proposed a social security dividend for parents. You can still get her book. http://search.barnesandnoble.com/The-Feminine-Economy-and-Economic-Man/Shirley-P-Burggraf/e/9780201479614

Other countries have a much more public discussion about public/private home issues. The Brits have openly exposed this false division between “spheres,? though I haven’t seen them connect it to 19th century dualism.  James Robertson says we need a “SHE” economy (A Sane & Healthy Economy) http://www.jamesrobertson.com/neweconomics.htm and All Work and No Pay; Women, Housework, and the Wages Due, edited by Wendy Edmond and Suzie Fleming, makes a similar case. Check out Nora Castaneda and the Women’s Development Bank of Venezuela, too. http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/global/nc_wdb_int.html

Who would pay for this Family Investment dividend? All of us Americans should. We all benefit from every healthy worker’s contributions of time and attention to the economy. Family time invested in future workers could be figured as a percentage of the GDP. Likewise, that time’s returned dividend could be calculated as a 20-year bond investment in the future GDP. It goes like this: Whenever a family member raises kids to adulthood, they loan the country their time, money and hope in the future economy.

Whenever they loan time and comfort to retired or ill workers past their prime and on their way out, they’re also investing in the economy. In a capitalist country, hospitals and funerals contribute significant economic activity—and none of it would be possible without old, sick and dying workers.

Now, if your kid winds up in a crack house, naturally, the cost of curing him or sending him to prison would have to offset your parental dividend, but as soon as he was up and working on the job again, your dividend could come back, along with his wages. Your dividend could also be used to set aside against your future aging and eventual demise. Traditionally this has always been the arrangement between generations: you invest in me, your kid, and I’ll take care of you when you’re old. This was an economic activity long before there were dollars..

If your kid arrives on the job market with an MBA or a law degree, so much the better.  A bigger dividend should reflect your larger investment in the American economy’s future well-being. Women and/or men who decide to invest time in families and America’s little future workers might also get tax breaks, same as they do now—only more on the level that companies do who come into town and provide a community with jobs. Yes, that kind of tax-break: property tax relief, assistance with operative set-up, abeyance of municipal charges.

What are jobs anyway? Only places where a worker’s time is invested in making products—consumed and used by whom? More of us workers! The economy is one huge sphere of workers and worker production, not two separate walled-off ones—not two at all!

If our government “of the people” had a mind to do it, Americans collectively might even match the expected parental time and financial investment, while the kid is growing up. We do this to some extent now with property tax investments in our public schools. The U.S. is the only major industrialized country not to provide some public funds for maternity leave. Other countries even invest in public health care, public childcare or flexible hours for working parents.

Misnamed, “socialism,” these capitalist investment policies recognize the financial importance of healthy youngsters, who grow up into healthy workers and managers and entrepreneurs tomorrow. Taxes on corporations and the owners of production could help pay for our collective investments in family, since they’re the ones who will benefit most financially from utilizing tomorrow’s responsible and healthy employees.

But if this doesn’t appeal to you, then consider the Tobin Tax, an idea put forward by Nobel-prize winning Yale economist, James Tobin, in the 1970s. His idea was buried and discredited by “free-market” bullies. But as nation after nation went bust, the dangers of currency game-playing kept resurfacing. If global speculators, gaming national currency systems and markets like a  casino, endangered national livelihoods—why not discourage recklessness by taxing international transactions? Paul Krugman just reiterated the idea again in The New York Times (Nov. 27, 09). http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/27/opinion/27krugman.html

According to South African economist, Margaret Legum, in her book, It Doesn’t have to be Like This, the Tobin tax would be impossible to evade and at a modest 0.25% would generate $250 billion on the now current $2 trillion in transactions. That’s $250 billion every year. That might fund our investing in our families—at least so long as we don’t allow yet another open-ended war to be declared. (War, it turns out, is profitable for everyone but the people involved.)

Yes, okay, the result of all this parental and shared community investment in our families would mean literally selling our kids’ into eventual wage-slavery. But we capitalists live with that reality already. Parents just don’t get a return on their investment. The Tobin tax could mean more public investment in this parental dividend; it could mean working class kids could get an education without putting their life on the line. Wars could not be waged without boys and girls desperate for money and meaning for their lives. Monetized caring could gain enough respect that more could decide to afford it more often.

Only because we’ve mentally kept the family sphere separate from the commercial sphere, do parents, especially moms,  get little but blame and expenses for their parental time, or for caring for their own parents when they’re past their prime. So tear down the last fragments of that old 19th century wall dividing private and public spheres! Freedom! More capitalism for all!

Not separate at all, two spheres separated by a man-made wall has always been a convenient lie. For the families who continue to make this economy work, it’s been an expensive lie. We live as wage-slaves on the job and come home to a second shift of unpaid slavery. And for what? Capitalism! Our families need more of it!

Sarkozy and the GDP

October 8, 2009 in MAKE ECONOMICS SEXY: Gaia Counts, MAKE ECONOMICS SEXY: Love Your Life | Leave a comment

Did this subject make the headlines in YOUR favorite paper?  Were people talking about this at the water cooler where you work? I wish they were!

In late September, the G20 got together in Pittsburgh—pretty dull so far, huh?  In itself this expanded economic gathering marks a shift in power to China and India and the Southern hemisphere’s “developing” nations. But on the way there, the President of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, who is considered a conservative among the foundational G8, made a “passionate plea” for a broader vision of the economy.

Sarkozy has created a special commission to revamp France’s national statistics-gathering. A new study by economists Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen has argued that calculating the Gross Domestic Product as a measure of the economy gives nations a skewed policy picture. I was jumping up and down, I was so happy hearing this!

Why? Because I love freedom-fries?  Freedom-Fries--Other-Stupidity-Well-Have-ToBecause French workers get 36 vacation days and a 35-hour work week, not to mention national healthcare?  Yes, yes, all that—but no, I was most excited because this is something Marilyn Waring, a young New Zealand Minister of Parliament, said 30 years ago!

She published a great book titled If Women Counted. Waring toured the world, talking about the way the GDP and its statistics left earth’s and women’s foundational contributions economically invisible. As a result, she said, our mother earth and family/social life didn’t “count” in our economic measures, and she showed the damaging results in the environment, food systems and our quality of life. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_Waring

We are still living with those GDP results now.  This story from Joe Wisenthal, a business writer here in the U.S., calls the GDP a “crappy” measurement. See the details of why The Business Insider published this here.

http://www.businessinsider.com/sarkozy-is-right-gdp-measures-suck-2009-9

As an American, you might also be interested in this story on Sarkozy, the GDP, and Canada’s positioning compared to the U.S.  in The Star in Toronto. By Martin Regg Cohn, it’s titled “How to measure Gross National Happiness,” something Bhutan is already doing.

http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/695624

As I’ve often argued on this blog, biology gets left out of the “economy” all together with GDP measurements. All the garbage gets externalized to Gaia. Passionate parents and lovers of all kinds get lumped together and misnamed the “informal economy.” The informal economy only cares and sacrifices and enjoys and supplies the gifts of life and makes an economy socially possible. Our juiciest, most valuable times, the reasons we work at all, should be renamed the “essential economy,” the “foundational economy.”  I call it our Eros economy because, without our deepest passions valued,  we’re dead without knowing it.

Eros’ love economy can be made visible. Some countries, like Canada and Britain, are already shaping policy around more holistic time and movement accounts. Without these measurements, our lives and the earth’s will remain the unnamed starving elephant in the room. A few will make out like bandits and leave the rest of us footing the bill. The GDP enables this description of the economy as warfare, something Waring also pointed out.

The GDP was originally designed by John Maynard Keynes, to help England rationalize and finance World War II. Later adopted by the U.N., the GDP’s measurement system has reliably helped world leaders view and sell war as something good for the economy.

Duh. No wonder. It conveniently leaves uncounted any debits that come from war, including environmental destruction, or damage to women and children and families and social functioning. And here’s the bonus. According to the GDP, the more expensive the war machinery, the more profit we get to add to our Gross Domestic Product! So corporations can count on fat national contracts—and citizens get to pay for it. Click here to see how much we’ve spent already on the two most recent wars. http://costofwar.com/

.The GDP is not only skewed and crappy, it is destructive.

Nothing’s Deadlier than a Woman’s Laughter

August 13, 2009 in MAKE ECONOMICS SEXY: Get Mad, Join Up | Leave a comment

Shadow BankingIf you’d like an informed woman’s view of Wall Street history and culture, but can’t stand to read all their blather, I urge you to visit Eva Chrysanthe’s website, PimpMyAdamSmith.com. Just click on the link to her site, listed to your left. I love all of her work for its serious economic fun.

My Life in Shadow Banking tells Eva’s personal New York encounter with the repeal of Glass-Steagall, a bill established post-Great Depression to separate the contradictory aims of banking for protection and the stock market’s risk-taking. Mixing the two had led to the 1929 Crash and Glass-Steagall ended the temptation of a bank’s overselling certain worthless securities because of “compensation.”

That bill was skirted by the Federal Reserve under the leadership of Alan Greenspan, who had been a director for J.P. Morgan just before he got on board at the Fed in 1987.

Banking lobbies had failed at getting Congress to repeal Glass-Steagall, but after two years under our Uncle Alan, the Fed’s board narrowly decided to double the original limit on revenues banks could earn selling securities. Neatly done—and without pesky legislation. In 1990, J.P. Morgan became the first bank granted permission to underwrite securities, so long as it didn’t exceed 10% of revenues. Coincidence, huh?  The door was opened. The pigs came into the kitchen. You can see all their shit on Frontline, which names names, if you’ve the stomach for it.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/gsearch.html?q=wall+street&x=0&y=0

But first go to Eva’s site for a mean laugh at our naivete and Clinton’s. Whether it’s Endless Desire, her brief history of luxury, or her sassy accounts of Adam Smith and Milton Friedman, you’ll get some relief from economic dyspepsia. For instance, about Godfather Poppa Friedman and his era of “Greed is good,” (a view shared by Uncle Alan), she says:

Like the biblical fall of man in reverse, Milton Friedman allowed us to bid our shame goodbye because, as we learned from Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics, the pursuit of our own wealth could be good for our fellow man. It was like finding out that french fries were “slenderizing.

www.pimpmyadamsmith.com/WhoWasSmith.html

Adam Smith, of course, is the most important demi-god of economics. He wrote The Wealth of Nations the same year the Declaration of Independence was signed by our founding fathers. But as Eva reminds us, he was no god, but a man who lived with his mother. She says few who quote him today have read his 620-page mind-numbing tome. Milton Friedman, Reagan and Bush’s economic advisor, who resuscitated Smith’s “invisible hand,” left a lot of his other parts dead and buried. His contemporaries thought he was dangerously liberal. Smith believed in government regulation.

Eva Chrysanthe is an accomplished artist and writer at work on a graphic novel whose working title is Adam Smith: An Economist Falls in Love with the Universe.

Domestic Violence, Domestic Flim-Flam

July 31, 2009 in MAKE ECONOMICS SEXY: Partnership, not Domination | Leave a comment

I can’t get excited anymore by the bizarre mixture of bad news and Wall Street’s opportunism, up and down.  I noted the dog-and-pony show Ben Bernanke put on The News Hour, defending the Federal Reserve’s right to call itself Federal, while refusing to end its secrecy. This secrecy, the Fed says, is necessary. We cannot name names. Any woman sexually abused or threatened will recognize this line.

A group of international, private bankers got Congress to put the U.S. Treasury and us taxpayers in bed with the Fed, but if you’re like me, you’ve begun to suspect it’s an abusive relationship. It’s all beginning to sound like blah, blah, blah, when I know damned well women citizens and taxpayers had better not trust them.

Gloria Steinem, in a talk to about 500 Vermont Woman readers, there for the newspaper’s 5th anniversary, http://www.vermontwoman.com/articles/0609/pubmessage.shtml added a short note of caution to a celebration of what women have wrought in a generation’s time. She asked us to remember what we’d learned from the domestic violence movement. The most dangerous time for any woman in a violent relationship comes when she’s ready to leave.

Take a look at women’s “economic” relationship with the U.S. We continue to be the majority of the poor. Our pay in the job market continues to lag behind men’s, particularly if we are mothers. Clustered in the lower income rates, we get fewer tax advantages, and see half our tax money spent for guns and weapons at the Pentagon. When viewed closely, this economy seems essentially rooted in violence, not only buying and selling weapons to wage war—a very profitable business—but with public policies that arm the rich all over the world—and rob and exploit women and our planet.

red powercontrol

Worldwide, whether the war is economic or literal war, women get overrun, disregarded, or when hurt or killed, counted as “collateral” damage, if at all. Victims, women get blamed and discounted, whether for giving birth, or giving birth to the wrong gender—or as, here, for  not demanding higher salaries, or for being hurt and misshapen by a multi-million dollar advertising industry that “targets” us.

Try drawing a few parallels between physical violence and economic violence, as you look at the Wheel. Male Privilege prevails on Wall Street.  Using Coercion and Threats—that was Paulson’s method for getting TARP money, and now Bernanke is trying to Isolate us,  refusing us information we have a right to know.  You could say Blue Dog Democrats (almost exclusively white males) are Using the Children, calling a public healthcare plan “unaffordable.” These are methods many men will recognize, too. It’s not how healthy relationships or healthy economies function. It is anything but a democracy.

As women grow more economically and politically “independent,” watch out for danger and backlash. Women are much more than victims. We’re survivors and remarkably resilient, in a better position than ever to begin to make a difference in how our economy shapes up in future. Obama has put together a more diverse team in Washington than usual, but we women who aren’t economic wonks also need to put our heads together and do some safety-planning. We may need to build some economic shelters of our own.

For some bad but honest news about the economic perps, see Max Keiser’s July 28, 2009 article

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/max-keiser/the-shadow-banking-pyrami_b_245988.html

For hopeful policing, see Rep. Bernie Sanders’ letter to the Fed’s Ben Bernanke and his bedfellow, Timothy Geithner. The Fed has made 2.2 TRILLION available to international financial firms since Bears & Stern and Bernie wants to know—to whom did it go?  He suspects Goldman & Sachs paid back its TARP funds so it could give out outlandish bonuses—in other words, The Fed may have made money available to them under the Fed table, to pay bonuses to the guys who hit us with the latest crash.

http://sanders.senate.gov/files/letter-071509.pdf

Come home, Obama, Nancy and Paul–and clean up the mess

June 19, 2009 in MAKE ECONOMICS SEXY: Get Mad, Join Up, MAKE ECONOMICS SEXY: Partnership, not Domination, Uncategorized | 1 comment

I love Obama, yet it’s disappointing to hear about his new economic plan—namely putting some regulation back in place to protect the status quo for the biggies. Okay, he is creating a new agency for protecting financial “consumers,” which I suppose is a nicer term than “debtors.” Still, why not call it a Citizen Protection Agency?

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105718039

Worse, he now seeks more responsibility be given to the Federal Reserve. Hey, wasn’t the Fed and its board busy meeting behind closed doors the whole time our economy “approached the brink?” For years?

For those millions of Americans losing their jobs, the economy has already gone over the brink and down a dark hole. Economist Paul Krugman, who seems controversial because he’s at least aware of this, told PBS NewsHour June 17 he wanted a stronger plan, especially on financial compensation schemes. He was countered, in the ping-pong style that often poses as “objectivity,” by a banking lobbyist.  Yet as writer Cynthia Kouril at FireDogLake points out, they agreed on one item, something I noticed, too:

Ms. Casey-Landry [the lobbyist] repeatedly made the point that major features of the financial crisis were not caused by regular banks or savings and loans, but rather by unregulated mortgage companies, or what she called “shadow banks,” and by the role of players like AIG, and by what she called “systemically significant institutions” (which I took to mean anybody deemed “too big to fail”).

See Cynthia Kouril’s article and links at http://firedoglake.com/2009/06/18/financial-re-regulation-grades-are-in-and-obamas-plan-gets-a-d/

It’s “systemically significant institutions” closely tied to the Fed to worry about. This system weighs most of us and the nation with debt impossible to pay. Who will regulate the biggest boys, who still bet on and play volatile games with currency values in international hedge funds?  They “systemically” bring nations to their knees, only “normally” it’s been other nations. (If those are any example, hyperinflation will come next.)

Kouril thinks millionaire Democrat and Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, is right. We need a big investigation. Now that S.386 has passed, write to your elected representatives and help make them do it right. http://www.speaker.gov/newsroom/legislation?id=0306

While you’re at it, check out bill H.R. 1207, The Federal Reserve Transparency Act, first proposed by Ron Paul, a Republican millionaire on the far right.  http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h111-1207

I’ve yet to see how Paul’s retro ideas about re-establishing a gold standard for money-creation would help women “consumer” citizens, who are now being urged in TV ads to cash in their gold jewelry to pay bills. But holding the Fed accountable is a first step toward a financial housecleaning we badly need to have.

The Fed board now needn’t report out to the public what they decide at their board meetings or even who they loan billions to—given they are not really a government agency, but a system of private banks, posing as one. They create money as debt notes out of thin air. Paul wants audits at least.

On that note, William Grieder, a courageous writer, one who makes economics readable, has been critiquing a financial aristocracy for decades. He says he’s felt like “a bag lady out on the street corner, waving a placard to passing crowds.” So, hey, he relates. But now he has a new book—out from Rodale, not a NY publishing house. He believes this may be the crisis to wake us up from our slumber. If you find yourself feeling cynical and hopeless, William Grieder feels your pain, but says, Get up off your butt!

We’d better, before the thieves go on to the next robbery. Read an excerpt here and then go get Come Home, America. http://williamgreider.com/comehomeamerica

Male Anger vs. Girly Fear–that old schtick

June 15, 2009 in MAKE ECONOMICS SEXY: Love Your Life, MAKE ECONOMICS SEXY: Partnership, not Domination, MAKE ECONOMICS SEXY: Remember Gender | 1 comment

Thanks to my daughter, Kris, for this Mother’s Day article for investors in The Wall Street Journal. In it, columnist Jason Zweig advises men to share the reins to their investment portfolios with their wives. He opens with:

“Fess up, fellows: The masters of the universe have turned out to be masters of disaster. No matter which aspect of the financial crisis you consider, there is a man behind it.”

His article shows women investors tend to take fewer risks, trade less often and stick with their investments, leveraging less. He quotes psychologists who claim men are more likely to react to crises like our current one with anger, while women react with fear. That’s one way to put it, I guess.

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB124181915279001967-lMyQjAxMDI5NDExMTgxMTE5Wj.html

I think it more likely women understand their investments are only part of the universe. They’re well aware of how little trust should be put in arrogant men more interested in using money for self-aggrandizing sport, than in an honest return for smart investments in a future worth living. Acting with caution should only be called sensible—exactly Zweig’s point.

If our economy is a war, I’m deserting!

May 4, 2009 in MAKE ECONOMICS SEXY: Love Your Life, MAKE ECONOMICS SEXY: Partnership, not Domination | 1 comment

Warren Buffett, our country’s most famous investor, buffetts-warcalled last fall’s bank meltdown “an economic Pearl Harbor.” CNBC’s Becky Quick reminded him of this and asked him where we were, May 1st. Buffett looks like the Good-Humor Man with bodyguards, here, rattling his sword for stockholders, stating:

At that point, you could have lost the war. And there was a strike at the heart of the American system, the financial system…We got past that. Some of the right decisions were made then, so I give people great credit for doing that. The war isn’t over, though.”

Metaphors help explain what’s going on—but who exactly is the invader? Who is warring with whom? The last 30 years have seen a shameless increase in billionaires with hedge-funds, most of them “true-blue” American white males who employ CEOs. Meanwhile American wages and jobs have gone down or out of the country.

Game-players on Wall Street may love war. Winners get rich and become king of the mountain. But why should anyone fight for any king’s mountains of paper and electronic blips? Americans gave up kings when the Constitution was signed. I thought “the heart of the American system” was democracy, not “the financial system” Buffett here cites.

I am underpaid and overworked, aware of the growth in poverty around the world and among kids here at home. My adult children need 80 hours of labor to support their households, not the 40 hours my parents’ needed. Give me growing, living metaphors for any system you expect me to swallow.

Warren, make love, not war! Grow us money on trees! Dig out the cut-worms of debt. Weed out Wall Street’s witch-grass, choking out the flowering of our buzzing, living lives. I won’t rally round the flag for bogus war-mongering. I prefer what Pogo would have said about the economy last September and now:  “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Flight or Fight?

October 23, 2008 in MAKE ECONOMICS SEXY: Get Mad, Join Up | Leave a comment

Most of us are bored by economics, or scared of it. Our eyes glaze over at the abstract language. When we can’t understand, we feel stupid. We turn away or get angry.

Getting angry may be the healthier response. Americans have gotten angry lately, learning about mortgage frauds and the financial wizards who sold these around the world with obscure language no one was sure they understood. Who benefits form complex financial schemes? Not you and me. We just got stuck with another $700 billion bailout for investment banks, demanded by the same Wall Streeters whose political party rails against “socialism.”

Here’s some enlightening graphs that show the phenomenal increase in the net worth of millionaires and billionaires since 1983, about the time when conservative economist Milton Friedman first influenced “neo-liberalism” worldwide. Pay special attention to the long blue bar on the right.

http:www.theglobaleducationproject.org/earth/wealth.php

The weathiest 2% now own nearly half the world’s wealth, thanks to a so-called free market that favors the “redistribution” of money upward. Friedman’s ideas influenced Reaganomics here over 20 years ago. In the days of kings, neo-liberalism used to be called laissez-faire economics. Both reject regulation and interference with the rich. However, now that the richest banks are in trouble, these same neo-liberals run to us taxpayers. Those of us who believe in a more democratic economy (like Paul Krugman, I hope) think this is a good idea–but not with a continued sense of royal privilege for CEOs and speculative investors.

Here’s a link to a quote from John Maynard Keynes, an early 20th century economist whose ideas were overthrown by Friedman: “Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking.”

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/?8dpc

We all lose when women’s work gets discounted

October 27, 2008 in MAKE ECONOMICS SEXY: Remember Gender, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Over the past 30 years, we’ve seen a huge movement of women and mothers into the job market worldwide. Two wage-earners were always needed in American working-class families, but you’d expect our middle-class families to be more solid as a result of this new demographic shift. Instead we’ve seen an increase in bankruptcies; we’ve seen stagnant wages failing to keep up with rising costs. I hope you’re asking, why? (More on this later.)

In just about every economic category, women come up with the short end of the stick. Their reproductive and emotional work costs them in real time and expenses, as they rear the next generation’s workforce and maintain family and community connections foundational to a working economy. Yet this work continues to be unpaid at home or underpaid when out in the job market. The crucial work of childcare and homemaking and maintaining community doesn’t even register as “economic,” though clearly it is. We wouldn’t have an economy without it. It’s time to ask ourselves, what’s this economy for anyway?

www.timeday.org/economyconference/

This problem of invisible but essential work isn’t a “women’s issue.” It affects women and men and the families from which every human has benefited. We all need care at the beginning and end of our lives–and sometimes in between. This family care would be easier if the marketplace paid women fairly. The Institute for Women’s Policy Research reports that equal pay for the average woman would contribute $5710 to her household. Imagine. Over a 35-year working life, she would gain $210,000. Would this be a bad thing for your family? www.iwpr.org/pdf/payequityrelease.pdf

By now you’ve probably heard about The Washington Post story on a University of Florida study that appears to demonstrate male chauvinists with traditional ideas about women get paid $8500 more a year than you wussy men with fair-minded views. But not so fast! Bonnie Erbe Scripps, with Howard News Service, makes this observation (among others):

“Allow me, dear reader, to step back for a moment and agree that perhaps one of the study’s conclusions is correct: Egalitarian men face pay discrimination in the same way women, whether traditional or not, apparently face it. But perhaps that can be explained away because egalitarian men, like many of their egalitarian female counterparts, don’t want to put in 80-hour weeks. Perhaps they, too, want time to fully participate in the rearing of their children? Heaven forfend: Could that explain the pay gap these authors claim to have found?”  findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4188/is_ai_n28117313

I once complained to my husband, when I couldn’t find a pair of matched sox for work, “I need a wife!” He was very sympathetic, answering, “I know! I need one too!” We’re living in a wifeless world. Are you?

A $700 Billion Bailout–But Every Year?

October 31, 2008 in MAKE ECONOMICS SEXY: Get Mad, Join Up | 1 comment

We’ve been upset the past few weeks by Treasury Sec’y Paulson’s dashed-off request to Congress for $700 Billion to bailout investment banks “too big to fail.” But as an article in the International Herald recently pointed out, we hear no discussion by either Presidential candidate of the  $700 Billion forked over to the Pentagon year after year, to maintain its humongous global operations. Any Democrat’s mention of any cuts to their bloated budget leads to accusations of being unpatriotic or even not-real.

Excuse me, but $700 Billion here, $700 Billion there, it begins to add up. Can we really afford to police the world? Should we?  Money can’t make up for smarts and frequent reality-checks.

Americans didn’t die for the privilege of taking on the role of policeman.  Freedom and democracy go hand-in-hand with peace-making and enabling others’ empowerment. This is a legacy we can all celebrate, especially our soldiers–but not without the support of courageous and skillful diplomacy. We need an adequate State Department budget and the political will to use it, as Ed Carroll points out–and also checks and balances on those secret budgets of the CIA, which Carroll doesn’t mention here.

www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/06/opinion/edcarroll.php

Hazel Henderson’s cake diagram never made more sense

November 11, 2008 in MAKE ECONOMICS SEXY: Partnership, not Domination | Leave a comment

If AIG’s latest request for more bailout billions wasn’t the frosting on the cake, I’ll take the cake and eat it too. I’m referring here to Hazel Henderson’s famous economic cake that clarifies what now gets left out of the economy. You and me and our mother earth.

My pages about Gaia and Eros parallel what Hazel calls the “non-monetized” half of the economy, her two bottom layers. Without them, whatever you call them, Eros or the Love Economy, Gaia or Earth, we’d all be pretty flat. You’ll also see the monetized filling, the “underground economy,” so necessary to the addictions Barbara Brandt talks about in Whole Life Economics. What tops our present economic cake, of course, is that “private sector,” the folks who get all the frosting. Lately they’ve been helping themselves to the “public sector’s” bowl of batter too. But neither sector could sweeten a thing without the non-monetized work “the rest of us” do.

Henderson says we’ve outgrown this hierarchical paradigm. A futurist, Hazel Henderson now travels the world, speaking about a new transformative information age. http://hazelhenderson.com

totalproductivesystemindustrialsociety2

Now that the bailout is jumping out of the cake, buck-naked, (see more on this below) let’s hope this overblown economic party is close to being over. What we need is a designated driver.

Plus all of us should get a lick from that frosting spoon.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/11/business/11aig.php

Credit, credit everywhere and not a drop in debt

November 13, 2008 in MAKE ECONOMICS SEXY: Partnership, not Domination | Leave a comment

Stocks fell again when Paulson changed the plan for that $700 billion of our tax dollars AGAIN. Market analysts say it’s the uncertainty of the Treasury “script,” this one the third change of direction.

Other federal officials just turned down a bank request to forgive 40% of credit card debt for borrowers unlikely to be able to pay. For banks, getting 60% would be better than zero. Instead Paulson urges them to give us yet more credit (translate: debt).

What’s a poor investment bank to do? Here’s a quote from an accessible overview from The Columbus Dispatch in Ohio:

Earlier yesterday, federal bank regulators issued a joint statement jawboning banks to start lending money to consumers. But Alex Merk, president of Palo Alto, Calif.-based Merk Investments, a mutual-fund firm, said that there are many factors that are making banks hoard capital.

“They don’t trust their own balance sheets, and why lend to consumers when the consumer sector is going down the drain?” he commented.

www.columbusdispatch.com/live/content/national_world/stories/2008/11/13/economy_story.ART_ART_11u-13-08_A1_C1BSD01:html?sid+101

Everywhere Paulson and his peers look, nothing appears as it seems.  People who have been trying to manage more with less have lived with this reality for a while. For the past decade, while expenses went up and jobs lost ground, I’ve wondered if the news reported was about the same economy I knew. Paulson’s meeting up with insecurity somehow seems a comfort. What exactly SHOULD we trust about an economic system that creates 98% of its currency by private bank debt? Since no one creates the added interest money that bank loans demand, someone is always left in the hole.

Pull the curtain back on the Wizard

November 13, 2008 in MAKE ECONOMICS SEXY: Partnership, not Domination | 1 comment

Most people believe our government creates our money and that the Federal Reserve, that oversees it, is a government agency.  Wrong on both counts. Surprised? I felt like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, reading Attorney Ellen Hodgson Brown’s substantive and well-documented book, Web of Debt. Its history and its grasp of current events makes it comprehensive, and, even better, Brown makes it readable.  You’ll learn about the Populist roots of that Frank Baum story we all thought we knew so well. It turns out the yellow-brick road was the gold bullion of bankers at the turn of the century and Dorothy’s slippers weren’t ruby slippers; they were populist silver. Technicolor made them red for Judy Garland removing the meaning of what William Jennings Bryan and his followers campaigned for.

Brown thinks it is time we finish the work they began to bring justice to national monetary policy.  Her book’s subtitle hints at solutions: The Shocking Truth about Our Money System and How We Can Break Free. The book delivers on this.  Credit, which sounds so nice, only creates more debt, but our government could create debt-free money just the way people now believe it does.  Brown also has a blog.

http://www.webofdebt.com/

Another blog with an informed view of economics you’ll recognize:

http://www.dollarsandsense.org/blog/2008

Economic Bully-Boys No Longer a Secret

November 19, 2008 in MAKE ECONOMICS SEXY: Get Mad, Join Up, MAKE ECONOMICS SEXY: Partnership, not Domination | Leave a comment

This review of SHOCK DOCTRINE originally appeared in the April 2008 issue of Vermont Woman under my byline  At the end of my review here, you’ll find links to Naomi Klein and her views on economics since publication, and a video of her if you haven’t got time to read her astonishing book.naomikleinpaperbackweb

Canadian writer Naomi Klein strikes lightening at dark corners of contemporary U.S. history with her new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Her work, while not easy to read, brings cathartic relief. She makes terrible sense of the worst pictures of recent America: the Twin Towers, Abu Ghraib and New Orleans’ Katrina. She lights images flashed world-wide over the past generation, ranging from the fall of East Germany’s wall to Tiananmen Square, from Walesa’s solidarity vault over a fence in Poland to the overthrow of Russia’s “White House,” from the end of apartheid in South Africa to Africa’s impoverishment.

All have economic bullying in common, an element seldom reported. Klein connects the dots between “free-market” economics and a foreign policy underpinned by the CIA and outsourced military forces, both of which exploit poverty to guard global financial interests, joining terror with yet more terror.

If this begins to sound like a conspiracy theory-it is. But it’s one the perps themselves acknowledge. These are the men who manage international trade, leverage currencies and develop economic policies of governments world-wide. They meet in the cabinet backrooms of presidencies and dictatorships around the world and apply pressure from The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to enforce private takeovers world-wide. Klein follows this fraternity’s mind-meld, dancing in their macro-economic circles.

Klein’s tale reads like a mystery, linking two influential thinkers: the first an American psychiatrist, and the other, an economist, both with grandiose views of humanity’s need for their radical makeovers. Both were “professionals,” who used remarkably ruthless means.

Klein begins the tale with a cold war scenario close to Vermont. Former president of the American Psychiatric Association, Ewen Cameron, began experiments in the late 1950s. His institute, associated with McGill University in Montreal, sought to remake human personality, wiping the slate clean to recreate a new, improved person. An epigraph from Orwell’s 1984 aptly describes his aim, which was funded by the CIA. “We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”

Cameron used electric shock methods, but far more intensely than his peers. He combined this with sensory deprivation to prevent patients from knowing time or space, as well as hallucinatory drugs, disruption of sleep patterns, messages played over and over, loud noises or padded silences. Patients were stripped of clothing or any reminders of identity and memory.

They and their families had no idea Cameron was experimenting on them. His patients “regressed” to a dependent and malleable state, transformed into frightened children. They suffered terrible long-term harm and trauma-induced physical symptoms. By the 1970s, patients and their families had exposed Cameron’s secret and brought a lawsuit against the CIA. News in the Canadian press, this case was aided by the Canadian government and finally settled by the CIA, quietly, in 1988.

The CIA got their money’s worth. Cameron’s methods became part of the agency’s KuBark manual for interrogation, which is still in use. It ultimately found its way to military training facilities and to Abu Ghraib. Wherever KuBark went, electrical wires and psychological shocks showed up.

Meanwhile in another realm, a “free-market” economist named Milton Friedman, sought to wipe more slates clean, this time to remake economics.  Friedman preached one idea for over 30 years: “Only a crisis-actual or perceived-produces real change.”  He called his economic strategies “shock treatments.”

Friedman’s methods also called for quick jolts, rapid-fire transformation: tax cuts, no-holds-barred “free trade” for international corporations, privatized contracts to replace government functions, cuts to social spending, deregulation, and increases in military budgets. The last was essential. A charismatic teacher, Friedman ultimately headed the economics department of the University of Chicago and charmed an elite male following. His students included Donald Rumsfeld, who twice became Secretary of Defense, both times under Presidents Bush. Rumsfeld called his strategy for the Iraq war, “Shock and Awe.”

Friedman’s followers called themselves “The Chicago Boys.” Like Cameron and the CIA, Friedmanites were comfortable with erasing identities, even national ones, to remake the world in their image. Economic shocks administered by governments they counseled commonly roused terror in the public, resulting in a regression similar to the patients in Cameron’s care. Strip a nation of business-as-usual, its currency, its livable livelihoods, and people regress, becoming fearful, more malleable.

Klein doesn’t say this, but I was struck by their nickname for themselves in the context of coming to power in the 1970s. The Chicago Boys seems an affectionate nickname, until you remember women’s protests of the good-old-boys-network in those days and the male-only clubiness that patronized women-as-children. Collectively American women were making grown-up demands. They wanted to be involved in economic decisions that affected their lives. They wanted a social safety net, child care and maternity leave, and government involvement in alleviating women’s poverty.

The leading economist back then, the one Friedman eventually displaced, John Kenneth Galbraith, was a Keynesian mixed-economist, who thought government should take an active role in the economy. Galbraith encouraged Marilyn Waring’s important economic critique: Who Counts: Economics as if Women Mattered. She argued reproductive and caring work of family and community, as well as Mother earth’s work reproducing clean water and air, needed to be included in our GNP (Gross National Product). It wasn’t. It still isn’t.  Macro-economists use a national accounting system that counts weapons-making an economic plus, while weapons-use and war’s destruction never counts as a minus. Wasn’t this insane, Waring asked?

The Chicago Boy’s economic methods eschewed all such questions. Weapons contracts and weapons-use became the baseline of their operations. When Friedman had his first opportunity to apply his economic shock treatments in 1975, it was no accident it happened  in Latin America, where mixed economies had been thriving, though resisting U.S. control  Who was Friedman’s first client? A military dictator named Pinochet, who had overthrown the elected President.

Friedman’s work in Chile erased economic protections and compounded the misery of Pinochet’s prisons. Yet Klein notes this first project of his was barely mentioned in any of the obituaries lauding his reputation when Friedman died in 2006. More Latin American writers understood Friedman’s “Chicago Revolution” went  hand-in-glove with the torture of protesters and their “disappearances,” and administered first in Chile, then in Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay, Brazil and Guatemala. As Claudia Acuna, an Argentine journalist, told Klein, “Their human rights violations were so outrageous, so incredible, that stopping them became the priority. But while we were able to destroy the secret torture centers, what we couldn’t destroy was the economic program the military started and continues to this day.”

Thirty years later, Iraq would fall to a similar two-pronged shock, military and economic. I won’t attempt to describe here those more recent events but instead urge you to read the economic details yourself.

Friedman ultimately led Reaganomics’ trickle-down theories. His free-market ideology was revered by both Bush presidencies and influenced Bill Clinton in between. It’s worse than ironic that Friedman won the Nobel Prize in economics the same year that Amnesty International won it for their work with growing numbers of the tortured.  Only a few witness-writers linked the economic violence of The Chicago Boys with government killing and jailing, but the result was a “free” market enjoyed by only a few, coupled with terror for the many.

“Torture is sickening,” Klein admits, wishing she hadn’t found this connection. “It is often a highly rational way to achieve a specific goal; indeed, it may be the only way to achieve it,” the reason robbers carry guns, she remarks. Klein’s shocking claims are made the more shocking by her careful documentation.

For the Chicago Boys, elections serve as useful distractions, whatever the political theater, wherever the country, as long as economic decisions about peoples’ fates get decided by their decidedly small group. That group continues to be dominant in the global economy, having evolved to become “The Washington Consensus.” Friedman’s free-market ideologues refined their method of moving in quickly on crises and human misery, finding opportunities for shock treatments and radical change. Simply translated, their methods transferred enormous national treasuries, and the decisions about it, from the many to the few.

Near the end of his life, when Katrina had wiped out New Orleans’ infrastructure, Friedman quickly proposed (and George W. Bush quickly funded) millions of dollars be used to replace the city’s public schools with privately run “charter schools.” To Friedman, a state-run school system reeked of socialism and its overthrow was a good thing. It is highly doubtful, however, such a clean wipe of the slate for New Orleans’ schools would ever have happened in any open, democratic debate. Shocks, like Katrina and a FEMA that showed up too late, and too little, overwhelmed state and local governments to compliancy.

The Chicago Boys’ record, the Washington Consensus and its record, the global policies of the IMF and the World Bank and its statistics, all show us a world where growing numbers grow poorer and a very few grow very rich. Yet Klein ultimately ends her book on a positive note. World-wide, there’s growing resistance to the free-market’s shocks, a reason for us to hope for a better future-but only if we hold American bully-boys accountable, and only if we educate ourselves about our nation’s budget and policies.

http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine

Have a Nice Grief

December 4, 2008 in MAKE ECONOMICS SEXY: Love Your Life, Uncategorized | 1 comment

by Jim Pavlidis

Image by Jim Pavlidis

I just lost my mother, and so have been thinking about our American way of death. You may know of a book by that title, written by muckraker Jessica Mitford in 1963, and revisited in a recent updated version. Mitford once joked about her journalistic style, “Objectivity? I always have an objective in mind.” Mitford exposed the high cost of death and the funeral business (and in other books, shamed other American businesses, like prisons).

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200610u/jessica-mitford

Her angle on the “biz” still fits our zeitgeist. We Americans pay little public attention to mourning and grief. It’s practically un-American not to have a nice day. I googled “death statistics,” hoping to find some indicators of the economic cost to business or government for providing leaves for a death in the family. In the U.S., is this typically paid or unpaid leave? What are the economic costs for depression associated with mourning? How many Americans have trouble taking time off from work for funerals or finding needed time for settling estates? Could we cut costs by more actively engaging in this common and necessary human process?

I couldn’t find much about the topic. Imagine the size of our silence about this. Nearly two-and-a half million people die each year, (2,425,900 in 2006, says the National Center for Health Statistics).

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/08newsreleases/mortality2006.htm

The NCHS press release is happy about our life expectancy rates, up from last year, now age 78, but I’m saying, what about the family impact of those 2.5 million deaths? How do we the living deal with it? Who is measuring our “private” costs? Many of those 2.5 million are not only grieved and mourned, but estates must be settled by family members or appointed others, and their deaths cost Americans a good lot of money, particularly when travel costs for today’s far-flung families get included. What is the emotional cost when that time or travel isn’t affordable?

I found the U.K. and Canada talked more openly about death, calling it “bereavement,” and apparently they’re more generous in accounting for real costs. The Department of Work and Pensions benefits pays 2000 British Pounds immediately, or $2960 in today’s currency market, to help pay for immediate bereavement expenses. Social Security pays out $500 and calls it a “death benefit.”

http://www.dwp.gov.uk/asd/asd1/bb/bb_statistics_sept04.asp

Yes, I can critique Obama’s technology fix

January 10, 2009 in MAKE ECONOMICS SEXY: Partnership, not Domination | Leave a comment

President-Elect Obama’s “Remarks on American Recovery and Reinvestment” on Jan. 8, 2009, emphasized refitting America with job creation in the private sector ( public jobs like teachers, cops and firefighters mentioned briefly), along with investments in three areas: clean energy, high-tech upgrading of schools, labs and libraries, and the rebuilding of schools, roads and broadband networks. He also calls for $1000 in tax cuts for middle-class “working families.”

http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/2009-01-08-obama-economy_N.htm

I’m most closely connected to education and so noticed his leaving out  Pell grants for college students and ignoring data that shows education and testing improves when teacher: student ratios are kept low. Instead, he proposes technology will “upgrade schools.” Yet technology, to be effective, requires more education–but education of a particular kind. We need to teach students how to think and solve problems, not merely to purchase and test out the newest money-making tools for corporations, or to entrench our dependence on finding more money to buy more technology-the same old rat trap.

We need the “vision thing,” missing since JFK and his brother Bobby-unless you want to count Reagan’s “It’s Morning in America” wishful thinking. Are Obama’s “high-tech, high-wage jobs” and competing against kids in Beijing really the best our future generation can hope for? The wind and solar power he mentions may be smarter technologies, but we have larger human questions to face about what we do with our inventions and how we measure their impacts.

As the foundation of this megalithic global economy crumbles around us, so do its unsustainable assumptions of inducing debt as the only way to grow capital. It is debt repaid by an overproduction of goods and exhaustion of our natural resources, which is also unsustainable.  We need new paradigms for reframing economic thinking and addressing our overload of debt, both our nation’s and our private ones, on a planet clearly in trouble. Monetary reform and revamping our relationship with the private Federal Reserve bank should be on the table, along with a concrete food-basket standard for stabilizing global currencies. Education for women, daycare support, and changing international birth control policy, might also help “competition.”

Most importantly, we need to make visible the economy of EROS, our human exchanges with each other and the earth. Competition can be dramatic, even fun in the short-term, but cooperation, collaboration and “paying” sustained attention is more economical in the long-term. These activities tend not to “count” in competition. Labor continues to be discounted in Obama’s economic thinking-and the “free labor” of maintaining life, including yours and your kids at home, remains invisible. Maybe Obama has a staff and Michelle to watch over such details-but most of us don’t and his $1000 tax cut splurge on the nation’s credit card won’t purchase much help.

Money for Nothin’ (and the chics are free)

January 10, 2009 in MAKE ECONOMICS SEXY: Gaia Counts | Leave a comment

The lyrics from Dire Straits came to mind when I read an article about peak oil by James Howard Kunstler.  Kunstler wrote The Long Emergency and other great books  http://www.kunstler.com/and says this about American delusional thinking in the latest issue of Population Press (Fall/Winter 2008):

Years ago, U.S. negotiators at a United Nations environmental conference told their interlocutors that the American lifestyle is “not up for negotiation.” This stance is, unfortunately, related to two pernicious beliefs that have become common in the United States in recent decades. The first is the idea that when you wish upon a star, your dreams come true. (Oprah Winfrey advanced this notion last year with her promotion of a pop book called The Secret, which said, in effect, that if you wish hard enough for something, it will come to you.) One of the basic differences between a child and an adult is the ability to know the difference between wishing for things and actually making them happen through earnest effort.

The companion belief to “wishing on a star” is the idea that one can get something for nothing. This derives from America’s new favorite religion: not evangelical Christianity but the worship of unearned riches. (The holy shrine to this tragic belief is Las Vegas.) When you combine these two beliefs, the result is the notion that when you wish upon a star, you’ll get something for nothing. This is what underlies our current fantasy, as well as our inability to respond intelligently to the energy crisis.

While Kunstler is talking about energy needs, his ideas can be applied to financial realms, where “wishing on a star” and “something for nothing” are cornerstones on Wall Street and on Main Street, where bank “credit” is created out of air to become money. See Ellen Brown http://webofdebt.wordpress.com/monetary-proposal/

Kunstler and other formidable writers (including Lester Brown and Al Gore) are featured in Volume 14, Number 4, which is not yet up on the Population Press website, but it is worth a visit to see past issues as well as a scary ticker that shows population growth and the contrasting figure of arable land, which remains  static. Ouch!  http://www.populationpress.org/

G20 Meeting in April: Opportunity for a new Bretton Woods?

January 27, 2009 in MAKE ECONOMICS SEXY: Partnership, not Domination | Leave a comment

I am a subscriber to British green-economist James Robertson’s newsletter. His clear writing about the cross-purposes of “national” financing, namely the creation of money, not by governments (only 5% in Britain and the U.S.), but by private, commercial banks as “credit,” or rather debt, clarified for me the pickle we’re continually in.

Robertson’s work in Creating New Money: Monetary Reform for the Information Age http://www.jamesrobertson.com/book/creatingnewmoney.pdf led me to American writers Tom Greco (Money), http://www.reinventingmoney.com/ Global Research http://www.globalresearch.ca/, one of their writers, Richard Cook, http://www.richardccook.com/articles.php and Ellen Brown (Web of Debt), http://www.webofdebt.com/

All of them make it clear that the Federal Reserve System is not the governmental one we all assume. Its privately owned banks are in close alliance with private firms like Citibank and Goldman Sachs, who manipulate the market to suit the purposes of those who own most of our wealth. Any doubts I had about this were removed when the first “bailout” happened, the good old boys of banking in intimate contact, helping themselves to the Treasury-with no one accountable for where the money went.

Belgian ex-banker, Bernard Lietaer, http://www.transaction.net/money/bio/lietaer.html who helped create the Euro, says roughly this about the present means of money creation: if banks create “credit” out of thin air, as they do with Federal Reserve exchanges, mortgages and business loans, where then do we the people come up with the additional money always due for their interest? Where does that additional money come from? Systemically, such a scheme must lead to ruthless competition and what Riane Eisler (The Real Wealth of Nations) http://www.rianeeisler.com/rwon.htm calls the “dominator” paradigm. Who will be king of the mountain? Who must be pushed off to win?

Now Robertson, called the grandfather of “Green Economics,” is taking some hope from the enlarging of the usual G7 or G8 meeting of nations (for the top kings) to a G20 meeting, involving more nations than any time since Bretton Woods. He has put forward monetary reform as the first order of business-nationally first, and internationally second. His ideas may still seem radical-but only because most remain ignorant of how money currently gets created. For insights into new directions we might take for a more democratic future, check out Robertson’s clearly written recommendations.

If you haven’t read about monetary reform before this, stand by to say, huh? You mean this isn’t how money gets made now? Write to your congressional delegation. Write to Obama’s economic team!

http://www.jamesrobertson.com/article/nationalandinternationalfinancialarchitecture.pdf

Bank Balance Sheets (NOT)

March 5, 2009 in MAKE ECONOMICS SEXY: Partnership, not Domination, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

My good friend, Paul Baicich, sent me this  link to a great episode on This American Life on National Public Radio. The piece  explains what’s happening to Citibank and other giants our government is bailing out with billions. It will make the hair on your arms stand on end, because you’ll UNDERSTAND it. Yikes. Thanks to TAL and writers Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson for this – and other articles at this link.

Listening to this for 59 minutes is very much worthwhile.  Just click “full episode.”
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=375

I will share this link with my seminar on Money in Literature – the same day I show the film of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. Maybe I’ll throw in a little Jimmy Stewart, as George Bailey doing battle with Mr. Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life-a lovable piece of propaganda.

Ain't it wonderful?

Ain't it wonderful?

But NPR’s brave reporters didn’t touch the most blatant lie – that our network of insolvent banks borrow money from the Federal Reserve routinely – and that the Federal Reserve is itself a private network that poses as a government entity, while creating money out of thin air. Banks’ “assets,” which most assume are our deposits used to loan out, represent “liabilities” to the bank, while mortgages that create “credit” on the books (debt to YOU) are kept in motion by more air moola from the Fed. This bogus money creates debt systemically impossible to pay off. It represents 95% of the money in our economy-with only 5% issued by our government at the U.S. Mint.

The Fed also brokers our national deficit by selling t-bills that supposedly can’t go wrong, since we taxpayers will be left holding the interest-bag. The bag grew exponentially under Republicans Reagan and Bush. But even Clinton’s “balanced budget” never paid down a nickel of the principal owed-it only managed to pay the interest. So who benefits from keeping nations in debt? What are their names? That’s the sort of thing I’d like to see at Blumberg and Davidson’s blog, Planet Money.  http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/

I won’t hold my breath, not with Charles Schwab advertising on the front page. Still Planet Money is another valuable link for understanding what’s going on. Just remember what side their bread is buttered on.

Bankers like calling debt the “credit” industry and, like going through Alice’s Looking glass, it gets curiouser and curiouser in their balance sheets. But even investment banks with big players who finance nations aren’t where the real action is anymore: it’s in currency trading, where nations get regularly busted and citizens lose the value even of their currency savings-which to the banks, remember, are liabilities anyway. With a currency devalued, a whole nation can be had for a bargain.

In Grave Danger of Falling Food

March 11, 2009 in MAKE ECONOMICS SEXY: Gaia Counts | Leave a comment

Thanks to my student, Elizabeth Johnson, for writing so vividly about the film by this title. I decided to view it, and then had to link it here. Falling food gets transformed in this hour-long video, from plastic food packages dropped on war-torn barren ground from an airlift, to dozens of varieties of fruit overhead in a wild garden designed by Bill Mollison. www.permaculturecairns.com/billmollisonpermaculturevideos.html

Mollison is the New Zealander who coined the word permaculture. A former logger, who noticed that none of the loggers could afford to build a house from the lumber they were felling, withdrew to a remote forest and, like Thoreau, observed nature closely. He wrote about what he discovered of inter-related ecosystems. He said the paradigm of war on nature in present-day factory farming destroyed natural relationships, endangering bio-diversity and health. When he brought his ideas forward, they caught fire. He began to design plots of land to produce foods easily with regional nature in mind. Most importantly, perhaps, his designs can even work to enliven cities and suburbs. Here’s a link to the organization rooted in his ideas. http://www.permaculture.org/nm/index.php/site/index/mollison

Mollison doesn’t say this, but he communed with Gaia and Eros. He’s a lover and shunned war-making. His passionate commitment to Gaia’s innate wisdom, a little crazy and persistent with a sexy power, overcame conventional opposition. His words woke us up to our crucial need to rediscover devotion and attention to life in all its forms–quick, before it’s too late.

What Is the Federal Reserve?

March 23, 2009 in MAKE ECONOMICS SEXY: Get Mad, Join Up | Leave a comment

One of my favorite readers wrote to pose this excellent question. Where does our money come from? Who owns the dollar? We the People-or those Chinese we keep hearing about?  Few of us really understand our dollar isn’t just issued by our government and then printed at the U.S. Mint. It is financed as a debt by the Federal Reserve System, a Banking system, and when you learn about its function and its history, you can hardly believe it. So I’ve created a new page on the subject.

In the meantime, though, take a look at your dollar bill. What does it say? Issued by the U.S. Mint? Nope. It is signed by the Treasurer of the United States, not to be confused with the second signature, the Secretary of the Treasury. Huh?  My page on the Federal Reserve explains this.

dollar-bill

Note the dollar is labeled a Federal Reserve Note. The Treasury goes to the Federal Reserve and says, hey, we need this much money to pay the nation’s bills. The Federal Reserve then writes a check whose account is never reconciled, like yours and mine, and prints up these debt-notes. Every dollar we use costs Americans a dollar plus interest, the reason for inflation and rising prices.

We pay a growing percentage of interest each year in the federal budget-and to whom? To private financiers, including some nations’ banks, who “buy” U.S. bonds, auctioned off internationally by the Federal Reserve. Like many financial terms, the “buy” part of this is misleading. These buyers are actually “loaning” us money, at an interest price determined by the Fed, a private banking system in touch with world bond and currency “markets.” How much will the market bear? How long will the Fed keep writing us checks and running up the Treasury’s credit card?

If big money, behind even Central National Banks and the IMF, is buying anything, it’s buying a piece of us. Americans are being sold into debt-slavery, similarly to other nations’ citizens who have been auctioned off before us. (See Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine.) What fascinates me today about currency and monetary issues is the way only the far edges of our political spectrum, both left and right, have picked it up. I can’t believe my page on the Federal Reserve recommends you watch a lecture delivered to the John Birch Society! I’m a leftie!

But in this political climate, with this media framing the issues, we must not stay confused. To Americans any “socialism” is bad, except when the rich owners of corporations or banks benefit. Yet some on both sides of the aisle are talking about the same systemic problems, however different their approaches.  Shouldn’t American women citizens understand this conversation?

Meanwhile, mainstream politics continues to leave the Federal Reserve issue completely alone. Why? Maybe because potentially, it’s incendiary.

We women, who have been encouraged not to worry our pretty little heads about the nation’s budget and big finance, are the very ones who might bridge this political gap between the far left and the far right and promote public education about the usury that threatens to bankrupt the nation. All the candidates for President in the last election were millionaires, with the exception of one, which might explain why this present system doesn’t seem to bother too many of them.

Do you know the one non-millionaire who ran?  The answer is in the middle of my new page, About the Federal Reserve. Check it out!

Crisis of Credit and Stuff: Two Visual Explanations

March 31, 2009 in MAKE ECONOMICS SEXY: Gaia Counts, MAKE ECONOMICS SEXY: Partnership, not Domination | Leave a comment

credit-crisis1

My son Keith sent me a link to a great video by Jonathan Jarvis. It helps explain in plain English why many of our mortgages are now called toxic, worldwide. He naturally has an interest, living in Las Vegas, where the real-estate market has bottomed out-or maybe it hasn’t yet.

As you’ll see, the whole credit system needs an antidote, as some international investment bankers’ “packaging” of risk (actually an exploitation of our nation’s housing) is poisoning the economic system with an overload of debt, the dark side of credit. Who are the “investors” this video talks about, who bank at international investment banks? To whom do they answer?

Crisis of Credit

http://crisisofcredit.com/

Not to us. Our nation’s leaders are quick to rescue the “big players” by our nation’s enslavement to still more debt, just as they are now moving to rescue the American dream in our car industry. Yet GM’s Rick Wagoner leaves the company with $20 million in retirement (according to ABC) after having doled out more American jobs to robots or to countries where labor is not organized to defend itself. GM now plans to cut 49,000 employees by the end of 2009. Who does Wagoner and GM’s board answer to? The same international investors Obama and Geithner answer to at The Treasury and the Federal Reserve.

The film Roger and Me explains what has long been big autos’ direction for American workers, driven by the same international investors. Some are rightly asking, who exactly will buy autos if workers, even here in the U.S., cannot afford cars? Others ask, what will happen to earth’s climate if our world fills up with more cars?

story-of-stuffSee a funny short history, Annie Leonard’s The Story of Stuff, for a clear picture of why the same economic system that doesn’t work for mortgages or us, doesn’t work for the commonwealth of our nation, or for any nation really.  It undermines Eros, the energy that charges human hearts, and it surely hurts Gaia, a healthy planet. This economy has worked, up to now, for “international investors” to whom everyone, from international corporations to nations worldwide, owes yet more borrowed and bogus paper money.

The Story of Stuff

http://www.storyofstuff.com/

Imagine! or What American Corporations Avoid

April 3, 2009 in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Thanks to one of my readers who sent me these great links, in response to my groaning about our “Crisis of Credit & Stuff.” How many more bailouts and cars, American or otherwise, I asked, can our nation and Gaia withstand?

But here’s some good news on that front, an exciting new French design being tested in India, an air-powered auto, reported by BBC. Have you seen this on U.S. news?

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2228669770213573581

Another Japanese prototype runs on water-even leftover tea.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrxfMz2eDME

When did we last see an ingenious idea come out of Detroit? Let’s see. The SUV, which propped up the American working man’s self-image over the past 20 years, while manufacturing jobs got shipped overseas. It was a brilliant compensation. He didn’t notice the irony of making his trucks and cars bigger, while his paycheck was shrinking, not for decades.

Oh, but these two new ecological designs would only make cars and fuel less harmful, more affordable-and where is the profit in that? How would THAT help our present GDP, a national system of accounting where disasters add up for the economy, and health doesn’t count.

So, naturally (or unnaturally, actually) both of these companies are having trouble finding financing. Duhhhhhh, as my friend put it.

Just Say No to Big Bank/Treasury Games

April 5, 2009 in MAKE ECONOMICS SEXY: Get Mad, Join Up, MAKE ECONOMICS SEXY: Partnership, not Domination, MAKE ECONOMICS SEXY: Remember Gender, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

newwayfoward-protest1This is one of the posters being distributed by A New Way Forward, an organization calling for a national day of protest against CEO and Bank Bailouts on April 11th. Their website will help you discover what is happening in your area. Go out into the streets with your pitchforks and rolling pins!

http://anewwayforward.org/demonstrations/

I chose this poster,  designed by Eva Chrysanthe, because it’s so rare to see a female figure in the Investment Banking Bailout scandal.  Her No and  Section 382 refers to a tax law that was illegally overthrown last year by then-Treasurer Paulson, in a memo providing a tax windfall for his banking buddies who were already getting $700 billion from TARP.

I love the poster’s aside, commenting on women’s disadvantage: “Paulson played Defensive Lineman at Dartmouth, 1967. You: Did not.” Women aren’t at the top of the insider-clubhouse of the nation’s nine biggest banks, or at AIG and their ranks  on Wall Street are shrinking. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/01/business/01wall.html

It’s easy to decide the crisis has little to do with us. So why then do women always get the short end of the financial stick? (or is that dick?)

If women educated themselves about the Wall Street Meltdown and the finance culture of male one-up-manship, we might get the structural reform on Wall Street and in Washington we so badly need. Without women’s voices pressing for big change,  Obama won’t have what he needs to accomplish it.

A recent Bill Moyer interview, which I very much recommend,  presented a lawyer-banking regulator who worked on the Savings and Loan debacle back in the 80s, William K. Black. Black said the nation needs a high-profile Congressional Investigation, as happened after the Great Depression–ideally one headed by an elected woman, he added.

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04032009/profile.html

Another recent radio interview of the author of House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street, William Cohan, asked this former Bears and Stearn investment banker, Did he think this would have happened if some intelligent women had been part of their management team? (I missed the male interviewer’s name, but loved his asking.)  Cohan laughed and houseofcardsanswered the culture was definitely one of Alpha males gone wild.

What if a million women asked the Fed and the Treasury and all their Wall Street game-playing line-men–what on earth were you thinking? Get real!

Ingenious!

July 15, 2011 in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

A friend sent me this news link from The Center for Media and Democracy and it’s pretty astonishing. Ever heard of ALEC? No? That’s because you’re not invited.

ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, meets with state legislators behind closed doors and, together and cozy, they vote on state legislation the corporations present—legislation on privatizing education, influencing election laws, nullifying state torte law. Corporations get to vote and state legislators don’t have to do all that hard, hard work, writing their own bills.

Wait—how can corporations vote? And didn’t state politicians get elected to vote with the public, not corporations,  in mind? Ah, but now the Supreme Court says corporations have a voice and Fox News says, really, corporations ARE we the people—you know, the job-creating people. Next I expect we’ll see corporations running for office and, who knows, maybe getting elected.

So who funds these state Councils, which always meet at luxurious locales? The Koch Brothers! And who do you think got the first Adam Smith Awards made by the American Legislative Exchange Council—the Koch Brothers! See how nicely this works? See how they’re at work in your state at this link.

http://www.prwatch.org/news/2011/07/10883/about-alec-exposed

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