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