Taking it to the street

The late, great American historian Howard Zinn, as professor emeritus in Boston University’s History Department, said in January 2001, “For progressive movements, the future does not lie with electoral politics. It lies in street warfare—protest movements and demonstrations, civil disobedience, strikes and boycotts using all of the power of consumers and workers have in direct action against the government and corporations.”

That was from an interview for Joe Lockard’s Bad Subjects: Political Education for Every Life. So is Zinn’s statement any less true in February 2011, seeing Egypt at the barricades, tossing out Mubarak?

We can shudder at the reality of personal involvement, claiming that we read, write letters to the editor, articles, or books, nailing the bad guys at the banks who are drowning our world in debt. That is, thanks to a Fed that insists on printing our country’s money and charging us interest to use it. But when push comes to shove, we have to show up for democracy, take that news to the streets, and push back at power for the US government’s right to print its money, interest-free. Mostly we need numbers of people who have the courage and conviction to do it—and bring some sticks and stones when things go bad, as they did at times in the recent Egyptian revolution and are continuing now “from Northern Africa to the Person Gulf,” as the New York Times writes.

Earlier, the New York times wrote, “After 18 days of angry protests, Mr. Mubarak resigned and turned over all power to the military on Feb. 11, 2011, ending his 30 years of autocratic rule and bowing to a historic popular uprising that has transformed politics in Egypt and around the Arab world.” So, it was 30 years coming but struck like lightening and in 18 days the stone frozen image of Pharaoh Mubarak melted into a bad memory, descending into a coma like Ariel Sharon. Zinn must surely be cheering at this from the bleachers of the beyond, among the working classes of men and women he loved.

As Ellen Hodgson Brown points out in her amazing book The Web of Debt—The Shocking Truth About Our Money System—The Sleight of Hand That Has Trapped Us in Debt And How We Can Break Free, “The tradition of street protests [re: who prints our money] dates back to 1894, when Jacob Coxey’s Army marched from Ohio to Washington, D.C., to petition Congress to revive the Greenback system.” The Zinn quote came from Ms. Brown’s book, page 110. Well, Coxey’s army was eventually rebuffed, but the real victory, like Egypt, was that Coxey’s army walked to the barricades to be heard loud and clear about bringing back the Greenback. It was a necessary chapter in the ongoing battle that started before the American Revolution.

But the Rockefellers, Morgans, Carnegies of the 19th and 20th centuries thought otherwise. . They congregated in secrecy on Georgia’s Jekyll Island in 1913, that is, after each “familia” had become unbelievably wealthy, to make even more money and enslave the rest of us. This time, they gathered in secret to write the Federal Reserve Act. Brown comments, “In plain English, the Federal Act authorized a private central bank to create money out of nothing [yes, most of the gold was paper certificates], lent to the government [on paper] at crippling interest, and to control the national money supply, expanding and contracting it at will.” Those four lines sum up the issue in a nutshell.

The robber baron families were the inspirations for the Wonderful Wizard of Oz as in Ozs, Ounces, and the Yellow Brick Road of gold. They appeared as the Wicked Witches in the novel by “Journalist, L. Frank Baum (Chicago, 1900), a parable about Money Reform and the 1890s Midwestern political movement led by William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925).” The banking Wizards most pernicious quality is their monopoly over money manipulation, which can bring down and create governments, wars and other disasters, as they spread their wealth to do the wrong thing.

The banks and bankers do it with the business model of the “fractional-reserve” system descended from 17th Century goldsmiths. People brought their gold coins, jewelry, nuggets, to goldsmiths for safekeeping because they had the toughest safes in town. The goldsmiths issued paper receipts that could be traded in place of the bulky gold they represented. These receipts were also used when the gold-owners came to the goldsmiths for loans. But what the goldsmiths realized shortly after was that only some 10 to 20 percent of their gold cache was out at any time. That left them the opportunity to lend many times over, and with interest. From those earliest goldsmiths to the Fed, this “fractional-reserve” system remained the paradigm for lending money you don’t have, but with real interest. Disaster occurs when you have a run on banks for all assets at once as you had in the Crash of 1929. And then the bank crashes like it did in Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.

“Fractional-reserve” lending remains at the heart of banking, including the Federal Reserve System to this day, producing money literally out of air. In the 2008–2009 debacle, banks were maintaining even less than 10 percent of their deposits but making double-digit numbers of loans on it. When the mutual rush for money hit, the panic ensued, making credit tighter than a crab’s butt. Unfortunately, the previous risk (in this case mostly from derivatives) was privatized, but the debt was socialized and paid for by the government, again with Fed interest on the Treasury’s borrowed money. It adds insult to injury.

To this day, watch present Fed head Ben Bernanke create trillions out of air for “quantitative easements” of the economy, while it sinks deeper in debt like the Titanic and the rich dance on the top deck, the first to man the lifeboats of tax cuts and head to their non-taxed Cayman Island money.

This struggle for the government to print its own money over the Fed’s ersatz money, which is actually “loaned” to our government in the form of notes of debt (check the dollar bill), this again goes back to the American Revolution, and has plagued our economy to this day. Back then, King George III didn’t want the colonists using their successful currency or “scrip” to pay taxes. He wanted taxes, duties paid in gold or silver. This is what really brought about the Tea Party and the Revolution. Scrip had worked beautifully as a currency, being debt-free, helping the colonies thrive. But as colonies, old George wanted us debt-poor, selling our materials to him for survival at low prices. Post Revolution, Alexander Hamilton insisted against Jefferson’s better judgment to set up a separate bank to issue money. Jefferson, then in Paris, conceded, much to his chagrin later.

But “fractional-reserve” lending remains a fancy name for usury, which is a sin in Christianity and Islam. It is an ill-gotten gain, lending for a price, that can be eliminated by this government printing and lending its people its money, interest-free, to create employment, infrastructure, healthcare, etc. Those monies can be raised through various taxes or duties. And taxes are the dues of nationhood.

But when you have a financial Mafia like the Fed, supposedly lending us their notes, skimming interest and compounding it, you have the formula for revolving, crushing debt, i.e. our own $14.8 trillion national debt, almost the size of our GDP (Gross Domestic Product). Imagine that debt without that interest. It would be immensely smaller. So, what we should cut first is the Federal Reserve System. The U.S. Mint should print U.S. money (Greenbacks, dollars, etc) for its Treasury, not Federal Reserve notes that come with debt on every dollar, as if it was being loaned to us. The latter is more of the goldsmith’s “fractional-reserve” razzle-dazzle.

As Brown writes, “The ‘Federal’ Reserve is actually an independent, privately-owned corporation” [and not a bona fide branch of our government with government-appointed officials]. “It consists of twelve regional Federal Reserve banks owned by many commercial member banks. The amount of Federal Reserve stock held by each member bank is proportional to its size. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York holds the majority of shares in the Federal Reserve System (53). They are the Ozs behind the masks, the mere men there to bilk money, create bubbles or recessions, expand or deflate the currency, squeeze or expand the economy for the interests of the filthy rich and to impoverish the rest of us.

Do they have real power? Remember, Lincoln issued money (Greenbacks) directly from the government, not the Federal Reserve, to pay for the Civil War. He was assassinated after he succeeded. McKinley faced WW I and chose the US government to print money as the country’s banker. He was assassinated. JFK wanted to eliminate the Federal Reserve and use silver coin (which the Constitution permitted) to back our money supply. He was assassinated. Bottom line, the Fed is a genuinely criminal organization, a money mafia.

Through a variety of mergers, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup are the cornerstones of the Morgan and Rockefeller dynasties. Together they hold 53 percent of the shares of the New York Fed, which is the largest and most powerful bank over the 11 other central banks of the Federal Reserve System. Also, they are affiliated with The Bilderberg Group, as described in Daniel Estulin’s excellent book. The Bilderbergs are an international cadre of financial, banking, business, defense, political, media and elitist leaders. This group decides on the world’s fate each year at some hidden posh location in some small town, outside a major city. The Federal Reserve bankers are cohorts of this group, enemies of democracy in search of laissez faire capitalism—and we are the people in the street, the eternal Egypt that must buttress ourselves against them. It’s the money versus us, the US versus the Fed.

This is why you must show up for democracy and take your grievances to the street, in their faces, Tweeted there, Facebooked, Linkedin, or beamed up by Scotty. We have a revolutionary momentum in this moment and have to maximize it here and around the world. As to Israel and its 1973 peace pact with Egypt, we’ll see. Many Jewish people have been history’s money-lenders, changers, and tax-collectors, deeply related to financial oppression, consciously or not. Yet the “Christian” Morgans, Rockefellers, Carnegies et al must be recognized as in the same boat. They are not the friends of the masses.

Mind you, these minds, calculators, computers are always working. But the power of ten thousand voices in the streets for weeks can wake and focus them on the humanity before them that can bring down their bought-and-paid-for power. That is their worst bad dream and our best leverage. That is why they work in secret, in shadows and whispers, and we work in public, before the eyes of the world. We outnumber them, despite their attempts to buy media, newspapers, TV, the Internet, even armies and mercenaries to control dissent by force.

Brown reports, we have six corporations monopolizing media, “with directorates interlocked with each other and with major commercial banks.” She quotes Zinn again, “Whether you have a Republican or a Democrat in power, the Robber Barons are still there . . . Under the Clinton administration, more mergers of huge corporations took place [than] had ever taken place before under any administration . . . [Whether] you have Republicans or Democrats in power, big business is the most powerful voice in the halls of Congress and in the ears of the President of the United States.” This makes the notion of a fair election, and a legit Congress a joke. Big business’s big money undermines democracy to the root.

Brown also reminds us that taxes are a reliable source of income to the US government, even though they have often been “ . . . declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.” Some forms of taxes, even excise taxes, can be used. Income tax, which some claim illegal to use, according to the questionable 16th Amendment, was used to fight the war of 1812, WW II, and every war since. I suggest you read Brown’s book for the complete story. The problems of money, interest, and debt have plagued societies around the world throughout history.

Without having to borrow from bankers and suffer the crushing debt of their interest; to be able to create government capital from our government’s taxes without constantly being involved in wars for profit to refund bankers over and over again, we won’t have back-breaking multi-trillion dollar deficits. We will have the money to fund whatever social programs we need. Money for healthcare, education, infrastructure, retirement funds, science, defense, the arts. Name it. A future without the Federal Reserve System and its debt is out there in the street and we have to take it back, like the colonists’ script.

Take it back like the Egyptians took back their country. Take it back like the people of Wisconsin, who are presently in the street protesting for their municipal labor unions, for labor to have a voice and to bargain collectively, above and beyond their Republican governor’s desire to fire workers at random and silence labor to continue his corporate giveaways after only two months in office. Watch MSNBC’s Ed Schulz’s ongoing report on it. Wisconsin is in the streets to win the Super Bowl of Democracy. Zinn has to be cheering somewhere from the beyond.

Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer, life-long resident of New York City. An EBook version of his book of poems “State Of Shock,” on 9/11 and its after effects is now available at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. He has also written hundreds of articles on politics and government as Associate Editor of Online Journal, recently transistioned to intrepidreport.com.