For those of us not easily “distracted”, there's an interesting conference happening next week in Montpelier on monetary reform policy. An introduction:

Article 1 Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution reads,“The Congress shall have power…To coin money (and) regulate the value thereof…” Yet Congress has largely ceded that “money-creating” power to the private Federal Reserve Bank (the FED), from which that same Congress then borrows money back at interest whenever we need to spend more than we collect in taxes. This might not be a problem if the FED were actually part of the U.S. Government, the way the name makes it sound like it is. But the Federal Reserve is not a part of the Federal Government. To be sure, the President appoints the Fed Chairman, but the FED itself is owned by the private banks, and is a private corporation.

It is the private banks that have the power to create virtually all our money, out of thin air through the fractional reserve banking system. Our money supply (the checking deposits,savings deposits, CDs, money markets) comes into existence as loans, repayable at interest. By switching to a U.S. Treasury-issue system of money creation, all new money would be created “debt-free” without any need to ever pay it back to the Treasury.

This is not an inconsequential matter for our society. The world is drowning in debt. It is well documented that public debt has been increasing exponentially in recent years, such that in FY 2008, the U.S. Government paid $451 Billion in interest (c. 15% of the total of the federal budget). About fifteen cents of every dollar that we pay the IRS goes to interest on the debt!

It's some pretty heady stuff. I attended a conference in Massachusetts a few months ago, which was basically a history of the U.S. monetary system, followed why the reasons our current system as it currently stands is unsustainable and contributes to a lot of the problems we have in society right now.

The details of the conference:

A group of local citizens under the moniker The Kettle Pond Institute for Monetary Reform is bringing Joe Bongiovanni to the Pavilion Auditorium in Montpelier, Wednesday April 8 from 7-9 PM to present his talk: America’s Debt Crisis and the Need for Monetary Reform.

He’ll cover: what money is and how the FED and the private banks create money as debt in our country. He will explain the unsustainability of debt-created money. Then he will introduce the notion of debt-free money, its history in the U.S. from Colonial times through Lincoln’s time, and he will argue for its potential to create a more equitable and peaceful society. He will end his presentation by discussing The American Monetary Act, a draft of legislation that attempts to enact changes that Joe advocates which may be accessed here.

There will be plenty of time for questions and discussion after the presentation. Joe is very clear that this talk will be geared towards the person on the street. “For too long,” he says, “we have left decisions about our money system to the “experts” who are surely fine people, but who have no incentive to change the status quo.”

I know some of the people involved in this, they really have done their homework. It's not Ron Paul/fringe stuff. It's one of those things that stays of the radar of the national dialogue, in part because of its complexity, and of course, because the big banks and such are the ones making a killing on our current monetary policy. Hope some of you can make it.

You can download the full press release (excerpted above) here.