( – promoted by odum)

Most of us are waking up to the realization that the social contract we all have around money has been trashed. The scale of proven, un-prosecuted fraud in the mortgage scam is appalling.  Our major banks (who own the Federal Reserve that regulates them) are too big to fail.   The world is awash in debt and all we can think of to bail it out is more debt.  It is almost universally acknowledged that we have done nothing but kick the can down the road.

If having a desire for the economy to function better for the vast majority of people on this planet qualifies me as a liberal, I cherish the label.  I think I share that broad goal with most of my neighbors, many of whom, for example, vote for Bernie Sanders year after year.  People with this kind of community orientation tend not to organize their lives around making lots of money, and we don’t make a study of money. Most of us just need the money system to work for us and if it does then we like to go pay attention to other things we find more interesting, like, for example, art, sports, nature, or helping a neighbor recover from a flood.

This doesn’t prepare us very well for when the money system fails us, as it is doing now.  We drown in the complexity of trying to understand what a derivative is, let alone how it might bring down the entire economy.

This is where Joe comes in.  Joe Bongiovanni, (a former resident of Marshfield and former General Manager of Washington Electric Coop) has been a monetary reformer for over 30 years.  He specializes in explaining the Byzantine money system we have had since the passage of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913 in terms that we teachers, farmers, carpenters, artists, granite workers, etc.– can all understand.  He explains how the money system works as a hidden tax on the people, an incessant extraction of wealth from the true economy where most of us live and work to the financial sector.  

And…he dares to dream of and speak of: a money system that would halt this extraction, a money system that could support the true economy that produces our food and the things we need and want, a money system that could eliminate the National Debt entirely without austerity.  That last one is too big a dream for most of us.  There is no narrative that even states it as a goal, unless you heard it from a monetary reformer; indeed, I lose a lot of people as soon as I start talking about a money system that could allow us to pay off the national debt.

This coming Wednesday, September 14 at 7:30 PM, Joe will be speaking at the Pavilion Auditorium downstairs in the Pavilion Building (109 State St.) in Montpelier.  The topic is “Reforming the Money System to Solve the Debt Crisis.” In the talk, Joe will introduce the audience to Dennis Kucinich’s monetary reform bill, HR 6550, the National Emergency Employment Defense Act, and he will ask the audience to urge the Vermont congressional delegation to support the bill.  In particular, Joe hopes Bernie will sponsor the bill in the Senate.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I have been of friend of Joe’s since the 1980s.  In September of 2008, when the entire world economy teetered on collapse, I started listening to Joe on money.  At that time I didn’t even know what a money system was, let alone what monetary reform was.  Since then, I have helped Joe establish the website EconomicStability(dot)org, and a Youtube video blog called Coffee with Joe.

I am not an economist, so after studying this with Joe for the past three years, I don’t know if the NEED Act would actually work.  A debt-free money system has never really been tried on a grand scale (though Abraham Lincoln issued $450 million in debt-free US Notes during the Civil War, the original and true Greenbacks, until shut down by the money interests).  It could certainly be corrupted and administered with disastrous results.  It certainly does not absolve us of the responsibility of acting ethically or putting in place systems that stop unethical behavior.  The likelihood of it getting any traction has always seemed incredibly low to me, because it can only come from the grassroots, and most people shut right down when you merely mention a subject like the Federal Reserve.

But those of us who dare to dream of a world without war or starvation, where humans and nature find a balance, need to listen to Joe when he says that you can’t have any of those things if you don’t fix the money system. The Kucinich bill seems to me to offer the best opportunity to transition to a money system that is not only much fairer, but one that is much less prone to crashes.  But don’t take it from me; come to Montpelier Wednesday night, and hear about it from Joe.

Peter Young

36 Hudson Ave.

Plainfield VT 0566