Aired 23 July 2019 – 5:00 PM EDT
Interview with Ellen Brown, Author of “Banking On the People: Democratizing Money In the Digital Age”
“I don’t know about you, but I am nostalgic for the good old days, when PEOPLE robbed BANKS.” — Swami Beyondananda
Economics, and particularly the banking industry and monetary policy seems to be a mysterious black box to most people – our guest this week, Ellen Brown, characterizes it as a “sausage factory.” She is obviously referring to the quote attributed to Otto von Bismarck: “Laws are like sausages. You should never see them made.”
In other words, if we actually understood how and why banks do what they do, and how monetary policy is made – we’d never “swallow it”. Ellen Brown, author of the classic “Web of Debt,” a follow up book, “The Public Bank Solution”, and her latest in the trilogy, “Banking On the People: Democratizing Money In the Digital Age”, sprays the issue with “demystifier” and offers thoughtful, breakthrough solutions that will shift financial power and wellbeing from Wall Street to Main Street.
When I traveled to Washington, D.C. a week or two after the 2008 election, there was literally dancing in the streets. The mood felt like the liberation of Paris or the fall of the Berlin Wall.
But a lad and a lack. For many complex reasons, Obama bailed out Wall Street but not Main Street, and in the past decade we’ve come to recognize that the financial institutions that were “too big to fail” were not too big to fail the American people. As a result, the American middle class seems to have gone the way of the typewriter and slide rule, as the gap between rich and poor actually grew during the Obama administration. Bank loans for new businesses have been replaced with credit card debt that has further impoverished local enterprise, while the mega-banks continue to make mega-profits.
This week’s guest Ellen Brown is the founder of the Public Banking Institute and the author of a dozen books and hundreds of articles. She developed her research skills as an attorney practicing civil litigation in Los Angeles. In the best-selling “Web of Debt”, she turned those skills to an analysis of the Federal Reserve and “the money trust,” showing how this private cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves and how we the people can get it back.
She developed an interest in the developing world and its problems while living abroad for eleven years in Kenya, Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua. She returned to practicing law when she was asked to join the legal team of a popular Tijuana healer with an innovative cancer therapy, who was targeted by the chemotherapy industry in the 1990s. That experience produced her book “Forbidden Medicine”, which traces the suppression of natural health treatments to the same corrupting influences that have captured the money system. She also co-authored the bestselling “Nature’s Pharmacy”, which has sold 285,000 copies.
Today most of our money is created, not by governments, but by banks when they make loans. “Banking On the People” takes the reader step by step through the sausage factory of modern money creation, explores improvements made possible by advances in digital technology, and proposes upgrades that could transform our outmoded nineteenth century system into one that is democratic, sustainable, and serves the needs of the twenty-first century.
If you’d like a simple understanding of a complex financial “shituation” along with outside-the-box and inside-the-box functional solutions, please tune in.
To find out more about Ellen Brown and her work, please go to: https://ellenbrown.com/