Think Globally, Bank Locally

When Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich and talk radio types rail about the Federal Reserve and Wall Street and international bankers, do the words fringe and conspiracy theory and even wack jobs come to mind? Me too. Or at least they used to—but that was before the economic meltdown shook the world.

Since then I’ve been talking with everyone I know, and some people I don’t know, about what happened to our money and why, what’s going on with it now, and how we can change the system.

I recently attended the Economics of Peace conference, sponsored by RSF Social Finance and the Praxis Peace Institute, and learned about a variety of positive and hopeful initiatives, including alternative, complementary, and local currencies, mutual credit exchanges, barter systems, and cooperatives.

One of the most compelling presenters at the conference was Ellen Hodgson Brown, the author of the book Web of Debt (Third Millennium, 2008). Brown laid out how we the people lost the power to create money and how we can get it back again.

Banking shenanigans have been with us since Babylonian times. According to Brown, we’ve also had egalitarian money systems that worked quite well. Before the Revolutionary War, each American colony printed and circulated its own currency. These currencies were not backed by commodities, like gold or silver. Instead, they were based on trust.

In Ben Franklin’s Pennsylvania and other colonies, people were willing to accept the local currency as legal tender, there was plenty to go around, and commerce thrived. But the British government intervened and forbade new issues of this colonial scrip. Taxes had to be paid in gold, which meant borrowing from the British bankers. The result was widespread depression, which was a key factor that led to the revolution.

Ever since, Brown argues, private banking interests in the United States have usurped the public’s power to issue money and have captured the nation by debt. The tipping point came in the summer of 2007, with the collapse of two Bear Stearns hedge funds. The result was a credit freeze that crippled U.S. banks. The government’s solution has been to bail out banks considered “too big to fail” with taxpayer money. But Brown says the money isn’t making it into the real economy and that the derivatives exposure of U.S. banks is $175 trillion, far more than the taxpayers can afford to underwrite.

To escape the debt trap and reclaim control over our financial future, we need to quit bailing out Wall Street and restore the publicly issued money system of the American colonists. We don’t have to convince Washington or reform Wall Street to accomplish this. We simply need to think local, and create our own municipal and state banks. As Buckminster Fuller said, “To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”