The Daily Bell is pleased to present an exclusive interview by Ellen Brown (left).
Introduction: Ellen Brown developed her research skills as an attorney practicing civil litigation in Los Angeles. In Web of Debt, her latest book, she turns those skills to an analysis of the Federal Reserve and "the money trust." She shows how this private cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back. Brown 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. Brown's eleven books include the bestselling Nature's Pharmacy, co-authored with Dr. Lynne Walker, which has sold 285,000 copies.
Daily Bell: Hello again. We've interviewed you before. But for those unfamiliar, please give us a sense of how you came to be interested in monetary issues and how you came to write Web of Debt.
Ellen Brown: As Mike Whitney says, I'm really just a writer in search of a good subject. My first degree was in English literature from Berkeley, but when I figured out that I couldn't make a living as a writer in my twenties I went to law school (UCLA). I married another law student, practiced civil litigation for 10 years in L.A. and had two delightful children. My husband (now ex-husband) finally burned out on Beverly Hills law and signed up to be a lawyer for USAID, taking us abroad for 11 years – to Kenya, Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua – giving me a chance to try my hand at writing again. I wrote 10 books on health and the politics of health, including one co-authored bestseller that sold 285,000 copies ("Nature's Pharmacy").
I jumped from there into economics after reading Ed Griffin's "World Without Cancer," linking the pharmaceutical cartel to the banking cartel, which actually got its power through the private creation of money. When I discovered that "The Wizard of Oz" was written as a monetary allegory, growing out of the populist money reform movement of the 1890s, I had the plot line to make a dry subject interesting, and I proceeded to write.
I spent six years exploring the issues and perfecting my prose, until the two Bear Stearns hedge funds collapsed in June 2007, when I figured it was time to forget about art and rush to press. "Web of Debt" was in print two weeks later, self-published by print on demand through Lightning Source.
Daily Bell: For those new to this subject, what is Web of Debt's main thesis?
Ellen Brown: The thesis is that the power to create money has been usurped by a private international banking cartel, which issues our money as debt and lends it back to us at interest. The cartel makes it appear that governments are creating our money, and governments get blamed when things go wrong; but they are actually just pawns of the cartel. We the people can get back our government and our republic only by reclaiming the power to create our own money. We can use the same credit system that private banks use, but administered as a public utility, monitored and overseen by public servants on the model of libraries and courts. To be a sustainable system, profits need to be returned to the community rather than siphoned off into private coffers.
Daily Bell: Can you expand on debt-based money versus money that is issued into the economy without debt – and why the latter is preferable. Some would say the latter exercise comes with debt as well ...
Ellen Brown: I don't think debt is necessarily bad. The flip side of debt is credit, which is a very good thing. Inventing credit is probably the most innovative thing bankers ever did. But because the Italian bankers who first came up with that scheme were on a gold-based system, they had to do it essentially by cheating, pretending to have more money than they actually had. There would be periodic runs on the banks and the system would collapse. A public banking system would acknowledge credit to be just a legal agreement to pay over time. Creditworthy borrowers would get credit. Their access to credit needn't be contingent on someone else's agreement to give it up. The system would be mathematically sustainable.
Daily Bell: Let's back up. You believe that gold and silver only circulated as money once government got involved? True? Can you expand on this?
Ellen Brown: I think that's true by definition. Webster's dictionary defines a "coin" as "a usually flat piece of metal issued by governmental authority as money." Wikipedia says: "King Croesus, ruler of Lydia (560–546 BC), began issuing the first true gold coins, . . . with a standardized purity, for general circulation. They were quite crude, and were made of electrum, a naturally occurring pale yellow mixture of gold and silver."
Daily Bell: What about ancient archeology showing drowned cities off the coast of India?
Ellen Brown: I made an effort to look that up, since you asked; but I could find nothing to support your contention. If you would point me to some specific research, I could formulate a better answer. My research indicates that Indian gold coins came in later, and like coins generally were issued by the government. Here's what came up on a quick search:
"Although the world's first coins were Greek coins made in Lydia about 640 BC, it seems clear that India and China both invented coins independently within a few centuries of the Lydians. The earliest Indian coins were silver, and it was not until about 100 AD that the Kushan emperor Vima Kadaphises introduced the first Indian gold coin, which was a gold dinar bearing the image of Shiva."
Daily Bell: What makes you think that gold and silver, mined together as electrum, were not a store of value prior to the temple period?
Ellen Brown: Define the temple period please. The Sumerian temple period? That would be the third millennium B.C. The Sumerians did not use coins as money. Rather, they had what could be characterized as the first public banking system, based on accounting entries on cuneiform tablets. To say gold and silver were a store of value is a bit vague. Gold wedding rings are a store of value, but I wouldn't classify them as money.
Daily Bell: Why do you believe that government is superior to the free market?
Ellen Brown: Why do you believe that I believe government is superior to the free market? I believe government is necessary to have a free market. Otherwise you have the law of the jungle, the exploitation of the weak by the strong.
Daily Bell: Do you believe that government is effective at all levels big and small?
Ellen Brown: Without meaning to be rude, I have to say I'm slapping my forehead at some of these questions. Government can be effective at a variety of levels. Not all government is effective. Some government is very ineffective. It depends largely on the political structure.
Daily Bell: Do you believe in central banking so long as it is publicly controlled?
Ellen Brown: A publicly-owned central bank can be very effective in serving the people. The Commonwealth Bank of Australia is my favorite model. Not all publicly-owned banks, however, are effective for that purpose. I often hear British money reformers complaining that the publicly-owned Bank of England is still serving the interests of the private banking establishment, just as when it was private. It is public in name only.
Daily Bell: Do you believe that government was responsible for a good deal of mayhem in the 20th century?
Ellen Brown: Sure, but somebody manipulates governments into wars and other mayhem. I believe a government could be structured so that it actually served the people; but first, it would have to recapture control of its monetary system. Few governments are in that position today.
Daily Bell: Do you believe in the Invisible Hand? Do you believe in Misesian human action. How can you reconcile it with your preference for government decision-making.
Ellen Brown: You'll have to define your terms. I'd say the Invisible Hand that is at work right now is chiefly the hand of Goldman Sachs.
Daily Bell: OK, what are some triumphs of big government in your opinion?
Ellen Brown: National highway systems, bridges, waterways, dams, FDIC insurance, Medicare and social security, to name a few. If you doubt the latter two, consider what life was like in the depression of the 1890s, when there was no Medicare or social security, and people froze in the fields or starved. My grandmother, for whom I was named, died in Detroit during the Great Depression at age 42, trying to self-abort her eighth child, at a time when my grandfather was an unemployed auto worker and they could barely feed the other seven. My father was the oldest child and supported the family on a paper route. He never really recovered from that traumatic period. I suspect he is hovering about and prodding me on.
Daily Bell: Do you still believe the DARPA and the US federal government invented the Internet.
Ellen Brown: So says Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet. I read an interesting article that I can't find now called something like, "The Government Does Some Things Right," I think in the L.A. Times. It said the inventor of the internet went from one major private company to another and got rejected for funding. Only the government was willing to do research for its own sake, just because it was a good idea, simply to see what could be developed from it.
Daily Bell: You've used China and India as examples of public central banking in a positive sense. Yet both these countries have terrible inflation now. (As in too much money.) How do you respond to that?
Ellen Brown: China and India are the fastest growing economies in the world. They are hot investor targets, so money has been flowing in, both as foreign currency and as credit expansion for new projects. This is largely speculative investment, which has driven up prices because goods and services have not increased in tandem.
As Max Keiser observed recently, India is suffering more from inflated prices in commodities than we are because food and staples are a substantially larger proportion of the average Indian's budget than of ours. Commodities are going up for a variety of reasons, including (a) heavy competition for these scarce goods from developing countries, whose economies are growing much faster than ours; (b) in the case of soaring food prices, disastrous weather patterns; (c) the flight of "hot money" from the real estate market, which has nowhere else to go; (d) speculation, which is fanning the flames; (e) the growth of ETFs, which have made it easy for ordinary investors to jump in and out of commodities; and (f) the U.S. dollar carry trade created by the extremely low interest rates made available by the Fed to its banking constituents following the credit crisis of 2008.
Daily Bell: Define inflation.
Ellen Brown: There are two types of inflation, price inflation (an increase in prices over time) and inflation of the money supply (an increase in the amount of money circulating in the economy). These are often confused. Individual prices may be going up (as commodities are today), yet the overall money supply may be falling (as it is today). Many factors can be involved in price inflation. An excess of demand (money) over supply (goods and services) is one possibility; but price inflation can also result from an increase in costs (including interest costs, scarcity of raw materials, etc.) or from speculation, with "hot money" rushing from one investment to another and competitively driving prices up.
Daily Bell: Is it monetary?
Ellen Brown: The question needs to be refined. "Monetary" means pertaining to money, which inflation obviously does.
Daily Bell: Is the US money supply shrinking in your view?
Ellen Brown: Yes. According to the New York Times of September 2010, it is shrinking at the fastest rate since the Great Depression. See http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/opinion/12bove.html
Daily Bell: Why is that?
Ellen Brown: Per the NY Times, it's because banks are making fewer loans, largely because capital requirements have been raised. My proposed solution would be to supplement the supply of credit through state-owned banks, which have huge potential capital and deposit bases that can be leveraged into credit for local needs.
Daily Bell: How do you define the money supply?
Ellen Brown: I'll go with the NY Times: MZM (the liquid money supply in the economy); M1, M2, M3 (the broadest measure).
Daily Bell: How do you define deflation?
Ellen Brown: A shrinking MZM, creating insufficient liquidity to maintain business and productivity at optimum levels.
Daily Bell: Are you aware that some of your supporters want to shift the responsibility for printing money from the Fed to the Treasury in America? Do you agree with this?
Ellen Brown: I'm aware of a particular school of money reform that you may be talking about, but I doubt they would look charitably on being called my supporters. My own preferred alternative would be to nationalize the Federal Reserve.
Of course you realize that money is not actually printed by the Fed. It is printed by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, which is already part of the Department of the Treasury. http://www.moneyfactory.gov/aboutthebep.html.
Daily Bell: Do you believe your movement has been penetrated by military intelligence?
Ellen Brown: Not to my knowledge. I don't know why they would take an interest. I haven't even seen any Wall Street bankers take an interest. The opposition so far all seems to be from the other money reformers!
Daily Bell: Hard money economist Dr. North has made many criticisms of your work. How do you respond?
Ellen Brown: I haven't actually spent much time reading Dr. North's theories. He said in an email that I was a threat to the Tea Party movement, that his intent was to destroy me, and that there would be no compromise, so I've decided that arguing with him is an unproductive venture. He can have his theories and I'll have mine; may the best human win. If you want to present me with a particular criticism, I could respond to that. ***
Daily Bell: You've stated that you will no longer use Benjamin Franklin's Pennsylvania money or the Nazi era as examples of successful public money. What will you use?
Ellen Brown: Au contraire, I will definitely continue to use the Pennsylvania colonial bank, America's first publicly-owned bank, as an example. I think it's an excellent model. It wasn't "Benjamin Franklin's money" though; the bank was established by the Quakers, who came from England. Franklin just saw how well it worked and wrote about it in glowing terms. I won't mention 1930s Germany unless it comes up, because it's too controversial. My favorite modern-day models are the Bank of North Dakota and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia.
Daily Bell: How can anyone know how much money is enough money? Or when to stop lending in your paradigm?
Ellen Brown: Lending is an organic process, responding to the needs of the borrowers. Contrary to popular belief, banks do not lend their own money or their depositors' money; they create new money on their books every time they make a loan. I think lending is a much more natural and efficient way to get new money into the money supply than to have an independent body trying to dictate what the economy needs. But private banking institutions have proven they cannot be trusted with this powerful tool. Except for coins, which are a very marginal part of the money supply, all money today is just credit – the credit of the people. It should be a public utility, administered through publicly-owned banks.
Daily Bell: Won't your paradigm end up injecting too much money into the economy nonetheless?
Ellen Brown: No. Loans grow organically in response to the demands of trade, and that credit-money disappears when the loans are paid off. When demand for loans is low, the money supply shrinks naturally. You may be thinking of the paradigm of another school, which in your last article you referred to as representing a "Brownian Schism." I'm flattered, but they actually came first.
Daily Bell: How will you value the land and other goods used to secure the loan?
Ellen Brown: Just as bankers do now. I'm not talking about putting politicians in charge of running the banks. Publicly-owned banks are run by bankers, just as privately-owned banks are. See, e.g., the very well run Bank of North Dakota. The Commonwealth Bank of Australia worked so well because it was set up by a professional banker who decided to apply his insider knowledge to serve the public interest. Knowing that banks simply created credit on their books, he proceeded to finance massive infrastructure with this sort of book-created credit – and it worked, brilliantly well.
Daily Bell: Who will make the decisions? Won't they inevitably be corrupted?
Ellen Brown: What decisions? The question is too vague. At the Bank of North Dakota, the decision to advance loans is made by professional loan officers, just as it is elsewhere. Creditworthy borrowers get loans.
Daily Bell: Didn't Franklin disown state money as inflationary before he died?
Ellen Brown: Not to my knowledge. Anyway, it was set up by the Quakers. He just wrote about it.
Daily Bell: Why not fight for freedom instead of government intervention?
Ellen Brown: I am fighting for freedom – freedom from a corrupt banking monopoly that collects tribute for letting us use our own public credit. Freedom from starvation and disease resulting from an artificial scarcity imposed by a private monopoly over the creation of money and credit.
Daily Bell: What do you think is responsible for human progress – individual human action or government?
Ellen Brown: Both are obviously responsible. Without government you would not have roads, bridges, court systems, etc. Government sets the rules and provides a protective umbrella under which individual human endeavor can bear fruit.
Daily Bell: Does government create and invent things?
Ellen Brown: Sure, many things. My brother comes to mind. He has degrees in physics and engineering and works for SLAC, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, a government-funded agency. It says in its mission statement:
"SLAC programs explore the ultimate structure and dynamics of matter and the properties of energy, space and time – at the smallest and largest scales, in the fastest processes and at the highest energies – through robust scientific programs, excellent accelerator based user facilities and valuable partnerships."
Government researchers can do "pure research" -- research for its own sake – because they aren't focused on quarterly profits. My brother took reduced pay at a government job for that reason: he did not want to sell out to industry. Mondragon, a large and very successful cooperative in France, has a "department of good ideas," where people can go with their creative inventions and get them developed.
Daily Bell: What makes you think that a government based public money system wouldn't be taken over by powerful private forces just like this one has been? We call it mercantilism. If you give government power, won't the wealthiest end up with their hands on the levers of government?
Ellen Brown: That hasn't happened in North Dakota, which currently has the only state-owned bank in the country. Certainly a public institution that returns its profits to the public, which has full public accountability and transparency, and employs civil servants who make no bonuses or commissions for churning loans, has a better chance of serving the public than the corrupt private system we have now.
Daily Bell: Isn't there a small group of Anglo-American banking families that has hijacked the West and intends to build a world government?
Ellen Brown: So I have read.
Daily Bell: Would you be in favor of one world government?
Ellen Brown: Definitely not of the sort projected by that group. I think national and state sovereignty is very important, particularly in matters of money. But the internet and global trade are increasingly bringing us closer together, and we probably do need some sort of international rules to keep things running smoothly. For example, I think there needs to be a global yardstick for measuring the value of currencies against each other – not the "floating" exchange rates we have now, which are subject to speculative manipulation, but something based on the real cost of goods and services in each country. I have a chapter on that in Web of Debt, including a proposed model.
Daily Bell: OK, thanks for answering the tough questions again. How is your movement doing?
Ellen Brown: Very well, thank you! I did two presentations in the California Bay Area in December, which generated so much interest that we have just launched a Public Banking Institute to follow though. The website is http://www.publicbankinginstitute.org.
Daily Bell: Are banks being established in the US that conform to your model?
Ellen Brown: Not yet, but legislation is pending or being proposed in a number of states, and there has been a great deal of interest in the idea. That's why we set up the Public Banking Institute -- to handle inquiries, do research, generate literature, and advise interested groups.
Daily Bell: Where do you go from here?
Ellen Brown: I'm trying to get another book out on public banking, but I seriously need a staff. My mother's caregiver used to do some computer work for me, but she has moved on to become a nurse practitioner. Hopefully the Public Banking Institute will relieve me of some of my networking functions.
Daily Bell: What recent books and articles would you refer our readers to?
Ellen Brown: I used to be an avid reader of books but I no longer have time! My own articles are posted here: http://www.webofdebt.com/articles
Ellen Brown: The latest is posted on Huffington Post here: THE FED HAS SPOKEN: NO BAILOUT FOR MAIN STREET
Daily Bell: Thank you for your time and courtesy as always.
Ellen Brown: And thank you for yours!
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***Editor's Note: In fact, Ellen Brown did respond in detail to Gary North (see feedback thread, below, for link). The back and forth is considerable – and detailed. In the After Thoughts below we have tried to focus on a larger overview to try to return the discussion to the simplest and most fundamental issue, which is state control versus the free market.
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