Positive Money and the Chicago Plan

Real Currencies – by Anthony Migchels

Positive Money is undoubtedly one of the leading monetary reform organizations in the world. Their analysis of our monetary problems and proposed solutions is basically the Chicago plan. But the Chicago Plan does not address Usury.

Positive Money, headed by Ben Dyson, is based in the UK and is a spin off of the New Economy Foundation. It’s a not-for-profit corporation and is financed by a number of social justice foundations and grassroots supporters. Total income last year was 135,000 pounds.  

They have a powerful presence on the web. A well designed website, with an accessible narrative. They are very active on Facebook, where they have more than 20,000 likes, which is very substantial for monetary reform advocates. And this number grows quickly too, a testament to both their efforts and the growing general awareness of the issue.

Their communication is well thought out and professional. They break down the problem as they see it in concise videos and memes (pictures with a few sentences, which can easily be shared on Facebook). They churn out these memes regularly and they are continuously shared by many people who have an interest in monetary reform. By providing them they enable these people to promote the issue and this in turn gives Positive Money a strong voice in the debate.

Here’s a short video outlining their basic take:

They have a number of unofficial sister organizations abroad. For instance Sensible Money in Ireland and ‘Ons Geld’ (Our Money) in the Netherlands.

Recently they scored a nice success, when the British Green Party included Positive Money’s monetary agenda in their own program.

The Chicago Plan
Positive Money basically promotes the Chicago Plan.  In an effort to address the causes of the Great Depression, a first draft of this plan was circulated March 16th 1933 by a number of economists from Chicago University. It ultimately resulted in a paper called ‘a Program for Monetary Reform‘.

Irving Fisher was the most notable of these economists. At the time his plan, while appreciated by his colleagues, did not gain the attention it undoubtedly deserved, for the reason that his reputation had been severely damaged by his blindness to the bubble that preceded the depression. Only three days before Wall Street’s historic crash in October 1929, he predicted that stocks had reached ‘a permanently high plateau’.

It was an honest mistake, a lesson many continue to have to learn the hard way: he was heavily invested in stocks and really believed in the nonsensical stories that people make up during these, easy credit fueled, booms. He had been a wealthy man, but lost a very substantial part of his fortune in these weeks.

This blunder not only severely diminished his fortune, it was also a great bust for his reputation as a leading economist and it’s perhaps understandable that people at the time gave more credence to Keynes’ analysis of the situation. Keynes, after all, had already written ‘The Consequences of Mr. Churchill’ in 1925, after this Rothschild agent had reinstated the Gold Standard at their behest. Keynes predicted that this move would lead to a depression, undoubtedly one of the key reasons the Austrians always hated him so much.

However, Keynes claimed that depressions were caused by falling ‘aggregate demand’ in the economy (without pointing at the monetary reason: deflation) and suggested that the Government should compensate for this with anti-cyclical spending: borrowing money for investments for infrastructure and the like.

Fischer, perhaps exactly because he had learned the hard way, was much closer to the truth. He correctly stated that booms were caused by credit expansion and busts by deflationary debt deleveraging. What is more: he blamed the banks for this and squarely pointed at Fractional Reserve Banking.

His solution was to end Fractional Reserve Banking and force the banks to lend only what they had in deposits. Money creation should be left to the State, who should have the Central Bank print debt free money.

This then, is also what Positive Money prescribes as an antidote to our current problems.

The Goals of Monetary Reform
The New World Order is basically a group of banking families. They own the banking industry and through it the money supplies of the world. They use this control to suck up the wealth of the nations through Usury, which redistributes, ultimately everything, from the many to the very richest. Compound interest makes it unavoidable that these families owned the world within a few centuries after starting their lending operations.

Their second major tool is the manipulation of volume. Usury and racketeering cause money scarcity and associated permanently
depressed economies, which has been the norm throughout the West for most of modern history. Alternating inflation and deflation causes the boom/bust cycle.

The third main issue is that the banks control who gets credit and who doesn’t. They finance those they own or want to own and starve the rest. There is zero democratic control of credit allocation, let alone a recognition of the fact that the credit they create through Fractional Reserve Banking is in fact our credit, to which we are naturally entitled.

The Chicago Plan was devised to solve problem number two: the manipulation of volume and the associated boom/bust cycle. Positive Money correctly states that money must be only printed in good times with low inflation. This is indeed a reasonable formulation of how volume should be managed.

Under the Chicago plan outright bankster racketeering aimed at creating deflation would be more difficult, although not entirely ruled out.

It would probably also to a large extent solve money scarcity. But not entirely, because money scarcity is implicit in a usurious environment. Interest plus debt will always be bigger than the principal.

While solving problem two, the Chicago plan does not even address point one or three. Banks would continue to rake in the interest and pay out to the rich (‘savers’) and the poor would be paying. They would continue to decide who gets credit and for what.

The Money Power and the Chicago Plan
There is little reason to doubt Fisher’s (let alone Positive Money’s) intentions. It fitted well with the thinking of these days.

But on the other hand, the Chicago Plan is not very threatening to the Money Power either.

It is more than noteworthy that we see the same thing with the Chicago Plan as what has become the fundamental conclusion of our discussion of NSDAP monetary policy after they came to power: Schacht solved the depression by providing the economy with some extra liquidity through his MEFO bills, but he vehemently opposed and managed to shut down Feder and the Strasser brothers and their anti-usury movement.

For the Money  Power it’s a given that volume is under discussion. Their Austrianism is a typical example. It’s the redistribution through the monetary system that is the taboo.

Some highly amusing anecdotal evidence for this statement was recently provided by a friend, a notable monetary reformer from the Netherlands, who told me that at some convention he was invited by a well known Dutch economics professor to join the wholly innocuous ‘New Economy Transformers’, centered around ex-World Bank chief Herman Wijffels. The good professor had no qualms off handedly adding “but you will have to stop talking about the wealth transfer through the system all the time”.

Another issue is that leading Money Power outlets, including the Financial Times and the IMF, nowadays routinely positively discuss matters in a very similar veign to the Chicago Plan.

Is it worthwhile limiting oneself in the discussion to the boundaries of thought that the Money Power itself sets?

Full Reserve Banking
Until about six months ago, they didn’t mention the Usury issue at all. They reasoned (and basically still do) that Usury is too big an issue and getting it on the agenda, let alone rid of it, impossible.

But the growing momentum and ongoing feedback on their Facebook page made them change course and they produced a number of their typically high quality vids and memes exposing the hundreds of billions per year the British banks are raking in through Usury and the wealth transfer from the 90% to the 10% through this process and Usury in general.

But they frame it in such a way as not to disturb their proposed solution of Full Reserve Banking. They claim private money creation is the problem.

But ultimately it matters not who creates the money. What matters is what it costs and whether volume is stable. What matters is who gains by money creation.

We have already discussed Full Reserve Banking extensively in this article. Suffice it to say that the Money Power will quickly reestablish full control over any ‘debt free money’ and will continue to reign supreme through interest-slavery.

A 200k mortgage would still cost 300k in interest. The opulent would still rake in most of the money.

The conclusion is that the Money Power is comfortable with proposals that end the depression based on the correct analysis that they are caused by deflation. Sure, while implementing depression, they combat these plans, but they are no existential threat and in fact are used by them to solve depression when they have achieved the goals they were aiming for in creating them: they provide the necessary paradigms for the public to ‘understand’ what is going on.

But can we really avoid the Usury issue, considering the myriad profoundly dishonest and destructive  implications? Its supreme importance to the Money Power?

The more so since such reasonable ways to do away with it are readily available?

Conclusion
Positive Money and the Chicago Plan are close to Public Banking and the Hamiltonians. And even more so to Zarlenga and the American Monetary Institute. Modern Monetary Theory also fits in this group.

The main difference between the Hamiltonians and the others is either private or public fractional reserve banking with interest vs. private full reserve banking.

Their common basic idea is that the problem is that control of money is private and that it should be nationalized. They either nationalize money creation or the banks (which automatically means the money too).

They all avoid the crucial Usury issue and enforce the State. They do not really accept the commoner’s fair share in it all. The fundamental need to end interest slavery.

But to the common man it matters little whether he is paying interest to the State or to private banks. Governments are not the commonwealth and history shows less is more.

So while Positive Money is doing a wonderful job getting monetary reform on the agenda, their proposals are simply not comprehensive and are co-optable for the Money Power.

http://realcurrencies.wordpress.com/2014/02/25/positive-money-and-the-chicago-plan/

Sent to us by the author.