In his letter a couple weeks ago, Oyen Hoffman responded “to the ‘occupier’ and Conor O’Farrell in one fell swoop.” He was quick to criticize liberals, occupiers, and what he calls “the O’Farrells of the world,” but he gives little in the way of a solution to our problems, other than to “vote Obama out.”
Unfortunately, our Constitution makes no provision for a recall vote. Article 2, Section 4 of our Constitution does allow for removal of a president by means of impeachment, but this involves action by the Senate and the House of Representatives, not a popular vote.
I would, therefore, like to suggest an alternate way to achieve the economic well-being the framers of our Constitution had in mind for us (and which the Occupy Wall Street movement wants to see restored).
Article 1, Section 8 of our Constitution gives Congress sole power “To coin Money [and] regulate the Value thereof.”
Things went wrong in 1913, when the Federal Reserve Act turned this power over to the Federal Reserve (which, despite its name, is not part of the federal government). Overnight, control of our money was taken from “we the people” (through our elected officials) and given to people who are in no way accountable to us.
However, there is nothing in the Constitution that gives Congress the authority to give away that control.
In 2008, the Federal Reserve secretly gave an almost $8 trillion bailout to American and international banks, and those banks made $13
billion in profits through this scheme.
Where did the Federal Reserve get most of that $8 trillion? They created it out of nothing. Poof! Does creating money out of nothing seem too good to be true? Well, that’s exactly what it is.
Our nation’s economy is based on a Ponzi scheme that can work for a while but must sooner or later fall apart.
And fall apart it has.
- 15,000,000 more Americans are unemployed.
- Another 12,000,000 are underemployed.
- Wages are stagnant, and millions are being asked to take pay cuts.
- 43,000,000 live below the poverty line.
- 49,000,000 go to bed hungry.
- 3,000,000 are homeless.
- More than 2,000,000 homes have been lost to foreclosure and millions of homeowners are falling behind on their mortgage payments.
- There are $3 trillion in unmet infrastructure needs (business cannot thrive where there is inadequate infrastructure).
- Tax cuts to the top brackets cost the Federal Government over $1 trillion, yet have failed to create significant numbers of new jobs.
- There has been unreasonable concentration of wealth, unbridled expansion of national debt, and inflation of the currency.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
We must take back the power the Federal Reserve grabbed in 1913 and restore it to the people.
That is the goal of the National Emergency Employment Defense (NEED) Act of 2011, H.R. 2990 which representatives Dennis Kucinich of Ohio and John Conyers of Michigan introduced.
It’s easy to find — just Google it. It runs a bit over 40 pages, but here it is in a nutshell:
- Dismantle the Federal Reserve and incorporate it into the US Treasury.
- End the fractional reserve system.
- Impose transparency.
I am not suggesting the NEED Act would solve all our problems and I’m skeptical of the way it (as I understand it) places power to create money into the Executive Branch under the United States Treasury (whose job is to manage revenue), but at least our economic destiny would be back where it belongs — in our own hands. We might still muck things up, but, then again, I’d like to think that just maybe we wouldn’t.
My call to action: Start with http://www.facebook.com/pages/Pass-the-NEED-Act/246204562097844.
See where that leads you.
Dan Pietsch
Idyllwild
