The Bank of Nations: A Proposal

There is a missing international institution. Today we have the United Nations, an assembly of nations without the most important instrument of modern government, the power to issue money. We have the International Monetary Fund with the responsibility to regulate currency exchange rates, which it does in favor of rich countries, and we have the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development known as the World Bank whose role is to encourage poor countries to borrow money from rich ones, which puts them in a debt trap. The actual governors of the world today are the central bankers that create money and control its supply worldwide.

Central bankers have been very careful to make themselves independent of National governments. Here is the statement of independence for the European Central Bank from its website.

"Neither the ECB nor the national central banks (NCBs), nor any member of their decision-making bodies, are allowed to seek or take instructions from EU institutions or bodies, from any government of an EU member State or from any other body." http://www.ecb.int/ecb/orga/independence/html/index.en.html

Banker Mayer Amschel Rothschild in 1790 is reputed to have said, "Let me issue and control the money supply of a nation and I care not who makes its laws." So we have today in what we suppose are Nations governed by democracies, Nations in fact governed by bankers whose policies Nations are forbidden from influencing.

The Bank of Nations would combine the functions now incorrectly parceled out to different independent institutions.

1. The Bank of Nations would be a bank of issue; it would have the power to issue money.

2. The Bank of Nations would be owned and controlled by its member Nations. Any Nation could join on the condition that it accepts an Hour of Work as the standard of a fair wage and a fair price with variations negotiable by the people directly involved.

3. The purpose of The Bank of Nations would be to issue to its member Nations money denominated in Hours of Work debt-free and interest-free in sufficient amount to maintain productive and ecologically sustainable employment of its people.

4. The Bank of Nations would operate by cooperative rules; namely, each member Nation would have one vote and any income above its operating expenses would be refunded to its member Nations proportional to their contributions to that overage.

The Bank of Nations would combine in one institution, control by its member Nations, the power to issue money and regulation of its value and supply.

The problem is a borrowed money supply.

All our money is borrowed.  It has been that way since 1790. 

How is that a problem?

Where do we get the money to pay interest?

We get it from the borrowed money supply.  So when we pay interest, we reduce the money supply and find ourselves in a “panic, depression, or recession.”  In the 200+ years of the history of the United States, we have had about 50 of them.  Our guidance system is not working very well.

We can end the growth in debt by all but ending interest.  Bring it down to zero to 1/4 of one percent, like the FED did for banks borrowing from each other.

James Jackson, first congressman from Georgia, warned the First Congress on February 9, 1790, if they adopted Alexander Hamilton’s plan to fund the debt, “Though our present debt be but a few millions, in the course of a single century it will be multiplied to an extent we dare not think of.”

Total debt, not just Federal debt, hit a ceiling of $70 trillion in 2008 and we cannot increase debt enough to keep up with the debt growth trajectory.  We must bring interest down near zero.  A small amount can pay banks as a fee for service.

Go for the Gold

Go for the money, and fix it.  Its names, “dollars,” “euros,” “dinars,” Identify their nationality but not their value.  We need all money to say on its face what it is worth.  That seems like a lot to ask, but the odd thing is that we have used money without a definite stated value for so long.  We judge our money’s value at the moment we go to spend it.  We do not know and cannot know how much the money is worth until that moment. 

Let’s put Hour on all money, everywhere.  Then everyone will know, just by looking at it, how much their money is worth.  It seems like a novel idea for money, but it happens with all other measurements.  If a board is marked 10 feet long, we know and expect it to be exactly 10 feet long. The same is true of measures of volume, weight, temperature and time. 

The beauty of the old Gold Standard was that an amount of gold was printed on it as its value.  The unit was wrong, an amount of gold, but the statement of what the money was worth was still the correct idea.  We just have to pick up where the Gold Standard left off and print the value of all money in units of Hours of Work.  Imagine, encouraging work to produce wealth. 

Share the work, share the wealth.  It’s the way to go for the gold. Hour Money. 

While we are at it, let’s also make it Our Money.  That is money that the government spends into circulation by paying people with it to produce goods and provide services that promote the public well-being.  That’s what I understand by wealth, well-being.

Call off the dogs of war.

We are hearing talk about Iran that sounds like the talk that preceded the invasion of Iraq.  “Iran might be developing a nuclear weapon.”  “Iran wants to destroy Israel.”  “We must sanction Iran.”

Iran is a modern developed country. Take a look at the pictures on this site http://www.examiner.com/nonpartisan-in-national/iran-s-people-video  What right do we have to tell Iran what it can or cannot do? 

I think we are seeing a grand war strategy being followed.  Iraq is west of Iran, Afghanistan is east of Iran.  After invading both those countries, our top leadership are focused on Iran.  Why?  We know that the most obvious answer is oil.  But there is a deeper more troubling cause; the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned us about in 1960.  His original farewell address called it the military-industrial-congressional complex, but he deleted congressional so as not to offend congress.

Many people in our country have become dependent on military weapons contracts.  Look at the huge contract Boeing in St. Louis just got to produce F16 fighter jets for Saudi Arabia.  It was greeted with joy that people working for Boeing will have jobs for years to come.  But what kind of jobs, arming another country.  Who is the enemy? 

We are following the same path that led to World War I and World War II; we are building weapons day after day, year after year.  France and Germany did that before World War I, the war that was supposed to end war.  Germany, tortured by the terms of the Versailles Treaty, armed itself to conquer all of Europe in retaliation. 

We bombed Iraq to hell.  Why?  I believe it is because we had a huge stockpile of weapons that needed to be used to make room for more newer ones.  Congress just passed the National Defense Authorization Act with a price tag of more than $600 billion.  The “cuts” in the military just announced are not cuts at all.  They are reductions in the increases that were expected to occur over the next 10 years.  We are spending more than ever on weapons of mass destruction, including “modernizing” our thousands of nuclear missiles.  What right do we have to tell Iran that they cannot build a nuclear bomb when we have thousands of them and Israel has dozens?

We cannot kill our way to peace.  Have we learned nothing from the two World Wars we have already had, and Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.  The United Nations was created with the strongest support of the United States to end the scourge of war.  Yet today the United States wants nothing to do with the United Nations unless they do what we tell them to do.  People in the rest of the world believe that the United States today is the greatest threat to international peace.  I agree.  We need to disarm worldwide with the United Nations getting all nations to do it because we know a third world war will be worse than anything we can imagine.

Iran is connected to Russia and China by strong commercial ties for oil.  If we attack Iran, I cannot imagine Russia China just idly standing by.  And what good would come of any such attack?  What good ever comes from punishing another country with sanctions?  Our foreign policy needs to be do no harm.  We need a strong Peace Corp, not War Corp.

What do you think?

A Peace Agenda

We cannot kill our way to peace, unless by peace we mean the silence of a cemetery. So long as we prepare for war, we shall have war. Instead of slipping into the policy of war that he inherited, I wish President Barack Obama had repudiated war and declared that his policy would be that of a good doctor, Do No Harm.

To have peace, we must prepare for peace. For that purpose, I would like us all to pursue a peace agenda of four policies.

1. Tools, not weapons.

Weapons always waste. They waste if they are used. They waste if they are not used. Each year the world spends more than a trillion dollars, $1,000,000,000,000, on weapons, which can only kill men, women, and children and destroy property. Meanwhile, every day 40,000 children die for lack of pennies worth of clean water and beans. The United States spends the most, a third of the world weapons total.

Action: Stop making weapons. Make tools instead - "From swords to plowshares." The longer we wait, the poorer we are and the more we have to fear.

 

2. Cooperation, not conflict.

Cooperation produces wealth; conflict reduces it. Cooperation makes everything easier; conflict makes everything more difficult. Imagine how much richer the world would be, if the 20th Century had been a Century of Cooperation instead of a Century of War.

Action: Always and everywhere offer help, never harm. Resolve conflicts to mutual benefit. Imagine how much better off everyone would be if helping others to mutual benefit had been the U.S. policy instead of bombing Afghanistan and Iraq. The necessary skills are clearly presented in Roger Fisher and William Ury's book, Getting to YES. We can make the 21st Century the Century of Cooperation.

 

3. Equality, not inequality.

Equality increases wealth. Equal employment improves everyone's skills and, therefore, product quality. Equal pay increases effective communal purchasing power. Many unemployed people produce nothing and have no purchasing power.

Action: Achieve full employment by reducing the work week by the rate of unemployment. Set the national wage standard at the median wage,  For the United States in 2012, that would be $25 an hour. In true free and fair market fashion, let the people directly involved decide reasonable deviations from that standard.

 

4. Economy, not waste.

The word “economy” derives from the Greek oikos, meaning household, and nomos, meaning management. Good economics is good household management. Today we have terrible household management. We waste enormous amounts of material, effort, and people in under-education, un-employment, and over-consumption.

Action: Pay people to educate themselves to the limit of their ability to do jobs that produce the most real wealth: food, clothing, shelter, and good health, with the least work.

 

The goal: a healthy global household.

The goal of this peace agenda is to promote a healthy global household, people living well and wisely. It boils down to helping each other in a spirit of mutual respect and equality so we prosper together.

Bob Blain