|
Today We're
All Irish:
Debt Serfdom Comes to America
By Dr. Ellen Brown
17/03/08 "Global
Research" -- - March 17 is St. Patrick's Day, when
people of all national origins raise a glass and declare, "Today
we're all a bit Irish!" This may be truer than we know. The
Irish were driven to America by debt, and they are leading the
Western world in household debt today. The London Daily
Telegraph reported on March 13, 2008 that household debt in
Ireland has reached 190 percent of disposable income, the
highest in the developed world; and that the Irish banking
system is suffering such acute strains from the downturn in the
housing market that it may have to nationalize its banks.1
The same may soon be happening in the United States, and for
much the same reasons.
Debt Drives the Irish to
America
A short review
of the history of the Irish in North America reveals that few
were here before 1845, when a disease struck the potato crops of
Ireland, wiping out the chief or only source of food for many
poor farmers. Famine continued for the next five years, killing
over 2.5 million people. "God put the blight on the potatoes,"
complained the Irish farmers, "but England put the hunger upon
Ireland." Farmers who were heavily in debt were shipped to
England to pay the rent owed to their landlords. Impoverished
Irish immigrants saved what little money they could to send
family members across the Atlantic, traveling on overcrowded
ships on which many died of disease or hunger on the way. When
they arrived, the Irish men had to fight – often physically – to
get labor jobs involving long hours and low pay; while the women
worked mainly as servants (called "Brigets") to upper-class
families. Despite their very low wages, they managed to send a
bit of money back to their families, until other family members
had enough to buy the ship tickets to America. In the American
South (mainly New Orleans), the Irish lived in swamp land
infested with disease. Here, Irish men were looked upon as
actually lower than slaves. As one historian put it, if
a plantation owner lost a slave, he lost an investment; if he
lost a laborer, he could always get another. Because the Irish
workers were plentiful and expendable, they were often sent in
to do dangerous jobs for which the slave-owners were reluctant
to send their valuable slaves.2
"Debt Slavery" Replaces
Physical Slavery
This form of
"debt slavery" or "debt peonage" was not just an accidental
development of history. It was a deliberately-planned
alternative to the slave arrangement in which owners were
responsible for the feeding and care of a dependent population,
and it is still with us today. Although European financiers were
in favor of an American Civil War that would return the United
States to its colonial status, they admitted privately that they
were not necessarily interested in preserving slavery. They
preferred "the European plan": capital could exploit labor by
controlling the money supply, while letting the laborers feed
themselves. In July 1862, this ploy was revealed in a notorious
document called the Hazard Circular, which was circulated by
British banking interests among their American banking
counterparts. It said:
Slavery is
likely to be abolished by the war power and chattel slavery
destroyed. This, I and my European friends are glad of, for
slavery is but the owning of labor and carries with it
the care of the laborers, while the European plan, led by
England, is that capital shall control labor by controlling
wages. This can be done by controlling the money. The
great debt that capitalists will see to it is made out of
the war, must be used as a means to control the volume of
money. To accomplish this, the bonds [government debt to the
bankers] must be used as a banking basis. . . . It will
not do to allow the greenback, as it is called, to circulate
as money any length of time, as we cannot control that.3
A system of
"debt peonage" is inextricably linked to a banking system in
which money is issued privately by bankers and lent to
the government rather than being issued as "greenbacks" by the
government itself Today the "European plan" has evolved into the
private central banking system, and it has come to dominate the
economies of the world. A private central bank creates money
simply by printing it or entering it as an accounting entry,
then lends it to the federal government in exchange for
government bonds or debt. Private commercial banks create many
more dollars in the same way, advancing money created as
accounting-entry loans without even incurring the cost of a
printing press. Except for coins, the entire U.S. money
supply is now created as a debt to private bankers.4
Banks create the principal but not the interest necessary to pay
back their loans, so more money is always owed back than was put
into the money supply in the first place. More loans must
therefore continually be taken out to cover the interest,
spiraling the economy into increasing levels of debt and
inflation, in a futile attempt to repay principal and interest
on a debt that is actually impossible to repay. The result is
"debt peonage," and it has systematically reduced the people to
working for the company store, bound to their corporate masters
for the food, shelter and health care formerly provided by slave
owners under the old physical-slave system.
The Colonial Alternative:
The Pennsylvania System of Benjamin Franklin's Day
This is not the
only way to run an economy. Until 1913, when the Federal Reserve
Act was passed, the European system of debt peonage competed
with what was called "the American system" – debt-free
government-issued dollars generated by provincial governments to
pay their expenses. This "greenback" system was not actually
used in the United States after the American colonies became a
nation, except during the Civil War; but the "American system"
flourished for decades in colonial America. Paper money was
issued by local provincial governments not only to pay their own
expenses but as commercial loans. The most effective and
efficient of these government-issued money systems was in
Pennsylvania, where a publicly-owned bank issued paper notes and
lent them to farmers. Since this money returned to the
government, it did not inflate the money supply; and since the
government issued and spent an additional sum of money on public
works, enough money was kept in the system to pay the interest
on the loans and prevent the debt spiral afflicting the private
banking system. The Pennsylvania system worked so well that
it completely funded the provincial government without taxes or
inflation.
Benjamin
Franklin and others maintained that the chief reason for the
American Revolution was that Parliament forbade the colonies
from issuing their own money. Paper money issued by the
Revolutionary government got the colonists through the
Revolutionary War, but the British heavily counterfeited this
money as a deliberate war tactic, and by the end of the war it
had been inflated so much that it was nearly worthless. Fear of
inflation led the Continental Congress to completely omit paper
money from the Constitution, which does not say who can issue
paper money or under what circumstances. The private banks
filled the breach, and by 1913 the United States had the same
private central banking system that England had.
Today, the
pyramid scheme of lending 10 dollars and requiring 11 back has
resulted in the very inflationary spiral the Founding Fathers
feared. The money supply is inflated with more and more debt,
shrinking the value of the dollars paid to workers and
propelling larger and larger portions of the population into
debt peonage. If the government were to issue its own money
rather than borrowing from banks that issued it, and if this
money were used to pay for real goods and services (roads and
bridges, sustainable energy development, health services, and
the like), demand and supply would remain in balance and
inflation would not result. A government with a properly
designed and monitored system of publicly-issued money could
fund itself without taxes, inflation or debt.
Publicly-owned
banks are also called "national" banks or "nationalized" banks –
the very thing that threatens the private banking system in
Ireland today. We have come full circle: a system of national
banks is what used to be called "the American system." This
may be what we actually need – a public banking system operating
for the benefit of the public. The private European system
of debt peonage has failed. On this 2008 St. Patrick's Day, we
the modern-day Irish of all persuasions can raise a glass to the
possibility of being freed from the debt peonage that has kept
us wage-slaves for most of our national history.
Notes
1. "Irish Banks May Need Life-support as Property Prices Crash,"
www.telegraph.co.uk (March 13, 2008).
2. "Irish in
America," www.essays.cc.
3."Hazard
Circular," 1862, quoted in Charles Lindburgh, Banking and
Currency and the Money Trust (Washington D.C.: National Capital
Press, 1913), page 102.
4.See Ellen
Brown, "Dollar Deception: How Banks Secretly Create Money,"
www.webofdebt.com
(July 3, 2007).
Ellen Brown,
J.D., 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. Her eleven
books include the bestselling Nature's Pharmacy, co-authored
with Dr. Lynne Walker, which has sold 285,000 copies. Her
websites are
www.webofdebt.com and
www.ellenbrown.com.
Click on "comments" below to read or post comments
Comment Guidelines
Be succinct, constructive and
relevant to the story.
We encourage engaging, diverse
and meaningful commentary. Do not include
personal information such as names, addresses,
phone numbers and emails. Comments falling
outside our guidelines – those including
personal attacks and profanity – are not
permitted.
See our complete
Comment Policy
and
use this link to notify us if you have concerns
about a comment.
We’ll promptly review and remove any
inappropriate postings.
Send Page To a Friend
In accordance
with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material
is distributed without profit to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information for research and educational
purposes. Information Clearing House has no
affiliation whatsoever with the originator of
this article nor is Information ClearingHouse
endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
|
