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The debt limit threatens the economy. Is there a better way?
That was “The Sunday question” in the New York Times this week.
The question sadly reveals the institutionalized ignorance of our political leaders, our economists and our sycophantic mass media who do not really seek the answer to that question. The reason? Debt is profitable to the lender, our bloated banking system, whom they all serve despite the Biblical warning in Prov 22:7: “The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is slave of the lender.”
Our world is rife with problems despite its great wealth because our civilization has prioritized generating wealth over solving problems. It doesn’t make anyone rich to address the root causes of crime, sickness, war, poverty or ecocide. Promises to fix these things are used to garner votes but once elected those problems are not ignored but are in fact made worse because they are profitable for the few billionaires on top of this steaming pile of wealth extraction. There are no morals among our sold-out political/economic leadership. If there were these problems would be history instead of an existential threat.
The answer is not all that hard to find today for those willing to look but it also requires opening one’s mind and setting aside their programmed incredulity. As Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan wrote in his groundbreaking book, The Medium is the Message, “Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity.”
You will find the answer in the forgotten corners of our American history known by certain activists and academics who, for pointing it out, are labeled cranks and crackpots by the establishment which works to prevent the answer from getting out of the bag it has been kept in for centuries. Indeed, the entire schooling and media system was designed partly to keep it a secret but today it is quite out of the bag. In a word the answer to “is there a better way” is greenbacks, a term that most Americans do not understand. They rightly understand that it means money, but they assume it is the same cash money they depend on and use every day, which is not true.
The Greenback was sovereign money issued by the Lincoln administration to pay for the Civil War. The banks had refused to lend the government money to…
