The Ellen Brown School of Economics

Web of Debt may be the most useful and informative work I've ever read in understanding the causes of the sorry world we live in. I've been researching "real" economics for a long time, and thought that I was fairly economically-literate, but I've never found anything that put all the pieces together the way Ellen Brown does, and explains all the terms with clarity and even wit! It's not an easy read, but it's very rewarding, for anyone who knows things have gone terribly wrong but doesn't have the facts to say why. My copy is coffee-stained, dog-eared, and has every other line underscored - although her italics and quotes already put the emphases where due. I like the structure of the book, and the way it keeps interweaving time periods and going deeper. And her writing is delightful - who would have thought you could say "enjoyable" and "economics" in the same review.

I've been particularly grateful to see the attention she pays to the destruction of the Third World (and I agree with her that "Third World" is less demeaning than "developing") through currency manipulation, "free trade," and debt. Many economics writers fixate myopically on the impact within the US, and are blind to the long sordid history of the war against subsistence that is capitalism. She also follows the spider threads to how the financiers gained control of media and education. I recently ordered the John Taylor Gatto book she mentions, The Underground History of American Education: A School Teacher's Intimate Investigation Into the Problem of Modern Schooling. Noam Chomsky's books, Media Control, Second Edition: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda (Open Media) and Necessary Illusions (available on the web), may be to media what Web of Debt is to economics.

So now that we understand the problems, how do we change them? Ellen cites Dr. Carroll Quigley that, "...the secret of the international bankers' success is that they have managed to control national money systems while letting them appear to be controlled by governments. The US government itself is the puppet of invisible puppeteers..." If this is true, the only way to regain control of government is to first establish alternatives to the debt-based economy. But to do that, there first needs to be a core of people who are educated in deep economics and global issues. We need our own alternative "school of economics" with Ellen's book as a primary text. Does this exist, Ellen? Is there anything close? Can we start one?

Enlightening book about money systems

Web of Debt is a multi-layered book dealing with money systems of the past and the present.

It is part historical examination of monetary systems touching upon the money system of the Middle Ages, an eye-opening account of colonial currency, and the modern manifestation of currency control in the form of the Federal Reserve and the Wall Street market makers.

Web of Debt also reads like a journalistic effort because it provides a much needed insight into daily trading schemes of the market makers on the NYSE. After reading this book you will understand the harmful practice of short selling and problems still looming in the derivities market.

I also felt like this book is an economic lesson that all people can understand. Ellen Brown was able to break through the jargon of Modern Money Mechanics by using clear language and helpful examples to describe the workings of the Federal Reserve, bank lending, and money creation.

Thats not to mention the chapters on Third world debt and the burden of debt that contributes greatly to the poverty of these countries.

This book is not only for people interested in economic or wall street reform. Its for enviornmentalists, education advocates, and people hoping to remake American infrastructure. The common question these groups run into is: How are we going to pay for it?

Ellen Brown lays out the answer by advocationg for a truly Federal bank that would be able to create debt-free money. Its the cause that was fought for by Populists all over America just over a century ago. The money issue galvanized an entire generation of workers and farmers to educate themselves about the money monopoly and then to advocate for reform. If you want to educate yourself about our money system then this is the book for you.

PS The book is filled with fantastic quotes (I ended up taking a highlighter to mine so I could look them up later). I just wanted to end with this one from William Jennings Bryan winning Democratic nomination speech from 1896: "We say in our platform that we believe that the right to coin money and issue money is a function of government....Those who are opposed to this proposition tell us that the issue of paper money is a function of the bank and that the government ought to go out of the banking business. I stand with Jefferson...and tell them, as he did, that the issue of money is a function of the government and that the banks should go out of the governing business....When we have restored the money of the Constitution, all other necessary reforms will be possible, and....until that is done there is no reform that can be accomplished."

Brown lays bare the money illusion

Ever wonder why Economics is one of the most impenetrable subjects? Well, Ellen Brown has some good news for you: The obfuscation is intentional; the mechanics of money creation and economic expansion and contraction are really quite simple. Like Pre-Copernican astronomers, apologists for the private banks, which have a nearly worldwide monopoly on currencies, have invented ever more complex explanations and instruments to compensate for their unsustainable model of how money works.

Brown leverages the economic metaphors embedded in L. Frank Baum's "The Wizard of Oz" to reveal the means by which the money cartel has hijacked the assets of the world for the private gain of a few financiers and their corporate minions. Additionally, the author offers a number of solutions for our current fix, including the establishment of publicly owned banks.

It's also worth noting that the money cartel spends a lot of money supporting ideological hitmen to counter analysts such as Brown who have pulled back the curtain and revealed the truth behind the mumbo jumbo promulgated by the cartel's vassals. Don't be deceived; Brown and others like her are on to something. North Dakota, which runs its own bank, is generating jobs and a surplus while other states teeter on bankruptcy.

Needs to be re-spun

I had high hopes, when I first started reading this book. It didn't take long for the author to dash those hopes. While she correctly identifies problems with our monetary system (and accurately debunks some "solutions" that can't possibly work, such as the gold standard), she presents many errors of fact, many errors of characterization, and many errors of writing. She also had errors of solution. Her proposed solutions astounded me, as it simply is not logical that the same person who identified the problems would pose such solutions.

I will provide some examples of these errors, shortly.

What I like about the book is the author pulls back the curtain on the Frauderal Re-slave system, which, in typical government style, has a name contradictory to what it is. The Federal Reserve isn't federal, and it doesn't reserve anything. She explains how this fraudulent organization works and what its effects are on the economies of the world. She also discusses the control these banksters have on our political system and other institutions. This part of the book is very valuable.

Brown seems to understand monetary systems and currency extremely well. This coverage in the book is also very valuable. I have other books on economics, monetary systems, and currency from which a person can understand these facts, but my experience is that very few people must have read any such books. Thus, they don't understand economics, monetary systems, or currency. I'd recommend Web of Debt to other people just for getting this particular education. But my caveat would be, "The book has serious flaws." I'll now discuss those a bit further.

Factual errors

She said the banking cartel sent an assassin against Andrew Jackson. Well, yes, but there were actually FIVE assassins sent. All of them failed to kill Jackson.

Ms. Brown correctly named the conflict known as The War Between the States, using the terminology used by US Grant, so kudos there. But she made several factual errors in her discussion of it.

The British banks did not finance the South. Both Britain and France were standing by to see if they should enter the war. They needed to see certain things before committing. This was a huge factor during that time, and there was a lot of hand-wringing over it on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. Read Grant's memoirs, for one excellent source on this issue.

Early in the war, Lincoln said emancipating slaves wasn't important. But as things began looking bleak and worries of British or French entry on the side of the South began increasing, Lincoln got the idea of "freeing" the slaves in the Confederate states. The Emancipation Proclamation did not free the slaves in the Northern border states. It only "freed" those in another country, the one formed after the secession.

This turned out to be a great way to keep the South from gaining these key allies. Slavery suddenly became an issue in the war. And because Europeans were so appalled by slavery, this insincere proclamation served to propagandize the war to the Europeans as a noble cause of the North.

The cause of the conflict was not the one Brown attributes. Basically, the North ignored the Constitution. This is why the South seceded. It wasn't a civil war, because the South wasn't trying to take the means of government from anybody (they didn't take over the treasury or the capital, for example). They broke away and formed their own government in their own territory.

Big, big, big blunder

But her most amazing error was her discussion of the "myth of government inefficiency." Is she serious? To even call this a myth is a blatant disregard for reality. Obviously, Brown has no familiarity with the US federal government. She devoted an entire chapter to this fantasy, and that chapter cannot rightly be part of any work that portends to be nonfiction. She needs to correct her gross misperceptions.

She can start this correction by reading the GAO reports. A few years ago, the GAO reported that IRS employees spent half their work time visiting p*rn and gambling sites. Within the other half, they had plenty of time to embark on various self-enrichment scams such as the Hoyt Fiasco and the AMCOR atrocity. They had time to hold little kids at gunpoint in a Michigan daycare center in 1984, backing down only after the National Guard arrived on the scene. That's efficient?

And then in 2010 the GAO treated us to the wonderful news, no surprise, that the SEC employees who were grossly overpaid to watch over the system that collapsed were spending half of their work day visiting p*rn sites.

Brown must have never even looked at how government agencies does things. There's a reason for the old saw that it takes 10 government employees to do a one-person job. Government tends to recruit late in the season, and thus tap the bottom of the barrel of each graduating class. That's one problem. Another problem is government focuses on process, not results. Thus, to do anything an employee has to wade through thick legalese procedures. And often there are multiple sign-offs required, adding further delays and inefficiencies. The number of wasted steps in government processes is normally on the scale of "unacceptably huge." But maybe it's just ginormous.

I've worked in non-profits with people who retired from government. They "make a government project" out of the simplest things. We all know someone with a government job. Try doing anything with this person, and see how complicated they make it. Now, there are exceptions to this and that proves that government inefficiency isn't innate.

For example, book travel on Amtrak. Talk about efficient! What's my yardstick? Compare an Amtrak trip to the hassle-intense, grossly inefficient torture session known as "taking a flight" on our private airlines. If Amtrak took over all of the airlines (except Southwest and Midwest), I'd be a happy traveler.

Brown bases much of this book on The Wizard of Oz, pointing out it was an allegory for our banking system. Well, I live in Kansas. The DMV here is a model of efficiency. So is the Kansas Department of Revenue, which, unlike its federal counterpart, does not use terrorism as standard operating procedure and does not consider incompetence a virtue.

But in general, the federal government takes inefficiency to extremes.



Characterization errors

These really set my teeth on edge. Here are some examples.

The author mischaracterized JP Morgan, painting a picture that was the opposite of how the man was. Yes, he wanted a central bank. But he did not want the same kind of central bank the other bankers wanted. This is why the Federal Reserve was not created until 4 months after his death. It could not get traction with JP Morgan alive. That barrier was remedied by the folks he opposed. If you review his personal correspondence and other information about him starting at around 1909, you see a mental degeneration that, to me, indicates very strongly he was poisoned with heavy metal (arsenic, lead, or mercury probably). Morgan wanted an equity system, not one of debt. If we'd gotten his system instead of the fraud-based one we ended up with, there would be no web of debt today.

Brown also mischaracterized the relationship between Teddy Roosevelt and JP Morgan, and between Teddy Roosevelt and the power brokers. She got this completely wrong, and that's quite significant. TR was made Vice President in an effort to silence him politically. At the time, the VP wasn't the supervisor of the President the way Dick Cheney was for GW Bush. The office was a dead zone, and four years in it would derail your political career.

TR had been very active in working against the big money interests that were plundering public property, and sticking him in the VP slot would at least temporarily remove him from circulation. And, they hoped, keep him from getting back in. Brown also failed to mention that TR was shot in the chest while giving a speech against the central bank idea. He was so passionately against this, he kept speaking while bleeding from the chest wound.

Brown also got Taft completely wrong. There are several books and autobiographies that draw from actual correspondence between Taft, Roosevelt, and intimates in TR's life. One of the intimates in TR's life was Gifford Pinchot, who pushed hard for environmental reform and for stopping the big corporations from stealing timber and other resources from public land. This was a major issue for TR. Brown paints Taft as some kind of hero who corrected TR's chumminess with big corporations, but the actual case was completely the opposite. Taft immediately backpedaled on his promises to TR, and did such things as defund the Forest Service. Pinchot's correspondence on Taft shows what really happened, and I suggest Brown read that and then correct this part of the book accordingly. When TR was on his year-long safari, well, read about that and you'll understand.

While she's busy correcting her mis-history on TR and Taft, she can fix her profound misstatements about the Bull Moose Party.

Brown makes Lincoln sound way too noble. He was a schemer and a tyrant. He trampled over the Constitution in several major ways. Anyone who has seriously studied Lincoln and other major characters of the time can reach no other conclusion.

The result of his reign of error and terror was not just the bloodiest war in our history. It was a huge shift of power from the formerly sovereign states to the central government. Essentially, this cancelled the Constitution. Prior to Lincoln's War, the federal government tended to be bound by the Constitutional limitation that powers not expressly given to the federal government fell to the states. That is, the federal government had no powers other than those expressly stated in the Constitution. During and after Lincoln's War, the federal government expanded its powers to include new ones not expressly stated in the Constitution. In fact, it was doing this before the war, which was the reason FOR the war. After the war, there was no longer any real barrier to this illegal behavior and thus it accelerated.

Her opinion of Franklin Roosevelt is without merit. She characterizes him as a hero. Contrary to her statements, FDR's grossly misguided policies turned what would have been a short-term market correction into a financial depression that lasted for a generation. The evidence on this is overwhelming, so to get it wrong is pretty bad.

Writing errors

This book could be probably half as long, if Brown removed the repetition. This got to be annoying, to read the same statements, stories, quotes, etc. over and over again. I got the feeling she had written a series of standalone articles and just compiled them into a book. She needs to make a comprehensive whole, instead.

Solution errors

Brown's basic solution is to look at the same people who gave us $780 toilet seats and let them run our banks. No, I don't think so. I could go on about why trusting our "elected by controlled ballot" misrepresentatives in CONgress with our banking system isn't a good idea, but it's akin to having to explain that having the Pope convert to Islam is a bad idea. It should be that obvious.

Other authors have proposed workable solutions. Since Ms. Brown's expertise clearly is not analysis or problem-solving, she should excise her analysis and solutions from the book. She generally did a good job of reporting on the fraudulent system we have, and she should refocus the next edition on that.

If she feels compelled to propose solutions, then she needs to work on the "educate yourself" aspect. She did this to some extent in the book. She mentioned the allegorical movie "The Matrix" only once, and she could mine quite a bit of gold (no pun intended) from further exploration there. The Wizard of Oz is an allegory for a previous century; The Matrix is an allegory for our times. She could also explore the allegorical book, Animal Farm. Orwell claimed it was an allegory for the USSR. Nice way to stay out of prison, but when you read it with an eye to our own government you see why Orwell wrote it. Recall that his later work, 1984, was not so well-disguised.

What Brown should not do in a future edition is propose socialist utopian systems that would be entrusted to the same prostitutes, criminals, and unskilled labor we now call the US Congress. I was aghast that she did so in this book, given the facts she brought up prior to saying these things.

Nobody has yet explained where Chuck Rangel got the millions of dollars he invested offshore (nice of him to invest in America, eh?). Nobody has yet explained why Rangel, the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, which writes the Tax Code, is not in prison for tax evasion because he "didn't know" it was illegal not to report the income from those investments. No, I'm sorry, trading one set of criminals for another set of criminals won't fix a thing.

Conclusion

This book consists of 47 chapters spanning 477 pages. It contains a 7-page glossary, and an extremely light "selected bibliography" of only 2 pages.

If you're already well informed about the debt slavery system we have, our controlled elections (even Stalin commented on this in his time), US history (particularly Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, JP Morgan, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt), and the corrupt system that passes for a federal government in this country, then add this book to your collection. The discussion of the monetary systems, the debt system, the IMF, and the fraud that has destroyed so much will be educational and illuminating. You'll have to step through a few cowpies to get the good stuff, but it's worth cleaning your boots.

For the average reader, I'd suggest this. Read the book, but when you get to anything about history or proposed solutions, skip over it. Otherwise, you may confuse fiction with fact and consequently become disinformed.

This could have been an important, game-changing work. I hope Ms. Brown will revisit this book with the goal of making it one.

Amazing book

Before this book, I read The Lost Science of Money. It truly woke me up to reality. Its exhaustive look into the history of sovereign money was mind-blowing. Ellen Brown's Web of Debt picks up where the Lost Science of Money left off. It explains in layman's term how money is created and destroyed and explores the solutions to our current crisis. This is an excellent book and should be read by all who are serious about fixing our country.