Any society needs a monetary system to advance beyond the most primitive level. The trouble arises when the system is taken over by the most selfish and ruthless elements who use it for their own self-aggrandizement to the detriment of everyone else in the community.
This is what has happened in the nations of the Collective West. The primary mechanism of control is creation of a banking system based on usury—i.e., charging interest on loans. This fee for the privilege of taking part in the economic life of society is in fact an indirect tax that goes to support a financial aristocracy that ends up controlling all trade, politics, and even culture.
A façade of “democracy” and “self-government” may be maintained for appearances’ sake, but this is really a mechanism to engender the “war of each against all” so people won’t notice they are being controlled and manipulated.
In today’s world, a revolt against this system is gathering steam, led by “civilizational states” like Russia, China, Iran, India, and others—all states the Collective West defines as “threats.”
The financial elites quickly move to destroy any movement toward monetary reform, even as they tolerate or even encourage other types of relatively harmless protest, including “elections,” as well as self-destructive activities like drugs, sexual degeneracy, etc. The last US protest against the financial system was the “Occupy Wall Street” movement that was quickly suppressed.
Nevertheless, the core of a monetary reform movement has remained and continues to attract notice. Among these has been the “End the Fed” campaign of people like Ron Paul and Thomas Massey, but also a much more sophisticated group that has its roots in the activities of the American Monetary Institute, the Public Banking Institute, the Direct Funding movement, etc. A notable component of this effort was the NEED Act of 2011 entered onto the ledger of Congress by Dennis Kucinich, adopted as part of the platform of the Green Party, and still on the books.
Today, we present a major proposal for direct action by one of the leaders of the Green Party, Howard Switzer from his Substack, “Howard’s Newsletter.”
Howard is an architect promoting earth-friendly construction and sovereign monetary reform. He is a founding member and former co-chair of the Green Party of Tennessee and served many terms on the Green Party’s National Committee as a delegate from Tennessee while running for office in Tennessee three times. In 2017 he led a successful defense of the “Greening the Dollar” plank in the Green Party Platform against an effort by outside advocates of “Modern Monetary Theory” to remove it. He is also a founding board member and former president of the Alliance for Just Money, and he is a co-founder and a current co-chair of the GPUS Banking and Monetary Reform Committee (BMRC).
—Richard C. Cook, June 5, 2025
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Organizing an Electoral Revolution
Forging a Path to Freedom
By Howard Switzer, June 3, 2025
I have been reading numerous essays exposing and describing the enormous, catastrophic, horrific and unbelievably profitable crimes of the System, the capitalist monetary system. It is the mechanism of power in the private hands of the Monsters of Mammon, the apparent psychopaths who control the allocation of global capital, the money, thus “everything,” as Henry Kissinger famously noted. Most of those essays do not have a hint of what to do about it. The cynical use of the axioms “if it bleeds it leads” or “If it burns it earns” by the Monster’s mass media are used because they know that humans have a negativity bias that attracts our attention while positive stories do not. Those stories then get highlighted and repeated by numerous essay writers whose attention was captured.
This constant assault impacts our mental and physical health. Research has shown that people can exhibit increased depression and anxiety symptoms after only 14 minutes of news consumption. Negative headlines seriously play on our emotions too, which is why they push engagement so powerfully. “A recent Stanford University study reported, for example, that emotional stories are around 22 times more memorable than facts alone.”[1] This increased stress is a major factor in illnesses. To protect our health, we are told to reduce our exposure.
Negativity bias is related to our fight-or-flight response but the ‘recommendation for protecting our health’ seems to be flight rather than fight. Considering our predicament flight does not seem to be a viable option, for where can we go to escape this gargantuan monster’s global grip? Further, this serves the Monster’s agenda by keeping the people distracted by the symptoms of the disease, so they don’t see the disease itself. Those who write about solutions are ignored in favor of those who write only about the seemingly intractable problems.
The constant exposure to pain and fear makes us susceptible to neuroticism. “Compellingly, out-group animosity (denigrating one’s political opponents online) appears to be a stronger motivation to vote than in-group amity (friendliness). Thus, there appears to be political capital in encouraging online hate by one’s supporters. A 2018 study, for example, studied two populist rhetoric driven campaigns: Donald Trump’s 2016 US presidential campaign and the UK Brexit referendum from the same year. Researchers reported that both campaigns heavily appealed to similar pain points—fear, for example, as well as lost national pride, overplayed immigration fears, baiting opposing voter groups, and racism, or the fear of other nationalities or ethnicities. These negative headlines powerfully drove exposure and engagement.”[1]
All this indicates that to attract attention to fighting this we need to generate animosity for the Monsters of Mammon. However directing it at humans, no matter how awful they are, seems counter to the world’s need for greater empathy and care to reduce dangerous and destructive fear, replacing it with love, the other root emotion. Thus, I think we need to focus our hatred and animosity on the System, the capitalist monetary system, which is the illegitimate mechanism of power, a usurpation of power with the sin of usury. A power that rightfully belongs to us all, not a greedy, and one can only assume a psychologically damaged, few. Usury does have serious psychological consequences. It seems like we need to understand how the System operates then organize and express our hatred for what it does.
Mounting the Challenge
The issues facing civil society seem to get bigger and more urgent with every election cycle and polls show that the number one issue for most of the electorate, regardless of political affiliation, regardless of which party is in power, is the economy. What about the economy that makes it an issue? The answer unequivocally is money. People don’t have enough money to pay for the things they and their family need to maintain a decent quality of life; food, shelter, transportation, healthcare and enough money to pay their debts so as not to default on their loans and lose what they have. People are not concerned about inflation if they have enough money. No solution to the problem of poverty has ever been so effective as providing income to the poor, income is by far the best antidote for deprivation. An economy in depression is an economy with not enough money in circulation, a policy of austerity only makes it worse. The truth is that nothing denies a person liberty more than the absence of money and no truth has ever spawned more ingenious evasion than that. If the lack of money is the problem, then a political party that wants to win must offer a viable solution to that problem. Why is it that 80% of the population is struggling for lack of money? Over 60% could not cover a $400 emergency.
People can see that the economy is not designed to serve most people. “The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer” is an aphorism that has been popularly repeated since long before the civil war. We have an economic system that steadily transfers wealth to the super-rich. People have felt powerless as their government bails out the big banks and spends trillions on corporate subsidies and foreign wars. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated this process as 8 million more Americans slid into poverty, 100 million world-around, and100,000 small businesses, responsible for creating two out of every three new jobs in the U.S. economy, closed their doors permanently. At the same time the world’s billionaires increased their wealth to a record $10.2 trillion, and that is just the amount they admit to.
This is where we are, what some call “late-stage capitalism” is an unleashed neoliberal crime fest as private equity firms pillage any company that has value now even targeting retirement savings and healthcare. They are coming for our homes too. The result is increased economic suffering, homelessness, and increasing oppression to keep it going that way. Our elections and public policy are controlled by money. All the regulatory agencies are captured by the industries they are supposed to regulate, and the military industrial complex takes the lion’s share of discretionary spending year after year as interest payments on the federal debt blow past a trillion dollars per year. These are the reasons that trust in the two major political parties and our national institutions has fallen to a record low. There have been calls for a new political party to pick up the pieces and champion the American people. A party that can effectively tie economic justice to monetary reform can galvanize 80% of the population, farmers, working-class and small business Americans, to challenge elite power and present a credible alternative to establishment politics. The Green Party has the platform and infrastructure to be that party. What it lacks is vision.
Can there be any doubt that money rules the roost? That being the case it behooves us to look at the money system we have since it is not taught in any of our schools and has long been kept shrouded in mystery. It is our nation’s privatized monetary system that creates and allocates the money. There have been numerous calls for monetary reform over the last 240 years, but most people are unaware of them as the systemic solution has always been drowned out by constant debates over polarizing issues.
Key Problems with the Current U.S. Dominated Global Monetary System
The System is a system of usury; the abuse of monetary authority for personal gain which has been described as an extraordinarily efficient form of violence by which one can do the most damage with the least amount of effort. We call this System capitalism. Capitalism = (capital = money) + (ism = system) = money system. The central feature and source of the awesome power of the Monsters of Mammon is the debt-based private global monetary system they own and operate through the global banking system. Capitalism is often wrongly conflated with “free enterprise” and “free markets” but capitalism ensures that these are NOT free. This is because capitalism is a debt parasite on the back of free enterprise making every household, business and government in this world in debt and dependent on the banking System.
The System issues all money as interest-bearing debt in the process of making loans. That may sound relatively benign because it has been normalized, but it is a form of slavery that systematically concentrates wealth to the wealthiest, the Monsters of Mammon. Credit, used for money, is created by the banking system as the principal of a loan and, because that is the way money is created, the interest on that loan must be paid from money created by another’s loan. This drives destructive growth and predatory competition as people compete to pay the interest on their debts, so they won’t default on their loan and lose their real wealth collateral. The System is not stable because when loan payments (money destroyed) exceed loans being made (money created) the System crashes for lack of money creating a recession or depression depending on the amounts and how many loans default. This causes a massive transfer of wealth because when this happens the real-wealth collateral is picked up for pennies on the dollar by those with the money. Furthermore, interest is compounded (interest on interest) throughout the System’s economy which is built into the prices of all the goods and services we buy, on average 50%. This means money going to the Monsters of Mammon with every transaction.
“All wars are bankers wars” To be clear by bankers I mean their shareholders, the Monsters of Mannon, who demand a constant flow of profits. The System has for over 500 years, forced sovereign governments to turn over their sovereignty, their monetary authority, to the bankers due to war debt. The word capitalism comes from the French word, “capitalisme,” which refers to the system of war finance, or the practice of borrowing large amounts of money to fund the costs of war. War debt is how the Monsters of Mammon got nations to hand over their monetary authority to the wealthy private interests. who controlled large accumulations of money. You can tell those who are resistant by looking at the System’s list of enemies, the smaller of which have been or are being destroyed by war. The larger enemies are continually being threatened with war.
The System allows control of every industry in the world by the Monsters of Mannon. It dominates the ownership of raw materials, the means of production, exploits earth’s materials and labor, concentrates wealth, creates poverty, drives destructive growth, predatory competition and all wars.
The System has made the U.S. Dollar the international reserve currency and abuses its currency dominance using sanctions and war to gain control over resources it wants to exploit.
The System is a system of debt slavery: student loans, medical debt, and credit card exploitation trap millions.
The System causes inflation. Issuing money as debt is itself inflationary, but banks can increase inflation at will which is used as a weapon for controlling economies or bring them to their knees. Every instance of hyperinflation you’ve heard of was caused by banks making war upon a nation’s economy. The governments blamed for hyperinflation were the targets and have long served as the whipping boy for the crimes of the Monsters of Mammon.
The System allows the massive accumulation of money making it an instrument of power with which to control, industry, governments, economies, in short, as Henry Kissinger said, “…if you control the money, you can control everything.” The banking oligopoly, a handful of megabanks like JPMorgan, CITI Bank, Bank of America, etc., control most of the lending and are all owned, along with all the major corporations and their subsidiaries, by the largest asset managers in the world, BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, behind which the Monsters of Mammon hide and shield themselves from liability and accountability.
The System uses technology as a weapon but sells to us as a convenience, thus they profit from selling the very tools they use as a weapon to subjugate us and the world. Digital surveillance, private fintech, cryptocurrency and AI all threaten financial freedom and are employed by the Monsters of Mammon to make war upon the world.
This list could go on getting into more detail but that should be enough to make you realize the scale of what we are up against. To fight it we must summon forth the courage that David did to fight Goliath. Like David’s slingshot our weapon may seem too small and impotent for the job and yet it got the job done with miraculous efficiency. Our weapon is Monetary Reform, a term that people may find mundane and are unfamiliar with because it is not taught in schools; the System does not allow the monetary system to be a legitimate field of inquiry. Economists, to protect their careers, shun knowledge of it. Economics studies wealth while ignoring power and Political Science studies power while ignoring wealth. This is what makes these fields so mind-numbingly boring. However, Political Economy, the study of the relationship between wealth and power, makes both relevant and exciting.
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