The People, Planet & the Power of Money Project is an educational outreach to everyday citizens, advocating for a system of publicly created money. It started as a single book, but eventually became three shorter books to properly tell the story of how our money is created to those of us with no formal economics training. But why on Earth should a project about how our money is created be of interest to those of us outside the academic community?
Because in 2018 a fifteen-year-old girl in Sweden, Greta Thunberg, took it upon herself to skip school and stand outside Parliament with a sign that read “School Strike for Climate.”
We are told that we do not have enough money to address the crises of climate change, dying oceans, and plastic everywhere including our hearts and brains. Nor do we have the money to ensure that all of our citizens have a decent social safety net to get by on if a robot, a pandemic or another financial flimflam scam like that behind the Global Financial Crisis/Great Recession decides to take our jobs. As citizens, we are expected to accept this limitation of what our money system can do, without being told the truth about who really creates our money and how they do it.
Book One: Money Creation 101 directly answers the question of who creates our money. It also takes the economics profession to task for being unable or unwilling to tell us who creates our money and how they create it. We hear from a Federal Reserve economist, university professors, and others who have difficulty answering the question of who creates our money. We also listen to the pleas of economics students beseeching their university programs to simply teach the truth about who creates our money so that they will be properly equipped to respond to the existential crises facing humanity that they will be asked to solve after they graduate. After reading Money Creation 101 you will be better informed on the question of who creates our money and how they create it than the two respected economists from top university programs, who were interviewed anonymously at their own request, for the People, Planet & the Power of Money Project.
Book Two: History of Money 101 takes us back to our civilization’s birthplace—the Fertile Crescent, then to ancient Greece, Rome, the American colonies, the U.S. Revolution, and the U.S. Civil War, examining examples of publicly created money that successfully met the challenges of their time. A basic understanding of this history makes it much easier for us as citizens as we decide whether or not we want to keep our present system of bank-created debt-money or change to a more democratic system of publicly created money. This short book is chock-full of the type of monetary history that economics students across the globe are now begging their own university programs to include in their education.
Book Three: Spaceship Earth 101 owes its title to American economist Kenneth Boulding’s 1966 paper The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth.[i] Dr. Boulding defined the American economy of the time as a cowboy economy, symbolic of the seemingly limitless American plains and associated with exploitative, reckless, violent, and romanticized conduct. In sharp contrast, he coined the term Spaceship Earth, in which Earth was viewed as a closed single spaceship, devoid of unlimited resources that would allow us to extract and pollute indiscriminately. Within the concept of Spaceship Earth, humanity must find its place in a cyclical ecological system that we now casually refer to as a sustainable lifestyle. The Spaceship Earth 101 model looks at the Earth as a closed system powered by the sun, with finite resources. It expands the discussion to include the political and economic systems that the monetary system operates within, arguing that just as publicly created money rose to meet the challenges of the past, it can provide the necessary money to meet our environmental and social crises of today and tomorrow.
Climate change, dead zones in the ocean, nitrogen and phosphorus cycles run amok and plastic pollution everywhere, including our bodies, are global problems, as is the tremendous level of inequality within human society. While individual nations may have their own money systems, we are all part of a global money system. America must lead and that is the immediate focus. However, the change must extend across the planet and those who live outside the U.S. are encouraged to advocate for reform in their respective countries. The information within these books pertains to you and should be helpful to your understanding of a money system that was not designed to be understood, no matter what country or part of the globe you reside in.
The three separate books are all interrelated and you are encouraged to read all three. As your tour guide, I thank you for entering the world of the People, Planet & the Power of Money Project.
[i] Boulding, Kenneth E., “The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth,” Sixth Resources for the Future Forum on Environmental Quality in a Growing Economy in Washington, D.C. on March 8, 1966, http://www.ub.edu/prometheus21/articulos/obsprometheus/BOULDING.pdf
