Web of Debt

This book was written by Ellen Brown, a Los Angeles Attorney about the financial system. She is not an admirer. It was reviewed on Amazon.com

Web of Debt: The Shocking Truth About Our Money System -- The Sleight of Hand That Has Trapped Us in Debt and How We Can Break Free
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This book is just fantastic. It's worth reading for the history of the monetary system alone. No matter what the lone negative reviewer so far (T. Anderson) here may say, any flaws are mere quibbles. I have multiple degrees in the humanities, and have taken courses in economics, and have read all the big guns in the canon (Smith, Riccardo, Malthus, Marx, Marshall, Keynes, Freidman [ sic ], etc., etc.) but have never read anything quite like this before.

All the great economists are in the end finally propagandists for their particular worldviews. We are rarely reminded that in essential ways their craft is rooted in that dirty realm: metaphysics. The economists would like us all to believe that what they do is science, that it is a solidly rooted empirical craft. But the fact is that some of the most fundamental aspects of the discipline are rooted in that oftentimes most irrational, insubstantial and fleeting of things: human desire.

Money itself is the sublime exemplar of this fact. This odd measure of value. It is so ubiquitous in our culture, so fundamental to how we all live, yet we rarely sit and contemplate what it really "is." Where it comes from, what it does, and who (in the final analysis) really controls it. Most of us spend most of our waking hours chasing it, without really understanding what it really is we are doing.

Ellen Brown has given us all an opportunity to change that. Again, no matter that there are some few factual and perhaps conceptual flaws here. There's still a gluttonous orgy of food for thought in these pages. Starting with a brilliant expose of the origin of the banking system, and it's logic, she flays the monetary system and lays its anatomy out for examination. She gets you to think about what the banks are really doing when they loan.. what exactly is happening when they extend us those oh so seductive lines of revolving credit; what the nature of your mortgage really is.

She leads us from the Renaissance gold merchants' creation of the nascent capitalist banking system, through the 18th & 19th century struggles over control of the money supply, all the way through to an analysis of the current mortgage crisis. She warns us what may yet be in store for us if and when Freddie Mac finally defaults on its 700 billion in bond obligations.

MSNBC, the Wall Street Journal, Kiplinger Report and Economist will never explain any of this to you. I think we all can intuit why that is. You owe yourself this education. This information ought to be part of our daily political discourse, and a part of every high school education. Again, you gotta wonder why it is not.
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Are we being robbed? Believe it.

 

Errors & omissions, broken links, cock ups, over-emphasis, malice [ real or imaginary ] or whatever; if you find any I am open to comment.
 
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Updated on 04/02/2020 09:19