Given that the Tea Party & OWS agree on the FED, it initially made sense to
me they could combine for the limited purpose of exerting maximum political
pressure-starting with demanding a full audit. Yves Smith disagrees, and
told me in an email OWS would never engage in a marriage of convenience with
the Nativists they abhor. The pols & bankers of opposite ideologies managed
to field a winning team-will the other (opposites) remain divided and
powerless? Unless we welcome war/anarchy-why not proceed with one issue-see
how that plays out for the benefit of all citizens (wealth distribution) and
go from there. I respect Yves so much-I'm giving up hope.

-----Original Message-----
From: Kevin Carson
Sent: Tuesday, October 25, 2011 6:20 PM
To: P2P Foundation mailing list
Subject: Re: [P2P-F] is ending the fed a bad idea?

On Sun, Oct 23, 2011 at 1:16 PM, Michel Bauwens
<michel@p2pfoundation.net> wrote:
> I would love to publish a debate about this position:
>
> see:
> http://www.alternet.org/story/152810/four_things_occupy_wall_street_should_know_about_the_federal_reserve?
>

This is not so much a left-wing argument as a managerialist-liberal
one.  There seem to be a lot of people who assume that the only
alternatives out there are vanilla-flavored managerial liberalism and
"right wing."  And anyone who makes decentralist noises or has
problems with large institutions or bureaucracy is a "right-winger."
It's the left-wing counterpart of the talk radio idiot who hears a
Paulista talking about non-intervention and thinks it's a "librull."

And it makes some utterly unsupported assumptions -- for example, that
everyone calling for the abolition of the Fed is a right-winger or a
hard-currency goldbug.

In fact the anti-Fed movement is a house with many mansions, all over
the political spectrum.  I'm a left-winger more friendly to Greco's
barter currencies than to the gold standard, but I'm all for
abolishing the Fed.

It's certainly true, as Blumgart says, that central banks control the
money supply.  But the Fed is a bank-owned cartel that controls the
money supply by lending it into existence at interest.  Even if I
believed in the need for a central government control of the money
supply, it would make just as much sense to meet the need for more
currency by spending it into existence along the lines of Lincoln's
Greenback policy, or depositing it into existence in people's checking
accounts as the Social Credit people want to do.

I'd like to see something with Bitcoin's decentralized, encrypted p2p
architecture, but organized on the principles of Greco's mutual
credit-clearing network, as a subplatform of Freenet, that could be
adopted on a scalable basis by the people in any locality who wanted
to organize a local currency under cover of a darknet.  But to the
extent that such systems advance credit by allowing members to run
negative balances, they fall afoul of bank licensing laws.  We need to
eliminate the state's money monopoly and let a thousand flowers bloom.

--
Kevin Carson
Research Associate, Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Homebrew Industrial Revolution:  A Low-Overhead Manifesto
http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com
Desktop Regulatory State:  The Countervailing Power of Super-Empowered
Individuals http://desktopregulatorystate.wordpress.com
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html

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