Federal Reserve puts us all in debt
Mr. Bageant,
I've read a handful of your fine essays. One of the subjects you write about is our awful banking system. It is even worse than any Ponzi Scheme which is what you compare this bank system to.
A simple example explains it all. When the Federal Reserve lends money to the big banks something more miraculous than Jesus's multiplication of the fishes and loaves takes place! It's known as the money multiplier and it uses a trick called fractional reserve banking.
All this means that the bank can lend out money it doesn't have! What a cool trick.
Essentially, the bank can have only a million dollars in reserves and loan out 10 million! It would be like you loaning a friend a dollar but telling him you have loaned him ten and he must pay you back all this money plus interest! It works because everyone is duped by this scheme. Your friend tells everyone that you have loaned him ten and they go along!
This is the way the elites get productivity out of us schmoes because we eventually produce enough in order to pay back this money. This is why we have to work so hard. The Fed puts us all in debt in order to line the pockets of a few elites and to keep us producing.
If you look on our currency it says the note is good for all "debts" but there is no mention of "goods or services"! Like I said, cool trick!
Bob
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Dear Bob,
The machinery of extractive capitalism never ceases to amaze! Thank you for the insight.
In art and labor,
Joe
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What they're saying about Joe's book
Here are some comments about Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War.
"Joe Bageant is a brilliant writer. He evokes working class America like no one else. The account of his revisit to his Virginia roots is sobering, poignant, and instructive."
-- HOWARD ZINN, author of A People's History of the United States
"This book is righteous, self-righteous, exhilarating, and aggravating. By God, it's a raging, hilarious, and profane love song to the great American redneck. As a blue state man with a red state childhood, I have been waiting for this book for years. We ignore its message at our peril."
-- SHERMAN ALEXIE, author of Reservation Blues
"This fine book sheds a devastating light on Bush & Co.'s notorious 'base,' i.e. America's white working class, whose members have been ravaged by the very party that purports to take their side. Meanwhile, the left has largely turned them out, or even laughed at their predicament. Of their degraded state -- and, therefore, ours -- Joe Bageant writes like an avenging angel."
-- MARK CRISPIN MILLER, author of Fooled Again: The Real Case for Election Reform
"Joe Bageant is the Sartre of Appalachia. His white-hot bourbon-fuelled prose shreds through the lies of our times like a weed-whacker in overdrive. Deer Hunting with Jesus is a deliciously vicious and wickedly funny chronicle of a thinking man's life in God's own backwoods."
-- JEFFREY ST. CLAIR, author of Grand Theft Pentagon and co-editor of CounterPunch
"This recounting of lost lives -- of white have-nots in one of our most have-not states -- has the power of an old-time Scottish Border ballad. It is maddening and provocative that the true believers in 'American exceptionalism' and ersatz machismo side with those stepping all over them. Bagaent's writing is as lyrical as Nelson Algren's, and if there's a semblance of hope, it's that he catches on with new readers thanks to the alternative media."
-- STUDS TERKEL
"Deer Hunting with Jesus is one of those rare books that is colorful, depressing, hilarious, and biting all at the same time. Joe Bageant has given us a glimpse into the vicious class war that is too often ignored or hidden by those happily perpetrating this war."
-- DAVID SIROTA, author of Hostile Takeover
"Dead serious and damn funny ... Bageant writes with the ghosts of Hunter S. Thompson, Will Rogers, and Frank Zappa kibitzing over his shoulder ... Takes Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas, to the next level."
—- MOTHER JONES
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