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Web of Debt: The Shocking Truth About Our Money System and How We Can Break Free |  | Author: Ellen Hodgson Brown
Publisher: Third Millennium Press
List Price: $25.00
Buy New: $20.94
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Seller: backpack_books
Rating:  122 reviews
Sales Rank: 16749
Media: Paperback
Edition: Rev Exp
Pages: 544
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6 x 1.3
ISBN: 0979560829
Dewey Decimal Number: 332
EAN: 9780979560828
ASIN: 0979560829
Publication Date: December 22, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
EXPLODING THE MYTHS ABOUT MONEY Our money system is not what we have been led to believe. The creation of money has been "privatized," or taken over by a private money cartel. Except for coins, all of our money is now created as loans advanced by private banking institutions -- including the private Federal Reserve. Banks create the principal but not the interest to service their loans. To find the interest, new loans must continually be taken out, expanding the money supply, inflating prices -- and robbing you of the value of your money. Web of Debt unravels the deception and presents a crystal clear picture of the financial abyss towards which we are heading. Then it explores a workable alternative, one that was tested in colonial America and is grounded in the best of American economic thought, including the writings of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. If you care about financial security, your own or the nation's, you should read this book.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 122
 Finally, a plan to take (our) public resources back from private bankers! November 2, 2009
Marc Armstrong (Sonoma, CA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is the book I've been waiting for. Ellen Brown clearly and precisely lays out the premise for States taking control of their own resources - not leaving it to Wall Street financiers to squander, only to have us then have to bail them out. I thought we gave our money to them for safekeeping? Ms. Brown provides the basis for her later articles that show how each state can take back our (state) public resources and use these to capitalize a state public bank. This is a brilliant book - it will provide a perfect understanding of how public resources are not to be left in the "safekeeping" of private financiers.
 Dorothy's Revenge October 29, 2009
Mark Edward Bachmann (Westport, CT USA)
3 out of 7 found this review helpful
Lord help us all, this is one strange book. Financial conspiracy literature has always represented a genre of its own. Contributors cover the spectrum ideologically, from Leninist critiques of "finance capital" on the left to rants from the extreme right against cabals of international Jewish bankers. The literature includes more moderate voices too, from homespun nineteenth century populists to modern-day libertarians and some liberals. What all these discordant factions tend to have in common is a hatred for bankers, and an apparent belief that an ongoing ancient bankers' conspiracy exists that has caused every evil in the world from about the beginning of time. Many of them must imagine the Devil himself wearing a banker's eyeshade when he destabilized the Garden of Eden.
Ellen Brown has drawn on all this material in developing the background for Web of Debt. She seems to have arrived at her current enthusiasm via a circuitous route. Educated as a lawyer, she later re-invented herself as a holistic nutritionist and published several books on the subject. She has now read some books on economics and done seemingly a ton of internet surfing to re-invent herself yet again as a monetary theorist.
In fairness to her, Ms. Brown is a good writer and speaks with a witty, engaging voice. And for a lawyer-turned-nutritionist, she had developed a surprisingly good understanding of at least the basics of the American monetary system. She explains these mechanics with an initial clarity that may enlighten people unfamiliar with the subject. Readers, however, should beware of her dangerous ability to toggle in a heartbeat between lucidity and lunacy, without any indication she's aware that a transition has occurred.
You see, Ms. Brown's research has revealed for her a couple of core ideas, the first being the existence of the bankers' conspiracy. It began in ancient times when moneychangers cornered the gold supply and foisted yellow metal on the world as money and the universal measure of value. The conspiracy continues into the present day and has established its headquarters within the American Federal Reserve System, portrayed garishly as a giant spider on the green and purple cover of Ms. Brown's book. The Fed has cleverly dispensed with cumbersome gold now and wields it's power through private debt-based fiat money created by its affiliated banks whenever they issue loans. The interest burden on all this debt is compounding out of control and enslaving the country and the world.
Some readers no doubt will give Ms. Brown the benefit of the doubt this far. Where she completely escapes Earth's atmosphere, however, is with her second core idea, which is that there is an easy fix to all this. Her solution is to replace the Fed with a "true" government-owned central bank, which would issue a new kind of fiat money that would be used to pay off existing debt. There would be no debt or interest associated with this new money. Thereafter, the government would create money by simply spending it into the economy unencumbered by burdensome debt or interest obligations. Nothing but good things would follow from that point on.
It's hard to place Ms. Brown ideologically along the conventional right-left spectrum of political opinion. At times she sounds like a moderate liberal, and at other times like a radical leftist. Indeed, she promises that her simple program would quickly deliver on the core left-liberal agenda: universal health care, eradication of hunger, full employment, universal education, affordable housing for all, an end to poverty, and so forth, even subsidies for struggling artists. At other times, she strikes a conservative posture and promises to obliterate the federal debt and end the unconstitutional scourge of income taxation, thus delivering objectives dear to the heart of the most right-leaning Republican. She quotes reverently from Establishment icons like Milton Friedman, John Maynard Keynes, Abraham Lincoln, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and others. She weaves these sage observations, however, into a potpourri of snippets gleaned from her web surfing. She assembles material from a cast of semi-obscure ideologues and overwrought bloggers, many of whom contradict one another but somehow in the end all come out appearing to view the world from Ms. Brown's perspective. Her guiding metaphor throughout the book is The Wizard of Oz. Allegorical quotes from both the novel and movie versions give her book a literary coherence that would otherwise be lacking.
One of the strangest chapters in the book offers a dispassionate discussion of the early years of Nazi rule in Germany. It seems that the neophyte German Fuehrer, rather like Ms. Brown, fully understood the power of government-issued fiat money being spent directly into the economy in support of national objectives. This device was, indeed, the defining characteristic of "national socialism". It was thus that the new regime fully resuscitated a bankrupt economy and in a few short years created a vibrant non-inflationary prosperity. Ms. Brown jumps to a new topic before drawing any connection between this experience and Germany's transition into a militarized command economy. And she certainly doesn't waste attention on anything that followed after that.
Like most conspiracy theorists, Ms. Brown is a utopian at heart. And there can be something profoundly reactionary about utopians, because they often yearn for a lost glory that has somehow been stolen away. Ms. Brown talks about her utopia early in her book, and it turns out to have been twelfth century England. It seems that we've all been misinformed about the Middle Ages, and that at least for a time in England, the Middle Ages were a time a time of great "shared prosperity". Matriarchs were in charge, and money was accounted for on wooden tally sticks. It was only after the gold-loving patriarchal money-changers came onto the scene that debt and interest appeared and everything went down hill. Who would have known?
Most readers will probably feel that Ms. Brown is not off-base in her cynicism about our modern financial system. Something has obviously gone off-kilter at this point. The fact that the current economic crisis got underway after the first edition of her book appeared enhances her credibility now. Cynicism is cheap, however, and practical solutions are elusive. If prescriptions like the ones Ms. Brown has to offer ever gains traction, we might indeed find ourselves gravitating back towards the Twelfth Century, except this time with nuclear weapons and the Internet. We shouldn't expect a new Dark Age to resemble in any way Ms. Brown's free-money utopia.
Web of Debt will raise your Economics IQ! October 26, 2009
Allan Schoenfeld (Omaha, NE)
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
Web of Debt is amazingly well-written. The style is clever yet readable. WOD should be required reading as it provides an excellent survey of the U.S. Monetary system. The oveview spans from the Colonial Scrip to the fiat dollar and incorporates a clever literary device: the Wixard of Oz. You'll have to read the book to find out the economic background of this very American tale. The Web of Debt is brilliant in this regard. The book will raise your Economics IQ!
 Crackpot Realism Raises Eyebrows, Sells Books October 18, 2009
Linksman (Pinehurst, NC)
2 out of 5 found this review helpful
Money is complicated; truth is more complicated. A monetary tract addressed to the masses must ruthlessly simplify. This can be a profitable exercise, particularly when the author has a populist agenda in mind.
This book isn't 'the shocking truth', although it contains a good deal of nasty truth. We have allowed our fractional reserve banking system to spiral out of control, largely for the benefit of Wall Street traders who now hold our Nation hostage to the next blip in interest rates and currency exchanges. Brown claims the problem is endemic to the Federal Reserve System, which of course is not Federal and holds no Reserves. Our political representatives, notably President Woodrow Wilson (a first class crackpot and a Morgan stooge or a Rockefeller stooge, I forget which), turned our monetary future over to the Banking Cartel of Morgan and Rockefeller, and the rest as they say is history. We got two world wars, a depression, nuclear standoff, collapse of the Third World, Serial Financial Bubbles, and, ultimately, a grinding collapse of our Domestic Economy, which hadn't even happened before Brown finished the book.
Banking might have worked responsibly under sound regulation, geographic limitations, divorce from investment banking. Instead, regulation got everything wrong. Politicians sold out and bankers cashed in. It has only taken thirty years for banking to bankrupt the country. What now?
Conventional Monetary Cranks insist the answer is commodity money, primarily gold and silver. Brown favors Government fiat money, a strategy which goes back to Lincoln, who financed the Civil War with Greenbacks and may have been murdered by International Bankers as a result. Is this news to you? Brown suggests Garfield and Kennedy may also have been victims of International Banking Conspiracies. Well, it makes as much sense as the Warren Commission Report.
Money makes people angry, particularly when they can't seem to get hold of enough. Are we victimized by a Banking Conspiracy? Readers are free to judge for themselves. Personally, I find Brown indulging in too much proof by assertion. I find the prospect of putting money under the direct control of our elected politicians a desperate expedient, but I would not be surprised if we soon have no alternative. The best thing about this book is its potential to get people thinking about economics as a political matter. There really isn't any reason not to read it, but those who simply read it and stop there will not have much Truth to hold on to.
The missing link --> A.D. Hitchcock's Synagogue of Satan October 16, 2009
P. Marchand
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
I encourage readers to follow suite and read Andrew Carrington Hitchcock's book, The Synagogue of Satan. This work completes Ellen Brown's work in identifying people's names that to this day run our world from behind the scene.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 122
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