Presentation to the International American Monetary Institute Conference
September 19, 2025 (via Zoom)
(Watch the video, which includes the discussion following David’s presentation, HERE…)

Text, as delivered: 

I am deeply honored to be speaking with you today at this opening session of the American Monetary Institute’s 2025 conference.

We meet here at a time of extraordinary political division and economic confusion. People know something is terribly wrong with the economy. Federal and personal debts keep climbing, wages have stagnated, and savings and pensions feel increasingly fragile. Meanwhile, inequality continues to grow to unconscionable extremes, as devastating environmental crises unfold around us.

With rare exception, the explanations and solutions offered by our political leaders and by mainstream media are at best partial truths. At worst, they are intentionally misleading scams.

Note that my current focus is on the deeper human transition to an Ecological Civilization essential to a viable human future. Money is only one essential element of that transition. Since money is our defining topic for this conference, let’s start there, recognizing that throughout most of our human existence our ancestors lived without it.

I recently celebrated my 88th birthday. In the travels of my youth, I regularly encountered peoples in Africa and Asia who lived happy lives with little need for money. My generation completed the process of creating a world in which it is now nearly impossible to live in contemporary society without it. I must admit that in the innocence of my youth, I contributed to that process in my work with Third World business schools.

Money can be a highly useful tool, when used appropriately. But our current human dependence on money gives enormous power to those who currently create it. Determine who gets it…. And who does not. They use that power as a weapon tool to circumvent democracy, monopolize their control of Earth’s resource, and enrich and empower themselves.

To have a viable human future, we the people must now claim the power to create and allocate money. And put that power to the service of all people and the living Earth that birthed and nurtures us.

Fundamentally, we humans are living beings, not financial beings. We cannot live for long without a healthy living Earth—and the support and collaboration of our neighbors…. We cannot eat, drink or breathe money.

When properly used, money can be a useful supplement. However, we must never treat money as a substitute for our responsibility to  care for Earth and one another.

We currently face competing crises: environmental, social, and financial. They are connected in ways I will get to in a moment. Since we are meeting as the American Monetary Institute, I want to focus first on the money, starting with the U.S. debt now soaring out of control. Specifics differ by country. We will focus here on the United States.

In first quarter 2025, U.S. government debt accounted for $35.2 trillion dollars. But our debt problem is not limited to the U.S. government. U.S. household debt reached a record $18.2 trillion. And U.S.  non-financial business debt was $21.8 trillion.

I recall the days when we thought a million dollars was a lot of money. Note that a billion dollars is a thousand million dollars. And $1 trillion is a thousand billion.

Workers and taxpayers, are told the answer to paying down the U.S. federal debt is austerity. “Cut Social Security. Slash Medicare. Shrink public services. Raise taxes on working families. And maybe, we can “bring the debt under control.”

As most of you are aware, the only way to eliminate the debt is to restructure the money system. That begins with the rarely asked question: why are we in debt in the first place? Why does a sovereign nation that issues its own currency depend for its money supply  on public and private borrowing at interest from private bankers who we allow to create it effortlessly from nothing…. at no cost to themselves?

The answer to this basic question is simple, though we seldom hear it spoken outside of AMI discussions. We are trapped in debt because we have turned over the power to create money—our money—to Wall Street. We rent from private bankers, what should be our own sovereign currency.

Our defining task as the AMI must be to build public awareness of this basic truth. As most of you already know, here’s how the money trap works.

When a commercial bank issues a loan—whether to buy a house, finance a business, pay taxes, speculate in financial markets, or purchase U.S. Treasury bonds to fund public services. It does not lend out existing money from its vault. Rather, with a few computer keystrokes, it creates a new bank deposit out of nothing. That deposit becomes someone’s temporary spending power on which they are expected to pay interest to the bank.

The loan must be repaid, with interest that the bank never created. The cost to the bank of creating the money to issue the loan is essentially zero. The interest becomes a stream of pure income. And when the loan principal is repaid by the borrower, the amount of the principal disappears. But the bank keeps the interest.

This puts the rest of us on a built-in treadmill. Because the economy needs money to function, we and the federal government must constantly borrow more from the private bankers just to keep the economy from collapsing. But the accumulating interest we owe on that debt, grows in perpetuity.

For so long as we depend on this corrupt system, the interest on that debt—both public and private—can never be fully repaid. By design, under the current system, much of the debt is permanent. We must keep expressing the simple truth that the only way to eliminate our growing public and private debt—is to transform the system by which we create money.

Under the current system, if we eliminated all public and private debt, most of the money supply would vanish and the economy would crash. So, year after year, we roll the debt forward. In that process we pay hundreds of billions of dollars in interest to private bondholders, bankers, and hedge funds.

Meanwhile, the privatized financial sector has become a factory of fictitious financial assets—derivatives, collateralized obligations, cryptocurrencies, and other exotic instruments that inflate the paper wealth of the already rich, without requiring them to produce anything of actual value.

Most of the trading in these fictitious assets involves speculation: a form of gambling involving betting on the price movements of commodities, currencies, or even sovereign defaults without the need to own the actual underlying assets. The contracts involved are often leveraged by multiple layers of debt by which speculators gain control of large pools of financial assets they do not actually own.

When the system of fictitious assets collapses, as we saw happen in 2008, governments step in to rescue the speculators to prevent wider economic collapse. In that process, losses are socialized, profits are privatized, and societal inequality grows ever deeper.

This is not a system designed to serve ordinary people. It is a system designed to serve financial predators. It works very well in doing exactly that.

In 2023 alone, the U.S. government paid $659 billion in net interest—much of it to private banks, hedge funds, and wealthy investors—more than the entire federal budgets for education, housing, and energy. The predatory returns flowed overwhelmingly to the already obscenely wealthy.

Meanwhile, ordinary Americans live with stagnant wages, unaffordable housing, ballooning medical bills, and collapsing infrastructure.

The system works well for the rich. It fails for most other Americans.

Now, here is where the problem becomes delicate. Millions of Americans depend on pensions, retirement accounts, and Social Security benefits that are directly or indirectly tied to Treasury bonds.

If we were to simply cancel the federal debt tomorrow, many of these retirement savings would disappear. And that would be profoundly unjust.

Retirees and workers did not design this system. They played by the rules and contributed their whole lives to creating real value through their labor. The challenge is to protect pensioners while ending the unearned windfalls of Wall Street.

So how do we do that? I urge the American Monetary Institute to focus public attention on advancing an agenda of four essential interdependent parts consistent with AMI’s historical commitment to basic monetary reform.

No element of this four-part agenda is easily achieved, yet all four elements are essential to a viable human future. Success will require serious public education to which the AMI can make a defining contribution.

Part One: Democratize the Federal Reserve.
The Fed should be restructured as a public utility responsible for issuing debt free, interest free currency to meet essential public needs while stewarding the monetary commons. This means ending its role as a technocratic servant of financial elites. To achieve this, the Federal Reserve must be transformed from a tool of wealthy bankers into a transparent public institution accountable to Congress and the American people. Its mandate must shift from protecting Wall Street to serving society. That means prioritizing full employment, and ecological regeneration.

Part Two: Stop Government Borrowing from Wall Street.
The U.S. government must restore the Treasury’s authority to issue money directly—debt and interest-free. This sovereign money can be spent into circulation to meet urgent national needs: renewable energy, health care, full employment, housing, transforming and renewing infrastructure, retirement security, and ecological restoration. It can also be used to buy back Treasury bonds, thus retiring debt without shrinking the money supply or harming pensioners.

These two agenda items are part of the traditional AMI agenda. That agenda must now be expanded with the addition of two additional parts.

Part Three: Protect Earned Pensions.
Social Security and legitimate retirement accounts must be guaranteed in full. Treasury holdings in pension funds can be redeemed with sovereign money or replaced with federally guaranteed bonds backed by the public credit. At the same time, speculative claims—derivatives, hedge fund bets, crypto schemes—must all be written down and ultimately abolished. Obligations to workers must be honored. Windfalls to financial predators need not be.

Part Four: Eliminate Society’s Extremes of Wealth and Poverty while learning to live within Earth’s Limits.
By ending interest payments to private financiers on federal debt, the U.S. government can free up hundreds of billions of dollars every year. Those financial resources can be redirected to strengthening Social Security, investing in jobs providing care for people and Earth, and building worker- and community-owned enterprises that root wealth in real production to provide good fairly compensated jobs. To ensure fairness, we must also tax extreme wealth and speculative windfalls so that money creation does not fuel new concentrations of power devoted to reckless environmental devastation.

We face an extreme global crisis of our own human making. According to the Global Footprint Network, the current consumption of Earth’s 8.2 billion people would require 1.8 Earth’s to sustain. We have only one Earth, and it is the only planet we have yet identified with any current prospect of supporting life as we know it.

Yet, despite our current human over-burden on finite Earth, approximately 3.4 billion people, nearly half of the world’s human population, struggle to meet basic needs, living on less than $5.50 a day. In short, a significant portion of the world’s population lacks sufficient income to meet their essential needs in our modern money-dependent economy.

It should be a clear and foundational moral principle that no one is entitled to excess for so long as anyone is deprived of the means to obtain the minimal essentials of a healthy, meaningful life.

We hear a growing call for a universal guaranteed income to fill the global income gap. That call ignores the basic reality that we cannot eat money. Money is useless without working people engaged in essential care for Earth and its human population. Without human labor, money is worthless.

Instead of a guaranteed income, we need a program to provide everyone  with guaranteed living wage employment as caretakers of living Earth and its people.

Across our communities and around the world, there is an extraordinary amount of work that urgently needs doing—work that heals ecosystems, strengthens relationships, and ensures that every person can live with dignity and purpose.

We do not suffer a shortage of willing workers. We suffer a failure of imagination and political will.

We’ve faced this dilemma before. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, unemployment in the United States reached catastrophic levels. One in four Americans was out of work. Yet roads needed paving, rivers needed managing, forests needed replanting, and families needed food. In response, President Franklin D. Roosevelt launched what became one of the boldest and most beneficial public employment experiments in human history.

Through programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and the Public Works Administration (PWA), the federal government directly hired millions of Americans. They built trails, bridges, schools, theaters, and post offices. They restored forests and watersheds. They painted murals, wrote local histories, and brought live theater to rural towns. They lifted up not only families and communities, but the spirit of a nation.

The WPA alone employed more than 8 million people. The CCC, aimed at young men, gave more than 3 million workers housing, wages, and skills while planting over 3 billion trees and restoring thousands of acres of damaged land. These programs were not perfect—they excluded many women and people of color, and they were ultimately temporary. But they proved that the government can put people to work, quickly and effectively, in ways that serve the common good.

Today, we face a different kind of crisis, but the lessons still apply. Once again, our society is marked by deep inequality, underemployment, and unmet human needs. But now the stakes are even higher. The living systems of the Earth are in rapid decline. The climate is destabilizing. Our social fabric is fraying. The need for meaningful, life-serving work has never been greater.

Caregiving is one of the most urgent areas of unmet need. We are aging as a society, yet our care infrastructure is collapsing. Millions of elders need assistance and companionship. Families with children need affordable childcare. People with disabilities need daily support. And millions of potential caregivers—often women, immigrants, and young people—are eager to serve but cannot find paid, dignified work. At the same time, those providing care are often overworked and underpaid.

Our ecosystems, too, are crying out for human hands and hearts. From degraded forests to eroding coastlines, healing the Earth will take generations of labor to restore wetlands, rebuild topsoil, protect pollinators, and steward water systems.

The same is true for housing. In many communities, homes are unaffordable, overcrowded, or in disrepair, while thousands remain unsheltered. A national program to retrofit old buildings, build affordable homes, and convert underused properties into community housing that restores community life and reduces our dependence on private automobiles would create thousands of jobs while addressing a basic human need.

Food systems need similar attention. Industrial agriculture has degraded our soils and displaced small farmers. Local, regenerative farming can fulfill essential food needs, restore landscapes, and build resilience—but it requires people to do the planting, composting, harvesting, and educating. These are jobs that feed both body and spirit.

The clean energy transition is another opportunity for purposeful work. We need people to install solar panels, retrofit buildings, maintain microgrids, and construct wind and geothermal systems.

This work is not only technical—it is communal. Energy resilience must be designed with and for communities, especially those historically left behind.

Transition to electric cars is only part of our challenge. Ultimately, we must eliminate our dependence on private automobiles. Streets should serve people, not vehicles. Walking, biking, and electrified public transit must replace the costly burden of private automobiles. Transit hubs can integrate housing, shops, and services to make daily needs accessible without a car. The payoff is cleaner air, safer streets, and healthier lives.

Schools need more tutors, mentors, and social-emotional guides. Communities need artists to tell their stories, musicians to lift their voices, and actors to help us imagine new futures. Democracy itself needs people who organize meetings, support inclusion, and facilitate participatory budgeting and community planning.

In all these areas, we still allow human potential to go to waste. That doesn’t have to be the case.

Once we turn the money system into a public utility, we can address many essential public needs with no addition to either public or private debt.

Some will suggest that artificial intelligence will reduce the need for human labor. When used wisely and ethically, AI can enhance the impact of human work. But AI cannot replace it. It cannot hold the hand of an elder in pain. It cannot plant a forest or teach young people how to care for soil. It cannot facilitate a difficult community meeting. These are not tasks for automation. They are expressions of our humanity.

With imagination, courage, and commitment, we can take the next step toward an economy that honors all people, serves the Earth, and prepares the way for an Ecological Civilization. It is not only possible. It is necessary.

Here is the bottom line. We must learn to meet our human needs in ways consistent with the needs of the living Earth. We must do all of this in ways that:

  • Protect pensioners.
  • Eliminate inequality and unpayable debt.
  • Free the United States and the world from Wall Street’s grip.
  • Meet the essential needs of people and Earth in meaningful and satisfying ways.

The financial reforms essential to this agenda do not represent a new or radical idea. Lincoln issued Greenbacks during the Civil War. The NEED Act introduced by Dennis Kucinich in 2011 proposed the same idea. Throughout history, we have examples of sovereign governments issuing money to meet public needs.

The defining message of the American Monetary institute—has long been a call to move beyond the corrupt money system we now live under in which private banks create money from nothing, lend it to us at interest, and hold our government perpetually in debt. All to enhance the power and reckless spending of the already obscenely rich. That is a stupid, predatory, and ultimately suicidal system.

I’m sure that many of you here understand the details of these financial scams better than I do. The essential bottom line is that a healthy, truly democratic society cannot exist while dependent on private financiers for the money on which we depend for our daily living.

It is time to treat our money system as a public utility, managed for the common good. Only then can we provide secure meaningful, and adequately compensated work for all people, and build the just and sustainable economy that living Earth and its people deserve.

Thank you.