Category Archives: Collected Works

How the U.S. Banking System Works

How the U.S. Banking System Works

The United States banking system is a “fractional reserve” system. This began in the 1800s when the courts declared that money on deposit in banks was no longer the property of the depositor, but rather was a debt owed by the bank to the depositor in the amount of the deposit. This meant that the money deposited became the property of the banks to do with as they pleased, which opened the way for lending “their” money. It wasn’t long before they realized that only a small fraction of depositors wanted to withdraw “their” money at one time. Thereafter, banks began lending a large percentage of the money depositors placed with them and keeping only a small “reserve” to meet depositors demands for cash. This gave rise to two potential problems for banks: 1. a solvency problem (if the bank’s liabilitiesexceeded its assets, creditors/depositors were not all able to withdraw “their” deposits and the bank went bankrupt), 2. a liquidity problem (even though a bank might have assets in excess of its liabilities, it might not be able to convert enough of its assets to cash to meet the current demand for cash [from depositors’ withdrawals]).
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Posted in Collected Works

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man: How the U.S. Uses Globalization to Cheat Poor Countries Out of Trillions

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man: How the U.S. Uses Globalization to Cheat Poor Countries Out of Trillions

We speak with John Perkins, a former respected member of the international banking community. In his book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man he describes how as a highly paid professional, he helped the U.S. cheat poor countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars by lending them more money than they could possibly repay and then take over their economies.
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Posted in Collected Works, Uncategorized

Learning to Read by Malcolm X

MALCOLM X

Born Malcolm Little on May 19, 1925, Malcolm X was one of the most articulate and powerful leaders of black America during the 1960s. A street hustler convicted of robbery in 1946, he spent seven years in prison, where he educated himself and became a disciple of Elijah Muhammad, founder of the Nation of Islam. In the days of the civil rights movement, Malcolm X emerged as the leading spokesman for black separatism, a philosophy that urged black Americans to cut political, social, and economic ties with the white community. After a pilgrimage to Mecca, the capital of the Muslim world, in 1964, he became an orthodox Muslim, adopted the Muslim name El Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, and distanced himself from the teachings of the black Muslims. He was assassinated in 1965. In the following excerpt from his autobiography (1965), coauthored with Alex Haley and published the year of his death, Malcolm X describes his self-education.

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Posted in Collected Works

Still Separate, Still Unequal by Jonathan Kozol

Many Americans who live far from our major cities and who have no firsthand knowledge of the realities to be found in urban public schools seem to have the rather vague and general impression that the great extremes of racial isolation that were matters of grave national significance some thirty-five or forty years ago have gradually but steadily diminished in more recent years. The truth, unhappily, is that the trend, for well over a decade now, has been precisely the reverse. Schools that were already deeply segregated twenty-five or thirty years ago are no less segregated now, while thousands of other schools around the country that had been integrated either voluntarily or by the force of law have since been rapidly resegregating.
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Posted in Articles, Collected Works

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

 

The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green. The people of the village began to gather in the square, between the post office and the bank, around ten o’clock; in some towns there were so many people that the lottery took two days and had to be started on June 2th. but in this village, where there were only about three hundred people, the whole lottery took less than two hours, so it could begin at ten o’clock in the morning and still be through in time to allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner.
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Posted in Articles, Collected Works