Ellen Brown and Earl Staelin: Can Public Banking Solve AI? and End War?

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Attorneys and public banking advocates Ellen Brown and Earl Staelin explain why reforming our system of money creation could help end war and ensure universal prosperity.

Ellen Brown is the founder of the Public Banking Institute and the author of a dozen books and hundreds of articles including a new series on “AI Abundance.”

Earl Staelin is the founder of the Rocky Mountain Public Banking Institute. Note that the Public Banking Institute will be hosting a conference October 21-24 in Philadelphia.

Excerpts:

Kevin Barrett: Maybe the banks will have a harder time selling the wars if there’s universal prosperity, right? Scrambling for limited resources has been a big part of how they sell wars. Ellen, since you wrote the article series on AI Abundance, you can introduce the topic. Keep in mind that my audience is skeptical of AI.

Ellen Brown: Yeah, yeah, so is mine. It turned out I got a huge amount of pushback. I got hundreds of comments.

Elon Musk said (that AI will bring universal prosperity, necessitating a very high Universal Basic Income.) That is what prompted me to write about it.

I’ve written different times that the Treasury should issue our dollars directly the way Abraham Lincoln did in the Civil War when the British bankers were going to charge around 30 percent interest on loans to finance the war. And one of his advisors said, "you don’t have to borrow. You can just issue the money.” It’s in the Constitution: “Congress shall have the power to coin money and regulate the value thereof.” And it’s what the American colonists did. According to Benjamin Franklin it was the reason for the great prosperity of the American colonists until the King James required that they—well, the Bank of England leaned on the King to say “you can’t let them do that, issue their own money.” And according to some experts, that was the major trigger for the Revolutionary War was that suddenly we had no money. Before that, our money was paper money issued directly by the colonies.

So anyway, we can do that. So Elon Musk predicted that in 10 years, GDP in the US would be 10 times what it is now.

And meanwhile, we have this problem of AI taking over all the jobs. So you have people without jobs, so they don’t have incomes. And then you have a huge amount of supply. So instead of too much money chasing too few goods, which is how we get inflation, price inflation, you’ve got too little money chasing too many goods. And so he said we would need to do not just the universal basic income for everyone, but a universal high income just so we’d have enough money out there to buy all the goods that we’d be producing.

So I thought, well, where are they going to get this money? You know, they can’t get it from taxes, obviously. People have been talking about UBI for years, and it’s always, well, where are you going to get the money? You can’t afford it.

But where you could get the money is just have the government issue it directly, and it would not be inflationary, because in this case, you’re fighting deflation. You’re trying to bring the money supply up to match this amazing productivity. So that’s what triggered me to write about it in the first place….

And then people said, well, what about this? What about that? So I wound up writing five articles in that series. And the last one was about work. The objection has been that work is where we get meaning. And where would we find meaning in our lives if we didn’t have to go out to work?

Well, of course, sure, work is where we f