The 1913 Federal Reserve Act let powerful bankers usurp money creation authority in violation of the Constitution's Article I, Section 8, giving only Congress the power to "coin Money (and) regulate the Value thereof...."
Thereafter, powerful bankers used their control over money, credit and debt for private self-enrichment, bankrolling and colluding with Congress and administrations to implement laws favoring them.

As a result, decades of deregulation, outsourcing, economic financialization, and casino capitalism followed, producing asset bubbles, record budget and national debt levels, and depression-sized unemployment far higher than reported numbers, albeit manipulated to look better.
After the financial crisis erupted in late 2007, even harder times have left Main Street in the early stages of a depression, with recovery pure illusion. Today's contagion has spread out of control, globally. Wall Street got trillions of dollars in a desperate attempt to socialize losses, privatize profits, and pump life back into the corpses by blowing public wealth into a moribund financial sector, failing corporate favorites, and America's aristocracy. While Wall Street boasts it has recovered, industrial America keeps imploding. High-paying jobs are exported. Economic prospects are eroding. Austerity is being imposed, with no one sure how to revive stable, sustainable long-term growth.

This book provides a powerful tool for showing angry Americans how they've been fleeced, and includes a plan for constructive change. Incisive chapters include:

-- Dirty Secrets of the Temple: how privatized money control lurches the economy from one crisis to another;

-- Capitalism and Freedom Unmasked;

-- Greenspan's Dark Legacy;

-- A Short History of Government Handouts to bankers and other corporate favorites;

-- Quantitative Easing: Elixir or Poison?

-- Systematic Washington-Sanctioned Fraud;

-- Obama's Anti-Populist Budget;

-- The Recession Is Over, the Depression Just Beginning;

-- Manipulation: How Markets Really Work;

-- Waging War on America's Workers;

-- Permanent Debt Bondage from America's Student Loan Racket;

-- On the Chopping Block: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid;

-- Banking in Venezuela: An Alternative Banking System favoring citizens and the country;

-- Ending Today's Economic Crisis Simply and Easily, in America and Globally; and

-- Public Banking: An Idea Whose Time Has Come.
About the Author: Stephen Lendman is a writer and broadcaster. His work is exceedingly widely distributed online, with his articles carried on numerous listservs and websites such as Information Clearing House, Countercurrents, Rense, AltNews, Uruknet, Global Research, Counterpunch, and more. In early 2007, he began regular radio hosting, now The Progressive Radio News Hour on The Progressive Radio Network. He is co-author with J.J. Asongu of The Iraq Quagmire: The Price of Imperial Arrogance. He holds a BA from Harvard and an MBA from Wharton.