“The Future in Our Pockets” Study Group Success

by Mary Sanderson
Madison Branch and Women, Money & Democracy Committee

July 2023

Over four Thursday mornings in May, WILPF’s Women, Money & Democracy Committee (W$D) co-hosted with Alliance For Just Money (AFJM) a lively study group diving deeper into the Future in Our Pockets webinar (FiOP) we presented last February. We were six WILPFers and six others.

Mary Jensen told how Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future made her attend the FiOP webinar. When she joined the study group, Mary said she had been completely in the dark about the nature and importance of the monetary system before KSR’s novel, and that she is grateful to be beginning to understand some of the finance and economic talk on the news.

Dianne Blais used our work, together with her economics background, to present “A Better Economy” at a Women’s Finance event hosted by the Virginia American Association of University Women (AAUW) and League of Women Voters (LWV). Dianne said, “I opened my talk by asking, ‘who creates 97% of the money in the US?’ I spoke about our debt/war economy and…our founders’ goal of Congress creating the money (not commercial banks).” 

Weeks two and three outlined the specific ways in which this bank-credit system of money creation generates housing shortages, student debt, and permanent war.

Our last session focused on the three legs of an important solution, The American Monetary Reform Act (AMRA). These three measures, historically proven, are hard for us even to imagine after 300 years of trusting bank-credit for money.

1. Nationalize the private Federal Reserve into the Treasury as a federal agency to keep economic statistics
2. Take back from private banks the right and responsibility to create money by lending. That power to create money can be thought of as the goose that lays the golden eggs.
3. Return that goose to Congress who was tasked by the US Constitution with creating and controlling the money supply.

For a possible road to true self-governance, our money supply must be entrusted to an accountable body to be used for public purpose. We are off-target expecting government to do right while private banks hold the power of the purse.

W$D and AFJM will host a second study group to be held evenings in the fall, as requested by ten more Future in Our Pockets participants.

WILPF and An Economy of Our Own (AEOO) members and friends are invited to join the fall sessions. Watching the webinar and completing a short scheduling poll are the only prerequisites.