Ellen Brown Runs for Cover
Oct. 12, 2010
Ellen Brown has responded to my article, claiming she really is a conservative.
Conservative is as conservative does. A conservative who praises Hitler's National Socialism is not my kind of conservative.
She writes:
I don't have time to respond to all your points now, although I may update this post later.
She had better make time if she is intellectually honest.
Defending her promotion of Hitler's economy, she writes:
First, since you've made so much of my Hitler example and I've taken so much grief over it, I've quit using it to illustrate my point, even though the transformation of Germany's absolutely bankrupt economy into one powerful enough to take on the rest of the world in World War II was pretty dramatic.
I get it! She still believes it, but from now on, she will cover her flanks. She just won't say it any more. This lady is not gifted in the skills of public debate.
I now turn to less controversial examples of countries that pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps simply by drawing on the credit power of the nation. My favorite one right at the moment is the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, but another was featured on NPR just this week. The clip, called "How Fake Money Saved Brazil," describes how Brazil transformed a collapsed economy and money supply into the nation's present state of vibrant health, just by issuing a new currency.
Interesting. She refuses to engage me on any of my 52 criticisms. She raises a new unsubstantiated example.
Then it is back to her man, Adolf.
On Hitler's remarkable popular following, I was simply reporting. He DID have a remarkable following in the early thirties, and they were not marching in lockstep for no reason. It was because he had turned an utterly destitute economy around; and he did it basically by putting people back to work, paid for with a new currency backed by nothing but the credit of the government and the people. Your argument that this necessarily leads to fascism is belied by history. It did not lead to fascism when employed in Australia in the first half of the 20th century, or in New Zealand or Canada during that period, or in Guernsey for the past 200 years, or in the American colonies, or in this recent case of Brazil.
In short, she is exactly what I said she is: a cheerleader for National Socialism's economics.
She repeats the same nonsense abiut restoring the German economy. The Guernsey experiment story is also fake, as I have reported.
Her book is a fraud. I suggest that you not take it seriously. I also suggest that you don't take Greenbackism seriously.
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Update: December 28, 2020
When you click the link that I provided, you find that the page has been rewritten. She has removed her original response to my critique. She has substituted a polite response that does not mention Hitler.
If you doubt that she wrote what I quoted, you can verify it on this site, which quotes her verbatim, and provides a link to her now-modified page: https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Public_Credit
In 2018, Tom Woods cited her 2010 response. He then provided citations from economist Albrecht Ritschl, who provided a different narrative. It was Hitler's spending on armaments, 1933-36, that reduced unemployment. My conclusion: this was tax money spent on goods that provided no benefit to consumers. Read Woods' report here.
By late November, 2010, she reversed herself. She became a cheerleader for Bernanke's FED. I reported on this here: https://www.garynorth.com/public/7286.cfm.
She is still a cheerleader for the FED.
When I called her on this, she responded in a long article. She subsequently removed it. You can read about this here: https://www.garynorth.com/public/7303.cfm.
I don't blame her. She really was an ideal target for me. Every time she responded, it made things worse. Her responses were less competent than her book -- an amazing feat. She finally figured out the truth of this slogan: When you're in a hole, stop digging. "My responses to Gary North? What responses?"
After 2010, she has published mainly on Left-wing and green movement sites such as Resileence, Counterpunch, and Democracy Collaborative.
These days, she calls for universal basic income provided by the federal government. Read her article here.
Her hard-core conservative disciples have drifted away. She has been unable to replace them with leftists.
In 2010, a Google search for "Ellen Brown" and "Web of Debt" produced over 600,000 hits. Today, it is around 30,400.
She still publishes articles on her site. The site's Alexa ranking is over 2 million: https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ellenbrown.com. Any site with a number larger than a million has almost no traffic.
