A national proposal that would bring about major reform in the U.S. monetary system may not have even one advocate in Congress, but its supporters are convinced that if enacted, it would produce unprecedented prosperity for Americans and return to the nation a measure of liberty not seen since the Founding Fathers were alive.
The National Economic Stabilization and Recovery Act, or NESARA, promises “general prosperity without sacrifice, not some complex redistribution scheme contrived as patronage for Washington power brokers and special interests,” according to its author’s website. In fact, the reforms are promised to bring a doubling of the U.S. standard of living within a generation.
The bill – whose proponent is careful to differentiate from a fraudulent version using the same acronym – would do away with the Federal Reserve and establish a new monetary system under a U.S. Treasury Reserve System, controlled by Congress, which would feature “constitutional currency” – standard silver and gold coins and treasury credit notes.
Private control of the nation’s monetary system would be outlawed by putting monetary policy under a new Board of Governors of the Treasury Reserve System.
The plan promises to reduce national debt by requiring all commercial banks to exchange their income-producing government obligations for treasury credit notes, and reduce private debt by establishing a system where mortgage principal is paid off before any “monetizing fee” is paid to the bank. This would reduce a typical 30-year loan down to 20-years and build equity much more quickly.
Compound interest on secured loans would be outlawed. According to the author, both the national debt and future private debt would be reduced by $1 trillion. Banks, in fact, would be prohibited from purchasing government-issued debt.
The proposal also deals with taxes, establishing a 14 percent national sales tax on non-necessary retail purchases while simultaneously eliminating the personal income tax, corporate income tax, gift tax, estate tax and capital gains tax. The Internal Revenue Service would morph into the National Tax Service to administer the sales tax. Those items exempt from the sales tax include groceries, medical supplies and services, rent payments and insurance products.
NESARA is the brainchild of Dr. Harvey F. Barnard, a systems-theory consultant living in Louisiana, who says he has “a knack for fixing things.”
Barnard says economic problems have nothing to do with what kind of governmental system is in place.
“The basic problem is the equations that drive the system,” Barnard told WND. “It has nothing to do with the Democrats or the Republicans. It has nothing to do with the kind of government – it doesn’t matter if it’s communist, socialist, parliamentary, dictatorship. The same equations drive the system, and the system basically is not stable.”
He says he finished writing the bill in 1990, sent it to Congress and received no response. Finally, he decided to put in on the Internet and says it has been translated into at least five languages.
Kooks and con artists
Barnard mentioned that “scam artists” have picked up use of the NESARA acronym, hoping to make a buck, or several, from gullible Americans. One effort, run by a woman who calls herself the Dove of Oneness, takes part of Barnard’s work and adds her own claim: that the bill actually was passed in Congress five years and simply has to be “announced” for the benefits to begin and for “peace” to commence.
“That’s the rip-off,” Barnard said with a chuckle in reference to the Dove of Oneness site.
Barnard says he spoke to one man in the Netherlands who lost $600,000 to one such fund-raising hoax.
“NESARA is just an acronym that’s in the public domain,” he explained. “It’s not illegal for these people to ask for money.”
The Dove of Oneness site actually calls its “secret law” something slightly different – the National Economic Security and Reformation Act.
According to the News Tribune of Tacoma, Wash., the Dove of Oneness’ real name is Shaini Goodwin, who claims to have 315,000 readers of her weekly online updates. The paper says the woman updates her site from a mobile home in Mason County, Wash.
While Barnard’s site includes a solicitation for donations, he told WND he has not raised more than $500 total – most of it coming from a NESARA Club he had going for a while. Members each paid $15.
A site that appears to be affiliated with the Dove of Oneness claims Barnard’s site is “operated by the Bush family,” a contention Barnard disputes.
“I wish the Bushes would send in their dues,” he said with a laugh. “Supposedly I’m working for Bush Sr. I don’t know why they wouldn’t let me work for Bush Jr.”
Barnard talked about his bill’s lack of acceptance in the halls of Congress.
“Nobody in Congress wants to touch this,” he said. “They are scared to death.”
He says in the ’90s he spent time with presidential candidates Steve Forbes and Ross Perot pitching his plan to no avail.
Referring to the home-mortgage effect of NESARA, Barnard said the real benefit comes to the economy when a homeowner, paying payments for 20 years instead of 30, has 10 year’s worth of house payments to now put into the economy.
“We’re talking about a boom of biblical proportions,” Barnard said. “There’s never been anything this big tried in the history of the world.”
No more IRS code
Barnard says with a consumption tax replacing the income tax, the revenue into the federal treasury likely would not change, mentioning the percentage of the new tax is not set in stone.
The new system would still include Social Security payroll taxes, but Barnard says with the benefits of his proposal the program would not suffer the shortfalls now being projected.
The NESARA site boasts that the eight volumes of often incomprehensible IRS tax code would be replaced by a mere 24 pages of regulations for the new system.
Barnard characterizes the reforms as the only way power will be truly restored to the people.
“In a battle of knowledge between the lawyer-politicians and the public, the people fight unarmed,” states an explanation of the bill. “An elite group dominates through legal finesse. It holds the high ground, establishing rule with nothing more than technical words written on paper. …
“Misuse of this power for its own purposes, with considerable encouragement from voters expecting to get something for nothing, led to the nation’s current economic predicament. The easiest way out of this mess requires new monetary and fiscal policies. Both systems desperately need renovation.”
As part of the monetary reforms, the bill allows private coinage.
Says the website: “NESARA opens the public mints to unlimited coinage. Anyone may bring gold or silver bullion to these mints to be coined. A charge, called seigniorage, keeps them self-supporting. It raises the exchange value of the standard coin to a point above the exchange value of its bullion content, another way of protecting its circulation. In addition, seigniorage makes feasible the operation of private mints in competition with government mints, assuring the efficiency of both. The Secretary of the Treasury is directed to promote and regulate such operations.”
Barnard sees the monetary system as a “public utility” since it “belongs to the people.” His system, he claims, will see that the people actually benefit from it and not just the small percentage of wealthy people who control most of the nation’s wealth.
Said Barnard: “If I could find just one representative in Congress who would sign his name and throw this thing into the hopper, they’d have to discuss it. … But it will have to come from the bottom up.”
NESARA a ‘hoax’
A spokesman for the member of Congress who is likely the most critical of the Federal Reserve, Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, dismissed NESARA – both the Dove of Oneness version and Barnard’s proposal.
“We’ve gotten e-mails from crazy people over the years about NESARA,” said Jeff Deist, Paul’s spokesman.
Deist criticized Barnard’s bill, specifically the part dealing with home mortgages and compound interest.
“I don’t think something like this would exist pre-Internet,” he told WND. “It would have been too hard for people to circulate these things.
“I’m sure this guy has written this bill and he thinks it’s a good thing to do, but no one has explained to me why contracts for home mortgages should be done away with. Don’t banks have a right to earn interest?”
Deist said his boss used to receive an e-mail or so a week on NESARA – whichever proposal the acronym might represent – but that the issue has died down in the last couple of years.
“NESARA, I’m afraid, is just kind of a hoax,” he said.
Paul has been consistently critical of the Federal Reserve, pointing out the country survived for over 100 years without a central banking system.
“My boss is critical of the fact that someone can, without anything backing it, increase the money supply,” Deist said.
“We don’t think there should be a commission sitting around deciding what the interest rate to borrow money should be. We ought to have a free market in interest rates like we do in other areas.”
Deist emphasized that most members of Congress don’t understand monetary policy and have no interest in it.
“You talk to people about monetary policy and their eyes glaze over,” he said, “even though it affects us a lot more than the political stuff we argue about in the papers.”
Barnard says that even though he can’t get a member of Congress to embrace his idea, his Internet statistics show people from Congress, the IRS and the Social Security Administration have visited his website.
“They know about it,” he said, “but it just scares them. It’s too big a change.”
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