Follow the yellow brick road, to 'Web of Debt'

"The Wizard of Oz" is an American fairy tale of the power of the individual " how you have the ability to manifest your dreams. But it also shows us how there are invisible puppeteers pulling the strings of the people we see on the stage.

What makes this fairy tale so interesting now is that the story behind "The Wizard of Oz" is apparently about the creation of our current monetary system, and the web of deceit this system has created.

The author, L. Frank Baum, was a journalist in 1900 and wrote this children's story to say what he could not say in his editorials " that the banks were controlling our country.

In a fascinating book called "Web of Debt" by Ellen Brown, she explores how this simple fairy tale is a monetary allegory with lessons as pertinent today as they were in 1900.

The 1890s were plagued by an economic depression nearly as severe as that of the 1930s. The farmers lived like serfs to the bankers, having mortgaged their farms, their equipment, and sometimes even the seeds they needed for planting. The farmers were as ignorant as Scarecrow about banking policies. In the cities, unemployed factory workers were as frozen as the Tin Woodman from the lack of a free-flowing supply of money to oil the wheels of industry.

In the story, Dorothy's house lands on the Wicked Witch of the East (the Wall Street bankers) who had kept the Munchkins (the farmers and factory workers) in bondage for many years.

For killing the Wicked Witch, Dorothy was awarded magical silver (not red) slippers, representing silver coins. The debate at the time was between printing notes backed by gold or using silver coins for money.

But when Dorothy couldn't get home, she and her friends set off on a yellow (gold) brick road to seek help from the Wizard of Oz " the all-powerful President Grover Cleveland whose strings were pulled by Wall Street financiers.

You can read more on this at www.webofdebt.com. And while I don't consider myself a conspiracy theorist, this book goes into great detail about how our monetary system is really a network of private bankers, called the Federal Reserve. And how a few of its members created this massive investment scheme called "derivatives" that she predicted in 2006 would cost taxpayers hundreds of trillions of dollars to bail out.

She details the "sub-prime" mortgage crisis, the accounting scandals at Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae in 2003 and '04, and the impending crash, which happened about a year after publication. But she also offers a solution. The government needs to take back the money-issuing power from the banks.

While it seems like a logical step, the power of the private international banking cartel would make that nearly impossible to do. Unless, of course, this administration does nationalize the banks...

- Randi Thompson owns As You Wish, a government and media relations firm.