LaRouche Group Promethean Action Pushes Marxist Central Banking
When both Representative Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) reintroduced the Federal Reserve Board Abolition Act (H.R. 1846 and S. 869) in 2025, they took a crucial first step toward restoring American economic sovereignty. Their legislation would repeal the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 and completely abolish both the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve and the Fed’s regional banks. Simply put, their legislation would end the Fed.
In a press release from March 5, 2025, Representative Massie correctly diagnosed the crisis: “Americans have suffered under crippling inflation, and the Federal Reserve is to blame.” He further explained that “During COVID, the Federal Reserve created trillions of dollars out of thin air and loaned it to the Treasury Department to enable unprecedented deficit spending. By monetizing the debt, the Federal Reserve devalued the dollar and enabled free money policies that caused high inflation.”
Ingraham’s Angle
Yet, Representative Massie’s and Senator Lee’s efforts to end the Fed have drawn fire from a bizarre coalition of critics, including Robert Ingraham of Promethean Action (formerly LaRouche PAC). In a May 18, 2024 article, published on Promethean Action’s website, attacking Massie’s earlier Federal Reserve Board Abolition Act in 2024 (H.R. 8421), Ingraham claimed that simply abolishing the Fed is “insufficient to restore American economic sovereignty.” Given that the language and text of both H.R. 8421 from 2024 and H.R. 1846 from 2025 are identical, Ingraham’s criticism, on behalf of Promethean, remains equally applicable. While he acknowledges that the current Federal Reserve System monetizes debt and feeds speculative bubbles, his proposed “solution” is nothing more than a dangerous bait-and-switch that would plunge the United States into an outright socialist centrally planned economy.
Instead of returning to free market capitalism and constitutionally sound money, Ingraham proposes to “Abolish the independence of the Federal Reserve and make it a subsidiary agency within the U.S. Treasury.” In other words, he and Promethean want to reconstitute the Federal Reserve as a full-fledged “National Bank,” designed to issue more unbacked fiat currency in order to centrally plan and fund what he deems as the “productive economy.” He viciously attacks Massie, the Freedom Caucus, and the Austrian School of economics, deriding the desire for pro-free-market, constitutional sound money, such as a return to the gold standard, as “ANTI-AMERICAN.” Ingraham and Promethean do not want to end the Fed, they seek to evolve the Fed into a collectivist nightmare.
Socialist Strategy
One need look no further than chapter II of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ The Communist Manifesto to understand the true nature of Ingraham’s and Promethean’s proposal. Marx outlined 10 planks, or measures, as being necessary for the “proletariat” (i.e., those who sold their labor, or the working class) to “revolutionize the mode of production.” And the fifth plank explicitly calls for “Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.”
In his article “Socialism in America,” published in the September 2026 issue of The New American magazine, Steve Bonta accurately documented:
The Manifesto recommended, for example, that all credit be centralized in a central bank with state capital and a monopoly on monetary creation. This was accomplished in 1913 with the Federal Reserve Act, which created for the first time in America a bona fide central bank as the sole issuer of money, with total ascendancy over the credit markets (thanks to its ability to set interest rates and its power to buy and sell U.S. government debt). In other words, the creation of the Federal Reserve created a Marxist financial system for the United States.
Rather than stopping Marxism, Ingraham’s desire to strip the Fed of its quasi-private facade and fold it directly into the Treasury Department perfectly fulfills Marxism. It replaces a banking cartel with total government regimentation over the means of production and credit, which is precisely what Marx demanded.
Hamiltonian Policy?
To justify this corporatist scheme, Ingraham wraps his proposal in economic nationalist rhetoric, claiming that it represents the “Policy of Hamilton and Lincoln.” While his history checks out, in terms of accuracy, his reverence for such policies is completely misguided. Ingraham and Promethean Action’s LaRouchian insistence that state-directed credit represents a uniquely “American” policy is historically indefensible. As The New American has extensively documented, the system championed by Alexander Hamilton was not an “American invention,” but rather a carbon copy of the British mercantilist system that the American War of Independence was fought to escape.
As Dr. Thomas DiLorenzo explained in his article “The Federal Reserve Protection Racket,” published in the April 14, 2025 issue of The New American, Alexander Hamilton’s First Bank of the United States was the nation’s “first great monopolistic collusion scheme between business and government.” It promptly inflated the currency, causing 72-percent price inflation from 1791 to 1796. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison fiercely opposed Hamilton’s bank precisely because it was a vast, unconstitutional expansion of governmental powers that lacked any authorization under Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. Jefferson and Madison correctly recognized that such a national bank was designed to vastly expand federal powers at the expense of the states and the American people.
Greenbacks and Crédit Mobilier
The Promethean article also heaps praise upon Abraham Lincoln’s disastrous “Greenback” initiative. It was President Lincoln who ended free-market competition in banking by creating the fiat “greenback” dollar as a monopoly currency, while unconstitutionally taxing competing currencies out of existence through the Legal Tender Act of 1862. Furthermore, the massive federal subsidies and state-directed credit championed by Lincoln directly led to colossal mismanagement and corruption, most notably exposed during the Crédit Mobilier scandal.
Exposed during the administration of Ulysses S. Grant, the Crédit Mobilier scandal was a massive corruption scheme in which politically connected railroad executives pocketed millions in inflated construction profits, financed in part by federal subsidies, while bribing members of Congress with discounted company stock. It exposed the crony capitalism and political corruption fostered by Lincoln’s government-subsidized economic policies.
History repeatedly proves that when the government directs credit and subsidies, it breeds crony capitalism, inevitably resulting in a system where the rich and powerful manipulate government action for their own self-serving purposes. The Hamiltonian “American System,” far from being the embodiment of free enterprise, represents the very collusion between big government and big business that has plagued the United States for generations.
Spend It Wisely
Yet, Ingraham wants a government-run central bank to issue these same fiat notes for so-called productive ventures, insisting that printing money out of thin air is somehow “non-inflationary” so long as the state controls where it goes. In reality, however, this is nothing more than socialist central planning disguised under the veneer of well-known historical American figures.
The “real problem,” according to the LaRouchian critique, is not the quantity of currency printed out of thin air, but what it is spent on. By this ludicrous reasoning, creating fiat money to finance government-favored infrastructure, manufacturing, or other supposedly “productive” activities miraculously prevents the inflationary consequences of monetary expansion.
Whenever the government prints money to fund its pet projects, regardless whether those projects are constitutional or not or if they are deemed “necessary” for the good of the country, as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” was portrayed, it dilutes the purchasing power of every dollar in circulation. It makes no difference whether the printing press is operated by a cartel of private bankers at the Fed or by unaccountable bureaucrats in the Treasury Department; the result is exactly the same: the stealth taxation of the American people through inflation.
Inflation Issue
Shifting the monetary counterfeiters’ headquarters from the Eccles Building to the Treasury Building will not magically cure the disease of inflation. As Representative Massie aptly noted in his press release, “Through this process, retirees see their savings evaporate due to the actions of a central bank pursuing inflationary policies that benefit the wealthy and connected.”
Federal Reserve-induced inflation has caused the dollar to lose more than 97 percent of its purchasing power since 1913, when the Federal Reserve was established. This Fed inflation imposes a stealth, or hidden, tax on the American people, evaporating the savings of retirees, decreasing the standard of living for the middle class, and transferring wealth from productive Americans to politically connected financial establishment insiders.
The notion that government bureaucrats can circumvent these consequences merely by directing newly created money toward politically favored industries is fantastical and illogical. It does not matter whether the money is created to finance Wall Street speculation or Washington’s preferred industrial projects. The purchasing power of the American people is still being diluted through easy, elastic money and centralized economic planning. And this is precisely the danger of Ingraham’s scheme. It would not abolish the machinery of monetary manipulation, but would instead place it more directly under the control of the federal government. Rather than freeing the market from the manipulation of central bankers, it would empower Washington politicians and bureaucrats to choose winners and losers — determining which industries receive credit, which enterprises are worthy of investment, and which economic activities deserve preferential treatment. This is not free market capitalism; it’s the foundation for centrally planned state capitalism
Trojan Horse
The Promethean vision is a Trojan Horse. It seeks to replace the Federal Reserve’s financial racketeering with a state-run scheme of public credit. Consolidating credit into the hands of the state via a national bank is not a Hamiltonian win for America; it echoes the same exact policy demanded by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the fifth plank of The Communist Manifesto.
As Massie points out in his press release, “Monetizing debt is a closely coordinated effort between the Federal Reserve, Treasury Department, Congress, Big Banks, and Wall Street.” Merely absorbing the Fed into the Treasury would only strengthen this unholy alliance of government and corporate power.
Rather than handing the printing press directly to Treasury bureaucrats so they can micromanage industrial policy, the constitutional solution is the complete separation of the economy from the state. The Constitution is emphatically clear on what constitutes real money. Article I, Section 8 authorizes Congress the power to “coin Money,” while Article I, Section 10 stipulates that “no State shall … make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts.”
Return to Sovereignty
True economic sovereignty will not be found in neo-Hamiltonian statism or LaRouchian fiat schemes. It will be found by ending the Fed and returning to sound money, i.e. gold and silver, and using nontraceable and nonprogrammable money.
Representatve Massie’s legislation, which abolishes the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve and the Federal Reserve Banks, is the vital first step toward restoring constitutional sound money. Senator Lee echoed this urgency in the press release, saying:
The Federal Reserve has not only failed to achieve its mandate, it has become an economic manipulator, directly contributing to the financial instability many Americans face today.
Senator Lee rightfully concluded that we must “end the monetization of federal debt that fuels unchecked federal spending, and put American money on solid ground. We need to End the Fed.”
The United States does not need a reconstituted National Bank acting as a transfer agent for unconstitutional “greenback” U.S. Treasury Notes to fund a centrally planned industrial policy. Nor does it need to replace one form of monetary despotism with another, merely because the latter masquerades itself under the patriotic banner of Hamilton’s and Lincoln’s “American System.”
The answer to the Federal Reserve’s abuses is not to “perfect” or “reform” the machinery of centralized credit but to dismantle it entirely. Patriotic Americans must not fall for the collectivist Promethean or LaRouchian traps of replacing an unconstitutional quasi-independent central bank with an unconstitutional fully socialized, state-run central bank. They must reject Promethean Action’s Marxist overtures, enforce the Constitution, and urge their representatives and senators to support the Federal Reserve Board Abolition Act to finally end the Fed.
