Lawrence Parks - Founder and President of the Foundation for the Advancement of Monetary Education
Title: Who Will Protect Our Protectors? Rotary?
November 5, 2026, The Union League Club of NYC, Grant Room - 6PM
Lawrence Parks is the Founder and President of the Foundation for the Advancement of Monetary Education (www.fame.org).
He also hosts the Larry Parks Show, which airs weekly on Spectrum #56, Verizon FiOS Channel #34, and RCN Channel #35 in Manhattan. He has broad experience in academia, business, and finance. He holds a Ph.D. in
Operations Research from the Polytechnic University, where he received a National Science Foundation Fellowship and served as an adjunct professor teaching graduate courses.
Dr. Parks has studied the money issue for more than fifty years. His writings have appeared in Pensions & Investments, The Economist, The Washington Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Freeman, The Free
Market, The United States Congressional Record, National Review, The Labor Studies Journal, The Houston Chronicle, The New York Sun, The Washington Examiner, and many popular publications. He is the author of
the highly acclaimed What Does Mr. Greenspan Really Think?
Market, The United States Congressional Record, National Review, The Labor Studies Journal, The Houston Chronicle, The New York Sun, The Washington Examiner, and many popular publications. He is the author of
the highly acclaimed What Does Mr. Greenspan Really Think?
He testified before the United States House Committee on Financial Services Subcommittee on Domestic Monetary Policy and Technology in support of H.R. 1098, the Free Competition in Currency Act of 2011, including extensive written testimony. He has authored and produced more than 200 videos on the U.S. monetary system.
He is an active member of many civic and social organizations. He frequently speaks about the fight for honest monetary weights and measures.
His focus is on: (1) how our present fiat monetary system is destroying savings, pensions, and jobs for hundreds of millions all over the world; (2) how it threatens freedom; and (3) what to do about it.
TOPIC:
Title: Who Will Protect Our Protectors? Rotary?
Abstract: Police and firefighters are special. Their mission requires them to sometimes put their lives at risk to protect us. They are irreplaceable. We must be able to access their services promptly when we need them. Purchasing power from their pensions is being stolen by de facto thievery under the color of law. It is a feature of our dishonest, unsustainable, and unconstitutional monetary system. It must be fixed. I have suggestions about how to fix it. There may be a role for Rotary.
Abstract: Police and firefighters are special. Their mission requires them to sometimes put their lives at risk to protect us. They are irreplaceable. We must be able to access their services promptly when we need them. Purchasing power from their pensions is being stolen by de facto thievery under the color of law. It is a feature of our dishonest, unsustainable, and unconstitutional monetary system. It must be fixed. I have suggestions about how to fix it. There may be a role for Rotary.
Some Sample Talking Points: How police and firefighters, along with other NYS public employees, are being victimized. Using official data from 2000 to 2025, firefighters and police lost about $2.5 billion in purchasing power in their pensions due to undercompensated cost-of-living adjustment losses. They don’t fully understand how this happened.
We are all victimized by de facto institutional thievery through our monetary system.
Every country does this.
Secular law enforcement has failed us miserably.
The Founders wrote provisions into the Constitution to protect us. Over the past 150years, the Supreme Court has made political, not legal, decisions that have usurped the clear language of Article I, Sections 8 and 10, and the 10th Amendment, which govern Congress’ monetary powers.
Only our Constitution, among all nations, has monetary provisions that limit the government’s monetary powers: To coin, tax, and borrow money. The Constitution doesnot authorize printing paper money. The delegates overwhelmingly rejected paper money at the 1783 Constitutional Convention.
Story about the Founders' experience with paper money. The “dollar” no longer has an operational definition. A legal tender statute has forced it into circulation, but the Constitution does not authorize legal tender.
What does “legal tender” mean? Where did it come from?
The Founders, whose images appear on our paper money, all condemned paper money on moral, not economic, grounds. Federal Reserve “notes” are not money. They are not even legal notes. The public has been cheated through misrepresentation and nondisclosure of material information, which is fraud. None of this is taught in any school in the nation, as far as I know. The mainstream media never discusses it. According to the Federal Reserve, our money stock has increased from about $300 billion to about $22 trillion from 1960 to the present. How did all this “money” get into our economy?
How did this tsunami of “money” affect consumer prices? Pensions? Property Taxes? Bank compensation and dividends?
The CPI is a demonstrably phony metric: substitution, hedonic pricing, geometric weighting, surveys instead of actual data, and rounding to one decimal as if it were precise, when it is not.
As a practical matter, what is the remedy?
The Federal Reserve “fighting inflation” (by increasing interest rates) is like lawyers seeking “justice” or prostitutes talking about “love.” They just want the money.
The Constitution does not empower Congress to manage interest rates.
The “Gold Clause” story.
Justice James McReynolds: “The Constitution is Gone!”
On October 28, 1977, President Jimmy Carter signed Public Law 95-147, reauthorizing gold clauses in private contracts. This statute, which courts have already adjudicated and upheld, allows indexing dollar payments to the price of gold and offers the best protection, though not perfect, against further debasement of our so-called “dollar.”
Collective action (by whom?) → police and firefighters.
What can Rotarians do to help?
