A novel conception of money and the State is offered, in the context of post-golden-age financial and political systems (roughly from 1980 to the present), and with regard to the sovereign-currency States, focusing particularly on the USA. The basic elements of the paper are: (1) a novel semiotic understanding of money as language rather than as a unit of measure, money understood to communicate goods-ownership to the public, and debt ownership to the corporation; (2) a discussion of financial unsustainability under the present system in which the banking oligopolies possess a newfound freedom to create money capital both more independently and on a significantly larger scale than under the previous Glass--Steagall regime; (3) a critique of the neo-liberal simulation (in the sense of Baudrillard) of government debt and dissimulation of the sovereign-currency State, able to create money at will; (4) a delineation of two fundamental policy objectives: to genuinely meet the State's obligation to assure the life and pursuit of happiness that all citizens are entitled to, and secondly, to decompress ever-expanding and ever-dangerous capital; (5) specific, highly original policy actions are put forward, aimed at meeting these policy objectives, notably lifting budgetary constraints on federal government spending and transforming the central bank into a repository of guaranteed household deposits.
