OUR MONEY SYSTEM
PART 1 of 3

 

 

 

By Steven Yates
December 28, 2005
NewsWithViews.com

PART 1
Your Dollar Bill Is a Lie!

"You are a den of vipers. I intend to rout you out and by the Eternal God I will rout you out. If the people only understood the rank injustice of our money and banking system, there would be a revolution before morning." --Andrew Jackson, 1828 (to a group of investment bankers trying to persuade him to renew their charter)

Last week while undertaking the Web surfing that is part of my daily routine I ran across an article by one John Kaminski, an online author I hadn�t previously encountered.

It gave me a lot to think about.

Kaminski�s topic is the prevalence of lies in today�s culture and especially in today�s media. Lies related to the 9/11 attacks, for example; Kaminski is one of those folks who believes someone in our government knew they were coming. The truth, if truth this be, would be very costly to this someone�possibly to the Bush regime itself.

But this is just tangential to Kaminski�s main point: lies are where the money is. "There�s simply no money in the truth," he writes. "That�s why we stopped getting it. Yet, you can�t tell us money doesn�t matter when we�re all very hungry. If you don�t have any money, preaching what you think is the truth is definitely not the way to get it. Which is probably why I don�t have any."

Amen to that! I don�t have any, either! I am probably as close to broke, living from check to check, as Kaminski implies that he is!

I have been writing things down for as long as I can remember. My parents tell me I was doing it when I was a small child. Most of my efforts are directed at telling the truth, for anyone who happens to be interested in hearing the truth. I�ve occasionally experimented with fiction. I�ve long wanted to write a novel, especially a science fiction novel, but (so far) it hasn�t jelled. Not that I�ve had the time to make it jell, between my two teaching jobs (four classes in all), work on my next nonfiction book (a expansion of my surprisingly popular seven-part article "The Real Matrix" done last year for NewsWithViews.com) and work on these articles. I don�t regard myself as an entertainer but as a truth-teller. The science fiction novel�if it ever gets written�will attempt to communicate something about the human condition, just as Aldous Huxley�s Brave New World communicated something about the human condition�namely, the dangers of technological social engineering in the hands of those who regard human beings as cattle.

I don�t anticipate that any work of mine will sell as many copies as Huxley�s did, or become some kind of classic. This is a different culture now�more materialistic and sound bite oriented than his was, more manipulated via technology and media, and far less appreciative of anything mentally demanding. As Charlotte Iserbyt would say, far more dumbed down (see her phenomenal The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America). For all practical purposes, Brave New World is here.

Money has become a national religion of sorts. People and institutions worship it, like a surrogate god. They have little choice. No one has enough of it; thus the need to grasp more of it or budget very carefully what we have stands at the center of our lives and our institutions. Money issues encircle us, whether we like it or not. This includes those being paid far better than I am. We are not talking about people who take vacations every weekend, or eat at swanky restaurants every night, or who buy a new SUV every year. Frankly, I don�t know anybody who does that. I am starting to wonder if such people really exist, or if they are part of the edifice of lies.

The irony is, our money system is the biggest lie of all. It isn�t really money at all, but pieces of paper with numbers and the phrase legal tender printed on them.

Take a dollar bill from your wallet�if you have any dollars left after paying your bills and your taxes�and look at it closely. At the very top you�ll see the phrase Federal Reserve Note. Then, beneath that, The United States of America. In small print: This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private. Beneath George�s picture, at the bottom: One Dollar.

Long ago, when our fiat money was backed by gold, you would have seen different things. Imagine your grandfather undertaking the same project, examining a dollar from his pocket. Suppose the year was 1910. The dollar would not have said Federal Reserve Note because there was no Federal Reserve. What he would have been looking at would have been a real, honest-to-God dollar!

Just the name Federal Reserve is a twofold lie. The Federal Reserve is not federal and does not have any reserves. Many people believe the Federal Reserve is part of the federal government. It is not. It is a cartel of private central banks, many of them foreign-owned. Working in tandem with the U.S. Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve is a key institution of the Euro-American power elite. It has never been audited, nor had its books scrutinized by ordinary mortals.

For a startling and very detailed account of the origin and history of our banking system, I recommend G. Edward Griffin�s treatise The Creature From Jekyll Island. You might also read Murray N. Rothbard�s short work The Case Against the Fed for an incisive argument why a genuinely free economy does not need a central bank.

But back to your grandfather�s dollar. What would he have seen on it? Among other things, the phrase Will pay to bearer on demand just above One Dollar. This indicated that the slip of paper wasn�t really the bearer of value; it was a receipt indicating that the bank had in its repository a dollar�s worth of gold that would be redeemed at his demand.

This phrase disappeared from the dollar. Not right away, of course. If we look at, say, a 1928 dollar, the phrase Federal Reserve Note will be found at the top and Will pay to bearer on demand will still be found above One Dollar. The Federal Reserve had only begun to change the nature of money. For at an appropriate place in between the two we find the statement, Redeemable in gold on demand at the United States Treasury or in gold or lawful money at any Federal Reserve Bank.

But recently I ran across a representation of a 1929 dollar. This last phrase has changed. We see, Redeemable in lawful money of the United States at United States Treasury or at the Bank of Issue. The reference to gold is gone! There is no mention of legal tender on any of these. Now consider a 1934 dollar. The 1934 dollar has become legal tender: It says, This note is legal tender for all debts public and private and is redeemable in lawful money at the United States Treasury or at any Federal Reserve bank.

Interestingly, this was right after the stock market had crashed and the country had spiraled down into the Great Depression (the best account of which is still and will probably always be Rothbard�s America�s Great Depression).

Now compare that description with the dollar you took out of your wallet�again, if you had one. Your dollar bill says nothing about redeemability because it can�t be redeemed for anything. It is a note to pay nothing. The phrase Will pay to bearer on demand is gone.

Having been a Watergate-era teenager, I am old enough to recall when this phrase disappeared. It was 1971, the year President Richard M. Nixon took the money system completely off the gold standard and said, "We are all Keynesians now." The reference is to John Maynard Keynes. Many economists consider Keynes to have been the greatest theoretician of their trade who ever lived, which says more about them than it does about Keynes. Keynes�s own words, back in 1920, testify to ulterior motives: "There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose."

Keynes, a member of the Fabian society (a socialist organization originating in Great Britain in the early 1880s) and later a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, despised the laissez faire system that had built this nation in its early history, the remnants of which gave rise to the relative prosperity of the American middle class.

Laissez-faire economics is incompatible with centralization and control, so the international bankers set out to sabotage and destroy it. They did so by destroying, little by little, the value of its currency. Mainstream twentieth century economics rationalized this destruction and surrounded the rationalization with an edifice of impenetrable mathematical technique. Economists immersed themselves in what historian and philosopher of science Thomas S. Kuhn would later call a paradigm (in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions). Almost no trained economists would recognize the truth. Non-economists would be so put off by the complex tables, charts and graphs that they wouldn�t try to find it. The trick worked. Almost everyone assumed that economics was a mystery beyond the kin of ordinary mortals.

That dollar you were looking at�again if you had a dollar to look it�is a lie. It is backed with nothing. The only thing going for it is that legal tender phrase�the fact that the government and the banks accept it and will jail anyone attempting to introduce a different form of currency.

It also has going for it, one might say, people�s tacit consensus about its value. That your dollar is really worth a dollar is part of what we might call our consensus-reality. Consensus-reality is not (for lack of a better term) real reality. It results from a group agreement�a consensus�backed up in this case by civil authority, but not correspondence with fact. To see the difference, just realize that hundreds of years ago, people agreed�and were backed up by the authority of the church (which was then coextensive with civil authority)�that the Earth was at the center of the universe. This was their consensus-reality, which certainly seemed to fit their experience. They were wrong, because experience notwithstanding, their consensus-reality didn�t accord with fact.

Neither does ours, today, regarding money. Experience, agreement and civil authority notwithstanding.

Consensus-reality might be called by its proper name: ignorance. Perhaps surrounded by lies, when somebody asks the wrong questions.

So what is the "real deal"? To jump ahead, the "real deal" is that we are in real trouble, and it�s getting worse every day. It is common knowledge that wages have not kept up with inflation (debauched currency chasing the same amount of goods and services); this is why none of us has any money. Real, inflation-adjusted wages have been falling for over three decades relative to the cost of living. In an average family of four, both parents now have to work to pay the bills. Our savings rate has gone negative. Late payments on credit cards have reached all-time highs. Credit card companies, meanwhile, are raising their minimums and raising penalties on those who pay late in the form of higher interest rates�more fiat money in bankers� pockets.

A new federal law going into effect this month makes it harder to declare bankruptcy and have one�s debts erased; thus, declarations of bankruptcy are also at an all-time high, with some 13,000 per day by the end of September! That average family of four is thousands of dollars in debt, particularly if it contributed to the irrational "housing boom" which is very possibly the only thing keeping our economy afloat. I wonder if we will see the return of debtors� prisons�or, more likely, labor camps where a new underclass of indentured servants is confined until its members have worked off their debts, assuming that is possible.

Our national debt, meanwhile, is zeroing on $8 trillion�it might have reached $8 trillion by the time this reaches print. [Editorial note: it reached $8 trillion officially on October 18, one day prior to the official publication date of this part of the essay.] And this is just one component of our total indebtedness, which is at least ten times higher if not more.

Behind our dilemmas stands that cartel of international investment bankers�the Euro-American power elite�in the shadows behind such front organizations as the CFR, destructive trade accords such as NAFTA and CAFTA, and so on. The biggest lie of all is the one claiming that the consolidation of power at the center that has developed over the past century is a mere historical accident. The fiat money system didn�t happen by accident; it was deliberately created. By progressively impoverishing hardworking Americans through inflation, it makes full participation in our political system almost impossible for many. You are not in a position to contribute meaningfully or even vote intelligently if you are either at work or asleep! This all helps further the power elite�s goals of abolishing the Constitution and taking us toward a world government, ruled by the power elite as a kind of high-tech neo-feudalism.

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In the New World Order as its minions envision it, there will be no American middle class or any other kind of middle class. The power elite sees itself ruling over a permanently cash-strapped "global workforce" of human cattle. Today�s government schools (think School-To-Work, Workforce Investment and No Child Left Untested) are already preparing the way by teaching job skills but not history, logic or economics in any meaningful way.

Click here for part -----> 2, 3

� 2005 Steven Yates - All Rights Reserved