Tuesday 3 May 2011

Money: Some more History of the Lovely Green Stuff

I had what I thought was a good follow-up blog on money, hit the wrong key and it was gone...so this time lucky - hopefully (update-the old one has now magically reappeared so I will stitch the two together!).

The next and last blog in this series on money will outline what I think might constitute a ‘biological’ money system (unless I can find someone who has already done it).

Firstly, let’s finish our history of money.

Money is just a system for representing value and easing exchange but as a set of symbols its manipulation can rule society and mean the difference between life and death...

Henry Ford said if the people truly understood the money system they’d be a revolution before daybreak,

'It is well that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.'

(all quotes are from moneymasters.com unless otherwise stated)

In fact certain politicians and popular movements have in the past fully understood the money system. This is why Lincoln, Franklin, Kennedy and others have tried to free the USA from the control of the international bankers. They succeeded 6 times and 6 times the bankers regained control. They did this chiefly through murder (of numerous politicians and presidents), manipulation (of Congress by England’s central bank), bribery (of Congress by England’s central bank), sabotage (of the revolutionary scrip money by English counterfeits) and war (influencing the war of independence and possibly the US civil war). Europe on the other hand has arguably been controlled by bankers, without interruption, for hundreds of years.

Introducing non-debt money or criticising the bankers was often bad for one’s health. King Gustave of Sweden, Presidents Lincoln, Kennedy and Garfield all attempted to change the financial system. They were all assassinated.

'Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce...you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate.'

President Garfield.

Within 2 weeks of saying this Garfield was assassinated and Americans were starving whilst food rotted in the fields. All because the American system of exchange had been manipulated for the benefit of an elite. Think that sounds like crazy conspiracy theory? Not according to a number of US presidents and the world’s best known economist.

'The bold effort of the present bank (a pre-runner of the Federal Reserve) had made to control the government..the distress it had wantonly produced (a depression)...are but premonitions of the fate of the American people should they be deluded into a perpetuation of this institution (or one like it)'

President Jackson (italics mine).

'The treasury lacking confidence in the country, delivered itself bound hand and foot to bold and bankrupt ... Bankers pretending to have money, whom it could have crushed at any moment.'   

Thomas Jefferson.

The US Banks charter came up in 1811 with the press calling it a great swindle.
The Bank of England is said to have threatened war if the charter was not renewed. The charter was defeated by 1 vote. American and England were at war 5 months later in 1812.

President Jackson killed the 2nd Bank of America (a private central bank - a forerunner of the Federal Reserve). He also got rid of national debt. Then President Lincoln issued greenbacks - debt-free dollars. America had to be stopped - it was getting too powerful – and too independent.

After congress decided to withdraw the popular greenback between 1866 and 1886, 84% of US money was taken out of circulation causing a depression.

In the latter part of the 1800s, Otto Von Bismarck, the politician who unified Germany, said he was certain that the US civil war was at least partly inspired by elite bankers in order to cripple US economic independence. President Jackson also questioned such a bankers conspiracy.

In 1873 the Bank of England was said to have used the equivalent of £5 million to bribe the US congress to de-monitize silver (giving them more control over a US gold-backed money). This became the, 'Crime of 76'.  A depression ensued in the 1880s after Europe called in its debts and required them to be paid in gold, or gold-backed money.

The ‘Crime of 1876’ is referenced in The Wizard of Oz which was partly inspired by a financial allegory!

Scare-crow = farmers who understand the real economy but don't have faith in themselves.

Tin-man = factory workers (who need liquidity - the lubricating oil of finance).

Cowardly Lion = the great orator who gave up on monetary reform (silver coinage).

Dorothy's shoes were silver (in book) not red (in film) to represent silver-backed money. (Silver-backed money would have freed US industry from English control as England controlled world gold supplies).

Yellow Brick Road = gold.

The Trek to Oz = The march on Washington by Coxey to ask for reinstatement of greenbacks (interest-free, non-debt, government-issued money).

The 7 passages and 3 stairways of the Emerald Palace = The (monetary) crime of (18) 73.

Witch of the West and East = Rockefeller and Morgan who had the power to create money.

Dorothy defeats them using water = ‘liquidity’ (i.e. ease of exchange) of silver or non-gold-backed money.

In a nutshell, the international bankers force the US onto a gold-backed private money scheme then reduce the supply of gold causing a depression. During the depression industry is weakened whilst the cartels centralise power and grab assets. 

Milton Friedman, perhaps the most quoted economist of all time, said the Federal Reserve caused the great depression of the 1930s - on purpose. Others have argued this was to keep America’s powerful industry, which had no need for debt, tied to a debt-based financial system.

In 1929 after financial insiders had fuelled massive growth with plentiful money 33% of the US money supply was suddenly withdrawn. The economy crashed, the insiders bought up or rather, stole assets at rock bottom prices before the whole process started again.

Boom and bust is the method by which an international banking elite asset-strips the population and centralises ownership. All one has to do to create either situation is to inflate or deflate the quantity of money in circulation. Money is like oil, it lubricates the movement of human value, withdraw the oil and the whole engine seizes. Put too much oil in and the engine goes too fast, and crashes. This is why elected representatives, or the people directly, should control the money supply in a transparent manner. Presently, unelected bankers hold this power which they wield more or less in secret. One cannot have a true democracy when an elite controls the money supply.

If such a secretive financial system were to be allowed to continue over a few centuries a small elite would eventually emerge that would own the entire planet. Wait a moment, I have just described the world in 2011! Still convinced boom and busts are accidental?

Tally sticks, root and stock debt-free money helped make England powerful. King Henry's Charter of Liberties in 1100 and the Magna Carta created the background for Englands rennaisance. Then in 1664 the Bank 0f England got back in control with debt money. Within years the government owed 75% of its income for the debt on war-bonds (government IOUs). After the dark ages, When goldsmiths made their gold coins plentiful the English economy boomed. When the coins were scarce it tumbled. Those in the know, or who controlled the gold, could then buy up assets cheaply ahead of the next boom. Nothing has changed, its the same process now.

Thomas Edison summarised this process,

'Gold and money are separate things...gold is the trick mechanism by which you can control money...that is the root of all evil.'

Some other boom and busts said to be caused by manipulating money supply:

1866 - 84% reduction in US money.
1929 - 33% reduction in US money.
2007 - 40% reduction in world money supply.

Public sector net debt in the UK went from 400 billion in 2001 to 1200 billion in 2012. I haven’t studied it myself but I have heard it said that its actually impossible to pay off debt completely in our system (due to the nature of compound interest). The big lie is that debt is somehow a problem of the system. All we need is better management. This is a lie. Debt is the system.

Our money supply at present is only created through debt. The government creates the debt (as bonds which are just official IOUs) and we the people have to pay it back (to an often shadowy elite) with added interest.

Essentially this is an automatic tithing system. Richard Hall of the UFO/suppressed knowledge website, www.richplanet.com, estimates that without banks skimming our labour we could maintain the same standard of living in a 21-hour average week in the UK. Sometimes, it would appear that we are not so much being governed - rather, that we are being farmed.

The International Monetary Fund, alongside the Federal Reserve and central banks has behaved as front organisations for an international banking elite. The IMF has insisted on newly democratic poor countries paying crippling debts amassed immorally by lenders (by rich countries loaning to now ousted murderous regimes). They push for breaking down of internal industrial or farming protections that protected the price of poor’s people’s labour and goods. They also press for currency mobility. Both of these aspects puts power in the hands of international banking elites. If they don't like what a leader or government does in South Africa or Asia the capital investment or currency leaves and economies collapse. The sharks and loan men then move in. The debt circle goes on and the people go without. (From Naomi Klein’s ‘Shock Doctrine’). This is the debt scam on an international level.

And what exactly is the World bank? Apparently it is a privately owned company that makes money up out of nothing, then loans it to the countries private central banks, after which we the people are taxed to pay the interest on these loans-resulting in pure profit for the international bankers.

A well-educated friend remarked how opting out of global exchange can make a country poor but often the opposite is true. A fairly self-contained economy can be pillaged and many people left without much as the rich monopolise wealth. Globalisation has occurred on a massive scale yet 15% or more of Americans can’t even afford to eat without help and a billion people worldwide go hungry. Most countries see gaps between rich and poor growing.

Back to the UK..

'I felt like a prisoner in my own home - and all because I needed a washing machine and some clothes for my daughter.' Sylvia was paying £140 a week in debt at one point. UK personal debt is 1.5 trillion. Poor people’s third biggest cost after food and fuel is debt.

Observer 6/2/11:17

In a business magazine, an economist blamed the recession on greed. This is the standard, acceptable ‘guess’. Greed of bankers, or of ordinary people. However I don’t think either is entirely true. The banking elite did not get us into this mess ‘accidentally’ due to greed. Sure, the system is greedy but the boom-bust cycle and the debt spiral serve to empower an elite. They need that system if they are to remain in power.

Although people are encouraged to be mindless consumers the vast majority just want a secure comfortable life. Besides which our economic capacity is virtually unlimited, even without suppressed technology - not what the anti-human eco-extremists want to hear, but its true I believe. We could feed more humans than we could ever conceive, even just using our present mechanical-age technology.

Perhaps there are also those who would want to see a financial crisis escalate on a global scale as a pre-cursor to the final demise of nation states and the rise of a global government. Certainly, there will be those who are ready to profit from the seizure of national assets and the indebtedness of new generations, such as is now happening in Ireland and elsewhere in Europe.

How do our great governments spend our hard-earned wealth?

US spending in 2006 in US dollars.

War (killing people quickly)
580.5 billion
Disease profiteering (killing people slowly/formerly known as health-care)
614.1 billion
Debt interest repayments (theft) & Social Security payments (paying people who are waiting to join the above two groups).
1.1 trillion (thousand billion).

This is 85% of a budget of 2.7 trillion

In conclusion:

'Money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. And this term interest, which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money...of all the modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural..'

Aristotle   

Not just Aristotle but Jesus Christ and Mohammed are also said to have rejected debt-based money systems. They are unnatural, unlawful and represent a subtle form of slavery. It is hard to reconcile faith or humanity with a debt-based financial system I believe.

Personally, I don't believe we live in either a free-market or a capitalist economy. I believe we live in a corporatist socialist economy. The people are not in charge of our system, rather the system is in charge of them. We have all this technology yet many of us live our daily lives toiling like cattle, that is if we are lucky enough to have food and shelter.