The End of the World as... Not Quite Yet

At this the whole pack rose up into the air, and came flying down upon her.” Alice in Wonderland Illustrated by Arthur Rackham, 1907

The recent weeks, months, years of economic, political and social turmoil have not changed fundamentals. The Laws of Nature and Nature’s God continue to govern the universe — and our economy. While Mr. Paulson and more powerful shadows wax defiant, the Pudding has been served. Proof is in it: Newton’s apple and an economic house of cards.

At least 700 billion words have been written and spoken about $700 billion. Most of one category is of little value. Take your pick. Some readers may have considered past pleas the same. No sense of smugness arises from having been on the correct path when others may have taken wrong turns. There is still time to prepare for what is coming.

American’s mental fog is beginning to dissipate with the realization there is no place left to run or hide. We are forced to share a cell in a debtor’s gaol, and it may become a very nasty place. It is time to bust down prison doors.

For those who think it’s wise to keep lips sealed and to avoid exposing the neo-feudalist architects of our economy for what they are, traitorous cowards and lying, thieving jackals, silence has proved a fatal error for millions.

The recent tactics of the House leadership, on both sides, should have been chilling. Open hearings and debate by our Representatives were crushed by a cadre of ‘jack-booted thugs’ in what Congressman Burgess (Tex-26th) called Martial Law. What do those House leaders have planned for us after the November elections?

Yes, the Bailout has been voted down — for today — but Americans still don’t seem to get it.’ The victory is tenuous. Already the madmen and manipulators are at work, counting on the fear, paralysis and apathy of the opposition. Whether farmers are talking crops, chamber of commerce types are talking business deals, or college students are just talking, there is a failure to grasp the significance of crude gyrating between $150 and $90; the $5.5 trillion love-child of Freddie and Fannie; 800-point DJIA plunges; or a festering $70+ trillion in US government liabilities and debt spreading around the globe.

In a moment of anger, millions of trembling fingers pointed at greed, corruption, big oil company executives, Republicans, Democrats, capitalists, obscene profits, socialists, bankers... but the fingers do not point to forgotten fundamentals; to the fact an 1800 dollar and a 1945 dollar purchased an essentially equivalent sack of goods and services; or to the theft of a blessing and birthright which, had it been held close, would have deterred our imperial wars abroad and an impending police state at home.

Americans cry out, maddened by a $700 billion bunko game, yet in the same breath applaud Obama, a radical Marxist, or McCain the Neocon’s Fascist (Corporatist) pawn — both eagerly serving the same thieves who are running the bunko game — a grand Hegelian Dialectic Puppet Show, where skillfully pulled strings of Thesis and Antithesis are bringing America to a state of confusion, pain and Synthesis:

“The poverty of reasoning is astonishing. He has no logic. He can’t think consecutively. But that’s nothing. He has divided his biography into three parts, entitled — ‘Faith, Hope, Charity.’ He is elaborating now the idea of a world planned out like an immense and nice hospital, with gardens and flowers, in which the strong are to devote themselves to the nursing of the weak.”

The Professor paused.

“Conceive you this folly, Ossipon? The weak! The source of all evil on this earth!” he continued with his grim assurance. “I told him that I dreamt of a world like shambles, where the weak would be taken in hand for utter extermination.”

America Has No Money

In 2003, Wall $treet Week with Fortune writer Patricia Sellers asked Paulson if he loved snakes. “I love... Yes. I like to hold them and look at them,” he replied. According to Sellers, he is also obsessed with tarantulas. “This is the man whom Wall Street rivals and Goldman Sachs clients know only as one of the investment community’s steeliest, stealthiest power brokers.” Do you want this cult leader controlling your life?

Lawful Money is defined in Article 1, Sections 8 and 10: The Congress shall have the Power...To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin;... No state shall...emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts;... Consistent with the Constitution, The Coinage Act of 1792 (The Mint Act) defined the Dollar as a coin containing 371 and one-quarter grains of pure silver, and the Eagle Ten-Dollar coin as having 247 and one-half grains of pure gold.

Professor Antal E. Fekete sums up the characteristics of honest money: “It cannot be an abstraction, a legal fiction. It cannot be a promise to pay let alone an irredeemable promise. It must be material property commanding the most universal acceptability. To serve its purpose best, it should have a relatively high value in small bulk; it must be permanent, resistant to tarnish; it must be homogeneous, divisible without loss of value; and it must be readily recognizable.”

America has the opposite: fiat currency — currency by statutory dictate, void of intrinsic value. Federal Reserve Notes and electronic equivalents are irredeemable debt instruments, paper promises to pay a debt with more debt, or by extracting real wealth from the people by brute force of government’s power to tax — or to take. A Federal Reserve Note, decreed public tender, is not a Dollar.

We have no monetary standard, no store of value, no certainty from one moment to the next. Free markets, contracts, savings, insurance, pensions, and investments and transactions of every kind are rendered worthless or are picked clean by a criminal Congress which, by 1971, had approved the abolition of the last vestige of Lawful Money: international redemption of dollars with gold.

The Founders felt so strongly about protecting the integrity of Money, they included Section 19 in The Coinage Act of 1792: “That if any of the gold or silver coins...shall be debased...through the...connivance of any of the officers or persons who shall be employed at the said mint, for the purpose of profit or gain, or otherwise with a fraudulent intent, and if any of the said officers or persons shall embezzle...every such officer or person...shall be deemed guilty of felony, and shall suffer death.”

Why should Paulson, Bernanke & Co. and their lackeys in Congress have immunity? Do they make worse through connivance, fraud, earmarks, pork and bailouts? Do they continually debase by raising the debt limit and creating ‘money’ out of thin air? Have they not committed the same felonies for profit and gain? If guilty, do they deserve the same penalty? Of course not; they repealed Section 19.

Dr. Fekete comments on Fiat Money in France, by Andrew D. White:

“The act of inflicting an irredeemable currency on a people is an act of dishonesty by the government, and the influence of that dishonesty spreads through an endless number of channels and in an endless number of forms to the mass of people who are then corrupted in countless ways. To use White’s words: such corruption grows ‘as naturally as fungus on a muck heap. It was first felt in business operations, but soon began to be seen in the legislative body and in journalism.’ As to the corruption among legislators, he stated that ‘there was enough to cause widespread distrust, cynicism and want of faith in any patriotism or any virtue. Worse still was the breakdown of morals of the country at large, resulting from the sudden building up of ostentatious wealth and from the gambling, speculative spirit, spreading from large towns to small, and to rural districts. The disgraceful result was the decay of national good faith.’ White stated that ‘there came cheatery in the nation at large and corruption among officials and persons holding public trusts... Faith in moral considerations, or even in good impulses yielded to general distrust. National honor was thought a fiction cherished by hypocrites. Patriotism was eaten out by cynicism.’”

How times have changed in 200 years!

White also quotes from a 1789 letter wherein even Mirabeau, the French orator, statesman and scoundrel, decried paper money as “A nursery of tyranny, corruption and delusion; a veritable debauch of authority in delirium.” He called it “a loan to an armed robber.”

Two years later, 1791, Thomas Jefferson warned “banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a money aristocracy...This issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of the moneyed corporations which already dare to challenge our Government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

“Do you understand, Ossipon? The source of all evil! They are our sinister masters — the weak, the flabby, the silly, the cowardly, the faint of heart, and the slavish of mind. They have power. They are the multitude. Theirs is the kingdom of the earth. Exterminate, exterminate! That is the only way of progress. It is! Follow me, Ossipon. First the great multitude of the weak must go, then the only relatively strong. You see? First the blind, then the deaf and the dumb, then the halt and the lame — and so on. Every taint, every vice, every prejudice, every convention must meet its doom.”

“And what remains?” asked Ossipon in a stifled voice.

“I remain — if I am strong enough,” asserted the sallow little Professor, whose large ears, thin like membranes, and standing far out from the sides of his frail skull, took on suddenly a deep red tint.

Germany, 1920s: 4 trillion Marks to one US Silver Dollar. On the black market, it was 12 trillion marks. Pre-hyperinflation exchange rate was 4.2 Marks per Dollar.

A few powerful men and women meet behind closed doors in the nation’s Capitol, quashing the democratic process. Like the sallow little Professor in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907), they hold the American people in contempt, determined to decide our fate. Yet we refuse to say conspiracy, clinging to the delusion of ‘democracy.’

The chief of the Fed, the US branch of a globalist banking combine, and the Secretary of the Treasury, a long-time member of the same, are colluding with their international counterparts to perpetuate a nihilistic feudal system, to accelerate the transfer of power and wealth from the lower and middle classes to the “money aristocracy.” In the process, the fiat Federal Reserve Note has lost 95% of its purchasing power since 1945. Accident? Stupidity?

If Mr. Paulson and his Congressional co-conspirators have their way, a temporary but false sense of stability may return to the markets, but our prosperity, productive capacity and liberty will hemorrhage. The next ‘crises’ will not be long in coming; they will be more violent and less forgiving. Without Lawful Money, without currency redeemable in gold and silver coin, the tyranny of government and banking cartels can not be held in check by the people. Limited government is a sham, checks and balances phantoms. The ballot is meaningless. Politicians, judges, public officials of every stripe are bought and sold as printing presses are the mechanisms used to gain and consolidate power.

Andrew White’s 1896 essay was based on lectures “given to my students, first at the University of Michigan and later at Cornell University.” He described a natural progression of events:

Then arose the clamor for more paper money...the dyke once broken, the current of irredeemable currency poured through; and...It was urged on by speculators for a rise in values; by demagogues who persuaded the mob that a nation, by its simple fiat, could stamp real value to any amount upon valueless objects. As a natural consequence a great debtor class grew rapidly, and this class gave its influence to depreciate more and more the currency in which its debts were to be paid.

The government now began, and continued by spasms to grind out still more paper; commerce was at first stimulated...but, ere long, this overproduction and overstimulus proved as fatal to them as to commerce. From time to time there was a revival...but this revival of business was at last seen to be caused more and more by the desire of far-seeing and cunning men of affairs to exchange paper money for objects of permanent value. As to the people at large, the classes living on fixed incomes and small salaries felt the pressure first, as soon as the purchasing power of their fixed incomes was reduced...Prices of the necessities of life increased...and, while the prices of products thus rose, wages, which had at first gone up, under the general stimulus, lagged behind. Under the universal doubt and discouragement, commerce and manufactures were checked or destroyed. As a consequence the demand for labor was diminished; laboring men were thrown out of employment, and, under the operation of the simplest law of supply and demand, the price of labor—the daily wages of the laboring class—went down until, at a time when prices of food, clothing and various articles of consumption were enormous, wages were nearly as low as at the time preceding the first issue of irredeemable currency.

The most ingenious evasions of natural laws in finance which the most subtle theorists could contrive were tried—all in vain; the most brilliant substitutes for those laws were tried...At last came the collapse...and not till then, came the beginning of a new era of prosperity.

That is White’s snapshot of America in the waning months of 2008. Unfortunately, there are differences today which compel skepticism of assurances of a new era of prosperity, at least in the near term.

As Professor Carroll Quigley, Bill Clinton’s mentor, wrote in Tragedy and Hope (1966), “the financial powers have a far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole...to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences. The apex of the systems was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations.”

Until control of our economy is “taken from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs,” neither freedom nor prosperity can be assured. By continuing to borrow and print fiat paper, dictators can and will be.