If economists can’t say what they mean in simple, clear terms, then either there is something to be gained from mystifying what they are doing, or they themselves do not really understand what they claim to understand. --Rosa Luxemburg
If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion. --George Bernard Shaw
Why start with money?
There is a reason that economics is shrouded in mystery, wrapped in complex terminology, and made to feel outside of our reach: for if, to paraphrase Henry Ford, it were generally known how money works and how control over its creation has led directly to our present crisis, there would a revolution tomorrow. Why? Because once the cloak of disinformation regarding the prevailing economic system is lifted, we find that much of the world’s troubles--scarcity, ignorance, disease, and war--are all manufactured to enrich a small number of people.
So pervasive is our ignorance of money that we must address its creation before we can address the full scope of harm that it does to us when it is in the control of private interests, as it is now.
Where did money come from?
As David Graeber points out in Debt: The First 5,000 Years, anthropologists have challenged the concept promoted by economists that barter was a standard means of exchange before there was money. And while one could argue that anthropological evidence has its own self-imposed prejudices, including the concept that the development of human societies is accurately reflected in the scant evidence that has been collected, particularly concerning Paleolithic groups, for our purposes it makes little difference whether barter did or did not act as a steppingstone toward the creation of money.
The important point is that when money became widespread, it took on a life of its own, affecting us in ways we did not understand and playing a large role in changing human consciousness, culture, and organization, for better and for worse.
This brings us to our present situation, a crossroads similar to when we invented money. It is a time filled with uncertainty and all sorts of problems that need fixing.
While the past has provided us with many valuable lessons, we caution those who would point to prior theories and customs to meet our challenges, which require evolutionary solutions.
We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive. --Albert Einstein
Is there a better way to use money?
Let’s take a closer look at how we got here and see if--by understanding what money is--we can figure out a better way to make money work for us.
What does money stand for?
Generally speaking, money stands for value, either positive or negative: your monetary value is positive when the money owed to you by a person or corporation is greater than what you owe; your monetary value is negative when the money you owe to another person or corporation is greater than what you are owed. If you are owed no money and you owe no money, then whatever money you have is a positive value.
Where does value come from?
The value that we assign to money is created from labor, or work, including the extraction of natural resources and use of automated production based upon technology (e.g., machines and computers) invented through labor. Without human labor, there is no value. This is referred to generally as the labor theory of value. Simply put, it is a self-conscious decision to put human beings (labor and society), rather than money (capital and cartels), at the center of our economic organization.
President Abraham Lincoln put it this way:
Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.[1]
Benjamin Franklin, arguably the greatest promoter of the issuance of paper currency in the original 13 colonies, thought along similar lines:
The riches of a country are to be valued by the quantity of labor its inhabitants are able to purchase and not by the quantity of gold and silver they possess. ... Trade in general being nothing else but the exchange of labor for labor, the value of all things is, as I have said before, most justly measured by labor.[2]
Aristotle posited similar ideas 2000 years earlier:
There should be a unity as measure that connects everything and this unity is the basic need. By agreement money represents the need and has its value not by nature, but by law. We can create it, change it, and put it out of circulation. Using money should work according to proportionality—this way all will receive what they need. Need connects people and organizes exchange of work and goods. --Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
Labor is devalued through interest
Lincoln and Franklin are pointing to the same thing, something also recognized by other notable economists, including Marx, the greatest capitalist economic analyst, for his assiduous research on the economic activity of the British Empire that he detailed in his 3-volume masterpiece, Das Kapital, showing how a system centered on capital must continually expand to survive.
Although profit is an important factor, the central dynamic of capitalism is that interest instantaneously makes money a commodity (capital), which in turn is inflated at a compounded rate, thus devaluing labor proportionally. In other words, in the very moment that interest is charged, things (commodities, including money) are put above people, leading to a variety of aberrations and inverted values, such as corporations becoming persons, persons becoming commodities, and money becoming speech.
Capitalism reduces labor to a commercial commodity to be traded on the market, rather than a social relationship between people involved in a common effort for survival or betterment. --Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844
Essentially, credit is nothing more than the promise of future labor, debits represent labor that has been performed yet still awaiting trade, and interest is labor appropriated and devalued.
Why does value start with human activity?
We attribute value to human activity because, after all, we are the only species that classifies and keeps track of our behavior in this manner—that is, value is a byproduct of our consciousness interacting with our environment. To paraphrase from the famous Confucian tract, the I Ching, "the superior person discriminates between high and low." We create and then reflect upon our creation. Value is the importance we place upon that which we have created. Money, too, is something that we created with our labor. And it is an abstraction that has come to rule us, as we shall see.
How do we trade what we have created?
As our trading of "labor for labor" (Ben Franklin, see quote above) grew, involving greater varieties and numbers of goods and services, so did the use of money. Essentially, money is the lowest common denominator for items with varying values. Depending upon the society, value can be assigned to anything, including people, thereby defining different forms of slavery, including slaves as property and slaves as debtors.
How are money and value related to credit and debt?
Credit is generated by owning things of value; this is the plus side of money, which we sometimes describe as "in the black." Debt is generated by owing things of value, including money; this is the minus side of money, which we sometimes describe as "in the red."
How has the idea of money changed?
In recorded history, we find that money is seen generally in two different ways:
One way of seeing money is as a unit of account or a tally of value, that is, a means of keeping track of credits and debts; for example, a positive bank balance (indicated by a plus sign or black numbers), or a loan statement (indicated by a minus sign or red numbers). In pre-industrial England, matching tally sticks, (split from the same branch) were used for keeping track of credits and debts.
Another way of seeing money is as a store of value; that is, having value in and of itself, such as coins made of gold or silver, or when currency is backed by gold, silver, oil, or even a standardized group of goods and services. Ultimately, though, the value of these commodities--gold, silver, oil, etc.--is something that was originally derived from labor; in and of themselves, these commodities have no value except in the context of labor, that is, people working, extracting, and employing these commodities. As Lincoln and Franklin noted, if people were not present, money would not exist, and these commodities would have no inherent value.
For many Ages, those Parts of the World which are engaged in Commerce, have fixed upon Gold and Silver as the chief and most proper Materials for this Medium; they being in themselves valuable Metals for their Fineness, Beauty, and Scarcity. By these, particularly by Silver, it has been usual to value all Things else: But as Silver itself is no certain permanent Value, being worth more or less according to its Scarcity or Plenty, therefore it seems requisite to fix upon Something else, more proper to be made a Measure of Values, and this I take to be Labor. --Benjamin Franklin, A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper-Currency, 1729
Money as a unit of account (a tally of sums earned and owed) predated money as a store of value (a precious metal or commodity) by at least two millennia (after the so-called Flood); and the Sumerian and Egyptian civilizations using these accounting-entry payment systems lasted thousands of years, due to the stability of a system in which the governmental authority is not charged for using money, that is, when money is not treated as a commodity, but as a public utility. This is the most basic definition of sovereignty, i.e., the government, by law, is the only creator of money (legal tender).
In today’s world, money is most often represented as a series of numbers on a hard drive; still, some economists argue that money should be pegged to a specific commodity. But whenever a formal connection between money and a commodity is created, it is chiefly for the benefit of speculators, because the supply of precious metals, minerals, or commodities cannot expand to match the value of the goods and services that are constantly being created; even worse, the sources of and markets for these precious metals, minerals, and commodities are monopolized and manipulated, not to mention the brutal conditions under which these commodities are often acquired and extracted.
What happens when money as a means of accounting gets confused with money as a commodity?
In medieval Europe, goldsmiths developed a generally secure way of acting as a depository for their customers' gold and other valuables. As a result, they discovered that, at any one time, their customers usually never showed up and asked for more than 10% of the total amount of gold and other reserves that were in their vaults.
Knowing this allowed the goldsmiths to issue multiple times the amount of loans (or "house money") that they had in gold reserves, enabling their customers to go into debt to them ("the house"). At this stage, what the goldsmiths were doing was nothing other than counterfeiting, that is, loaning against what they did not own or, in many cases, even have in their possession. Once the goldsmiths amassed enough capital and the muscle it buys, they began to obtain royal franchises that legalized their scam. At that point, their system of creating money from reserves that do not exist (or exist only in part) became known as "fractional reserve lending" (though, for non-sovereign entities, such as privately owned banks, it remains, by definition, a form of counterfeiting). The merchant-customers of the goldsmiths-turned-bankers would set sail with wares purchased with this credit and return with silver or gold, paying off the loans, plus a profit for the house derived from the interest on the principle of the loan.
Despite the flaws in this system--that the banks were loaning what they didn’t have, which led to economic chaos as a result of periodic runs on the banks (with assets returned for only pennies on the dollar and the perpetrators sometimes hanged or beheaded, for abridging the public trust)--fractional reserve lending allowed European countries to do things that previously they could only wish for, such as rapidly expanding their economies and, most notably, helping them see that money need not be dependent on or indexed to commodities in order to create and account for value.
The problem with gold
As a result of the instability and outright criminal operations of such systems in which private parties control money creation and credit regulation, there are many who argue that paper currency must be backed by precious metals or other commodities of high value. For a start, this conclusion reveals a lack of understanding regarding the fundamental problems with money as a store of value, beginning with the spiritual problem of valuing material objects above people. Such persons claim that “the full faith and credit” of a people or nation is an inadequate basis for a currency, and that an expensive commodity (gold), which can only be purchased by those who have lots of money or credit, is a better basis for a national currency. But what is a national currency if not the people?
Is a Bond or Bill-of-Exchange for £1000, other than paper? And yet is it not as valuable as so much Silver or Gold, supposing the security of Payment is sufficient? Now what is the security of your Paper-money less than the Credit of the whole Country? --Cotton Mather, Some Considerations on Bills of Credit, 1691
We return to our previous quote of Franklin:
But as Silver itself is no certain permanent Value, being worth more or less according to its Scarcity or Plenty, therefore it seems requisite to fix upon Something else, more proper to be made a Measure of Values, and this I take to be Labor. --Benjamin Franklin, A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper-Currency, 1729
We concur: Labor creates value and the sum total of value is produced by the people, whose labor guarantees it. So, ultimately, the value of labor is represented by currency, which is guaranteed "by the full faith and credit of the people."
Argentina, during the period from 2001 to 2005, serves as a perfect example of how "the full faith and credit of the people" is the actual value, or promise of value, that backs a currency, and not "fractional reserves" nor vast gold holdings of a small group of persons who use the illusion of "sound money" to manipulate the system to their advantage.
This demarcation between "the full faith and credit of the people" and the false idols of gold and other material objects appears in almost all spiritual teachings, but it is perhaps best illustrated by the sequence from Exodus in the Torah (the Old Testament in Christianity), where Moses returns with the tablets from Mount Sinai and pits faith against the golden calf.
They have been quick to turn aside from the way that I commanded them, and have made themselves an idol cast in the shape of a calf. They have bowed down to it and sacrificed to it ... (Torah, Exodus, 32:8)
Jesus, too, drew the same line in the sand when he said:
No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon. --Matthew 6:24
In addition to the spiritual transgression of placing "the value of gold" above that of "faith in people to fulfill their obligations," there are a number of technical factors that undermine the precious metals argument.
As Ellen Brown noted in an interview with the Daily Bell, there are three ways that gold can be integrated into our monetary system:
(1) ... a "gold-backed" fiat currency, of the sort we had until 1933 domestically and until 1971 internationally; (2) 100% gold coins, as Ed Griffin recommends; or (3) gold, silver, and anything else trading freely with dollars, as recommended by Ron Paul.
As Brown goes on to point out, "the first alternative failed historically and doesn't work mathematically," the second alternative ignores the fact that the amount of gold required is not acquirable, and the third alternative wouldn’t change the relative values of paper currency and precious metals and would be difficult to implement effectively.
For example, consider how quickly the financiers shut down competing private money creation processes (private mints converting gold and silver into coins) during the 19th century mining booms in the American west (see illustration below). After eliminating competing private mints, silver-backed currency was nixed completely a few decades after this, since it was a more difficult market to monopolize. Essentially, the problem with gold is that, in addition to the spiritual issues (leading to the valuation of a material objects above that of the human community and even the biosphere itself), it is a scarce commodity the market for which is cornered by the same small group of financiers (through extraction, usury, and central banking) that currently control the money creation process. Whatever gold remains freely circulating is not enough to prevent manipulation of the market by these financiers.
The financiers keep gold in play (through the manipulation of information and markets) to hedge their bets. For example, before they crash a currency, they take their holdings in that currency and transfer it into precious metals, then wait until the currency has bottomed out, before converting gold back to the local currency at a nifty profit, thus enabling their usurpation of local resources.
So, again, the debate boils down to whether our system is going to be based on people or on things. Hopefully, enough of us have learned what happens when a system is based on gold or on money as a commodity (store of value): the material object defines value and is manipulated for its own sake, with the rights of people fully abridged and replaced by the rights of corporations. On the other hand, when money is an accounting of the value that we create, it is sustainable and serves human beings.
The problem with interest
While confusing money with commodities--that is, seeing money as a store of value--is a widespread misconception and practice, the biggest flaw in the privately owned banking and monetary system generally goes unrecognized and is purposefully obfuscated: the interest charged for the use of the financiers' bank-notes (whether pegged to reserves or not). Interest on a loan is never created with the loan and does not, even temporarily, increase the money supply, as the principal of the loan does, for the time the loan is outstanding. When the principal (bank money) is paid off, this temporary increase in the money supply is extinguished, resulting in a net gain/loss of zero, except for the interest, which must be pulled from the money supply to pay for the time during which the borrower used the counterfeited bank notes.
In addition, the moment that interest is charged on money, money becomes a commodity (capital)--that is, it changes from a unit of account to a store of value--with its value inflating exponentially and placed above the value of people, whose labor is--in that same instant that interest is charged--devalued and deflated exponentially (and which also becomes a commodity: human capital), essentially putting an abstraction that we have created (money) in control of our lives. Simply put, usury is the theft of labor and the fruits of that labor, and it turns labor into chattel.
Such juxtaposing of our value hierarchy--capital over labor--has many ramifications, not the least of which is the debasing of human beings and their environment. Consider how the economics of premeditated scarcity is used as a club to beat back better working conditions or environmental protections. What could be plainer than to say that those who support such a value system have placed money--the almighty dollar, the golden calf, mammon, etc.--above all humanistic and spiritual values. Metaphorically speaking, this is doing the devil’s work. Psychologically speaking, the root cause of this behavior is our shadow--our instincts and ego--taking control over our higher self.
Human behavior evolves through our own choices
Such a fear-based system essentially defines human behavior as fixed in the animal kingdom from which it is partially derived--that is, as the static concept of "human nature"--rather than seeing it in consonance with the evolutionary forces that define the progression of light, from the Singularity of the first dimension to the infinite phenomena of the universe, with light becoming conscious of itself.
All of these considerations, from the economic to the spiritual, are why the story of Jesus includes the incident in which he turns over the tables of the money changers and drives them from the Temple with a whip, declaring them "Thieves!" It is a perfect metaphor for the insidiousness of usury. Usury is the point at which economics and spirituality converge: usury puts things above people; sharing puts people above things.
Compound interest is a mathematical trick
Apologists for the present monetary sham have proposed a variety of mathematical scenarios that purport to show that interest is somehow created during what bankers call "the business cycle," but these constructs fall far short of proving anything other than how those well-versed in numbers can make them lie (as if P + I = P, when P and I are > 0). As we will see--in Step 4 -- Making money a public utility through sustainable economics--at the completion of the business cycle (within the paradigm of a privately owned banking system), interest reduces the money supply, thus enabling the banks to control an ever-increasing proportion of assets, including corporations and governments. Clearly, private banking is not a business, but a tool of war, an assault on human dignity, and a means to world domination, as we shall see in Step 3 -- Explicating the money cartel’s point-of-view.
The process of compounding interest on principal is generally misunderstood because so many people have difficulty using and interpreting mathematical symbols, a situation which then lends a pseudo-magical aura to "scientific" findings, as if the universe were a perfectly predictable entity. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, including their extensions (the observer principle, particle-wave duality, etc.), have proven such causal suppositions of certainty to be false. Further, Solomon's Proof shows that Einstein's theory and Heisenberg’s principle, as well as a number of their extensions, have entered the realm of proof or axiom, thus relegating Newtonian-Euclidean linear logic to dustbin of history, along with a heap of other "unassailable" scientific theories.
Unlike the physics of the post-Einstein and Heisenberg era, old school mathematics does not account for the anomalies (synchronicity and singularity) of the right brain; instead, it relies almost entirely on left brain conceptualizations. But, mathematics and physics are necessarily subsumed by a higher logic that synthesizes both causal and acausal phenomena.
So, forget the self-serving formulas for the private creation of money and interest and look at the net effect of interest on the money supply (see our proof in "Step 4 – Making money a public utility through sustainable economics") and the transfer of assets from the commonwealth, where they are created, to the balance sheets of those who control the world's central banks, currencies, and credit. Just as the Occupy movement insisted, the gap between those who create and those who steal is getting larger. (see "Capital in the Twenty-First Century," Thomas Piketty, translated by Arthur Goldhammer, Belknap Press, Cambridge, MA, 2014.)
Should time be monetized?
Once interest has been applied, and money turned from an accounting into a commodity, it enables the monetization of the time for which credit is extended by the house to the customer, institutionalizing the notion that "time equals money," as if such a limited view of time provided a central truth around which life should be organized. Even if we accepted such a spiritually impoverished notion of existence, it’s clear that, in our universe, time does not accumulate at a compounded rate; after all, given that quanta represent the fundamental units of space-time, and given the law of conservation of energy, we may deduce that the progression of space-time (excepting the anomalies at the lowest and highest vibrational states, e.g, black holes and white holes) is arithmetic, not geometric, even as its progression takes place within four dimensions (a torus). This limitation on the increase of four-dimensional objects has been recognized since antiquity:
Thou shalt not give him thy money upon interest, nor give him thy victuals for increase. --Leviticus 25:35-37
While "hard money" advocates squawk a lot about the Fed buying large amounts of U.S. Treasuries and "printing money," given that Federal Reserve Notes are, for the most part, still the world reserve currency, it makes perfect sense that the money supply would be constantly expanding at a rate in consonance with the steady creation of value created by labor, i.e., it is labor's time which should be monetized, not time in and of itself.
Interest sleight-of-hand yields big results
Yet, we seem inured to interest, which is nothing more than a cheap trick, like the brain teaser we were taught as children: Would you rather have a million dollars, or a penny the first day, doubled every day for a month? The neophyte takes the million dollars, turning down $5,368,709.12.
Once a nation parts with the control of its currency and credit, it matters not who makes that nation's laws. Usury, once in control, will wreck any nation. Until the control of the issue of currency and credit is restored to government and recognized as its most conspicuous and sacred responsibility, all talk of the sovereignty of Parliament and of democracy is idle and futile. --William Lyon Mackenzie King, Canadian Prime Minister, 1935
Mortgages are an extension of the trick of interest, where interest is charged up front, so that while the money-lenders compound interest over the life of the loan, say 30 years, they have front-loaded the interest payment, charging for value that was never created by labor in the context of progressive intervals of space-time. Adding insult to injury, by the addition of this inverted schedule of amortization, the lien holders retain a greater percentage of the asset. This is particularly handy for the usurers, since they also determine periodic contractions of the money supply by which they seize collateralized assets (the fruits of our labor) at fire sale prices.
Compound interest compounded by fraud
Finally, there is the matter of collusion, fraud, and racketeering in the setting of interest rates, as became clear in July 2012 with the LIBOR scandal, involving financial instruments from A to Z, including the suppression of interest rates to keep the derivatives markets from collapsing the global house of cards built upon usury. This manipulation of worldwide interest rates has been dubbed "the crime of the century," but that's an understatement.
Such conditions put private banks in the odd position of holding down interest rates to keep the system going (and here), which explains why they are spending their money on manipulating and speculating in high-return markets, rather than loaning money to the medium and small-sized businesses that represented half the jobs in the U.S. before the 2008 crash. For example, while the rigging of LIBOR may recently have slowed down the usury cycle (earlier it was used to speed it up), it has also supported a more lucrative scam that was initiated before the interest rate plunge: manipulating the municipal bond market and selling interest rate swaps to cities (such as Baltimore, Oakland, and Philadelphia, which are now suing), counties, states, and other taxing districts, e.g., public schools, as well as pension funds, with the expressed consent of whatever vassal governments are necessary.
Every level of the financial system is rigged, including: the incestuous relationship between the Fed and the so-called "too big to fail" (TBTF) banks that own it, for whom the Fed guarantees any losses resulting from their repeated speculative excesses; and, the Fed’s Permanent Open Market Operations purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds through so-called "market makers," i.e., the TBTF banks; Fed actions disguised as foreign purchases, all of which fund computerized front running in the stock market, where superfast programs skirt the rules to drive prices up and down and where insider trading is rampant; and, finally, banking regulations set by the financiers through their proxies, the central banks and the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), used to attack target organizations, including nation-states and independent banks.
For example, when BIS changed reserve requirements to burst Japan’s "real estate bubble" in the late ‘90’s. Much of the squeeze on independent banks is a result of similar pressures and, to a degree, accounts for the high rate of independent bank failures and takeovers, except in North Dakota, where the Bank of North Dakota (BND) provides help to local banks. (More on the BND in Step 4 – Making money a public utility through sustainable economics.)
Whenever the cartel’s criminal activities become public knowledge, their usual strategy is to pretend to investigate the transgressions, consolidate any lawsuits so that a small group of people can be controlled (much like they did in corralling the 50 states attorneys general to defuse the MERS scandal), slap a few hands, and move on to bigger and better frauds. When the banks, the Fed, and the regulators all work hand-in-hand, the heads of the crime families go scot free.
Money as a commodity lent with interest creates the "business cycle"
Nevertheless, on the basis of a loan agreement drawn up by the private lenders, compounded interest is expected to be created magically and paid back from the existing money supply. Obviously, such a debt-based, interest-bearing system creates a shortage of money—unless the system is constantly expanding with new debt, which it is not; rather, the money supply expands and contracts in response to what the private banks call "the business cycle," as if these machinations occurred independent from their manipulations.
When the economy is expanding, this drain (interest being removed from the money supply) goes relatively unnoticed, despite the fact that the interest continues to accumulate, because the private banks choose to either recirculate their interest income (by applying it to their reserves and lending against that) and expand their loan exposure, or by issuing dividends, or simply by borrowing reserves from the Fed and creating more temporary bank money; but when the banks choose to contract the money supply, all that interest comes due, which means it is taken out of circulation, accelerating the contraction, since loans are being paid off or defaulted upon and few new loans are being made. So, at the end of the so-called "business cycle," the casino chips begin to disappear and the house rakes in the collateral. The net result: severe devaluation to the commonwealth, whose money supply otherwise would never contract (except, possibly, as a result of war, pestilence, or "acts of G-d"); rather, with public control over money creation, the money supply would be expanded proportionally to the growth of goods and services that are constantly being created and expanded by labor.
In other words, in a privately controlled banking system, commercial bank loans and credit cards are nothing more than bait. Interest is the poison pill: the greater the economy, the greater the money supply; the greater the money supply, the greater the interest-generated debt--until the loans are called.
... the truth is, that capital may be produced by industry, and accumulated by economy; but jugglers only will propose to create it by legerdemain tricks with paper. --Thomas Jefferson to John W. Eppes, 1813
In fact, the financiers--through their public relations department mouthpiece, The New York Times--freely argue that the manipulated instability of markets, which results from the surplus value (interest) that they add at every turn, is preferable to sustainability. What the money changers are saying is that their objective is theft; in fact, as scandal after scandal shows, theft is their business model. More on that in Step 3 – Seizing the Money Cartel’s Point-of-View.
Going back to our original question in this section--"What happens when money as a means of accounting gets confused with money as a commodity?"--we see that when money is mistakenly used as a commodity, rather than as a unit of account, we end up with a system that values capital over labor, material objects over people, and the devil’s work over our God-given gifts (or, in psychological terms, our shadow [instincts and ego] over our higher self).
And the devil, taking him up into a high mountain, shewed unto him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time. And the devil said unto him, all this power will I give thee, and the glory of them: for that is delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I will, I give it. If thou therefore wilt worship me, all shall be thine. And Jesus answered and said unto him, Get thee behind me, Satan ... --Luke 4:5-8
Private ownership of money begets debt slavery
Given this rigged casino in which the house always wins, the question arises whether money is to be used for the gain of society, or whether money is to be used for the gain of a few?
When money ceases to be used for creating and purchasing what is needed for society--food, clothing, shelter, education, healthcare, culture, etc.--and begins to be used for the pursuit of more money, the market becomes subject to political and economic forces directed by those who accumulate and leverage their profit to create more profit ("money making money"), a vicious cycle that subjects the vast majority of people to a form of slavery in which most people never have enough money to meet their basic needs.
This is because money has been taken out of the system to pay for interest, to meet arbitrary reserve requirements required by privately controlled central banks, to profit shareholders, or simply to create a shortage of money, precipitating bankruptcies, foreclosures, and joblessness, which, in turn, facilitate the theft of collateralized assets.
As we see, when money becomes an end in itself, it becomes an abstraction that rules our lives, creating a permanent inflationary and deflationary cycle, where there is alternately too much money and then not enough, except in the accounts of those who control its availability. For example, since 1890 there have been 25 recessions and depressions. These ups and downs ("the business cycle") are simply a means of funding the creation of assets and then usurping them.
Those who control the money supply believe that these assets are rightly theirs (as the notorious financier, Andrew Mellon, once said: "In a depression, assets return to their rightful owner."), since they funded the assets through loans and other debt instruments based on their private bank notes. They use this tautology, loans based on the creation and lending of money that they never had in the first place, to assert their right to control the public money supply, as if "legal tender" was a commodity to be franchised like McDonald’s hamburgers. As noted earlier, counterfeiting by the goldsmiths bought the power to leverage their gains and obtain a license to continue the same deceptive practice protected by "law."
The net result is that the financiers end up with an ever-increasing percentage of the assets, as detailed in a recent study by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. Currently, no more than 147 organizations (banks and holding companies) control the core of the global economy. This is easily accomplished through private control of the money creation process and charging the world interest to use the private bank notes that supplanted sovereign currency as legal tender. For example, consider that, in the same year of the Swiss study, of the 50 largest U.S. corporations, 80% of the cash was in the hands of four banks: Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Bank of America. As Reuters reports, this does not include the approximately $32 trillion that private parties have looted and stashed in offshore "tax havens," that is, pirate treasure buried on tropical islands.
The pirates have taken over the governments: private banks are not businesses, in the sense that labor creates goods or services; they are a means of using money to acquire assets and power; they are political organizations with the most regressive of objectives, that is, corporate control over the state--the very definition of fascism.
Interest: Borrowing exponentially from the future
The question then arises as to the necessity of interest, particularly in the design of a sustainable model. Like Macbeth’s urge to "jump the life to come," interest invokes labor that will never be performed, claiming, essentially, that the original labor which was performed and converted into money, to exchange for other goods and services, somehow increases in value (at a compounded rate, no less!), in perpetuity, because the usurers claim that money is a commodity.
This brings us back to the humanistic and spiritual values which we previously referenced. Under the current paradigm of usury and debt slavery, there is an expectation of return on capital just as we would expect for the use of our labor or any resource. Such a perspective is perfectly consistent with this paradigm, within which everything is commoditized; however, as we examine the nature of money, what we discover is that it is not a commodity, like gold or silver, nor is it a service, like labor--it is a relationship and an agreement involving both labor and commodities that facilitates their exchange.
So everything should have its value: that makes possible exchange and a common market. Money makes all things commensurable. Without exchange no community, without equality no exchange, without commensurability no equality. --Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
This means that we have a choice in the role that money plays when we assign value. We can put human beings (labor) front and center in our system, or we can have our existence ruled by abstractions (money) and commodities (gold, silver, oil, diamonds, etc.). If we wish to create an economy in which human beings are valued over things, then money is simply a means of accounting for our accumulated labor. It is not something that is loaned between people with the intent of being compounded, since it has no existence outside of accounting for our labor. In fact, interest is the antithesis of labor, since it reduces the value created by labor by contracting the money supply to satisfy its "legal" demand. Again: interest is the enslavement of labor and the theft of the fruits of labor!
The problem of agit-prop
As more and more people begin to catch-on to the fraudulent practices underlying our monetary and financial systems--overcoming the financiers' concerted effort to have us confuse money with commodities and thereby persuade citizens to act against their own interests--and as more and more people see how the cartel’s power over money creation has enabled this small group to control all the key corporate and once-sovereign resources on the planet, the money cartel has stepped up its propaganda efforts to obfuscate the situation.
This effort isn’t confined to the mass media, which has been consolidated into a handful of corporations, but across the entire fabric of society, from the commercial to the spiritual and everything in-between, including education, politics, food, housing, sports, and culture. The pervasiveness of the cartel's behavior-modification techniques has established a baseline point-of-view for significant segments of society; yet, this seemingly monolithic control masks the true disposition of those living under its matrix. Given the cartel's heavy-handed suppression of large-scale protests when their news blackouts fail, as happened with Occupy Wall Street, tells us both the seriousness of the perpetrators and their growing fear of the evolution of mass consciousness. Clearly, the cartel’s view of society’s prospects and of "human nature" is dystopian. It's the only way they can justify their totalitarian behavior.
Any successful organizations that propose an alternate path, including spontaneous movements and clever marketplace attractions, are swallowed up by a juggernaut of corporate and government agents marching to the tune of the usurer-kings and their black ops.
In the political sphere, for instance, the Tea Party and other associated extremists, such as the gun lobby, herd their members through warnings of impending economic and political doom—but these "minutemen" have missed the boat: the overthrow of "the American way of life" (the usurpation of democracy and laissez-faire capitalism) that they feared has long since passed, with only a few well-placed bullets needed to facilitate the coup d’état. Tea Party darlings, such as Ron or Rand Paul or Paul Ryan, appeal to distrust of big government to deflect the focus from the corporate takeover of the state, beating the drum, for instance, to "End the Fed" and replace it with the gold standard, as if those who control the Fed were somehow separate from those who have cornered the gold market. The Tea Party is nothing more than a creation of Big Tobacco and other oligarchs.
Meanwhile, liberalism and even Occupy are corralled by similar tactics--by infiltration aimed at undermining their movements through violence--or, rendering them ineffective by using the federalization of the police to unconstitutionally deny them their right to peacefully assemble. Finally, the left is manipulated by supposedly liberal apologists, such as Bill Maher, who mock their (Occupy Wall Street's) resilient decentralized model and encourage them to create an organization, so they can be hijacked. The same tactics have been exported worldwide, for example, in the Ukraine.
The banks have been at this since before England's North American colonies became a nation. The American Revolution was continually sold out--beginning with charters for the First and Second Bank of the U.S. and continuing until the bankers coup was formalized in the Federal Reserve Act--bringing us 19 recessions since that fateful day, December 23, 1913, when most of Congress was supposed to be on recess. Endless convoluted arguments have been invented to justify this wholesale sellout of our sovereign republic.
Religion fuels corporate hegemony as well, as contemporary pulpits are filled with snake oil salesmen selling the notion that "rendering unto Caesar" is, literally, what Jesus suggested, rather than underscoring his contempt for the crass materialism of Rome. As we shall discover in the next chapter, this interpretation does not jibe with historical facts; rather, it is agit-prop designed to legitimize the financiers' (including the Fed's, the City of London's, and the Vatican Bank's) role in controlling the planet.
How do we change the equation and use money to improve our lives?
Clearly, if we are going to master money and use it to benefit humanity, we must face the fact that a debt-based, interest-bearing system, as a matter of course, cyclically creates a shortage of money--thereby systematically denying us the currency needed to maintain our assets--while, simultaneously, permitting the largest, "too big to fail" banks that own the money supply, to subsidize their losses--by advancing themselves unlimited funds (through TARP, quantitative easing, and other cleverly named bail-out shams)--and use those taxpayer-supported subsidies to seize the hard-earned fruits of our labor for pennies on the dollar.
To correct these criminal practices, our objective must be to create a system that is able to grow without the burden of an ever-increasing debt that comes from private bankers taxing our money supply via compound interest.
To do so requires that our currency, credit, and money supply be created and managed in the public interest. Such a system is called public banking (the efficacy of which we detail in Step 4 -- Making money a public utility through sustainable economics). In sum, we must transform the current practice of debt-based slavery into a practice of credit-based freedom. Such a transformation depends upon a qualitative change in consciousness--conscious spiritual evolution--that is, overcoming the forces and ideas that limit human potential, including the destruction of language and thought, as Orwell foretold.
Footnotes:
[1] Annual Address to Congress, Dec. 3, 1861. ("Selections from the Letters, Speeches, and State Papers of Abraham Lincoln, by Abraham Lincoln," edited by Ida Minerva Tarbell, Ginn & Company, 1911, p. 77.)
[2] A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper-Currency, 1729.
Copyright, 2013, Robert Bows
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[The forgoing is an excerpt from our new book, 7 Steps to Global Economic and Spiritual Transformation, which is now available online at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other sites.]
This is profoundly important, but where is step 2? I suggest putting links at start or end of the article to the other steps so it's easier to follow.
ReplyDeleteThis step, and the six following, are all found on the website; click on "Classic" in the upper left and scroll; however, they are all early drafts, and somewhat incomplete compared to the final versions, which can be found in my last book (the link to which is at the top of the page, 1st paragraph).
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