Overview of Step 1 -- Exposing the story of money and usury

[We are pleased to announce that our book, 7 Steps to Global Economic and Spiritual Transformation, is now available online at Amazon and at Barnes and Noble.]

The following is an overview of the first chapter in our book:

$1,000 compounded at 8% interest over 100 years yields $2.2 million for the banks,
who have been loaning money created from thin air for the last 500 years in Europe and the U.S.

In our new book, 7 Steps to Global Economic and Spiritual Transformation, we identify and discuss concepts that are integral to humanity surviving its current crisis in a progressive and sustainable manner. The first six steps involve collective issues that must be understood by individuals, and the seventh step is one that each of us must take individually.

Let’s begin with Step 1 – Exposing the story of money and usury.

We start with money because, other than consciousness, it is the central driving force of planetary events. Money is so familiar that most folks believe they understand how it operates—we work, we get paid, and we try to balance our checkbook—but money actually functions quite differently for central bankers, who create it from nothing and charge principal and interest for its use.

Historically, money has been seen in two distinct different ways: as an accounting for value and as a store of value. When money accounts for value, it operates as a credit for what we have created and/or sold through our labor, and exists only in representational form as cash or credits, which serve as the medium of exchange; when money is a store of value, it represents what is perceived as the intrinsic value of a commodity—say gold, silver, or oil—which in themselves, or as promissory notes which represent them, act as the medium of exchange.

However, these two systems of money are not separate and unassailable systems. Using terms that are common to most forms of economics—that is, labor and capital—the relationship between money as an accounting for value and money as a store of value can be expressed like this:

Money begins as the value created by labor and is commodified into capital when interest is charged for its use.

In most contemporary schools of economics, defining money as the value created by labor is called the labor theory of value, but in actuality, there is no theory involved. It is simply a choice to base a monetary system on labor, instead of basing it on capital, which means basing a monetary system on commodities.

The difference that results from this choice is obvious. When the corporate operatives that fill the Congress and the White House tell us that environmental protections cut into corporate profits, and would therefore negatively affect the economy and employment, they are saying that the exigencies of the commodity of capital are of a higher priority than life on this planet.

So, the choice is clear: we either base our monetary system, and the resulting economic system, on life or on death. Basing our monetary system on commodities is a guaranteed losing proposition for the 99%. It is a mathematical certainty. Here’s why:

In the US, UK, EU, and most other places, the banking industry, from the central banks on down, is privately owned. Thus, private parties, beholden to the shareholders of the holding companies that control the banks and their captive transnational corporations, decide when to create money and when to stop creating it, based on the objectives of those at the top of this global power pyramid. These objectives are: power, profit, propaganda, and population reduction.

When you take out a loan, say at 10%, a private bank creates money and charges you interest for its use by giving you the principal amount of the loan, say $1,000. When you spend this money, it temporarily increases the money supply by $1,000. When you pay back the principal, the money supply is reduced by $1,000, which brings the total money supply back to where it started. However, you still owe the bank an interest payment, say $100. Where does this come from? From the existent money supply, which is now reduced by $100. As you can see, when this loan cycles is repeated many millions of times, the banks end up controlling an increasing percentage of the money supply, with the banks’ interest income increasing as well.

But the mathematical tricks do not end there. During the upswing of what the bankers call “the business cycle,” when the number of loans are increasing, there is an increasing amount of temporary bank money in the money supply to pay for the interest. But when the banks determine that the collateral provided by individuals and corporations for the loans has reached a significant and attractive threshold, they invent a false flag event, such as Lehman Brothers in 2008, to freeze loans, crash the economy, and seize the collateralized assets, the fruits of our labor. Such a process has been repeated every five plus years, on the average, since the creation of the Federal Reserve System, our private central bank. This is why, as various peer-reviewed studies have shown, the 1% end up with almost all the assets.

Thus interest is, ultimately, the theft of labor, and why a system based on commodities—such as capital, gold, silver, and oil—eventually destroys labor and the planet.

Reporting from “Behind the Curtain,” this is Bob Bows.

[We are pleased to announce that our book, 7 Steps to Global Economic and Spiritual Transformation, is now available online at Amazon and at Barnes and Noble. The foregoing article is based on the precepts of our book. ]