“It’s not WHAT backs our money, it’s WHO controls the QUANTITY!”
- Bill Still
Anytime
one looks to make adjustments to our monetary system they will be
well served to make certain that they are careful what they ask
for. What and who backs our money is an age old battle, the
discontent created by gold backed money is exactly what led to one of
the most famous speeches of all time where William
Jennings Bryan famously
said,“You
shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you
shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”
People
who support gold backed money do so mostly for the right reason –
to keep the QUANTITY OF MONEY UNDER CONTROL. There are,
however, MANY misrepresentations, half-truths, and self-serving
reasons to promote gold either as a backing for money or as a
direct form of money itself.
People
who support backing our money with DEBT do so for only one
reason - GREED. When money is backed by debt, interest and debt
repayment sweeps it back into the banks and thus causes the banks to
seek ever increasing quantities of DEBT and PROFITS. Those
closest to the creation of credit dollars profit ,
while those furthest from it pay
for it.
Let’s clear out the fog of history and look at our money
system objectively. To view money for what it is, we need to
speak in a common language so that we all understand the features
of money:
Assay
– Metallurgy.
To analyze (an ore, alloy, etc.) in order to determine the
quantity of gold, silver, or other metal in it.
Credit
Dollars – Are
dollars that come into existence via a loan and thus they bear
interest. ALL dollars in our current system, except coins,
come into existence in this manner. When paid back, credit
dollars go back out of existence. In a system
that is almost entirely credit dollars, such as ours, new debt
must constantly be issued to replace old debt and it must expand by
an amount equal to the interest or otherwise deflation will
occur. This is why we experienced a bout of deflation last year
as credit creation dropped, and it is why politicians who
are funded with banker dollars stand in front of teleprompters
stating, “We must get credit flowing again!”
Debt
Repayment – There
are only two ways to pay back debt. Pay it back per
agreement, with interest, or default.
Debt
Saturation – A
condition whereby once a person, business, or a government has pulled
forward in time all future income (beyond reasonable lending
limits), then additional debt cannot be forced into that entity
without producing a future debt default.
Fiat
– Means
“by decree,” usually by the King or by the Government in
power. Once our government puts a money into circulation, it
becomes “by decree” and is thus “fiat.”It does not matter
what BACKS the money.
Fractional
Reserves – This
is the ability to lend more credit dollars than a bank has. This
concept first began with the gold smiths who used to hold other
people’s gold in their safes. For this service, they would
charge a small fee and issue gold receipts. They
figured out that as long as not everyone cashed in their receipts at
once, that they could write more receipts than they actually
possessed in gold. This was the birth of the Fractional
Reserve concept, a concept that many still believe is simply FRAUD
(that’s because it is, UNLESS everyone agrees that it’s okay to
do and there are limits placed upon it – if you use U.S. Dollars,
you’ve agreed).
Fractional
ability creates LEVERAGE. Limits in America began at reasonable
limits but have increased time and again on behalf of the bankers who
have done away with rules regulating and limiting this ability. The
effective fractional ability in America is now INFINITE as many
of the large banks possess far more debts than assets.
Interest
Bearing / Debt
Backed – The
act of borrowing money means that one person is giving up the use of
their money to another for a specified time, and in return for the
time they are without its use, and for the risk of possibly not being
paid back, the person lending money charges interest. Under our
present money system, all money (except coin) is brought
into being as debt. At the Federal level, our nation takes in
taxes. The amount they spend above that is our current
deficit. Our deficit is borrowed from via the Treasury primarily
from commercial banks. In this way, we all pay interest to
private banks for the use of our nation’s money.
Money
– Is
simply an agreed upon method to exchange the fruits of one’s labor
for another’s. That is the essence of money, everything
else you read is simply an over complication of money’s purpose.
Monetary
Inflation/ Deflation – An
increase/ decrease in the overall supply of money,credit, and other
instruments that leverage them.
Price
Inflation/ Deflation – An
increase/ decrease in the overall PRICE of the goods or services
under examination.
Real
Dollars – Are
dollars that came into existence without the backing of DEBT.
Many
proponents of gold backed money argue that it is “Constitutional
money,” or “honest money. Neither is the case,
let’s start by reading what
the Constitution actually says,
not what other people say it says. There are really only
two sections that deal with money, they are both a part of
Article I (italics are mine, otherwise it is all in context):
Section
8: The Congress shall
have Power To lay
and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and
provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United
States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform
throughout the United States;
-
To borrow Money on the credit of the United States;
- To
regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several
States, and with the Indian Tribes;
- To
establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization, and uniform Laws on the
subject of Bankruptcies throughout the United States;
-
To coin Money, regulate
the Value thereof,
and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;
- To provide for the Punishment of counterfeiting the Securities and current Coin of the United States;
- To provide for the Punishment of counterfeiting the Securities and current Coin of the United States;
So,
Congress is given the power to coin money and to “regulate the
value thereof.” Note the terminology “current Coin of
the United States.” “Coin” is a term used to mean
money when capitalized as it is here. Would this not
indicate that the “Coin” or money of the U.S. Was envisioned
to
possibly change? No mention of gold or silver
here. For that we must examine the only place gold and
silver are mentioned:
Section
10: No State shall enter
into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque
and Reprisal; coin
Money; emit Bills of
Credit; make any Thing
but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts;
pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the
Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility.
Section
10 deals with STATES. “No state shall… coin Money; emit
bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a
Tender in Payment of Debts…” This is saying that states shall not
make their own money, issue their own credit, and when they pay back
the Federal Government, they must pay them back in gold or silver.
Bill
Still, an expert on the history of money, has this to say about these
two sections:
“Congress
is given the responsibility to "To coin Money, regulate the
value thereof...." in Article 1, Section 8. Regulating the value
of our money is one of the most important responsibilities of
Congress. The mere fact that they had to "regulate the value
thereof" implies without question paper money not backed by gold
or silver.
The
reason states were forbidden to pay in anything but gold --
something which was never enforced, incidentally -- was that
during the previous generation, some states had been responsible,
like Pennsylvania, and printed just enough, while some states had
been irresponsible and printed too much. It was an anarchic
situation. Interstate commerce would have been impossible without
this clause.
“Bullionists”
respond that the 1792 Coinage Act specifies that a dollar coin shall
contain so many grams of gold. They misconstrue this to be a mandate
for gold backing of paper dollars. You can read it for yourself,
the original is now available
online. That
is hardly the meaning.”
Thus,
the people who support gold as a basis for our money have pulled the
gold and silver coin phrase out of context. It is CONGRESS,
elected by the people, WHO HAS THE POWER TO
COIN
MONEY. Not the bankers, not the states. Today it
is the bankers who actually Coin most of our money and it
is backed by debt.
An
objective review of history will find that NOTHING has ultimately
worked to back money and to keep the quantity of money under
control. Everything has ultimately failed for one reason or
another. That’s because “It’s not WHAT backs the money”
that’s important, “it’s WHO controls the QUANTITY!”
If
gold backed money actually worked, then those money systems would
still be around today, but they are not. During the 1920s gold
backed our money yet one of the largest credit bubbles in
history was formed and ultimately popped regardless of the existence
of a gold backed money system – the same has been repeated
throughout history.
There
are several reasons that the quantity of money gets out of control
regardless of commodity backing:
1.
Bankers have been the ones to always get their hands on control of
the gold and the availability of any paper that is backed by gold.
They have time and again wielded the power to hurt the economy as
blackmail against the people and politicians to get their way.
2.
Politicians can simply change the ratio of paper to gold or any
other commodity. From the time of the Gold Standard Act of 1900
until President Nixon removed the dollar completely from gold, the
ratio of paper to gold was changed many times. Here’s a
Wikipedia entry describing what happened just during the 20th
century:
The
Gold
Standard Act of
1900 abandoned the bimetallic standard and defined the dollar as
23.22 grains (1.505 g) of gold, equivalent to setting the price
of 1 troy
ounce of
gold at $20.67. Silver coins continued to be issued for circulation
until 1964, when all silver was removed from dimes and quarters,
and the half dollar was reduced to 40% silver. Silver
half dollars were last issued for circulation in 1969.
Gold
coins were confiscated in 1933 and the gold standard was changed
to13.71 grains (0.888 g), equivalent to setting the price of 1 troy
ounce of gold at $35. This standard persisted until 1968.
Between 1968 and 1975, a variety of pegs to gold were put in place.
The price was at $42.22 per ounce before August 15, 1975 saw the U.S.
dollar freely float on currency
markets.
Why
do you suppose the ratio was changed? The ratio of gold/
silver was always changed under pressure to increase the quantity of
money.
3.
Storing
and controlling the actual gold is quite a feat and is subject
to manipulation. First a country who wishes to back
their currency must possess gold. According to Bill Still,
“At the end of World War II, the United States had over
700 million ounces of gold in Fort Knox, then thought to be
about 70% of the world’s supply. By 1959 gold reserves at Fort
Knox had dwindled to less than 558 million ounces, and by 1971, 291
million ounces.” Recently the IMF (International Monetary Fund –
the world’s central bankers) became the world’s third largest
holder of gold:
How
did the IMF get that much gold? By lending countries debt
backed money and accepting gold in repayment! If that’s not
a great scam, I don’t know what is. I’ll gladly run off
some credit notes on my printer to anyone willing to exchange
their gold to me! Gold is measured in Troy ounces. There are 12 Troy
ounces per pound, or 24,000 Troy ounces to a ton. If
that chart is correct, the U.S. now only possesses 195,204,000 ounces
of gold, that’s quite a drop from the 700 million claimed in
the 1940s. And the IMF now has 103 million ounces. What was
their productive effort to obtain that?
Even
today without gold backing our money, it is being manipulated by BOTH
governments and bankers. This is something that must stop,
it must be allowed to trade freely! Too bad it’s
simply not. In fact, GATA (the Gold
Anti-Trust Action Committee)
is
suing the Federal Reserve Board concerning
international gold “swaps.” Here is more from Zero Hedge
on
the manipulation that
is currently occurring with gold. And here is still more on
what they call the
smoking
gun showing that the Fed is controlling gold.
“The
Fed claims that its gold swap records involve "trade secrets"
exempt from disclosure under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.
While GATA has produced many U.S. government records showing both
open and surreptitious intervention in the gold market in recent
decades (see http://www.gata.org/node/8052),
Fed Governor Warsh's letter is confirmation that the government is
surreptitiously operating in the gold market in the present as
well. That intervention constitutes a huge deception
of financial markets as well as expropriation of precious
metals miners and investors particularly. This deception and
expropriation are what GATA was established in 1999 to expose and
oppose.”
Who
owns the gold located at Ft. Knox? Does it belong
to the bankers? No? How about the“Fed?” No? Does
it not belong to the collective people of the
United States? If that’s the case, why has it not
been assayed and records made public? I’ll bet you can
guess.
To
learn more about the history of what backs our money, I highly
recommend that you, your family, and your friends watch Bill Still’s
movie, The
Secret of Oz.
When
it comes to keeping the quantity of money under control the ideal
system would be one that allows the QUANTITY of money to increase
and
to decrease
in
accordance with the reality of the economy, the size of
the population, and a multitude of other factors. Such a
currency would withstand the shock of war or natural disaster and
neither produce extremes in PRICE inflation or PRICE deflation.
There
is simply no way to remove humans completely from the
equation. This is the illusion of commodity backed money –
it is just that, an illusion – it has never worked to actually keep
the quantity of money under control, nor has any system
ultimately passed the test of time.
Even
if we had perfect economic models (not even close) and a computer
controlled the quantity,the computer would have to be programmed by a
human!
Here’s
the simple truth… What ultimately backs a country’s money is
the RULE OF LAW, and what ultimately backs the rule of law is a
nation’s PEOPLE. Not its bankers, and rarely its politicians.
The
very best that one can achieve when it comes to human nature and
keeping GREED in check is to have checks and balances. Citizens
of America, YOU are the ultimate check and balance when you have
transparency,
and YOU are needed by your country at this critical
juncture
of our history!
Freedom's
Vision was
designed to obtain the maximum benefit with the minimum of
working parts. The strategy is to get the maximum number of
people behind it knowing that each change will create a special
interest group who is against it. There is much else that
needs to be reformed, like the way we collect taxes, but those
issues will be easier to manage once monetary and political reforms
are enacted. We must work to limit how much we attempt
to chew on the first bite.
The
benefits
of
Freedom’s Vision are many:
1.
Avoid
the disaster about to unfold – regardless of how we get
there, by inflation or deflation, the math of debt that underlies
our currency does not work. This would break that math and
preempt the negative events that are going to follow should we fail
to take action.
2.
No more debt backed money for our Federal
Government. Lower taxes and more productivity result.
3.
Direct and immediate relief for people in debt, accomplished
in a way that’s fair to everyone including those who are not in
debt and without creating excessive price inflation, deflation or a
giant “moral hazard.”
4. Direct
and immediate compensation for those who are savers and have been
damaged by past practice.
5. Relief
for States, almost all of whom are in deep debt trouble.
6. Cleanses
the banks and financial businesses of unserviceable debts and
derivatives and would ensure that they stay that way. All banks would
survive the transition, immediately benefiting from improvements
in our citizen’s balance sheets. The same process would
be used to cleanse other financial like businesses.
7.
Businesses, both large and small, would immediately benefit from our
citizens and the banks improved balance sheets.
8. Unfunded
liabilities would immediately get better with zero percent price
inflation.
9. Limits
on special interests would separate their money from politics
lessening the pressure to continually increase the quantity of
money. This allows long term decision making. Special
interests associated with the banking, oil, defense,
food, insurance, and other industries would no longer have
their huge pull. Thus politicians would not have to focus on
spending our resources on special interests, but instead on the
interests of the people. Budget pressures would decrease
as a result.
10. States
would exercise more control over their own destiny. Lower
taxes on the state level, more productivity. Low cost money
would become available to repair and upgrade current
infrastructure and to build the infrastructure of tomorrow’s
commerce.
11. The
powers possessed by the central banks would be greatly diminished
freeing our country and others from their methods of control via
debt, now even issued worldwide by the IMF. Countries
would no longer be working to pay central banks
interest. Instead they would work to develop their own rule of
law, their productive labors could be used to improve their own
infrastructure, to feed and cloth themselves, and to build a future
for themselves. In other words, they need to be taught how to
fish, not simply given a fish and asked to pay it back forever and
ever.
12. No
price inflation eroding away future savings. People
who take on reasonable debt could once again make progress
towards paying it off.
13.
Massively supports education, underpinning progress so that we may
continue to lead the world in innovation and the production of
meaningful technologies.
14.
Provides a national mission - focused on creating the energy
and infrastructure of the future. REAL and meaningful
economic growth would ensue and massive new employment would
result
Your specific input is needed to improve the outline and to provide specific legal language. You are needed to support Freedom's Vision, we need your participation in the SWARM, and we need volunteers to organize and execute the Swarm. We are making progress on a new website, and we are organizing a Political Action Committee (PAC) now. Bill Still and I are both officers of the committee, we have a volunteer to act as the PAC Treasurer, but we need a CPA to volunteer to back us up in regards to accounting.
It
is our intention to provide overall input and strategy and to even
travel with the Swarm. We need someone who is a leader and an
organizer who can keep the swarm amicably focused on the target. We
need leaders and organizers in each state. We also
need all the members that comprise any successful
organization – everyone’s talents are needed, please email us at
time4changenow@comcast.net
to
let us know your strengths, what state you reside in, and how you can
help (we will be creating a data base on the website for this but
need a Secretary as well). This organization will focus on
only two objectives initially; one is economic reform and
the second is political reform as outlined in Freedom's
Vision.
Our
future America will thank you for your support, and so do we!
Nathan
A. Martin
Bill
Still
