The Empire of Money (Wilberg on Wedesday)

THE EMPIRE OF MONEY

…and the myths that underpin it

INTRODUCTION

“Let me issue and control a nation’s money and I care not who writes the laws.”

Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744-1812), founder of the House of Rothschild

Where money and wealth rules politics, geo-political empires have become a mere instrument and façade for one empire that rules over all others – ‘The Empire of Money’.  This has been the case since the plutocracies of imperial Greece and Rome, since the abolition of ‘tally sticks’ as debt-free money in England, the deliberate use by the English of counterfeit notes to undermine the debt-free forms of ‘scrip’ or paper money issued by the colonists in American, the creation of the Bank of England and funding of King George’s war against the colonists by the Rothschild banking empire.  And today it is the likes of Goldman Sachs that rule – not Europe and not the United States empire.

The Empire of Money would have us believe that nation states are long out of date and is all in favour of ‘Unions’ of all sorts, not just the ‘European Union’ but the once free Union of States it turned into ‘The United States’ – now nothing but a military and police state serving the Empire.   On the other hand, any nation or union of nations that seeks to be or once again become an imperial political power is immediately targeted by the Empire of Money – not for the purpose of political but of financial ‘liberalisation’ i.e. monetary and political subservience to the Empire of Money. Hence the recent liberalisation of private banking in both China and Russia.   The Empire of Money is what the German thinker Ernst Jünger would have called ‘the Leviathan’. Political and military-technological empires are merely its titular ‘Titans’ – creations of the One God it worships – Money.

As with other religions, along with the religion of money – what Marx called ‘The Monotheism of Money’ – goes a mythology. The Empire of Money however, is based on a religious myth different from that of other religions in a most fundamental respect. Why? Because it dare not even speak its name lest it be recognised as the monumental myth that it is. The concealment of this myth is therefore truly a ‘conspiracy’ in the root sense of the word – for only the rulers of the Empire of Money recognise it as a myth. The truth it conceals is ‘breathed together’ (con-spirare)  behind the closed doors of bankers’ boardrooms and invisible financial cabals.

THE MONUMENTAL MYTH

What then is this monumental myth – a myth that underpins the entire Empire of Money. The myth is a mythical belief – a belief that is so ubiquitous and so ingrained in the minds of economists, the mass media and political parties of all colours that it is never even formulated outright, yet alone questioned. It is the unquestioned belief that the public spending of governments is dependent on either taxation or on borrowing from private bankers. With this belief firmly in place, and to meet their ever-growing debt obligations, governments either have to tax more, borrow more, and/or impose draconian cuts in public spending on their people. For once in the grip of debt ever more government taxation and/or ever more brutal public spending cuts are  required merely to repay the interest on accumulated debt to the Empire of Money.

For the Lords of the Empire of Money demand their money back – even if they themselves have lost it through their greed to extend loans to individuals and nations who need them because they can no longer afford to ‘live within their means’.  This is the new, neo-feudal face of capitalism – the Lords demand their tithe of the Gross National Product of nations – and ensure they get it because it is built on the quicksand of loan money. They do so through means of a Big Lie – one necessary to support the basic mythical belief on which the Empire depends. This is the lie – also believed and propagated by the press, media and political parties of all sorts – that the only way of reducing a country’s ‘national debt’ is through massive cuts in public spending and in people’s incomes, pensions, public services, benefits etc. 

MAKING MONEY FROM NOTHING

Where, one may ask, does this loan money that is so generously offered to individuals or businesses by the banks – or else forcefully imposed on whole nations –  come from in the first place? Herein lies yet another unquestioned myth whose hidden and secret truth is  known only to the few – the 1% that rule the Empire of Money. As mere serfs or slaves we are led to believe that banks lend money that we, as savers, deposit with them. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth.  Banks quite literally create money from nothing – simply by keying any figure that is desired into a borrower’s electronic computer account. Once keyed in however, this figure counts as money belonging to the bank – allowing the bank in turn to demand that borrowers pay that sum of money to the bank out of their earnings and their savings, and that along with a nice bit of interest on top. The bank itself does nothing to earn money except by making money from nothing – as fictitious loan money for which it then demands hard-earned money from the borrower.

What if you could use your personal computer to digitally key in any figure they wanted into other people’s computer accounts as a ‘loan’ – and then demand that they pay you back this money at interest – even though the money itself was created from nothing – just through a few strokes on a keyboard? If this sounds like a dodgy scam, then it is no wonder that The Empire of Money doesn’t want us to know that this is exactly how the entire banking system works.

For when you take out a loan from a private bank what you are really doing is giving the bank permission to create the very money you borrow from nothing, after which they then claim it as theirs  and demand you to give it back to them – at interest!

To add insult to injury – if loans that private banks use to ‘make money from nothing’ turn out to have been too risky, then governments spend billions or even trillions of pounds of our money to bail these banks out.  The banks on the other hand, begin to hoard their money – no longer lending to individuals, small business or even to each other, but raising bank charges and interest rates and refusing mortgages.

The real reason why so many countrys’ national debt is so high is because they long ago surrendered a basic national right to international bankers. This is the sovereign right of a nation to directly create and issue its own publicly-created money instead of:

(1) borrowing money from private bankers, and

(2) using public money not just to pay off the ever-spiralling interest on our debt to them – but also spend trillions to bail out the Big Banks!

Another reason is that more than 90% of the entire money supply of nations is not created as paper money or coins, but exists in the form of electronic or digital money created and owned by the banks as ‘debt’. The Big Banks therefore wield an all-powerful ‘Sword of Damocles’ over governments. For were these banks to collapse so would virtually the entire money supply of nations. That is the real reason why the banks are seen as ‘too big to fail’. They would collapse also if all debts to them were paid off in one go – for their financial ‘assets’ consist of nothing but debts.

THE HIDDEN TRUTH

Behind the myths and big lies on which the Big Banks depend however is a basic hidden truth – one which no one in the Empire-controlled media or political and economic debate is aware of or would  dare to speak of.

This hidden truth is that if private banks both can and do ‘create money from nothing’ then so also could states and governments – not as debt to private banks but as public money created and spent for the benefit of the people and not the bankers i.e. for the benefit of  the ‘99%’ and not the ‘1%’ who rule the Empire of Money.

To ward off and counter this truth yet another Big Lie is propagated and yet another myth accepted as fact. This is the myth that publicly created money would lead to ‘hyperinflation’. Yet if government treasuries could directly issue and create the money supply of nations directly, they could also decide how much money to inject into the economy during any given period in order to avoid inflation.

The task of governments would then only be to decide what that money is spent on i.e. anything but paying off vast quantities of debt and interest to private banks – which is what most public money is currently spent on.  Thus countries would be better off no matter how much money they issued.  The ‘hyperinflation’ myth arose from the example of Germany, which was deliberately saddled by the Allied powers – in reality the Empire of Money – with crippling debt and reparation payments after the 1^st World War.

“The Treaty of Versailles had imposed crushing reparations payments on the German people, who were expected to reimburse the costs of the war for all participants — costs totaling three times the value of all the property in the country.” Ellen Brown It was precisely because the then bankrupt Germany did not default on its debts to the Allied powers and did not seize the opportunity to issue public money directly that it left the Deutschmark open to  financial speculation – the real reason for the hyperinflation. Ellen Brown: “….it was the privately-owned Reichsbank, not the German government, that was pumping new currency into the economy. Like the U.S. Federal Reserve … it was operated for private gain. What drove the wartime inflation into hyperinflation was speculation by foreign investors, who would sell the mark short, betting on its decreasing value. In the manipulative device known as the short sale, speculators borrow something they don’t own, sell it, then “cover” by buying it back at the lower price. Speculation in the German mark was made possible because the Reichsbank made massive amounts of currency available for borrowing, marks that were created with accounting entries on the bank’s books and lent at a profitable interest. When the Reichsbank could not keep up with the voracious demand for marks, other private banks were allowed to create them out of nothing and lend them at interest as well.” As a result, “People were living in hovels and starving. Nothing quite like it had ever happened before – the total destruction of the national currency, wiping out people’s savings, their businesses, and the economy generally. Making matters worse, at the end of the decade global depression hit. Germany had no choice but to succumb to debt slavery to international lenders.”

SUMMARY

One need not take the arguments of this article alone as proof of what it claims to be the monumental myth and Big Lies underpinning that global financial system which I call ‘The Empire of Money’ – a system which allows a minority of bankers to rule the politics of nations and political empires and to ‘make money from nothing’ through debt. Instead one need only take heed of those rare confessions which have come from the bankers themselves – in the full recognition of the fact that: “The few who understand the system will either be so interested in its profits or be so dependent upon its favours that there will be no opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that capital derives from the system, will bear its burdens without complaint, and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests.”

The Rothschild brothers of London writing to associates in New York, 1863

CONFESSIONS OF THE BANKERS

“The bank hath benefit of interest on all moneys, which it creates out of nothing.”

William Paterson, director of the Bank of England

“I am afraid the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that the banks can and do create money. And they who control the credit of the nation direct the policy of Governments and hold in the hollow of their hand the destiny of the people.”

Reginald McKenna, as Chairman of the Midland Bank, addressing stockholders in 1924

 “The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was ever invented.”

“The bankers own the world. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create money and control over that money, and they will create that money right back again. Take this power away from bankers and all great fortunes will disappear, and they ought to disappear, for this then would be a happier, better world to live in … But if you want to continue to be slaves to the banker and pay the cost of your own enslavement, then let the bankers continue to create money and control credit.”

Josiah Stamp, director of the Bank of England during an informal talk to about 150 history, economic, and social science professors in the late 1920′s at the University of Texas.

“The banks do create money. They have been doing it for a long time, but they didn’t realise it, and they did not admit it. Very few did. You will find it in all sorts of documents, financial textbooks, etc. But in the intervening years, and we must be perfectly frank about these things, there has been a development of thought, until today I doubt very much whether you would get many prominent bankers to attempt to deny that banks create it.”

H.W. White, Chairman of the Associated Banks of New Zealand, to the New Zealand Monetary Commission, 1955

“Banks lend by creating credit. They create the means of payment out of nothing.”

Ralph M. Hawtry, former Secretary to the Treasury

“Commercial banks create check-book money whenever they grant a loan, simply by adding new deposit dollars in accounts on their books in exchange for a borrower’s IOU.”

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York

“This is a staggering thought. We are completely dependent on the Commercial Banks. Someone has to borrow every dollar we have in circulation, cash or credit. If the Banks create ample synthetic money, we are prosperous; if not, we starve. We are, absolutely, without a permanent money system. When one gets a complete grasp of the picture, the tragic absurdity of our hopeless position is almost incredible, but there it is. It is the most important subject intelligent persons can investigate and reflect upon. It is so important that our present civilization may collapse, unless it becomes widely understood, and the defects remedied very soon.”

Robert H. Hemphill, Credit Manager of the Federal Reserve Bank, Atlanta, Georgia

Congressman Patman: “How did you get the money to buy those 2 billion dollars’ worth of Government securities in 1933?”

Governor Eccles: “We created it.” Patman: “Out of what?”

Eccles: “Out of the right to issue credit money.”

Patman: “And there is nothing behind it, is there, except our Government’s credit?”

Eccles: “That is what our money system is. If there were no debts in our money system, there wouldn’t be any money.”

Dialogue notated during hearings of the House Committee on Banking and Currency, September 30, 1941. Members of the Federal Reserve Board call themselves ‘Governors.’ Eccles was Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board at the time.

IS THERE AN ALTERNATIVE?

Is there an alternative to the rule of ‘Wall Street’ and the entire global Empire of Money. Yes there is – but only if the unquestioned myths and big lies that underpin it are exposed. Only then can the central goal of a people’s revolution be defined i.e. to re-affirm and re-institute the sovereign right of all nations and states (including the states of the U.S.A.) to issue their own publicly-created money without borrowing from private banks and for the benefit of the people and not the bankers.  The institution of public money creation and public banking through ‘People’s Banks’ – communal, regional, state and national, must be the key aim of ‘Occupy’ movements or movements of resistance to ‘debtocracy’ such as those in Greece and Spain. To achieve this aim many or all of the following steps will be necessary, albeit not necessarily in the order listed:

• Organisation of Local People’s Councils in different regions, town and enterprises.
• Creation of a National People’s Militia to arrest all puppet politicians serving the Empire of Money and prosecute criminal bankers for dealing in fraudulent debt assets and derivatives.
• Election of new National People’s Assemblies from these Councils.
• Creation of new People’s Currencies in different regions and municipalities.
• Creation of a single new National People’s Currency to unite these local currencies.
• Centralisation of money creation and money supply in the hands of National People’s Banks.
• Rejection of all so-called ‘rescue packages’ from international banks such as the ECB and IMF – which just impose yet more debt to the banks – and debt can’t be paid with more debt!
• Defaulting on all ‘national debt’ to the international banks,
• Halting all cuts in public spending and ‘austerity measures’ – using publicly created money to aid the people and restore the economy – not to put billions back into the banks.
• Cancellation of all privatisation programs and monetary outflows from the nation.
• Promotion of ‘inter-nationalist’ cooperation and trading agreements with other states, nations and peoples who win back power and sovereignty from the international banks.
• Bringing down the Dollar and Euro i.e. calling upon the Greek people to restore the Drachma, the Germanic to restore the Deutschmark – and the people of the United States to restore an equivalent of the Greenback (the first paper currency to be issued as publicly created money).