The Theft of the Dollar

by Tom Dennen

You’ve heard that the dollar is now worth only 6% of its original value in 1913, when the Fed was illegally given control of U.S. money supply contrary to the Constitutional Mandate that Congress issue the coin of the realm?

Nothing new…

In Roman times, the theoretical gold standard stayed fairly stable until war loomed. when large numbers of coins were needed to raise an army and pay for supplies. This often necessitated the debasement of the coinage. In other words, replacing some of the gold, usually with pewter.

…but it may be what’s wrecked this country.

Because since the inevitable Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) conclusion was brought to us by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, war has been nothing but a racket, part of the theft of the dollar’s value… (continued below this ultimate whistle blower, General Smedley Butler’s astonishing expose – if you haven’t seen it, don’t skip it now)

Remember the Silver Dollar?

She was not only beautiful, but used to contain one ounce of 99-fine silver and she laughed and rang like the Liberty Bell when you dropped her on stone or metal.

The decline in the silver content reached the point where the coins contained virtually no silver at all quite a few years ago and she just thunked and grunted when dropped.

What the Fed did was metaphorically exchange about one percent copper in a one-ounce Silver Dolllar every year of issue until the coin was almost all copper and a merchant had to charge a hundred coins to get the one ounce of silver he orignally charged for his goods.

“Inflation” from one dollar to a hundred.

In 1913, an item that cost $0.06 (six cents) now costs $1.00, an inflation or devaluation of 94%, hardly noticeable one year after another but that’s what the FED has done with the Dollar since it was given control of our money supply.

Where is all the gold and silver that used to back our money?:

Stolen?

It’s called inflation, but it’s really the theft of a percentage of the true value of money over time; and since banking runs in families, the Fed families have all the time in the world.

Time, of course, also allows for the creation of ‘Constructed Paradigms’ like inflation, but that allow other, equally subtle forms of theft.

A ‘Natural Paradigm’ is the ‘common knowledge’ that it is necessary, say, to drink at least two pints of water a day to replenish the body’s 70% water and needs ro be ‘topped up’ daily.

An example of a ‘Constructed Paradigm’ is Bank Charges. It’s “common knowledge” today that you actually pay banks to lend them your money.

Instead of paying you interest on it, they charge you to deposit it, charge you to count it and then, irony of ironies, in unconsionable greed, charge you to spend it!

The verbal expression of the Constructed Paradigm?

“That’s the way it is”.

Fair?

That’s like believing a shark won’t eat you because you’re a vegetarian.

“Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street” - Mary Ellen Lease, an populist leader in the 1920′s.

Today Main Street has dried up, with fifty million people standing quietly on its sides, not in food lines, but in Christmas and New Year supermarket lines holding nice, shiny plastic food stamp cards.

A few more million will  be ‘looking for jobs’ in a Not-so-Happy New Year, jobs that are long gone, outsourced to countries with ‘cheap labor’.

And, just like in 1930, a very, very small few, well under a million Americans, are cruising in their mega yachts and counting the gold and silver in their vaults like Scrooge McDuck.

     Fair?

Doesn’t come into it.

By, with and for the People? Long gone…

William Jennings Bryan and the populists in the early 1900′s wanted real money in circulation, currency that would do the job money was created to do – serve as a medium of exchange allowing an easy flow of goods and services from their creators to their consumers without outside, interest-bearing middle-man interference.

Money, said Bryan, should be issued “debt-free and interest-free by the government, on the model of Lincoln’s Greenbacks.

What the American people got was [another Murdered President] and a money supply created by private banks as credit (or debt) lent to the government and the people at interest.“Although the national money supply would be printed by the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing, it would be issued by the “bankers’ bank,” the Federal Reserve.

The Fed is composed of twelve branches, all of which are 100 percent owned by the banks in their districts.

“Until 1935, these branches could each independently issue paper dollars for the cost of printing them, and could lend them at interest.”As if these dollars were backed by gold or labor instead of ink on paper. Enough of this so-called ‘money’ has been issued over the last 100 years to devalue the Dollar by 96%.

Lease again, “We want money, land and transportation. We want the abolition of the National Banks, and we want the power to make loans direct from the government. We want the foreclosure system wiped out.”

Before the Crash of ’29, “The New York Fed had been pouring newly-created money into New York banks, which then lent it to stock speculators. When the New York Fed heard that the Federal Reserve Board of Governors had held an all-night meeting discussing this risky situation, the flood of speculative funding was retracted, precipitating the 1929 stock market crash.

“At that time, paper dollars were freely redeemable in gold; but banks were required to keep sufficient gold to cover only 40 percent of their deposits. When panicked bank customers rushed to cash in their dollars, gold reserves shrank. Loans then had to be recalled to maintain the 40 percent requirement, collapsing the money supply.

This is how gold was recalled during the last depression:

“The result was widespread unemployment and loss of homes and savings, similar to that seen today. In a scathing indictment before Congress in 1934, Representative Louis McFadden blamed the Federal Reserve. He said:

Mr. Chairman, we have in this Country one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever known. I refer to the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Banks . The depredations and iniquities of the Fed has cost enough money to pay the National debt several times over. . . .

Some people think that the Federal Reserve Banks are United States Government institutions. They are private monopolies which prey upon the people of these United States for the benefit of themselves and their foreign customers; foreign and domestic speculators and swindlers; and rich and predatory money lenders.

These twelve private credit monopolies were deceitfully and disloyally foisted upon this Country by the bankers who came here from Europe and repaid us our hospitality by undermining our American institutions.”

That’s still true today.

Time for a new ‘Populist Movement” or a revolutionary change?

“Populist movements grow out of pupular discontent For over thirty years, inequality has been growing. Profits and productivity and CEO salaries have risen, but workers haven’t shared in the growth. But hard times, as Lawrence Goodwyn, the great historian of the Populist Movement notes, do not generate democratic movements. Times have been “hard” for most people for a long time. When families lose ground, people tend to believe that they are at fault, that their luck has been bad, that they made the wrong choices. They work harder; they take on debt; they get by. Resignation and deference are normal.

“Movements start only when reality – and organizers – begin to open people’s eyes.”

(The above is an abstract drawn, inter alia, from Ellen Brown’s “100 Years is enough! Time to Make the Fed a Public Utility)

For Ellen Brown’s, clear, concise in-depth argument for change, to which this article owes its inspiration, CLICK HERE