MONEY ISSUE MAY BE THE ESTABLISHMENT'S ACHILLES' HEEL IN ITS WAR ON
Edwin Vieira, Jr., Ph.D., J.D.
PART ONE of this Commentary explained why America needs constitutional money and banking, and that she could have both of them if the Establishment so willed. But...
b. The Establishment does not want constitutional money and banking for the most self-interested and venal of reasons.
(1) The Establishment cannot admit that it has been wrong for over a century as to money and banking, and that its faulty policies have had, and will continue to have, increasingly disruptive and inevitably destructive economic, political, and social consequences. Such an admission would destroy the Establishment's cherished and cultivated myth of "progress": the illogical and often counterfactual notion that what happens today is inevitably better than what happened yesterday. And "progress" having been exposed as a myth where matters as important as money and banking are concerned, Americans will demand to know in what other areas the Establishmentís "progress" has actually amounted to retrogression, and how that retrogression has exposed this country to danger.
In addition, a general debunking of the myth of "progress" would demolish the pseudo-intellectual foundation for "the living Constitution:" the Establishment's claim that the Founding Fathers' philosophy of law, government, and economy is outmoded, and needs to be updated by constantly increasing the powers of a centralized bureaucratic state, extending their application, and intensifying their enforcement, at the expense of Americans' liberties and traditions in the political, economic, social, and even cultural spheres.
Admission of its errors with regard to money and banking would shatter the Establishment's aura of intellectual capacity and superiority--and certainly of infallibility and integrity. For, if the Establishment has been so very wrong for so very long where matters as vital as money and banking are concerned--and so intent on and successful in concealing its blunders from public scrutiny and justifiable criticism--where else has it been wrong, where else is it wrong now, and where else will it be wrong in the future? What dire consequences does this country face from all those as yet undiscovered pratfalls? How great will the costs be--and who will pay them? And why should an Establishment, finally proven to be more foolish than wise, concerned more with self-aggrandizement than with "the general Welfare" the Constitution sets as one of its goals, and above all thoroughly mendacious, be suffered any longer recklessly and lawlessly to gamble with Americans' freedom, security, and prosperity?
Thus, admission of its chronic failures in the area of money and banking would refute--indeed, would subject to deserved ridicule--the Establishment's claim to perpetual leadership of American society. If the present monetary and banking mess has festered while the self-professed best and brightest from the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderburgers, the Republican and Democratic Parties, the prestigious think tanks, and the boards of directors of behemoth globalist banks and corporations have rotated in and out of the highest public offices in the United States--all the while focusing only on short-term manipulations of money and banking in order to fatten their own purses, while turning blind eyes to the long-term dangers born of the unnatural coupling of politicians and bankers--perhaps these groups are not warehouses that stock public servants of unquestionable quality, but merely Mal-Marts that purvey shoddy merchandise at exorbitant prices.
(2) From the Establishment's perspective, these are revolutionary ideas. For rejection by a critical mass of Americans of the Establishment's claim to leadership would result in its loss of position, perquisites, profits, and power. After all, the present unconstitutional monetary and banking systems enable politicians to redistribute vast amounts of real wealth from society's to their control through monetization of public debt and the hidden tax of inflation, and then to parcel out that embezzled wealth through governmental spending to their clients in influential special-interest groups, which then arrange for the politicians' re-elections, in what they all anticipate will be a never-ending cycle of prevarication, predation, plunder, and political power. When the unconstitutional monetary and banking systems are set aside, this cycle must end.
The Establishment knows how much is at stake: The amount of governmental spending accurately measures governmental power over society. The amount of governmental redistribution of wealth accurately measures people's dependency on politically generated incomes and the politicians who provide them. The extent of people's dependency on politicians for economic payoffs and favors accurately predicts their support for continuation and, inevitably, expansion of a political apparatus that can and will provide such benefits. By constantly increasing total governmental spending, and intensifying people's dependency on politically generated incomes, politicians maintain themselves in office and multiply their own power, perpetuating and strengthening that political oxymoron: a popularly elected oligarchy. Thus advance hand in hand political redistributionism--the theory and practice of using government to transfer wealth from one portion of society to another, and political careerism--the theory and practice of turning government from a sacrificial public service by, into a profitable personal business for, officeholders.
Moreover, through carefully targeted redistribution of wealth, politicians increase the economic and political power of the private special-interest groups they serve. In their turn, these groups inundate the electoral process with campaign contributions and other political expenditures and in-kind services that generate torrents of propaganda, agitation, misinformation and disinformation, and "get-out-the-vote" hoopla carefully crafted to deceive the electorate into selecting candidates most favorable to the special interests. Overall, this process empowers and perpetuates a political and economic ruling class that oversees, not a republic, nor even a democracy, but a manipulocracy, in which the manipulators inveigle the manipulated into believing that the manipulated are in charge, because the manipulated vote for candidates and policies the manipulators manipulate the manipulated into choosing.
Observe, too, that politically protected fractional-reserve banking would generate a manipulocracy even if politicians and their special-interest clients did not particularly benefit from the Ponzified banking systemís continual expansion of currency and credit for the purpose of "monetizing" public debt. For fractional-reserve banking enables bankers to redistribute wealth from society to themselves and their economic clients through the even more extensive "monetization" of private debt, and the so-called "forced savings" that such monetary inflation and credit expansion cause. Those who say the Federal Reserve System imposes no net drain on the taxpayers, because the twelve Federal Reserve regional banks remit most of their profits to the Treasury, forget that the real looting of society takes place at the lower levels of the System, where private debt is monetized. The thousands of private "member banks" in the Federal Reserve System remit none of their after-tax profits to Treasury, or to the American people as a whole. The ability to tap the spigot of "forced savings" increases the economic, and derivatively the political, power of the bankers, their clients, and their various camp followers in big business and the financial sector--who then can use that artificially enhanced political muscle to insure that their fractional-reserve racket will never be adequately policed. The direct symbiosis between bankers and politicians when bankers "monetize" public debt, thereby enabling politicians to redistribute more wealth than they could through taxation alone, only exacerbates the problem.
Manipulocracy is not simply a matter of ideological brain-twisting, however. Successful political manipulation benefits, but does not derive solely, from the Establishment's domination of the big media, big publishing, the ubiquitous (as well as iniquitous) governmental schools, and the other spigots of mass brainwashing. True, the soapsuds of propaganda, managed news, disinformation, compulsory miseducation, and general intellectual corruption are necessary to float the Establishment's ideology that indoctrinates people to accept, advance, and even applaud their own exploitation. Yet no manipulative ideology can be politically effective for very long if the manipulated in some sufficient number do not believe that they are receiving material benefits in some sufficient amount from putting it into practice. If "politics is the art of the possible," the perdurance of any scheme of political looting depends upon its actually delivering some of the stolen goods it promises. Thus, the ideology of the modern redistributive "welfare state" would be impotent to delude voters without politicians' demonstrated ability to redistribute wealth, more wealth, and even more wealth, year after year, election after election. (That, one way or another, this flow of wealth is largely siphoned away from the great mass of people who believe they are benefitting from governmental transfer payments generally escapes notice.)
At the end of the day, the political cornucopia of stolen wealth can be filled from only two sources: taxation (political confiscation) and monetary manipulation (the financial juggling tricks of political currency and political banking). Taxation, however, is always limited by politicians' recognition of the necessity to maintain a working, producing economy that can be perennially looted. And taxation is never politically popular with its victims. If too much is taken, the grasping hand throttles the golden goose. If too many are taken from, the myth of "free" governmental services becomes unsustainable.
Redistribution of wealth through monetary manipulation, distinguishably, is essentially unlimited--except by the eventual destruction of the monetary and banking systems as a whole in hyperinflation, depression, or both. Which calamities, History teaches, politicians tend wrongly to assume will never occur while they hold office, and in any event invariably blame on someone other than themselves when the roof finally falls in. For example, when currencies in East Asia collapsed in the late 1990s, the identities of the real culprits remained obscure, while blame was very publicly laid at the doors of such abstractions as "crony capitalism." or of the ever-ready scapegoats the then Prime Minister of Malaysia singled out, the Jews. And, closer to home, when the Federal Reserve System collapsed in the 1930s, the real culprits all escaped indictments, while Franklin Roosevelt confiscated gold from innocent Americans, and prosecuted people who stood on their constitutional rights and refused to comply. Perhaps even more importantly, 99.999% of the population today has no idea how monetary redistribution operates, how it adversely affects average Americans, who benefits from it, or even that it is going on. Amazingly, most people even call Federal Reserve Notes "dollars"--when they are nothing more than bank scrip or tokens, irredeemable in real "dollars" and shrinking in real value every day. Dr. Lawrence Parks, of the Foundation for the Advancement of Monetary Education (www.fame.org), ridicules Federal Reserve Notes as "irredeemable paper tickets"--which is an especially apt description, because their use admits the ignorant sheep into the process of their own economic shearing.
this puts a new twist on an old saying: Some people's ignorance is
other people's bliss. For these reasons, politicians and bankers have
shrewdly, if cynically and antisocially, amended the old, self-limiting,
and unpopular procedure of political looting--"tax and tax, spend
and spend, elect and elect"--into the new, boundless, and pleasantly
intoxicating process of "tax and tax, inflate and inflate,
spend and spend, elect and elect."
© 2006 Edwin Vieira, Jr.
- All Rights Reserved
E-Mails are used strictly for NWVs alerts, not for sale
Edwin Vieira, Jr., holds four degrees from Harvard: A.B. (Harvard College), A.M. and Ph.D. (Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences), and J.D. (Harvard Law School).
For more than thirty years he has practiced law, with emphasis on constitutional issues. In the Supreme Court of the United States he successfully argued or briefed the cases leading to the landmark decisions Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, Chicago Teachers Union v. Hudson, and Communications Workers of America v. Beck, which established constitutional and statutory limitations on the uses to which labor unions, in both the private and the public sectors, may apply fees extracted from nonunion workers as a condition of their employment.
He has written numerous monographs and articles in scholarly journals, and lectured throughout the county. His most recent work on money and banking is the two-volume Pieces of Eight: The Monetary Powers and Disabilities of the United States Constitution (2002), the most comprehensive study in existence of American monetary law and history viewed from a constitutional perspective. www.piecesofeight.us
He is also the co-author (under a nom de plume) of the political novel CRA$HMAKER: A Federal Affaire (2000), a not-so-fictional story of an engineered crash of the Federal Reserve System, and the political upheaval it causes. www.crashmaker.com
His latest book is: "How To Dethrone the Imperial Judiciary"
He can be reached at:
Redistribution of wealth through monetary manipulation, distinguishably, is essentially unlimited--except by the eventual destruction of the monetary and banking systems as a whole in hyperinflation, depression, or both.