A history of Commodities, Currencies, and Usury

A history of Commodities, Currencies, and Usury
by Whigswin

The point I want to make in this article is not that any commodity currency is “bad”, but that currencies backed by commodities are generally exploited with compounding interest. I want to illustrate that the point of money is not what you use as currency, but how it is distributed to the people of the country they belong. I will also address some of the misconceptions on commodity standards and the complications of these standards bring when in relation to the constitution of the United States.

Misconception One- The Federal reserve note is backed by nothing

The most common misconception about the Federal Reserve note is that it is backed by nothing. When in actuality the dollar is backed by two things American labor and oil. This is why Austrian economists have not been able to correctly predict the collapse of the dollar in recent years, all they can be sure of is that “it is coming”. It is important to know that the dollar is backed by oil when talking about the devaluations of the dollar because the commodity that it is backed by (oil) is currently threatened by cap and trade legislation. On the flip side if the dollar was distributed by the treasury like the constitution demands and it was backed by oil, gold, copper, or any other commodity it would still be unconstitutional because the commodity would regulate the value of the currency (paper or not)and the congress would not be able to do it's job of regulating the value of the currency. A silver standard would also cause complications because silver can't be taxed under current US laws. This would limit the powers of the government to tax. This would be okay if it was only during a recession or a depression as a temporary measure, but if the silver bought lasted after that kind of situation it would also be against the general welfare of the people and the country.

Misconception two: The gold standard is Federal Gold coin money

Another misconception I've come across is the idea that that the gold standard is using physical gold as a currency when in actuality it is only the dollar backed by the gold's value. The people who tell me this are usually new to Ron Paul and don't understand the gold standard. Gold and silver are given full authority to the states to be distributed as currency.

Section 10 of the constitution Wrote: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 Obligationof Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility.

As long as it is not a federal standard there is nothing saying gold and silver currencies cannot be used by the states to pay off debts, but the federal government is not meant to control the state money, nor is any commodity given special treatment to be distributed and regulated by the government under the constitution. The founding fathers had varying views on what should be the commodity distributed by congress. Benjamin Franklin advocated paper currency and wrote an essay called A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency , Adam Smith preferred Gold, but the commodity used as federal money could just as easily be rubber, plastic, wood, or cloth. The material that should be used was never actually emphasized in the constitution, except in opinion in essays written by the people who wrote it. The commodity used is purely the product of an informed intellectual decision by the legislature and the American People.

Misconception Three – The currency used during Jesus's time was gold

This is a complete untruth and the Money Masters Documentary documents this.

The whole money master transcript is here
http://users.telenet.be/casierstefaan/filmpjeslinks/The_Mone...

Quote:In the bible, 2000 years ago, Jesus drove The Money Changers from the temple.
It was the only time Jesus used force during his ministry.
What were Money Changers doing in his temple?
When Jews came to Jerusalem, to pay their temple taxes, they could only pay it with a special coin, the half-shekel of the sanctuary.
This was a half ounce of pure silver, about this size.
It was the only coin around at that time, which was pure silver and of assured weight, without the image of pagan emperor.
Therefore, for the Jews, the half-shekel was the only acceptable to god.
But these coins were not plentiful.
The Money Changers had cornered the market on them.
Than they raised the prize, just like any other commodity to whatever the market would bear.
In other words, Money Changers were making exorbitant profits because the held a virtual monopoly on money.
The Jews had to pay whatever they demanded.
To Jesus this totally violated the sanctity of gods house.

Money Masters part 2 the Money changers- transcript

It is also emphasized in the bible that Jesus didn't just kick out the money changers, but also anyone who had bought any merchandise from the money changers as well.

Quote:Mark 11
Jesus Clears the Temple
12The next day as they were leaving Bethany, Jesus was hungry.
13Seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to find out if it had any fruit. When he reached it, he found nothing but leaves, because it was not the season for figs.
14Then he said to the tree, "May no one ever eat fruit from you again." And his disciples heard him say it.
15On reaching Jerusalem, Jesus entered the temple area and began driving out those who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves,

16and would not allow anyone to carry merchandise through the temple courts.
17And as he taught them, he said, "Is it not written: " 'My house will be called house of prayer for all nations'[c]? But you have made it 'a den of robbers.'[d]"
18The chief priests and the teachers of the law heard this and began looking for a way to kill him, for they feared him, because the whole crowd was amazed at his teaching.
19When evening came, they[e] went out of the city.

A History of commodities and usury.

It is a documented fact that the origin of usury and fractional reserve banking came from the goldsmiths (which many of the old statutes forbidding usury classified as “jews”) The Goldsmiths discovered that they could loan the paper scrip that people bought gold with at interest even if they didn't have enough gold available to loan. This went completely unnoticed by the populace.

Quote:A 1000 years after the death of Christ, Money Changers, those who loan out and manipulate the quantity of money, where active in medieval England.
In fact, they were so active, that acting together they could manipulate the entire English economy.
These were not bankers per se.
The Money Changers generally were the goldsmiths.
They were the first bankers, because they started keeping other peoples gold for safe keeping in their vaults.
The first paper was merely a receipt for gold left at the goldsmith.
Paper money caught on because it was more convenient than carrying around a lot of heavy gold and silver coins.
Eventually goldsmiths noticed that only a small fraction of the depositors ever came in and demanded their gold at any one time.
Goldsmiths started cheating on the system.
They discovered that they could print more money than they had gold and usually no one would be the wiser.
Than they could loan out this extra money and collect interest on it.
This was the birth of fractional reserve banking.
That is loaning out many times more money than you have assets on deposit.
So if a 1000 dollars in gold was deposited with them, they could loan out about 10.000 in paper money and draw interest payments on it and no one would ever discover the deception.
By this means, goldsmiths gradually accumulated more and more wealth and used this wealth to accumulate more and more gold.
Today this practice of loaning out more money than there are reserves is known as fractional reserve banking.
Every bank in the US is allowed loaning out at least 10 times more money than they actually have.
That's why they get rich on charging let's say 8% interest.
It's not really 8% per year which is their income.
It's 80%.
That's why bank building are always the largest in town.
But does that mean that all interest or all banking should be illegal.
Hardly.
In the middle ages, canon law, the law of the catholic church, forbade charging interest on loans.
This concept followed the teachings of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas.
They taught that the purpose of money was to serve the members of society, to facilitate the exchange of goods, needed to lead a virtuous life.
Interest in their believe, hindered this purpose by putting an unnecessary burden on the use of money.
In other words, interest was contrary to reason and justice.
Reflecting church law in the middle ages, Europe forbade charging interest on loans and made it a crime called usury.
As commerce grew, and therefore opportunities for investment arose in the middle ages it came to be recognised that to loan money had a cost for the lender, both in risk and in lost opportunity.
So some charges were allowed, but not interest per se.
But all moralist, no matter what religion, condemned fraud, oppression of the pour and injustice as clearly immoral.
As we will see, fractional reserve lending is rooted in a fraud, results in widespread poverty, and reduces the value of everyone else's money.

Money masters part 4 The Goldsmiths – transcript

Quote:“Forasmuch as the King hath seen that divers evils and the disinheriting of good men of his land have happened by the usuries which the Jews have made in time past, and that divers sins have followed thereupon albeit that he and his ancestors have received much benefit from the Jewish people in all times past, nevertheless, for the honour of God and the common benefit of the people the King hath ordained and established, that from henceforth no Jew shall lend anything at usury either upon land, or upon rent or upon other thing.” –the English Statutes of the Jewry, 1275

This not meant to hate on the Jews what I am emphasizing is that any currency, even gold, can be loaned at interest in a way that victimizes those they distribute the money to

Even Milton Friedman ( a chicago school Free market economist) acknowledged that there is

Quote:"no other proposition in economics that is as well established" as the proposition that "inflation" occurs only when the "quantity of money" -- even if it's fiat paper money not backed by a commodity or precious metal -- "rises appreciably more rapidly than [economic] output" (Free to Choose, p. 254)

Governments should regulate the value of a Nation's currency in the Public interest

The idea that governments should control the value of a nation's currency is not just emphasized in section 8 of the constitution. It was also emphasized by many of history's great leaders.

Quote:Like Julius Caesar, king Henry The First of England finally resolved to take the money power away from the goldsmith about 1100 AD.
Henry could have used anything as money.
Sea shelves, feathers, or even yak dung as is often done in the remote Tibetan provinces.
But he invented one of the most unusual money systems in history.
It was called the Talley Sticks system.
Here I have one of the few surviving examples of this form of British money which lasted 726 years until 1826, a Talley stick.
The Talley system was adopted to avoid monetary manipulation of the goldsmiths.
Talley sticks were money fabricated of long sticks of polished wood.
Notches were cut along one edge of the stick to indicate the denominations.
Then the stick was split lengthwise trough the notches, so that both peaces still had a record of the notches.
The king kept one half to protect against counterfeiting.
Than he would span the other half into the economy and they would circulate as money.
This particular Talley stick is huge, it represented 25.000 pounds.
One of the original stockholders in the bank of England purchased his original shares with this stick.
In other words, he bought shares in the world richest and most powerful corporation with a stick of wood.
It's ironic that after it's formation in 1694, The Bank of England attacked the Talley Stick system, because it was money outside the power of The Money Changers just as king Henry had wanted it to be.
Why the people accept sticks of wood for money?
That's a great question.
Throughout history people traded anything they thought had value and used it as money.
You see, the secret is that money is only what people agree on to use as money.
What's our paper money today?
It is really just paper.
But here is the trick.
King Henry ordered that Talley stick had to be used to pay the king's taxes.
This build in demand for Talley stick, immediately made them circulate and be accepted as money.
And they worked well.
In fact, no other form of money has worked so well and for so long as Talley Sticks.
Keep in mind the British empire was build under the Talley Stick system.
The Talley Stick system succeeded despite the fact that The Money Changers constantly attacked it, by offering the metal coin system as competition.
In other words, metal coins never went completely out of circulation.
But Talley Sticks hung on, because they were good for the payment of taxes.
Finally, in the 1500th, king Henry VIII, relaxed the laws concerning usury and The Money Changers wasted no time reasserting themselves.
They quickly made their golden and silver money plentiful for a few decades.
But when queen Mary took the throne and tightened the usury laws again, The Money Changers renewed the hording of golden and silver coins, forcing the economy to plummet.
When queen Mary's sister, Elisabeth I took the throne, she was determined to regain control over English money.
Her solution was to issue golden and silver coins from the public treasury and take the control over the money supply away from The Money Changers.
Although control over money was not the only cause of the English Revolution in 1642, religious differences fuelled the conflict, monetary policy played a mayor role.
Financed by The Money Changers, Oliver Cromwell finally overthrew King Charles, purged the parliament, and put the King to death.
The Money Changers were immediately allowed to consolidate their financial power.
The result was that for the next 50 years The Money Changers plunged great Britain into a series of costly war.
They took over a square mile of property in the centre of London, known as The City of London.
This area is still known today as one of the predominant financial centres of the world.
Conflicts with the Stuart kings lead The Money Changers in England to combine with those in the Nederland's, to finance the invasion of William of Orange, who overthrew the Stuart in 1688 and took the English throne.

Money masters part 5. - Talley Sticks

Quote:Here in Paris the Bank of France was organised in 1800, just like the Bank of England.
But Napoleon decided that France had to break free of debt and he never trusted the Bank of France.
He declared that when a government is dependant upon bankers for money, the bankers not the leaders of the government are in control.
Napoleon Bonaparte: "The hand that gives is above the hand that takes.
Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency: their sole object is gain."

Money Masters part 23 Napoleon's rise to power

China has also proven that when the government owns the central banks (public banking) the economy is much better than when the private banks own the government.

THE SECRET OF CHINA’S MIRACLE ECONOMY:
THE GOVERNMENT OWNS THE BANKS RATHER THAN THE REVERSE

http://www.webofdebt.com/articles/secret_of_china.php

Can we go back to Gold?

I have already emphasized in my last article “Is the gold standard unconstitutional?”that there is not enough gold” to go to a gold standard” for 300 million Americans ,and I had ignorantly thought that the gold standard was using physical gold as currency. This has turned out to be an untruth and was a mistake on my part ,but what I was trying to emphasize was that because gold's value cannot be regulated by congress it is unconstitutional for it to be used as a federal currency in the United states even If it is simply backing the dollar. If the constitution was, say, amended to allow a commodity , like gold or platinum, to regulate the US currencies value who would we be buying the gold from?

We know that the Rothschild still own quite a bit of the gold that they had monopolized in earlier days and we know that the JP Morgan chase bank is almost entirely gold reserves. We know that the swiss banks have a lot of gold and some even speculate that the Fort Knox gold was sold to Germany in violation of the trading with the enemies act during WWII.
None of them however have a monopoly on all the gold ever mined, but we know that even the estimate of all gold produced around the world in a year is still less than the Pentagon's yearly military budget.

http://money.howstuffworks.com/question213.htm

HOW TO END THE DEPRESSION WITH A RETURN TO THE AMERICAN SYSTEM
1. Wipe out derivatives, destroying the largest mass of fictitious capital the world has ever known. This includes credit default swaps, mortgage backed securities, structured investment vehicles, collateralized debt obligations, repo agreements, and other toxic paper. Outlaw hedge funds. Outlaw adjustable rate mortgages. Stop all foreclosures. Seize bankrupt banks, brokerages, and insurance companies and put them through debt triage under Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings. Re-establish the uptick rule against short sellers. Stop speculators with position limits and margin requirements for oil and other energy markets. Stop exporting jobs to third world sweatshops under NAFTA , CAFTA, and WTO.
2. Seize control of the Federal Reserve System and nationalize it as a bureau of the US Treasury. Decisions about money supply and interest rates must be made by public laws, passed by the House and the Senate and signed by the President. Re-start the US economy by issuing an initial tranche of $1 trillion in cheap 0.5% to 1% federal credit – federal lending, not spending – to state and local governments as well as to private companies engaged physical production. Production means infrastructure, manufacturing, mining, construction, farming, forestry, transportation, and commerce in tangible goods. Productive activities qualify for 1% or less federal credit. Gambling, narcotics, prostitution, financial speculation, speculation, and money laundering are not productive, so they must take their chances in the free market they claim to admire so much. A centerpiece of a recovery program would be the rebuilding of rail systems, water systems, electrical grids, and the interstate highways, all of which are approaching the point of physical breakdown. Nationalize the Big Three auto companies and reconvert them for mass transit.
3. We must keep Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, food stamps, Head Start, WIC, and the remaining parts of the social safety net fully funded, since IRA/401k accounts and private insurance will increasingly be wiped out. Federal emergency relief on the model of FERA, CWA, and WPA will soon be needed. Any cuts in these programs will lead to death on a vast scale, especially among the old, the sick, and the very young. Monetarist ideologues who sneer at the nanny state should tell us where they stand when it comes to the very real threat of genocide against the American people.
4. Abolish the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and set up a new world monetary system based on full employment through the revival of industrial production.