Steven Yates - Our Money System

Steven Yates – Our Money System

OUR MONEY SYSTEM PARTS 1 - 3 Author: Steven Yates Date: December 28, 2005 http://www.newswithviews.com/Yates/steven12.htm

PART 1 Your Dollar Bill Is a Lie! "You are a den of vipers. I intend to rout you out and by the Eternal God I will rout you out. If the people only understood the rank injustice of our money and banking system, there would be a revolution before morning." --Andrew Jackson, 1828 (to a group of investment bankers trying to persuade him to renew their charter) Last week while undertaking the Web surfing that is part of my daily routine I ran across an article by one John Kaminski, an online author I hadn’t previously encountered (see: http://www.rense.com/general67/kam3.htm). It gave me a lot to think about. Kaminski’s topic is the prevalence of lies in today’s culture and especially in today’s media. Lies related to the 9/11 attacks, for example; Kaminski is one of those folks who believes someone in our government knew they were coming. The truth, if truth this be, would be very costly to this someone—possibly to the Bush regime itself. But this is just tangential to Kaminski’s main point: lies are where the money is. "There’s simply no money in the truth," he writes. "That’s why we stopped getting it. Yet, you can’t tell us money doesn’t matter when we’re all very hungry. If you don’t have any money, preaching what you think is the truth is definitely not the way to get it. Which is probably why I don’t have any." Amen to that! I don’t have any, either! I am probably as close to broke, living from check to check, as Kaminski implies that he is! I have been writing things down for as long as I can remember. My parents tell me I was doing it when I was a small child. Most of my efforts are directed at telling the truth, for anyone who happens to be interested in hearing the truth. I’ve occasionally experimented with fiction. I’ve long wanted to write a novel, especially a science fiction novel, but (so far) it hasn’t jelled. Not that I’ve had the time to make it jell, between my two teaching jobs (four classes in all), work on my next nonfiction book (a expansion of my surprisingly popular seven-part article "The Real Matrix" ( http://www.newswithviews.com/Yates/steven.htm) done last year for NewsWithViews.com) and work on these articles. I don’t regard myself as

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an entertainer but as a truth-teller. The science fiction novel—if it ever gets written—will attempt to communicate something about the human condition, just as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World communicated something about the human condition—namely, the dangers of technological social engineering in the hands of those who regard human beings as cattle. I don’t anticipate that any work of mine will sell as many copies as Huxley’s did, or become some kind of classic. This is a different culture now—more materialistic and sound bite oriented than his was, more manipulated via technology and media, and far less appreciative of anything mentally demanding. As Charlotte Iserbyt would say, far more dumbed down (see her phenomenal “The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America”). For all practical purposes, Brave New World is here. Money has become a national religion of sorts. People and institutions worship it, like a surrogate god. They have little choice. No one has enough of it; thus the need to grasp more of it or budget very carefully what we have stands at the center of our lives and our institutions. Money issues encircle us, whether we like it or not. This includes those being paid far better than I am. We are not talking about people who take vacations every weekend, or eat at swanky restaurants every night, or who buy a new SUV every year. Frankly, I don’t know anybody who does that. I am starting to wonder if such people really exist, or if they are part of the edifice of lies. The irony is, our money system is the biggest lie of all. It isn’t really money at all, but pieces of paper with numbers and the phrase legal tender printed on them. Take a dollar bill from your wallet—if you have any dollars left after paying your bills and your taxes—and look at it closely. At the very top you’ll see the phrase Federal Reserve Note. Then, beneath that, The United States of America. In small print: This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private. Beneath George’s picture, at the bottom: One Dollar. Long ago, when our fiat money was backed by gold, you would have seen different things. Imagine your grandfather undertaking the same project, examining a dollar from his pocket. Suppose the year was 1910. The dollar would not have said Federal Reserve Note because there was no Federal Reserve. What he would have been looking at would have been a real, honest-to-God dollar! Just the name Federal Reserve is a twofold lie. The Federal Reserve is not federal and does not have any reserves. Many people believe the Federal Reserve is part of the federal government. It is not. It is a cartel of private central banks, many of them foreign-owned. Working in tandem with the U.S. Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve is a key institution of the Euro-American power elite. It has never been audited, nor had its books scrutinized by ordinary mortals. For a startling and very detailed account of the origin and history of our banking system, I recommend G. Edward Griffin’s treatise “The Creature From Jekyll Island.” You might also read Murray N. Rothbard’s short work “The Case Against the Fed” for an incisive argument why a genuinely free economy does not need a central bank.

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But back to your grandfather’s dollar. What would he have seen on it? Among other things, the phrase Will pay to bearer on demand just above One Dollar. This indicated that the slip of paper wasn’t really the bearer of value; it was a receipt indicating that the bank had in its repository a dollar’s worth of gold that would be redeemed at his demand. This phrase disappeared from the dollar. Not right away, of course. If we look at, say, a 1928 dollar, the phrase Federal Reserve Note will be found at the top and Will pay to bearer on demand will still be found above One Dollar. The Federal Reserve had only begun to change the nature of money. For at an appropriate place in between the two we find the statement, Redeemable in gold on demand at the United States Treasury or in gold or lawful money at any Federal Reserve Bank. But recently I ran across a representation of a 1929 dollar. This last phrase has changed. We see, Redeemable in lawful money of the United States at United States Treasury or at the Bank of Issue. The reference to gold is gone! There is no mention of legal tender on any of these. Now consider a 1934 dollar. The 1934 dollar has become legal tender: It says, This note is legal tender for all debts public and private and is redeemable in lawful money at the United States Treasury or at any Federal Reserve bank. Interestingly, this was right after the stock market had crashed and the country had spiraled down into the Great Depression (the best account of which is still and will probably always be Rothbard’s “America’s Great Depression”). Now compare that description with the dollar you took out of your wallet—again, if you had one. Your dollar bill says nothing about redeem-ability because it can’t be redeemed for anything. It is a note to pay nothing. The phrase Will pay to bearer on demand is gone. Having been a Watergate-era teenager, I am old enough to recall when this phrase disappeared. It was 1971, the year President Richard M. Nixon took the money system completely off the gold standard and said, "We are all Keynesians now." The reference is to John Maynard Keynes. Many economists consider Keynes to have been the greatest theoretician of their trade who ever lived, which says more about them than it does about Keynes. Keynes’s own words, back in 1920, testify to ulterior motives: "There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose." Keynes, a member of the Fabian Society (a socialist organization originating in Great Britain in the early 1880s) and later a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), despised the laissez faire system that had built this nation in its early history, the remnants of which gave rise to the relative prosperity of the American middle class. Laissez-faire economics is incompatible with centralization and control, so the international bankers set out to sabotage and destroy it. They did so by destroying, little by little, the value of its currency. Mainstream twentieth century economics rationalized this destruction and surrounded the rationalization with an edifice of impenetrable mathematical technique. Economists immersed themselves in what historian and philosopher of science Thomas S. Kuhn would later call a paradigm (in his “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”). Almost no trained economists would recognize the truth. Non-economists would be so put off Page 3 of 14

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by the complex tables, charts and graphs that they wouldn’t try to find it. The trick worked. Almost everyone assumed that economics was a mystery beyond the kin of ordinary mortals. That dollar you were looking at—again if you had a dollar to look it—is a lie. It is backed with nothing. The only thing going for it is that legal tender phrase—the fact that the government and the banks accept it and will jail anyone attempting to introduce a different form of currency. It also has going for it, one might say, people’s tacit consensus about its value. That your dollar is really worth a dollar is part of what we might call our consensus-reality. Consensusreality is not (for lack of a better term) real reality. It results from a group agreement—a consensus—backed up in this case by civil authority, but not correspondence with fact. To see the difference, just realize that hundreds of years ago, people agreed—and were backed up by the authority of the church (which was then coextensive with civil authority)—that the Earth was at the center of the universe. This was their consensus-reality, which certainly seemed to fit their experience. They were wrong, because experience notwithstanding, their consensusreality didn’t accord with fact. Neither does ours, today, regarding money. Experience, agreement and civil authority notwithstanding. Consensus-reality might be called by its proper name: ignorance. Perhaps surrounded by lies, when somebody asks the wrong questions. So what is the "real deal"? To jump ahead, the "real deal" is that we are in real trouble, and it’s getting worse every day. It is common knowledge that wages have not kept up with inflation (debauched currency chasing the same amount of goods and services); this is why none of us has any money. Real, inflation-adjusted wages have been falling for over three decades relative to the cost of living. In an average family of four, both parents now have to work to pay the bills. Our savings rate has gone negative. Late payments on credit cards have reached all-time highs. Credit card companies, meanwhile, are raising their minimums and raising penalties on those who pay late in the form of higher interest rates—more fiat money in bankers’ pockets. A new federal law going into effect this month makes it harder to declare bankruptcy and have one’s debts erased; thus, declarations of bankruptcy are also at an all-time high, with some 13,000 per day by the end of September! That average family of four is thousands of dollars in debt, particularly if it contributed to the irrational "housing boom" which is very possibly the only thing keeping our economy afloat. I wonder if we will see the return of debtors’ prisons—or, more likely, labor camps where a new underclass of indentured servants is confined until its members have worked off their debts, assuming that is possible. Our national debt, meanwhile, is zeroing on $8 trillion—it might have reached $8 trillion by the time this reaches print. [Editorial note: it reached $8 trillion officially on October 18, one day prior to the official publication date of this part of the essay.] And this is just one component of our total indebtedness, which is at least ten times higher if not more. Behind our dilemmas stands that cartel of international investment bankers—the EuroAmerican power elite—in the shadows behind such front organizations as the CFR, Page 4 of 14

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destructive trade accords such as NAFTA and CAFTA, and so on. The biggest lie of all is the one claiming that the consolidation of power at the center that has developed over the past century is a mere historical accident. The fiat money system didn’t happen by accident; it was deliberately created. By progressively impoverishing hardworking Americans through inflation, it makes full participation in our political system almost impossible for many. You are not in a position to contribute meaningfully or even vote intelligently if you are either at work or asleep! This all helps further the power elite’s goals of abolishing the Constitution and taking us toward a world government, ruled by the power elite as a kind of high-tech neofeudalism. In the New World Order as its minions envision it, there will be no American middle class or any other kind of middle class. The power elite sees itself ruling over a permanently cashstrapped "global workforce" of human cattle. Today’s government schools (think School-ToWork, Workforce Investment and No Child Left Untested) are already preparing the way by teaching job skills but not history, logic or economics in any meaningful way.

PART 2 The Biggest Swindle in History! "If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered… I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies..." --Thomas Jefferson The best account of the "banksters," as one might call them, is still G. Edward Griffin’s “The Creature From Jekyll Island.” Another useful item is downloadable from the Internet under the title “I Want the World Plus 5%.” Although Griffin’s main focus is the Federal Reserve system, he offers a compelling account of how the invention of fractional reserve banking empowered men whose subsequent influence usually went unmentioned in standard histories. Early goldsmiths—the first bankers—stored precious metals for customers for a fee, and issued their customers a certificate. This made perfect sense; a certificate was much easier to carry around than a bag of gold. These certificates became the first currency. The bankers then noticed that few customers ever withdrew all their gold at once; actual withdrawals never exceeded around ten percent. They realized they could use certificates to issue loans as well as store coins. Griffin explains, "They said it was a pity for all that coin to just sit idle in their vaults. Why not lend it out and earn a profit which then could be split between themselves and their depositors? Put it to work, instead of merely gathering dust" (Creature, p. 165). It seemed safe to write certificates loaning out 80 or 90 percent, and charging the loan’s recipients’ a fee: what became known as interest. What had happened? The early bankers had discovered how to create "money" out of thin air. They became the first "banksters." To make this clearer, let’s illustrate. Suppose we’re playing poker at Paul’s house, with Paul acting as banker. There are seven of us, and we’ve each given Paul $20 for 20 poker chips. So Page 5 of 14

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Paul’s cash box contains $140. Any of us can leave the game any time we want, and exchange each of our poker chips for a dollar. We’re enjoying the game, so no one leaves. The $140 remains in the box. The poker chips are functioning as backed currency for the purposes of the game. It is being held in escrow, one might say. Now suppose Paul’s brother Peter shows up. He wants to borrow some money. Suppose Paul lends him $120 from the box. Strictly speaking, of course, Paul has no right to lend Peter that money. He ought to obtain an additional $120 to lend Peter, or use $120 of his own money. Paul cannot lend Peter $120 from the box and still consider the poker chips to retain their value as backed currency. If he loans Peter the $120 anyway, this leaves just $20 in the box. He has debauched the value of the poker chips, and also placed himself in an awkward position should both I and a companion wish to leave and both of us want back a total of more than $20. Paul would have to default on his contract, which was to keep our money safe for the duration of our participation in the game. A bank that defaults on its contract, fails. The banker is out of business. Back to the early bankers. They stored, shall we say, $140 in gold from seven customers (all depositing $20 worth of gold) and issued $140 in the form of seven certificates, each stating their exact value: $20. The certificates might even say, will pay to bearer on demand, $20. Now would-be borrowers appear. A banker decides to "put [this money] to work." He issues additional $20 certificates for up to $120 of what he has in his vault, under the assumption that the original customers will not want their gold back all at once. Do the arithmetic, and we see that the banker has issued certificates totaling $260 (the original $140 plus $120 in loans). This despite his having just $140. He has created the other $120 out of thin air, ex nihilo, as God is supposed to have created the world. Only our banker is not God, and his certificates are no longer fully backed by one of God’s precious metals. They are being accepted and used as if they were, by borrowers who suspect nothing. They have become fractional money. The worth of the gold behind them is a fraction of their total face value. The actual worth of any particular certificate is therefore a fraction of its original worth. The supply of certificates in circulation has been artificially inflated. The borrower believes, of course, that he can redeem his certificates for their full face value; he is being charged interest on their full face value! The banker collects the profit; he can extend the loan indefinitely, collecting more profit. This is fractional reserve banking, and if we understand fractional reserve banking, we can understand the basis for the greatest swindle in the history of Western civilization—and why the Founding Fathers empowered Congress (not bankers) to "coin money, and regulate the value thereof." The bankers, of course, adopted the motto, "Tell no one." The process became a trade secret, beginning the cloak of secrecy that has surrounded international investment banking ever since. It didn’t always work. Banks did fail. But if owners of large banks feel safe lending out and charging interest on more and more certificates, the fraction that represents the real value of the certificates shrinks until it approaches zero—in which case the certificates are completely off their original gold standard. As Griffin puts it (Creature, p. 169), "fractional money will always deteriorate into fiat money. It is but fiat money in transition." Fiat money is just unbacked paper currency, protected by legal tender laws compelling citizens to use it as real money and mandating severe penalties for anyone who doesn’t. Page 6 of 14

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The temptation of fractional money is just the temptation of easy money: the lure of unearned wealth. Things began to get nasty when European bankers began loaning huge sums of fractional money to governments. The two started working together in the late 1600s, with a government granting a charter to a group of "monetary scientists" to start a bank and giving it a legal monopoly. The bank then created fractional money and loaned it to the government as needed. Thus was invented central banking. Central bankers could easily generate enough "revenue" to bankroll wars by manufacturing money for the government’s use—as much as it needs! The bankers not only got rich but enjoyed the government’s full protections. After all, the central bank must not under any circumstances be allowed to fail! Thus a central bank by definition operates outside the confines of a free market. The most famous family of central bankers, of course, is the House of Rothschild, founded in Frankfort, Germany by Mayer Amschel Bauer who changed his last name to Rothschild, and whose five sons—Amschel, Salomon, Nathan, Kalmann (Karl), and Jacob (James)—became the first prominent internationalists. Each was placed in charge of a central bank in one of the five centers of influence: Amschel in Frankfort, Salomon in Vienna, Nathan in London, Karl in Naples, and James in Paris. Working closely together, they became the most powerful bloodline in 1800s Europe. M.A. Rothschild had said, "Give me control over a nation’s currency, and I care not who makes its laws." His sons worked closely together. Salomon wrote Nathan in 1815, "We are like the mechanism of a watch: every part is essential." One cannot study the House of Rothschild without getting a whiff of sulfur. Rumors abounded that the Rothschilds were closet Satanists. Be this as it may, they manipulated kings and governments at will. Anyone who got out of line found himself in the midst of a spectacularly nasty war. The Rothschilds despised laissez-faire economics. They realized it implied absence of indebtedness to the banks. They did not want financial independence. They wanted the cattle (their view of us ordinary mortals) tied to wage slavery and subject to authoritarian regimes—bankrolled by their henchmen, of course. It stands to reason they would hate America, and set about to bring her down. A book entitled “The Coming Battle: The True History of Our National Debt,” originally published around the last turn of the century and recently rescued from oblivion by Paul Walter, of the NewsWithViews.com commentary site, documents our government’s furious struggle to rein in power-hungry bankers throughout the 1800s. Yet with the rise of corporate empires like those of Morgan, Rockefeller and Carnegie (all recipients of Rothschild assistance), and the growing influence of "money power" on the federal government, the struggle was lost in 1913. The day before Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act, Congressman Charles A. Lindbergh Sr. (father of the famous aviator) told the House, "This Act establishes the most gigantic trust on earth. When the President signs this bill, the invisible government by the Money Power will be legalized." In this way 1913 is a pivotal year in U.S. history. That was the year the incipient shadow government controlled by the banking cartel assumed control over the American financial system and therefore over the U.S. economy. Keynesian economic theory would later rationalize this centralization and micromanagement. (It is worth noting in passing that 1913 was also the year the IRS was created.)

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The swindle proceeded from there. The quick and dirty version goes something like this: the collusion between the cabal of "banksters" and the federal government began to saddle every man, woman and child with an albatross of debt, by building up a money system and an economy based on debt—fractional money borrowed from the banks, who—with the full protection of the federal government—have created money out of thin air. In Part One, we examined how we finally departed from the gold standard that once meant sound dollars. Now our total indebtedness cannot be paid off, even in principle. Were the national debt (which officially surpassed $8 trillion on Oct. 18) ever to be paid off, there would be no currency in circulation—hard as that is to believe! As crazy as it sounds, our entire money supply—the sum total of currency in circulation—exists because it was borrowed. The "banksters" collect the profits and sink them into their tax-exempt foundations. What Griffin calls the Mandrake Mechanism is the banking machinery that converts debt into fiat money. (See Creature, pp. 185-207.) In this process lies the explanation why the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers are multibillionaires many times over, while you and I live from hand to mouth despite working two and maybe three jobs. It explains why people who once held down good-paying jobs are just as strapped for cash. It helps explain, in combination with the various ways of redistributing wealth we adopted when our society accepted the essential features of Fabian socialism, why the cost of living has gone into the stratosphere. The amount of fiat money in circulation has soared; our wages have not. Everybody knows how wages have "stagnated" since 1971, the year we went off the gold standard. Again, an illustration is helpful. Suppose the federal government claims to need $1 billion for whatever purpose. Obviously it doesn’t have $1 billion, since politicians and bureaucrats produce nothing (with the possible exception of misery). The feds go to the "banksters" in the Federal Reserve. They agree to deliver the $1 billion in credit to the feds in exchange for the latters’ agreement to pay it back with interest. Congress authorizes the Treasury Department to print $1 billion in U.S. Bonds, delivered to the "banksters." The Treasury Department prints $1 billion in bank notes, "bought" from the Federal Reserve (which pays only the printing costs!) and exchanged at full face value for the Bonds. The feds use the $1 billion for whatever they claimed to need it for. And they have indebted the people—that’s you and me— to the "banksters" for $1 billion more—plus interest! Now replicate this process several thousand times. You or I, of course, would be imprisoned if we did this. But it’s legal when the government and the "banksters" do it. This has been going on since 1913, and explains the $8 trillion national debt. In 1920, the national debt had jumped to $24 billion from around $1.15 billion (the debt when the Federal Reserve was being covertly planned at Jekyll Island). By 1968 it had risen to $347 billion. It reached $1 trillion right after Reagan went into office, and topped $2 trillion right around 1986. In 1992 it hit $4 trillion. It surmounted $7 trillion in January of 2004. Now it’s $8 trillion. In other words, we have amassed more debt in less than two years than was amassed during the first 200 years of this country’s history! And the process is accelerating! The federal government has become a bloated Leviathan existing on borrowed money and borrowed time. It is difficult to know which major party is worse. The Democrats authorize policies based on a philosophy of tax-and-spend. They rip Page 8 of 14

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off the public directly. The Republicans authorize policies based on a philosophy of borrow-and-spend. They rip us off indirectly. Both parties are controlled by the "banksters," protected by their many shills in the mainstream media. I submit that this money system has almost completely destroyed the foundations of this country. It has also destroyed the so-called American Dream—whatever hope any of us might once have had of "succeeding" working within the system, playing by its rules. (Genuine entrepreneurship is still possible, but extremely difficult.) Our money system may be the biggest swindle not just in U.S. history but the biggest swindle ever, especially as most of the public has no idea it has been swindled. While any of the seven poker players in our illustration above could leave the game any time they wanted, you and I can leave this larger "game" only by croaking! Even then, your kids will get stuck with the bill! The plain truth is, for all the talk of an "economic boom" in the 1990s (it was an expansion of the amount of fiat money in circulation, so that loans were easy to obtain), and for all the talk about a "housing boom" in the present (again the result of credit spending, i.e., debt), this system is manifestly not sustainable. It must eventually crash and burn; it is not a matter of if, but when. The "banksters," of course, are still keeping to that adage: "Tell no one." Their money long ago came to control academia via the endowment system, government schools via their control over education schools, money from tax-exempt foundations such as Carnegie and Rockefeller, unions such as the NEA and agencies such as the DOE (see Iserbyt’s tome referenced in Part One for details) as well as the mainstream media that controls the information that reaches the public. That is why people who write the way I have here are dismissed as "conspiracy kooks," as has been G. Edward Griffin despite his massive documentation from Federal Reserve materials themselves. President James A. Garfield said way back in 1881, "Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce." Not long after uttering those words, he was shot in a Washington railroad station and died two and a half months later.

PART 3 Where Do We Go From Here? "America is at that awkward stage. It’s too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards." --Claire Wolf, 101 Things To Do Till the Revolution Parts One and Two presented evidence that we have a problem of some magnitude on our hands. Some ask me, What can we do? Is there any way out of this mess? They are disappointed when I don’t have any magic wands. I’m just the messenger. I can suggest what some folks are already doing, which is to buy gold and silver. Clearly the value of gold is going to go up relative to the value of our fiat dollar. This obviously isn’t a complete solution. Unless you want to live in the woods, escaping the clutches of our money system and its super elite masters is very hard. While some people do not keep money in banks, most do and are

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unaware of any alternatives. Not to mention the difficulty of doing business on any large scale outside this system. There are pessimists and there are optimists, with different schools of thought in each with different degrees of credibility. The pessimists think nothing can be done; the process of encirclement toward global control is too far along, and there are too many resources arrayed on the other side. We are relatively few, poorly organized, and strapped for cash. We have no Ford or Rockefeller Foundation on our side. We have, at best, the Web (where writers publish for free) and publications like this one (where everyone works for free). None of us dare give up our day jobs—from which we can be fired if we get too politically incorrect! There is something to this, I admit. However, we should note that the laws of economics are what they are, regardless what government is in power or what the "banksters" do. Part Two of this series established that the current process is unsustainable. Other things being equal, the laws of economics themselves will one day bring our financial flights of fancy down in flames. If that happens, then given how advanced nations’ economies now interpenetrate one another, it may plunge much of the globe into a depression making the 1930s look like a picnic by comparison. Unemployment would reach levels never before seen in the advanced world. Partial infrastructural collapse could mean a return to quasi-medieval conditions. Millions of people would be killed in food riots, starve, freeze to death the following winter, or die from diseases we thought were wiped out, before a leadership capable of picking up the pieces could emerge. It is unlikely that such leadership would care about Constitutionally limited government! Anyone with functioning brain cells should be motivated to prevent this scenario, if at all possible! What about the optimists? They divide into two groups: those I increasingly think of as irrational optimists and those I would label rational optimists. Rational here means guarded, or cautious. They realize we did not get into this predicament overnight and we will not get out of it overnight. Moreover, they recognize human fallibility and sinfulness, which ensure that we will never have perfect civil government—the desire for that is the stealth humanist in each of us. I have encountered schemes I am now convinced will not work—given the generally low educational level of today’s American public. These schemes all say, essentially, "If we just do x, we’ll be saved!" X might be abolish the IRS, or elect a Libertarian to national office. The first, I suppose, is not impossible—but be warned, it could be replaced by something worse. Read Joan Veon’s latest article on NewsWithViews.com. Or see Jim Cox’s review of Neal Boortz’s book on Fair Tax last Thursday on LewRockwell.com. Let’s use common horse sense. The feds are not going to cut off their free ride without ensuring that something replaces it. The second isn’t going to happen, either. American voters, with few exceptions, are brainwashed by the so-called two-party system and sold on don’t-throw-away-your-vote arguments. Moreover, today’s money system is designed—among other things—to keep outsiders out. Insiders have access to huge sums of federal dollars and other resources third parties usually do not have. Even when the latter do have money it helps but little; Ross Page 10 of 14

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Perot’s billions were unable to win him a single electoral vote in 1992. The fact that many Libertarians reject the idea of a financial power elite as "conspiracy theory" is automatically working against them. In this case, what about being done with it and seceding from the Union? Before we dismiss this idea, we should observe that if the Declaration of Independence—by its own statement a secession document—was valid then, the idea of organizing and departing from tyrannical governments is valid now. Secession deserves more than a passing glance these days, especially since just the weekend before last, a number of Vermonters convened to approve separation from the United States. The group called the Second Vermont Republic (SVR) did not meet in the back room of a restaurant but in the gold-domed capitol in Montpelier, resulting in national attention. The SVR argument: the Washington government has lost its moral authority, is unsustainable, and unfixable. It’s too late to work within the system, as Claire Wolfe says above. But let’s not shoot the b******s. Let’s separate peacefully, taking Vermont back from big government, big business and the money system. We heard secession stirrings in various places back in the 1990s. The League of the South, of course, has satellite organizations throughout the South. But the idea has also been floated in Texas, Arizona, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Michigan, Hawaii, Alaska, and doubtless elsewhere. The phenomenon is worldwide. Quebec has long wanted to separate from Canada. The Kurds wanted freedom from Iraq, and still do. Chechnya wants independence from Russia. Tibetans want out of Communist China. Following 9/11, the idea receded into the background, at least here. But in the wake of an increasingly out-of-control Bush Administration, having possibly lied its way into an unconstitutional foreign war and itching to declare martial law in the homeland, secession talk has resurfaced. One of the goals of Christian Exodus, which convened here in Greenville last month, is to congregate a sufficient number of Christians in South Carolina to change the political climate and, if necessary, separate from Washington D.C.’s grasping paws. Secessionists have to think through what a viable separation would involve, though. It won’t happen by meeting in the back room of Prime Sirloin; it can only be carried forth via a strategy aimed at capturing state government. Thomas Naylor, of SVR, was able to convene his group in the Vermont capitol, and thus gained the most credibility any secession movement has yet achieved. I spoke with Mr. Naylor about the SVR strategy, and he told me his meeting had been approved by the Vermont Speaker of the House and the Sergeant-atArms; several legislators and a likely candidate for governor appeared. James Howard Kunstler (author of The Long Emergency, about Peak Oil and the end of American suburbia) gave the keynote address. The group put forth a Vermont Independence Resolution, but is not to the point of acting to secede from the U.S. yet; this would involve signing an official declaration of independence, presenting it to Washington and in other major capitols around the world attempting to obtain recognition abroad. Huge hurdles would remain to be cleared. Any state separating from the U.S. would have to survive with no federal dollars whatsoever—for education, roads, or anything else. Of course, to secessionists this would be a good thing, but could ordinary people do it? I’m not asking whether federal dollars for these things was constitutional. Of course not. But the fact remains: many at the state level have grown dependent on these dollars. Here in South Carolina, ending the flow of federal money would mean surviving on our own in a potentially very hostile environment. This would call for maximum self-sufficiency. A self-sufficient Page 11 of 14

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infrastructure could not be created following the act of secession. It would have to be mostly in place already. Vermonters might have a serious problem keeping warm during the ensuing long northern winter. Mr. Naylor was aware of these things, but saw the effort at obtaining state funding to replace federal funding as just one step to be taken later in a long process. He made a useful observation: an end to the torrent of unfunded federal mandates would free up state money to handle such problems. The real hurdle would be convincing the people of any state that secession is both legitimate and necessary. What would accomplish this? Kunstler’s Long Emergency, if it hits; the collapse of the dollar as discussed in Part Two; or an attempt by Bush to suspend the Constitution and declare martial law. In other words, things will have to get worse before conditions are right. Our poorly educated and self-absorbed masses—not to mention an entrenched political and business establishment!—will literally need a fire built under them before they see a need to act. For those who can clear all these hurdles, I would be the last person to stand in their way. But no neo-secessionist has answered me convincingly: assuming every bit of this can be accomplished, what, specifically, will the new leadership do when the feds send in the heavy artillery. Peaceful secession sounds nice, but by definition will work only if both agree to let the other one go without a fight. It isn’t impossible; Czechoslovakia split peacefully. So did Slovenia. But circumstances there were rather unusual—the parent nations had just been freed from Soviet enslavement. Most secession movements have had to fight for freedom. Advocates of secession thus had better be sure what they are getting themselves into, which means having plans to deal with the consequences. If they lose, they would doubtless be imprisoned—possibly executed if firefights broke out and any feds lost their lives. If they win, they had better be ready for maximum self-sufficiency amidst hostile surroundings. The guarded optimist recognizes something else easily overlooked. The power elite may be rich, but it is not infallible. There is no magic to its methods. Its members are not numerous— probably a few hundred in all. Their unofficial secular ideology—the worship of power and money—is alien to most peoples’ ways of thinking. Despite what gets uploaded to CFR web pages, which most of America’s entertainment-seeking masses won’t access anyway, the elite fears public disclosure. They have had close calls before, such as when Carroll Quigley’s “Tragedy and Hope” was published, or with the Barry Goldwater and George Wallace candidacies. If the wrong person gets elected to national office, they are finished. This is why they have seen to it that huge sums of money are now necessary for a credible national candidacy—sums that are beyond the means of those outside their orbit of approval. They could still miscalculate or stumble—especially as events accelerate. Let’s also remember that New World Order kingpin David Rockefeller Sr. is 90 years old, and doubtless would like to see some of his envisioned globalist system in place before he goes to meet his Maker. This may be one reason New World Order underling-elites in the Bush Administration are advancing their "free trade" agenda with reckless abandon. There is hope. The original timetable for the FTAA, for example, is defunct. The elite’s original date for implementation was January 2005. Discussions on the deal have stalled; the recent Summit of the Americas in Argentina disintegrated amidst political squabbling and public protest. The year 2005 is almost over, with no FTAA in place. The plain truth is, those who study these trade deals want no part of them! So what may we conclude? I come back to Page 12 of 14

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my first realization: none of us have magic wands. Where we go from here depends on what people do with this information. I can communicate it. Others must pick up the ball and run with it. With this in mind: (1) People must get over their phobia about "conspiracy theories." It is as much a fact as gravity that a cabal of international bankers—"banksters"—staged an economic coup back in 1913 with the Federal Reserve system. Since then this cabal has sunk its wealth into taxexempt foundations and increased its power by controlling the flow of dollars from such foundations and other entities into government, media, academia, business, public education, and elsewhere. Its current goal is to establish regional regimes, the first of which is the European Union. The proposal on the table here is an American Union modeled on the EU. The long term goal is world government: the New World Order. On their own web pages the globalists are open about their plans for the world. (2) The truth—correspondence with fact as opposed to consensus-reality (see Part One)—is on our side. The laws of economics are on our side. (See my articles a few weeks back on Fred Bastiat.) The fact that certain kinds of societies tend to prosper and flourish, while others stagnate and go into decline, is on our side. That these trends occur for identifiable reasons is on our side. Socialism does not work, and the high-tech neo-feudalism of the financial power elite will not work. (3) Nevertheless, any attempt to take our political system and economic lives back from the "banksters," whether by secession or other means, is going to be fraught with hazards. Some will end up unemployed, doing their work living with relatives or tolerant friends. Civil disobedience might be necessary; I can easily envision people ending up in prison before things play themselves out. The Homeland Security and USA Patriot Acts already lay the groundwork for political dissidents to be declared terrorists and held without being officially charged with anything or allowed appeal to the courts. (4) We must therefore educate, educate, and then educate some more. The means of doing so are in place; it is just a matter of using them. I am all in favor of homeschooling, for instance, and forming private schools to pick up where homeschooling leaves off. We need real education on a large scale. Real education is more than job training for wage slavery in the "global workforce." It means being able to think and act independently, as an individual. This calls for an education heavy with reading, writing, arithmetic and mathematics, personal finance and economics, religious and ethical instruction, and basic reasoning. Historical literacy is also necessary. Part of our problem is that most people today have little inkling who our Founding Fathers were, why they separated from the British Empire, or what they put in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. A viable opposition to the incipient New World Order must immerse itself in our Founding and the philosophy behind it—so that its members know not simply what they are against but what they are for. This essay has been long and unwieldy. I hope I haven’t lost anyone. Since I’ve no crystal ball about what the future holds, I must end inconclusively. I’ve no magic formulas; it’s up to all of us—those who teach and write and those who organize and those who act. Given what we are up against and its long history, this won’t be easy. It is tempting to say, this is God’s world, and in the last analysis He is in charge. We don’t want this to become an excuse for sitting on our duffs. I don’t believe God wants us to cooperate mindlessly with evil. "Shall the throne of Page 13 of 14

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iniquity, which devises evil by law, have fellowship with you?" asks the Psalmist (Ps. 94:20). So in the last analysis, we must stand against this darkness we call the New World Order, understand its premises and strategies, and make our case for all who will listen how destructive this movement really is. Then we must work for freedom for ourselves, our families and our communities while planning as best we can for an uncertain future.

Steven Yates, Ph.D., is the most published professional philosopher in South Carolina. He teaches as a lowly adjunct instructor of philosophy at University of South Carolina Upstate (occupational punishment for his utter lack of political correctness and for pursuing issues from the standpoint of adherence to Constitutionally limited government, personal moral responsibility guided by a Christian worldview, and the rule of law as opposed to arbitrary rule by politicians, judges, and unelected bureaucrats). Later this month he will be joining the faculty at Greenville Technical College in Greenville, S.C., also as an adjunct. He is the author of “Civil Wrongs: What Went Wrong With Affirmative Action” (San Francisco: ICS Press, 1994) and Worldviews: “Christian Theism vs. Modern Materialism” (Xlibris Corporation (August 17, 2005)). He also works on manuscripts with names such as “In Defense of Logic and Philosophical Questions” as well as on a science fiction novel, “Skywatcher’s World.” His articles and reviews have appeared on LewRockwell.com as well as NewsWithViews.com and other websites. He has also published in academic journals including Inquiry, Metaphilosophy, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Reason Papers, Public Affairs Quarterly, Journal of Libertarian Studies, Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics and others. He recently held a year-long fellowship with the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Ala., has appeared at conferences ranging from the American Philosophical Association to the South Carolina Society for Philosophy, and made numerous talk radio appearances. He spoke on “The Real Matrix and Sustainable Development” at the recent 6th Annual Freedom 21 National Conference in Reno, Nev. He lives in Greenville, South Carolina, where he also directs the Worldviews Project and is a member of the S.C. Chapter of Citizens Committee to Stop the FTAA. His blog is at: http://itshappeninghere.blogspot.com E-Mail: [email protected]. ###

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