You’re in debt. I’m in debt. Everyone in this mortgage-saddled, card-swiping, impulse-buying nation is in debt. Our economy is driven by the spending of money not earned, by the focus on short-term gains while taking on conditions that ensure artificial scarcity in the future. This model of debt culture, immediately and unequivocally, must be changed. This change must be internalized at all levels of society to make a world more stable and focused on real value. The specter of indentured servitude must be driven out.
The servile state of our government mirrors that of our own consumerist lives.
The U.S. government has run a budget deficit every year since Nixon’s heyday in 1969, meaning that expenditures have outpaced tax collections for 40 years straight.
Every coming year, the treasury is left to start off from a worse and worse condition as if dying the thousand deaths of an unpious Buddhist – each time tossing more debt onto the ponderous pile. The national debt clock in New York has literally run out of digits, unable to even display the negative sum of $11,000,000,000,000.
Each taxpayer has roughly a $45,000 stake in this debt, which basically means you’re a bona fide shareholder in a criminally inefficient system. Picture yourself as a haggard, worn-out parent on “My Super Sweet 16,“ buying another lime-green BMW for your shrieking materialistic daughter you now doubt you actually have the capacity to love. That’s about where this stands.
Rather than racking up a surplus of tax dollars in the good years to ease expenses in the bad, our government has decided to ride whole-hog on the boom-and-bust economic model. If we had any sort of residual budget to spend from, a recession would be manageable – yet your government has decided to let the living standard for the majority of the country oscillate from bad to worse.
But don’t worry – according to the Federal Reserve, debt is wealth.
The reforms the Fed enacted to prompt a rebound from this economic ‘recession‘ (i.e. ‘total shit show‘) focus on freeing more credit for investors, consumers and entrepreneurs. So we can borrow more money and spend it on things we can’t afford, creating more obligations and what amounts to financial bondage. This isn’t a new trick for the Fed.
Every dollar that flows through this country is property of the Federal Reserve. All legal tender was created by our government’s sale of bonds to the Fed, promissory notes that imply their cash is someday coming back plus interest. In this way, over half of our government’s debt is owed to the Fed. Forty percent of our income taxes go to pay the interest on that debt. Here’s a thought: why?
Why is it that the Federal Reserve has some sort of financial credibility that our government has to buy to create money? How is the Fed of greater repute? Why does the Fed have a status greater than that of the U.S. government?
The Federal Reserve, shall I remind you, is a private bank that has had the sole authority since 1913 to control the issue of American currency. It is entirely independent of the will of our government and the bank’s ownership and interests are surrounded by that foggy mystique that smells like secret societies.
Woodrow Wilson, elected through banker influence, had some mixed feelings after signing the Federal Reserve Act.
“I have unwittingly ruined my country,” he wrote. “We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the civilized world … a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.” The “dominant men“ business certainly wasn’t new, as women couldn’t help put Wilson in office, but the group of dominants certainly became smaller and shadier.
But if that group of puppetmasters is benevolent, everything should work out, right? After all, they’re the people that know money best! This, sadly, is too true. In 1929, the Fed exacerbated the Great Depression from a mere cough to a coma-inducing pneumonia.
Analysts normally hesitate to call out the Fed for inflating the dollar and increasing interest rates during a contraction but Ben Bernanke, the chairman himself, casually copped to the crime, calling archconservative economists by name (“I would like to say to Milton [Friedman] and Anna [Schwartz]: regarding the Great Depression. You’re right, we did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.“).
If that hasn’t creeped you out of spending money for the next fiscal quarter, here’s a quote from the Rothschild family, one of the kingmaking names that undoubtedly had a hand in creating the Fed: “[Central banking] gives the National Bank almost complete control of national finance. The few who understand the system will either be so interested in its profits, or so dependent on its favors, that there will be no opposition from that class…. The great body of the people, mentally incapable of comprehending, will bear its burden without complaint, and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests.“
What’s the recipe for a Molotov cocktail?
It can’t really be said that anyone knows the names behind the Fed. The Securities and Exchange Commission doesn’t need to publish the Fed’s shareholders, as the Fed is not publicly traded. Reportedly, even American politicians don’t actually know who owns the Federal Reserve. Maybe they did the handshake wrong.
As the treasury continues to take out loan after loan in a deficit spendfest that is this unplanned recession, the Fed’s power over the American people extends. The future of our country is tied up in an installment plan that future taxpayers must bear. That uncertain future is rapidly catching up to us.
There is a way out, which I will outline in future editions of this series. For now, let me leave you with the hope that the revocation of the Federal Reserve act is introduced into Congress every year by proponents of a sensible monetary system. The act itself is unconstitutional, precluding Congress‘ protected power to coin and regulate the value of currency and a subsequent Supreme Court Decision in 1935.
If this country is capable of anything, that is responding to the fire of public opinion. They give us the fuel. Strike the spark.
CHEYA CARY is down for a protest when you are. Send him your list of grievances at cheya.cary@gmail.com.