WEALTH AND MONEY PART XXVII: WAR, TAXES, BANKING AND THE LOOTING OF AMERICA
“Our roads and bridges are crumbling, our airports are out of date and the vast majority of our seaports are in danger of becoming obsolete. All the result of decades of neglect. None of this is really in dispute. Business leaders, labor unions, governors, mayors, congressmen and presidents have complained about a lack of funding for years, but aside from a onetime cash infusion from the stimulus program, nothing much has changed. There is still no consensus on how to solve the problem or where to get the massive amounts of money needed to fix it.” – – – CBS 60 Minutes Documentary
One must note in the above quotation – – – America cannot repair its infrastructure because we don’t have the money. But the question is never asked: Do we have the wealth? Of course the answer to this is an undebatable yes. Yes, we have the sand, gravel and cement needed to replace the failing concrete in our roads, bridges, airports and seaports. Yes, we have the metal needed to fabricate the necessary structural steel. Yes, we have all the required raw materials. Yes we have plenty available manpower. Yes, we have the heavy construction equipment. Yes, we have the knowledge and the engineering expertise to convert all these resources into the true wealth of new infrastructure.
But we don’t have the money. Think about this. We are surrounded by readily available resources, but we are forbidden to use them because we don’t have a pile of manmade pieces of paper with dollar signs printed on them or manmade numbers on a financial computer screen that say it is OK to convert our own resources into wealth. The ridiculousness of this situation is readily apparent, but we are so conditioned into thinking money is wealth that we do not recognize the financial rigging. We must remember:
Wealth = (Matter + Energy) X Human Knowledge
Money = The Claim to Wealth
The questions we must ask are why our government doesn’t have any money and why is our government in debt? The answer is multifaceted, but three issues stand out.
First, America now spends over 600 billion dollars (600 billion “claims” to wealth) annually wasting our true wealth in the form of advanced science, engineering, and physical resources, to kill people. Our most exquisite knowledge – knowledge that might otherwise be used to solve so many of humanity’s pressing problems – is squandered in military investments to murder and destroy. This is currently done under the guise of stopping terrorism, but it is well known that our military actions for the past 15 years have only served to increase terrorism while impoverishing all but the richest Americans (many of them making a fortune off the arms industry). The true function of the U.S. military at this point is simply to impose corporate imperialism around the world.
Second, and contrary to the deliberately fabricated lie that government spending (other than the military) is out of control, our government has been defunded. We no longer effectively tax the rich or corporations.
The latest Oxfam Report shows that the world’s 8 richest people, 6 of whom are American, now lay claim to as much wealth as the poorest half (3.6 billion people) of all humanity (Forbes list in rank: Bill Gates, Amancio Ortega, Warren Buffett, Carlos Slim Helu, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison and Michael Bloomberg). These 8 individuals obviously cannot begin to use the vast physical resources potentially available for 3.6 billion people. But since these 8 individuals have marks on financial computer screens that say they have the “money” to claim ownership of these resources and the poorest 3.6 billion people do not, one half of all humans on Earth are unable to articulate their enormous potential wealth. Like Americans who are forbidden to convert their readily available resources into infrastructure, one half of all humanity must go without because they don’t have any “money.”
The third and most critical reason why our government has no money and is in debt is that we have given the function of money “creation” to the private banking industry rather than keeping it as a public, government right. As such we are forced to borrow our own money at interest from the large private banks that own the Federal Reserve.
Money is not wealth but the claim to wealth. He who creates the money owns the wealth.
We are akin to a group of hungry people looking at food going to waste in their own garden because a few individuals “creating” the required “permission to eat slips” (we’ll call them dollars) are hoarding the slips for their own selfish use. These permission slip “creators” cannot begin to eat all of the available produce, but rather than give up their greed and sociopathic power lust, they watch the masses starve while the food rots in the garden.
More than any other single factor, granting the function of money creation to the private banking cartel is crippling America (not to mention the entire world) and her people. So we must ask . . . why don’t the hungry people – or the people who need to repair their infrastructure – create their own permission slips? Why are they forced to “borrow” at interest permission slips created out of thin air on the computer screens of private bankers? Why are they forced to go into permission slip debt?
The answer is we don’t need to put up with any of this. The power of money creation is the constitutionally guaranteed right of the U.S. government. Banking at the level of the Federal Reserve must become an entirely public function. We do not need to borrow a single dime to repair our infrastructure. We create our own permission slips. And contrary to the screams of the private banking cartel, debt free and interest free publicly created money is no more inflationary than the debt bondage money created by the private banks.
“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, the banks . . . will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. . . The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.” – – Thomas Jefferson (1809)
We are watching Jefferson’s predictions play out before our very eyes.
Part XXVIII will discuss: The Wrong Way to Finance Infrastructure