Posts Tagged “End the Fed”

Here is the speech I gave at the third End the Fed protest in Boston, on November 22nd, 2009.

The Empire of Lies.

In 1946, a British author named Eric Blair wrote an essay about how words shape ideas, and vice versa. Of particular interest to this former newspaper journalist was how politicians often used words not to expose ideas, but to obscure them; not to clarify thoughts, but to make rational thought nearly impossible. He had this to say: “In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and a not a ‘party line’…when one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases - one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy…the appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself.” In this era of tele-prompters and speech-writing committees, we can certainly appreciate Mr. Blair’s observation. We need to examine the words of today’s American “leaders” with an equally unforgiving attention to detail.

In 1950, Mr. Blair passed away - but not before writing one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. Like many of his generation, Blair had fallen in youthful infatuation with the egalitarian ideals of the socialists - but had become disillusioned, as he realized that human beings were not capable of peacefully wielding the sort of power that a socialized economy must require for its central planners. Ironically, if he had also known economics - and understood the more crucial, but unfortunately less riveting, reality: that socialism cannot work, simply because economic calculation (and the ordering of even the most simple production processes) is impossible without the prices generated in a free market - his novel (which is a sort of character study of human nature) might not have been nearly as interesting.  For, in his depiction of a future totalitarian state - ruled by “revolutionaries” who (as usual) inscribe on their banners the words Peace, Freedom, and Strength - he was really concerned with human emotional failings rather than those of a purely intellectual nature. Orwell - as he is better known - understood that when men are deceived by false prophets, when they close their minds to reason, they do so voluntarily. Our leaders may lie to us, but we do not become unfree until we begin lying to ourselves.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Big Brother has perfected the art of propaganda. The Ministry of Truth is engaged in a gradual process of rewriting the English language, so that heretical ideas - or thoughtcrimes, as they are called - will eventually be impossible to put into words, let alone action. In order to convince the masses of people to accept the inherent contradictions contained in any totalitarian system, the Party has coined three slogans that involve the pairing of words whose meanings are opposites. In doing this, the rulers both boldly display their domination over the minds of their subjects (wielding language as a blunt instrument of coercion) and siphon away any real meaning from the words themselves (hollowing out concepts that the proletarians would need to understand, before being able to mount a successful resistance movement).  Let us see what these slogans tell us today:

WAR IS PEACE

The U.S. government has been engaged in a perpetual war since about 1950. To be sure, the names change occasionally, the face of the enemy shifts - and, very rarely, a goal is actually declared to have been “accomplished.” The latest mechanical larynx has declared that the “War on Terror” is henceforth to be referred to as the “Overseas Contingency Operation.” But as the words change, the facts remain the same: we have thousands of soldiers scattered across the globe, and numerous factories constantly churning out new guns, bombs, aerial drones, and other instruments of violent death. America used to supply the world with ever-improving consumer goods, and in exchange, our working class once lived a proud and prosperous existence. We were respected - not hated - for being rich and free. Today, we export destruction, occupation, and a philosophy of aggressive force. We are despised, like any oppressor - euphemisms just don’t seem to work as well on people who have lost a life, a limb, or a loved one. Ironically, in today’s America, war IS peace: we have not legally declared war since 1942.  Some would say that avoiding an honest declaration of intent makes it easier to avoid responsibility. Ultimately, the American people are responsible. We have been lying to ourselves, pretending to believe in freedom, while spreading fear and unfreedom throughout the world - and bankrupting ourselves and our children in the process.  Soon the bills come due.

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

The most brazen tyrants have a habit of telling what Hitler called the “Big Lie.” This involves telling an untruth so colossal that the “broad masses” of people cannot believe that the teller “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” The best liars, of course, are those who believe the lies they are telling - and it is for this reason that the “progressive” movement has been so successful. Their process of self-hypnosis began with acts of verbal trickery. So - in order to oppose individual liberty (a concept rooted solidly in the American experience) and substitute its opposite (a centralized nanny-state) - the socialists simply co-opted the language of the very philosophy they were setting out to destroy. Before they stole the banner of Liberalism from the defenders of freedom, they changed the meaning of freedom itself. For today’s “liberal,” freedom equates roughly to equality of means - you are not “free” for example, if you don’t have access to all the luxury goods of your neighbor, or if you have to ask someone for a job (instead of being entitled to it), or if you don’t have special laws and privileges accorded to you, simply because you belong to one particular group or another. When Americans began using this “positive” definition of freedom (the right to do or to have) instead of the purely “negative” one (freedom from coercion, compulsion and fraud), we began the long journey down the road to contradiction. In today’s America, freedom IS slavery - in the form of an ever more entrenched and dysfunctional paternalism.  Now that government programs have made us free from addiction, poverty and unemployment, the latest Big Lie is that bureaucrats will make us all healthy. When socialism fails again, in addition to having lost more of our dignity, we’ll all be poorer as well. Ironically, we’ll all then be less free, no matter which definition of the word you prefer.

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, there are three remaining superpowers left, all vying for world supremacy. Each empire demonizes the other two, and presents its own system of political economy as both morally and mechanically superior to the others’ (when, in fact, they are all of them virtually identical). In order to keep war hysteria at a frenzied level – and so that individuals will continue to sublimate their own identities beneath that of the total state - an external enemy must exist, and the enemy must be the opposite of all that is good. The domestic servants of empire come to love their dictator because he protects them from the fearful “other” and - on a less conscious level - because he shields them from a sense of degraded and distasteful self. To people who are accustomed to lies, the truth hurts. Many people are happy to trade peace, freedom, AND truth to postpone a painful process of self-realization, and in exchange for a false feeling of security. In today’s America, ignorance IS strength. None of these empires, fictional or real, could be paid for, if the governments and the banks (choose whichever one it is that you find more unacceptable!) didn’t jointly control the supply and distribution of money - through taxation, inflation, and endless borrowing.  But after decades of dependence, many people don’t want to be free. They prefer to pretend, pushing the cognitive dissonance they are daily required to accept deep down into their subconscious. The West, Eurasia and China have all converged upon virtually identical economic systems: and no matter what names the economic planners attach to them, they each conform well to what Orwell presciently called “oligarchical collectivism.” The dogmas of the world’s vast empires might all be summed up in a new slogan: CAPITALISM IS SOCIALISM.  If you were born after the revolution, there’s a good chance you do not know what at least one of these two words REALLY means.  How many words have we left to go?

Ben Bernanke says that the world must remain ignorant of the monetary maneuvers he executes from behind his oracular curtain. Secrecy is necessary, we are told, to protect the strength of the dollar (95% of whose value the Fed has already destroyed). Transparency will surely endanger this jobless economic “recovery.” To the unemployed and to the confused, Ben says: Why the mistrust?  The Fed, after all, is only there to protect you: to ensure a smoothly-functioning economy by constantly tinkering with the value of your money - and haven’t they done a great job? Monetary policy is far too sensitive an issue for proles like you and me - and apparently even for the most privileged members of “the Party.” The resistance needs only to restore the truth: for when we end the ignorance, we will end the Fed. If we succeed, we will restore the promise of peace, freedom and strength to the American people. If we fail, we’ll all just have to learn to love Big Brother.

Yesterday, I attended my second protest organized by members of “End the Fed” - not one group so much as several affiliated sound-money organizations and activists who have come together under one national slogan. The first nation-wide protest took place on November 22, 2008 - its goal was to raise awareness about how the Federal Reserve is destroying what little is left of our formerly capitalistic system, like a worm hollowing out an apple from the inside. By continually devaluing our money, the Fed is destroying the very foundation upon which all economies are based - a reliable medium of exchange. The Fed’s inflationary policies redistribute wealth from small savers, and people on fixed incomes (the poor and elderly, for example), to politicians and bankers. To make matters worse, the Fed’s attempts to “regulate” the general level of prices, by constantly tinkering with the supply of money (a power that allows it to alter the value of the dollar at will) - results in the business cycle, which puts millions of people through the ringer every few years, during the “bust” phase. But you don’t have to take my word for it - why not read a couple of articles by Keynes and Mises and then see whom YOU believe?

It is a combination of a general ignorance of economics, coupled with an unfounded belief in the power of government to solve economic problems, that has led America to where it is today: at the doorstep of full-blown fascism. Again, don’t take my word for it - learn for yourself what the definition of fascism is, according to the man who invented it; see how the U.S. currently stacks up to the society that this man built for his people, supposedly for their own “good.” There are respected thinkers on both sides of the artificial and self-reinforcing political dichotomy that passes for rational discussion in this country, who will also make this point. Radical feminist liberal Naomi Wolf, for example; and Ron Paul, statesman and revolutionary. After examining the facts, I think most Americans will at least admit that a system of economic fascism is certainly the end that will be achieved if the current trend in our economic life is continued for a few more years.

I gave a speech yesterday about the mental stages I believe many people will pass through on their way to an accurate understanding of what money is and how it works in the false republic we live under. I obviously cannot say how it actually FEELS to be another person, but I remember how I have felt over the past 18 months or so. Here is the text of the speech, in downloadable PDF form. I will post video as soon as it is available.

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Money: the stages of understanding.

Revolution is primarily a process of education. Sam Adams, one of our great political philosophers, understood that the great battles of human history are fought not by soldiers – but by teachers; not on deserts, mountains, or city streets – but in the minds of men. All revolutions begin with “an irate, tireless minority” who – by definition – do not submit to the prevailing opinions of society as a whole. It is only through their continual agitation, that small “brush fires” of truth are initially set. It is only by their courageous adherence to principle, that these brushfires are gradually fanned into a blaze of revolutionary sentiment. It is only under the weight of their willingness to defy the status quo, that the “arc of the moral universe” bends slowly, but surely, toward justice. Revolutionaries have faith in themselves because they have faith in something much greater – they know that truth does not become error, even if nobody sees it. New truth is always unseen at first, and new philosophies are always written by men who are – at first – ignored or misunderstood.

Why must it be so? Why doesn’t the majority join quickly with a cause that will benefit them and their children far more than a system that makes them less free, and less human? It is because we were all born in what Plato called an intellectual “cave.” From childhood, we were taught that things – as they are – are things as they MUST be, ought to be, or have always been. And because there was no one there to tell us otherwise, many people have never questioned the reality we inherited, or dreamed of a new reality that we ourselves could create. To the inhabitants of the cave, the truth is nothing but the shadows – for they have never seen the light. So the process of awakening men must inevitably be an arduous one, for most of us are afraid to question the basic assumptions that establish our familiar and comfortable identity. Only as it becomes more and more clear that there is something wrong with the system, will men begin to lose faith in leaders who promise to solve our problems for us. As Jefferson said in the Declaration, “Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, then to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed.”

So it is today. After enduring a subtle and pervasive form of oppression for several generations, a majority of American citizens have lost a critical awareness of their position, and have come to accept their present plight as natural. The system of subjugation has faded into the background and become just a pale canvas on which the more shocking daily indignities of life now present themselves. The wars, the bailouts, the torture, the regulations – all these rungs on the ladder of creeping totalitarian control – merely punctuate and obscure a much more deeply ingrained injustice: one that most of us accept only because we take it for granted; one that has allowed our government and its accomplices to pay for the aforementioned and truly insufferable evils. I want you to know that times are changing: We are a tireless minority; we are no longer willing to suffer the insufferable; the brushfires are blazing; and we know that it is our duty to focus the force of the rising revolutionary sentiment onto its proper target. We know what must be eradicated – and it is monopoly control of the money supply. We know in what Form this evil is currently embodied, and therefore what we must abolish: The United States Federal Reserve System. To put it concisely, we must End the Fed.

In order to gain support for our movement, we must educate our fellow citizens about money. We must meet them where they are and ignite a fire of curiosity, or at least give them a sense of how important the monetary issue truly is.

About eighteen months ago, I began educating myself. I had watched the first few presidential debates, and I noticed one man on the stage who spoke differently than the rest. Not only was he willing to break with all the other candidates of his party to take a principled stand against the Iraq war, but he also made an argument that opposition to war must be grounded in opposition to expansive government power in general. As the son of anti-war “liberals,” my curiosity was ignited; when he referred to euphemistic terms for torture as “Newspeak,” implying that a form of Orwellian fascism had already “happened here,” I was listening; and, when he talked about ideas with which I was less familiar – the role of government, the purpose of the Constitution, inflation, sound money, and foreign debt – I realized I had some reading to do. In the fall of 2007, when Dr. Paul began openly making a case for getting rid of the central bank of the United States, I realized that I had no idea what a central bank actually was, and I began to explore the story behind the Federal Reserve.

I realized recently that there were several stages of understanding through which I passed. I can only surmise that most of my fellow travelers inhabit one of these stages at the moment. We must use the recollection of our own path to help guide others down a path of their own.

• To begin with, I remember what it was like never to have questioned the government’s control of our money. I am ashamed to say that my tacit support for the system was due purely to my own intellectual laziness. I was also hindered by a general disinterest in economics which, to a humanitarian like me, seemed deplorably technical and not sufficiently concerned with the harsh reality of human suffering. I still believed that the role of government could be to help the unfortunate – and despite all the things I hated about U.S. foreign policy, I still could not imagine that our leaders would pay for the wars through a systematic theft from Americans of the hard-earned fruits of their labor. I had accepted money like cavemen accepted the sun disc – never looking directly at it, and feeling only that it had always been there. I never wondered: where did money come from? Who controls it? Has it always been made out of paper?
• In the 2nd stage, I became very aware of just how much I didn’t know, and felt – justifiably – very confused. I began asking more questions of the above sort, and since I was busy with my studies, I resorted to the internet for quick answers to some of my queries. I found several interesting movies that explained the workings of the Federal Reserve and brought to my attention the practice of “fractional reserve banking.” This is the process by which commercial banks create new money out of thin air. I had never heard of this concept, and was astonished and skeptical. The morality of money was beginning to creep into my consciousness. How could the legal right to counterfeit be denied from me, I thought, but not to a special class of privileged men? It just didn’t seem fair. And as I read more about the history of the Fed: about how it was founded on a private island by seven bankers who were addressing each other by fake names; or how the gold backing of our money has been steadily siphoned away since the Fed was founded; or how Fort Knox hasn’t been audited since the 50’s; all these multifarious and evocative details made me feel almost like I might be the victim of a conspiracy.
• Now, I am not saying that there isn’t a conspiracy here – in the 3rd stage, this sort of explanation seemed very plausible to me. And who knows? Maybe Paulson and Bernanke and Geithner and all their Wall Street pals really are deliberately engineering another great depression so that they can take over the world – all I’m saying is that there doesn’t HAVE to be any conspiracy. All that would have been necessary for this socialist monetary system to evolve would be for the previous system to have a defect (even an easily repairable one), for that defect to cause problems, for the source of the problems to be misdiagnosed, and for the new system to perpetuate itself despite its own obvious flaws, simply because it provides benefits to those persons who hold the reigns of political and financial power.
• One of the other details about the Fed, of which many people are unaware, is its “independent” and therefore quasi-private nature. In fact, much of the anti-Fed literature out there objects to the Fed’s existence on the very grounds that it IS private, and thus not answerable to the “people,” through their elected representatives. Many anti-Fed activists on the left even advocate that, to fix the problem of constant theft of our money and our children’s money, we take control of the money supply away from greedy private bankers and put it back into the hands of the politicians, where it belongs! In the 4th stage, I was fixated on this detail of “private” ownership, and so the “nationalization” argument did have a certain appeal to me – especially because I was also overly focused on the “backing” of the fiat money: on the fact that the debt paper came into existence, technically, by means of a loan from the Federal Reserve to our government. For this reason, I even wrote that the government ought to just create money out of thin air and spend it into existence, as opposed to asking the Fed to create it out of thin air and “loan” it to them, in exchange for U.S. Treasuries that our government clearly does not intend ever to honor. But, as it became clearer to me that BOTH bankers and politicians benefit from the money system they control, and since it is clear that the financial and political elite have extensive interconnections, I eventually realized that reform of the monetary system could not be merely an ostentatious switch of control from one group of bureaucrats to another. In order to prevent abuse of the power to counterfeit, this power must be denied to all. Control over money should belong to no man, nor to any government of men. A “public” monopoly is no better than a “private” monopoly – not in this case. Only by ending all attempts to regulate the money supply, and debunking the economic theory that underpins such foolish attempts, will the scourge of inflation (and its more flamboyant cousin, the business cycle) be abolished. Only in this way will capitalism be given the chance it deserves. We must return to a commodity money, and this time we must make sure that it is not administered by the government.
• And so I arrived at the 5th stage. In this stage I learned that the Fed is essentially a cartel like any other. The banking industry, at a certain point in its history, formed a non-competitive “cooperative.” Like any monopoly agreement within an industry, it could only be enforced through the strong arm of government regulation. So, the Fed was created, at the behest of bankers, who were just as powerful a special interest group in 1913 as they are today. The Federal Reserve System allowed the bankers to counterfeit money at higher rates than before, without the risk of failing due to bank runs; and it allowed the politicians to pay for socialist projects and imperial wars that the American people have traditionally opposed. Fiat money allowed the United States to become an empire. Like all empires, ours will come to an end with the destruction of our currency. I now see our government for what it is – a collection of men who are not qualified to run our lives, since no man could claim those qualifications; a crumbling edifice of what once was a great experiment in liberty; a tyranny similar to the one that men like Sam Adams urged their neighbors to oppose.

We must teach our neighbors about money. We must not feel ashamed at trying to help them. We must not feel self-conscious or impatient, for our task is certainly not as hard as it must have been for our ancestors. Harriet Tubman famously said that, though she had freed a thousand slaves, she could have freed a thousand more – if only they had realized they were slaves. We are the Harriet Tubmans of our day. With the help of God and our fellow men, we have broken free from the intellectual chains that bind all men born into a system designed to oppress them. It matters not whether this design is deliberate. Each of us takes our own road to awareness, and it is our duty to wake up those whom we have left behind in our struggle for freedom. If each of us frees a thousand, or a hundred, or ten, or even just one slave – they will surely free another. And when millions of slaves know the truth about our government, it won’t matter which of their unconstitutional laws we choose to ignore – they won’t be able to stop us. When the state cannot enforce its unjust edicts, then the revolution is accomplished.

Boston Federal Reserve Bank
April 25, 2009