Swiss to use Gold Again
Aug 12, 2011
Good points Larry. As you say controlling the money supply so there will not be too much or too little is quite simple. I suggested a yearly assessment and you quarterly – either one would work. The problem is not in predicting how much money is needed for stability but in controlling spending by our dear leaders. This will be a problem that will need to be addressed no matter what money system is used – and history tells us that a gold standard is no deterrent.
The people themselves will set up their own organizations – more effective than the Tea Party that will put the needed pressure on our leaders to govern for the good of the people rather than their own.
Re: BOL Engineered Collapse…
Aug 12, 2011
Blayne: Could it be the BOL have influenced the World governments to a debt based currency so it would collapse and make way for a new currency that is more tenable?
I say this because it seems the only thing that will change this unsustainable monetary system and false economy that is now evaporating is complete collapse. Although the Swiss Proposal is a step toward a more stable currency.
JJ You’re right that mistakes often lead us to something that will correct those mistakes and in the end we progress but it is not in the plan for the Brotherhood to lead us into either error or the lesser of two or more paths.
We do not need their help to come up with bad ideas. Humanity is capable of coming up with plenty of these on its own. Now and then an agent of darkness injects something in the system that really gets some traction but as far as money goes they can normally sit back and let us chose badly and then support the choices that further their cause.
On the other hand, there are not a lot of good ideas from humanity centered on money that have the possibility of materializing in the near future. The forces of light will encourage the good ideas that do materialize and seek to inspire new ones as we grow in consciousness.
In saying this, let me stress that the Brotherhood doesn’t attempt to get humanity to accept concepts that are beyond our consciousness. The story of Moses illustrates this. God considered giving the Israelites the higher law, but when he saw that their consciousness wasn’t ready, because they were worshipping the golden calf, he then gave them a bunch of black and white rules, a lower law.
This lower law did not involve deception but was designed to help the people make progress.
On the other hand, the current money system is full of deception and debt that doesn’t guide us anywhere good except in maybe unraveling illusion so something better can be made.
When humanity enters the path of error then the Brotherhood patiently awaits the day of opportunity to push us on the path of correction. Sometimes they just have to wait until disaster occurs so we can definitely see we are in error and may then be open to positive change.
Blayne As most here know I disagree with JJ on the Middle East wars. I think they are unnecessary and have ulterior motives for banksters etc. he says they are necessary to keep the DB’s plans from coming to fruition inferring BOL influence here.
JJ I’ve only supported current one war in the Middle East – the one in Iraq. I believe the brotherhood knew the risks and that the cost would be great but supported this in the hope that a degree of freedom could be established in that area to pave the way for freedom of movement when Christ comes again. It appears that the war in Afghanistan is a no win situation. I think the original short war was necessary, but not much has been accomplished since then.
On the other hand, the Iraqis have gotten a taste of democracy and other Middle Eastern people are desiring more freedom because of it. I think successful seeds have been planted there. That doesn’t mean that some temporary tyrannies will not surface in various places but overall I think the Middle East is heading for progress.
Blayne I have my serious doubts about the seeds of democracy being planted In the Middle East however even if it has been will it not take a serious blow when the US and Europe along with Asia go down in flames due to the unsustainable debt based monetary system and the troops will have to come home simply from lack of money?
JJ The forces of darkness often attempt to get their way by manipulating the money system. The perilous economic situation the world is in works to the dark brothers advantage and this is one of the greatest threats to the hoped for materialization of democracy in the Middle East.
On the positive side, our financial problems could delay democracy, but not destroy the seed, for the seed is good.
Blayne: This gives me a side tangent thought that perhaps the BOL are trying to end the wars with this collapse. But never the less a collapse will leave everyone in disarray and make a perfect opportunity for some new dictators to rise especially in those regions.
JJ If there is a collapse both sides will be doing everything in their power to implement their ideas. A collapse is desired more by the Dark Brothers because it gives them greater opportunity to manipulate the people. In the past a collapse or revolution has usually worked in their favor but humanity is advancing and this may change the next time round.
Blayne: I just wonder why they would promote these wars when they are unsustainable based on the monetary system. Was the monetary system the fail safe to end the wars?
JJ The only recent war I know they supported was Iraq. This was a calculated gamble. It may require a substantial passing of time to see how successful it turns out, for the Masters look some distance in the future in making their decisions.
Re: BOL Engineered Collapse…
Aug 12, 2011
Larry W BTW, I think Blayne makes a good point that the current precarious world money supply could facilitate a change for the better and could very well have been engineered or used by BOL first Ray.
JJ That’s possible but remember that first ray energy was released just before WWII and the Nazis picked it up. This wasn’t what was hoped for but the forces of light did win the war and progress was made.
Re: Swiss to use Gold Again
Aug 13, 2011
Thought I’d make a few comments on the article posted about the Swiss making a partial return to gold.
It says: In March, Utah repealed its capital gains tax on gold and silver coins it will recognize as legal tender. Twelve other states are considering similar legislation.
JJ This is a good move but mostly symbolic as the big tax as well as control comes from the federal government.
Quote: Then, in June, Senators Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) introduced the Sound Money Promotion Act that would remove the 28% federal tax on gains realized in the use of gold or silver coins recognized as legal tender for use within a state.
JJ This is the legislation we need if an alternative metallic currency is to be created. It should be expanded to loosen the rules on non metalic fiat local currencies so experiments can be made with a variety of money systems.
Quote: Now, in Switzerland, efforts are underway to create an official Gold Swiss franc (GSF) with a set of coins, each with a fixed content of gold. The proposed constitutional change would permit private institutions to issue an unlimited number of coins whose appearance, content and weight of gold, and definition would be under the supervision of the Swiss government.
For example, the smallest coin would have a face value of 1 GSF and have 0.1 grams of gold in its center, similar to today’s bi-metallic euro coins, and be worth — at today’s price of gold, about $4.00.
Five, 10, 20 and 50 GSF coins would have 0.5, 1.0, 2.0 and 5.0 grams of gold and today would be worth approximately $20, $40, $80 and $200 respectively. Gold Swiss franc bank notes are conceivable, as are GSF bank deposits, but they would have to be 100% backed by gold held by the issuing institution. Credit transactions would be legal, but fractional reserve credit would be forbidden under Swiss law.
JJ This is a good move considering the instability of the debt-based currency the world now uses. They have an interesting solution to avoid the use of very tiny gold coins in that they place the small amount of gold in the center of a larger coin – maybe something like our quarters.
A problem I see with this is thieves would take the gold out of the centers and replace it with lead and the counterfeit would be difficult to detect by regular merchants.
Quote: “The primary purpose is to make it easy for the Swiss people to use or hold gold as an alternative to the Swiss franc and all other currencies,” explains Thomas Jacob, the man behind the gold initiative who now heads the newly founded Goldfranc Association.
JJ I would guess that most people would just hold on to the partial gold coins and spend the paper making them very similar in use to the gold coins we invest in today.
Quote: Within the next few weeks, signatures will be collected to launch an initial referendum that would require the Swiss National Bank to repatriate all of its gold holdings to within the borders of Switzerland, prohibit it from selling any more of its gold, and require a minimum 20% of its assets be gold.
JJ This move may be partially responsible for the recent leap we have had in the price of gold.
Quote This referendum will put the issue of gold as money on the political agenda. The next step is to offer a follow-on initiative permitting the free-coinage of GSF.
JJ The current imitative still leaves full metallic monetary control in the hands of the State. If they allowed private enterprise to coin money with no fractional banking allowed it would be interesting to observe the developments.
Quote: The creation of a Gold Swiss franc and the free coinage thereof, along with the repeal of taxation by the U.S. of gold and silver coins used as legal tender, would liberate market participants to generate spontaneously a new monetary order.
JJ I don’t think it would create a new monetary order, but many people would use it for a security back up and collect the coins for investment. Unless there was a total collapse the people would still use paper and digital fiat money as their main spending mechanism. Keep in mind that under this proposal most of the money will still be debt based fiat.
Now if they also freed up the laws that would allow for the creation of non debt based fiat money we would see many more changes.
In advocating freedom of the people to print or coin their own money I do not advocate that the State relinquish control over issuing the main currency with which taxes are paid. Without this control then we could return to the cacophony of the mid 1800s where we had 7000 different types of banknotes issued each having different values making exchanges costly and time consuming.
Our current system has a lot of flaws but one thing that is often overlooked is the great convenience of having one currency rather than 7000 and not having to pay fees up to 40% to exchange one currency for another.
Re: Swiss to use Gold Again
Aug 13, 2011
I certainly think a free-for-all currency would create problems..
Example..
You receive payment issued from some bank in Oklahoma. You’re uncertain about it’s stability but you have a good profit margin and accept it. You then take the money to a local grocery store and they say it is not on their list so you’re out of luck. You then go to an exchange center and they tell you that this is one of the currencies they do not even deal with. This bank claims to back up their money with gold but too many people have complained that they cannot redeem their money.
The guy then gives the exchange some other bills he received from other issuers and is disappointed to see that he must take a 40% discount for one and 30% for another. Now it turns out that most of the profit he thought he made is gone.
In 1860 they had 7000 different money types. With several times the population and much more commerce a free-for-all would probably give us over 20,000 different types of money. Why you would want to head toward such a nightmare is a mystery to me.
After the country went off the partial free-for-all (after 1860) no one with a memory of the situation wanted to return to it let alone install a complete free-for-all with no government insolvent at all.
Re: Relationships 101
Aug 14, 2011
Dan: I would think those that WANT (are TRYING) to be mentally polarized but are not there yet (ie; in truth are yet emotionally polarized), would be more likely to deny, suppress or ignore their feelings than those truly mentally polarized.
JJ This is a good point Dan. There are many people who think they are smart who may fool others into thinking they are mentally polarized when they are in a lot of glamor and very emotionally polarized. The true mentally polarized person has mostly mastered the emotions and does not deny or suppress.
A good test to determine if a person is mentally polarized is to strongly disagree with him – telling him his views are nonsense – or even insult him. If you see a lashing out or signs of a grievance then he is not mentally polarized.
Re: New Book Cover
Aug 14, 2011
It’s too bad we cannot discuss a book cover without the danger of hurt feelings present. Oh, well, let us move on.
The cover I designed was not written in stone. I’m sure a number of people could come up with something better – though I do like it myself. The need is to reach the largest number of people who would possibly read the book. My cover was a little new agey and that may cause some mainstream people to bypass it.
On the other hand, Steve’s cover would appeal to the mainstream mind more than mine and that may be a good thing. Who would have thought we would get a good mainstream design from such a non mainstream group?
I showed the cover to my wife and she thought it would fill the need better than my design. (There goes the illusion of Artie rubber stamping everything I do.)
Now if I use this I will need a good copy of the graphics, so I hope Stephen has the original graphics in high resolution.
Here’s what I would like you to do Steve.
Prepare a copy of the cover with no text approx 8.5″ x 5.5″ in 600 DPI and email it to me as a JPEG. I will then add the text and present it to the group.
Thanks for your effort. Good job.
Depressions
Aug 14, 2011
You (Blayne) state that several depressions during the 18th century were illusions and no one responded to this claim. This is not true as I did respond and will respond again with a repost since you seemed to have missed it.
First, let me point out that just because there was growth in GDP during a certain period doesn’t mean that major economic problems did not exist.
We had growth near 3% last year and I didn’t see you talking about the idea that the bad Obama economy was a myth.
If you think the depressions of the 19th century were illusions need to read a little history. Here is an eye-opening account from a book called “Coxey’s Army,” pages 13-17.
Hard times in the 1870s had been accompanied by a series of major railway strikes and urban disturbances. During a less severe slump in the mid-a80s, anti-Chinese riots had erupted on the Pacific Slope. In 1893, with the worst downturn yet, normally confident and optimistic Americans shuddered at the thought of what the future might bring. Already during the fall and winter of 1893/94, the ominous cry “Bread or Blood” had been heard in several of the nation’s cities, and the rise of Coxeyism suggested that worse was yet to come.”
The season of economic despair began in mid-1893, when panic on Wall Street signaled the start of a depression that would last four years. Within six months nearly five hundred banks and sixteen thousand businesses had failed. Only two of the five western transcontinental railroads remained solvent. No matter what the industry, people fortunate enough to retain jobs frequently saw their wages cut by one-fifth-or even by one-half Every month thousands more involuntarily joined the ranks of the army of unemployed, although no one could be sure of the exact number: the federal government did not keep such statistics, and neither did many states. What statistics were available were crude and not always meaningful. One report estimated that on January 1, 1894, 25 percent of the breadwinners of Montana and Utah were without work; 50,000 were jobless in California. In Chicago that figure was close to 100,000, and in New York City it fell somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000, depending on who was guessing. Making matters worse was the fact that the jobless often had dependents who constituted an even larger portion of the destitute; an estimated 7,000 unemployed San Franciscans, for example, had 20,000 dependents. Atlanta had 3,000 out of work with 15,000 dependents, while for Philadelphia the figures were 62,500 jobless and 187,000 dependents.
The grim statistics caused the head of the New York Central Railroad, Chauncy M. Depew, to comment: “I have been through all the panics of the last thirty years, but I have never seen one in which the distress was so widespread and reached so many people who previously had not been affected as this Panic of 1893.” And what advice did he offer the jobless? Join Coxey’s army, commit suicide, or “cheerfully and courageously do the best you can and not cry.””
The press added a human dimension to the unemployment statistics. Journalists told of hopeless, penniless old men wandering the streets of Saint Paul, of men in the prime of life without jobs in the timber country of Wisconsin and Oregon. In the Iron Range near Lake Superior even the largest mines had closed. The stillness in towns like Ironwood and Hurley was deathlike. With forty inches of snow on the ground outside and temperatures hovering near eight below zero, people huddled around fires; some had neither food nor clothing for their children. In some cases only the kindly merchants who fed the miners and their families loosened the grip of starvation.
In Denver, a relief camp opened in River Front Park using tents provided by the state militia, but it attracted so many indigents from all over the West that it was forced to close for lack of facilities. For a time the railroads of Denver allowed the jobless to ride east on freight trains, but the number of freeloaders grew so great that the companies cancelled the offer and begged authorities for protection.
The annual convention of casket manufacturers reported that business was off because of the depression, and one member tried to make light of the situation by quipping that times were so bad that the sick could not afford to call a doctor and thus improved their chances for recovery. But unemployment was no joke. The blow was psychological as well as economic.”
“Last cent gone,” a thirty-two-year-old widow living in Chicago penned in her diary for November 10. “Children went to work without their breakfast. Gave them car fare and a nickel each for lunch and promised them a royal dinner when they got home. .. . This awful struggle is wearing me out. I cannot sleep and my face is beginning to look haggard.” Newspapers carried stories of people in similar circumstances who committed suicide rather than steal food.’
There was simply no escaping the sights and sounds of hard times. Iowa schoolmarms were occasionally surprised by a band of homeless wanderers who had broken into the classroom for a night’s shelter. And whether the railroads approved or not, passenger trains on the western lines were overrun with freeloaders clinging to any place a human hand could grip. Frequently half as many people rode out-
side the cars as within. Some perched on the roof and braved the hail of cinders blown back from the locomotive, while others crouched under the cars on the trucks, suspended only inches from the whirling and dangerous axles. Many such passengers were well-dressed men on their way to the cities of the East where they believed-erroneously-that work would be easier to find than in the sparsely settled Rocky Mountain country. Husbands promised to send money back to support their wives and children in Denver or Cripple Creek, but some families would never be reunited.
In cities of the East, the jobless congregated outside newspaper offices every morning trying to be the first to scan the “help-wanted” ads. Sometimes they also participated in public protest meetings and signed petitions to be forwarded to Congress, probably the most ineffective thing an unemployed person could have done in 1893. 16
It was not simply that congressmen were insensitive to the plight of the jobless. Most were charitable men, but they nonetheless reflected the survival-of-the fittest ethic that then prevailed in America. When asked what the government could do to help, the nation’s leaders typically answered, “Nothing.” They argued that “economic laws are a part of the machinery of the universe as much as the laws of gravitation.” Unemployment was a natural phenomenon like an earthquake or cyclone, a product of forces beyond human control. Government tinkering with economic laws could only make things worse. “Laissez-faire,” said one apologist for the philosophy of governmental inaction, “has its drawbacks, but it means, on the whole, wealth, vigor, resource, and capacity for recuperation.” ‘ 7
Each bout of economic depression in the nineteenth century yielded its crop of platitudes about the need for the jobless to bear their suffering and privation with patience. Beyond their limited personal resources, the only help they might receive came from private charity and local relief programs. Occasionally small-town merchants extended credit and a helping hand to the jobless, and saloon keepers allowed homeless men to bed down on the sawdust in an out-of-the-way corner of the bar-“Hotel de Drunk,” they called it. Saloonmen were generous with their food, too, although hard times threatened to end the time-honored custom of the free lunch with a five-cent beer.
Private charity took a bewildering variety of forms. The New York World gave away more than a million loaves of bread, and the rival
New York Herald distributed thousands of dollars worth of clothing. A Tacoma philanthropist, A. V. Fawcett, served Christmas dinner to a thousand children who ranged in age from two to fifteen. They consumed 75 turkeys, 500 pies, 200 pounds of cakes, 300 loaves of bread, 500 pounds of potatoes, 5 cases of corn, and 50 pounds of coffee. 18
A cheap and efficient method of relief favored by both private and municipal charities was the soup kitchen. Great caldrons filled with donated meat and vegetables provided mulligan stew to all comers. In some locales an able-bodied man might first be required to earn his meal by chopping firewood, which was then distributed to heat the homes of the poor. For a single meal, a man often had to chop a sixth of a cord of wood, working all the while on an empty stomach. Destitute women were occasionally assigned jobs in a municipal laundry.
Cities also established free employment bureaus and funded public-works projects like digging ditches for sewer lines. In this way Seattle employed 600 diggers, 200 to a shift, for 15 days. In Chicago men in tailor-made suits stood in line for pick-and-shovel jobs that paid 15 cents an hour. When snow blanketed the city in December, Chicago hired 20,000 shovelers for a few hours to clear its streets. Occasionally a community attempted to systematize the welter of overlapping and ineffective public and private programs, but in some places the poverty was so overwhelming and the confusion so great that officials were reduced almost to throwing loaves of bread at the unemployed.”
Surrounded by an ocean of misery, the affluent sought to insulate themselves from the human dimensions of hard times. In almost mocking disregard for the true plight of the impoverished, hard-times parties and masquerade balls became the fad. A hostess gave a prize such as a sack of flour to the guest who dressed as the most forlorn specimen of poverty or a broom to the most deplorable example of shabby gentility.
In Chicago a lavish charity ball-the highlight of the city’s social calendar-took place in January 1894. “It was the night for the poor,” recorded the Chicago Herald, “a gala, dazzling, blinding spectacle for the rich.” The money it raised would buy bandages for the injured and food baskets for the hungry. Many of the city’s foremost citizens were present: Robert T. Lincoln (the well-to-do son of the president), Mrs. Potter Palmer, the Philip Armours, George M. Pullman, and Marshall Field. The ball was a visual feast, a maze of color and beauty, of silken gowns trimmed in ermine and diamonds, and corsages of red roses. While the affluent danced away a frigid night, the poor huddled outside, their scantily clad bodies pierced by sharp winds sweeping off ice-covered Lake Michigan. Such contradictory scenes typified the times that gave rise to the Coxey crusade.”
Copyright 2011 by J J Dewey