ENIGMA CURRY

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M3 -- The last truth of our money. Buried.

In the Constitution of the united States, all of the powers of Congress regarding the creation of money are in article 1, section 8:

[ The Congress shall have power ] To coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and fix the standard of weights and measures; To provide for the punishment of counterfeiting the securities and current coin of the United States.

Very clearly, the Constitution says that Congress may create coins, not paper money, to be used as currency. Paper money has no intrinsic value. It is only a promise to the bearer that someone will give you real money in exchange for that piece of paper. Paper money is not a new phenomenon either. It was well known to the founders of this country including those at the Constitutional convention. In fact, the continental Congress issued over $225 million in paper bills of credit to fund the Revolutionary war. ¹

Further on, in Article 1, Section 10, there is a clear distinction made between coin and paper money (aka bills of credit):

No State shall coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of debts.

Ever since the Constitution was signed and published, there has been a continual degredation in the public's understanding of this important fact: paper money has always created inflation and rapidly devalues as more bills are produced. When the continental Congress made their first 'Continental' dollar, it was worth exactly 1 dollar's worth of gold. A dollar is a specific unit of weight of gold. That's what Article 1, Section 8 is alluding to when it states that congress can fix the weight. By the end of the war, due to Congress printing so many paper bills, that same 'Continental' was worth half of one percent of one dollar's worth of gold.¹ By that time, you needed 168 of these bills to purchase what 1 of them used to buy. Today, a Big Mac costs $3.15. Imagine that same Big Mac costing $529.20 just five years from now. That's the kind of inflation we're talking about here.

The authors and signers of the Constitution knew exactly what kind of limitations they were putting upon themselves, and future generations, when they declared that Congress could only use coinage for currency. They knew that paper money would get them into trouble like it already had.

Our government, though, has found it all too easy to ignore these limitations. Throughout our history, our leaders have debased our currency by printing it whenever they have wanted. In 1971, all remaining doubts that there were links between the paper 'dollar' and real money were laid to rest.

Ever since 1971, the US 'dollar' has been officially backed by absolutely nothing (unofficially a lot longer than that). The only reason why people accept it as a valid medium of exchange is because of the confidence people have in the strength of our country. Let me repeat that - the only reason why people accept the 'dollar' is because people trust that the US is being responsible with its monetary policy.

On March 26, 2006, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System ceased to publish the M3 monetary aggregate. WTF is that you may ask?

The M3 is the report that the Fed publishes (or until this year, that is) that shows exactly how many bills are being created and held. If it becomes no longer possible to tell how many 'dollars' are being made, then how is the confidence in our monetary policy going to fare? What have we got to hide?

A lot, apparently.

The M3 has more than doubled in 10 years. Bush has borrowed more money from the Fed than all the previous presidents of the US combined. We're still shoveling money into Iraq, and we're steadily preparing to mount war against Iran. What better way to hide how much money is being stolen from us than to destroy the source of that information?

1. A History of Money and Banking in the US, Murray Rothbard, pg 59, 60

Fiscal irresponsibility completely out of control.

I've written a few times on how badly we're spending money these days, but this article from Rolling Stone should bring the point home:

According to the Treasury Department, the forty-two presidents who held office between 1789 and 2000 borrowed a combined total of $1.01 trillion from foreign governments and financial institutions. But between 2001 and 2005 alone, the Bush White House borrowed $1.05 trillion, more than all of the previous presidencies combined.

How have we let things get this far out of control? It's unbelievable: more money borrowed in five years than in all the two-hundred and eleven years previous... and Bush still has until January 20, 2009 to bring that number even higher.

This is money that you and I will be held accountable for one way or another

Imagine a boot smashing on a human face -- forever

I am sick to my stomach after reading this latest news. We have heard over the last several months a lot about justification of torture and debate on when, where and under what circumstances it should be allowed to occur. This, though, is personal - An uncensored glimpse into our own local reality: domestic torture of unconvicted Citizens of our own country.

Eugene Siler of Jacksboro, TN was brutally beaten by Police officers in July of 2004. His wife Jenny secretly hid a recorder in the room and caught the whole candid event on tape. The transcript has been available for a while. The audio has now been realeased as well.

Luckily, the officers involved have all been charged and sentenced to prison, if but for a small token amount of time.

Please read or listen to the above. If you have any lingering beliefs that law enforcement is here for our benefit or in any way respects the rights of their fellow human beings, this should put things in their proper perspective.

You might be thinking that this all turned out OK because the officers were all convicted. Yes, that is the good part of this story, but it was only due to the secretly hidden recording device. How many more untold stories like this are hidden forever?

Thanks to the Hammer of Truth for the story.

Waking Life

I'm trying to determine if things are just getting really bad or if I'm just starting to wake up.

I try to read the news everyday. I browse the topics at mainstream media sources but I try to get as much of my daily info from a variety of independent and blog-type news sources. Unfortunately, a lot of really important things are filtered out by the mainstream media these days. Also, I don't have enough time in my day to read all the potentially really newsworthy topics in the blogosphere. I've missed a lot in just the past few weeks alone:

• Boy convicted for putting pictures of guns on MySpace
  This 16-year-old was arrested in February because he posted pictures of his father's guns on his blog. The pictures were taken privately in his own home, and he had his father's permission to handle the guns, even when he was alone at home. He has been convicted of 'possession of a handgun by a juvenile'; however, the law also gives permission for parents to allow their children to handle their guns in their own homes. Therefore, no law has been broken, but it looks as if he will be going to prison regardless.
• Federal agents attempt to seize gold tooth caps from suspected drug dealers
  To their credit, the agents said that they didn't know that the tooth caps were impossible to remove without destroying the teeth. However, these agents only admitted this after the defendants' lawyer got an injunction to stop them. By that time, the defendents were already loaded up in the car and ready to go to the dentist. The best quote from the lawyer:

  It sounds like Nazi Germany when they were removing the gold teeth from the bodies, but at least then they waited until they were dead.

  No kidding! Not only were these people not dead, they weren't even convicted yet!
• The White House wants to examine your shit... Literally!
  In the ongoing war against drug users, the latest tactic is examination of your excrement for traces of cocaine.
• Disease-Mongering!
  Now we have drug companies inventing (!!) new diseases in order to gain more market spectrum and profits. Richard Ley, of the Association of the British Pharmecutical Industry, has this to say:

  We provide information that there are treatments out there that might help certain conditions, but at the end of the day it is down to health professionals to decide if they are appropriate.

  My translation: "We just throw random chemicals together and call it science, and then we pay off the doctors to sell our stuff. Oh, but we're not actually saying that our drugs are for any particular purpose. Again, they're just random chemicals, You do what you want with them."

Kind of makes one rethink the avian flu thing now doesn't it?

Oh, but you might say, "Ryan, that's not very libertarian of you to say that. Let the company sell what it wants to sell, it's your fault if you do something stupid with it. Let the market take care of it".

I might believe in the free market, but I don't have to stay quiet when a company does something I don't like, especially when it is in collusion with the government. This is far, far, removed from a free market. Currently, only the companies that are a part of the FDA elite are allowed to hock their wares.

• The FDA comes out with 'New' evidence that marijuana has no medical value
  This 'news' comes to us despite how testing marijuana is actually illegal in this country so they couldn't have done any real tests, despite how all the party's involved are a bunch of government-funded bureaucracies that certainly have their own agendas, despite hundreds of tests that show the contrary, despite the fact that, if the same standards were applied 30 years ago, even aspirin wouldn't have been approved by the FDA, despite the fact that people, since the beginning of time, have been able to responsibly use marijuana and no deaths directly attributable to it have been recorded. Yea, let's all congratulate the FDA on their new 'scientific evidence'.
And scariest of all:
• Bush Advisor, John Yoo, admits that Bush has the right to crush a child's testicals That recording was from a debate in December. Regardless of whether one has the right to torture a suspected terrorist or not, where does one get off saying that you can torture the suspect's family members, especially their children? These people are facists and should be taken out of power immediately!

The scariest thing about all of this is not that any of this has happened, but that there doesn't seem to be much outcry about it. When it was proven that Bush lied to us to get us into a war, I thought the People would revolt. We didn't. We don't seem to care about torture. We don't seem to care about domestic spying. We don't seem to care about anything that our government does anymore. We all seem to know that at least something they have done is unconstitutional. But where are the protests? We got Clinton impeached for far less. I think it's gotten so bad that maybe it's just too overwhelming and is just washing over us like the tide. I don't want to be lazy, I want to do my part, but it shouldn't be such a chore to dig this stuff up every day. We need to be proactive and refuse to put up with this sort of crap anymore. I'm still holding out for us, hoping that more people will gain the courage that Michael Badnarik has, that people will make the current regime accountable, that people's voices will be heard; I know that most of us still have one.