(Money Matters; So Do Myths - Especially Myths About Money)

Well, now! That last one seems to have struck some nerves. Unlike, for instance, the essay “On the Justice of Roosting Chickens” some time ago by the far more prominent Professor Ward Churchill, I seem to have drawn stony – stunned, maybe – silence. It may well be that I give myself too much credit, but the usual chorus of protesting howls – all the “traitor” epithets, invective, and nugatory nitwit-isms – are conspicuous by their thunderous silence.

Whassamatter, folks – cat got your tongue? Or is it that’s it’s hard to tell somebody who’s had your dog’s teeth fastened in his leg for years that your dog doesn’t bite . . .?! Or that the guy with the gun pointed at your head is a good guy, "just doing his job" - ?

Yeah. There isn’t anyone who’s awake and rational enough to use the toilet who doesn’t know why people seek public office in the Land of the Fee. And that "Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely" is a rule that applies to power as little as that possessed by a local dog catcher.

It’s the reason that unless we begin to choose public officials by lottery, we won’t survive as a nation. The history of this country, short and documented by massive recording technology as it is, chronicles the ineluctable fact of what happens to a democracy infected by capitalistically-driven greed. Greed begets greed. Greed begets immorality, and crime. People cheat. Greed successful becomes power, and the ambition for power. People who seek power cheat, and the vicious cycle becomes a societal and governmental tornado, ripping everything it reaches apart. There isn't any doubt about that. It's what has happened.

Capitalism, the life force driving the United States, is after all a system whereby the earth and its assets, including people, are exploited and turned into "capital." That was money once; now it is essentially power (basically, only the poor use actual money - the rich, being powerful, have no need for it). The first - and greatest, most essential - U.S. myth is that capitalism somehow creates wealth from nothing. It doesn't. Capitalism is an economic system based upon the creation of monetary value for those with military or property-derived power, and has never operated - could not possibly operate - without input from outside itself. That means systems NOT capitalistic.

No capitalistic society, and no capitalist, has ever been capitalist without having been the equivalent of a colonialist and exploiter of someone or something exploitable - i.e., more primitive or weaker. Examples so abound that to recite them is pointless. When it had driven the people already there from the nation it became, the United States and it capitalist system was built on slavery. It prospered and became great - absolutely powerful and absolutely corrupt - with the muscle of black slaves. It used up the lungs of miners, chewed up the bodies of factory workers, and saved itself from economic depression by victimizing its farmers and ranchers. It got greased the wheels of progress with the sweat of children and the poor. History is an obvious thing when it recapitulates common individual experience. The United States of America is perhaps, as I said, the classic example. "Ontogeny," someone once said, "recapitulates phylogeny." The macrocosm is a multiplication of the microcosm.

As a moral question, all that is necessary is to find a way to justify the process, something man's religions - those great teachers of morality - have always somehow found easy to do. Nevertheless, the ineluctable fact remains that for one or a few at a banquet table to have all the food means that some or someone at the table must do without. Starve, in other words. The nearing end of the earth's oil supply will soon teach that lesson in a manner that cannot be gainsaid.

It has always (since high school, where I debated the proposition often) been a wonder and mystery to me how the nation's great religions and religious teachers have been able to remain relatively silent - at very least, to speak in a moral sense, ineffective - as "American" capitalism has deluded us into believing that our torrents of gas-guzzling SUVs, our shopping malls crammed with luxury and effort-saving (energy-consuming, in other words) gadgets, our groceries piled to the ceilings with food, our throw-away stadiums and buildings, and more, are the logical product of a superior economic and social system.

It's a lie. Maybe it was told often enough. Or maybe we just wanted to believe it. Far more comfortable that way. The guy shivering under the bridge, trying to sleep, is there because he wants to be. People dying of starvation are really committing suicide. They could just get a job. Sure. Their kids . . . well, there must be a word that takes care of that. "Collateral damage" - socially, I mean?

What does an individual - like Bill Gates, for instance - do with an income of, say - there are a dozen ways to compute it, all depending on who's telling and how you look at it - $800 per SECOND? What IS a dollar? How does the U.S. Treasury decide when it's time to print a dollar? What justifies it, makes it legal? Who gets it, once they're printed it? Those, parenthetically, are questions I've been asking people for years, and during a national tour a few years ago, I actually walked around malls with a clipboard and asked people at random. That's how I know you haven't the faintest idea about money, economics, or the merits of one economic system compared to another. The fact is that when you tell me that capitalism is the greatest economic system on earth and all that twaddle, you have no idea of what you're talking about.

All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise not from defects in their Constitution or Confederation, nor from want of honor or virtue, so much as downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation." John Adams, our second President said that. Was he ever right.

So what? Just this: you also wouldn't have the faintest idea of what it means to have a tax system like ours, with a federal Gestapo like the Internal Revenue Service. I have, not only because I lived through a war with them, but because the war gave me incentive - being tortured emotionally and physical will do that for you, thank you very much - to learn about money, economics, and the truth relative to them. The truth is that when government takes over the economic system - that's IRS, in case you're not paying attention to you own life - it's power becomes absolute. "Civil rights," the Constitution and its Bill of Rights, "Land of the Free," and the rest become meaningless. Government soon destroys the minds, the liberties and the very meaning of the people it tyrannizes. The arts, literature, music, food - everything that makes life worth effort - are cheapened and diminished, ultimately destroyed. I know - I lived it. The microcosm tells you what to expect of the macrocosm, you know.

Let's go back to Mr. Gates, the world's most successful capitalist (and, by the further way, I got some of these figures from another site, one concerned only with how much the great - world's richest, you know - man "earns." Check it out. http://evan.snew.com/ecgi/gates.cgi?160686983589928513936723178410604 ). What does anyone actually do with that kind of money? A couple of years ago, responding to a high school student's averment concerning how great it would be to have that kind of money, I assigned the class the project of trying to spend on paper ALL of $800 a second. None could imagine - even find with research - enough things to spend that kind of money on; few got to expenditures of even a billion. Here, though, are some things we learned:

 The United Nations Development Program reported in 1998 that the world's 225 richest people now have a combined wealth of $1 trillion. That's equal to the combined annual income of the world's 2.5 BILLION poorest people. Tell me: from man's earliest history, everyone living pretty much equally by gathering food, water, and life sustenance off the land, how do you think it came to be that way?

But back to Bill and his super-capitalist fellows: according to the National Coalition for the Homeless, there are 760,000 homeless people in the United States. If Bill, just one of the super fat cats, has a net worth of $27,382,000,000 (the number from the website I've mentioned), then he could give each of the homeless people $36,028.79. That's right at any given minute, of course; he keeps right on "earning," while they get poorer - and are joined by more and more homeless. And, by the way, unless I'm wrong and did my own computations incorrectly (during my travels, estimating the number of homeless was another project) that 760,000 figure should be closer to 2,000,000!

According to the people at Save the Children it costs $240 to provide the basic needs of one child for a year, which means that Bill Gates alone could save 114,091,180 children. I hope you're paying attention.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing, in Fiscal Year 2003, the United States Government printed paper currency worth a total of $153.52 billion, making the net worth of one citizen 17.83% of the nation's money issue for one year.

BUT WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN? One night on a radio talk show where I "appeared," a lady called in to say she was confused. "Of course you are, dear," I said. "The government and the super-wealthy people who run it spend billions to keep you that way. Look around (I use that expression a lot - it's a good way to know the truth). Of course, both the fact of your being kept confused and what you see of that when you look around makes it obvious when you think about it that we do not have a democracy, as we think we have - assuming, of course, that "democracy" means the people knowingly decide what their country should be. Maybe its a confused democracy, or democracy by confusion.

Are you thinking yet? Good, let's see if we can make another point, one that makes some REAL difference. In 2004, George W. Bush won the US Presidential Election with a total of 62,028,285 votes. That means that if JUST ONE fat cat should decide to BUY all the votes Bush got, plus one, he could, in fact, BUY the presidency. Had Bill Gates, for instance, done that, his net worth at the time would have enabled him to pay each voter $441.44. That'll by a lot of votes (especially illegal Mexican alien votes).

When you consider that George W. Bush and his military industrial complex cronies only had to buy the electoral college, you may get my point.

The subtitle to my book, "Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story," is "'America' and Its Freedom Myths." On the book's webpage, I quote John F. Kennedy, our 35th President. "For the greatest enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, pervasive, and unrealistic." One of the most basic tenets of "America" is that our system of laws is fair, that it discriminates against no one. All are equal under the law. REALLY? Then why, for instance, is are the penalties and punishments for violating that law so UNfair? Why, for instance, does an individual living on the pittance that is Social Security pay the same fine for a traffic violation as Mr. Bill Gates? A hundred dollars may be a sixth of the my monthly income. For Gates, it is his income for a second and a half (approximately - rounded or in federal government mathematics).

A few years ago, the US Justice Department tried to assess a fine of $1 million a day against Microsoft Corporation for an alleged antitrust agreement violation (now and then the fat cats seem have a falling-out; it's to keep people like that lady confused). If Mr. Gates would have been forced to pay the fine out of his own pocket, he'd have been able to pay the million every day for 27,381.8 days, or 74.96 years. The "Nation of Laws" doesn't discriminate, huh?

"Capital" is money, but only for the little people. For them, it's the carrot to the donkey. He'll stay on the rich man's treadmill as long as the rich man holds it out there in front of him. Even at that, "money" is a difficult concept. Money, for instance, never has the same value. In Mexico, a while back, I could get ten or eleven Pesos for a dollar. Everywhere I've traveled - and that's all over the place (a bum, unlike people with money, goes wherever the hell he pleases) - it was the same. What's up with that?

Well, take a hypothetical country. If the country has a "money economy" (remember that the rich don't use actual, in-your-hand, money very much), that means that it has a central bank, one run by the government (i.e., the rich). That bank decides how much money to print, controls the cost of the money ("interest" - what a word THAT is, huh? A little like "issues?"), and what the money is worth. The rich (the government and the bankers who run the government) always tell the jackasses following the carrot that we have a "free market" That's another of those "American" myths I talk about in my book. The U.S. Free Market is horseshit, a lie so blatant and obvious that only behavioral conditioning on a massive scale can explain it. "Tell a lie often enough . . . "

First off, who decides what money is, after all? Who has control of the printing presses? If the government had to live by collecting pigs, cows, corn, wheat, and property generally, it would not only make a helluva mess, it would make government 1/1,000,000th as big. So, in my fictionalized nation, the Federal Reserve (fancy term for "bank," huh?) tries to measure the total value of all those commodities it would otherwise have to tax. and to keep money of the same value circulating in the populace. If you suspect this is where the mischief comes in, you HAVE been paying attention. There is mischief a-plenty.

Why? Well, if the Fed prints too much money, the price of everything goes up. If wages go up, too, that oughtn't be a big problem, had it? Ah HA! But the bankers - who "earn" by lending the "money" - don't like that, because it cuts into the buying power value of the "interest" they collect. They aren't satisfied with getting something without effort or work, they want that "something" to be worth more than the "money" people already have (by working).

If the Fed prints too little money, prices fall. People always tell me that sounds like a good deal (people are kept confused, remember?) until I mention what it means when you OWE somebody money. You owe a guy ten bucks, but suddenly the ten-spot will buy a lot more than it did before you borrowed it. With everybody in the U.S. up to his eyeballs in debt, deflation (when the Fed prints too little money) would be an economic disaster. Wages would drop in value, while the debts - a number - would stay the same. To a guy like me, who dropped out of the "money" economy a long time ago, that's kind of comical, but it's true, and not so funny, if you're confused enough to base your life on the government's funny money.

So if the government can keep yanking you around by changing the relationship between its "money" and your hard work, and, obviously, people can make millions without having lifted a finger in the bargain (sorry for the choice of words) do you wonder why there are almost 36,000 lobbyists in Washington, D.C.?

Next "American" myth: We are the world's big buddy, running to the aid of anybody in trouble, and all that. Bullshit! That's like saying Bill Gates has donated a million dollars, or ten million, or a billion, again. There happens to be on country that prints all the money it wants to - got to keep the folks there in walking-around money (and the government spending like a drunken sailor), you know - while everybody else in the world - knowing damned well they're being had - has to accept that same money for everything they do and everything they make. That wondrous "standard of living" "American's" brag about ad nauseum is being maintained because we can go on printing all that money, forcing other countries to accept it regardless of how much we do or make. What we produce most of anymore is dollars, while other countries in the world have to produce commodities - real THINGS.

Now do you wonder why they hate us? Do you also wonder that - like I mentioned earlier here in the Mongoose Trick Blog - that China now has us by the throat? Anyway, how the hell do we DO that? I mean, if all the rest of the nations of the world have to do is stop playing our Sammy Glick game to make the dollar fall to its real, market value, why don't they?

Now we have to go back to what a dollar really is. Anything anybody else will accept in return for what he has has value. Whatever it was, it was "money." Gold, silver, diamonds (not so much), etc., had universal exchange value. But some things didn't require a wagon to carry around, and paper IOUs (sort of) proved to be very handy. Money, modern style, you might say (and that's where the typical nitwit seems to think he knows everything - he's finally understood something).

For some time, one of these I.O.U.s was worth - represented, actually - so much money. For the confused lady that night, I invented off the top of my head an island where the islanders grew magic bananas. A banana could turn into anything its owner wanted, so it represented goods and service (I fudged a little). After a while, instead of carting around bunches of bananas - tarantulas and snakes hide in there, you know - they started writing I.O.U.s. I owe you ten bananas, etc. One day when yanqui banker came to the island, and (of course) didn't have any bananas, he started writing I.O.U.s just like the islanders (and if that reminds you of anything, hey - maybe you ARE paying attention). The shit hit the fan - on the island, that is.

After the yanqui banker had written 500 I.O.U.s, there were 1500 I.O.U.s on the island, instead of the original 1,000, while the number of bananas was still only 1,000. The price of a banana was now $1.50, where it had been a dollar before the yanqui banker showed up. Now, all the people on the island could do was try to grow more bananas (well, hell - YOU tell ME what you think the banker did).

Anyway, you know what happened to the dollar's relationship to gold and silver. It kept going bananas (oooh! - did I really say that?) until one day in 1971 (guess who?) the U.S. said to hell with it, we'll just write I.O.U.s - no more banana growing. Oops - actually, we said we'll just print money and to hell with gold or silver backing. It's worse, now, of course; you don't even have the I.O.U.s. Just a number in an account that can fly around in the computer, the telephone - or in your confused head. So what does THAT make money?

It's just power, an entitlement to somebody else's brains, skill, person, or property. It's a claim on somebody else's effort, work. It all comes down to that, no matter how you "cut" it. "Ineluctable," like I said (I got that from Bill O'Reilly and his "Factor" - use big words and prove what a genius you are). The islanders have to bust their asses, work half again as long or fast, in order to pay off the yanqui banker's markers.

Oh, and I want to mention one more thing (there'll be more on this subject, but we've got a nice start with the "American" myths): notice that the banker was a Christian, a MORAL man. Went to church every Sunday, read the Bible (or whatever), and spouted scripture and blessings right and left. He was so convincing that he goes back to the island again and again; and he still writes those I.O.U.s, too.

We can only wonder how long it will take the islanders to catch on.