#57.2 Perspective: The Present Moment

Here is the first Perspective article. 

People are spoiling for solutions, not for platitudes, not for slogans, not for disconnected bureaucracies, they want solutions. Charles Ortel 7/9/16 

The heart of the present system is its insatiability. It's about to suffer a heart attack (which is when your heart attacks you.) 

(Some may get this; there is a deliberate connection between the heart of the present system and the engineered popularity of giant extinct animals; dinosaurs. We trust you also understand that the present system must likewise eventually go extinct. The common understanding is that these animals went extinct suddenly and so too will be the demise of the present system.) 

This systemic insatiability, for all that it has anything to do with power and wealth as it is customarily conceived, is expressed in the mathematics of usury. This insatiability therefore attaches to anything usury touches, especially to investments promising yield, currencies promising a reward for merely remaining idle. We have more precisely defined usury as limited only to money, where whether it is of silver, gold, paper or more exactly entries on ledgers, genuine usury always demands in return that which was never created, causing deliberate scarcity of money. 

Scarcity of money is also brought about by other things that get far less attention than they should, such as depreciation, which is where most money dies. This in turn explains why new sources of money must be implicit in the design of any supplementary monetary system, else economies die. Those who teach a metaphor of money as a small fixed quantity are without truth as all money, all true money is marked as money, is issued, thence is spent on something and from thence runs its course until it is spent for something that depreciates almost completely in which case that money dies. 

What about gold and silver coins? They wore away! The most circulated of these coins were the most worn (following the inverse of Gresham's Law) which is the real law: cheap money drives out the more expensive. The states; then as now in thrall to the banks, taxed (take back) the money back, so these states wouldn't have to borrow any more and in any case governments didn't do much more than send people to go places and kill people. All the other things governments do now, weren't thought up back then. The state mints would recast the gold and silver into fresh coins and spend them into the economy, starting with the same military-industrial complexes as existed then as now. If the monarchs owned these places personally, then they took a profit from the making of weapons as well.

But it's actually worse than that. How about the “huff and puff” business cycles? We now call them bubbles. How about fractional reserve lending where we now know that many of these lending institutions, who all lend what they do not have, are leveraged 50 to 1!? Who gave them the authority to do all of that? Why son, banking is older than the American republic. THEY make the rules and then FORCE others to live by them. Understood yet? It's a fraud (stealing from everyone who uses THEIR money) protected by a FORCE that is paid for in THEIR money. So much for democracy, we live under a financial tyranny. It's one reason this blog is still up and running; to tell the truth and hope there are still a few that might listen.

We have for years been swimming in streams of THEIR money that was lent into existence from nothing – THEY STOLE OUR FIAT, because in order to do the impossible, to issue money that is acceptable in trade for a good or service, that money must be “backed” by something; the willingness to receive it back in trade for what you sell. This is the only “backing” any money needs. But all money needs to be based on a standard that doesn't change. Is that true of any money out there? No. Why? Because it is all conceived of as commodities pricing other commodities. Remember, barter has never gone away. Money is only used to split-barter and nothing else. 

One reason THEIR money is ultimately going to fail is that it is literally being used right now to allow producers who cannot sell locally to sell globally while others who have the money don't produce a thing but live on artificially expensive real estate, etc. Another reason is that each of these currencies generates its own pricing of anything available locally where that currency is used. Then speculators play games and make money on money without contributing anything of significance, in this case, arbitrage, or betting on the future exchange rates among currencies. This is another way to squeeze and loot countries, such as what's happened to Greece. 

And it's even worse than that: This system, in order to sustain itself, must devour its own. It devours any and all sources of cash and resources easily sold for cash. In the process, it pretends to amass wealth while destroying it. We'll get to this and we hope you see it. Instead, the present system amasses economic black holes everywhere, it swallows the future to hold up the present, to say to the world that a security is valuable when it is in verifiable fact, worthless. This is the absolute and unassailable truth of the merger and acquisition business. They'll tell you it is to achieve greater efficiencies, but in short, it is to save their extended credit. For if these ventures, some corporations extending back now a few hundred years, were to fail, so would they, quite literally. As it was said, 

For he who has, it shall be given to him and he shall have abundance. But he who does not have, even that which he has shall be taken from him! Matt 13:12 

Is that not happening right now? 

So eventually, perhaps quite soon actually, the system will collapse of its own weight, inefficiency, illusions, centralization, grandeur, greed, etc. and go extinct as the dinosaurs. But to those who wield FORCE, their concerns are similar to managing cattle scattered over thousands of acres; they see us as cattle to be milked and slaughtered at their whim. Their job is to STAY IN POWER, so that upon the commands they get from the money powers behind the curtains, they can begin to cull the human population as those hidden powers have long wished, without scaring the majority to revolt. This is the boiling frog technique. The heat has been turning up and up all my life and now looking back we can see it. Their plan is a worldwide concentration camp with most people driven into overcrowded clamorous dangerous cities, where the squishing and smashing process will be continued, leading to genocide of various classes and races that would not easily conform to the transformations that are currently under way. 

But it's never a good time for them when their financial system fails. They have to run for it when that happens, and evidence is mounting they are preparing for this right now. But it wont help them. They always try to take their gold with them if they can. But it's pretty heavy stuff to have to haul around a lot of it. They think it's extremely valuable, but you could sieve it from seawater. 

Truth is, there's actually quite a lot of gold. I saw a lot of it in one place one time at the Federal Reserve in New York. Yeah, just once. And there's plenty more of that elsewhere. But does it circulate as actual coins, as at a grocery store? No, of course not. It sits around in vaults and they enter numbers on spreadsheets and write paper receipts for it called notes. If they run a gold standard or they run a fractional reserve on it - and I do mean fractional – for every dollar in reserve (depositors' dollars) they lend out a minimum of nine, and we all know its many times that now - then they want to exercise their right to usury, which come on folks is nothing but stealing from the rest of us. As we said, it's asking back what was never created. 

If it was a 100% pure gold reserve system running usury, you'd best have to go into the gold mining business or gold assay business and mints would see more activity and there would be a mad rush everywhere to find and get more gold. And guess what folks, this actually all ties back to alchemy and other magical belief systems in the middle ages and long before that concerning the so called magical properties of gold. What passes for science and the higher ends of technology turns out to be an extension of the same; “man attempting to be God” ideas. Or for some men anyway. But my point is that they'd do all this just because of gold, not because they couldn't use something far cheaper and better as circulating tokens of a money system. 

Most of us would prefer to live quiet, sensible, creative, prosperous and productive lives, doing things that matter for others as well as ourselves, NOT having to worry all the time about money and where the next piece of it must come from to keep the wolves from the door. It was said pretty much exactly like that too by a close friend/mentor of mine from years past. He admonished me to beware of the rich. He didn't mean the usual wealthy “pillars of the community” types either, oh no. He meant the high and mighty who had so much money they truly didn't have to work. It was something similar to much from the advanced pen of F. Scott Fitzgerald. I have an obscure and famous book on the subject I've not read yet and have of course met with many reflections on the numerous dangers of sharing company with the rich, but my friend's stance was above adamant. It was a matter of trust to him. The man with insatiable appetites who already has much and more shall be given him, might just as easily turn on you and consume you, then toss you aside as some used napkin. It happens all the time; more often than most even know. 

We are all aware of the attitude. A few have made contact with it at first hand. Some famously write of it as class conflict. It needn't be, if the economic rewards were honestly acquired. In times past, the monarchs ruled and could and did give to whom they would. Such is the case today, even under more democratic or republican or whatever political fantasies. All that is mere fronts for the powers behind the scenes that run it all through their stolen fiat and usury. Once you have looked into this all long and hard, you cannot accept a lesser conclusion. 

But let's be honest. We know in our day to day lives how to recognize SANITY among our fellow humans and most of us live in the REASONABLE EXPECTATION of continuing peace. We know that there is not a thing, nothing, absolutely nothing, that can overcome the present system or where it is headed. The sane thing to do is to expect its collapse and then what? Ask them for more money? Are you insane? Would you take any more of it from them after their last batch turned out to be toilet paper as in Venezuela and soon some other South American republics? Meanwhile the prices rise and the money becomes ever more scarce and must be scarce on purpose, because it is loaned into existence and the money to pay back the debt for borrowing it was never created. 

It is also said, 

You come out from her, My people, that you should not partake in her errors, and that you would not receive from of her wounds Rev 18:4 

It says more too. You notice I use this phrase a lot on this blog. Though he may have suspected it, E. C. Riegel can't have expected it. He saw his solution as a remedy for THEIR system. We do not, as their system is not, has not been and will not ever be ours. It is revealed for most to see that it is built on frauds, lies, deceit, special privileges, rewarding the wrong and thwarting the right, etc. 

But the reason I use it is that another friend / mentor of mine, a well known to some, British financial publicist, used it in reference to finding another monetary solution. In 2009, he basically set me on the course of discovery with reference to these words and others, a few months before his perhaps untimely death. 

The first rule is to do no harm. The second is to be scrupulously honest as you can, especially when it comes to business. The terms of trade are as they are from day to day based on supply and demand. Limited quantities of production with more economic redundancy and better fit to activities adhering to natural efficiencies to scale, are preferred solutions. Gargantuan, one culture and product line fits all, produced at efficiencies to scale that completely outstrip demand so as that excess product actually has to be scrapped? Are you kidding me? This is what the present system in its insatiability does. It wont be stopped, it can't be reformed, it will merely plunge on to its eventual demise. It's been long time to be leaving it. To form something else. To form something of our own. 

Meanwhile, how many neighborhood jobs might be paid in Valuns? Phrases like, “just give me 2 Valuns,” might swing plenty of small jobs that would mean quite a difference to your friends and neighbors who you have to share spaceship earth with. Give them something to buy with their Valuns too, paying taxes in dollars or whatever the brand of THEIR local money happens to be. We'd probably see the recycle markets dealt with first. As their system collapses, we'd take over what falls from them. It's really that simple. Once we have our own money and system, when their money finally does fail, or their political fronts first, we will still have money; ours. 

When I was a boy, I thought of becoming an architect, a little later an artist, a painter. A little later, when I could play the piano well enough, a musician. I thought at one time I would like to be a teacher. At three times in my life I was offered an avenue toward becoming a lawyer. I always scored high on matters concerned with the law. I scored in the 93^rd percentile of the Graduate Record Examinations in the year I took it. I took many other civil service tests. I got offers from various sources within the US Defense Department. Finally I got a phone call from a man offering me a way into computer programming and I went for it. 

At the end of 20 years in corporate America, I went private and worked for a foundation and managed some money. I have been “retired” for some time and now am an official senior citizen. I had a reasonably good career and most importantly met some powerful people and have seen some of the inside of the system. Believe me, there are many very good, well meaning people involved in all of it, often incredibly unaware of what they are doing or why they are doing it, except to get those dollars. As long as life looks good and prospects favorable, people don't complain. We have been very well trained not to complain. The conditioning has worked. We know what it means to recognize SANITY and its absence without much doubt and generally prefer living with the REASONABLE EXPECTATION of continuing peace. Notice, I do repeat things, phrases, words, etc. because I did want to be a teacher.

“So then, professor. What do you profess to know?” 
The professor turns and says, “To observe well is to know,” and continues with a smile.

Let's get back to the basics. Reference will be made especially to the proposed Valun system but the concepts are general enough to receive wider reception and relevance:

Work – TIME out of one's life to earn barter for necessities; food, shelter, clothing, etc. determined in whatever money one is paid for one's time. All the rest of the time you have to be alive is yours, including the time you are literally asleep.

Wealth – Anything capable of producing income. If it doesn't provide an income, it aint wealth, it's just stuff. Wealth MUST produce income. 

Value – What is capable of being priced for sale in money. Higher value is priced above lower value.

Commonwealth – The local area where people actually live as the common wealth which can provide them an income to support and sustain their living there; synonymous in some ways with community. Notice please that this means it will always take many people to support a viable monetary system.

Money – (one eye) The accounting mechanism (machine) used to split-barter. The third party in any transaction using it, applies equally to all so called crypto-currencies: a purely accounting mechanism (machine) consisting of account ledgers and tokens used as a convenient medium of exchange chosen to split barter between buyer and seller who both belong to a commonwealth accepting its use. (Wow, I repeated myself a lot there.  The concepts are THAT important!)

Commodity – Anything that can be quantified / counted.

Income – A return from wealth, measured in money.

Expenses – Value expressed in money expended to stay in business.

Assets – Acquired stuff that can actually produce a return on the Value invested in it. Anything that can be easily sold for money.

Liabilities – Debt, usually in money rather than whole barter, acquired through honest transactions to remain in business.

Profit and Increase – Any money left over after paying expenses from income, usually calculated on a monthly, quarterly, yearly or multiple year basis. Note: This does not include regular payments to support a normal level existence; the monthly recurring costs of maintaining a living standard, but rather only that money left over that was not regularly spent, that is saved over into the next time period.

Savings – Accumulations of money left from clearing expenses with income.

Liquidity – The ability for Assets to be easily sold for money.

Solvency – The state of all current expenses covered by current income.

Subsistence – The right of the poor to issue Valuns based on the rules agreed upon by the local community; based on the local minimum wage in the currency of the local area. Usually determined by the week or month. This feature regarded as “Natural Socialism” to us. It is our intention to have communities that are prosperous enough to eliminate poverty such that none will need to resort to this feature, but it would be there just in case.

Value Unit; Valun – The proposed international standard Value Unit or Valun represents the thousandth part of a transaction involving 1 oz of gold bullion = $2,160 on 2 November, 2011 (11/02/2011). At inception V1 = $2.16 and right now (7/17/16) to purchase at fair trade, that transaction would be $2.65. The Valun is designed not to fall below $2.16 in exchange with the dollar. For all other currencies, they would start from the day of inception and calculate what their own local currencies would be equal to an “in your hands” price for an oz of gold. They would calculate the differences between those prices and today's prices to obtain how much in their local currency would purchase a Valun. We did some of this for some time a few years back, but have discontinued the practise simply due to lack of interest.

Market – Places where goods and services are offered for sale for money. Formerly without money, such places used whole barter, which was and is time consuming and inefficient; why money was developed.

Money metaphors to Energy:

Particularly electrical energy - It is issued, it is spent for something, exchanged for split barter, whatever is purchased is capable of being re-sold for less than new and each time that happens more money dies. Money thus runs a one way course through an economy from its birth to its death and as a part of its vital contribution to human civilization must be resupplied on a regular basis or economies die – or at least revert to local whole barter which is a return to times when human life is universally nasty, brutish and short. Money circulates but ultimately dies in depreciation.

What about precious metals? They are a commodity that can be almost infinitely measured. The role of precious metals in money is precisely that they can store relative Value in a small space. Precious stones do so as well. Those who deal in them regard them as portable real estate, literally. Think of a piece of genuine jewelry as able to place a nice down payment on a piece of real estate and you have a perspective on how things are.

When you settle a barter deal using precious metals: you worked for dollars and spent them for metals. The dealer you bought your metals from at the price you bought them becomes your third party in any transaction involving those metals, as he/she was indirectly involved in any eventual transaction at the exchange in dollars for metals. But in fact, it was not merely they who were parties, but those who actually set the price of the precious metals that resulted in the final price for actual possession. So now you have your metals and you buy something with them. The person accepting your metals may need to sell some or all of them to obtain money in dollars to settle expenses including replenishing inventory.

Force – Money available to be spent. Many have heard of pools of liquidity. Money issuance is the fundamental of the force of money which is why the preponderance of study has been devoted to this subject. Money issuance, how much and by whom determines at least the starting line of how much (yes, a commodity that can be counted) of money is available at any time. In the Valun system, this fundamental of how much money is available is directly determined by how much any members are willing to work. See the self financing of labour on this blog.

Current – A recognized standard as a medium of exchange. The proposed international standard Value Unit or Valun has anywhere and at all times a known purchasing power. There are no exchange rates to consider and all prices for anything are settled with reference to the relative availability (supply and demand) of services and things in each local community.

Resistance – Prices above which nothing moves.

Insolvency + no liquidity = bankruptcy.

“Professor. What's your reaction to having gold priced at $12,000/oz and what would that do to the Valun? Would you continue your experiment even if some other currency gains such ascendancy as to displace the dollar in pricing gold?”

Your questions are appropriate. Here's what we do. A new inception date begins with any increase in the price of gold over the previous inception date. It never goes back down, never. As for the first question, we would have to be willing to pay $15,000 an oz to actually possess any gold at that price. That would put the Valun at inception to $15 and 1 fen/cento would be worth fifteen cents American. If the price of gold falls in dollars, the Valun rises. It never falls below its new inception and all Valuns out there immediately rise in value. Any V-Checks would be a V1 at $15, a V1/2 at $7.50, a V1/4 at $3.75, a V1/8 at $1.50. If the price of gold falls below inception, the Valun rises against it as the Valun does not move, THEIR money does. But if gold and silver ever get this high, then the dollar is pretty much toast. 

Now, if the dollar becomes toast as far as pricing precious metals is concerned, then it has reverted to becoming a local currency itself and anyone tied to it becomes … enslaved in fact more than they already are, in fact enslaved by using it. Debt cancellation is HIGHLY likely and in that case we may be in very serious trouble. We certainly have told you so. 

Here's an idea. We must get the proposed International Value/Valun Exchange Society (IVES) up off the ground. We are not ashamed to admit we may need to raise money (yeah, some of THEIR money) to launch this. Perhaps crowd funding of a modest kind might be necessary. But for what? For advertising. How are we going to reach those who need to be reached who are often or mostly off the internet? This will take printed materials. That always costs money, THEIR money. 

Finally, we especially need to re-assert that our fiat has been stolen from us. This blog's Valun proposal gives us a way to deal with all of THEIR money including precious metals. If we don't; If we do not re-assert it, our right as individuals to issue our own money, then let's face it, we are not only slaves of the present system, we are willing participants in its crimes.

David Burton
dpbmss@mail.com

Current Hypothetical Value of a Hypothetical Value Unit 

PS: I thought I'd give you some visuals. These are examples of what some pieces of paper that were circulating money looked like. The real examples of this paper money are valuable collectibles nowadays. That goes for any old paper money from just about any country. People collect it like some collect postage stamps.

BTW, the pictures I've already peppered through these Perspective articles could just as easily be pictures used on your own money if you lived in the particular area associated with them. What any community decides to put on its money is pretty much up to them.

Gold Notes:

Gold certificates - Now you'll probably hear of “gold trade notes” which are really the same thing. These gold certificates were used so that traders would have greater assurance of being paid and not cheated while their goods were en route aboard cargo ships, etc. Presumably the settlement could be made in either some equivalent of the paper dollars or in gold coins. 

Silver Notes:

Called silver certificates these performed the same function but in silver. It could and did happen that whole economies were based on these notes. But of course they'd only be as good as that the institutions with their names on them were holding 100% reserves and not running some lending money they didn't have fractional reserve financing. What were the chances of that ever happening? You guessed it. NO guarantees at all. You want to play “chase the gold or silver coin” when you flash one of these so imprinted pieces of paper in front of some clerk? I doubt it. But it bears asking if such schemes eventually went bust before, and they did, what's to ensure that such do not fail for the same reasons again? That's right, people are inherently greedy and untrustworthy and would rather have without working, etc. We know all that. It only points out the idealism some have to want to return to a past solution that was honestly no better than what we have now. 

FRNs of unusual size:

That's Madison on the $5K note and Salmon B. Chase on the $10K note.  A few who worked in banks may have run across these maybe forty or fifty years ago. Those that may still exist now are collector's items.

Designs for local V-Checks:

You have seen a few scattered in these Perspective articles. They could be as diverse as you please as long as certain basic requirements for size, design and quality are followed. 

Was just curious.  You included all those pics of their money to show us how stupid it looks compared with your naturalistic designs?  If so, I see your point.  Their stuff always looks base and crude.  We could make ours look much better.  Dave  Kansas

You have some idea what we could do.  But of course, we must get ourselves together and get organized and enthusiastic about the prospects.  These are economic lifeboats we're advocating here, a very bold and radical step, but one long overdue.