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Address by Edwin Vieira Jr.
Hyatt Regency Crystal City Hotel, Arlington, Virginia
Friday, April 18, 2008
Hyatt Regency Crystal City Hotel,
Arlington, Virginia
Friday, April 18, 2008
Silver and gold are not merely
valuable commodities, investments, and media of exchange. More importantly,
they are key "checks and balances" in America's legal and political
institutions.
The fight against the use of
silver and gold as money that has been waged by bankers and rogue politicians
since the 1870s as to silver and the 1930s as to gold -- and will intensify
as fiat currencies collapse throughout the world -- is ultimately
directed against America's national independence, her constitutional
government, and every common American's individual liberty and prosperity.
The Constitution of the United
States adopted a monetary system consisting of silver and gold coin, in which
the standard is the "dollar," containing 371 1/4 grains (troy) of
fine silver, with the values of gold coins to be measured in
"dollars" according to the free market's rate of exchange between
silver and gold. Neither the general government nor any state is authorized
to emit paper currency.
These restrictions prevent rogue
public officials from turning public debts into currency, as a means for
redistributing wealth from society to political elitists and their clients in
special-interest groups.
Furthermore, although the
Constitution does not mention banks, either public or private, its only
correct construction requires separation of bank and state -- extirpation of
all inherently fraudulent fractional-reserve banking schemes -- and rigorous
regulation of all other fractional-reserve arrangements that might operate
fraudulently. (See Edwin Vieira Jr., "Pieces of Eight: The Monetary
Powers and Disabilities of the United States Constitution," second
revised edition, 2002.)
But since the early 1800s rogue
politicians and bankers have steadily subverted the Constitution by forging
an increasingly tight relationship between bank and state. Through the grant
of one abusive special privilege after another, politicians have immunized
fractional-reserve banking against the just economic and legal consequences
of its own inevitable failures, so that public officials and bankers could
turn both public and private debts into currency -- thus separating the
supply and the purchasing power of currency from the economic discipline of
the free market, and rendering those matters largely political in nature.
Under the Federal Reserve System,
Americans no longer enjoy "money" in the economic sense but are
subjected to what must be denoted as "political currency," with
emphasis on the adjective. Political currency is emitted on the basis of
political debts --that is, either 1) public debts or 2) private debts for the
payment of which the creditors expect public bailouts if their debtors
default.
Unfortunately, the Federal Reserve
System is inherently unstable, and must lurch from one self-generated crisis
to another, each increasing in severity, until its house of financial cards
self-destructs.
Having separated society's medium
of exchange from the production of real goods and services in the free market
-- and instead linked the currency to creating, packaging, marketing,
servicing, and eventually salvaging political debts -- the Federal Reserve
system encourages, facilitates, and rewards irresponsibility on the part of
both lenders and borrowers, in the private as well as the public sector.
For those who benefit from the
system to continue to loot society, the supply of political currency must
expand. For that supply to expand, political debts must increase.
True enough, political debts can
increase, even geometrically, because political currency can be created (as
the saying goes) "out of nothing" to float them. But real wealth
cannot be generated simply by the emission of paper promises. Neither can new
paper promises pay off old ones.
So, avarice being unlimited,
insatiable, and imprudent, the whole operation must cumulate and culminate in
an unsustainable bubble of debts that either implodes in a depression or
explodes in hyperinflation.
Although the Federal Reserve
System is fatally flawed, the wealth and power of elitists in high finance,
big business, and the political class depend on maintaining it -- or
replacing it in a timely fashion with something of equal serviceability for
their ends.
As it cannot long be maintained,
it must and will soon be replaced. With what remains a matter for speculation. Not open to the slightest doubt, however, is
that, as crises have rocked the system, the establishment has always moved
farther away from the Constitution -- deeper into the sump of lawlessness --
to shore up the banking cartel, and always at the expense of common
Americans.
In the 1930s, in response to the
collapse of the fractional-reserve racket, rather than reforming the
operations of the banks, the Roosevelt administration and a pliant Congress
seized the American people's gold and outlawed almost all public and private
contracts promising to pay in gold. In the 1950s and through the 1960s, until
the Nixon administration terminated redemption of Federal Reserve notes in
gold in 1971, the inflationary policies of the Federal Reserve System drained
off more than half of America's national stock of gold to foreign banks and
the profiteers operating through them. And during the last few decades,
surreptitious manipulation of the precious-metals markets has kept the price
of gold (measured in Federal Reserve notes) suspiciously low, even as this
country's financial structures have become increasingly shaky.
The price of gold has been
manipulated for two reasons, one being the suppression of evidence, the other
the throttling of monetary evolution.
First, an ever-increasing price of
gold reflects the breakdown of the Federal Reserve System -- just as an
ever-increasing temperature reveals that the human body is sick, and when it
reaches a critical point that death is imminent.
Second, those who fatten off of
political currency need to prevent ordinary people from realizing that only a
return to silver and gold as common media of exchange can stabilize America's
economy, and especially from actually employing silver and gold in preference
to Federal Reserve notes in their day-to-day transactions. However, as the
Federal Reserve System experiences ever-more-frequent, ever-more-serious, and
ever-less-tractable problems, downward manipulations of the prices of gold and
silver will become impossible. And that the system is beyond repair will
become apparent to all.
At that point, the question will
arise -- and behind the scenes doubtlessly already has arisen among bankers
and politicians -- as to how and with what to replace the banking cartel.
When a political currency has
failed, the traditional trick of the bankers and politicians has been to
introduce a new, supposedly more stable currency -- often within a new,
supposedly more stable banking apparatus. This was the sleight of hand that
moved America from the independent state banks in operation prior to the
Civil War, through the partially cartelized national banks created in the
1860s, to the fully cartelized Federal Reserve System established in 1913.
Throughout this devolution, the
progression of illegality became increasingly stark.
The state banks violated Article
I, Section 10, Clause 1, of the Constitution. But at
least they operated only regionally. The national banks violated Article I,
Section 8, Clause 2, and operated throughout the country. But at least their
emission of paper currency was limited by the amount of public debt a
generally thrifty Congress was willing to incur.
The Federal Reserve System,
though, is a corporative-state (or fascist) structure that purports to
delegate Congress' supposed monetary powers to private interests; and the
system's bubble of both public and private debts will expand to the limit of
the avarice of the cartel's operators, their clients, and their political
henchmen.
Nonetheless, as unconstitutional
and economically unsound as they were and are, all these schemes operated and
even now operate under color of the national
sovereignty and laws of the United States, subject in principle to
overarching control by the American people. Indeed, Section 30 of the Federal
Reserve Act still explicitly reserves to Congress the right to repeal, alter,
or amend the system at will. But with the Federal Reserve System the bankers
and politicians have gone about as far as they can go within the economic and
political institutions of the United States. And they have separated paper
currency from the discipline of free markets about as far as possible, while
still pretending to maintain some semblance of a connection to free markets.
So as the Federal Reserve System
shakes itself to pieces, the likelihood is that first, a new currency will
arise outside of the United States in some regional supra-national entity
such as the proposed North American Union; and, second, the value of this new
currency will not be controlled by free financial markets but, instead,
propping up the currency's value will be the excuse for extensive
governmental intervention in and manipulation of the markets.
This plan is so alien to the
experiences and desires of most Americans that its implementation will
probably require a controlled meltdown of the Federal Reserve System to
bludgeon them into accepting the North American Union as the only way to
obtain a new, supposedly stable currency and to return to something
approaching economic normalcy. Yet even a controlled meltdown, along with the
accompanying absorption of the United States into a new Northern Hemispheric
political order, will unavoidably generate extensive economic, social, and
political unrest that will threaten the financial establishment's power.
Even dumbed-down Americans will
not long suffer conditions of depression akin to those of the 1930s, let
alone South American levels of inflation as well. Desperate people will ask
questions and assign blame. Perhaps not just a few will abandon debt currency
altogether and substitute silver and gold as their media of exchange. They
and others will conclude that the Federal Reserve System is unconstitutional
-- and therefore that its operations are arguably a complex of criminal
offenses. (See 18 U.S.C. §§ 241 and 242.)
Many will realize that the
establishment's scheme for replacing Federal Reserve Notes with a
supra-national currency is a political crime on a more stupendous scale yet,
because it depends upon destroying both the Constitution and the Declaration
of Independence. Then an aroused people will take political action against
the institutions and individuals responsible for foisting the funny-money
scheme on their country.
On the other side, the establishment
will not be idle. It will do anything and everything possible to maintain its
position. Obviously the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence will
be expendable, because the establishment has been trying to whittle away the
former on a piece-by-piece basis over the years, and intends to do away with
the latter at one fell swoop in the near future. So this country, as an
independent nation, will be expendable too. And if this country, why not the
freedom and prosperity of common Americans as well?
Will ordinary Americans -- at
least 80 to 90 million of whom are armed -- meekly put up with a program
aimed at their own country's assisted suicide? Why should they, when they
have nothing to lose economically or politically? If they refuse to knuckle
under, the establishment's only recourse will be to attempt to lock down the
whole country under a para-militarized police
state, perhaps with the assistance of "peacekeepers" from Canada
and Mexico (for the employment of whom negotiations are apparently already in
progress).
That is why careful observers
conclude that the paranoia being generated by politicians and the big media
over "homeland security" -- and the frenetic para-militarization
of law-enforcement agencies at the national, state, and even local levels in
the name of "homeland security" -- are not caused by or aimed at
foreign "terrorists" at all, but instead target ordinary Americans
in their own home towns.
The establishment is preparing to
force justifiably angry Americans into line when its financial house of cards
comes tumbling down, either in a controlled demolition or otherwise.
Americans will not be the only
victims of such repression. The establishment must prevent other peoples, in
other parts of the world, from jumping off the financial treadmill of
political currency. That will require the use not only of economic and
political pressure, but also -- indeed, especially -- of military coercion.
For the provision of which the establishment will attempt to force common
Americans to pay, and to send their sons and even their daughters off to
fight, die, and be maimed and sickened in foreign lands.
Little good, then, will it do for
an ounce of gold to soar to $2,000, $3,000, or higher -- and for silver to
increase in value proportionately too -- if the ultimate consequences are a
police state in America, then a supra-national regime replacing the United
States, accompanied by endless military conflicts throughout the world.
In the grand scheme of things,
gold and silver are far less important as economic investments or hedges
against hyperinflation or depression than as guarantors of individual freedom
-- and then to the fullest extent only when they are actually used as media
of exchange throughout society. Silver and gold as currencies supply the
foundation necessary for economic democracy and limited government; whereas
fiat currencies inevitably function as the tools of fascism, socialism, and
every other form of financial imperialism.
Thus, the fight over gold and
silver as media of exchange is about more than mere money, let alone making
money. For it is a fight with only two possible outcomes: either control of
their own lives by the people themselves, or control of the people and their
lives by political and economic elitists. To achieve the first and avoid the
second no price will prove too great to pay.
Edwin Vieira
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