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Posted by: Goppy 8 months, 1 week ago
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fiftynineComment removed: Hard Banned
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hyperbola8 months, 1 week ago
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Possibly, but both CNN and Fox would be part of that movement. They both play this up as a "divisive" issue aimed at maximizing emotional responses, which fits their role as corporate media mainly interested in preserving privileges of the rich at the expense of the poor. Frankly the man the reporter interviewed was right about one thing: Americans are mad about being made paupers in theri own country. Of course, it is rather ironic that the "tea party" type of rabble rousing is mainly aimed at making Americans ignore the fact that it is the corruption of a system that has been transferring wealth to the super-rich ever since Reagan (by both parties) that is the root of our economic pain. Until that base corruption is rooted out (and you can decide for yourself whether either of our political parties is really trying), matters will only get worse.
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Perhaps the most interesting part was the assertion about Lincoln. The fact is that Lincoln was not afraid to take a step that both the Obama and Bush administrations have avoided like the plague. Lincoln directly challenged corrupt bankers rather than letting them control the country. In contrast, both the Bush and Obama administrations have caved in to exactly the oligarchical financial circles that caused our present crash. INdeed, both administrations have appointed members of the corrupt oligarchical financial circles to "direct recovery", thereby sealing in corruption. In my opinion, NEITHER of the political parties (and certainly not the propaganda promoted by right-wing billionaires at the tea parties) has as yet addressed the fundamental corruption that has set in since Reagan: robbing the poor for the benefit of the rich and using the pluder in benefit of financial oligarchs. This article (which is long) is well worth reading in its entirety.
Revive Lincoln’s Monetary Policy: an Open Letter to President Obama
..... The bankers had Lincoln's government over a barrel, just as Wall Street has Congress in its vice-like grip today. The North needed money to fund a war, and the bankers were willing to lend it only under circumstances that amounted to extortion, involving staggering interest rates of 24 to 36 percent. Lincoln saw that this would bankrupt the North and asked a trusted colleague to research the matter and find a solution. In what may be the best piece of advice ever given to a sitting President, Colonel Dick Taylor of Illinois reported back that the Union had the power under the Constitution to solve its financing problem by printing its money as a sovereign government. Taylor said:-
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hyperbola8 months, 1 week ago
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"Just get Congress to pass a bill authorizing the printing of full legal tender treasury notes ... and pay your soldiers with them and go ahead and win your war with them also. If you make them full legal tender ... they will have the full sanction of the government and be just as good as any money; as Congress is given that express right by the Constitution."
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The Greenbacks actually were just as good as the bankers' banknotes. Both were created on a printing press, but the banknotes had the veneer of legitimacy because they were "backed" by gold. The catch was that this backing was based on "fractional reserves," meaning the bankers held only a small fraction of the gold necessary to support all the loans represented by their banknotes. The "fractional reserve" ruse is still used today to create the impression that bankers are lending something other than mere debt created with accounting entries on their books. 1
Lincoln took Col. Taylor's advice and funded the war by printing paper notes backed by the credit of the government. These legal-tender U.S. Notes or "Greenbacks" represented receipts for labor and goods delivered to the United States. They were paid to soldiers and suppliers and were tradeable for goods and services of a value equivalent to their service to the community. The Greenbacks aided the Union not only in winning the war but in funding a period of unprecedented economic expansion. Lincoln's government created the greatest industrial giant the world had yet seen. The steel industry was launched, a continental railroad system was created, a new era of farm machinery and cheap tools was promoted, free higher education was established, government support was provided to all branches of science, the Bureau of Mines was organized, and labor productivity was increased by 50 to 75 percent. The Greenback was not the only currency used to fund these achievements; but they could not have been accomplished without it, and they could not have been accomplished on money borrowed at the usurious rates the bankers were attempting to extort from the North.
Lincoln succeeded in restoring the government's power to issue the national currency, but his revolutionary monetary policy was opposed by powerful forces. The threat to established interests was captured in an editorial of unknown authorship, said to have been published in The London Times in 1865:
"If that mischievous financial policy which had its origin in the North American Republic during the late war in that country, should become indurated down to a fixture, then that Government will furnish its own money without cost. It will pay off its debts and be without debt. It will become prosperous beyond precedent in the history of the civilized governments of the world. The brains and wealth of all countries will go to North America. That government must be destroyed or it will destroy every monarchy on the globe."-
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hyperbola8 months, 1 week ago
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In 1865, Lincoln was assassinated. According to historian W. Cleon Skousen:
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"Right after the Civil War there was considerable talk about reviving Lincoln's brief experiment with the Constitutional monetary system. Had not the European money-trust intervened, it would have no doubt become an established institution."
The institution that became established instead was the Federal Reserve, a privately-owned central bank given the power in 1913 to print Federal Reserve Notes (or dollar bills) and lend them to the government. The government was submerged in a debt that has grown exponentially since, until it is now an unrepayable $11 trillion. For nearly a century, Lincoln's statue at the Lincoln Memorial has gazed out pensively across the reflecting pool at the Federal Reserve building, as if pondering what the bankers had wrought since his death and how to remedy it.
...Lincoln did not invent government-issued paper money. Rather, he restored a brilliant innovation of the American colonists. According to Benjamin Franklin, it was the colonists' home-grown paper "scrip" that was responsible for the remarkable abundance in the colonies at a time when England was suffering from the ravages of the Industrial Revolution. Like with Lincoln's Greenbacks, this prosperity posed a threat to the control of the British Crown and the emerging network of private British banks, prompting the King to ban the colonists' paper money and require the payment of taxes in gold. According to Franklin and several other historians of the period, it was these onerous demands by the Crown, and the corresponding collapse of the colonists' paper money supply, that actually sparked the Revolutionary War. 2....
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22391....
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