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DEATH TO COUNTERFEITERS

by Open-Publishing - Thursday 16 February 2006
3 comments

Economy-budget Governments USA Peter Fredson

DEATH TO COUNTERFEITERS

By Peter Fredson

February 16, 2006

Once I owned a small, gray, coarse paper bill, issued in Revolutionary days of the U.S. It was crudely hand-etched and printed on a small hand press. On it were the words: DEATH TO COUNTERFEITERS. Counterfeiters would have had an easy time printing any denomination of bill for the technical skill was minimal. The temptation to print money in those days of poverty and tumult must have been enormous, hence the penalty of Death.

Those pieces of paper, if accepted by an innkeeper or grocer, signified room and board, meals, drink, clothing and all kinds of material resources. Sometimes local legislation would require people to accept the bills. What backed them up? Simply the collective word of the revolutionaries that the bills were “good.”

Nowadays the penalties for counterfeiting are not quite as heavy. The technical skill to reproduce our bills is notorious, as the bills are printed with special inks, threads embedded in the paper, secret watermarks, etc. Yet with the Xerox machine, people have been creative and have passed many bills to the unsuspecting public.

The difference between counterfeit and “real” money is that the “real” money is backed up by real material goods, like gold, silver, platinum, land, etc. and by the collective word of our elected officials that the money is “good.” Otherwise anyone could print their own money, worth only the paper and ink to print the money.

I went sight-seeing to Washington about 30 years ago and visited the Bureau of Printing and Engraving. In a long tunnel a visitor could peer through slits in the wall at the huge presses in action. It was an impressive sight.

There were pallets of paper, many feet tall. The paper was placed into some sort of rotary presses which spewed out bills at the other end. Then it was inspected for flaws and sent to a gigantic steel blade for cutting. In the few minutes I had to watch the process, probably over a million dollars was printed. And this keeps on, day and night. Billions of bills are printed, cut and stacked yearly.

At one time the bills were Certificates, which could potentially be redeemed for the equivalent in gold or silver, which backed up the value of the paper.
However, with World War II, Franklin D. Roosevelt declared that all such certificates, all gold and silver, were no longer available to individuals. In fact, even owning silver or gold coins was subject to fines and prison.

The war costs were staggering. The tanks, planes, submarines, destroyers, battleships, cannon, shells, grenades, explosive devices, the military pay, the transportation costs, the services, food, weapons, clothing, brass buttons, insignia all had to be paid, and with paper money.

At one time the amount of paper money in circulation exceeded the amount of precious metals that backed up the currency. But nothing could stop the presses, nothing could stop the production of military goods, or begin to pay for the immense destruction of infrastructure.

Eventually the war came to a shuddering halt, and slowly the economic basis of the warring nations began a recovery. Some nations began hoarding of precious metals, with vaults, as at Fort Knox, bulging to the roof with heavy bricks of metal. Gradually the presses slowed to keep production of paper money in some kind of balance with “real” goods.

However, in the 1990’s world troubles again stimulated war production. The presses churned out their pallets of bills. Many nations became debtors, others creditors. Soon the amount of paper with printed denominations exceeded any kind of backing, other than “trust” in government operations and confident but unsubstantial statements that balance would quickly be restored.

With the advent of the Bush Neocon administration, with its vast strategy for world domination, bases all around the world, a huge army for preemptive action, the enormous cost of modern equipment and explosives, there was no longer any balance worth mentioning. The military establishment which Dwight Eisenhower warned us against, took over the country, avid for war with huge profits.

Representative Ron Paul, of Texas, recently qualified our monetary situation as “counterfeiting.” The paper money is worthless. Nothing backs it up. We borrow to the maximum, pay enormous sums for never-ending interest, and show no interest in any kind of deficit. The President has run up the largest deficit in world history, and seems proud of the accomplishment. His sycophant Congress seems blind to any sort of economic emergency.

For them, Victory is near, Good Progress is announced daily, and the corporate millionaires quickly became billionaires. With each dollar printed, all the other dollars already in circulation become diminished. But paper is cheap, and gullible people think colored paper, with pictures of past presidents, and security threads and inks, will keep them safe from bankruptcy, crushing debt, and passing the debt on to their unsuspecting children.

We owe other nations for their goods. The deficit is ENORMOUS, but our carefree President is deaf, dumb and blind because the war he began with Iraq is bankrupting us and he intends to make more preemptive wars with Iran and Syria.

His corporate buddies are also deaf, dumb and blind as the money to their private bank accounts rolls in by the bushel-basket. They have to move fast to shove all that money, much of it corrupt and dishonest, into Lear Jets, huge mansions, Caribbean Islands, and all of the “good” things of life that they feel they deserve because they back a petulant, irascible, Constitution-hating, carefree, pitiless egomaniac who wants to show his Daddy that he is a “man.”

I don’t know if this nation can survive as a democracy with the present administration, for the next three years.

The present budget, based on many false promised, is the greatest in history for military expenditure, on for some unknown war Bush is now planning, and is famous for the lack of compassion or sympathy for the poor, homeless, veterans, dark-skinned people or for the enormous failure of his promises to control oil consumption, aid science, math, education, provide comprehensive health and social security for all Americans

His followers don’t seem to care that his corporate buddies are enriching themselves beyond dreams of avarice, or that corruption has seized control of Congress and the Executive branch.

Our money is worthless and once other countries realize how precarious our President has made an economy based on worthless paper money, they will get off of the Dollar standard, and go to some other standard as a guarantee for their investment.

Then the bankruptcy of America will hit the fan and the American public will be left without any assurances as to their future welfare. Legislation will force the public to accept worthless paper. Germany did that once. I still have stamps issued by Germany for millions of Deutchmarks. My grandmother told me that in order to buy a loaf of bread in Germany, in that time; she had to take a knapsack full of paper bills to the grocer.

Can that happen here? You betcha.

How many Republican Senators are voicing alarm? How many will it take to change a light bulb?

Perhaps they prefer to live in the dark?

Forum posts

  • The U.S. currency is still backed up, primarily by real estate. As long as there are land "owners" who stand to lose should they not pay their mortgages which are valued in U.S. dollars, then those dollars have value. This would hold if all the gold in Ft. Knox were to magically disappear.

    Now, it is true that the printing presses are diluting the value of the dollar. If more dollars chase the same amount of debt backed by real assets, then the value of a dollar drops. This is what we call inflation. But as long as this dilution is slow enough, refinancing occurs and the dollar remains backed by something.

    • I was mainly trying to show on how thin a thread all of civilization, democracy is based on. It is our beliefs that a bit of paper is "worth" a loaf of bread, or that another is "worth" a house. Today the President has True Believers that insist that a tremendous deficit in trade and national economy is "good." They insist that credit cards are "good" because you can spend more than you can possibly make. They know that small pieces of paper can become tanks, guns, planes, munitions. They know that those same pieces of paper can, by extension of belief, become instruments for the eradication of Islam. Their belief in saving souls is aided by belief that bits of paper will bring them closer to Paradise. They believe that bits of paper will help the Supreme Creator to conquer EVIL. They believe that in sending small bits of paper to televangelists, the Creator will smile upon them with a bushel-basket full of bits of paper.

      Bush mercilessly exploits such beliefs to the hilt. I could continue indefinitely but I’ve said enough to illustrate my point.
      Peter Fredson

  • Most of your facts are just plain wrong. The outlawing of gold ownership happened long before WW2 and silver ownership was never outlawed. I guess all the Washington quarters and Walking Libery halves minted throught the war were illegal to own? After glaring errors like that it is impossible to take anything you said later seriously.

    Big Head