Ezra Pound Gold & Work

As for monopolizability: no one is such a fool as to let someone else have the run of his own private bank account; yet nations, individuals, industrialists, and businessmen have all been quite prepared—almost eager—to leave the control of their national currencies, and of international money, in the hands of the most stinking dregs of humanity.
*
As for the validity of primitive forms of money such as a promissory note written on leather, we have C. H. Douglas’s memorable comment that it was valid enough as long as the man who promised to pay an ox had an ox.
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At 5:30 p.m. on Monday, 30 January 1933 (Year XI), the author of the following notes submitted a list of eighteen points to a personage of the Italian Government. Ten years later these points were published in the Meridiano di Roma with the result that that newspaper was banned by the United States postal authorities. There are certain ideas that are not welcome in liberal circles.

The Way of Utopia

On the 10th of September last, I walked down the Via Salaria and into the Republic of Utopia, a quiet country lying eighty years east of Fara Sabina. Noticing the cheerful disposition of the inhabitants, I enquired the cause of their contentment, and I was told that it was due both to their laws and to the teaching they received from their earliest school days.

They maintain (and in this they are in agreement with Aristotle and other ancient sages of East and West) that our knowledge of universals derives from our knowledge of particulars, and that thought hinges on the definitions of words.

In order to teach small children to observe particulars they practise a kind of game, in which a number of small objects, e.g., three grains of barley, a small coin, a blue button, a coffee bean, or, say, one grain of barley, three different kinds of buttons, etc., are concealed in the hand. The hand is opened for an instant, then quickly closed again, and the child is asked to say what it has seen. For older children the game is gradually made more elaborate, until finally they all know how their hats and shoes are made. I was also informed that by learning how to define words these people have succeeded in defining their economic terms, with the result that various iniquities of the stock market and financial world have entirely disappeared from their country, for no one allows himself to be fooled any longer.

And they attribute their prosperity to a simple method they have of collecting taxes or, rather, their one tax, which falls on the currency itself. For on every note of 100 monetary units they are obliged, on the first of every month, to affix a stamp worth one unit. And as the government pays its expenses by the issue of new currency, it never needs to impose other taxes. And no one can hoard this currency because after 100 months it would have lost all its value. And this solves the problem of circulation. And because the currency is no more durable than commodities such as potatoes, crops, or fabrics, the people have acquired a much healthier sense of values. They do not worship money as a god, they do not lick the boots of bloated financiers or syphilitics of the market-place. And, of course, they are not menaced by inflation, and they are not compelled to make wars to please the usurers. In fact, this profession—or criminal activity—is extinct in the country of Utopia, where no one is obliged to work more than five hours a day, because their mode of life makes a great deal of bureaucratic activity unnecessary. Trade has few restraints. They exchange their woollen and silk fabrics against coffee and groundnuts from their African possessions, while their cattle are so numerous that the fertilizer problem almost solves itself. But they have a very strict law which excludes every kind of surrogate from the whole of their republic.

Education for these people is almost a joy, and there are no redundant professors. They say that it is impossible to eliminate idiotic books, but that it is easy to distribute the antidote, and they do this by means of a very simple system. Every bookseller is obliged to stock the best books; some of outstanding merit must be displayed in his window for a certain number of months each year. As they become familiar with the very best books, the disgusting messes served up periodically by The Times or the Nouvelle Revue Française gradually disappear from the drawing-rooms of the more empty-headed young ladies–of both sexes.

They attach the importance to skill in agricultural tasks that I attached in my youth to skill at tennis or football. In fact, they have ploughing contests to see who can drive the straightest furrow. As for myself, I felt I was too old for such activities, and recalled the case of a young friend who had also been seized this archaic passion: he wrote that his first acre “looked as if a pig had been rooting about all over it.”

After I had heard these very simple explanations of the happiness of these people, I went to sleep under the Sabine stars, pondering over the astonishing effects of these reforms, apparently so trifling, and marvelling at the great distance separating the twentieth-century world from the world of contentment.

Inscribed over the entrance to their Capitol are the words:

THE TREASURE OF A NATION IS ITS HONESTY.

Particulars of the Crime

It is no use assembling a machine if a part is missing or defective. One must first have all the essential parts. Fully to understand the origins of the present war it will be useful to know that:

The Bank of England, a felonious combination or, more precisely, a gang of usurers taking sixty per cent. interest, was founded in 1694. Paterson, the founder of the bank, clearly stated the advantages of his scheme: “the bank hath benefit of the interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing.”[1] In 1750 the paper currency of the Colony of Pennsylvania was suppressed. This meant that this confederacy of gombeen-men, not content with their sixty per cent., namely, the interest on the moneys they created out of nothing, had, in the fifty-six intervening years, become powerful enough to induce the British Government to suppress, illegally, a form of competition which had, through a sane monetary system, brought prosperity to the colony.

Twenty-six years later, in 1776, the American colonies rebelled against England. They were thirteen independent organs, divided among themselves, but favoured by geographical factors and European discords. They conquered their perennial enemy, England, but their revolution was betrayed by internal enemies among them. Their difficulties might serve to stimulate Italians today, and the problems of that time might suggest solutions in Italy now.

The imperfections of the American electoral system were at once demonstrated by the scandal of the Congressmen who speculated in the “certificates of owed pay” that had been issued by the various Colonies to the soldiers of the Revolution.

It was an old trick, and a simple one: a question of altering the value of the monetary unit. Twenty-nine Congressmen conspired with their associates and bought up the certificates from veterans and others at twenty per cent. of their face value. The nation, having now established itself as an administrative unit, then “assumed” responsibility for redeeming the certificates at their full face value.

The struggle between the financial interests and the people was continued in the battle between Jefferson and Hamilton, and still more openly when the people were led by Jackson and Van Buren. The decade between 1830 and 1840 has practically disappeared from the school-books. The economic facts behind the American “Civil” War are extremely interesting. After the Napoleonic wars, after the “Civil” one, after Versailles, the same phenomena may be observed.

Usurocracy makes wars in succession. It makes them according to a preestablished plan for the purpose of creating debts.

For every debt incurred when a bushel of grain is worth a certain sum of money, repayment is demanded when it requires five bushels or more to raise the same sum. This is accompanied by much talk of devaluation, inflation, revaluation, deflation, and a return to gold. By returning to gold, Mr. Churchill forced the Indian peasant to pay two bushels of grain in taxes and interest which a short time before he had been able to pay with one only.

C. H. Douglas, Arthur Kitson, Sir Montagu Webb give the details. The United States were sold to the Rothschilds in 1863. The Americans have taken eighty years to discover the facts that are still unknown in Europe. Some of them were made known in Congress by Charles A. Lindbergh, the aviator’s father, and later included by Willis A. Overholser in his History of Money in the United States.

A letter from the London banking firm of Rothschild Bros, dated 25 June, 1863, addressed to the New York bank Ikleheimer, Morton & Vander Gould, contains the following words of fire:

Very few people
will understand this. Those who do will be occupied
getting profits. The general public will probably not
see it’s against their interest.[2]

The favourite tricks of the usurocracy are simple, and the word “money” is not defined in the clerks’ manual issued by the Rothschilds, nor in the official vocabulary “Synonyms and Homonyms of Banking Terminology.” The tricks are simple: taking usury at sixty per cent. and upwards, and altering the value of the integer of account at moments advantageous to themselves.

Ignorance

Ignorance of these tricks is not a natural phenomenon; it is brought about artificially. It has been fostered by the silence of the press, in Italy as much as anywhere else. What is more, it has been patiently and carefully built up. The true basis of credit was already known to the founders of the Monte dei Paschi of Siena at the beginning of the seventeenth century.

This basis was, and is, the abundance, or productivity, of nature together with the responsibility of the whole people.

There are useful and potentially honest functions for banks and bankers. One who provides a measure of prices in the market and at the same time a means of exchange is useful to the nation. But one who falsifies this measure and this means is a criminal.

A sound banking policy aims, and in the past has aimed, as Lord Overstone (Samuel Loyd) has said, “to meet the real wants of commerce, and to discount all commercial bills arising out of legitimate transactions.”[3]

Nevertheless, at a certain moment at about the beginning of the century, Brooks Adams was moved to write:

Perhaps no financier has ever lived abler than Samuel Loyd. Certainly he understood as few men, even of later generations, have understood, the mighty engine of the single Standard. He comprehended that, with expanding trade, an inelastic currency must rise in value; he saw that, with sufficient resources at command, his class might be able to establish such a rise, almost at pleasure; certainly that they could manipulate it when it came, by taking advantage of foreign exchange. He perceived moreover that, once established, a contraction of the currency might be forced to an extreme, and that when money rose beyond price, as in 1825, debtors would have to surrender their property on such terms as creditors might dictate.[4]

So now you understand why the B.B.C., proclaiming the liberation of Europe, and of Italy in particular, never replies to the question: And the liberty of not getting into debt–how about that?

And you will understand why Brooks Adams wrote that after Waterloo no power had been able to resist the force of the usurers.[5]

And you will understand why Mussolini was condemned twenty years ago by the central commitee of the usurocracy. And why wars are made, i.e., in order to create debts which must be paid in appreciated money, or not paid at all, according to circumstances.

War is the highest form of sabotage, the most atrocious form of sabotage. Usurers provoke wars to impose monopolies in their own interests, so that they can get the world by the throat. Usurers provoke wars to create debts, so that they can extort the interest and rake in the profits resulting from changes in the values of monetary units.

If this is not clear to the novice, let him read and meditate the following sentences from the Hazard Circular of the year 1862:

The great debt that (our friends the) capitalists (of Europe) will see to it is made out of the war must he used to control the volume of money. . . . It will not do to allow the greenback, as it is called, to circulate . . . for we cannot control them (i.e., their issue, etc.).[6]

In fact, after the assassination of President Lincoln no serious measures against the usurocracy were attempted until the formation of the Rome-Berlin Axis. Italy’s ambition to achieve economic liberty—the liberty of not getting into debt—provoked the unleashing of the ever-accursed sanctions.

But the great Italian publishing houses, more or less open accomplices of the perfidious Italian press, have not published the works of Brooks Adams and Arthur Kitson in which these facts are given. The press has been perfidious, and the great publishing houses have been more or less conscious accomplices according to their opacity. One cannot hope to prevail against bad faith by making known the facts, but one might against ignorance. The publishers have received their information through certain channels; they have taken their tone from the Times Literary Supplement and from books distributed through Hachette and W. H. Smith & Son, or approved by the Nouvelle Revue Française.

Nothing, or practically nothing, has arrived in Italy that has not been picked over by the international usurers and their blind or shifty-eyed servitors. And the result is to be seen in an artificially created ignorance and snobbery. Neomalthusianism needs looking into. In Italy, as elsewhere, crime fiction has served to distract attention from the great underlying crime, the crime of the usurocratic system itself. If this may seem of no importance to politicians and men of action, it has nonetheless created a vast blockage of passive inertia in the very so-called “literary” or “cultured” circles which set the tone of printed matter. They read, they write, and the public gets the sweepings. And from this dishwashing process derives the CREDULITY that has contaminated a great part of the public with the “English disease,” namely, a pathological disposition to believe the fantastic tales put out from London and disseminated gratis by indigenous simpletons.

Of the liberals (who are not always usurers) we would ask, Why are usurers always liberals?

Of those who demand the dictatorship of the proletariat we would ask, Must the proletariat of one country impose dictatorship on the proletariat of another?

To those who inveigh against the concept of autarchy, saying it costs too much; that grain should be bought in the cheapest market—we would recall that it was precisely the importing of cheap grain from Egypt that ruined Italian agriculture under the Roman Empire. And if this fact appears too remote from our own times, it may be noted that those who speak of this kind of trade usually end up by talking about the export of labour, that is, the export of workers, the export of human beings, in exchange for commodities.

Many are beginning to understand that England, in her sadistic attempt destroy Italy, is destroying herself, though the public still fails to understand the origin of this mania for destruction. Deny, if you like, that the purely and exclusively economic man exists, yet the analysis of economic motives is useful for an understanding of avarice. The greed for monopoly is a fundamental evil. It may be seen in the transgression of the unjust price, condemned by the economic doctrine of the Church throughout the period of its greatest splendour.

It must be understood that the whole of the current taste in literature and entire journalistic system are controlled by the international usurocracy, which aims at preserving intact the public’s ignorance of the usurocratic system and its workings. The details of the military betrayal are known, but the intellectual betrayal has not yet been understood. Ignorance of this system and its mechanisms is not a natural phenomenon; it has been created.

Liberalism and Bolshevism are in intimate agreement in their fundamental contempt for the human personality. Stalin “disposes” of forty truckloads human “material” for work on a canal. We find d1e liberals talking about export of “labour.”

Liberalism conceals its baneful economics under two pretexts: the freedom of the spoken and written word, and the freedom of the individual, protected in theory, by trial in open court, guaranteed by the formula of habeas corpus. Enquire in India, or in England, to what extent these pretexts are respectec. Ask any American journalist what freedom of expression is left him by the advertisers.

Some further items of useful knowledge:
(1) We need a means of exchange and a means of saving, but it does follow that the means must be the same in each case.
(2) The state can LEND. The fleet that was victorious at Salamis was built with money lent to the shipbuilders by the Athenian state.
(3) To simplify both government and private management, a system which can operate at the counter, whether of a government or private office, is preferable.

A NATION
THAT WILL NOT
GET ITSELF INTO DEBT
DRIVES THE USURERS
TO FURY

The Pivot

All trade hinges on money. All industry hinges on money. Money is the pivot. It is the middle term. It stands midway between industry and workers. The pure economic man may not exist, but the economic factor, in the problem of living, exists. If you live on clichés and lose your respect for words, you will lose your “ben dell’ intelletto.”[7]

Trade brought prosperity to Liguria; usury lost it Corsica. But in losing the ability to distinguish between trade and usury one loses all sense of the historical process. There has been some vague talk in recent months about an international power, described as financial, but it would be better to call it “usurocracy,” or the rule of the big usurers combined in conspiracy. Not the gun merchants, but the traffickers in money itself have made this war; they have made wars in succession, for centuries, at their own pleasure, to create debts so that they can enjoy the interest on them, to create debts when money is cheap in order to demand repayment when money is dear.

But as long as the word “money” is not clearly defined, and as long as its definition is not known to all the peoples of the world, they will go blindly to war with each other, never knowing the reason why.

This war was no whim of Mussolini’s, nor of Hitler’s. This war is a chapter in the long and bloody tragedy which began with the foundation of the Bank of England in far-away 1694, with the openly declared intention of Paterson’s now famous prospectus, which contains the words already quoted: “the bank hath benefit of the interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing.”

To understand what this means it is necessary to understand what money is. Money is not a simple instrument like a spade. It is made up of two elements: one which measures the prices on the market, one which bestows the power to purchase the goods. It is this twofold aspect that the usurers have taken advantage of. You know well enough that a watch contains two principles, a mainspring and a hair-spring, with a train of wheels between the two. But if someone asks you what money is, you don’t know what the ten lire notes and the twenty centesimi pieces, which you have in your pockets, are.

Until the seventh century after Christ, when an Emperor of the T’ang Dynasty issued state notes (state notes, not bank notes, mind you), the world was practically compelled to use as money a determined quantity of some commonly used commodity, such as salt or gold according to the degree of local sophistication. But since A.D. 654, at least, this metal has no longer been necessary for trading between civilized people. The state note of the T’ang Dynasty, of the year 856, which is still in existence, has an inscription almost identical with the one you read on your ten lire notes.

The note measures the price, not the value; or in other words, prices are calculated in monetary units. But who supplies these notes? And, before the present war, who controlled the issue of international money? If you want to discover the causes of the present war, try and find out who controlled international money, and how it came under such control.

For the moment I will give you only one hint from the history of the United States of America:

The great debt that (our friends the) capitalists (of Europe) will see to it is made out of the war must be used to control the volume of money. . . . It will not do to allow the greenback, as it is called, to circulate . . . for we cannot control them.[8]

This is from the Hazard Circular of the year 1862. It seems to me that a similar situation existed in 1939. I would say that Italy, not wanting to get herself into debt, drove the great usurers to fury. Think it over! And think of the nature of money itself, and of the economists’ invariable irresponsibility when we ask them to define such words as money, credit, interest, and usury.

If we are going to talk about monetary policy, monetary reform, or a monetary revolution, we must know first of all exactly what money is.

The Enemy

The enemy is ignorance (our own). At the beginning of the nineteenth century John Adams (Pater Patriae) saw that the defects and errors of the American government derived not so much from the corruption of government officials as from ignorance of coin, credit, and circulation.

The situation is the same today. The subject is considered too dry by those who do not understand its significance. For example, at about the end of last December a banker boasted to me that at a certain period he could remember Italian paper money was worth more than gold. One concludes that in that particular “golden age” the Rothschilds were wanting to purchase gold cheap, in order to send its price rocketing later.

In the same way the Sassoons and their accomplices profited from the slump in silver. At one period, in fact, silver fell to 23 cents per ounce, and was later bought by certain American idiots at 75 cents per ounce, in order to please their masters and to “save India,” where, with the return to gold, Mr. Churchill, as we have remarked, forced the peasants to pay two bushels of grain in taxes and interest which a short time before could have been paid with only one.

To combat this rigging of the gold and silver markets we must know what money is. Today money is a disk of metal or a slip of paper which serves to measure prices and which confers, on its possessor, the right to receive in exchange any goods on sale in the market up to a price equal to the figure indicated on me disk or slip of paper, without any formality other than the transfer of the money from hand to hand. Thus money differs from a special coupon, such as a railway or theatre ticket. This universal quality confers special privileges on money which the special coupon does not possess. Of these I will speak another time.

Besides this tangible money, there is also intangible money, called “money on account,” which is used in accounting and banking transactions. This intangibility belongs to a discussion of credit rather than a treatise on money. Our immediate need is to clarify current conceptions with regard to the so-called “work-money,” and to make clear that money cannot be a “symbol of work” without any other qualification. It could be a “certificate of work done” on condition that the work is done within a system. The validity of the certificate would depend on the honesty of the system, and on the authority of the certifier. And the certificate would have to refer to some work useful—or at least pleasurable—to the community.

An item of work not yet completed would serve as an element of credit rather than as a basis for money properly understood. Speaking metaphorically, one might call credit the “future tense of money.”

The elaborate assay procedure of mints has been developed to guarantee the quality and quantity of the metal in coined money; no less elaborate precautions would be necessary to guarantee the quality, quantity, and appropriateness of me work which will serve as the basis for what is to be called “work money” (meaning “certificate-of-work-done-money”).

The same frauds of accounting practised by the gombeen-men of the past in order to swindle the public under a metallic monetary system will, of course, be attempted by the gombeen-men of the future in their attacks on social justice, irrespective of the kind of monetary system that may be established. And they will be just as likely to succeed unless the nature and workings of these practices have been fully understood by the public—or at least by an alert and efficient minority.

It is only one plague-spot that the creation of work-money would eliminate. I mean that the advantages of the gold-standard system lauded by the bankers are advantages for the bankers only—for some bankers only, in fact. Social justice demands equal advantages for all.

The advantage of work-money mainly derives from one fact alone: work cannot be monopolized. And this is the very reason for the bitter opposition, for the uproar of protest, natural and artificial, which issues from me ranks of the gombeen-men, whether they be exotic or indigenous.

The idea that work might serve as a measure of prices was already current in me eighteenth century, and was clearly expounded by Benjamin Franklin.

As for monopolizability: no one is such a fool as to let someone else have the run of his own private bank account; yet nations, individuals, industrialists, and businessmen have all been quite prepared—almost eager—to leave the control of their national currencies, and of international money, in the hands of the most stinking dregs of humanity.

Work cannot be monopolized. The function of work as a measure is beginning to be understood. The principle has been clearly put before the Italian public as, for example, when me Regime Fascista reports mat the Russian worker must pay 380 working hours for an overcoat which a German worker can procure with only 80.

An article by Fernando Ritter in the Fascio of Milan, 7 January, 1944, refers to money not in generic words and abstract terms such as “capital” and “finance,” but in terms of grain and fertilizers.

As for the validity of primitive forms of money such as a promissory note written on leather, we have C. H. Douglas’s memorable comment that it was valid enough as long as the man who promised to pay an ox had an ox.

In the same way the certificates of work done will be valid provided that the utility of the work done is honestly estimated by some proper authority. It should be remembered that the soil does not require monetary compensation for the wealth extracted from it. With her wonderful efficiency nature sees to it that the circulation of material capital and its fruits is maintained, and that what comes out of the soil goes back into the soil with majestic rhythm, despite human interference.

The Toxicology of Money

Money is not a product of nature but an invention of man. And man has made it into a pernicious instrument through lack of foresight. The nations have forgotten the differences between animal, vegetable, and mineral; or rather, finance has chosen to represent all three of the natural categories by a single means of exchange, and failed to take account of the consequences. Metal is durable, but it does not reproduce itself. If you sow gold you will not be able to reap a harvest many times greater than the gold you sowed. The vegetable leads a more or less autonomous existence, but its natural reproductiveness can be increased by cultivation. The animal gives to and takes from the vegetable world: manure in exchange for food.

Fascinated by the lustre of a metal, men made it into chains. Then he invented something against nature, a false representation in the mineral world of laws which apply only to animals and vegetables.

The nineteenth century, the infamous century of usury, went even further, creating a species of monetary Black Mass. Marx and Mill, in spite of their superficial differences, agreed in endowing money with properties of a quasi-religious nature. There was even the concept of energy being “concentrated in money,” as if one were speaking of the divine quality of consecrated bread. But a half-lira piece has never created the cigarette or the piece of chocolate that used, in pre-war days, to issue from the slot-machine.

The durability of metal gives it certain advantages not possessed by potatoes or tomatoes. Anyone who has a stock of metal can keep it until conditions are most favourable for exchanging it against less durable goods. Hence the earliest forms of speculation on the part of those in possession of metals—especially those metals which arc comparatively rare and do not rust.

But in addition to this potentiality for unjust manipulation inherent in metallic money by virtue of its being metallic, man has invented a document provided with coupons to serve as a more visible representation of usury. And usury is a vice, or a crime, condemned by all religions and by every ancient moralist. For example, in Cato’s De Re Rustica we find the following piece of dialogue:

“And what do you think of usury?”
“What do you think of murder?”

And Shakespeare: “Or is your gold . . . ewes and rams?”

No! it is not money that is the root of the evil. The root is greed, the lust for monopoly. ‘CAPTANS ANNONAM, MALEDICTUS IN PLEBE SIT!’ thundered St Ambrose—“Hoggers of harvest, cursed among the people!”

The opportunity of dishonest dealing was already offered to the possessors of gold at the dawn of history. But what man has made he can unmake. All that is needed is to devise a kind of money that cannot be kept waiting in the safe until such time as it may be most advantageous for its owner to bring it out. The power to swindle the people by means of coined or printed money would thus disappear almost automatically.

The idea is not new. Bishops in the Middle Ages were already issuing money that was recalled to the mint for recoining after a definite period. The German, Gesell, and the Italian, Avigliano, almost contemporaneously, devised a still more interesting means of achieving a greater economic justice. They proposed a paper-money system by which everyone was obliged, on the first of the month, to affix a stamp on every note he possessed equal to one per cent. of the note’s face value.

This system has given such praiseworthy results in certain restricted areas where it has been put into operation, that it is the duty of any far-sighted nation to give it serious consideration. The means is simple. It is not beyond the mental capacity of a peasant. Anyone is capable of sticking a stamp on an envelope, or on a receipted hotel bill.

From the humanitarian point of view, the advantage of this form of taxation over all others is that it can only fall on persons who have, at the moment the tax falls due, money in their pockets worth 100 times the tax itself.

Another advantage is that it doesn’t interfere with trade or discourage building activity; it falls only on superfluous money, namely on the money mat the holder has not been obliged to spend in the course of the preceding month. As a remedy for inflation its advantages will be seen immediately. Inflation consists in a superfluity of money. Under Gesell’s system each issue of notes consumes itself in 100 months—eight years and four months—thus bringing to the treasury a sum equal to the original issue.

(To make this still clearer, imagine a note left in the safe for 100 months. It will be a note on strike which, for 100 months, fails to function as a means of exchange and does not serve its purpose. Well then, the tax on this laziness will equal its face value. On the other hand, a note that passes from hand to hand can play its part in hundreds of transactions each month before it has to be taxed at all.)

The expense of numerous departments whose present function is to squeeze taxes out of the public would be reduced to a minimum and practically vanish. Office workers don’t go to the office to amuse themselves. They could be given the chance of spending their time as they liked, or of raising the cultural level of their social circle, while still receiving their present salaries without the need of diminishing the material wealth of Italy by a single bushel of grain, or by a litre of wine. Those who are not studiously inclined would have time to produce something useful.

A cardinal error of so-called liberal economics has been to forget the difference between food and stuff you can neither cat nor clothe yourself with. A republican[9] realism should call the public’s attention to certain fundamental realities. Philip Gibbs, writing of Italy for Anglo-American readers, cannot see that anything can be done with a product except sell it. The idea of using it does not penetrate the Bolshevik-Liberal psychology.

The Error

The error has been pecuniolatry, or the making of money into a god. This was due to a process of denaturalization, by which our money has been given false attributes and powers that it should never have possessed. Gold is durable, but does not reproduce itself—not even if you put two bits of it together, one shaped like a cock, the other like a hen. It is absurd to speak of it as bearing fruit or yielding interest. Gold does not germinate like grain. To represent gold as doing this is to represent it falsely. It is a falsification. And the term “falsificazione della moneta” (counterfeiting or false-coining) may perhaps be derived from this.

To repeat: we need a means of exchange and a means of saving, but it does not follow that the means must be the same in each case. We are not forced to use a hammer for an awl.

The stamp affixed to the note acts as the hair-spring in the watch. Under the usurocratic system the world has suffered from alternate waves of inflation and deflation, of too much money and too little. Everyone can understand the function of a pendulum or hair-spring. A similar mental grasp should be brought to bear in the field of money.

A sound economic system will be attained when money has neither too much nor too little potential. The distinction between trade and usury has been lost. The distinction between debt and interest-bearing debt has been lost. As long ago as 1878 the idea of non-interest-bearing debt was current—even of non-interest-bearing national debt. The interest that you have received in the past has been largely an illusion: it has functioned on a short-term basis leaving you with a sum of money arithmetically somewhat greater than that which you had “saved,” but expressed in a currency whose units have lost a part of their value in the meantime.

Dexter Kimball collected statistics of American rail bonds issued over a period of half a century, and made interesting discoveries as to the proportion of these obligations that had simply been annulled for one reason or another. If my memory doesn’t betray me, the figure was as high as seventy per cent.

That industrial concerns and plants should pay interest on their borrowed capital is just, because they serve to increase production. But the world has lost the distinction between production and corrosion. Unpardonable imbecility! For this distinction was known in the earliest years of recorded history. To represent something corrosive as something productive is a falsification—a forgery. Only fools believe in false representations. Give money its correct potential; make it last as long as things last in the material world; give it, above all, its due advantage (i.e., that of being exchangeable for any goods at any moment, provided the goods in question exist)—but do not give money, beyond this advantage, powers that correspond neither to justice nor to the nature of the goods it is issued against or used to purchase. This is the way that leads to social justice and economic sanity.

Military Valour

There can be no military valour in a climate of intellectual cowardice.

No individual should get angry if the community refuses to accept his proposals, but it is intellectual cowardice if one is afraid to formulate one’s own concept of society. This is all the more so at a time full of possibilities, at a time when the formulation of a new system of government is announced. Everyone who has some competence as an historian, and is in possession of certain historical facts, should formulate his concepts in relation to that part of the social organism in which his studies have given him authority to act as a judge.

To cultivate this competence in future generations one must begin, in the schools, with the observation of particular objects, as an introduction to the apprehension of particular facts in history. The individual does not need to know everything on an encyclopaedic scale, but everyone with any kind of public responsibility must have knowledge of the essential facts of the problem he has to deal with. It begins with the game of the objects shown to the child for an instant in the hand that is then quickly closed again.

Thought hinges on the definition of words. Aristotle and Confucius bear witness. I would conclude the compulsory studies of every university student with a comparison—even a brief one—between the two major works of Aristotle (the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics), on the one hand, and, on the other, the Four Books of China (i.e., the three classics of the Confucian tradition—the Ta Hsüeh or “Great Learning,”[10] The Unwobbling Axis,[11] and the Analects—together with the Works of Mencius).

Extra-university education and that of the public in general could be taken care of by means of a simple ordinance relating to bookshops: every bookseller should be obliged to stock and, in the case of certain more important works, display in the window for a determined number of weeks per year certain books of capital importance.

Anyone who is familiar with the masterpieces, especially those of Aristotle, Confucius, Demosthenes, together with Davanati’s “Tacitus,”[12] will not be taken in by the nasty messes now offered to the public. As for money, it will be enough if everyone thinks for himself of the principle of the hair-spring, of the national and social effects, in other words, that would result from the mere application of a stamp in the most appropriate place. Better on the currency note tl1an on the receipted hotel bill.

One used to speak of “Cavalieri di San Giorgio,”[13] never identifying them with due precision. Money can cause injury, and economic knowledge is today about as crude as was medical science when it was realized that a broken leg was damaging but when the effects of germs were unknown. It is not so much the money that buys a Badoglio, but the hidden work of interest that is everywhere gnawing away, corroding. This is not the interest paid to the private individual on his bank account, but interest on money that does not exist, on a mirage of money; interest equivalent to sixty per cent. and over as opposed to money that represents honest work or goods useful to mankind.

To repeat: the distinction between production and corrosion has been lost; and so has the distinction between the sharing-out of the fruits of work done in collaboration (a true and just dividend, called partaggio in the Middle Ages) and the corrosive interest that represents no increase in useful and material production of any sort.

It is, of course, useless to indulge in anti-Semitism, leaving intact the Hebraic monetary system which is their most tremendous instrument of usury. And we would ask the Mazzinians why they never read those pages of the Duties of Man which deal with banks.

Bulletin of Civic Discipline

Arguments are caused by the ignorance of ALL the disputants.

Until you have clarified your own thought within yourself you cannot communicate it to others.

Until you have brought order within yourself you cannot become an element of order in the party.

The fortune of war depends on the honesty of the régime.

Notes

1. Quoted by Christopher Hollis, The Two Nations, chap. III. See also Pound’s Canto XLVI.—Trans.

2. The Italian text follows the author’s own paraphrase in Canto XLVI, which is therefore used here. These particular words are quoted (enthusiastically) from a letter received by the Rothschild firm from “a certain Mr John Sherman,” presumably to be identified with the American statesman who was then Senator for Ohio and later Secretary of the Treasury. Overholser gives the full text in the fourth chapter of his book.—Trans.

3. Quoted by Brooks Adams, The Law of Civilization and Decay (new edition), Knopf, New York, 1943, pp. 307-8.—Trans.

4. Brooks Adams, p. 315.—Trans.

5. Ibid. pp. 306, 310, 326-7, and chap. XI generally.—Trans.

6. Quoted by Overholser, op. cit, chap. IV. Also by H. Jerry Voorhis: Extension of Remarks in the House of Representatives, 6 June, 1938, Congressional Record, Appendix, Vol. 83, Part II, p. 2363.—Trans.

7. Dante, Inferno III, 18. “Homely english wd. get that down to ‘USE OF YOUR WITS’ but I reckon Dante meant something nearer to Mencius’ meaning: . . . sense of EQUITY.”—E. P. in a radio speech, see If This Be Treason, p. 32.—Tr.

8. See note p. 6, above.—Trans.

9. At the time of writing the Fascist Social Republic was established in northern Italy, while “liberated” Italy was still a monarchy.—Trans.

10. “Studio Maturo” in the text.—Trans.

11. i.e., the Chung Yung, or “Doctrine of the Just Mean,” rendered in the text as “L’Asseche non Vacilla” at a time when a more notorious Axis was anything but unwobbling. The author’s latest rendering of this title is “The Unwobbling Pivot.”—Trans.

12. Bernardo Davanzati (1529-1606), celebrated translator of Tacitus.—Trans.

13. Italian nickname for gold sovereigns.—Trans.

3 comments
SandyNovember 6, 2013 at 3:09 am
I wonder if The United States were sold to the Rothschilds in 1863 is the explanation for the queen knighting, from time to time, American citizens, such as Sir Alan Greenspan?


Daniele PaceJune 26, 2015 at 12:05 pm
Prof Giacinto Auriti gave the answer to the 5 question of Ezra Pound theorising the Popular Ownwership of Money. He has a great reputation in Italy. You can find more here or ask for the books !

http://danielepacebloguk.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/the-importance-of-auriti-and-of-legal.html


SRPNovember 24, 2020 at 8:36 am
As for the strategy of devaluing money in order to encourage spending and discourage hoarding: It seems to me that inflation itself serves this purpose. The stamp-system as described above by Pound, is obviously unworkable as 99% of money today and tomorrow is both earned and spent electronically.

I think that originating money only upon performance of labor is key. And discouraging hoarding by some means (such as by deliberate controlled inflation). But where is big capital obtained if no hoarding allowed? And how is the lending of capital incentivized if interest is prohibited? Would the State be the only lender?

And where does the State get money except by taxation? Does the State own certain profitable industries and obtain revenue from these rather than taxation?

https://counter-currents.com/

All they have had is the power to print money. The rest, they have usurped from humanity

Curtis Lemay famously said:

There are no innocent civilians. It is their government and you are fighting a people, you are not trying to fight an armed force anymore. So it doesn’t bother me much to be killing the so-called innocent bystanders.

As a human being, should this not concern you? What part of the organized slaughter of vast numbers of innocent people can you find acceptable? Do you believe that you are special in some way, that you were being protected, or that you will be protected now?

There has been abundant evidence of great evil at work in the world, throughout time and in our present time. Do you really wish to be ignorant of its existence and operation?

There is an interconnectedness of all things. If you don’t care about the obvious lies, the deaths of innocent children, the fire-bombings of cities, the suppression of dissent, the propaganda, the escalating terrorism, in which, quite strangely, innocent people are always and everywhere the target, sooner or later it is coming for you, or your children, or your grandchildren. If you know and you’re not doing anything about it, or saying anything about it, it’s time.

It’s time to start connecting the dots, because they lead to you.

If you are wealthy, you might assume that, because the system has allowed them to accumulate wealth, they will be protected in some way, that they are special. You are special. They’re saving you for dessert.

You have been allowed to chase profits while the wellbeing and re-silience of your people have been broadly and systematically eliminated.

There are monsters under the stairs eating people alive. But you don’t want to look under the stairs, because you want to keep using the stairs.

To not know is bad. To not want to know is worse.

Willful ignorance of the existence and operation of evil is a luxury even the wealthy can no longer afgord.

We are in the grip of the greatest evil humanity has ever faced (or refused to acknowledge, as the case may be). Hybrid war is unlimited.

It has no bounds. It is global, and it is inside your head. It is never-ending.

Nothing focuses the mind like an imminent hanging, or as Samuel Johnson originally said, “Depend upon it sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

Hybrid war can be stopped. Stopping it begins in your mind.

During the Great War, Edward L. Bernays had worked with the Committee on Public Information to “sell” the war to the public. In 1928, he published his book Propaganda [53], in which we can read this statement on the subject:

Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

The systematic psychological manipulation of society, begun with the evils of the Great War, has continued non-stop and has escalated to the point that we are now subject to full spectrum, continuous psychological operations.

Eighty-one years after the publication of Bernays’ book, Chris Hedges wrote the following [54, p. 51]:

A public that can no longer distinguish between truth and fiction is left to interpret reality through illusion. Random facts or obscure bits of data and trivia are used either to bolster illusion and give it credibility, or discarded if they interfere with the message . . .

When opinions cannot be distinguished from facts, when there is no universal standard to determine truth in law, in science, in scholarship, or in reporting the events of the day, when the most valued skill is the ability to entertain, the world becomes a place where lies become true, where people can believe what they want to believe. This is the real danger of pseudo-events and pseudo-events are far more pernicious than stereotypes. They do not explain reality, as stereotypes attempt to, but replace reality. Pseudo-events redefine reality by the parameters set by their creators. These creators, who make massive profits selling illusions, have a vested interest in maintaining the power structures they control.

The people behind the wars have never been investigated and removed from power. They have continued in control of all central banks, and money creation, and have extended their control globally.

Certainly many who have abetted this are ignorant of the greater design.

But the people behind the wars are, quite literally, lying, thieving killers, and they know it. To say that there is much evidence of this is an understatement. Perhaps they have not killed innocent men, women and children with their own hands, but they have deliberately caused these deaths. That this is done with intent can be known through the persistence of their planning and actions over many decades. While the scale and audacity of this criminality seems unimaginable to us, nothing is unimaginable to them. Their criminality has now reached unprecedented and ultimate scale, as its aim is the subjugation of the entire globe and of all people.

Wars have always been not so much about taking things as about subjugation of populations on all sides. Vast destruction and death are acceptable to their planners. You might ask, how could the people plotting and executing such insane schemes be held together? I suggest that it has something to do with the binding power of shared guilt, of the criminal pact. The perpetrators are each and all are bound, whether explicitly or unconsciously, by evidence of shameful, treasonous acts committed against their own people. The commission of crime is a power totem among them. The more heinous the crime, the more powerful is the binding force.

In the past few years, you have been living within an escalating hybrid war. Globally, we have witnessed overt media control and propaganda campaigns; censorship, including arrests of people speaking in public; monitoring of all electronic communications and physical contact tracing; brutally enforced lock-down and masking requirements, with people being beaten, handcuffed and arrested, even in their homes; suspension of healthcare services and weakening of healthcare systems; invasive testing requirements for employment and travel; forced quarantine of travelers; and coerced quarantine and “vaccination” of the healthy general population.

Governments dropped all pretense of democracy and were emboldened to practice open despotism. There were no functioning checks on this power. The courts provided no effective recourse to the public.

Governments broadly abused fundamental human rights, using as justification the need to prevent the spread of infectious diseases, which are, in truth, a great many, ever-present, and continually evolving. And so, this justifocation, if allowed to stand, affirms the end of democracy and the continuation of openly despotic government.

Are you able to contemplate that this may have been about more than a virus?

We have witnessed designs and real attempts to exert physical control over every person’s body, globally, and this is continuing [55]. Why is this happening?

I will make a startling assertion. This is not because the power to control is increasing. It is because this power is indeed collapsing. The “control system” has entered collapse.

Their power has been based on deception. Their two great powers of deception, money and media, have been extremely energy-efficient means of control. But these powers are now in rampant collapse. This is why they have moved urgently to institute physical control measures. However, physical control is difficult, dangerous and energy-intensive.

And so, they are risking all. They are risking being seen. Is this not a sign of desperation?
Where will they hide when they have all of the assets, when they have damaged all of humanity, and caused billions to awaken through suffering?

They promote the belief that they are all-powerful. They are not. All they have had is the power to print money. The rest, they have usurped from humanity.

Never before has a system benefitted so few at the great expense of so many. Is this not inherently unstable and unsustainable? Physical control, as opposed to rule by deception, requires enormous energy.

Can this be sustained while destroying all economies, and abusing all people, globally? They do not know how to “build back better.” Look at their footprint around the world—the destruction, the economic devastation. When it comes to the real world, they are exceptionally good at just one thing: fucking things up. Then they declare victory, and fix blame on others for the horrific damage done.

(...)

All organizations promoting war are criminal organizations. The people behind them are mass murderers. The men and women orchestrating chaos in country after country are criminals of the worst kind. The people following orders are not heroes; they are criminals.

The people controlling this system are quite obviously not benevolent.

They are not noble. They are not elite. They are insane!

They are the antithesis of everything we could value, admire, and love.

These people do not represent human development, or the future of humanity. They are lacking in essential human qualities. They are aberrant. Antipathy for humanity is aberrant. For 99.99% of human history, sociopaths like these would not have survived the next winter.

Their nature was seen and they were ostracized from the village, to save the village.

They operate today through anonymity enabled by inhuman scale of social organization. Even so, this will not allow them to continue indefinitely. We have entered a time in which their nature is being recognized. Knowledge of their existence has become unavoidable.

Their grasping will come to an end, because all of humanity cannot allow it to continue. Once it is recognized, humans will bond against a common existential threat. People from all walks of life will join in common cause. We have witnessed this already.

Their power structure can and must be dismantled non-violently. The “masterminds” will not yet be known. However, the individuals and organizations near the levers of power (monetary, media, government, “healthcare”, military, police, legal, corporate), operating with criminal intent toward the mass of humanity, can be identified. The allegiances of these functionaries are unstable, driven by narrow self-interest.

By directly and personally putting these people on notice that their actions are being documented, and subject to criminal prosecution, they may be impelled to decline further involvement. This process can be accelerated. It is not necessary to wake up the majority! We are not fighting the 1%, but the 0.01%. Even without mobilizing the majority, it is entirely possible to realize an enormous advantage of intelligent, capable, activated people.

If the people behind this Great Taking persist in their insane schemes, they will inevitably be found. It will be quite simple to follow the collateral to those who have arranged to take it. Perhaps they aren’t such masterminds after all!

We will come to know who is behind this hybrid war against humanity.

We will come to know who controls the Bank for International Settlements, the Federal Reserve System, and all central banks globally, and hence all political parties, governments, media, and armed forces.

We will come to know who controls the CIA.

And we will finally know who has been behind the assassinations.

Let me close with John F. Kennedy’s own words:

Our problems are man-made;
therefore, they can be solved by man.

***
Supreme excellence consists of breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.
Sun Tzu

What is this book about? It is about the taking of collateral, all of it, the end game of this globally synchronous debt accumulation super cycle.

This is being executed by long-planned, intelligent design, the audacity and scope of which is dificult for the mind to encompass. Included are all financial assets, all money on deposit at banks, all stocks and bonds, and hence, all underlying property of all public corporations, including all inventories, plant and equipment, land, mineral deposits, inventions and intellectual property. Privately owned personal and real property financed with any amount of debt will be similarly taken, as will the assets of privately owned businesses, which have been financed with debt. If even partially successful, this will be the greatest conquest and subjugation in world history.
We are now living within a hybrid war conducted almost entirely by deception, and thus designed to achieve war aims with little energy input. It is a war of conquest directed not against other nation states but against all of humanity.

Private, closely held control of all central banks, and hence of all money creation, has allowed a very few people to control all political parties, governments, the intelligence agencies and their myriad front organizations, the armed forces, the police, the major corporations, and of course, the media. These very few people are the prime movers.

Their plans are executed over decades. Their control is opaque. When George Soros said to me, “You don’t know what they can do,” it was these people to whom he referred. Now, to be absolutely clear, it is these very few people, who are hidden from you, who are behind this war against humanity. You may never know who they are. The people you are allowed to see are hired “face men” and “face women.” They are expendable.

One might seek comfort in thinking that this must be crazy; nothing like this has ever happened before . . . but it has. The precedent for the intent, design and horrific execution of such a plan can be found by examining the early 20thcentury, the period of the great wars and the Great Depression. The proclaimed “Great Reset” now in progress, however, includes major innovations, which will allow unprecedented concentration of wealth and of power over humanity through deprivation. How might it come to pass that you will own nothing, as so boldly predicted by the World Economic Forum? It certainly is not about the personal convenience of renting.

With the collapse of each financial bubble and the ensuing financial crisis, a story is rolled out which should by now be familiar to you. It goes like this: All of us are at fault. We just wanted too much, and we were living beyond our means. And now, our collective greed has caused this terrible global crisis. The “Authorities”, the “Regulators” had struggled mightily to protect us from our own “animal spirits”, their great and elaborate efforts having been demonstrated through decades of work. Despite their good intentions, however, they failed, and can’t be blamed (or prosecuted) for that. After all, we are all to blame. In any case, let’s look forward. The financial system must be restarted, so that we can provide credit to you again, create jobs and get the economy growing, whatever it takes! 

This time, what it will take is all of your property, or what you thought was your property. Here is your Central Bank Digital Currency deposited on your smart phone, so that you can buy milk. Noblesse Oblige!

Money is an extremely efficient control system. People order themselves upon money incentives, and thus diffcult, dangerous and energy intensive overt physical control need not be employed broadly. But the money control system breaks down at the end of a monetary “super cycle”, with collapse in the Velocity of Money (Velocity, or VOM). This is a multi-decade process.

Velocity is the number of times that a unit of currency is spent to buy goods and services in a period of time. This is measured by comparing the value of all goods and services produced in a period of time (Gross 3 I. Introduction Domestic Product, or GDP), with the value of all cash and deposits which can be used nearly as easily as cash (Money Supply).

Velocity = GDP Money Supply Thus,Velocity × Money Supply = GDP. Lower Velocity results in lower GDP.

Milton Friedman was an economist noted for the study of monetary history. In his book A Monetary history of the United States, 1867-1960 [1], co-authored with Anna Schwartz, we find the following observation:

[W]e know enough to demonstrate rather conclusively that . . .velocity [of money] must have declined sharply from 1880 to World War I . . .

Collapse in VOM is exactly what was unfolding from the 19thcentury and leading up to the Great War. Within a few years, the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires ceased to exist, as did the Qing Dynasty. The German economy was destroyed. Then followed the Great Depression, the Second World War, and the slow collapse of the British Empire. No populations were unscathed. There were no winners.

Or were there?
***

My Aunt Elizabeth had been ten years old when the banks were closed by executive order in 1933 [30]. When I asked her to tell me about the Great Depression, she said that suddenly no one had any money, that even wealthy families had no money and had to take their daughters out of private school because they could not pay the tuition.

I wondered why even these wealthy families could not send their children back to their schools after the banks were reopened.

The answer is that only the Federal Reserve Banks and banks selected by the Federal Reserve were allowed to reopen.

“The Federal Reserve Banks,” writes Allan Meltzer, “sent the Treasury lists of banks recommended for reopening, and the Treasury licensed those it approved.” Meltzer’s study A History of the Federal Reserve [31] is considered the most comprehensive history of the central bank.

People with money in banks that were not allowed to reopen lost all of it. Their debts were not canceled, however; these were taken over by the banks selected by the Federal Reserve System. If these people could not make their debt payments—which was now likely, since they had lost their cash—they lost everything they had financed with any amount of debt, e.g., their house, their car, and their business.

Thousands of banks were never allowed to reopen. The grand facades of former bank buildings could be seen around Cleveland. There was such devastation of banks that a neighborhood Catholic church was built with massive stone columns salvaged from a bank building which had been demolished.

The Cleveland Trust Co. had grown through acquisition to become, by 1924, the sixth largest bank in the United States. As noted by The Case Western Reserve University Encyclopedia of Cleveland History [32], “the bank survived the Depression well.” How was that possible?

It was selected by the Federal Reserve to consolidate debts. I had a finance professor who told the class that Cleveland Trust had run a systematic process of foreclosing upon and evicting many thousands of families from their homes in the greater Cleveland area. After these families were evicted from their homes, and their equity wiped out, they were offered the possibility of moving back into their former homes as renters, the advantage to Cleveland Trust being that these families would pay to keep the houses heated until they could be sold.

Cleveland Trust did “well.” How did my finance professor know about this? His family was one of those many thousands of families whose home mortgage had been taken over by Cleveland Trust.

Contrast this with the cheery image conveyed by William L. Silber, who was a member of the Economic Advisory Panel of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. In his article Why Did FDR’s Bank Holiday Succeed?

[33], Silver writes:

Much to everyone’s relief, when the institutions reopened for business on March 13, depositors stood in line to return their hoarded cash to neighborhood banks. Within two weeks, Americans had re-deposited more than half of the currency that they had squirreled away before the suspension. The market registered its approval as well. On March 15, 1933, the first day of trading after the extended closure, the New York Stock Exchange recorded the largest one-day price increase ever. With the benefit of hindsight, the nationwide Bank Holiday in March 1933 ended the bank runs that had plagued the Great Depression . . . Contemporary observers consider the Bank Holiday and the Fireside Chat the one-two punch that broke the back of the Great Depression . . . the speed with which the Bank Holiday Act reestablished the integrity of the payments system demonstrates the power of credible regime-shifting policies.

The Emergency Banking Act of 1933, had been passed by Congress on March 9, 1933, three days after FDR declared the bank holiday, with only a single copy available on the floor of the House of Representatives, and with copies being made available to senators as the bill was being proposed in the senate, after it had passed the house [34].

Was it successful? We are led to believe that the Bank Holiday was a brilliant scheme. Well it was—for some. It was enormously successful for those banking interests who took the assets and consolidated their power. It certainly demonstrated the power of “regime-shifting policies.”

We will see that it was not just about taking peoples homes and other stuff. As to ending the panic, perhaps that is not so difficult to do when you have fomented the panic.

In the Wikipedia article The Great Depression [35] we find the following illumination of the Fed’s odd behavior in the years leading up to the bank holiday:

The Monetarist explanation was given by American economists Milton Friedman and Anna J. Schwartz. They argued that the Great Depression was caused by the banking crisis that caused one-third of all banks to vanish, a reduction of bank shareholder wealth and more importantly monetary contraction of 35%, which they called “The Great Contraction.” By not lowering interest rates, by not lowering rates and by not injecting liquidity into the banking system to prevent it from crumbling, the Federal Reserve passively watched the transformation of a normal recession into the Great Depression.

The Federal Reserve allowed some large public bank failures— particularly that of the New York Bank of United States [in Decem-ber, 1930]—which produced panic and widespread runs on local banks, and the Federal Reserve sat idly by while banks collapsed.

Friedman and Schwartz argued that, if the Fed had provided emergency lending to these key banks, or simply bought government bonds on the open market to provide liquidity and increase the quantity of money after the key banks fell, all the rest of the banks would not have fallen after the large ones did, and the money supply would not have fallen as far and as fast as it did.

This view was endorsed in 2002 by Federal Reserve Governor Ben Bernanke in a speech honoring Friedman and Schwartz with this statement [36]:

Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an of f i cial representative of the Federal Reserve. I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression, you’re right. We did it.

We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.

As this is “ancient history”, it was safe for Bernanke to make such an admission. But more to the point, it would allow him to posture as the wise man who had studied the “mistakes” of the Federal Reserve, and then to justify the Fed’s extraordinary measures to follow in the Global Financial Crisis. Is the Fed indeed “very sorry”? Can one believe the promise that “we won’t do it again”? They have studied the lessons of the past in detail; however, their purpose has been to prepare a new and improved global version for the spectacular end of this debt expansion super-cycle. That’s what this book is about.

Contrary to the image of success, which has been handed down to us, the Bank Holiday did not end the Great Depression. There was no recovery which might have allowed people to service their debts and keep their property. Why was that? 

“Inexplicably”, the Federal Reserve kept conditions tight [37]:

According to literature on the subject, the possible causes . . . were a contraction in the money supply caused by Federal Reserve and Treasury Department policies and contractionary fiscal policies.

If that was a comprehensive program to assure there would be no recovery, it worked quite well. Conditions remained broadly stressful for years, and they kept price levels down, so that people had no opportunity to sell assets for paying off debts. I know from family letters that, despite having no debts, times were quite tough. Grandma Webb wrote to her son (who was in a youth athletic program on an army base) about Grandpa Webb having been out trying to get any work for Webb Equipment. That was in 1936.

Contrary to the image of FDR as a savior, the people in my family who lived through the 30s considered FDR to be something like Satan himself, and they were not religious people.
Here is an interesting quote from Silber [33]:

The Emergency Banking Act of 1933, passed by Congress on March 9—combined with the Federal Reserve’s commitment to supply VIII. Bank Holiday 46 unlimited amounts of currency to reopened banks—created de facto 100 percent deposit insurance.

So according to William L. Silber, who was an economic advisor to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Fed miraculously and suddenly in March of 1933 had the means “to supply unlimited amounts of currency to reopened banks”, which were, of course, only the banks selected by the Federal Reserve System. Clearly, the Fed had had the means all along to avoid the failure of those thousands of banks. A panic can be fomented easily when you run the system. They made it happen. They planned it, and then brought their solution after they got their regime-shifting policies in place.

The Federal Reserve System and the banks selected by the Fed were prepared to take things from people on a vast scale: their homes, their cars, and even their new electric appliances, which had been sold to them with the innovation of consumer credit. Did “the bankers” need to take this property? What was the real purpose? Can you get past the idea that they were trying to help? Even if we can, we are always led to think about this in a small way—that it is always about a natural human greed for money and for material things. It was not then, and it is not now.

Ask yourself: if they don’t want your money, and they don’t really want or need your stuff , and they’re not trying to help you, what do they want? What’s the point of all of their efforts?

This may be difficult to hear: It was deliberate strategy. It was about ultimate, complete power, allowing no centers of resistance. And so, it was about deprivation. It was about subjugation—and it still is, in more ways than we know.

It was not about helping people then, and it’s not about helping people now. It is all part of the same deliberate herding of humanity and elimination of any pockets of resilience, which plagues us still.

While Cleveland is now a crumbling city, it was a center of incredible prosperity in the 1920s. The Federal Reserve Bank building in Cleveland was completed in 1923, less than ten years after the signing of the Federal Reserve Act. The bank vault is the largest in the world, and it incorporates the largest hinge ever built. It seems they were preparing to put a lot of stuff in there, and for the possibility that there might be some stress about that. Perhaps it was not to be filled with refrigerators, washing machines, and toasters. There are machine gun turrets above the sidewalk on the street level.

There was a larger objective.

The preparatory work had been laid when the Federal Reserve System was secretly planned, and with the passage of the Federal Reserve Act in the quiet before Christmas, 1913. The Federal Reserve Act set up an inevitable logic that the Fed must take the gold of the public in a sufficiently major crisis, with the justification that credit could not be expanded otherwise.

This is exactly what is now set up to happen with all securities owned by the public, globally.
Here is an important excerpt from the Wikipedia article on Executive Order 6102 [38] :

The stated reason for the order was that hard times had caused ‘hoarding’ of gold.

However,

the main rationale behind the order was actually to remove the constraint on the Federal Reserve preventing it from increasing the money supply during the depression. The Federal Reserve Act (1913) required 40% gold backing of Federal Reserve Notes that were issued. By the late 1920s, the Federal Reserve had almost reached the limit of allowable credit, in the form of Federal Reserve demand notes, which could be backed by gold in its possession.

The executive order to confiscate all gold owned by the public was made under the authority of the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917, which had been enacted four years after the creation of the Federal Reserve. The act had been used to confiscate the property of interned natives of Germany, and more. This is described by Daniel A. Gross in his article The U.S. Confiscated Half a Billion Dollars in Private Property During WWI [39], whose subtitle reads: “America’s home front was the site of interment, deportation, and vast property seizure.”

Apparently all the U.S. public was now the enemy. Think about this.

People who were simply protecting themselves and their families from the actions of the Federal Reserve System were accused of hoarding gold, and literally criminalized if they persisted in doing so. The rationale is incredible: You are hoarding gold, so we will take it and do what with it? Hoard it! As we have seen, once they had taken the gold of the public, they did not then use the resource to expand credit. People remained in a debt trap. The deprivation continued and even worsened. Clearly, the need to expand credit served only as a pretext for the confiscation of the public’s gold, which was the real premeditated objective.

I asked my father why people had turned in their gold. He said that if you did not you were a criminal, but further, that there was nothing you would be able to do with it because you could not legally transport or sell it. So, essentially, the use and value of gold had been confiscated.

This was certainly the case because it remained illegal for a U.S. person to own gold for more than forty years!

Here are some excerpts from Executive Order 6102 [40]:

All persons are hereby required to deliver on or before May 1, 1933, to a Federal Reserve Bank or branch or agency thereof or to any member bank of the Federal Reserve System all gold coin, gold bullion and gold certificates now owned by them or coming into their ownership . . .
Whoever willfully violates any provision of this Executive Order . . .may be fined not more than $10,000, or, if a natural person, may be imprisoned for not more than ten years, or both . . .

Note that the penalties were quite severe, and that all the gold was literally to be turned over to the Federal Reserve System. How nice!

Now we can see the purpose of constructing, in 1923, the largest bank vault in the world and a fortified building!

Perhaps gold will not be confiscated immediately this time around.

Gold has not been targeted as the essential collateral backing as was the case under the Federal Reserve Act. In this go-round it is securities of all kinds, globally, which have been set-up as the collateral backing underpinning the derivatives complex.

The big banks are organized as holding companies with subsidiaries.

The purpose of this structure is to legally separate risks. A subsidiary can be designed to take on liabilities, which cannot attach to assets in other subsidiaries or to the holding company. The weakened subsidiary can be separately bankrupted. (...)

David Rogers Webb
https://thegreattaking.com/

Manifesto For The Abolition Of Interest-Slavery - Gottfried Feder

Volumes of books have been written on the 3rd Reich and the Second World War that deal primarily with Adolf Hitler, his generals, the War, or other “exciting” tangents from the European Theater in that period of time.

However I doubt that the families of the millions of men and boys who died in that tragedy known as WWII would refer to any of it as “exciting,” and this publisher would be in agreement with them. What is often left out of these books are the core principles and foundations of National-Socialism (Nazism) that got Hitler elected and brought Germany out of the depression before any other affected nation had.

Adolf Hitler’s economic system – heavily influenced by the genius of Gottfried Feder – was unlike anything the world had ever seen, and it worked better than anyone predicted at the time. National-Socialist economics were of pivotal importance to Hitler’s government, but those policies are sadly very poorly understood today for a variety of reasons, including the aforementioned lack of “excitement” surrounding economic policies of 70+ years ago on the other side of the world. As the reader will soon come to understand, “breaking the bondage of interest-slavery” was strongly emphasized, though most Americans have never considered the idea of life without interest on a house or car payment. Gottfried Feder discusses this in his Manifesto, and almost all of what he says in it applies today as it did in 1919. Some authors and Nazi sympathizers have even suggested that if Germany’s brilliant economic ideas had spread to other nations, this would soon lead to the end of endless profits and power for the banksters, and hence the need for the Allied powers to bring Germany to her knees.

Germany’s currency and trade systems begin to give one an understanding of the causes of World War II. This was stated by Hasting W. S. Russell, who wrote at the beginning of the War: “A war of financiers and fools, though most people, on the allied side at any rate, do not yet see very clearly how financiers come into it. . . . Financiers also desired war as a means of overthrowing their rivals and consolidating still further their immense power. . . . Hitler not only engaged in barter trade which meant no discount profits for bankers arranging bills of Exchange, but he even went so far as to declare that a country’s real wealth consisted in its ability to produce goods; nor, when men and material were available, would he ever allow lack of money to be an obstacle in the way of any project which he considered to be in his country’s interests. This was rank heresy in the eyes of the financiers of Britain and America, a heresy which, if allowed to spread, would blow the gaff on the whole financial racket.”

Gottfried Feder (an early mentor of Hitler) had been advocating banking reform as early at 1917, and was ardently against interest slavery and usury. In his Manifesto he stated that the source of the banker’s power and wealth comes not from work, but from “the effortless and infinite multiplication of wealth which is created by interest.” Instead, the German State offered loans for a set price. For example, marriage loans up to 1000 marks were implemented and were repayable in interest free installments. A quarter of the loan was forgiven at the birth of each child. Via this method, people were never stuck paying off an interest charge each month like they are today with the credit card scam, but instead their payment actually went towards paying off their initial debt.

Adolf Hitler describes the National Socialist monetary system in a succinct paragraph: “If ever need makes humans see clearly, it has made the German people do so. Under the compulsion of this need we have learned in the first place to take full account of the most essential capital of a nation, namely, its capacity to work. All thoughts of a gold reserves and foreign exchange fade before the industry and efficiency of well-planned national productive resources. We can smile today at an age when economists were seriously of the opinion that the value of currency was determined by the reserves of gold and foreign exchange lying in the vaults of the national banks and, above all, was guaranteed by them. Instead of that we have learned to realize that the value of a currency lies in a nation’s power of production, that an increasing volume of production sustains a currency, and could possibly raise its value, whereas a decreasing production must, sooner or later, lead to a compulsory devaluation.” He added, “We were not foolish enough to try to make a currency [backed by] gold of which we had none, but for every mark that was issued we required the equivalent of a mark’s worth of work done or goods produced.” The National-Socialist economy is one based off work and production.

The twenty-five point “Program of the NSDAP” reflected the teachings of the influential Feder.

Among these points are: “10. It must be the duty of every citizen to work either mentally or physically. The activities of the individual may not conflict with the interests of the general public but must be carried on within the framework of the whole and for the good of all.”

Within two years of Adolf Hitler being elected, the unemployment problem had been solved and the country was back on its feet. It had a solid, stable currency, no debt, and no inflation, at a time when millions of people in the United States and other Western countries were still out of work and living on welfare. Germany even managed to restore foreign trade by using a barter system: equipment and commodities were exchanged directly with other countries, circumventing the international banks. This system of direct exchange occurred without debt and without trade deficits.

Economist Henry C K Liu wrote of Germany’s remarkable transformation:

“The Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, at a time when its economy was in total collapse, with ruinous war-reparation obligations and zero prospects for foreign investment or credit. Y et through an independent monetary policy of sovereign credit and a full-employment public-works program, the Third Reich was able to turn a bankrupt Germany, stripped of overseas colonies it could exploit, into the strongest economy in Europe within four years, even before armament spending began.”

In Billions for the Bankers, Debts for the People (1984), Sheldon Emry wrote:

“Germany issued debt-free and interest-free money from 1935 and on, accounting for its startling rise from the depression to a world power in 5 years. Germany financed its entire government and war operation from 1935 to 1945 without gold and without debt, and it took the whole Capitalist and Communist world to destroy the German power over Europe and bring Europe back under the heel of the Bankers. Such history of money does not even appear in the textbooks of public (government) schools today.”

Manifesto for the Abolition of Enslavement to Interest on Money 

Mammonism is the heavy, all-encompassing and overwhelming sickness from which our contemporary cultural sphere, and indeed all mankind, suffers. It is like a devastating illness, like a devouring poison that has gripped the peoples of the world.

By Mammonism is to be understood:

on the one hand, the overwhelming international money-powers, the supragovernmental financial power enthroned above any right of self-determination of peoples, international big capital, the purely Gold International;

on the other hand, a mindset that has taken hold of the broadest circle of peoples; the insatiable lust for gain, the purely worldly-oriented conception of life that has already led to a frightening decline of all moral concepts and can only lead to more.

This mindset is embodied and reaches its acme in international plutocracy.

The chief source of power for Mammonism is the effortless and endless income that is produced through interest.

From the thoroughly immoral idea of interest on loans the Gold International was born. The mental and moral constitution grown from the lust for interest and profiteering of every kind has led to the frightening corruption of a part of the bourgeoisie.

The idea of interest on loans is the diabolical invention of big loan-capital; it alone makes possible the lazy drone's life of a minority of tycoons at the expense of the productive peoples and their work-potential; it has led to profound, irreconcilable differences, to class-hatred, from which war among citizens and brothers was born.

The only cure, the radical means to heal suffering humanity is: the abolition of enslavement to interest on money.

The abolition of enslavement to interest on money signifies the only possible and conclusive liberation of productive labor from the hidden coercive money-powers.

The abolition of enslavement to interest signifies the restoration of the free personality, the redemption of man from slavery, from the curse whereby Mammonism has bound his soul.

Whoever wishes to fight capitalism, must abolish enslavement to interest.

Where must the abolition of enslavement to interest begin? With loan-capital!
Why?

Because loan-capital, compared to all industrial big capital, is so overpowering that the great money-powers can only be fought effectively through the abolition of interest-slavery.

20:1 is the proportion of loan-capital to industrial big capital. The German people must annually raise more than 12 billion in interest for loan-capital in the form of direct and indirect taxes, rent, and the rising cost of living, while even in the boom-years of the war the sum-total of all dividends distributed by the German joint-stock companies amounted to only 1 billion.

The avalanche-like growth of loan-capital surpasses all human capacity for calculation, through eternal, endless, and effortless income from interest, and from interest on interest.

What blessing does the abolition of enslavement to interest bring for the laboring folk of Germany, for the proletarians of all countries of the Earth?

The abolition of enslavement to interest gives us the possibility of pursuing the repeal of all direct and indirect taxes.

Hear this, you value-producing men of all lands, all states and continents: all state revenues flowing from direct and indirect sources pour constantly into the pockets of big loan-capital.

The profits of state-owned businesses, including the postal service, telegraph, telephone, railroad, mines, forests, and so on, suffice entirely for the funding of all essential state commitments for schools, universities, courts, administrative agencies, and social welfare.

Thus no true socialism will bring any blessing to humanity as long as the profits from public enterprises remain tributary to big loan-capital.

Therefore we demand as a fundamental law of the state, first for the German peoples, then as a fundamental law for all those kindred peoples that wish to enter with us into the cultural community of a league of nations, the following: (...)

9. Through intensive enlightenment of the people, it is to be made clear to the people that money is and should be nothing other than a voucher for completed labor; that while every highly developed economy of course has need of money as a medium of exchange, the function of money also ends with that, and in no case should money be lent a supramundane power to grow of itself by means of interest, at the expense of productive labor.

Why have we not already done all this, which is so self-evident, which must be regarded as the Egg of Columbus for the social question?

Because in our Mammonistic blindness we have unlearned how to see clearly that the doctrine of the sanctity of interest is a monstrous self-deception, that the gospel of the loan-interest that alone makes one blessed has entangled our entire thinking in the golden web of international plutocracy. Because we have forgotten and are deliberately kept in confusion by the omnipotent money-powers about the fact that -- except in the case of a few rich people -- the interest that seems so lovely, and is so beloved of the thoughtless, is completely offset by taxes. All of our tax-legislation is and remains, so long as we do not have liberation from enslavement to interest, only a tribute-obligation to big capital, and not, as we would imagine, a voluntary sacrifice for the accomplishment of labor for the community.

Therefore liberation from enslavement to interest on money is the clear motto for the global revolution, for the liberation of productive labor from the chains of the supragovernmental money-powers. (...)

The third and most dangerous factor is the enormous growth beyond comprehension of big loan-capital through interest and through interest on interest. I must here digress a bit more and hope through a small excursion into higher mathematics to explain the problem. First some examples.

The charming story of the invention of the game of chess is well known. The rich Indian king Shihram granted to the inventor, as thanks for the invention of the royal game, the fulfillment of a wish.

The wish of the wise man was that the king should give him one grain of wheat on the first square of the chess-game, two on the second, four on the third, and thus always on each square twice as many as on the one before. The king smiled at the seemingly modest wish of the wise man and ordered that a sack of wheat be brought so that for every square the grains of wheat could be apportioned. As we all know, the fulfillment of this wish was impossible even for the richest prince in the world.

All the world's harvests in a thousand years would not suffice to fill the 64 squares of the chessboard.

One more example: many will still remember from their schooldays the torture of calculating compound interest; how the penny invested at the time of the birth of Christ multiplies at compound interest so that it doubles every 15 years.

In the year 15 after the birth of Christ the penny has grown into 2 pennies, in the year 30AD to 4 pennies, in the year 45AD to 8 pennies and so on. Very few will remember what value this penny would represent today: a volume of gold equivalent to the volume of the Earth, the Sun, and all the planets combined would not be adequate to represent the value of this penny invested at compound interest.

A third example: the fortune of the House of Rothschild, the oldest international plutocracy, is valued today at about 40 billion. It is well known that in Frankfurt around the year 1800, old Mayer Amschel Rothschild, without wealth of his own worth mentioning, laid the foundation for the gigantic fortune of his house through fractional-reserve lending of the millions that Count Wilhelm I of Hesse had entrusted to him for safekeeping.

Had the accretion of money through interest and interest on interest with Rothschild succeeded only at the modest rate of the penny, the curve would not have climbed so steeply as it has. But assuming that the Rothschilds' collective wealth increased only at the rate of the penny, the Rothschilds' fortune in the year 1935 would be 80 billion, in 1950 160 billion, in 1965 320 billion, and with that it would already exceed by far the total German national wealth.

From these three examples a mathematical law can be derived. The curve that represents the rise of the Rothschild fortune, the curve that can be derived from the number of wheat-grains for the chessboard, and the number that the multiplication of the penny produces at compound interest, are simple mathematical curves. All of these curves have the same character. After initially modest and gradual increase the curve becomes ever steeper and soon practically approaches being almost tangential to infinity.

Altogether differently, however, does the growth-curve of industrial capital proceed. Likewise sprung mostly from small beginnings, soon a strong escalation of the curves appears, until a certain saturation of capital is reached.

Then the curves run flatter, and in certain industries will perhaps even decline slightly, if new inventions have led to the devaluation of existing factories, machines, and so on. I would like to select only one example here, the development of the Krupp works. In 1826 old man Krupp died almost without assets. In 1855 Alfred Krupp received his first order for 36 cannons on behalf of the Egyptian government. In 1873 Krupp already employed 12,000 workers. In 1903 Frau Berta Krupp sold the entire works and property to the Alfred Krupp joint-stock company for 160 million. Today the total value of the stock-capital amounts to 250 million.

What does the name Krupp connote for us Germans? The acme of our industrial development. The world's first maker of [steel] cannons. A vast sum of the most tenacious, purposeful, intensive productivity. For hundreds of thousands of our folk-comrades the Krupp endeavor has meant bread and work. For our nation, weapons and defense – and yet it is a dwarf compared to the Rothschild billions. What significance does the growth of the Krupp fortune during a century have compared to the growth of the Rothschild fortune through effortless and endless accretion from interest and interest on interest? (...)

Thus for example the curve of the Rothschild fortune must be set 80 times so high as the Krupp curve. The purpose of showing the curves of course is only to demonstrate the fundamentally different character of the two types of capital. The curves of loan-capital show at first a quite gradually rising development; the development then goes faster until, ever wilder and dragging everything with it, it raises itself far beyond human concepts and strives toward infinity.

The curve of industrial capital by contrast remains in the finite! However strong the divergences that a trace may show in detail, overall the fundamental character of industrial development will always be such that after strong initial development a certain period of maturity, of saturation, follows, after which sooner or later the decline ensues.

  Nothing shows us more clearly the deep essential difference between loan-capital and industrial capital. Nothing can make the difference clearer for us between the devastating effects of loan-capital and the business-profits (dividends) of business-capital put up and risked in large industrial enterprises, than this comparison.

It cannot be emphasized enough that the recognition of the mathematical laws that loan-capital and industrial capital follow, alone shows us the clear path where the lever is to be applied for setting aright our wrecked finance-economy. We recognize clearly that not the capitalistic economic order, not capital in itself and as such, is the scourge of humanity. The insatiable interest-need of big loan-capital is the curse of all laboring humanity!

Capital must be! Labor must be! Labor alone can do little. Capital alone can do nothing!
Capital without labor can only be sterile! Therefore the most important demand, the most noble task of the revolution, the most sensible meaning of a world-revolution, is the abolition of enslavement to interest on money.

The House of Rothschild today is valued at 40 billion. The billionaires of American high finance, Misters Cahn, Loeb, Schiff, Speyer, Morgan, Vanderbilt, and Astor, are valued together at 60-70 billion at the least. At an interest-rate of only 5% this means an income for these eight families of 5-6 billion, which, according to the researches of Karl Helfferich, is roughly 75% of the annual income that all taxpayers in Prussia had in the year 1912. (There were at that time around 21,000,000 taxpayers, 75% of that would be about 15,000,000. For every taxpayer there are on the average 1.56 relatives; hence 23 million relatives.)  Around 38,000,000 Germans thus have had to live on what the afore-mentioned billionaires have as a yearly income.

Certainly the American billionaires are not pure loan-capitalists in the same sense as the House of Rothschild and so on. I do not care at all to argue about whether the American billionaires are really “100-million-dollar millionaires” or “1000-million-mark billionaires”; in the former case one would just have to reckon in one or two dozen additional Croesuses. Or let us simply accept Rathenau's “300”; then our inventory will certainly be in order. Here it is not important to give an exact number, but the acknowledged ratio of 300 to 38,000,000 opens our eyes about the brutal reign of international loan-capital.

Therefore let us cast off these terrible chains that can only strangle all energetic labor; let us tear away from money the power to bear interest, and ever again to bear interest until all humanity has become entirely obligated for interest to international loan-capital.

Thus it is these three points that make clear to us for the first time where alone the lever may be effectively applied for the alleviation of our internal financial distress.

For another thing, we recognize that the assault of the entire socialist world of ideas against industrial capital has been completely off the mark, because even an intended complete regulation or socialization of all entrepreneurial profit – assuming an unweakened economy – would yield a laughably meager sum, compared to the enormous financial burdens of the budgets of our Reich and our State.

Through the abolition of enslavement to interest on money the entire financial malaise can be eliminated with one blow. At once we feel solid ground under our feet again; at once it must and will become clear to us that we have only deceived ourselves in the most grotesque manner with this wretched bond-economy.

For what else is loan-capital, but debts? Loan-capital is debts! One cannot repeat that often enough. What form of madness is it when the German people in its totality have borrowed 150 billion for its war? When it has even promised itself for this a quantity of 7½ billion in interest and now feels itself shifted into the awkward situation, inevitable from the start, of trying to collect this 7½ billion from itself in the form of entirely fanciful taxes?

**

The tragic thing about this self-deception meanwhile is less the stupidity of this whole war-bond economy, of which we have always made so much better use than the rest of the world, than the fact that only a relatively small number of big capitalists derives enormous benefit from it, while the entire laboring folk, including the medium-sized and smaller capitalists, as well as business, trade, and industry, must pay the interest. And here the political side of the whole idea comes to light. Here they can recognize that in fact big loan-capital and only this [i.e. not industrial capital] is the curse of all laboring humanity. One may twist and turn the thing as one wishes, but always the mass of all hard-working people must in the end bear the cost of interest-payments on loan-capital. The middle-sized and smaller capitalists have nothing to show for their lovely interest-payments; can have nothing to show, for the sums of interest must be entirely taxed away. Whether in the form of direct taxes or indirectly in the way of indirect taxes, stamps, tariffs, or other burdens on commerce, the hard-working folk is always the sucker and big capital the beneficiary.

It is now quite astonishing to see how the socialist idea-world of Marx and Engels, from the Communist Manifesto to the Erfurt Program (especially Kautsky), and even the current socialist leaders, spare the interests of loan-capital as if on command. The sanctity of interest is taboo; interest is the holy of holies; no one has yet dared to call it into question. 

While property, nobility, security of person and possessions, the laws of the Crown, privileges and religious conviction, honor of officers, fatherland, and freedom are more or less outlawed, interest is holy and unassailable. Confiscation of wealth and socialization, thus outright violations of the law that are only somewhat sugarcoated, insofar as they are committed ostensibly in the name of the totality of individuals, are the order of the day: all of that is permitted, but interest, interest is the noli me tangere, the “touchmenot.”  The interest payment on the Reich's debt is the alpha and omega of the state budget. Its gigantic weight drags the ship of state into the abyss and yet … it is all a big swindle ... a monstrous self-deception, fostered only and solely for the benefit of the great money-powers. (...)

Swindle, I said! Interest-swindle! A strong word. But if this word has justification, which during the war was perhaps the most used word in the field and at home, it has the most justification in regard to the interest-swindle.

But what about the war-bonds? With the first 5 billion, the Reich took out of the pockets of the people savings that actually existed. The money flowed back again. Then came the new loan to suck up the money again, and with that the last residual savings. And again came the pump and sucked up the billions, and again they ebbed back again, until merrily, after this charming game was repeated nine times, the Reich had incurred 100 billion in debt.

In exchange the people of course held in their hands 100 billion in finely printed paper – at first we imagined that we had become so much richer – but then comes the state and says, “I am facing bankruptcy.”

Yes, but why? – I myself certainly cannot go bankrupt even if I occasionally take a hundred-mark note from the right upper pocket and put it into the left.Certainly it would be the biggest folly of all if we continued the folly of our war-bond economy by declaring bankruptcy.

[* Feder here is regarding the German nation as a unified entity rather than a mere aggregation of individuals: the money that has been transferred from some Germans to other Germans remains within the German nation, which means that it is within the power of the German government to adjust the distribution, perhaps to the immediate disadvantage of some individuals but for the good of the nation as a whole.]

Let us break the enslavement to interest on money! Let us declare the war-bond certificates to be legal tender with interest canceled, and the nightmare of state bankruptcy will melt away from us like March snow under the Sun.

People say to me, the cancellation of interest-payments is a disguised state bankruptcy. No, that is not true! – The specter of state bankruptcy is really only a fairytale and a bogeyman invented by the Mammonist forces. (...)

Further Program 

Although the abolition of interest-slavery is not the final goal of the new statecraft; it is truly the most incisive deed, the only deed that is able to unite all peoples into a true league of nations, against the tyranny of Mammonism that encompasses all peoples. But it is not the end. On the contrary, the abolition of interest-slavery must lead to further steps, because, as we have seen, it lays hold of the global evil by the root, and indeed by the main root.

Only when the groundlaying demand for abolition of interest-slavery is fulfilled, is the path cleared for the first time ever for the social state. This must be clearly recognized, and it must be accomplished in spite of all Mammonistic powers. The cry for socialization [while interest-slavery persists] is nothing more than the attempt to bring about the formation of a trust of all industries and to create giant conglomerates everywhere, over which big loan-capital, in spite of all wealth-taxes, will naturally also have the deciding influence again in the future. A socialistic state on a Mammonistic foundation is an absurdity and leads by nature to a compromise between Social-Democracy, already strongly contaminated with Mammonism, and big capital.

We, by contrast, demand radical rejection of the Mammonistic state and a reconstruction of the state according to the true spirit of socialism, in which the ruling basic idea is the obligation to nourish -- in which an old basic demand of Communism can find its rational and useful satisfaction -- in the form that every member of the folk shall receive his assigned entitlement to the soil of the homeland through the state's allocation of the most important foodstuffs.

We further demand, as a skeleton for the new state, a representation of the people through the Chamber of People's Representatives, which is to be elected on the broadest basis, and next to that a permanent Chamber of Labor, the central council in which the nation’s workers have a voice in proportion to their distribution by profession and economic class. Finally we demand the highest accountability for the directors of the state. This new construction of the state on a socialist-aristocratic basis will be treated in an additional work that will appear soon from the same publisher.

The prerequisite for all this construction however remains the abolition of interest-slavery. My unshakable belief, nay more, my knowledge makes me recognize clearly that the abolition of interest-slavery is not only enforceable but will and must be taken up everywhere with indescribable jubilation. For bear in mind: in contrast to all other ideas and movements and endeavors, however well intentioned, that aim at the improvement of mankind, my proposal does not want to try to improve human nature; rather it applies itself against a toxic substance, against a phenomenon that was artfully – no, diabolically – invented, completely contrary to the deepest feeling of man, in order to make humanity ill, in order to ensnare humanity in materialism, in order to rob from it the best thing that it has, the soul.

Hand in hand next to it goes the frightful, pitiless tyranny of the money-powers, for which people are only interest-slaves, exist only to work for the dividend, for interest.

Deeply troubled we recognize the frightful clarity and truth of the old Biblical proverbs, according to which the god of the Jews Yahweh promises to his chosen people: “I want to grant to you to own all treasures of the world; at your feet shall lie all peoples of the Earth and you shall rule over them.”

This global question is now laid out before all of you. Global questions are not solved with a wave of the hand, but the idea is clear as day. And the deed must be diligently propagated; we must understand clearly that we face the most formidable enemy, the world-encompassing money-powers. All force on the other side, on our side only justice, the eternal justice of productive labor.

Extend your hands to me, working people of all countries, unite!

Publisher’s Afterword 

While repetitive at times, this Manifesto clearly stresses the importance of ending interest-slavery and presents some of the many benefits that would arise from such a radical departure of what we know as the "norm." What most Americans are unaware of is how much emphasis the Nazis placed on uplifting the working class. This lack of awareness comes in spite of the NSDAP name: National-Socialist German Worker's Party.

Concern and struggle for the working class continues today, as does the movement to end profits without work - interest-slavery. Such modern struggles have been far more successful in Europe than in the United States, but there is a single American organization calling itself the "American Nazi Party" ( www.anp14.com ) that continues to harp on very similar economic principles as Feder and the NSDAP. In fact, due to the ever increasing wage disparity in the US, coupled with high unemployment rates nationwide and general dissatisfaction with the current government, such movements are currently seeing relatively strong growth.

It is clear as to why Feder's ideas have not taken root in modern society, and that is because of the influence that the international banking powers wield over most nations. In the US, the Federal Reserve is a private banking entity that is not accountable to the US Government, yet they hold tremendous power over the American economy. Had Feder's ideas been implemented here in the States, Ceteris paribus, it is almost certain that the recent mortgage crisis of 2007, which led to deep recession, high unemployment, and the big bank "bailouts" wouldn't have occurred.

This publisher hopes that the Manifesto was read with an open mind, free of any preconceived ideas about "Nazism" or the horrors of war that are so often associated with the 3rd Reich. Clearly there was much more to the ideology and practices of National-Socialist Germany than the History Channel or even most "history" books provide. Modern governments have taken much from Nazi Germany such as laws protecting animal rights, the "green" movement (see Richard Walther Darré), paid vacations and other labor comforts that we take for granted today. Would it be too absurd to suggest that maybe their economic policies held some merit as well?