The Money Gambit

- as with the rulers, the writers of the history books, carefully keeping the 'true' story of the long, long fight for democracy hidden from the people, pretending it is something won when it has actually more nearly been lost, so it is with money - it is difficult to understand the current situation, as any informed, engaged democratic participant needs to do, to participate in making decisions about what to do in our country, or what is going on in the world, without a clear understanding of what money is, where it comes from, and who controls it - and the history that brought us to our current situation. Let's look at this essentially simple but powerful tool for we hobbits that has been turned into a great weapon for Mordor in a bit more detail, and understand how this came about, and how it works today.

As with our lack of clarity and understanding about 'our great democracy' which is surely a great idea, but is notable in its current form more for its illusion than its reality, a central part of what we are missing in the whole process of trying to understand what is going on with our money is some relevant history of how it all started, and how it developed and was and is managed, and how that is related to how we got to where we are today, and what is actually going on today in terms of 'the economy', which is considerably more understandable than the basically simply untrue 'civics book for children' version we are continually fed - that 'the economy!!" is some sort of great 'natural force' that is very wild and dangerous, and our learned bankers and economists and finance ministers are doing their very best to manage this wild powerful force so we 'average normal hobbits' are protected from its ravages - sometimes that great wild force overcomes our Great Noble Defenders, and we nice folk suffer some economic consequences, but in the end we are lucky to have such great strong economic warriors defending us, etc etc. Sorry if you more knowledgeable folk are getting a bit nauseous. But that is the kind of story we are led to believe, that 'the economy' is some great wild uncontrollable force, and we can only trust our wise banking and finance people to control it - and by golly they do a pretty good job of it, overall (as we're constantly reminded in the media).

And of course that's all utter horseshit, a strong word is required. If we could see a larger perspective, we might see that although the world economy does seem a bit wild at times, it is very much a 'managed wildness', a great wall of fire built and maintained by our rulers, as one of the primary walls to keep us controlled, and if we had a better vantage point, a vantage point informed by facts rather than the religious crap of the High Banker Priests and Economists, we might be able to see this great wild economic wall is an artificial construct, and we could easily tear it down and open up the free and prosperous world that lies beyond their economic chaos - in exactly the same way we passed laws to stop people running around with guns shooting each other and anyone else, we could pass laws to regulate what goes on in our economy - if we wanted to. Chaos is good for the people running our country and world, however, giving them endless opportunities to loot the rest of us, and as long as they run things, economic chaos will be part of the ruling paradigm.


Back in the timeship to have a closer look at how this all started ...
Over the last couple of decades, the actual history of 'money' in our societies, particularly the story of the last few hundred years since the modern bank-money-credit-accounting system economy started to replace the gold-based bartering system, and then became dominant, has been studied by a lot of people even if you don't hear about them and their findings at school or through the 'very controlled message we don't really want people knowing or thinking about this stuff' mainstream media, and now that the indoctrination/gatekeeping function of the education system and media has been at least significantly breached through the internet where non-ruler-controlled voices can share and discuss things those-who-would-be-kings-ruling-ignorant-passive-serfs would rather were not shared or discussed, such as various parts of history dealing with things like the never successful but still ongoing fight to permanently contain 'democracy' in western countries, or the way our current monetary-credit-accounting system evolved and how it is currently used as a central part of the control system, there is much to be learned of great relevance and shedding great insights into our current situation.

Perhaps the most thorough accounting of what has been and is going on with this thing we know as 'money' is to be found in Stephen Zarlenga's very well-documented Lost Science of Money, and the other shorter offerings (particularly their Short intro to Monetary Reform) on the AMI (American Monetary Institute) website about how to understand and fix the current system. Ellen Brown's Web of Debt has also become a classic in terms of exposing what is going on with our money-credit system, and is very informative, and a considerably shorter and less scholarly and somewhat less expensive read. For those who prefer documentaries to reading, two excellent introductions are All wars are bankers' wars and The Money Masters, by a guy called Bill Still, who has several other films equally good; and there are some specifically Canadian things that you're not going to get on the CBC, a series of shorter films led by Money as Debt by a Canadian named Paul Grignon are also very popular and instructive in terms of getting an overview of the big picture here, plus a short but pithy vid by a guy called Bill Abram, The Crime of the Canadian Banking System, and a film called Oh Canada, the Movie, Our Sold and Bought Out Land. There's also a lot of good info on the British site Positive Money (I don't agree with their general ideas about what to do about the problem, but their background is good - if we ever get more than a handful of people in Canada understanding the problem, we're going to have to discuss what to do about it ourselves, as not everyone might agree with my ideas - but the crucial point is understanding what is going on in the first place, and understanding that something needs to be done if we are ever going to be a sovereign country 'of by and for the people' rather than continuing on as a quasi-feudal society 'of by and for the banksters'). And there is much else out there to be found by googling 'Monetary Reform'. If you are not already familiar with these things, as I suspect most readers of this book are not, I would urge you at the very least to watch the Money Masters documentary before reading any further here - as these things are so well introduced in these places, there is no point in me repeating it all, and I am only going to give a brief summary of this history, which may raise questions for the curious reader that would be answered more fully from watching or reading some of these things.

What I just want to do here, as with this entire book, is simply put this information into the frame of my own observations as to how this all ties into what is going on today and the last few decades in Canada - how we got here, and how to get back onto some more useful path in terms of fighting these predators who have taken over our country a bit more effectively. There are a couple of new ideas that I haven't heard before that add, I think, some insight to what is going on today, and has been for the 'capitalist era' of the last couple of hundred years.

The main point is - if you do not understand what is going on with money, and are fighting to get this fundamental power under true, informed democratic control, your efforts at 'change' are completely fruitless, throwing rocks in the dark at non-existent targets provided by the Rulers to occupy your attention and keep you away from more important things (i.e. 'the budget!!' 'tax what??' etc etc - all distractions to keep you from the central question - who controls the money, and where does it come from?). This is the **key** issue, and if there is no monetary reform, there cannot be any democratic reform - the first great banking family in Europe was reported to have as a slogan something like, Give us control of a nation's money, and we care not who makes their laws. And it remains a fact, in our modern world - whoever controls the money, controls pretty much everything else.

A new understanding of what is going on with money and 'debt' that opens the door to new and better ways of fighting for our better country
So, briefly, let's just try and get our current situation into clear focus, where it can be understood, and thus help illuminate the path to what we need to do to start winning our struggle here. like another smart guy said, or different smart guys in different ways - those who do not understand the past are doomed to keep repeating it. We have been ruled by a small group of people who control the money in our modern world because most of us have no idea at all what is really going on with this money stuff. And we're not going to break free of their debt chains until we *do* start to understand it, and through understanding it, see the way to getting ourselves out from under their command.

Until a few hundred years ago, work and trade were conducted basically through the intermediary of some commonly accepted bartering commodity - I work on your farm, you pay me 'in kind' (a meal, place to sleep in your barn), or in gold, which I then use to buy food, shelter, whatever it will buy that is available that I want; you take your crops to the market, get paid in gold or some accepted commodity and in turn buy what you want. This is the market, that has always existed in some form in most human societies, and probably always will as long as humans are around - of course, we're always going to have predators who take things by violence, or try to, or people who think they are more clever than others and try to cheat in various ways, but most of us are basically honest, and want to give some kind of fair value for things we get, and also help in making our communities a better place to live. There are some historical exceptions, of course, in smaller more localized situations where a primitive 'communism' or other form of working together and sharing sans 'market' developed, or the (somewhat overblown in terms of importance) 'gift economies' some writers have recently tried to use as a diversion to the kind of discussion I am having here, and others have had, but in our much larger western 'civilizations', people work, either for others or themselves, and exchange the value of that work for other things they want that are available. Generally speaking, again with occasional exceptions in some circumstances, no free lunches for able-bodied adults, we have to extend labour to live, and most do it willingly, as we all, or most of us, like to feel we are 'earning our own way', while contributing to our communities, and not mooching in some way, and indeed in most cases quite happy to work to gain the many benefits of our modern technological society, and hold our heads high among our peers as an equal citizen contributing to our community.

Always exceptions, of course, and in earlier pre-capitalist 'everything has a value we must get our pennies!!!' times there was a lot more openness and sharing as (the average poor) people recognized they were all in the same boat together much moreso than they do today, and wandering strangers could expect a meal for a bit of work, or at the market a 'baker's dozen' meant 13 buns rather than the modern capitalist 'baker's dozen' which is more likely to mean 10 smaller buns, but for most of us, this is the way we understand the world and our place in it, and has been for millennia. We all do different things, different kinds of work, and as the population grows and the things we have to make our lives easier or better continue to be developed there is more stuff to buy and more work to do, and we exchange our work for these things to the degree we can or want to, according to our earned (or of course sometimes borrowed) credits in the great accounting system we use to keep track of these things. And around and around and around it goes, generally getting better all the time as creative people continually build on the work of those who came before and create new technologies to make our lives easier and more interesting - very simple idea, basically. The more we work as a group, and the smarter, the better our lives, exchanging our own particular work value for other things we want in our continually getting-better-all-the-time community. Through much of history gold was the most common 'common barter exchange commodity', often in more advanced or stable communities or societies formed into coins of a specific value to make trade easier, and often other metals were used, but this does not change the fact that the gold was still a finite commodity which doubled as a common bartering exchange tool as many people wanted it and thus it was valuable.

This 'common bartering exchange tool' had, of course, the great advantage of not requiring every person who wanted to work to barter individually with every person selling something they wanted - the 'common bartering exchange tool' of gold, or various other things that were occasionally used, was a convenient way of helping the ever growing markets work more efficiently. But of course there was a serious problem with gold, or any other commodity, as a basis for bartering commerce - it could be in short supply, through either a natural shortage, some natural disaster destroying a supply, somebody hoarding it, or somebody stealing it. An economy depending entirely on a supply of a commodity to function as a common barter-exchange tool to allow something bigger than a common subsistence life was thus limited and/or precarious in various ways. But one feature of we humans is that as we progress, we figure out ways around problems, and at some point in time during the 15th-16th centuries, a solution to this problem was created.

As described in the films referred to above, gold artisans, who had a small (or no doubt not-so-small for some) side-business of storing gold in their vaults for others who had acquired more gold than they needed for day to day use but did not have safe places to store it, or someone doing the same kind of business, would give out pieces of paper indicating ownership of gold. And of course it was not long after that that those with this paper got the idea that they could just use this paper instead of the actual gold in return for whatever the holder of the paper wanted to buy, just as if he was using the real gold itself, which was at first just a convenient way for people to use their gold to buy things without having to cart it around in public, which of course could be a dangerous business in less lawful times.

And then (we must speculate a bit, but some speculations are necessary and compelling, see a certain Mr Darwin, or a certain Mr Einstein with his 'thought experiments, or any Sherlock Holmes detective type looking at a situation, and thinking back to what must have happened to arrive at that situation), as humans less scrupulous will do when opportunity presents itself to use some new tool in some perhaps less than fully honest way to increase their own share of the wealth of their community, however that wealth is manifested, some clever and less scrupulous gold merchant realised that with that gold in the vault, and only paper being exchanged, they could create more paper claims for the gold as loans than they actually had gold in their vaults, which would give them a good profit when they loaned it out at interest, as long as they were sure the real owners would not be looking for it, which was a pretty safe bet if they had a lot of people they were saving gold for, as it was unlikely they would all come looking at the same time, and make a bit of interest on the side. Or, as their gold reserves grew and they loaned out more and more 'gold' they did not actually have, *and* charged interest on gold they did not have (!!), the interest kept making them wealthier and wealthier, a lot of interest.

And this is exactly what the banks do today - loan out 'money' they do not actually have - a great deal of 'money' they do not actually have, somewhere around 95% of our entire 'money supply' is this kind of credit - and charge interest on it, making them very, very wealthy (hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars in loans, stretched over many years at compound interest - a veritable neverending cornucopia of income... all based on credit-money created out of thin air - the greatest con in history ....{every year we have headlines like this - Canadian banks make record profits again)). There are other problems, serious problems, with this practice of loaning something you do not really have, and having the brazenness to charge interest on it as well, as we'll look at in the next chapter - but the first point is, if we are going to understand what is going on in our modern world with 'the economy' - as it has been for pretty much as long as humans have lived together in communities, wealth is power, in the hands of those who wish to turn it to such ends, and it is without doubt probably the greatest way to get wealthy to simply be able to create your own gold, or reasonable facsimile thereof people believe is gold, from thin air.

And that is exactly what those gold merchants-cum-bankers were doing back in those days - creating the mythical Philosopher's Stone, the power to essentially create gold from nothing. There was much work yet to be done - but this was the beginning. And they didn't even need 'lead' to do it - just paper, and some badly misplaced human trust.

And how does this fit into our situation today, the great world financial chaos, and a lot of related problems? Well, to answer that question is why we're here. And we need, again, to look somewhat deeper into history than those currently teaching it wish to. The Las Vegas casinos don't have little booths outside their doors explaining concepts like 'house always wins', and the modern bankers don't have little brochures they give you about where money comes from, and why you really should protest at what they're doing, which you might if you understood what that actually is.

A long long time ago - but not that far away ...

Remember where we are, back in the later 'middle ages', where the ideas of 'democracy' and 'rule by law' within that democracy were also more or less just beginning, in no real way resembling the modern versions we have of 'representative democracy', becoming the basis of society. We need to understand first that, in order to become widely accepted, this 'fiat money' system required some form of 'big government' which could establish enough trust, through the Law, for people to accept this paper, trust that it would be redeemed when they wanted to spend it after they accepted it. And never forgetting that for the average 'little' people, small businesspeople or laborers of various kinds, using this paper credit-barter-exchange-tool, that either the gold, or paper, represent somebody's work, either the farmer growing crops he sells at the market, or the labourer working for the farmer and getting paid in that gold, or some similar thing. It is one thing to turn over your week's worth of shirt-making to someone for a few pieces of gold in which you have 100% faith, to accepting a piece of paper that says some 'bank' somewhere has the gold, and will give it to you for that piece of paper.

We need to keep in mind where we are historically speaking here - 16th-17th-18th century England, and Europe, and later the US, where 'democracy' might be an idea, and some of the trappings in place in early manifestations, but where the main power is still quite openly exercised by military power as controlled by warlord-kings of various types, with some considerable power over ignorant peasants still of course, in European countries, claimed by the Catholic/Christian church, and an increasing power in the hands of merchants who had accumulated wealth through various sorts of trade or other wealthy people who had obtained wealth through other means, perhaps hereditary, perhaps just looting of one type or another or other criminal activities, the source of many great fortunes whose power still is exercised in modern times, including the wealth of nations, notably for we 'westerners', the first great national fortune amassed by the Spanish and Poruguese from the massive looting of central and south America during the 16th-17th centuries (a fortune quickly lost to clever bankers), followed by the British looting of large areas of the world for a couple of hundred years, and the Americans replacing the Brits and doing their own looting of large parts of the world for the last couple of hundred (more facts as much as possible swept under the rug when it comes to public understanding of who is running what and why and how in our 'democracies'). And these wealthy non-hereditary monarchical powers were starting to use the developing democratic institutions as their own power base to counter the power of military hereditary 'lords and nobles' rule, supporting popular movements in their attempts to put some further limits on omnipotent-as-much-as-possible god-kings who established their own 'rights' by simple physical violence. So the struggle for 'democratic power' in the immediate precursor to our own times was not really between 'we the people' and hereditary warlords, as they like to make us believe in their 'winners write 'em and winners have things they'd rather the people they rule don't know or understand' 'managed' history books, but between two powerful factions, both of whom were content to keep the mass of citizens in some form of ignorance and peasantry and toiling endlessly for their daily bread, as most wealth is based on human labour in one way or another, and the individual, whether monarch or pope or business tycoon, becomes wealthy by appropriating (aka stealing) as much of that wealth as possible from those who do the work to create it to their personal control.

And we need to understand the limitations, at the time, of this first incarnation of 'paper money' - obviously, a piece of paper has or had no intrinsic value recognized widely, unlike the gold coins of various sorts which were widely accepted that the paper could be exchanged for, so for one person to use this paper to buy things, the receiver or acceptor of the paper, especially average peasants or labourers who would have little recourse with their 'superiors' if the paper proved valueless, had to have considerable trust in both the person using the paper, and the merchant who promised to redeem that paper for the real commodity, the gold, upon demand. A trust which, in the early days, would not be widespread but, during the period we are talking about, the 17th and 18th centuries, the populations are growing, the overall tangible wealth of the kingdoms-beginning democracies is increasing, in terms of infrastructure and ever increasing quantity and usefulness of goods and services available with new inventions for those able to afford them, and it is also a time when 'rule by law' rather than warlord whim is increasingly being demanded by the people, and, slowly in cases, being implemented in entire countries - often more notable in its expectation than its enforcement in these early days, certainly, but nonetheless the idea of widespread safety and rule by law - including perhaps mainly the growing demand of the increasingly wealthy merchant-business class for 'rule of law' rather than 'rule by warlord whim' - was becoming more and more expected, and thus the potential of this paper money and its many advantages over a commodity-based system such as gold to become more widely trusted and accepted growing also. (and also, the 'mid-level' capitalist entrepreneurs of the time, very largely honest and willing to work very hard to build both their business and country, absolutely required an honest money-exchange system, and these businessmen were undoubtedly a strong influence for 'good' during these times - the British empire did not develop only from looting that enriched the rulers, but from leading the world in many innovations during this time, and their businesses depending on reliable postal and transportation and legal systems, all of which further depended on a reliable banking system ... and yes, the brutalities of the times, as written about by Dickens and others, were the other side of the coin, but we must recognize the better side as well, as forming the basis, really, of the better things in the world we have today - they were building powerful tools, and as I have often noted, tools can be used for good or evil, and these tools were quickly seen for their power potential and taken over by those who would be predator rulers, and we have been under their rule ever since.)

And as the idea of rule by law rather than 'nobility whim' became more desired by the people and entrenched through the idea of 'democracy', the area in which a well-known gold merchant's paper money would be regarded as trustworthy also became larger, and thus the wealth, and thus power and influence, of the gold merchants, or bankers as they began calling themselves, became greater also, as the amount of paper they could issue pretending to be but not actually backed by gold increased in proportion to everything else.

And, of course, the businesspeople, small and large, who, as time passed, would turn to using this money with more and more trust, from their greater understanding of the bigger picture, and would in turn slowly be requiring the people who worked for them to use it too, although those at the bottom of the feeding chain, in the peasant lack of worldliness, would naturally be somewhat reluctant to accept some piece of paper as payment for their work, knowing only too well how wantonly those higher in society stole from them. But eventually, over time, the paper money came to be widely accepted, and finally, as today, accepted as the only real currency in all of our 'developed' countries.

We need to recognize a couple of very important things about these beginnings of what we now refer to as 'fiat money':

• >>> from the beginnings, this credit-paper money system we have today was in private hands, enriching a small, increasingly privileged and powerful cartel of private businesses who arrogated this great power to themselves from the beginning, a power that was one of many in its early years, but has now become the greatest power in the world.
• >>> from its roots it was essentially a fraudulent undertaking, creating pieces of paper claiming to represent gold that the lender did not actually have in their possession,
• >>> and actually charging interest on this non-real 'gold' the 'loan' supposedly represented.

(one should be careful to think clearly here, and not go leaping off into pre-existing wild libertarian tangents about something we will get into in more detail anon - the idea of 'fiat money' (actually more correctly called 'credit', a different idea and fundamental meaning) is not of itself fraudulent, or bad, as long as those using it understand where it originates (a simple kind of credit-exchange system as a way of accounting for some kind of work that has value to others), and its 'trust' basis, and nobody is profiting from 'creating' the 'credit' unfairly - if a democratic government, for example, manages such a system for the benefit of all citizens, and the credit, and credit creation, are managed in an impartial and non-inflationary way and issued, or created, 'interest' and debt-free when needed for normal growth and development and needs, that is fine - we will look more at this later. But when a private cartel, interested only in its own maximization of power, creates loans on the basis of pretend gold it does not actually possess, and charges interest on such loans, and also of course manages the credit system for its own (class) power and expropriation of wealth created by the working classes - that is very obviously not 'democratic', and most people would term it criminal fraud as well. As I said, we will look at this in a bit more detail later, but for now it is important to be aware of this distinction, as there are a lot of bad and misinformed ideas floating around out there about 'fiat money' (and much else).)

• >>> we also need to see that here we are starting a 'banking system', in which nobody actually sees any 'money' (gold, in these early days) - as time goes on, people just have 'bank books' which lists the amount of 'gold' they ostensibly 'own', and it is the daily business of the bank to transfer this 'gold' from one account to another, as directed by the account holder (which again, I must continually note, is a good system, a good tool, actually more than 'good', but amazingly good and powerful - **when controlled by 'we the people' in some form** - but has pretty much endless power, endless opportunity, for abuse when in the hands of any kind of private business cartel, owned by 'business' people whose primary objective in life is maxing their own wealth in the society - and again, more later, but we must always keep this in mind, as, you may be suspecting already, it is very directly related to our current financial chaos.
• >>> note also the beginnings of 'paper money' here, and what it actually is. At some point during the development of this system, the bankers realised that issuing general 'bank notes' would be more practical than issuing specific pieces of paper saying 'Mr Jones has one hundred pounds of gold', which Mr Jones can then use to buy things - just a general note saying 'this note is redeemable for 100 pounds' would make the transactions much easier. (aside from counterfeiting, of course, but that is a tangent not relevant here). And how many bank notes? Well, only as many as were needed - from very early times, the growing amount of 'credit' in all of the bank accounts, based on 'loans' that were supposed to be 'gold backed' but were not, was growing at a far more rapid pace than the amount of bank notes needed, and it needs to be understood that such bank notes at no time ever represented all of the 'gold' (not) in the bank, the notes were just a convenient way for an account holder to transfer some of his or her savings to someone else, without directly ordering the bank to transfer from one account to another. And so it is today - the total value of all bank notes in circulation today in Canada is approximately only 3% of the total 'savings' available in bank accounts. Again, more anon - but it needs to be understood where all of this started, and how. The bank notes are *not* the sum total of the money supply, they are simply a token representation of some small amount of the greater 'credit' total in the system, which is still in existence even if any particular bank runs out of bank notes to give to its customers.
• And we also need to keep in mind the great potential power of this paper money, as it essentially began the enablement of a much larger and more dynamic economy no longer limited by a finite, in short supply commodity such as gold as a means of transacting business or a large market, but an economy which potentially had no such limitations - in whatever community, or country, the paper money was widely accepted, the people would be enabled to do their work and accept this paper money as the 'common barter replacement tool' to buy things, and of course there is no practical limit as to how much such 'credit' can be created - as much as people do the work to earn, really, in the same way there is no practical limit on how many points a basketball team can score, as long as they are legitimate points, and not created fraudulently to benefit some special interest group (there must be limits established, of course, to prevent inflation etc, but these are human factors, not 'natural limitations' as we have with precious metals, etc).

And so around and up the spiral goes - a budding businessman no longer has to find investors to provide him with actual loans of real gold or other accumulated treasure to pay to get a business started, all he needs to do is convince one of these merchant-bankers that he has a good idea, and if the banker agrees, and lends him some of this paper money - or simply credits his bank account with the amount of credit needed - to pay workers and buy supplies, he can start a (hopefully) profitable business from which he will pay back the loan - with interest of course.

• And then - and most importantly - we need to always keep in mind, as this is the root of our current problems, that in its earliest days, this paper money was created in the hands of private businesses, and used to create private profits - the emerging quasi-democratic government institutes of the time, insofar as they paid attention to the needs and wants of 'average people' rather than the 'power interests' of non-monarchical money they in truth represented and were, really, negotiating among, were primarily responding to these average people by creating some 'rights' for average people in their dealings with the emerging 'democratic' state and hereditary nobility, and etc. The peasants who supposedly 'elected' the MPs were still mostly un- or ill-educated serfs, laborers or artisans or running small farms or small businesses, dealing in small money and personal concerns, concerned with their daily lives and not particularly aware of the politics of nations and rule beyond the immediate impacts of such powers, or the importance of the great change occurring around them in terms of this paper money starting to be used in place of gold. The 'peasant' workers would be grubbing for their few pence worth of grubby coins or bills to buy their food or drink, completely in another world from the well-connected would be new capitalist-businessman going to see his friend the banker and an hour later having newly created 'credit' to the tune of 50 or 100 thousand pounds with which to start his new enterprise - from which he would find a few dozen or hundred peasants to pay a few pence per day for their labour, which he planned to get wealthy on.
• And the 'democratic' government was also, we must remember, still in a position of one player among many struggling for power in those times, and in the milieu of the times there was no real question of their even thinking about, let alone assuming any power to create money, which was still primarily gold-based at least in theory. And also, of course, the banking interests, well aware of the power of their money, and well aware of the developing power of the new 'parliamentary governments', had 'their' MPs in the quasi-democratic parliament and had no interest, obviously, in having a 'democratic government' thinking about taking the money power from them insofar as they exerted influence there, and thus like any other player of the times, the 'democratic government', when needing money, relied on the limited taxation powers they were allowed by the king, or borrowing gold from those who had it to lend - which of course included the gold merchants who were making a good business out of lending paper claiming to have gold they did not actually have.

There is of course much further exploration required to illuminate such issues more thoroughly, but such details are for larger works than this simple volume - I simply wish to make the point that in these early days, with various forces struggling for a share of power, and the very idea of 'democracy' still in its nascent stages, when this new idea of 'paper money pretending to be exchangeable for gold' came along, that would eventually become our current 'omnipotent power' 'fiat money' system, there was no real question of a government controlling it, as neither 'democracy' nor this 'paper money' were yet recognized as the great powers they would become, and the paper money was, at the time, in its beginnings, nothing more than a small adjustment or enhancement to the gold-based common-bartering-commodity-tool bartering system in place at the time, and completely managed and controlled by those who had the gold to guarantee the paper notes (fraudulent issuing of such notes aside), which the government did not have. And such would remain the case as the years and centuries unfolded - the idea of a 'democratic government', with quite limited power in reality, stepping into the shoes of the very wealthy and powerful gold merchants-cum-'bankers' and assuming the power to control this gold, or paper, 'money' would be discouraged as much as possible by those who controlled this money, and as the years and centuries rolled by, the idea simply became ingrained, and the way this credit was created and used never challenged.


We've found the alchemist's stone!! Don't tell anyone - if we keep it for ourselves, we can have wealth and power beyond any previous human dreams!!
From our hindsight position we can make another important observation that hasn't been widely disseminated for public discussion, again for obvious enough reasons: First, having great wealth in the form of gold had almost always given the owner great power, and still does - but of course gold, or silver, or jewels, all have the quality of being in limited supply, and needing to be found and put into some sort of acceptable form before being used, and also were subject to various other limitations such as having it looted by some invader and making you poor again, or your local supply too small to allow for growth. So imagine having the power to essentially create a gold-equivalent out of thin air, with a few strokes of a pen, the dream of alchemists seeking the philosopher's stone almost since time immemorial - and that was what they were doing during this period, creating this power, the power to create gold - and very much including the power that gold confers - from nothing. Quite literally - a piece of paper that essentially created gold, or the exchange-value and power thereof.

And it was also a new type of pretender to the throne - when wealth was based on treasure, it was those with the greatest strength who tended to accumulate the treasure through looting and being strong enough to defend the 'fruits of their labours' - but as 'wealth' became more and more defined by 'bank accounts' - the power also shifted, to the new merchant banking class who were slowly establishing this new form of 'money' as the power of the land.

But of course predators would not survive long if they gave up at the first sign of opposition, and the successful ones learn to quickly adapt to new modes of conflict and power, and the fight to control this new form of money-aka-power would be long and fierce.

And so the embodiment and beginning of the new wealth, paper money, began, and over the next few hundred years was to grow, as private gold artisans-cum-merchants found their sub-business much more lucrative than their original business, and started calling themselves banks and issuing 'official' bank notes, all supposedly redeemable in gold but, as with the paper notes of their forebears the gold merchants, inevitably being produced in greater numbers than there was gold to redeem them, which, we should note, was, although certainly fraudulent for the banks to do, but on the other hand, as long as the issuers of such paper retained some semblance of sanity, and the supply of goods and services available in the country of the notes kept pace and remained adequate so that those working to produce the goods and services, and being paid in these bank notes, remained reasonably satisfied with what their 'money' would get them in the local market, and the overall performance of their economy, the paper money provided a way of managing an economy not requiring actual gold to mediate as a 'commonly accepted bartering commodity' or limiting the amount of economic activity a community could engage in, and thus allowed the economy, and community, and country, to grow at whatever rate those doing the work and building the infrastructure could grow them.


The beginnings of 'capitalism': made possible by 'fiat money'
Think first - no capital, no capitalism. 'Capitalism' is, in essence, the control of either large amounts of bank 'money' wealth, or large amounts of income-producing property such as large factories, either of which are called 'capital' (there's another crucial factor, the intent of the user of the money-aka-'capital', but that's for a deeper look at capitalism in general, rather than the beginnings.. I get into it a bit more in my essay It's not 'the left' trying to take over the world and shut down free speech and all that other bad stuff - it's 'the right'!!). And the beginning of such large fortunes and an elite class beyond hereditary 'self-proclaimed nobility' based on vast wealth including ownership of large property really got started back during these days described above when the industrial revolution was getting under way, which was also the same times the gold merchants-cum-new 'bankers' were learning the game and power and means of creating gold out of thin air. Without this ability to create a widely-accepted gold-substitute, what would the new businessmen-entrepreneurs with their futuristic dreams made possible by the industrial revolution, and other scientific and technological advances happening at the same time, have done if they had to find real gold or jewels to pay for the great industrial works they dreamed of (yes, certainly there were 'fortunes' back in those days, fortunes based on 'real gold' etc accumulated over the years and centuries by warlords looting stuff and using it to build great castles and whatnot, but they never called this loot or property 'capital', which only started after the banks started creating money out of paper)? Mayhap they would have found other ways, but one is hard pressed to imagine anything that could have facilitated the great leap forward of the great constructions of the early decades of the industrial revolution without the concurrent rise of modern banks and their new 'gold', their fiat credit-money, a new credit-accounting system accepted over an entire country. (and don't read things I don't mean into this - although in our modern world capitalism is beyond any argument an instrument of nothing but evil, it is obvious that in these early days in England, a great deal of 'good', of true progress, was being done with this combination of a lot of very creative, hard-working, enterprising people with great ideas, and the emergence of the power of credit-money to enable them to make their ideas become reality - the few decades of the Industrial Revolution in which so many things were begun, and the following century in which the Modern World really began - all, very arguably, only because of this new way of enabling business, and the economy that they grew and that grew them in one of the great periods in our history, which must have been very heady days to live in, to be free to build and grow to the limits of your imagination and energy without reliance on gold or other 'hard valuable commodities'. As the parasitic class moved in in later days, of course, the great power was more and more frequently used for evil, as the parasitic predators manage to turn every thing they touch to their evil ends, but that does not in any way lessen the greatness of the invention itself.)

There are various ideas about where the word 'capital' and its derivatives originated, but there's no doubt that these great early enterprises based on the things made possible and manifest during the industrial revolution working with the scientific advances of the Renaissance, fueled by bank-created credit-aka-'gold', were the basis of the original capitalist fortunes.


'Capital accumulation'
We might also briefly mention 'capital accumulation' here, which nobody seems to have attached to the beginnings of 'fiat money', as I describe above. It's all put down to 'clever investing' and so on, with the subsequent massively wealthy 'capitalist class' somewhat deserving of the power their great 'capital wealth' confers upon them. But if we understand how this 'capital' was originally formed and acquired, with the bankers creating the credit-money that was then used to create the 'capital', we can have a different kind of understanding. If a true democracy of informed, intelligent and engaged citizens had the same power, the same great credit-accounting tool, to use, they could have created the same great buildings and other infrastructure that constitute the actual 'capital', and used it all in the interests of creating a strong, egalitarian democracy. But of course when this great tool was being developed, the society was still very much in flux, with 'ruling classes', the hereditary wealthy, the emerging merchant business wealthy class, with remnants of the religious power still active, on one side, all fighting for their own maximum share of 'power', but all very much united against, and to control, the massive peasant class doing all of the labour that created all of the wealth the ruling classes claimed as their own, so of course it was one of their 'accepted tactics' to keep this large peasant class very ignorant of what was going on in the world, and completely away from any understanding of what was going on around them. And as described earlier, the ruling classes know about ruling, and know about maintaining their peasant class in a powerless state, and the new wealth-producing 'capital' was just another great tool in this service - and so it has remained. But if we are to escape this elite rule, we need to degrade and destroy these myths, and understand the reality about capital, as we understand the truth about the capitalists, about whom a bit more later. But the great 'capital accumulation' is, to look at it another way, simply the theft of the millions of hours of work of the workers of the world, which actually created the great structures which comprise the 'accumulated capital', both 300 years ago and now - the capitalist class, the ruling class, have, as they have always done, simply used their power to claim the wealth created by others as their own, and used their power to control the forces of violence which enable them to continue claiming this 'capital' as their own. But, as with everything they do, they lie, and the great 'capital' of modern society is rightfully the property of all those who created it, and we are not going to realise Democracy until we claim the great 'capital' we have created for ourselves, its rightful owners.


Capitalism ascendant - the US in the 19th century:
Let us just finish in the interests of finishing the overall background with a quick look at the US, as it is of course the central money power in the world today, and is now based entirely on bank-created money-credit with no pretence at gold redeemability at all (if you're new to this kind of 'real history' and are still among the many who believe the 'Federal Reserve' is a government institution, google around - the Creature from Jekyll Island is probably a good place to begin, Griffin a good analyst up to the point he gets lost in the 'great collectivist takeover' nonsense he probably got brainwashed with in the 50s like so many others - 'the Fed' is entirely owned and operated by various private banking cartels around the US, with government, and media, connivance of course in the deception - the bankers, the very clever modern leading predators, understood very early on that in terms of investments, one of the most necessary, and profitable, was in the politicians who the people elected to 'represent' them - far, far easier to control a few hundred politicians, and a few mass-market newspapers, than tens of millions of voters ....). From the earliest days of the United States, control of the money-credit was a central concern of many people in the middle of trying to create and grow a new democracy, as the old-world (that is, British) bankers sought to retain the power to control the money-credit of the US they had had since its beginnings as a series of British-based colonies, and keep the income flowing from the US to the UK, and those who saw how this meant eternal servitude for the proposed new country - indeed, the attempt of the UK to prevent the US from creating its own currency and credit system was one of the central reasons the American War of Independence was fought - another fact never mentioned in history books which wish to keep the entire idea of where money comes from and who controls it for what purposes out of public knowledge, but a central one. It is well explained in the Bill Still films, so I don't need to get into details here, other than to note that during the 1800s and into the 20th century, the fight for control of the nation's currency continued, as during those days many more people than currently understood the power that resided with this control and spoke openly about it, educating the populace to what was going on, and those who fought for private banking power wished to retain the money-creation power in private hands, and those who fought knowingly for their democracy (limited in ways though it obviously was) fought to have the money-credit creation power in (sort of at least) democratic hands. (an interesting aside - no less a major US figure than Ben Franklin has written that the major reason for the American Revolution was not simply 'taxes', but that the British government insisted their American colonies cease and desist from using their 'colonial script' and instead base their economy on gold borrowed from British banks (at interest, etc, of course) - Franklin - the real reason for the revolution; Bill Still's The Secrets of Oz also documents the struggle during the late years of the 19th century for control of the power to create money very well)

History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling the money and its issuance. - James Madison

Unfortunately, (at least for 'we the people', of course) as is well documented in Bill Still's films, and in other places, the bankers eventually won, and by the 1920s had full control of the American money system with the 'enshrinement' of their power with the very fraudulently named Federal Reserve Act of 1914, and went a little crazy with their money creation for speculation rather than honest investment, as people are wont to do when they have won some significant victory, and not many years of speculation-fueled money-credit creation later their exuberance raced them off a cliff as they caused the still infamous 'crash of 29 (as indeed, to jump ahead for a minute, they did for much of the 1990s and early 2000s after their most recent victory in the 1970s in regaining control of the national money-credit systems with the same results of vastly over-creating credit for speculation, the global financial meltdown). During the 1930s, with the tens of millions of 'normal' Americans, and Canadians, very unhappy at what capitalism had wrought (as there was still a strong and public resistance to the excesses of great wealth and its treatment of average workers back in those days, clearly identified as 'capitalism vs the people', and a strong movement fighting for some form of real democracy rather than the moneyed aristocracy who still expected to really run the country, and generally did - more talk on this history we are *not* taught later), began demanding some serious changes to the banking system, clearly telling those running the place there were limits to the amount of corruption and abuse that would be accepted during the fight for democracy without more violent revolt, and Roosevelt pacified them with his 'New Deal' (Conrad Black's well-known quote that with the New Deal, Roosevelt saved capitalism from itself), with some quite serious regulations on the banking industry, and in Canada Prime Ministers Borden and then King created the Bank of Canada, with its control by the government and power to issue credit, as previously only private banks had been doing. And then of course was the second world war, and following the war, the struggle for control of the issuance of credit-money remained on the backburner out of the public eye where it had been relegated during the war years, aided by the fact that for the next 20-25 years, constrained by the regulations put in place during the 30s, and finding ample opportunity for profitable growth through the rebuilding of Europe and providing the American mass market with new consumer goods as the war machine was redirected into such things, the banks themselves were behaving somewhat more responsibly than they had during the years leading to the big crash, and not abusing their power as they had during the 20s, and also, in Canada, the Bank of Canada was used intelligently by politicians at least considering the best interests of the people they were elected to represent as they undertook great post-war infrastructure development and social programs largely using the Bank of Canada wisely for the development of the country, again from the end of the war through the late 60s and early 70s, with no sign of any terrible 'national debt' (described well by Bill Abram in this vid).. which is where the story ends for now, to be finished in the Corporate Reactionary Revolution a bit later on.


Butbut Everything's fine and under control in Canada - they tell me so all the time!!
But wait - our economy seems to be functioning really well, they tell us so all the time in the media, the politicians and economists we hear on the CBC! I mean, sure there's the 'Greek meltdown crisis', but that's because they have managed their economy so badly the last few years, but our economy is in really fine hands with the Governor of the Bank of Canada always presented as one of the financial geniuses of the world, and whatever problems are going on internationally, we're safe here, and things are doing great, we have lots of money to go to our sports games and cheer for our favorite teams, and take in all the great summer music concerts we hear about on the CBC every day - what's the problem here? How could it be better?

- as always, as noted in the last chapter, always remember who is writing the history books, and controlling the media that tells you about what's going on today - the people who are benefiting from this system. Who of course want to maintain it, as it is an absolutely *great* system for them, a kind of endless cash cow transferring the great wealth we produce together to their control, with no fuss and bother from the people being so conned. If they told you the truth about what had been happening the last 30 years, and how they've been pulling a typical con trick of keeping the mark happy until they're long gone into the sunset, you might have a bit more concern. You won't, for example, find things like this around the corporate propaganda media - The 'good banks' myth, by Murray Dobbin (Dobbin has a lot of other things to say about things you won't hear on the CBC - one of many true Canadian public intellectuals barred from the capitalist notion of 'public debate', which is very much a totalitarian kind of idea - you will hear what we want you to hear, and you better believe it too, if you don't want some attention from people you probably don't want attention from - Murray Dobbin's Blog)

So let's have a quick look then before we move on about why things are a bit less great (sarcasm again, actually, a *whole fucking lot!!* less great) than they've all been leading you to believe. It's quite important, really, so important you're absolutely sure NEVER to have heard it at school, or talked about on the CBC or read it in whatever you daily newspaper is.

We better start a new chapter to talk about what is actually wrong with having the 'new capitalists' controlling our money, our country, our world, our souls.