Two Kinds of Money

I got an email yesterday from the American Monetary Institute that at last made clear to me something I have never before had really clear: there are two moneys: government money and private money.

Our Constitution originally provided only for government money, but left the implementation of that to people who had various motivations for making it less than entirely comprehensible; the U.S money system wobbled around badly for more than 100 years until in 1913 a corrupt (or stupid) Congress turned our money system over to "the bankers," who immediately made "private money" de rigeur for the nation. It has been so since.

The AMI email further made clear that there is true money and false money: true money is government money (it could, I expect, be gold, if the state passed a law to make it money, that is, legal tender), and there is false money, which is credit. Credit is a loan, and it almost universally requires that interest be paid. In our mad system all loans are of private money; all interest goes to private bankers.

Here in the U.S. and elsewhere in much of the world, the only serious money is credit, false money. That underpins the trouble were in: interest charges build up and eventually get dumped on the taxpayers. Now I believe our congressional shills are being asked to raise our public debt ceiling to $16 trillion. Them's a lot of money, principal plus interest, to owe. It will of course never be paid under the present system somewhere down the line, to the point past which the can can't be kicked, lies default. If anybody asks, I'm for that. It does not strike me full of horror since I own no debt.

But meanwhile, the can is being kicked down the road, and the true source for money reform is ignored. It's not obscure or hard to find. It was entered in the last Congress as HR 6550 by Dennis Kucinich of Cleveland. It can be read at the AMI website (Google for that).

Stephen Zarlenga of the Institute says HR 6550 provides an "elegant and gentle accounting" means for converting all of the loans issued by the private bankers into "U.S. money." You'd think the possibility that we could make that big change, get interest-free govt. money and pay off the public debt "elegantly and gently," and get $2.5 trillion for desperately needed infrastructure (thus ending unemployment) would interest somebody, but greedy people are hard to convert. Marvelously hard, I'm told.

A Bit More on Religion

A week or more ago I wrote a letter to the editor of a magazine I have contributed to in the past that sets out my reflections on whether or not a government in the U.S. could ever likely be what is called a "confessional state," that is, a govt. where a religion is formally accepted as being the bedrock of its morality and laws. This was stimulated by an article arguing in a book review that the "bedrock" religion for the U.S. ought to be the Catholic one.

My letter addressed the point:

". . . .The cultural scene here is profoundly confused: our ruling Judaic elite is pouring its antagonistic products—“entertainment” and “porn”—on top of the endless back and forth contests of the many “Christianities” already stressing the population. We are mammonite to a fare-thee-well and getting worse by the hour. I have no notion that a confessional nation is possible anywhere in this land lying between the Atlantic and the Pacific. Certainly not a Cathoiic one.

The crucial phrase for me in [the] review is from the Vatican document Dignitatis Humanae: “God Himself has made known to mankind the way in which men are to serve him and thus be saved in Christ and come to blessedness. We believe that this one true religion subsists in the Catholic and Apostolic Church . . . all men are bound to seek the truth, especially in what concerns God and His Church and to embrace the truth they come to know. . . . Religious freedom has to do with immunity from coercion in civil society. Therefore it leaves untouched traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion, and toward the one true Church of Christ.” (I assume this is an accurate translation.)

I certainly agree with all my heart that everybody should have “immunity from coercion in civil society” but what is one to make of the contention that “this one true religion subsists in the Catholic and Apostolic Church”? I could argue of course that the reference does not really mean the politico-religious institution headquartered at Vatican City but rather the true church that is an entirely spiritual entity, but I doubt any Tamils or Sikhs or Malaysians or Chinese or Esquimos will be taken in by that. They will recognize that what is meant is just the famous old Roman Church.

The claim I have quoted is insupportable in this global world where the Europeans and their colonial diaspora are fast disappearing into insignificance. Not that that political shift invalidates any truth, but I insist that a just God has always spoken to his chlldren on earth equally. I can believe nothing contrary to that. The Lord Christ said to look within, not at earthly institutions.

It seems plain to me that no anthropomorphic religion can claim exclusive truth and try to brush everybody into their basket; rather that all of them partake of the one truth of the one God in different ways, adjusted for culture and especially language. I’d expect a certain  amount of static for that view from hard-nose Catholics, none at all from, say, Hindus, Buddhists, or Taoists. More and more that static seems to me something one just has to live with.

I’ll close with a quotation from Ibn Arabi, a 14^th century “Andaluisian Moorish Sufi philosopher,” who seems to me to have hit the nail on the head. Would the Lord Jesus Christ have disagreed?

“My heart has become capable of all forms. It is a pasture for gazelles and a monastery for Christian monks, and a temple for idols, and the Kaabah of the pilgrim, and the table of the Torah, and the book of the Qoran. I am the religion of Love, whatever road his camels may take; my religion and my faith are the true religion.”

More on Religion Pro Tem

To return to the topic of religion: I was awake for about two hours after 3 am last night and was thinking about religion rather more radically than I do when more than 1/2 awake. I think I'll try to set down, rapidly, some of the thoughts that came to me in those rather stressed and dreamlike few hours,

I am a Catholic, but am increasingly upset that the Church, at least the American branch of it, does not seem to go in for the Lord Jesus' nonviolent way. Rather it rubber stamps the horrible war mongering we are up to in service of our banker-munitions men rulers. Individual clerics and their civilian cohort are often in the opposition camp, but they have no influence on the public church, which seems, to quote Eliot, "wrapped the old miasmal mist" as much as ever.

I can't get out of my mind a website that outlined what the well-dressed bishop needs to appear on the altar. The custom-tailored rig costs something like $150K and is elaborate and antiquated to a fare-thee-well. I fear the Church (I mean the Rome-based political-religious HQ of it which functions as the top-down ruler) is asking for another reformation. It may get it from the surrounding culture, which is foundering (IMHO), as Japan shows in the recent tsunami events and as the world is showing in its reaction to Peak Oil.

Can the old Church survive all this unchanged? I doubt it. In what direction does it need to go? I'd say toward simplification of costume and rigamarole for starters.  I do not mean toward more guitar music, etc., but toward a more direct worship of the man-God Christ and a keener appreciation of his tenets. The Oxford Group of the first half of the 20th century was going in the right direction, I'd hazard, until it was cut off by the deaths of Frank Buchman and, almost immediately, his appointed successor, Peter Howard. These untoward events seemed a clear rebuke of Buchman's own top-down theory of church-rule: clerics will lead, the sheep are to follow. As Newman made clear the Athanasian-Aryan crisis was resolved by the lay people not the clerics. Why expect anything different now?

And some sort of solution at least needs to be bruited for solving the shortage-of-priest problem. The profound and basic rules for the establishment and maintenance of an ecclesia are well known. Gather two or three in Christ's name and let the the resulting church be supported by the contributions of its members, without outside help. AA is the model here. If a church can't support itself, it'll disappear. Fair enough. And let it be clear that the HQ is supported and ruled by the multiple churches not vice versa. A church needs a place to gather but doesn't need to own it or decorate it in gold leaf, not at first anyway. Again, AA is the model.

One can be grateful for the great church that has existed for the last 2000 years without feeling obliged to keep it going as an ancient relic for 2000 more. The Spirit of Christ is the lodestar and determinant of all. But the Church has delivered an intact liturgy it would be crazy and improvident to reject. John Paul did not reject the Anglican liturgy, one of the most wonderful to emerge from the Protestant thing.

It will be a great day, too, when the Catholic Church recognizes that the Spirit of Christ, Second Person of the Trinity, has represented God to the human race from its beginnings. And has spoken to all races and in all languages in the "religions" dispensed over the centuries. (There is and can be only one religion, but there are many "vernaculars" of it.) The word "Christ" is local and language-bound; the Spirit (of Christ) is worldwide and universal.

Well, that's enough for one post. Enough, perhaps, to get me burned as a heretic in times past. but probably not today. Who cares enough to do it?

Old Friends Are The Best

I read the sentiment expressed in my headline above somewhere a long time ago and have never forgotten it, even thought I don't much act as if it were important to keep in touch with Old Friends. I am actually living these days more or less as a hermit, that is, very much alone with my wife in an encircling world of some impressive craziness, with which I don't seem to have much connection. I am not unhappy with this, which I guess proves the herrnit point. I don't have to be a hermit. I could very easily step up my contacts and be all over the place with social activities. But I don't do it. Make few phone calls and put off over and over again the ones I should make. In other words, self-chosen hermeticism.

Today I intend to communicate with two Old Friends. Let's see if I do it. Will try to report tomorrow.

An Early Morning Blog

I'm writing this at 10:30 am on a Friday morning, when I am usually deep into news on the internet and unlikely to write anything for hours. But I have a great need to get some writing done on a book that is seven years overdue at the publisher's, who says he is still waiting for it (mirabile dictu!), so I am wondering how to get myself started on a new morning regimen of writing no matter what, à la the great writers of yesteryear, like Trollope, for example, who no matter what, on foot or horseback doing his rounds as a postal guy, got his 3,000 words a day done or made up for it the next, hell or high water.

Them were the guys. I am apparently not one of them. But I still need to get that writing done. Could attempting this blog in the am, when I am usually numb of brain and mute of ideas, work? Maybe I'll try. Anyway this is the effort for today. So far not a useful idea in the whole kaboodle.

Had lunch yesterday with a friend (much younger) who thinks the budget rattle in DC is just that, a rattle, a kick-the-can-down-the-road bit of political theater. So do I. I am much more conspiratorial than he is, however, and I insist O is just a mouthpiece for the bankers, starting with the rich Jews in Chicago, who picked him as a winner early on and put him over on the country. Now we shall have to pay for that. How? What do the "rich Jews from Chicago" want? It would be nice to know. I shall think about that.

The Blabber Boys Are At It Now For Sure

The highly heralded debate over the ongoing national budget and the raising of the debt limit by Congress is now officially launched and in full swing. It is a crashing bore because it is all words and very little substance. It won't have much of that until the whole money system is put on the operating table for deep surgery. And that won't happen while there is a breath left in any banker or a volume of words left in any banker's publicist-puppet-legislator.

We ought to nationalize the Federal Reserve, notify the bankers their day is over, and operate the Federal creation of money as the single most important branch of the federal government and run it with at least as much honesty as the Postal Service. Hahaha, you say. And I say, Hahahah indeed. References supplied on request. It has all been throughly worked up—and ignored because it means the end of the 500-year sway of private banking, and that is upsetting to our élites, who are mostly banker-minions. Take about paradigm change. Wooweeeeee.

We are in the age of big-time baloney. My wonder is if "things can keep going anyway" while the baloney roars around the electronic echo chambers (TV, that is). Everyone seems to think so. Everyone in the sense of "most people." I tend to like the contrarians, who are insisting that disaster is at the door, not so much because I am a disaster-lover but because it seems that we teeter at the moment on the edge of a whole bunch of disasters, and I am convinced one of them is going to turn out to be real. The one that is most likely to hit soonest I'd guess is some version of the Peak Oil disaster: somebody is going to fail to deliver oil and that will create a result and the result will be some version of breakdown.

But of course it may well be something else. It'll be something, I'd guess, and something pretty unexpected and unpleasant.

  

My New Book on WWII Is Published

I just this morning checked Amazon, and they have my new book, A War Far Off for sale at $11.95. I have used Amazon's CreateSpace print-on-demand service to print it. I have ordered a few copies to give relatives and friends, but I'd be delighted if all you zillions of readers of this blog sped out and bought a copy. It's my record in 40 letters to my granddaughters of what I (chose to) remember of WWII all these years later. I first went off to a Navy school in January 1944, 67 years ago. It's a wonder I have not been ashcanned long since, but I think that as of this moment I am still compos mentis. Anyway, lots of luck to me on this venture.

News Flash! Govt. Tells Fibs

    Joel Hirschorn (whoever he is) has a telling article on the Global Research website to the effect that the U.S. Govt. is lying about unemployment big time.
    
    Here is a critical paragraph about relative wealth: "In other words, contrary to all the blabber from politicians and pundits, the current recovery is largely delusional as far as the vast majority of Americans are concerned.  Of course, the rich Upper Class is doing just fine.  In 2009, the richest 5 percent claimed 63.5 percent of the nation’s wealth. The richest 20 percent of Americans own 84 percent of all wealth.  The overwhelming majority, the bottom 80 percent, collectively hold just 12.8 percent.  As the Economic Policy Institute has reported, the richest 10 percent of Americans received an unconscionable 100 percent of the average income growth in the years 2000 to 2007, the most recent extended period of economic expansion."

    And the true uemployment rate is about 17 percent, not the feel-good number the media has been pushing in the last few days of 8.8 percent. (I love that ".8," as if it were a "significant" number.) This state of affairs is a fine backdrop to GOP efforts to savage "social network" provisions. Not that I think the thing is a matter of Dems vs Repubs. It's rich versus poor, naked class rip off. 


    I haven't any idea where all this is going, but I venture it is not going to be to a good place.