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The Federal (Not!) Reserve
(None!) Note (Ain't!)
Of course the FRN can't be a real dollar because a dollar is a unit of measurement, like a gallon or a yard. The Coinage Act of 1792 defined a dollar as 371.25 grains of silver. So what is the FRN a 'dollar' of, paper? Stubby says print a picture of a banana on a piece of paper and call it a 'One Banana Note.' It you believe it's a real banana, go ahead and take a bite! At a 6% annually engineered rate of 'inflation' the FRN decays in buying power by .1643383% per day, which is why you can't see it. But 6% per year would erode your money by 50.62979% in ten years. That's half your buying power gone in one decade. Poof! So why isn't an army of peasants marching on the District of Corruption, brandishing their pitchforks? Because the money erosion process is like a magic show running in slow motion. The rabbit is pulled out of the hat so slowly that the audience falls asleep before they can even begin to get curious. Here's a good question to ask your friends and neighbors the next time they get chatting about the supposed long-term beneficial effects of inflation on housing values: 'If houses keep increasing in value as they deteriorate, why don't builders just build deteriorated houses?' Each time Big Ben 'Helicopter' Bernanke pushes the button on the Big Green Monopoly Money Machine, tens of billions more green 'dollar' coupons flood into the money supply and instantly devalue all of the others already in circulation. The public has been conditioned to view this inflationary engineering as 'the rising cost of living' and to accept it as an unavoidable phenomenon of existence. You know, like why men can't figure out women, and why women can't figure out why men don't quit trying. Imagine what life would be like for a carpenter whose yardstick kept shrinking by 6% each year. It would measure 33.84 inches next year, 31.81 inches the following year and so forth. How could he ever know where to draw the cut mark? Now imagine what life would be like for the taxpayer whose retirement planning keeps shrinking by 6% each year. He'd be like the guy in a rowboat who's trying to row 40 miles (translate: years) to the Retirement Finish Line. Unbeknownst to him (...he spent his entire youth being shipped back and forth each day to a government social conditioning camp, I mean public school, and is now thoroughly hypnotized...), the water is secretly flowing DOWNSTREAM, away from the finish line, at about 6 mph. Forget retirement. He'll have to row 6 mph UPSTREAM just to stay in place! So he gets a college degree and starts rowing. Pretty soon he notices that the '<---- This Way To The Retirement Finish Line' sign on the riverbank is getting BEHIND him. What the heck's going on? He should be able to put that tree in the dust. After all, he's got a 'good job.' So he rows harder, causing the economy to overheat. That prompts the Fed to speed up the current a little and now he's really sweating. Just then, his boat springs a leak. INCOME TAXES! PAYROLL TAXES! And that %&*!$$ sign is getting farther and farther behind! So he gets some bigger oars (a better J.O.B. which stands for 'Just Over Broke') and rows for all he's worth. He has a wife now, plus 2.1 kids, and the boat is a whole lot heavier than when he started. So he decides to upgrade to a bigger boat. But that takes money he doesn't have. So he crawls on his hands and knees into a local bank and borrows a boatload of credit (sorry) from the bankers... who just tied a huge bucket to the stern of his boat, and that bucket is adding to the stream's resistance! He's really sweating now. He hates having to hand the Missus a pair of oars but he has no choice. Now she's putting her back into it, too: she just went out and got two part-time jobs and now she's too exhausted to even think straight. To lighten the load, and because they can't possibly home school their children now, they remove the kids from the boat and stick them in a local government behavioral conditioning camp, er, public school. With the government watching their kids all day and MTV handling the babysitting an additional 20 hours a week, they can devote themselves to rowing with all their strength for 10 more years... but hold on just a darned minute! That !$&*$##! sign is STILL right where it was TEN YEARS earlier! At this point, they start rowing as if their life depended on it, which naturally causes the economy to heat up again. So the Fed slows down the current a tad which allows them to catch up a little. Just as things are getting easier, the Fed speeds up the current a WAY up! This cycle of faster and slower goes on for 40 years and that poor family is so busy rowing and bailing at the same time that they don't have two minutes to figure out what's going on. Suddenly, the 'Finish Line' which had actually been flowing TOWARDS them all this time, smacks right into their boat and capsizes it. But they can't swim! At this moment, Congress (always eager for more votes) motors over in a luxury yacht and throws them a partially inflated life raft stocked with free cheese, mostly free medical care and subsidized elder housing, and ties their raft to that sign with all kinds of strings. And that's where they stay tethered until the day they die. The FRN is money because the gubmint says its money. That makes it fiat money, i.e.., money by decree. Decrees are backed up by armies, usually very BIG armies, further demonstrating that gubmint is the organized implementation of force. Printing money is a pretty good racket. Try it yourself and you'll be awarded an all-expense-paid vacation at Club Fed. When Bernanke does it, he's rewarded with free helicopter lessons! Printing money is easy, as far as ol' Stubby can tell. You feed rag linen into one end of a computerized intaglio printing press and a green, oh-fisshul looking coupon pops out the other end. Stick the likeness of a deceased notable in the middle and some numbers in each corner and -- voila! -- you got yerself some money. Unfortunately, those green paper tokens in your wallet that the gubmint provides for your use as a circulating medium of exchange are no longer backed by gold or silver. They're not backed by anything else of any value either, not even .22 rounds, whiskey or toilet paper. In fact, they ain't backed by nuthin!' Well, that's not exactly true. They're backed by the willingness of one damn fool to pass them on to the next. Think: public confidence as a confidence game. And now you understand why paper money is so dangerous. Because the first user gets it for free, while the last user gets stuck holding the bag. Without paper money it would be impossible to conduct wars like the perpetual 'war on terror' which 'Deadeye' Dick Chaney recently said should last a lifetime. Most people think the Federal Reserve is some kinda' agency of the gubmint. Actually, 'ol Stubby thinks the entire U.S. Gubmint is an agency of the Federal Reserve!! The Federal Reserve Note 'dollar' isn't federal, there are no reserves and it fails the legal definition of a note. Other than that, no problem! Everything is fine. Nuthin' to worry about, Citizen. Go back to sleep and pay your taxes. Let's take a look at some FRNs. George Washington is displayed on the $1 bill. Can you imagine Patrick Henry's reaction if we could stick him in Sherman and Peabody's 'Way Back Machine' and beam him up to the present? When Patrick first took a look at the Constitution, the ink still damp, he exclaimed: "I smell a rat!" He was referring to what he perceived to be an elitist agenda to eventually consolidate all power in the seat of government under the guise of a representative republic. Naw, that could never happen, could it? As soon as the Washington administration was settled in, George sent his former aide de camp, Alexander Hamilton, to squash the Whiskey (tax) Rebellion. And squash it he did, good and proper. A new King George was now on the throne and populism went straight down hill from there. Hamilton's former handlers now display their boy Alex on the $10. Writing as one of three pseudonymous proponents of the new form of government in what has come to be known as the Federalist Papers, Hamilton sought to pacify a suspicious public that the powers of the new government would be defined and strictly enumerated; that nothing would be left to interpretation; that, borrowing a phrase from the makers of Ragu spaghetti sauce, if it wasn't 'in there,' the gubmint couldn't do it. No sooner was that finagling federalist fop Hamilton installed as the first Secretary of the Treasury than he argued for the creation of a National Bank under the principle that the power do to so was 'implied' in the Constitution. That is the very moment when Burr should have taken aim. In his later years, Thomas Jefferson wrote of Hamilton as being a lover not just of monarchy, but of a monarchy 'bottomed on corruption.' Sounds about right. Moving along, the $20 bill presents a cameo of 'Honest' Abraham Lincoln, under whose reign our constitutional republic reached its high water mark. History will one day show that it's been all down hill ever since. With his fingers crossed behind his back, Lincoln cut up the Constitution into little squares, left them near the toilet where he could reach them, and promptly adopted to himself the methods of a tyrant. Some of his acts were so egregious they'd have made Janet Reno blush, such as forcibly raiding and closing down northern newspapers critical of his policies and having their editors arrested. But all tyrants are really sissies. Lincoln was so scared of having Lee's Army of Northern Virginia staring eyeball-to-eyeball at him from across the Potomac that he had several members of the Maryland state legislature arrested and transported to windowless cells in Albany, New York where they were held, incommunicado, for the duration of the War of Northern Aggression -- no visitors, no access to a lawyer, no hearing, no habeas corpus... wait a minute, that sounds like Guantanamo! And why, pray tell? So that Maryland could not vote to secede from the Union. To this day a stanza in the Maryland state song, 'Maryland, Oh My Maryland' contains the line, 'The despot's heel is upon thy shore.' The despot being 'Honest Abe.' Lincoln even had secret escape tunnels dug under the White House. The Almost Actual History Channel recently ran a puff piece on those escape routes. They're still there today. Maybe Gee Dubya can use them to hightail it when the voters finally wake up! 'Honest' Abe has been enshrined in history as the man who emancipated the slaves. Of course, his Emancipation Proclamation had absolutely no legal force or effect in areas where blacks were still enslaved, and slaves had already been freed in those areas that were under Lincoln's control. So the proclamation accomplished exactly nothing, other than to get 'Honest' Abe some nice, eternal PR. Here's what the 'Great Emancipator' had to say in the fourth presidential debate against candidate Stephen A. Douglas held in Charleston, Illinois on September 18, 1858 (from The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln edited by Roy P. Basler, Volume III, pp. 145-146.). Remember, this is the Great Emancipator speaking here: "I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in anyway the social and political equality of the white and black races - that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the Negro should be denied everything." Perhaps someone should notify Jesse Jackson! Stubby and family were recently honored to have some true southern folk visiting us here in our New Hampshire home (deep behind Yankee lines) where their entire family lined up in the living room like some partisan version of 'The Sound of Music' and, a capella, sang several popular Southern folks songs from the 1860's. One ditty, which they sang to the tune of 'Yankee Doodle,' contain the lines:
Jeff Davis is a gentleman,
Ol' Abe lies sick, Remember, this was contemporary POPULAR MUSIC in the South in the early 1860's! Moving on, we see Andrew Jackson (no relation to Jesse) portrayed on the $20. 'Old Hickory' hated the bankers so much he called them a 'den of vipers' and threw them out of the White House. We figure that's why the bankers stuck him on the $20, kinda' like displayin' your enemy's severed head on a pike outside the castle door. Ulysses Grant is depicted on the $50. Grant issued the orders that sent waves of marauding Yankee troops plundering through the conquered South, slashing, burning, raping, looting and destroying everything in their path. Wait a minute, wasn't that Baghdad? When Lincoln heard of Grant's exploits he is reported to have danced a little jig in expression of his glee. The Grants maintained black servants throughout the war. When George Orwell wrote in his classic work Animal House, 'All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others,' could he have had the Grants in mind? Meanwhile, Robert E. Lee, General of the Army of Northern Virginia, freed all of his slaves. They don't teach this stuff in the gubmint social conditioning camps, er, schools, but you home schoolers can learn it from Mom at the kitchen table! Heh, heh. Ben Franklin is depicted on the $100. Some suspect Franklin was a double agent for the British and part of an illuminist conspiracy to keep America in the back pockets of the bankers in the City of London. Tupper Saucey does a good job of researching this in his book 'Rulers of Evil.' Stubby recommends this book highly, but you might want to read it under the covers with a flashlight! Finally, we get to the Stubby Reserve Note. This is a lovely paper coupon bearing the likeness of Stubby Candles' dear, departed mother in the middle, and is the most expensive note ever printed in all of human history. It bears the serial number 'OOICU812!' and the denomination '$68 Trillion' in each corner. On the back it says 'In Stubby We Trust!' and shows a picture of the 1772 Burning of the Gaspee. Stubby figures this 'note' could be mailed to Washington, D.C. to pay off the entire federal debt -- both funded and unfunded -- all in one fell swoop! Of course that would probably cause ol' Stubby to be awarded a free, all-expense-paid trip to Guantanamo Bay, so Stubby has decided to just keep on buying silver and let the federal debt keep ballooning. In closing, let's all rub our chins and think hard about this one. If the gubmint owes the 'federal debt' to itself, why doesn't it just forgive itself its own debt and start all over again? I mean, heck, if you owed yourself $68 TRILLION DOLLARS couldn't you just decide not to bother yourself over it any more? Or mebbe' the gubmint doesn't actually owe those bux to itself. Mebbe' it owes them to the Federal Reserve. So who owns the Federal Reserve? Here you go...
Chart 1
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