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First published in February 2017

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That pretty printed paper in your wallet, that stuff called money, where does it come from? What gives it value, and why can you buy things with it? The question is not an idle one, nor is it a cynical one, but rather ultimately practical. And yet, this essential question is never asked by the authorities who lecture us on economics, nor the politicians who grace us with their precious opinions from their gilt offices.

That is to say that even though the media brainwashes us into believing that money is the most important thing in the world, money itself can never be a topic for discussion.

The problem of money is an old one. The current crisis of money is a crisis of value, a crisis in which our money is cut down, eviscerated, and slaughtered before our very eyes by an invisible butcher called inflation, in a secret ritual whereby money is printed up by the Federal Reserve, using black magic, and then doled out to the rich and to the banks for free.

As we enter final horrific stage of this travesty, we will be forced to switch to digital currencies that are controlled by unaccountable powers at the Federal Reserve, powers who will turn off the money in our wallets, or freeze our accounts, or seize our money for taxes, or for fines, at their whim.

When banks print up money to buy stocks, or pay off the debts of the rich, the money in your pocket, in your savings account, decreases in value proportionally. In short, the rich are stealing your money by diluting it while you sleep. They call this theft “inflation,” implying that money becomes worth less following some natural principle. Inflation is, according to them, a natural disaster, like an earthquake or a typhoon, like a flood or a drought.

This fiction about money and value is backed up by the authoritative musings of the pay-to-play experts. But they all know that the money in your bank did not become less valuable because of an act of God. It was crushed when the banks cranked out trillions of dollars to buy worthless stock, to purchase useless weapons, to buy up farmland so that you will pay more for food, to buy up housing so that you will pay more for rent.

We cannot understand the current money crisis unless we consider the process by which we got here over the past hundred years.

Specifically, it was the establishment of the Federal Reserve on December 23, 1913 that started this downhill path. Although we needed a national bank accountable to the Congress and to the people, one in which money was created and regulated by the government in a transparent manner in accord with the Constitution, we ended up with a system wherein private banks have the final say over fiscal policy.

Sadly, the crafty and devious banker J. P. Morgan, and not visionaries like our founding fathers, put together the system that regulates money, that serves as the heart of the nation’s economy.

Although the system worked, the poison slowly spread through the body politic over the next century as the private banks used their control of money to bribe (that is to say, “to lobby”) congressmen, presidents, professors, journalists, and all other authority figures to endorse this system, thereby leading the cow to the slaughterhouse.

Ultimately, the fiscal policies of the United States, the creation, distribution, and the determination of the value of money, are determined by private bankers, or by government officials at the Department of the Treasury were raised by the banks, and are loyal to them, not to the people.

There was a period, from the 1930s to the 1970s, when the Federal Reserve was relatively well administered. Government officials were aware of the dangers of unregulated global finance and they benchmarked efforts to control capital in Europe, and even in the socialist block. But the corrupt and unconstitutional nature of this false national bank never really changed: it sought to toss off the flimsy chains put on it during the New Deal, and it reared its ugly head again in the 1990s.

When the banks discovered that their secret takeover met almost no opposition in a decadent passive society, they decided to seize control of not only the economy, but of politics, of education, of medicine, and of culture in 2020.

Men and women of conscience abandoned the federal government like rats from a sinking ship.

But let us go back to the value of money. Money was backed by gold in 1879. That meant that in theory you could redeem your dollar bill for gold, and on occasion people did so. But when the entire edifice of government and the economy collapsed in the great depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, on June 5, 1933, ended the gold standard and placed in its stead the authority of the federal government.

Although this move made sense in light of the horrific economic crisis, and the fact that the rich controlled all the gold, the result was that the dollar was no longer tied to anything but the impression that the government had authority. That is to say that the nature of money became ideological.

Yes, a tentative relationship between the dollar and gold was established again after the Federal Reserve had amassed a significant amount of gold, but that relationship was tangential. The citizen could not simply demand that his or her dollars be redeemed in gold, and even that tie was severed permanently by President Richard Nixon in 1971.

The move away from gold, from any concrete object that gave value to the slips of paper in your wallet, created a fiat currency, as it is called, and such an untethered money had a malign impact on American society, granted that the changes were so slow as to be imperceptible.

During the 1930s, the depression, the federal government printed up money to help pay those who had been impoverished by the collapse of the speculative economy.

Economic recovery for the working men and women was successful, but in a limited sense. The new role of the Federal government, the projects for electrification and road building, had a mixed impact on our society.

On the one hand, life became easier, and more convenient, and for some it was healthier. The poor were, for the first time, treated as citizens when programs like social security and welfare offered them real protection against the terrible poverty that has haunted the working man since time immemorial.

This approach to economics, to money, was deeply influenced by the experiments carried out in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, and it had real merits.

But there was a price to be paid for this solution.

The resulting New Deal was a compromise that brought change, but that demanded citizens give up economic, organizational, and intellectual independence. Our citizens came to rely on large organizations like federal government, and then later on multinational corporations—which essentially function as governments.

The small farmer in 1930 was largely independent in terms of money, energy, food, and the other necessities of life. They were many who met their needs without much interaction with banks or with government. The nation had been founded by leaders who felt that such independent self-sufficient farmers were the key to long-term democracy—a vision we should have held to.

Our citizens grew vegetables and animals for food, and could preserve that food for the winter. They produced energy from windmills, water mills, horses, and good old fashioned manual labor without depending on utility corporations, or multinational oil companies. They despised companies like Standard Oil that tried to make Americans dependent on petroleum.

Our citizens knew how to gather medicinal herbs and to treat health conditions without hospitals. They made their own furniture, bought iron tools from neighbors who forged it, or borrowed items from each other when required. Money was not critical to that economy, nor was consumption; chairs were made to last for a 100 years, dresses woven to last for 40 years. Frugality was a virtue.

The New Deal helped those devastated by the banks, but it demanded integration into a money economy run by the government, and specifically by the Federal Reserve, which remained under the control of the private banks who were just itching to toss off their reigns.

When the economy improved after the Second World War, and especially when Americans became dependent on government and corporations in the 1970s, the private banks starting making up the rules for money again, and buying off the supposed regulators.

Politicians will never suggest that we form cooperatives and establish our own local currencies, that we build a local economy that has no need for multinational banks or factory farms, no dependence on monopolistic logistics and distribution systems, no ties to marketing and sales gimmicks, nothing to do with the tools by which corporations mean to bleed us dry.

Almost all transactions today are carried out in the money controlled by the Federal Reserve, that is to say, money controlled by multinational corporations and banks, and the super-rich who hide behind them.

Moreover, as impressive as it may be that the dollar is the global currency, that means that any number of global banks and shifty billionaires around the world are interested in the dollar, not because they care about Americans, but because they wish to squeeze even more profit out of it.

You may be able to vote for a politician, and maybe your vote will be counted. But when it comes to the value of money, or to access to money, the United States is a dictatorship. The Department of the Treasury, the Federal Reserve, and the congressional committees overseeing monetary policy are tightly controlled by multinational private banks. No one who is not bought and paid for by them will be allowed to come near the process by which money is created and its value is determined.

And then there is the pseudoscience of economics, a field of study far less reputable than astrology and bloodletting, that tells us that interest rates, rather than the grand theft of money by multinational banks, is the cause of inflation; that tells us we must consume and waste in order to have a healthy economy; that suggests to us that importing food and other necessities from abroad through the parasitic logistics and distribution systems controlled by the banks, is a sign of growth, and that this scam is more modern and efficient than growing your own food and running your own local economy.

That fairy tale is a massive fraud. If you produce most necessities in your community and buy and sell, or barter, with each other, and if you run local banks as cooperatives, then the money, and the value, will remain in your community, and will not be siphoned off to vampire private equity firms in New York or Singapore, in London or Geneva.

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This article was originally published on US Provisional Government.

Emanuel Pastreich served as the president of the Asia Institute, a think tank with offices in Washington DC, Seoul, Tokyo and Hanoi. Pastreich also serves as director general of the Institute for Future Urban Environments. Pastreich declared his candidacy for president of the United States as an independent in February, 2020.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.