Britannia Radio

Answering The Most Important Question
A 21st Century Nation Can Ask
By Dick Eastman
1-29-11

Q: What is the core knowledge the world must have to overthrow debt slavery and chronic economic depressions and such extreme redistributions of wealth to financiers, speculators and monopoly corporations? A: Each class, creditor and debtor, operates in a different economy. The creditor class regulates both. In the lower class -- consisting of the household and production sectors of the domestic economy -- is constrained to operating in the lower loop. Banks and government are the means whereby the upper loop regulates and "farms" the lower loop. In the lower loop money exists only as loans made by banks. Every loan for a time reflates purchasing power to the lower loop, but every loan eventually ends up deflating more purchasing power than was added for the simple reason that both the principal of the loan and compound interest on the loan must be paid back. The upper loop provides the lower loop with a flow of loans but it takes back over time a larger flow than it takes in. Since the lower loop of households and domestic businesses of the domestic economy cannot pay back the loan with money, it must pay with assets. If the upper loop wants to own new industries that exploit new technologies they extend loans to lower loop businesses so that the lower loop entrepreneurs, engineers and skilled workers will have the tools and payment to develop and build this new industry. Then the upper loop simply stops making loans until the drainage of principal and interest bring on deflation and depression. The new businesses will fail due to lack of demand for their products which in turn is due to the drain of purchasing power. The new businesses will go bankrupt and will be bought up cheaply by the upper loop with their large reserve of accumulated interest which they have been withholding. However the upper loop does not by the failed businesses directly from the people who started the businesses and built them. Rather they wait until the businesses have gone into receivership -- so that the money they pay for the bankrupt properties will not go to lower loop people. The upper loop loses power if every the lower loop people ever have purchasing power free and clear. Now the upper loop money is not loans. The money of the upper loop is bets. It is a money of pure speculation. When speculators gamble in the derivatives market they create marketable bets called derivatives, but also commodities futures, swaptions or whatever bet they choose to make. The upper loop is completely unregulated. The upper loop is all about gaining assets from values they have created "out of thin air" -- they find that "thin air" moves and physical matter and controls human behavior. The upper loop uses "thin air" to gain the assets of the earth. One more thing. If a nation should try to run its own purchasing power system, the upper loop creditor class will us some of their accumulated interest or just their great "thin-air" event-shaping power to buy politicans or revolutionaries or other trouble makers to bring those nations down. It is my hope that if enough people knew what was going on, that they could band together and capture the thin=air machine and modify it so that it provides thin-air purchasing power exclusively to the household sector of the lower loop. There would be no more upper loop. Each household would receive new purchasing power free and clear with which to spend as he or she sees fit. (Children's social credit can be saved for an education and a house or spent on present family expenditure.) This new money appearing in households would be the only source of new money in the economy. Thus all economic power and political power would stem from the household sector. Household demand would direct production. There would be a financial sector, but it would no longer create our money. Banking would be a simple matter of paying savers for the use of their savings so that money can be given to entrepreneurs, engineers and skilled workmen to meet the needs of the country. Dick Eastman Yakima, Washington Corrected "second edition" of this tract for Kitson-Douglas-Soddy-Fisher monetary reform and against "Austrian School" economics, buying gold and the gold standard. What populists want America to know about the gold racket and terrible price we pay for interest-loan-based purchasing power: Vol. 6 Number 1 Gold Commodities and Investments Observer John M. Cain Dick Eastman GCIO forecasting editor John Maynard Cain interviews Dick Eastman Cain: Why are you predicting an immediate permanent collapse of gold? Eastman: New knowledge on the demand side. Cain: What do you mean? Eastman: A new, simpler and vastly superior way of looking at the gold market has taken hold among people who have been looking to gold as protection from dollar inflation and dire shortages in a collapse. There is a model of economic behavior called Rational Expectations Theory which can be applied in this case. That theory states people learn after being burned, that people adjust their buying and selling to avoid traps when an old theory or an old scam has repeatedly failed them and a new model appears which much better explains the market. The new model shows gold as something entirely different than what Austrian-School libertarian or Neo-Classical conservative interpretations of the dollar crisis and the function of gold in such a crisis. Cain: What's the new model? Eastman: That the price of gold is controlled by a monopoly. That gold has no intrinsic value -- by which I mean its commodity use in electronics, status decoration, wedding rings and art always has a negligible effect on its price. That demand for gold is speculative and precautionary almost exclusively. That the price gold is controlled by speculators with the power to manipulate price. That advisers who do nothing but recommend that people buy gold are in fact simply shills working for the Gold Monopoly That ... Cain: What are you insinuating? Eastman: I'm not. I am describing how we are in the midst of a collapse in the demand for gold that is being brought on by a new understanding of what the gold market really is and how it really functions to our detriment. I will grant you that all true-believers in gold sincerely believe what they are saying or at least are trying to believe. Pro-gold-standard Austrian Economics has an extensive and impressive literature backing it which makes believing easier. An intelligent person can easily be taken in by their story when alternative analyses of critical thinkers are being kept from them. But now a new and far more competent analysis has appeared and is taking over. The current depression within the domestic economy that is centered among households and domestic businesses has forced the common people to think on their own for the first time and they have come up with far better answers than the professional economists have been giving us. The consequence is that people no longer look to gold for protection. Now, despite what the physicians are saying, the people are not going to allow the high and mighty quack doctors bleed the patient to death in a misguided effort to save him. Cain: So back to the model. Eastman: This populist view of gold that has broken out and is flat-out beating the problematic von Mises - Rothbard "hard-money" model whenever the two views come into contact, rejects the thesis that gold somehow can "back" money, that anything backs money. Money obtains its value exclusively on the basis of peoples informed expectations of what it will buy. Gold in a vault does nothing for the value of money. However gold does constrain the use of money. When no money can be invested unless it has a yellow Rothschild permission token attached that is what hobbles the economy. Cain: Certainly if I can go to a bank and exchange a gold-backed dollar for the hard metal then the money is backed by that amount and is the equivalent of that amount. Eastman: You consider yourself a libertarian, don't you? Cain: Always. Eastman: Do you like government price controls? Cain: Not usually. Eastman: So you would not like it if you went to the store to buy a loaf of bread and found that the government had set the price. Then why do you like it when you go to the bank to buy gold and find that the government has set the price? Why do you like the system in which an entrepreneur wanting to start domestic business that can hire unemployed people and utilize abundant unused resources and machinery to meet real household needs is prevented from doing so because none of the credit to set it all in motion is allowed out of the bank because it lacks a Rothschild gold permission slip? But it is even worse than that. Under the gold standard you are not allowed to buy anything anywhere without first paying tribute to the Rothschilds by buying their Token of Permission to make the transaction. With the gold standard the Rothschilds have imposed the requirement of a gold dog tag on every piece of money for permission to spend it. Cain: I don't understand. Eastman: The domestic economy and all of us in it today are perishing for want of domestic economy purchasing power. And while it is true that our money is created when banks make loans and that this money comes, as they say, out of thin air, it is also true that those same loans are going away at an even faster rate. They are going back into thin air, as principal is repaid and as even more loan-created money is dragged away with it in the form of compound interest. This is chronic deflation. To buck this perpetual deflationary drain which kills demand for goods and labor, the banks can make bigger loans to consumers, business and government -- a bubble or, when done through government debt financing, a bailout, a New Deal or a war -- but that too will all soon end up going down the drain of paid back principal and interest. This is the problem and gold does nothing to solve it. The gold market and the gold standard exist to serve a much different purpose. The whole idea of a gold standard is to make it impossible for new jumps or transfusions of loans to take place. Gold is a constraint that is shackles those who would otherwise make those loans. Always and ever the creditors, that is the lending class, do not want easy money in the domestic economy loop. They loose when money is cheap and plentiful in this country. The idea of the creditor class is that any new loans to counter-act the deflation might bid up prices as it reflates purchasing power, and just that reflation is exactly what creditors who have trillions of dollars owed to them, do not want to happen. Deflation all by itself makes creditors wealthier. Inflation, on the other hand, represents to them a tremendous loss of their wealth. Nothing increases the wealth of the creditor class more than by making dollars more dear through reduction of money in circulation between the household and domestic business sectors. Deflation makes the creditors' stacks of the IOU's they hold worth more, increasing their wealth, and inflation makes the IOUs worth less, decreasing their wealth. Deflation increases their command over all markets of the domestic economy. It increases their power relative to ours. With the deflation that always must come from usury, each dollar that is owed to them as interest or principal when it comes due will command more worker labor and more worker product of goods and services. So the creditors solution guaranteeing that their gains from chronic deflation will not be cancelled by corrective inflation is to impose a gold standard. Any and all new pieces of money the economy creates for itself must have a golden Rothschild dog tag or it won't be allowed to buy anything. Gold is a constraint on the national economy for the benefit of maximizing the worth of creditors' bonds. It imprisons credit to protect the windfall gains that Big Finance enjoys from deflation, gains that come at our expense as a windfall loss. Cain: So you're saying inflation is actually needed to catch up purchasing power lost to deflation and that a gold standard is imposed intentionally simply to prevent this reflation from happening so big holders of dollar denominated paper assets can continue to see their wealth appreciate. Eastman: How concise. I wish I said that. Cain: Thanks, but I don't see how that affects the thinking and decisions of people who up until recently have been buying gold. Eastman: What people have now learned and what is sending gold to the center of the earth, is that gold won't deliver on saving the economy or on being of much help in a collapse. By buying all that gold everyone has been merely merely sending our dollars out of the domestic economy where they are needed to keep us employed and productive so we can buy food and so forth and gives that precious dollar purchasing power to the international financiers who certainly are not turning around with it and making investment loans to US businesses. Cain: OK, let's take a different tack. You deny that gold backing makes a difference. Does that apply to coin too. Surely you can't deny that when the fiat currency collapses in a hyperinflation that gold coins will still be able to buy food, water and other necessaries. Eastman: We have to get away from these "Austrian" false images implanted by Gerald Celente, Glenn Beck and Ron Paul. Hyper dollar inflation will occur internationally, but not domestically. Deflation will remain the order of the day in the USA for all us commoners. We will not be flooded with dollars. The hyperinflation will come in the form of impossibly high import prices -- but in the domestic economy no one will have the money to bid up prices of what Americans sell to each other. At home the dollar will still command what local resources can produce. However, the government, with fixed debt obligations -- or debt obligations negotiated with the IMF and World Bank in exchange for promises to privatize and sell off all public land and assets -- will tax more than ever -- making the dollar even more valuable domestically. Don't picture the German case of 1923. It won't happen. And remember this. Wages and the sale price of foreclosed houses are the prices that go down fastest and furthest in deflation, but fixed-loan debt burden are among those prices that never go down except though bankruptcy. Property taxes too will not go down, since they are used to pay municipal bond lenders and so forth. What debt obligations people can't meet will be made up in loss of remaining assets and harsher servitude, as the revision of bankruptcy laws in the 1990's most diligently has ensured. Cain: But what about all of the dollars that the Fed is putting out in exchange for securities, the so called helicopter money? Eastman: That money isn't entering the domestic economy blood stream. Yes, foreclosed houses and bankrupted businesses are being bought up, but from the bankers, not from the former homeowners or business owners who will never see that money. Americans are walking away from their small businesses just as some are walking away from their homes. The upper-loop, as I call it, are getting that Fed money and that bailout money, but they are not investing it in American domestic businesses. The upper loop easy money is not trickling down to the lower loop. The American working middle class has fallen into poverty because of this deflation and the American poor will literally die of deflation, not of inflation. Cain: Then you are saying the dollar will retain its value in the "lower loop?" Eastman: Yes. The high prices encountered their will be from either scarcity, that is, less economic pie per dollar -- a decrease in supply from abroad. Or the prices will rise by the hand of monopoly pricing power deliberately raising prices to suck up any pockets of cash the lower-loop commoners may still have their hands on. The price of gasoline is such a monopolist administered prices. People don't realize that the creditors own the corporations and that therefore corporations go after "deflation max" just as much as they go after "profit max." In fact, coordinated deflation maximization pursued among the entire banking-and-monopoly-corporation is more profitable than seeking profit maximization in the old fashioned way of setting long-run marginal cost to marginal revenue at the micro-economic level. The stockholding financiers make more money when corporations and banks cooperate in making their killings at the macroeconomic level, that is by deflating rather than by actually selling products in individual markets. The trillions in dollar denominated IOUs held by jointly by Big Finance and Big Business is what makes this the case today. Cain: Getting back to gold, you can't deny that if I buy a thousand dollars worth of gold now, then later on when there is the great domestic scarcity that is being predicted, that the gold I bought will then buy more than I would have been able to buy had I held on to the dollars instead. Clearly it is smarter to buy pay X dollars now for gold and later on buy back more than X dollars with the same gold later on than it is to hold the X dollars and have only X dollars later on. Eastman: You missed it. The dollars are not for hoarding, they are for spending, they are for adding to the total incentive power that moves people to produce in this country and that pays their bills in this country. If you buy locally or if you lend outside the banking system to a small businessman you are strengthening the domestic economy -- a whole string of purchases takes place from that money -- that money will be spent and respent with a multiplier effect according to whatever the velocity of money circulation-- that is, until it is swallowed up and lost as an interest payment or someone sending his dollars out of the loop to buy sterile non-circulating gold stamped with Ron Paul's image. Big mistake. Cain: I'm not following you. I'm talking about buying gold when an ounce of gold buys only a few dollars in anticipation of buying dollars with that gold at a future time when gold buys a lot of dollars. Eastman: OK, say you buy the gold; and say, dollar prices of goods and services go up due the end of credit from abroad and to dollar inflation in foreign currency markets. Imports will go down. There will be less total consumption "pie" available to consumers and less imported inputs for domestic production. Say too that all avenues of obtaining credit to continue trading our increased indebtedness for food are exhausted -- the financiers have determined that our ability to pay taxes and make private sector loan payments have been maxed out. What will happen? Well, certainly at this point American who has purchased gold will be constrained to use that gold to buy dollars to make purchases. But don't you see, you and your gold will just be a repeat of you and the equity people had in their houses. It is no different. It is just a nugget of wealth that Rothschild temporarily put in your hand to get you to hand over your dollar circulation currency, you economy supporting money, so he could profit from more deflation. You won't spend the $1000 worth of gold as you would have spent or loaned the $1000 of liquid spendable dollar money. Gold is always a deadbeat in the economy. It never works. It is called an investment, but that is the opposite of what gold is. Gold is dis-investment. And when you do get around to selling your gold for dollars -- it will be a buyers market -- the dollars will be so few that the gold will actually be sold at a low price -- you will view this as "being forced to sell my gold too soon" -- but that will have been the scam all along. You will need cash and you will sell your gold cheaper than expected to get some. This is because you did not understand that the inflation wouldn't be happening where you are. You starved local producers of the cash they needed to stay in business -- by leaking out the dollars you yourself earned to get gold. Yes, when you are driven to selling off your gold you will indeed prop the dollar for a while -- just as your getting a second mortgage propped the economy for a little while before you lost your house. But in the end when the gold is finally back in the Rothschild's hands, you will see that it was Rothschild who sold gold and got wealthier from the deflation and then bought the gold back near the same low price, while you never did see that hyperinflation everyone was worried about. (The Rothschild's have too many of our dollar denominated IOUs every to permit a domestic economy hyper inflation. Ever and always they are deflationists when they already have everyone's savings and expect to receive most of our earning streams. Cain: But don't you see a point where the dollar based economy fails? Eastman: Where it ever to reach the point where actual purchases of food and fuel had to be made directly with gold coin or bullion, 90 percent of us would already be dead or near dead. We are dead without credit. A gold craze is a deflation bomb. And a gold standard is a constraint on credit, reflation and recovery. The chains of the most profound servitude are the gold standard holding down credit from coming to our rescue. And let me add this. Don't think for a moment that even after such a complete collapse that gold would trade at an "intrinsic" value or at its value as a commodity useful in electronics and high-end decoration and art. Gold coins and bars would be valued because it is accepted by the commons, by fiat (i.e., autonomous declaration) of the commons. But it is exactly this fiat bestowal of money status upon gold by the commons -- their economic sovereignty, if you want to use that term -- that is being withdrawn. Now, with this new understanding, people are dropping gold as hopeless, and turning to common problem of setting up system without these flaws. When the real strengths and virtue of fiat money is discovered and the true consequences of hoarding gold or going to a gold standard are disclosed to the public , the people will move heaven and earth to get rid of the cross of gold we have born too long. As people are learning that gold price is never intrinsic value, that it is set by those holding a corner on the market, that it cannot sustain an economy, that it puts the gold monopolists in total control, and that buying it actually brings on more deflation speeding economic collapse -- they no longer want it and they convince others not to want it either. Cain: How does buying gold speed the collapse of the economy. Eastman: The economy is collapsing because the Money Power is withholding purchasing power from the "lower-loop" household and domestic business sectors. The loans still outstanding and attached to collateral remain our only money in the lower loop, and that is being eaten up by the relentless payment to the upper loop of eventually all of the principal plus the compound interest -- with transfer of our assets into the hands of the Money Power making up the inevitable shortfall. Anything that drains dollar blood from the living economy speeds national dissolution. When Americans buy gold from the "outer-loop" what is happening is that the Rothschilds are buying our dollars, removing our dollars from domestic circulation so that we will lose more jobs and suffer more foreclosures. Dollars mean life. Gold does not. Dollar circulation keeps the real economy alive. Gold does not buy any of the goods and labor services that most of us sell to support ourselves. It is illegal to pay wages or pay taxes in gold. And even if, to prove the populists wrong, gold were made legal tender, there would not be enough of it at the prices it would command to sustain market-driven production and distribution to keep us alive, as I said before. Cain: Aren't you being an idealist and expecting everyone else to be an idealist too when you ask them to give up the advantages of gold for the common good? Eastman: If you are taking gold bars with you on a boat trip and the boat sinks and you have to swim for it, is it idealism for you to realize that if you to swim for shore with the gold tied to your waste you will never make it? But when talking about the money system, we are all swimming together and those loading us with the heavy burden of gold are going to exhaust and sink us all. The salvation-by-gold scenario being sold by Celente, Beck is totally ludicrous once it is understood that deflation is the problem rather than inflation, that gold is merely a collar that the Rothschilds put on the people's credit or a dog tag attached to each fiat dollar that must be paid for or arranged for on terms of compound interest before we are allowed to transact business with each other in this country. We are dying of deflation. The solution is not to send abroad more of our too little purchasing-power dollars so we can accumulate little hoards of gold as an imaginary hedge against hyperinflation you will never see. This too real super depression that is crushing the lower loop -- a lower loop which government and economists and pundits never even see much less think about -- is in fact a crisis brought about by a shortage of purchasing power and nothing else. Ron Paul castigates supporters of fiat currency when fiat currency is the only thing that can save us. Cain: So what do you suggest we do? Eastman: Rather than buying gold from the Rothschilds so Rothschild withdraws our dollars from our economy giving him the deflation and us the added burden that makes him richer, let us provide our own "thin-air" money and leave him out of it. Why must right now allow these international creditors and outer-loop dollar holder to swoop down here at a time when foreclosed houses (rental properties) and businesses are going for pennies on the dollar -- and buying up all of our assets which they aquired because they understood deflation and we did not, because they gave us plenty of it and we didn't know to stop them. I say, "The heck with that noise." It's time to set up our own national fiat money system where money is just created --our representatives sent to the legislatures need only agree "let there be social credit"-- money that originates in households, that goes directly to the hands of consumer families, -- free and clear with no strings attached. Cain: Social credit? Eastman: Social credit plus repudiation of all debt to the scammers. The situation is in many ways like making the discovery that the dealer in a poker game is cheating with Aces up one sleeve and Kings up the other. When that happens you don't just let the dealer rake up all of his ill-gotten winnings and walk away from the table. You refuse to give him the pot. And you won't let him keep the winnings he got earlier that are now in his pockets. We are being robbed and mugged. They've cut open our chests and removed our pace makers. We can't live with the little they have left us. All debt to them must be repudiated and their usury racket must be stopped once and for all. All that we have to do is to call out the cheater and take back what is still rightfully ours. Remember the legal principle: "Fraud vitiates all contracts." The deflation racket constitutes a vast conspiracy to commit fraud by a concealed cheating mechanism. Cain: Now I know why you are called the fruitcake from Yakima. Eastman: Apple bread. Cain: Fruitcake. Your groundless rejection of gold is most stupid thing I ever heard. I don't know where to begin in untangling all of the fatal errors of logic you have committed. Eastman: Are they lending us money and then taking away the same amount as the loan plus compound interest? Cain: Yes. Eastman: But afterwards are they taking the interest they collected and lending it back to local entrepreneurs for local investment so we can build greater productive capacity and have a bigger economic pie for ourselves as so-called "financial intermediaries: are supposed to do? Cain: No, they are keeping it away from us. Eastman: So they are not letting the interest and bailout money they extract flow back into the economy. How do you think it came about that there are now ten times more dollars outside the household - domestic production loop than are in that loop? How did the outer-loop which doesn't produce one damn product, end up with all the money, and all of the producers of this country have lost their businesses and have no money? How can the people in the domestic loop live when they are continually subjected to this net drain that has taken the entire United States, land, buildings, improvements, everything and put it in the hands of the families of the Financial Sector and those Corporations which are the big holding bins where all of the businesses they have foreclosed and bought up are tossed? Cain: They can't. Eastman: Then what is left but to shut down the current Financial Sector based on usury and stop thinking of money as a commodity for which we must pay bankers as if they produced it at their own cost, when in fact all they really did do was peform the "thin-air" trick at no cost to themselves? We don't have to pay interest to bankers for the money we need to make the economy go. You pay bankers for loans of existing money that other people have saved. You don't pay them for their monopoly on the magical "thin air machine" which is really our own "social credit" power that they have gotten control of. Cain: But if the people were simply given money without working for it, no one would work. It would destroy the spirit of competition and kill all incentive. Eastman: When you play the board game Monopoly everyone is given a certain amount of money with which to play and when they pass "Go" they each get $200. The game does not start with everyone arranging a loan from the player who gets to be banker. The banker does not demand interest payments on all of those moves past "Go" that people make. And most of all, the player who gets to be banker isn't allowed to mix his money and the bank's money and call it all his money. But that is the deal the Rothschilds have secured for themselves in every country over the last two centuries on this planet. Like I said earlier, "The heck with that noise." It's time to rewrite the rules. It's time the bankers "houses and hotels" go back in the tray and we repair to the rules as they should be written. Cain: But you are denying the importance of financial credit in building up this country and in getting us out of recessions. Eastman: No, I am asserting the fact that the financial sector has been a vampire on the bosom of this country draining her life away even as by her people and her resources she should have and could have bestowed on all of us endless bounty and strength and opportunity and boundless hope. Cain: Do you have any idea how crazy you sound to people who listen to you? Eastman: Yes I do. But then those people begin to think and they see that I am right and they reject the gold scam as just another facet of the great international conspiracy of scammers. Cain: Thank you, Dick Eastman, for taking the time to explain your views. Eastman: Thank you for having me. Gold Commodities and Investments Observer "Why think when you can own gold?" -- Cain Note: The preceding is a populist propaganda tract written as the dialog form of olden days. John Maynard Cain does not exist and neither does, as far as I know, the newsletter Gold Commodities and Investments Observer