When The Butterflies Come

by Rosemary Ness Bitner

  “So real money is what?”

  “It is that which holds value, is portable, and is readily accepted in trade and commerce. Gold and silver qualify. And if it’s not acceptable under an imposed fiat currency scheme, then a black market will always develop apart from contrived fiat-imposed marketplaces, and the black market will always grow to become the dominant market until the fiat-controlled market capitulates and becomes a marketplace that accepts real gold and silver money. That’s the history of these things. It’s not rocket science. Gold and silver are eternal, like the sun and the moon. Paper burns or it decays, gets eaten by insects, and loses value.

  “What makes people wise up?”

  “It’s hard to explain. It’s like when a change in the weather happens. It’s when life stops feeling good. Everybody just kind of feels it. It’s like at the end of a party when you’ve had so much to drink that you can’t even get it hard to screw the prettiest girl there, even though she’s begging for it. You know the party’s over.

  “It’s simple to understand honest money. Ancient Hebrews understood it. In Proverbs, there’s a verse about society needing honest weights and measures. That means when somebody works and gets paid, they must get paid in something that represents equal value to their work. They must get paid in silver or gold coins because precious metals will hold value over long periods of time—that is, if the bankers aren’t fraudulently manipulating the market price of it to artificially hold down the price of the metal. They do their fraudulent manipulations by selling paper ounces short on the commodity exchange to hold the price down while they take delivery of the physical metal into their own vaults. This scam will not go on forever. Competing exchanges that require physical delivery are already competing with our exchange. Price control will go to the physical market and the paper market will follow. This will happen during the period when the currencies reset their prices to the metals or when the currencies are replaced with new metal-backed currencies. When the little guy wises up and the price of silver resets sharply higher, he’ll have to pay a lot more for the silver or work a lot harder for it. When the financial landscape changes, the bankers will own all the metal and they’ll screw the little guy, like they always do.”

  “How is the little guy getting screwed right now?”

  “By working like a fool. The husband and his wife are both employed in part-time jobs and forced to accept dishonest weights and measures, dishonest money, for honest work or product. The little guy must work for his paper dollar, but the government doesn’t have to work for their dollars. They issue a bond. The Fed prints dollars and gives the dollars to the government for the bond. This circle jerk is all computerized and digitized. The value of the little guy’s efforts or product sold is diluted, eroded, and debased by the unlimited creation of fiat dollars by government borrowing.

  “The current system is abused by politicians who pass laws that favor their donors and funnel fiat government money into all kinds of nefarious schemes. They pay college professors grant money to study stuff like what time of day bugs like to fuck or how some ancient battle was fought. Really? Who gives a shit about crap like that? Or they’ll have wars like Vietnam and Iraq so neocon fucktards can get money to defense contractor buddies. Or they’ll spend money on nuclear bombs, enough to blow away civilization ten times over when they only need to kill everybody on Earth once. How many times can you kill dead people? Only governments that don’t have to earn the money they piss away do insane things like this.

  “It’s cheap government money for the rich and well connected, and it’s high-interest money and never-ending debt servitude for the great unwashed masses. It leads to horrible waste of resources and gross misallocations of capital and talent. It destroys savings. Diminished savings diminish capital formation. The economy carries a debt it can’t service or repay. We have a depression. We have World Wars Three through Six. People die. Cats sleep with dogs. Men turn wives into whores and sell kids out to pedophiles because that’s the only way the family can make money and survive. Humanity reverts to savagery. We may end up with another asshole like Hitler as a result of the folly of fiat money.”

  “Can’t the central banks change course?” Bob wondered aloud.

  “In a word, no. A government that uses dishonest money has no interest in serving the people who elected it. The only interest is in perpetuating the system.

  “To perpetuate the system the political class and bankers employ Kabuki theater. They’ll insert a magical shyster president who promises to unite the races only to later divide them, things like that. The problem with that agenda is it’s the wrong one. Race relations are neither the problem nor the cause of divisions, only the symptom of the deeper division between those who control money and therefore power pitted against the ninety-nine percent who don’t. Dishonest money is the sole cause of the problems that America faces. It’s all Woodrow Wilson’s fault. The culpability must be laid where it belongs. Every other issue is a minor irrelevant sideshow. It’s that differential. The Kabuki part is the sideshow of division and the ‘us against them’ mentality the political class instills with divisive social programs like Obamacare. All these things are subterfuges intended to distract from the truth, which is that the political class is adamant not to allow the people to have real power which only comes about when people have real money.”

  Bob stares at him for a moment, then asks, “Can’t the public vote for a change to honest money?”

  “They could try. If they understand the issue it could happen, but the odds are against that. The voting system is rigged for change to lose. The established powers in both political parties will work together to thwart the idea. Unfortunately, few politicians understand the message that needs enunciation. Americans’ votes don’t count anyway. The political class contracts the software companies to program the voting machines to continue the status quo. Votes don’t matter.

  “Fundamental change doesn’t occur by established means because established means themselves, the voting processes, are corrupted by those who have power. Power is an aphrodisiac. It’s very hard to voluntarily give up one’s own power and too easy to rationalize keeping hold of power regardless of the misery it causes. Fundamental change occurs from the bottom up, like it did in the first American Revolution.”

  “You said first as if you expect a second. Isn’t there a way for the existing system, especially through the Fed and the banks, to right things internally?”

  “It’s too late for that. They used to print money and cause inflation, and then they’d raise interest rates and invert the yield curve, making short rates higher than long, causing a credit crunch and a recession. That would move things toward a perceived normalcy for a while, but the aggregate debt load on the system kept rising. They can’t do their one-trick pony act anymore. They’ve gone so far into money printing and monetization of government and other bad debt that they now ride a tiger. They can’t get off. Interest rates are stuck near zero. If they raise rates, bank loan asset values drop and wipe out the equity of the banks and the Fed. They must keep asset values artificially high to prevent systemic collapse. They are cornered. Their stimulating efforts failed.

  “Instead of raising short-term interest rates, which would immediately cause the worst depression in the history of history, they keep short rates artificially low and keep buying poor quality debt from banks that are choking on it and creating more of it, with more printed money. It’s not a healthy central bank with money creation checked by gold and silver backing of money. It’s the opposite of what the Founding Fathers made into constitutional law.

  “Bankers do great as long as the Fed stays in business and the public gets screwed. The Fed says inflation has something to do with labor costs, while prices of beef and everything else are doubling. People will go along with fiat money insanity for a while, even for generations, but then people come unglued because they can’t make it. They raid stores and steal stuff, they cheat on their taxes, bla
ck markets show up, riots break out, cops get shot, and civilization unravels. You can only water down ground beef for so long, you can only put less in the cereal box for so long, and you can only put your thumb on a scale for so long until people figure it out.”

  “Then what happens?”

  “People see they’re in trouble. Those who misled the public for generations, who went along with Keynesian economics instead of going back to Say’s Law, where money is honest and only used for transactions, not deficit government spending, are in more trouble. Banking policies that prevented clearing out unhealthy businesses and consumer debts get scrapped along with the Fed and its member banks.”

  “Where do you think we’re headed?”

  “We’re headed forward to the past. The past is our future.”

  “What past?”

  “The same one all fiat monies and their banking systems have. Take the German Weimar Republic. The country had crushing war reparations debts and impossible future payment burdens. The United States and the western nations of Europe and Japan have crushing debts and impossible future payment burdens. The German people thought they could escape the problem. As individuals, they took on more and more risks. They bought stocks which went up for about three years in a grand finale market top blow off. The market gains kept them even or ahead of the depreciation in the Deutschmark. The market players could pay for their groceries for a while, but toward the end that all changed because their currency collapsed.

  “In mark terms, a German who had a million marks in their markets saw his value increase to nine million marks in the last two or three years of the rise. The mark wasn’t gold-backed at the time, but the U.S. dollar was. When the German economy went through its collapse, their currency collapsed with it. The German who now had a nine-million-mark valued portfolio had to sell his stocks for marks and convert marks to buy dollars or gold to get money for food. The mark was legislated to be worth nothing and was replaced by the Rentenmark. When the German converted his marks to dollars, he lost ninety-nine and nine-tenths percent of his wealth. He lost everything. German companies went bankrupt along with the country and its currency.

  “The dollar we use for money, like Weimar’s mark, is no longer gold-backed like it was before the Fed got its grip on America’s economy. Americans’ incomes, like the Germans who lived the Weimar disaster, can’t keep pace with the rising cost of food, health care, and essentials. The dollar is being devalued in real goods and services like the Weimar mark was. To cling to their wealth, Americans put their money in the stock market, like Weimar Germans did. Americans have employee retirement pension plans, individual retirement plans, trusts, individual wealth, all invested in the stock market. Financial planners, the insects, cheer Americans onward with high-yield products, partnerships that use leverage, mortgage debts, equity loans, margin accounts, exchange-traded funds that use leverage, just about anything imaginable to reach eight percent returns. Americans are told they’ll get eight percent a year if they stick to their insect’s plan.

  “They’re not told the Fed is a hollow corpse, that banks will fail from bad loans, that people will have to swallow negative interest rates on money they keep at the bank, or that the insects need to recalibrate their financial planning models to assume a negative two percent interest rate instead of a positive eight percent rate. It’s all set up for a terrible destruction of wealth. America today has eerie similarities to the Weimar Republic. It’s like a jet flying over an ocean that loses power to its engines. It doesn’t end well.

  “The insects blather that diversification will prevent a collapse, but in a systemic credit contraction all assets, stocks, bonds, home values collapse similar to what happened in Weimar Germany. We want to believe that somehow we are different, our markets are different, our money managers are smarter, but when I look at the underlying conditions, our situation is no different now than their situation was back then.”

  “But the Weimar was a creation after the Great World War. The Germans lost the war. America has won its greatest wars, World War Two and the Cold War.”

  “Yes, but no. You see, when there’s a war, no country wins, economically speaking. There are costs on all sides and huge debts are incurred to fight wars. The winners have the costs of rebuilding the losers to avoid never-ending strife arising from defeated peoples. Look at the Marshall Plan, McArthur’s rebuild of Japan. Look at West Germany’s costs to absorb failed East Germany. Our Middle East adventures weren’t cheap either.

  “But I digress. The point is, regardless of the source of the debt, it is the size of the debt that matters. America, indeed the entire world, is crushed by staggering debt burdens. Most do not see the predicament the Fed has them and it in, nor are most prepared to survive an economic collapse that could mirror the Weimar collapse.”

  “What can they do about it?”

  “First they must see the risk. We’re talking about crowd psychology. After the Titanic hit the iceberg, the captain’s main instruction to his officers was not to let the passengers panic. People in authority never want people under their control to be alarmed, and that’s natural. It’s necessary for the people to stay docile to maintain control of them. Lifeboats went away half-empty while people partied on the decks. Two-thirds of the passengers died that night because they didn’t know the risks, and the men in authority told them there was no need to panic. If the guys in charge were honest, another seven hundred people would have lived.

  “Financial markets aren’t the same as ocean liners sinking, but the psychology of crowds is the same. Americans are constantly reassured everything is fine, that the Fed will always back-stop the market, that there’s no reason to think your insect-created plan will not succeed. It’s like a crowd believing a sinking ship will miraculously get them across seven hundred miles of ocean when it’s dead in the water. People need to see the risk is that their plan will not get them there, that insects don’t know what they are talking about, and it’s time to make sure they survive when the economy goes under. In other words, make sure you have a seat on a lifeboat.”

  “And the seat is gold and silver, right?”

  “I’m afraid so. You see, unlike the Titanic, where one-third of the people survived, on the USS Lollypop America, only one person in a hundred owns gold or silver. Financial survival rates among Americans will be lower than the life survival rates on Titanic.”

  “Do you think that will happen here?”

  “It’s happening and it’s past the point of no return. It’s like that ship. It’s time to get off. Our top political leaders are career crony kickback artists, serial rapists of the nation, and slimeball influence peddlers who sell off the nation’s interests for payoffs from big donors or foreigners. Politicians run for office saying we need serious conversations about reforming Social Security, welfare, defense, government waste, whatever, but none speak to the truth which is that things are dire because we have dishonest money. Once elected, no politician wants change because of the pensions, benefits, and kickbacks they can get by cooperating with the bankers’ lobbyists to screw the public. Nothing will change until….”

  “Until the public changes things from the bottom up,” Bob chimed in.

  “Bingo! You’re a fast learner! I’m proud of you. You’re one American in a thousand who understands what money is and what it isn’t. People understand that the United States is based on three branches of government. Like a three-legged stool, we have a legislative branch to make law, an executive branch to enforce law, and a judicial branch to interpret law. As long as those three branches exist, everything should work out somehow and the country keeps going into perpetuity, right?”

  “Right!”

  “Wrong! If a three-legged stool has nothing to set on, if it floats in midair detached from Earth, can you sit on the stool?”

  “No.”

  “The stool without a foundation or floor to set upon is useless. Similarly, a government with three branches but without a solid fo
undation to set upon is also useless. The necessary foundation for the United States to survive as a sovereign nation is honest gold and silver money as the constitution prescribed. Honest money is the floor the three branches of government must stand upon. No floor, no government. Without honest money, all you have is corruption in government and society on all levels. All Americans become con artists trying to get more dishonest fiat money than the other guy. Civility collapses, dignity flees, and ethics are scorned. What’s left is a nation of depraved, dishonest people who live in fantasy worlds. Family life disintegrates. Sin is glorified. Debt piles up until it chokes normal life like weeds choke a lawn.

  “Eventually, maybe soon, a change occurs that sweeps away the country that once was and replaces it with something authoritarian. People stop wondering where they will go for their next vacation to piss away their fiat money. Instead they wonder how they will eat. Summer turns to winter, socially speaking. Change is forced on the people. When the slave master knows the slave accepts substandard rewards for labor, the slave master knows he can push the slave harder. When the slave master can give dishonest money in return for labor, the slave master knows the entire nation is weak. The people will eat dirt if the slave master tells them to. They’ll starve and accept corruption because they have lost their backbone and their guts. They want to be taken care of by their slave master, even for just one more day. They are screwed until a leader emerges and rallies them to demand change.”

  David raised his index finger and wagged it in front of his eyes. It was a wag of admonition, like a cat’s tail twitches when intently watching a mouse, waiting to strike its paw.

  “If the people choose change, the change times will not be happy times. Misery like never before seen on Earth will descend. Causes of pent-up frustrations will get pulled up by their roots and destroyed. People know that when less than one percent of the people control over ninety percent of the wealth, something’s wrong.