The Secret of Oz | Bill Stills 2010 Award Winning Documentary

➡ The text discusses the American economic crisis, attributing it to escalating national debt and unsustainable banking systems like fractional reserve lending. It stresses the need for a systemic overhaul, drawing parallels with ideas presented in L. Frank Baum’s “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” and calls for governments to issue money without debt to alleviate economic hardships.
➡ The text discusses the historical evolutions of money, from Roman Republic’s copper and bronze to gold under Julius Caesar which led to Rome’s downfall, the role of goldsmiths in England, and the introduction of tally sticks by King Henry I that redefined the British economy and democracy issuing debt-free money which thrived for centuries. The power and control over money influenced political, social, and cultural developments throughout history.
➡ The speaker asserts that the main economic problems lie in government borrowing and banks lending money they don’t possess, which undermines national sovereignty, leading to rule by banks or plutocracy. They propose monetary reform – a solution that forbids state borrowing and requires banks to lend only what they have – to regain control and sovereignty over the economy.
➡ The shift from using tally sticks to borrowing money supply from banks in 18th century England significantly increased the nation’s war debts and caused economic strain in its colonies, specifically America. The introduction of the Bank of North America, the country’s first privately-owned central bank, caused inflation and was eventually shut down due to public outrage; yet, the gap in the US constitution regarding the federal government’s role in emitting paper money still leaves room for economic instability.
➡ The text provides a historical overview of the role and influence of privately owned central banks in America. It covers how notable figures like Jefferson and Andrew Jackson opposed these banks due to their manipulative control over the country’s money supply. This led to economic instabilities and wealth discrepancies. Despite opposition, the banks’ influence persisted, resulting in financial crises. Presidents like Jackson and Lincoln attempted reforms, such as government-issued, debt-free currency; however, these were combated post their tenures, leading to significant economic distress.
➡ The manipulation of the US money supply by big banks through the 19th and early 20th centuries caused severe depressions and poverty. This economic crisis was attributed to the withdrawal of money from circulation, the replacement of greenbacks with gold, and centralizing banking control, ultimately bringing the nation to its knees. Unprecedented inflation followed measures aimed at preventing system collapse. Today, some conjecture that the 2008 economic crisis was manipulated or spiraled out of control due to the debt money system pioneered by the big banks.
➡ The text primarily focuses on the economic depression in the United States during the late 19th century, highlighting the conflict between gold and silver as the basis of currency. It outlines key events and figures in the monetary crisis, with an emphasis on 1896 and the pivotal role of William Jennings Bryan, who advocated for the reintroduction of silver and vehemently opposed the gold standard; it touches upon the manipulation tactics employed by bankers and financial institutions controlling the economy, and the hardships endured by the common people, particularly farmers.
➡ William Jennings Brian’s presidential candidacies and consistent opposition to national banking interests engaged the American public and influenced political climate. Despite his losses in presidential runs, his policies delayed bankers from establishing a new privately owned central bank for two decades.
➡ The text discusses the symbolism found in the Wizard of Oz, relating it to historical financial systems dominated by figures like Rockefeller and Morgan, and symbolic suggestions for monetary reform. It further explores possible federal and state-level monetary reform proposals, including government-issued money, the prohibition of banks creating new money, and state-chartered banks using the fractional reserve principle to their advantage.
➡ The text discusses the potential solution of incorporating state-owned banks for circulating money without incurring debt, taking inspiration from the Bank of North Dakota and Sweden’s full reserve banks. Additionally, it highlights the adverse effects of privatizing banks using the example of Iceland’s banking crisis, and points out the growing opposition towards joining the EU in the country.
➡ The text follows a critique of the current banking system which relies on debt and interest, further arguing that true economic freedom can only be achieved if governments issue their own currency. It proposes a shift toward a democratic system where the control over quantity of money belongs to the state, rather than private banks. The narrative refers to historical issues like national debt, and suggests the future wellbeing of society could be improved by a shift in the monetary system.

What’s going on with the american economy? Foreclosures are everywhere, unemployment is skyrocketing, and it looks like this may only be the beginning. As a result, most Americans fear that our cherished basic freedoms and way of life are under direct attack as our standard of living sinks like a stone. But could it be that all these problems were foreseen a hundred years ago by L. Frank Baum, the author of the Wonderful wizard of Oz? Why is this just coming out? Because when the MGM movie the wizard of Oz was made in 1939, significant changes were made from L.

Frank Baum’s original book version written 40 years earlier in 1899. In the book version of the wizard of Oz, Dorothy’s slippers are made of silver, as opposed to in the film version where Dorothy’s slippers are made of ruby. You take away the silver slippers on the gold or yellow brick road and all of the other symbolism tends to be lost. Now let’s see what the experts say about our current problem, then look at our history so we can understand what L.

Frank Baum was trying to say in his book the Wonderful wizard of Oz. Well, it’s no secret to any American that we’re living in very precarious times. Americans are being robbed blind and they don’t even know who’s doing the robbing. I mean, we clearly are in a bus and we’re heading for the edge of a cliff and there still is probably time to change course. The only problem is the people driving the bus don’t realize that there’s a cliff there yet.

If the problem that’s grinding the economy to a halt is too much debt, and if nobody in the government, in either party is looking at solving the debt problem, then the answer is it’s going to go into a depression as far as the eye can see and so we’re going to have a massive, massive recession, or let’s call it a depression, while the economy rebalances away from a service sector economy towards a good producing economy, away from a borrow and spend economy to a save and produce economy.

That’s what we need to do. We can’t get from where we are to where we need to be without a severe depression. What can government do? The sad answer is, under our current monetary system, nothing. It’s not going to get any better until the root cause of the problem is understood and addressed. There isn’t enough stimulus money in the entire world to get us out of this hole.

Why debt? The national debt is just like our consumer debt. It’s the interest that’s killing us. You must understand that every penny, every dollar we have in circulation is created as an interest bearing debt. So what is the national debt? When government spends more than it collects in taxes, it has to borrow the difference by selling interest bearing ious, such as us bonds. When a us bank buys a $100 us bond, it gets to loan out ten times that amount.

So the bank not only gets back the $100 plus interest from the federal government, it gets to loan out another thousand dollars it doesn’t have and charge additional interest. Banks are allowed to create this extra money out of thin air. That’s why bank buildings are the biggest in every town on the planet. This system of lending way more than you have is called fractional reserve lending. Almost all our money is created by banks lending it to people, to companies, or to government.

As we’ll see, there is a better way for a government to get money. Simply issue it, without debt, for the benefit of all citizens equally. Abraham Lincoln did it. Ben Franklin did it. Jefferson wanted to do it. Honest Americans have fought against this bank controlled debt money system throughout american history. But unless we change it soon, most of our freedoms will soon be lost in a tidal wave of debt.

75 years ago, an employee of the Atlanta Federal Reserve explained the importance of the debt money system and how it can strangle our economy. Someone has to borrow every dollar we have in circulation. If the banks create ample money, we are prosperous. If not, we starve. When one gets a complete grasp of the picture, the tragic absurdity of our hopeless position is incredible. It is the most important subject intelligent persons can investigate and reflect upon.

A government should never go into debt. It doesn’t need to go into debt. A government can issue the money it needs. That’s absolutely right. Under our current money system, the government has to borrow our money into existence, then pay interest on it. That’s why they call it the national debt. All our money is created out of debt. Politicians who focus on reducing the national debt without trying to actually fix the underlying cause probably don’t understand what the national debt really is.

To reduce the national debt would be to reduce our money. And there’s already not enough money for the average person. Why haven’t we heard this before? Because most of the media and Congress are beholding to the big banks for loans. Yes, Congress still appropriates money, but where do they get it? Again, what they can’t raise from taxes, they borrow from banks. In 2009, Congress will spend over $4 trillion, but they will have to borrow half of it.

But on top of that. In 2008, 2009, Congress bailed out the biggest banks by giving them nearly a trillion dollars. The worst part is we aren’t just giving the money away, we’re borrowing it to give it away. If we don’t do something about the fact that we are now in a situation where the additional debt we’re taking on is actually depressing GDP, we’re going to have a major problem here in the very near future.

You can’t keep doing that forever. Sooner or later the people that loan us that money are going to say, no, we’re not going to loan you anymore. One of the things I think that’s difficult to figure out from the political side of this thing. It’s clear that they’re making a lot of mistakes. And the question in my mind is, are these mistakes? Could people in know the highest officials of the land really be ignorant about what they’re doing? Because I can’t look at what the politicians are doing in Washington.

I can’t look at that and say there’s any hope of that working and these guys have to face election. Now. When the next election rolls around, they’re not going to be politically popular figures. There are going to be consequences for the politicians. So what makes them push the wrong buttons? The other day I heard a senator on tv say, the trouble with General Motors, they have too much debt and so the solution is to give them another big loan.

Well you can’t borrow yourself out of debt. General Motors can’t, you and I can’t, the federal government can’t. Nobody can borrow themselves out of debt no more than, like I said before, you cannot drink yourself sober. And that’s what we’re all trying to do. So it don’t make any difference what kind of stimulus. And Obama, he had the right idea. We’re going to build lots of new roads, but he’s going to borrow the money.

Well, we can’t even pay the debt now. I mean, we can’t even pay the interest on it. Nobody’s even talking about the debt problem as such. They’re talking about the fact that, gee, the bankers aren’t making enough money to live in the way that they’re accustomed to. Until politicians begin to understand where the root of the problem lies, we’re never going to fix this. But the good news is that the solution isn’t new or radical.

America used to do it long before L. Frank Baum wrote about it. Throughout american history, politicians have fought with big bankers over it. But this aspect of our history has now been erased from history books. I think we need to reconsider and rethink perhaps the very foundations of our economic and monetary system. The government, a government agency of some kind should take charge of the money supply. But that’s not the way it is now in Great Britain.

No, not in any country. It’s almost all over the world. Bulk of the money supply is now created by commercial banks as debt. If we were starting for people that were just at the start of the constitution of a society and someone suggested, well, look, the best way of creating the money and putting it in is to combine it with the function of providing a competitive, profit making market for borrowing and lending, it would be regarded as idiotic.

You want a new cause to embrace? You want to do something good for humanity? How about one simple reform that will fix most of the bad things in this world, like hunger, poverty, disease and misery. This is the ultimate civil rights struggle. Humankind’s escape from serfdom. As President Obama put it, due to the ongoing recession, the number of chronically hungry people will climb to over 1 billion worldwide.

But this is completely unnecessary. Yes, we could eliminate world hunger in a few years, but how? The solution is the secret that’s been hidden from us for over a hundred years, ever since the time when author L. Frank Baum wrote the wonderful wizard of Oz. But before we show you what these symbols were, we’ve got to understand some history, otherwise the wizard of Oz connection just won’t make sense to you.

So let’s take a journey down the yellow brick road through monetary history. Our first stop will be Rome. The problem with money is that, like many other things in life, people fight over who gets to be in control of it. In fact, the only time Jesus became violent was when he chased the money changers from the temple. He made a whip out of cords, and he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables.

What was that all about? The money changers were the bankers of that day. They had created a special silver coin called the half shekel of the sanctuary. Even the poor had to have some of these coins to pay their temple tax, so the money changers could charge whatever the market would bear. This monopoly on money was nothing less than stealing from the poorest jews on their holiest ground.

This outraged Jesus, just as it would outrage the senators of the Roman Republic a few years later. Although we will never know for sure, fighting over control of money may have been the cause of one of the most famous assassinations in history. What made Rome great? There were many factors, but certainly the most overlooked was the money system of the Roman Republic. About 300 BC, the Roman Republic supplied the people with a plentiful form of cheap money, money made from copper and bronze.

Then they spent this cheap money into the economy. It was a revolutionary idea. Today, opponents of this money system call it fiat money, money not backed by precious metals. But what the roman republicans had discovered was that it doesn’t matter what backs the money. All that matters is who controls its quantity. Did it work back then? It was amazingly effective. Unlike today, it was a money system created without debt to the government.

This was the first great experiment in wresting the money power from the goldsmiths. This cheap form of money circulated for the benefit of all citizens equally, not just the usual gold coins, which always benefit the rich. With this new plentiful supply of money, real wealth flowed to the common man. Without the use of either gold or silver, Rome became mistress of commerce of the world. Her people were the bravest, the most prosperous, the most happy, for they knew no grinding poverty.

Her money was issued directly to the people and was composed of a cheap material, copper and brass, based alone upon the faith and credit of the nation. With this abundant money supply, she built her magnificent courts and temples. She distributed her lands among the people in small holdings, and wealth poured into the coffers of Rome. But then, suddenly, Julius Caesar changed the roman money supply drastically. He started minting gold coins with his image on them.

Then he declared himself emperor for life, putting an end to Rome’s great experiment in elected government. The Republicans in the Senate hated gold money and the plutocracy ruled by the rich that it implied. Although the senators assassinated Julius Caesar, gold money now had taken root, empowered by the very rich and the dictators, they were able to buy with their gold. After Caesar’s assassination, copper and brass were demonetized.

Taken out of circulation, the quantity of money was reduced by 90%. A deep depression set in. The average person had to sell his property just to buy basic necessities. The wealth of the nation was quickly concentrated into the hands of the richest Romans. Once again, gone was the incentive to work hard and build a great nation for the common good. By 401 AD, Rome was sacked by the visigoths, and humanity was plunged into the gloom of the dark ages.

So in Rome, we learned that with cheap, government issued money, the roman republic flourished. But under gold money, it perished. This controversy between cheap money and gold money continues throughout history, and, as we’ll see, is symbolized in part by the yellow brick road. Flash forward seven centuries to 1100 ad. In England, there were no banks like we think of them today. What served as banks were the goldsmiths, those who made their gold into gold coins.

Although most people didn’t understand it, these goldsmiths controlled the economy of the nation and thereby even the politics, even in a monarchy. By acting in concert, goldsmiths could either make money scarce or plentiful. When they made their gold money plentiful, the economy of the nation flourished. When they made their gold coins scarce, a depression set in and they could buy up assets for pennies on the dollar. About 100 ad, King Henry I, the son of England’s first norman king William the Conqueror, was low on gold money.

A series of costly wars had depleted the royal treasury. So just as colonial Pennsylvania would do hundreds of years later, Henry created a unique form of government issued money called tally sticks. Tally sticks did not represent any quantity of gold or any other commodity. They were simply polished sticks of wood issued by the king, which he declared to be good for the payment of taxes. That made tally sticks just as good as any other form of money.

All right, here we are in the bank of England museum with curator John Keyworth and I’m holding my hand one of the oldest forms of british money. This is called a tally stick. This is actually a very rare example of a tally stick because it has the two halves of the tally stick. The idea with the tally stick was that you cut notches in a piece of wood.

Usually it was hazel. And these notches were of a prescribed size dimension. If you look at this one, you can see it’s got 1000 pound notches. So there’s six notches times 1000 pounds each. Is that the way it is? Exactly. So that’s a 6000 pound pallet stick. This side is called the stock. This was kept by the person who made the loan or paid the money in. I see.

And this is the foil. So the foil would be spent into existence. And the idea was this, splitting the stick down the middle was to prevent counterfeiting because of course a stick splits uniquely down the middle because when the debt was repaid, the two pieces were put together and if they didn’t tally, something was awry. The longer half of a tally stick was called the stock, the root word for stocks and bonds or stockholders.

For centuries, the supporters of goldbacked money have belittled tally sticks as an unimportant form of fiat money, one not backed by gold or silver. Some authors even claim that tallies weren’t a real money system because they were only used for very large transactions. But that’s just not the case. And was this the common size of tally sticks? In the Middle Ages, the average size was reckoned to be the length from a man’s the tip of his thumb to the tip of his forefinger.

Quite short. Because if you think of it in terms of this, this is 6000 pounds. That means it’s a huge sum of money. So the wider the spacing, the larger, the larger the amount. But it was a prescribed distance. It was an inch and I think half an inch for hundreds and quarter of an inch for tens. And then it became little lines drawn across with a saw.

So it is clear that tally sticks were used for smaller denominations too, and worked well as an effective debt free money system. For 726 years, without the crushing weight of debt based money, England flourished into the greatest power on earth for many centuries. At their peak, it has been estimated that 95% of english money was in the form of tally sticks. Compare that to today, where the only debt free, government issued money is in the form of coin, about 3% of the money supply in the UK and far less in the US.

After democratizing the money power of the nation with tally sticks, King Henry then began decentralizing political power as well. King Henry granted something called the Charter of liberties, voluntarily stating what his powers were under law. Before that, kings had assumed unlimited power. This was followed in 1215 by the Magna Carta, the basis of the US constitution. A new class began to develop, the merchant class. Trade routes grew and new towns sprang up along them.

This mercantile class needed stability, and so they supported the king, his strong central government and the rule of law. In 1265, the first parliamentary elections were held. Government by the people in England was born. As money poured into the middle class, the small business persons of the day, feudalism began to break down and the english renaissance was born. By the 16 hundreds, serfdom in England was legally banned.

Humanity, at least in England, was finally set free. Literature flourished. Now there was money to support artistic endeavors like the plays of William Shakespeare. The nation was at ease due to a debt free money. Although life in the Middle Ages was certainly not easy by today’s standards. Once tally sticks were killed and the nation became indebted to bankers, it got worse. After 600 years, the money changers were finally able to begin to reassert their control over english money, when they convinced the parliament to create the bank of England.

This put the banking community back in control of manipulating the quantity of english money. Now England had to borrow its money supply from banks and pay interest on it. Instead of the government simply issuing its own money without such debt. So in England, we learned that simple sticks of wood broke the monopoly of gold money. This debt free money lasted for seven centuries and allowed a small island nation to rule the waves and freedom to root deeply in the new middle class.

With the goldsmiths back in control, England was now financing its wars with this bank loan money. Just 75 years later, England’s war debts consumed 75% of its budget. Three quarters of british taxes were spent just on paying the interest on its war bonds. As a result, England needed to squeeze more and more money from all their colonies to pay the interest on this new growing debt. America was no exception.

Pre revolutionary America was still relatively poor. There was a severe shortage of precious metal coins to trade for goods, so the early colonists were increasingly forced to experiment with printing their own homegrown paper money. This paper money was called colonial scrip. Colonial script was a dangerous concept for bankers. It broke the colonies free of the privately owned central bank system, where money had to be created by banks and then loaned to governments.

As Franklin put it, in the colonies, we issue our own money. It is called colonial script. We control its purchasing power, and we have no interest to pay to no one. In 1764, the british parliament passed the Currency act again. It ordered all Americans to pay their taxes in gold or silver coin. To Ben Franklin, this return to a gold money system was the basic cause for the American Revolution.

The colonies would gladly have borne the little tax on tea and other matters had it not been that England took away from the colonies their money, which created unemployment and dissatisfaction. Americans were mad and did everything they could to get around Britain’s gold money system. In 1765, parliament passed the Stamp act, requiring that certain printed materials had to have a stamp placed on them, indicating that a tax had been paid and paid in gold.

This is what drove America to open revolt. Do you understand what that means? Without gold, you could literally buy or sell nothing. Why? Because the British had successfully forced the colonies to pay for everything using only a precious commodity, gold. This is the very definition of the word plutocracy, rule by the rich. These people that deal with gold and silver only have never spent 1 minute of actually trying to figure out how it worked in history, how it would work in real life.

And the only way they can support their gold theories is they just treat it as religion and said, we don’t have to understand it. We just know that that’s God’s money and it’ll work. And that’s not true. By the outbreak of the revolution in April 1775, the colonies started printing a new form of paper money to finance the war. It was called continental currency because unlike colonial script, it was the first issued by the new central government.

Continentals were great at first, but then the British started counterfeiting it massively sending it to America literally by the bail. By the end of the war, the currency was virtually worthless. As George Washington lamented, a wagon load of money will scarcely purchase a wagonload of provisions. Earlier, colonial script had worked because just enough was issued to facilitate trade, and counterfeiting was minimal. In other words, the quantity was controlled by the government that issued it.

Goldbugs today try to claim that because paper money didn’t work during the Revolutionary War, it shouldn’t be used today. But keep in mind it doesn’t matter what backs your money. All that matters is who controls its quantity. Will it be your elected officials or will it be some unelectable banker? Colonial paper money before the revolution had worked so well that the bank of England had parliament outlawed and forced America to use only gold money, gold which they control.

In our next stop on the yellow brick road, which represents the banker’s gold money system, we find how the curse of the privately owned central bank first came to America. In 1781, towards the end of the war, the Continental Congress met here in Philadelphia. They pondered what to do about their grave financial situation. The money was so worthless that people papered their walls with it. Congress finally agreed to give a group of bankers a monopoly on creating U.

S. Money by loaning it to the government. It was the first privately owned central bank. The plan, of course, was modeled on the bank of England. The new bank would be called the bank of North America. It would be the first of a string of controversial privately owned central banks which Congress would charter. Then, in the face of public outrage, uncharter over the years, four years later, in 1785, the value of the new currency had plummeted.

Inflation was rampant. Prices had risen by 72%. So after a stiff battle, Congress killed this, the first privately owned central bank in America. Two years later, when it came time to write the constitution in 1787, many of the delegates did not remember how well America’s government issued paper money had worked. In Pennsylvania. They were still stung by the inflation of the bank of North America and the hyperinflation during the revolution, primarily caused by british counterfeiting.

Strangely, the constitution allows the federal government to borrow money, but is silent on the federal role in printing paper money, known in the language of the day as emitting bills of credit. This defect in the constitution is at the root of all our economic problems today. Two years after the US constitution was signed, debt free money was tried in Sweden in 1789, but with tragic results. To pursue a war with Russia, King Gustav II persuaded the swedish parliament to print debt free money called Rixgalds.

This was very costly to the bankers. Sweden had learned the secret of simply printing its own money without debt. In 1792, only three years into the experiment, King Gustav was assassinated by money lender Jacob Johann Ankerstrom. As is frequently the case in time of war, too many Rixgalds were printed. The quantity was not controlled. A nation will sacrifice everything for survival during time of war. So inflation ruined the debt free money experiment in Sweden by 1834, just as it had a few years earlier during the American Revolution, again, because the quantity was not controlled.

One mistake the constitution didn’t make was to mandate that the federal government pay all its debts only in gold. Then we would have wound up with the same system that had caused the revolution in the first place. It does mandate that for state governments, but that has never been adhered to. All the constitution had to do was demand that only Congress could issue the nation’s money debt free, just like most people think happens today.

This defect in the constitution left the door wide open for bankers to ram a bill through Congress in 1791, four years after the constitution had been signed, to turn over creation of the nation’s money to private bankers once again, like all the privately owned central banks that would follow, the new bank was given a name that would deceive people into thinking it was part of the US government.

But it was not. It was called the first bank of the United States. This is actually the original building here in Philadelphia. After a contentious debate, Congress finally granted the new bank a 20 year charter, a private monopoly. Again. The nation’s money would be created out of thin air by the new bank and loaned to the government and to private individuals, all at interest. Just as our money supply is created today, so if there was $100 million worth of money in the economy, there would be $100 million worth of national debt, debt the citizens and their children would have to pay interest on by taxation.

And so it is today. The national debt is roughly the same as the national money supply. As secretary of state, Jefferson watched the borrowing with sadness and frustration, unable to stop it. I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our constitution taking from the federal government the power of borrowing. Although Jefferson served two terms as president, from 18 one to 18 nine, nothing was done until the bank’s charter came up for renewal in 1811, the press openly attacked the bank, calling it a great swindle.

Some writers have claimed that the head of the bank of England warned that the United States would find itself involved in a most disastrous war if the bank’s charter were not renewed. After another contentious debate, the bank’s renewal bill was defeated by a single vote in Congress within five months. The War of 1812 was on. In 1813, Jefferson wrote to his son in law, John Epps, although we have so foolishly allowed the power of issuing our own debt free money to be filched from us by private individuals, I think we may recover it.

The state should be asked to transfer the right of issuing paper money to Congress in perpetuity. Jefferson had it exactly right. Congress, and only Congress, should have the right to issue America’s paper money, and at no interest to no one. In 1814, the British successfully attacked Washington and burned the White House and the Capitol. After the conclusion of the War of 1812, the very next year, the bankers were back, trying to get Congress to reinstate their precious privately owned central bank.

Jefferson lashed out in a letter to then treasury secretary Gallatin. The treasury, lacking confidence in the country, delivered itself bound hand and foot to bold and bankrupt bankers pretending to have money whom it could have crushed at any moment. But despite Jefferson’s protests, in 1816, Congress passed a bill giving another 20 year charter to a new, privately owned central bank, the second bank of the United States. Once again, the english debt money system was back in control of America.

It was almost like the revolution had never happened. But then the bankers ran headlong into old hickory. Andrew Jackson. By 1828, opponents of the bank nominated Senator Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, the hero of the final battle of the War of 1812, to run for president. The banks poured millions into Jackson’s defeat, but to no avail. The american people were fed up with the privately owned central bank and wanted out.

Jackson was swept into office in 1832. With Jackson’s reelection approaching, the bank tried to have their charter renewed early in the hopes that Jackson wouldn’t want the controversy of a fight with bankers just before the election. They were wrong. Although Congress passed the renewal bill, Jackson vetoed it. His veto message drew a direct line between the bank and its masters in the bank of England. It is easy to conceive that great evils to our country and its institutions might flow from such a concentration of power in the hands of a few who are irresponsible to the people.

Controlling our currency, receiving our public monies, and holding thousands of our citizens in dependents would be more formidable and dangerous than a military power of the enemy. Nicholas Biddle was head of the second bank of the United States. He was brazen with the financial power he wielded over the nation. He even threatened to cause a depression if Jackson’s veto were not overturned. Nothing but widespread suffering will produce any effect on Congress.

Our only safety is in pursuing a steady course of firm monetary restriction, and I have no doubt that such a course will ultimately lead to restoration of the currency and the recharter of the bank. Biddle made good on his threat. America was quickly plunged into a deep depression. Property was foreclosed on for pennies on the dollar. Jackson responded forcefully. You are a den of vipers. I intend to route you out, and by the eternal God, I will route you out.

Eventually, the nation’s newspapers sided with Jackson, and the bank was not rechartered. Jackson then set about paying off the national debt, a debt caused by the government borrowing the nation’s money supply into existence. Jackson was the only president who ever paid off the national debt. A few weeks later, an assassin tried to shoot President Jackson. He stuck two pistols in the stomach, but both misfired. Jackson solemnly warned the nation about any future attempts to establish another privately owned central bank.

The bold effort the present bank had made to control the government, the distress it had wantonly produced, are but premonitions of the fate that awaits the american people should they be diluted into a perpetuation of this institution or the establishment of another like it. Jackson went through essentially a multi year war trying to get rid of the second bank of the United States. He ultimately won that war.

He believed that the bankers of the time were extremely destructive to the commonwealth of the United States and that their policies were essentially to cause inflation in various asset classes and then cause deflation and wipe out everybody who was in debt. It’s a pattern that is repeated throughout history. If you control the quantity of the money, nobody else cares about anything else. You can cause depressions, deflation, inflation, anytime you’d like for your own political and monetary benefit.

And if you can give people cheap credit that they cannot afford, human nature is that people will take whatever you give them for free, okay? Whether it ultimately destroys them or not. And so you can create these boom and bust cycles that ultimately asset strip the wealth of average people. Jackson got us out of debt. But 25 years later, Abraham Lincoln would do even more. Return to government issued debt free money.

He called them greenbacks, the inspiration for the Emerald city of Oz. The bankers were still angry about Jackson killing the second bank of the United States 25 years earlier. Since then, America’s economy had boomed, a bad example for the rest of the world. America had to be stopped. So they devised a plan to split the rich new nation. Divide and conquer by war. President Jackson saw this coming as well.

In his farewell address back on March 4, 1837, he warned the nation, have designs already been formed to sever the Union? This great and glorious republic would soon be broken into a multitude of petty states without commerce, without credit, loaded with taxes to pay armies trampled upon by the nations of Europe. The bankers figured that no matter what the outcome, a war between north and South would leave America so financially strapped that the entire western hemisphere would once again be opened to colonization.

Standing directly in the way was the newly elected president, Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln evaded assassins in Baltimore in February of 1861 on his way to his inauguration in Washington on March 4. The very next month, the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, after seven southern states seceded from the Union. Soon thereafter, France invaded Mexico and stationed troops along the southern border of the US. Great Britain moved 11,000 troops into Canada and positioned them along America’s northern border.

The two longtime european enemies were ready to fight over the scraps that their central bankers were about to make of the american experiment in freedom. Lincoln was in a classic double bind. No matter what he did, he was being forced into a war by the hidden hands behind the financial curtain. He agonized over the fate of the Union, sensing it was only through the strength of union that the financial powerhouses of Europe could be held at bay.

In 1861, Lincoln went to New York to apply for the necessary war loans from what he hoped were patriotic american bankers. But the bankers saw him coming and knew that the plan was to split the country in two. And so there was a high probability that Lincoln’s government would default on any loans. Consequently, they demanded an interest rate of as much as 36%. Lincoln returned to Washington depressed.

Then Lincoln came up with the most brilliant idea of his presidency. He decided to return to America’s colonial monetary roots, have the government issue their own money. So that is exactly what Lincoln did from 1862 to 1865. He printed $450,000,000 of the new bills, which he called us notes. To distinguish them from debt based money, he had them printed in green ink on the back with a red seal on the front.

That’s why the notes were called greenbacks. Since Congress had declared greenbacks to be legal tender for all debts, Lincoln was able to pay his troops and buy their supplies. With this new money, all created at no interest to the federal government. As MIT professor Dr. Davis Rich Dewey would write 40 years later in his financial history of the United States, the underlying idea in the greenback philosophy is that the issue of currency is a function of the government, a sovereign right which ought not to be delegated to corporations.

On April 14, 1860, 541 days after his second inauguration and five days after the end of the Civil War, Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s theater. After the death of President Lincoln, the bankers began to reassert their control over America’s money. This was no easy task. Lincoln’s greenbacks, just like Rome’s plentiful debt free coins and England’s debt free tally sticks, were generally popular and their existence had let the genie out of the bottle.

The public was becoming accustomed to debt free money. Popular songs sang the Greenbacks praises. On April 12, 1866, Congress passed the Contraction act, authorizing the secretary of the treasury to begin to retire the greenbacks in circulation and to contract the money supply. Authors Ted Thorne and Richard Warner explained the results of the money contraction in their book on the subject, the Truth and Money book. The hard times which occurred after the Civil War could have been avoided if the greenback legislation had continued as President Lincoln had intended.

Instead, there were a series of money panics, what we call recessions, which put pressure on Congress to enact legislation to place the banking system under centralized control. In 1866, there was $1. 8 billion in currency in circulation in the United States, about $50. 46 per capita. In 1867 alone, $500 million was removed from the US money supply. Ten years later, in 1876, America’s money supply was reduced to only $600 million.

In other words, two thirds of America’s money had been called in by the bankers. Incredibly, only $14. 60 per capita remained in circulation. What’s so important about how money was withdrawn from the US money supply? Because this is the real cause of depression’s deliberate manipulations of the money supply by big bankers to get what they want politically. The very thing King Henry was trying to put a stop to when he created tally sticks in 1100 ad.

Ten years later, the money supply had been further reduced to only $400 million, even though the population had boomed. The result was that only $6. 67 per capita remained in circulation, an 84% decline in just 20 years. The people suffered terribly in a protracted, severe depression. Now, let’s put these percentage figures into perspective. On January 28, 2009, the world’s business and government leaders met in Davos, Switzerland, at the annual World Economic Forum which they optimistically titled shaping the Postcrisis World, as though someone had already fixed the problem.

According to Reuters, the world’s largest news service, the world’s money supply had nearly been cut in half in the previous 15 months. 40% of the world’s wealth was destroyed in the last five quarters. It is an almost incomprehensible number. And how does that compare to the Great Depression of the 1930s? According to Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman, the depression was caused by the Fed refusing to halt a deflation of 33% of the nation’s money between 1929 and 1933.

The drastic decline in the stock of money and the occurrence of a banking panic of unprecedented severity did not reflect the absence of power on the part of the Federal Reserve system to prevent them. In retrospect, the contraction could almost certainly have been prevented and the stock of money kept from declining, or indeed increased to any desired extent. In other words, by January of 2009, the world’s money supply had been contracted more than that which caused the Great Depression in America in the 1930s.

Some believe the economic crisis that began in 2008 is still being completely manipulated by the big banks. But it is more likely that their debt money system has finally spiraled out of even their control. In 2008 and 2009, nations poured unprecedented money into the system to prevent its collapse. At the very least, unprecedented inflation will surely follow. After Lincoln’s death, the big bankers began returning America to the yellow brick road of financial serfdom.

But first, they had to get rid of the silver slippers. But the bankers were not done bringing post civil war America to its knees. They wanted to take all silver money out of the system, make only gold be money. The bank of England wanted America’s money in their control. And what better way to achieve that than mandating a gold only money system? The next year, Congress passed the Coinage act of 1873, and the minting of silver dollars abruptly stopped.

Newspapers derided the act as the crime of 73. Everybody knew about it. The average American hated it. Demonetizing silver made money even more scarce. It put the bankers, who were the primary holders of gold, in even greater control of America. It’s been a puzzle to a lot of economic historians. This obsession with keeping the amount of currency so strictly limited. It didn’t seem to comport with the expanding economy of the time.

You have this rapidly expanding economy, you have immigration, that in parts fueling it. You have westward expansion, you have new industries, new technologies, and yet you have a restricted money supply, which makes it increasingly difficult for people to engage in consumption, in purchases and other types of economic activity. By 1873, L. Frank Baum was just 17 years old, but he was already publishing a local newspaper in his hometown of Chittenongo, New York.

By 1877, the nation was in an uproar over the hated crime of 73. Riots broke out from Pittsburgh to Chicago. The torches of starving vandals lit up the sky. The bankers huddled to decide on their next move. They decided to hang tough. At the 1877 meeting of the American Bankers association, the ABA, they urged their membership to do everything in their power to put down the notion of a return to greenbacks.

The ABA secretary, James Buell, authored a letter to the members that blatantly called on the banks to subvert not only Congress but the press. It is advisable to do all in your power to sustain such prominent daily and weekly newspapers, especially the agricultural and religious press, as will oppose the greenback issue of paper money. To repeal the act creating banknotes, or to restore to circulation the government issue of money will be to provide the people with money and will therefore seriously affect our individual profits as bankers and lenders.

See your congressman at once and engage him to support our interest that we may control legislation. Political parties advocating a return to greenback money sprang up and ran candidates for Congress and president. In the 1878 elections, 21 independents were swept into Congress, mostly greenbackers. Two years later, in 1880, the american people elected general James Garfield president. Garfield understood how the economy was being manipulated. As a congressman, he had been chairman of the appropriations committee and was a member of the banking and currency committee.

Garfield understood the ability of the very wealthy to manipulate gold money. He investigated the cause of the Black Friday gold market scandal of 1869 when financier J. Gould and others cornered the gold market, causing wild fluctuations in the price. This is a photograph of the actual quote board from the New York gold trading Room, which Garfield introduced as evidence during a congressional investigation the following year. This is Garfield’s handwriting.

After his inauguration, he slammed the money changers publicly in 1881. Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce. And when you realize that the entire system is very easily controlled one way or another by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate. Garfield understood. Perhaps only coincidentally, however, within a few weeks of making this statement, on July 2, 1881, President Garfield was assassinated.

After Garfield’s assassination, the depression deepened, leaving the unemployed to face poverty and starvation. Produce was left to rot in the fields. The country was facing poverty amidst plenty because there was insufficient money in circulation. To keep the wheels of trade turning, the country sorely needed the sort of liquidity urged by Lincoln and the greenbackers. But the bankers insisted that allowing the government to print its own money would be dangerously inflationary.

That was their argument, but critics called it humbuggery. The big bankers finally had complete control of the money supply again by killing off the last competitor to their yellow brick road. Now they had to hold on against the rising anger of the average american. In 1888, L. Frank Baum moved his family to Aberdeen, Dakota Territory to open a general store. Baum sympathized with the local farmers, hard hit by the combination of scarce money and a severe drought.

Unfortunately, he got so deeply in debt that the bank foreclosed on the store. In 1890, Baum, at age 34, started a local newspaper. It was an election year and politics was a hot topic in the midwest. The 1890 congressional elections were a landslide for the Democratic Party only 300 miles south of Aberdeen, South Dakota. In Omaha, Nebraska, one of the newly elected congressmen was William Jennings Bryan, the man who would become known as the lion of the free silver movement.

A few years later, L. Frank Baum would closely follow the meteoric career of Brian and even create the character of the cowardly lion to symbolize his political career. The year 1890 saw no economic relief in Dakota territory, so Baum’s newspaper folded at the end of the year. In 1891, Baum moved his family to Chicago, where he took a job at the Chicago Evening Post. Meanwhile, back on the national front, the bankers were ready to unleash additional monetary restrictions.

Their methods and motives were laid out with shocking clarity in a memo sent out by the American Bankers association, the ABA, in 1891. Notice that this memo called for bankers to create a depression on a certain date three years in the future. Here’s how it read in part. Note the telling reference to England, home of the Mother bank on September 194. We will not renew our loans under any consideration.

On September 1, we will demand our money. We will foreclose and become mortgagees in possession. We can take two thirds of the farms west of the Mississippi and thousands of them east of the Mississippi as well at our own price. Then the farmers will become tenants as in England. The next year, a leaflet known as the panic circular was issued by the American Bankers association and was subsequently published in many newspapers.

It urged all national banks throughout the United States to help deepen the money panic. Silver, silver certificates, and treasury bonds. That is to say, all the government’s money must be retired and interest bearing national banknotes made the only money. You will at once retire one third of your circulation, your paper money, and call in one half of your loans. Be careful to make a monetary emergency among your patrons, especially among influential businessmen.

The future of our debtbased money system depends upon immediate action, as there is an increasing sentiment in favor of government legal tender notes and silver coinage. The depression actually began in 1893 with what historians now call the panic of 1893. It all started when european investors demanded payment only in gold, draining gold reserves in the US again, America was being forced by the Europeans onto a gold only money system.

The results were as inevitable as before. A deep depression quickly set in, as the major holders of gold in Europe choked the life out of the american economy. In total, over 15,000 companies and 500 banks failed, most of them in the west. Unemployment skyrocketed 600%, up to over 18% nationwide by 1894. With the winter of 1894 coming on, untold thousands of farms were foreclosed on. As a result, many families had to walk away from recently built homes.

It’s said that the image of the vacant victorian haunted house originated from this era. These depressions could be controlled fairly easily with America on the gold standard, and the banks own most of the gold. Since gold is scarce, it is one of the easiest commodities to manipulate. People wanted silver money legalized again so they could escape the stranglehold the money changers had on goldback money. People wanted silver money reinstated, reversing Mr.

Sed’s act of 1873, by then called the crime of 73. Bankers and financial institutions tended to oppose silver as part of the backing of the currency. They didn’t have control over the mining and production of silver in the west, and without that control, they couldn’t have the overall control they liked over the currency. Most monetary reform advocates today argue that the solution to our current economic woes is a return to a gold standard.

This would require that our money be backed by a certain percentage of gold. Interestingly, they use the same terms that bankers of the late 19th century used. They called gold backed money honest money and constitutional money. I worked for a gold dealer for a short time and I would sit there in a room with 40 people calling and trying to sell gold all day long on the phone, and every one of them was telling them, get rid of that worthless money and buy the good money.

Then it come to the end of the month, and every one of them walked into the office and wanted the bad money for their pay. As the depression deepened and big banks continued to buy up farmers foreclosed properties, a lion emerged out of Nebraska to try to break their deadly chokehold on the american economy. 1896 was a pivotal year in american history. L. Frank Baum was now living in Chicago and deeply interested in politics.

But to make a living for his wife and four children, he worked as a traveling salesman. When he was home, he was writing his first children’s stories. On the political front, the presidential campaign of 1896 would see the explosive money issue dominate the election. The farmers of the west were sick and tired of the bankers not lending out their gold money. In fact, most of the money that was still in circulation was about $300 million worth of Lincoln’s old greenbacks.

A virtually unknown former congressman from Nebraska, William Jennings Bryan, ran for president as a Democrat and embraced the free silver issue, which the Populist Party had unsuccessfully tried earlier. Brian’s father had been an ardent greenbacker. The New York bankers were well aware of the anger and tried to control the 1896 democratic convention. An article said to have been published in a Bankers magazine of 1892 shows not only their attempts to manipulate the politics of the day, but also their deep contempt for the average american voter, whom they refer to as the inferior social stratum of society.

We must go forward cautiously and consolidate each acquired position, because already the inferior social stratum of society is giving unceasing signs of agitation. Let us make use of the courts. When through the law’s intervention, the common people shall have lost their homes, they will be more easy to control and more easy to govern, and they shall not be able to resist the strong hand of the government acting in accordance with the control of the leaders of finance.

As the quote continues, notice how they try to manipulate the population into focusing on diversionary political issues. We must keep the people busy with political antagonisms. We’ll therefore speed up the question of reform of tariffs within the Democratic Party and will put the spotlight on the question of protection for the republican party by dividing the electorate this way, we’ll be able to have them spend their energies at struggling amongst themselves on questions that for us have no importance whatsoever.

Now let’s return to the 1896 democratic convention. The issues were remarkably similar. William Jennings Bryan represented the embodiment of all the Democrats wrath against the gold money system. At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1896, Brian made an emotional speech entitled Crown of Thorns and Cross of Gold. Brian’s speech was so powerful that it propelled him from relative obscurity to the presidential nomination on the fifth ballot at the tender age of 36.

Amazingly, we have Brian’s actual voice recreating portions of this famous speech, recorded years later with the advent of recording technology. Although the recording does not capture the power of the original moment, it does allow us to hear Brian’s voice. I come to speak to you in the defense of a cause as holy as the cause of liberty, the cause of humanity. Never before in the history of this country has there been witnessed such a contest as that through which we have just passed.

Brian’s recreation recording then skips significant portions of his original speech. According to the official proceedings of the Democratic National Convention, Brian continued with these important references to America’s monetary history. What we need is an Andrew Jackson to stand, as Jackson stood, against the encroachments of aggregated wealth. We say in our platform that we believe that the right to coin money and issue money is a function of government.

We believe it. We believe it is a part of sovereignty. Those who are opposed to this proposition tell us that the issue of paper money is a function of the bank and that the government ought to go out of the banking business. I stand with Jefferson rather than with them, and tell them, as he did, that the issue of money is a function of the government and that the banks should go out of the governing business.

Remember the 1892 memo from the Bankers magazine which bragged that they would try to busy the Democrats with the tariff issue? Here is where Brian refers to that very issue. They ask why it is we say more on the money question than we say upon the tariff question. I reply that if protection has slain its thousands, the gold standard has slain its tens of thousands. When we have restored the money of the constitution, all other necessary reforms will be possible, and that until that is done, there is no reform that can be accomplished.

However, the gold standard and its 30 year long restriction on the money supply had become so unpopular that even most Republicans had come out against it. Now Brian’s recording picks back up. They will search the pages of history in vain to find a single instance where the common people of any land have ever declared themselves in favor of the gold standard. They can find where the holders of fixed investment have declared for a gold standard, but not for the masses have.

If they dare to come out in the open field and defend the gold standards, the good thing, we will fight them to the uttermost. We will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them, you shall not press down upon the bow of labor this crown of thorn. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold. The bankers were scared. The average american farmer was mad about the lack of a plentiful money supply.

Now it looked like they had finally gained sufficient political force to win the highest office in the land and disrupt all the bankers plans. As a result, the 1896 campaign was among the most fiercely contested presidential races in american history. Though Brian was only 36 years old at the time, this speech is widely regarded as the most famous oration ever made before a political convention. The McKinley campaign outspent Brian by a five to one margin.

Brian’s strategy was to take his political campaign on the road. Brian invented the national stumping tour. He made over 500 speeches in 27 states during the four month campaign, an average of four a day, many of them lasting over 2 hours. Across the nation, tens of thousands of Americans rallied around Brian’s appearances with torch light parades. L. Frank Baum’s own son wrote that Baum marched in more than one torch light parade for Brian.

The battle became so heated that thousands of miles away in Alaska, the highest mountain in North America, Mount McKinley was even named for Brian’s opponent, Republican William McKinley. It seems that the first gold miner on the mountain, a man named William Dickey, named the mountain in honor of the gold money candidate in retaliation because his many silver mining friends so zealously supported William Jennings Brian. McKinley got manufacturers and industrialists to inform their employees that if Brian were elected, all factories and plants would close and there would be no work.

The ruse succeeded. McKinley beat Brian by a small margin. Brian ran for president again in 1900 and in 1908, but fell short each time. But the threat his presence presented to the national bankers afforded the republican alternatives, Roosevelt and Taft, a measure of independence from the bankers. Roosevelt mildly opposed their monopolies and Taft was unenthusiastic about their proposed central bank legislation that would finally be passed in 1913 as the Federal Reserve act.

The bankers therefore shifted their support to Democrat Woodrow Wilson in 1912. Although William Jennings Bryan never gained the presidency, his efforts delayed the money changes for 20 years from attaining their next goal, a new privately owned central bank for America, the Federal Reserve. Brian’s defeat in 1896 was a great victory for big bankers. Their yellow brick road had effectively controlled the politics of the nation by squeezing the life out of the money system.

So who was L. Frank Baum? Lyman Frank Baum was born to wealthy parents right here in this house in Chittenongo, New York, in 1856. This is the house where L. Frank was born. His family lived in this area and it had the barrel factory here across the road from the house over here. Yes. His father made his fortune in the oil fields of Pennsylvania. In 1880, at age 24, his father built him a theater in Richburg, New York, and Baum set about writing and acting in plays.

Baum’s theatrical career met with little success, so in 1888, he and his wife Maude moved to Aberdeen, Dakota Territory where he opened a store known as Baum’s Bazaar. These were tough times in the midwest. Baum was in the habit of giving credit to his former clients and this eventually bankrupted his store. Baum turned to editing a local newspaper, the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer. Baum, however, was not the owner of this republican newspaper.

Jobs were scarce and Baum was forced to write for his republican audience despite his family’s liberal to populist political leanings. By 1891, times had grown so tough in Dakota Territory that even Baum’s newspaper failed. So he moved Maude and their four sons to Chicago where he took a job reporting for the Evening Post. Like most riders, he had to work multiple jobs to feed his growing family. In 1897, Baum wrote and published Mother Goose and Prose, illustrated by Maxfield Parrish.

In 1900, Baum and Denslow published the wonderful wizard of Oz. The book was the bestselling children’s book. For two years after its initial publication, Baum and Denslow teamed up to produce a musical stage version of the book that was also a huge financial success. Early film versions were produced in 1910 and 1925 but the MGM classic movie starring Judy Garland as Dorothy was produced in 1939. This version included many changes that largely obscured the monetary reform symbology.

Dorothy’s silver slippers were changed to ruby slippers to take advantage of the new Technicolor process. Now, with the history of money in America laid out, let’s take a look at the wizard of Oz to see if these symbols make sense. Well, the principal and most powerful symbolic reference is, of course, the yellow brick road and the silver slippers. In the book version of the wizard of Oz, Dorothy’s slippers are made of silver, as opposed to in the film version where Dorothy’s slippers are made of ruby.

You take away the silver slippers on the gold or yellow brick road and all of the other symbolism tends to be lost. The original populist solution was government issued money called greenbacks. But the greenbacker movement had failed, so the populists had switched to expanding the money supply with government issued silver coins. The underlying dispute, however, was not what money was made of, but who should issue it, private bankers or the people themselves through their representative government.

The first person Dorothy meets along the way is the scarecrow, representing the supposedly ignorant western farmer. Although he thinks he doesn’t have a brain. The scarecrow proves to be very clever at figuring things out on the trek to Washington. And this was Baum’s way, perhaps, of saying that the farmer in fact did understand the basics of economics and that an expansion of currency was in fact a legitimate way of improving the condition not only of the farmer but of the economy as a whole.

Next, Dorothy and the scarecrow meet with the tin Woodman, bomb’s symbol for the factory worker. And what he needed was some oil or liquidity. He needed the liquidity of more money in the system. As Professor Hugh Rockoff of Rutgers University put it in his 1990 article in the Journal of Political Economy, the tin Woodman had joined the ranks of those unemployed in the depression of the 1890s, a victim of the unwillingness of the eastern gold bugs to countenance an increase in the stock of money through the addition of silver.

And then there was the lion who represented William Jennings Brian. Brian was actually called the lion of the silver movement. He was the leader. Brian was considered a coward because after his loss in 1896, he backed away from the free silver movement. According to Professor Rockoff, the last character to join the group is the cowardly lion. This is Brian himself. The sequence is not accidental. Baum is following history and suggesting that the movement was started first by the western farmers, was joined by the working man, and then, once it was well underway, was joined by Brian.

The roaring lion is a good choice for one of the greatest american orders. So off go the four unlikely companions headed for Oz along the dangerous yellow brick road in hopes that a powerful wizard will grant their requests. Some experts view this as symbolic of the very 1st march on Washington, that of Coxy’s army in 1894 to try to break the depression. Jacob Coxy was a successful businessman who led a march from the midwest to Washington DC to seek redress for the economic plight of millions at the time who were suffering during the crisis of the depression of 1893.

He marched with a so called industrial army. These were just unemployed men. So this trek is often seen as inspiration behind Dorothy and her group’s trek to Emerald City to seek redress from the Oz or the president of the United States. Coxy was hoping to meet with President Cleveland. However, he was arrested for trespassing, jailed, and his movement was dispersed. Coxy was a greenbacker and his idea was simple.

The federal government should build public works and pay for them by printing money. At the time, the idea seemed to be the wildest kind of extremism. But given unemployment of 18. 4%, few modern economists would be prepared to dismiss such a proposal out of hand. On the trek to Oz, the cowardly lion falls asleep in a field of poppies. But why poppies? The poppies were representative of the opium wars that Brian was posed to.

Poppies are a source of opium, and falling asleep in the field of poppies symbolizes the populist fear that Brian would fall asleep in the midst of these new issues. The lion was rescued from this field where he was sleeping by a bunch of little field mice, who, it said in the book, alone, of course, they wouldn’t have been able to move this giant, giant lion, but when they all got together, they were able to move them together.

So this is like an excellent image of the populist movement. How a lot of people who had no power in themselves or alone, if they knew the direction in which they wanted to go, could move mountains, could actually have a major impact. There’s a great deal of symbolism in the book that was lost in the movie that there’s just so much of it, there’s no way that it couldn’t have been reflective of this monetary reform movement.

And some of it is just very pointed, like it couldn’t mean anything else. For instance, there’s one passage when they get to Oz and she’s shown to her room in the palace, she goes through seven passages and up three flights of stairs. Well, it just means nothing unless it means. It means the crime of 73, which to all populace meant that statute which had revoked the ability of the people to bring their own silver to the mint.

It is not surprising that the layout of the Emerald palace should reflect the numbers seven and three. The crime of 73 was a crucial event in populist monetary history. The two wicked witches were the east and the west. The two banking powers at that time were Rockefeller and Morgan, and JP Morgan headed the Wall street bankers in New York and ultimately got his funding from Europe. The wicked witch of the west could represent the Rockefeller interest, based in Cleveland, based in the midwest.

Rockefeller was dominant in the west and Morgan was dominant in the east. So when Dorothy first lands in her house and kills the witch, she gets the slippers, which are the power, actually, the power of the witch. They’re no use to you. Give them back to me. Give them back. Keep tight inside of them. Their magic must be very powerful or she wouldn’t want them so badly. So the power of the witch is the power to create money.

Dorothy doesn’t realize that she now has that power on her own feet, the power to create money. Dorothy and her troop are then told that they must go kill the Wicked Witch of the west. Bring me the broomstick of the Witch of the west. But if we do that, we’ll have to kill her to get it. She hurls near biblical plagues at the group wolves and crows and black bees, all of which they defeat.

Finally, she is forced to use her golden cap, another symbol of the gold standard, to call the winged monkeys which capture the group. Dorothy eventually kills the witch by pouring a bucket of water on her, suggesting the liquidity that silver money would add to the economy, breaking the stranglehold of the banker’s gold money system. With additional liquidity, the economic fortunes of those people can be improved. People wanted government issued money silver.

In this case, the banks had forced America onto a gold money standard. Then they could cause the depression anytime they wanted to merely by reducing the supply of gold money. When they return victorious to the wizard, Dorothy is asked to sew the wizard’s getaway balloon out of green cloth. Then the wizard accidentally leaves without her. Fortunately, Dorothy is able to seek out Glinda, the good witch of the south.

Oh, will you help me? Can you help me? Dorothy is then told that the power to solve her problems has been with her all along. She only needs to click the heels of her silver shoes together three times. Like Dorothy, America itself had the power to solve its problems simply by expanding the money supply. Government issued silver money. When Dorothy finally gets back to Auntie M and Uncle Henry in Kansas, she finds that the silver shoes have fallen off her feet, just as the silver issue was vanishing in the late 1890s.

And Baum was right, the silver cause would become a distant memory once the United States became firmly committed to the gold standard. With the passage of the Gold Standard act in 1900, the same year the wonderful wizard of Oz was published. L. Frank Baum never admitted embedding the symbols of monetary reform in the wizard of Oz. Consequently, some fans vehemently deny that there is any connection. However, the period immediately after the book’s release may offer some helpful clues regarding his motives.

References to current affairs appear in a number of Baum’s later works. In 1901, Baum worked on a comic opera entitled the Octopus or the title Trust. This was while he was still trying to break away from writing any additional Oz books. However, the public pressure became too great as the wizard of Oz continued to grow in popularity. Eventually, Baum appeared to lose all interest in politics as he became wealthy from having written what would become the most popular children’s story in history.

So what can we do about this. There are several alternatives. They fall into two general categories. Actions at the federal level and actions at the state level. There are three basic federal level solutions, all of which have at their core that governments should issue and control the quantity of money. And commercial banks can only lend out the money they actually have. British citizen James Robertson splits up the money power between two competing governmental bodies.

The british government would publish monetary objectives approved by parliament, for example, an inflation range of two to 3%. Then the bank of England would create just enough debt free money to achieve those objectives. It would then give this money to the government to spend into the economy by the normal budgetary process. This is an agency of society. It’s a public agency acting in the public interest, and it’s acting in the public interest to achieve objectives given to it by the elected government.

It should be at professional arm’s length from the elected people themselves, because the legislators are going to try and get as much money as they can into their local economy. And if it’s a question of a national elect, they will want to manipulate decisions about the money supply in favor of keeping them in power. That seems to me you can’t ignore that fact. It’s a fact of life.

Commercial banks would still be in operation, but could only lend out the money they have. Then they would have to compete for additional money on the open market, just as other corporations have to compete in the market to buy the materials they use. Lending out extra money that a bank didn’t have would be considered a form of counterfeiting. They would be prohibited from creating new money at all.

And they would be competing, absolutely competing without subsidy, as they have now, competing with other banks to provide a better deal. And what this would do, it would make the banks truly competitive, which they’re certainly not at the moment. They’re about the only huge industry that is subsidized to the level that they are. And also a competitive market for borrowing and lending would encourage new entrants to come in much more than they can get in now, when the existing licensed banks are so highly subsidized by the permission that they are given to create new money.

Right? In other words, banks could only lend money they actually had. Absolutely. And I think that that’s the situation that the central monetary authority should be in. It should create the money debt free, and it should give it to the government to spend into circulation. In Ellen Brown’s solution, the government would create all the money debt free. The solution to all this is to return to the government issued money of the american colonists, and particularly the colony of Pennsylvania, which had its own bank.

Congress feels that they have to bail out the banking system. And the reason is that we think that we’re dependent on this banking system for our credit. But we’re not like Dorothy and all the characters in the wizard of Oz, we have the power to create our own money. The government’s mentality in general seems to be we’ll do what we have to do and we’ll worry about paying for it later.

But what you could do is pay for it now. In other words, you don’t have to pay for it later. You don’t have to pay for it with debt. You can just pay for it with money. In the moneymaster’s solution, the government creates all the money in the form of debt free us notes or their electronic equivalents, and then spends that money into existence through the normal budgetary process.

Existing money is of course, replaced one for one, with the new debt free money. The national debt is paid off with this new money as well. But to prevent inflation, reserve requirements are gradually raised on the commercial banks, requiring them to maintain 100% reserves. In other words, banks could then only loan out money they actually have. I think that the solution is what I call $1 of capital, which is simply that you have to have a dollar capital against every unsecured asset you lend against.

So if you’re going to loan against credit card, you have to have a dollar capital for every dollar that’s outstanding in balance. If you’re going to write loans against houses or against cars, you can write all the loans you want against the value of that asset, whatever that is. And as long as you do that, there’s never a banking safety and soundness issue. Solutions at the state level will be easier to achieve initially before reform at the federal level is politically possible.

An interesting fact is you don’t have to have a federal charter to create a bank. States can charter banks as well. All it takes is a bill passed by the state legislature. Many states already allow state chartered banks. The state then deposits all their funds into their new bank and can then utilize the fractional reserve principle to their advantage by making loans to themselves for roads, bridges, et cetera, at no interest.

When the loans are repaid, the money is extinguished from the system. The beauty of this system is you create wealth without creating a permanent increase in the money supply and the consequent inflation. During the civil war, Virginia authorized counties to issue their own debt free money. Since there was no gold, there would have been no money in circulation to maintain commerce. These surviving bills are tissue paper thin.

Minnesota monetary reform expert Byron Dale has proposed legislation from Minnesota to charter a state bank, which would be empowered to give the state government all the money necessary to provide infrastructure funding, such as road building and repair, without debt or interest. My concept of money reform is just a little bit different, but it’s only based upon the fact that for me personally, it’s easier to work on my state legislators than is my federal legislators.

And of course, the solution to our problem is clearly money put into circulation without debt. Now, it really doesn’t make any difference how you do it. It just as long as the money comes into circulation without a debt to anybody and as a payment. The very concept of the bill is to simply have the banks create the money and spend it into circulation to build the infrastructure for the state.

This proposal is currently working its way through the Minnesota legislature with several bankers as sponsors. Actually, the stateowned bank idea is nothing new. The bank of North Dakota is the only stateowned bank in America. It was created in 1919 as a populist movement swept through the debt ridden farmers of the northern plains. Even in these worst of times, the bank of North Dakota is earning record profits and helping fund their state.

It’s been doing this for the last 90 years. Hardly a radical startup idea. According to the bank’s president, Eric Hardmeyer, we are the depository for all state tax collections and fees. We plow those deposits back into the state in the form of low interest loans. Over the last ten to twelve years, we’ve turned back a third of a billion dollars just to general fund to offset taxes or to aid in funding public sector needs.

Not bad for a state with a population of 600,000. In 2009. The state of North Dakota does not have any funding issues at all. We in fact are dealing with the largest surplus we’ve ever had. Interestingly, the bank of North Dakota idea was initiated by a group of swedish immigrants to North Dakota in the early 19 hundreds. Community banking had been going on in Sweden for at least a century before that.

Around 1820, the Swedes came up with the idea of the savings bank. These full reserve banks only lent out money they actually had. They decentralized the money power and were encouraged by the government as a way for municipalities to fight poverty. These operated on what was known as the church steeple principle, where the bank could only make loans to customers whose houses could be seen from the highest church steeple in town.

These community banks increased the commonwealth instead of the big bankers’wealth, this helped Sweden grow rich, which helped Stockholm to grow into the magnificent Venice of Scandinavia that we see here today. But then the debt based bankers attacked the savings banks. They first convinced most of them to consolidate into bigger and bigger banks. Then the swedish parliament was convinced to pass a law allowing the nonprofit savings banks to be bought up by the commercial banks.

After a series of mergers, these banks are now called swed bank. They were under a severe attack during the 80s, but many of the saving banks still remain in the country, and they are very effective, and especially because they decentralize the power and give it back into the hands of the citizens. They empower the local communities, and in times of crisis, they have proven to be more profitable than the big banks.

Now there are only about 50 savings banks left, a small remnant of a great idea for publicly owned banking that shows that communities or even nations can operate debt free. Iceland’s tiny economy and sparse resources were also nurtured by a series of public interest savings banks. Despite a population of a little over 300,000 people and a gross domestic product of around only $12 billion, Iceland is one of the most civilized nations on earth.

But then the government privatized the savings banks, similar to the swedish savings banks 20 years earlier. But in Iceland’s case, even the Lansbunken, which essentially was the bank of Iceland, was privatized as well. For the first few years, things looked good. The economy doubled. But under the surface, the private bankers were creating a huge financial bubble. They opened a new offshore Internet bank called Iceave, targeting depositors in the UK and Holland by offering attractive interest rates for new depositors.

Hundreds of thousands of new accounts were opened. Entire towns and police department pension funds put their money into Isaave, as did charities such as cancer relief funds. Using fractional reserve lending, Isave fanned that into billions. For questionable new loans, Isave started investing in european ventures, especially in Russia. Many now believe that Isaave actually became a money laundering operation for the russian mafia, all the while trading on the good reputation for solid banking Iceland had built up over the previous decades.

However, when bank was privatized, it still used the good reputation of Iceland to grow huge and do lots of criminal activities. And the owner, Tor, he became one of the rich boys in the world really quickly. One of the billionaires I’ve seen documents linking him to the russian mafia and his father. One oligarch that fled to the U. K. Confirmed that Iceland was used as a money laundering machine for the russian mafia.

When the crash came in 2008, the big icelandic banks quickly failed in the five years time they were privatized before the collapse, they actually grew ten times the icelandic GDP. And when it collapsed, you can imagine how huge the collapse was because they collapsed onto the shoulders of the nation or the taxpayers. The icelandic parliament at first poured enormous amounts of taxpayer money into them to try to save them, but they still failed.

Then the government bailed out all the icelandic depositors. But the ice save accounts were not in Iceland and were never insured by the icelandic government, and so they were not bailed out. However, in the face of tremendous political pressure at home, the british and dutch governments bailed out the ice save accounts of their citizens and then tried to make Iceland pay for it at terms that have decimated Iceland’s fragile economy.

The income tax of more than half of the nation. Just the interest of this particular loan, then you have other loans then we would have gotten from, in 2007, being the most developed nation in the world, into a nation spending all its DTP, just paying interest of foreign loans. Inflation shot up. Icelanders soon discovered that even the principal on their home mortgage loans was indexed to inflation. Many Icelanders saw the principal on their home mortgages double and their payments triple.

This despite rising unemployment. The way the loan system is in Iceland is completely outrageous. I mean, your rights as a consumer are zero. Foreclosures mounted and the citizens rioted. They call it their revolution. They stormed the parliament square. The president was forced to call for a referendum. 93% of the people voted not to bail out the bankers. The Brits aren’t exactly a shining light here about how to handle international relations.

No, it’s one of the worst conducted most absurd things I’ve seen in a long time, really. I mean, it is obvious that the Icelandis cannot afford to pay this money back. What we’ve just seen is the first anti bailout tax revolt here. Now the ruling party is trying to convince Iceland to join the European Union to be eligible for loans to save its economy. The people, however, seem unconvinced that more and more debt is the solution.

Iceland now seems determined to take back their money power and not take on more national debt. What I want to implement here is a healthy banking system where you don’t have fractional reserve, you don’t have high interest. The bank should not serve as mafia outlets. It should be something that is important for the communities. Over 70% of Iceland now opposes joining the EU. And some are now supporting proposals for cities to start up savings banks based on the bank of North Dakota model to provide local credit and stop the rising wave of housing foreclosures.

We’re not part of EU yet. They are trying to put us in it with 70% of Icelanders don’t want to join the EU. But the social democrats are in power, and that is their sole mission to get Iceland into the EU. Iceland is proud of its democratic heritage. Iceland is the home of the oldest parliament in Europe, having met annually for over 1000 years. For the first 800 years, the icelandic parliament met at this site where the north american tectonic plate meets the european plate called thingfedlish.

Icelanders consider this a holy site where elected government was born. Today, Iceland is the new battleground as it attempts to become the first nation in modern times to escape the serfdom of the debt money system. If Iceland escapes, the rest of the world will be watching. If you end up paying this money, entering into the EU to try to find salvation that way, it will only get worse.

What has happened in Iceland is going to happen on a worldwide scale in our lifetime. There won’t be enough money to cover all the debts. Why are governments pumping money into private banks? Why are they not letting them roll? I mean, just like any other. And then the excuse is, oh, they’re too big to fail. Let them fail, please. So what this all boils down to is whether America, still the freest nation in history, will once again break free of the privately owned central bank as it has six times in the past.

Our money is not issued by the government, even though they make it look like it is. It doesn’t have to be this way. This system has got to go. Some will say, well, those crooks in Congress will create too much money once they get the money power. But Congress now creates all the money at once. It just creates it as debt, which never gets paid back and which we, the people, have to continually pay interest on.

Instead of creating bonds or debt, the government could and should be creating dollars interest free, even though the federal government is out there borrowing and spending $3 trillion, 10% of GDP, 9. 4 or something like that. Over the last two years, even though they’ve done that, the total amount of debt outstanding in the system since the beginning of 2008 has actually contracted, including the federal government that comes directly off the Federal Reserve zone.

Z one. Okay. You cannot grow an economy in a debt based monetary system for real. When the outstanding credit is becoming smaller, it can’t be done, because all money is debt in one form or another. But more importantly, the treasury could solve this. Treasury has authority to issue non debt backed currency. They do it every day. And the quarters that are in your pocket are not debt backed.

As the inventor of the electric light, Thomas Edison, put it, if our nation can issue a dollar bond, it can issue a dollar bill. Both are promises to pay, but one promise fattens the users and the other helps the people. Edison was friends with carmaker Henry Ford. Ford understood how the monetary system depended on keeping the average american confused. It is well that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system.

For if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning. Under this system, we can never get out of debt. It’s just impossible. Nor is goldbacked money the solution that was the most important symbol in the wizard of Oz. You think international manipulation is easy now? Just wait until we return to a gold money system. As Thomas Edison told the New York Times, gold and money are separate things.

Gold is the trick mechanism by which you can control money that is the root of all evil. The solution is government issued money. That’s the most democratic form of money system. It maximizes freedom in a republic instead of the centralized control of the international plutocracy we are rapidly devolving into. But be prepared to deal with the modern day goldbugs. Their arguments divert us from the real question. They say that this money that is created by the state or by society, whatever, is not real money.

It may represent real money, but it isn’t real money. It’s not what backs our money, it’s who controls its quantity. That’s what the wizard of Oz was all about. Big bankers were controlling the quantity of american money, gold money. Others will say Congress isn’t responsive to the people as it is. Well, of course not. Politicians are responsive to those with the power. Right now, the banks have the power.

We have to take back the ultimate power of any nation, the power over its money. With the power of banks diminished, politicians will become responsive to the voters once again. If we value the founding father’s dream of freedom and escape from serfdom by political self determination, we have to conclude that creating our money is too important a function to be put into private hands. History has shown time and time again that leads only to plutocracy ruled by the rich and ultimately slavery.

But what about the banks? They’re already failing. Let the big banks fail. No bank is too big to fail. Government can issue its own money. We don’t need their hyperexpensive compounding interest system. Don’t worry. Banks or banking won’t go away. You’ll still go down to your corner bank to deposit your check, your bank will still be there. Only the guts, the bank’s accounting system, the part you will never see anyway, will change.

At the moment, most of our means of exchange is these electronic digits which will jump from one bank account to another as we do our business and so on. So there’s this cloud of numbers moving about in the economy, which is our means of exchange. Now where do they come from? They all come into existence when somebody somewhere takes out a loan. Every pound circulating. I’m not talking about the physical cash in your pocket, I’m talking about the electronic digits, has been borrowed by somebody in the past.

So the overall effect of that is that society as a whole, that’s us, is actually paying interest to the issuers of these digits for their existence. So the lending and the issuance are stuck together at the moment. I think that’s what we want to change. We want to separate that, put the issuance in the hands of a public body which will issue the whole of our currency debt free in the public interest by the people, for the people, et cetera.

Thereafter we can lend it to each other, borrow it from each other in the normal way. So for the average person you won’t notice that much difference except you’ll find the whole of society, the whole of economy, is a lot better off because there’s not this background draining, siphoning of these money numbers back to the issuers. It does not mean that the banks will be unable to be prosperous.

They would have a slightly different business model than they enjoy now. But not even all the banks have that model today. You had savings and loans, credit unions, loan companies that historically don’t create new money, but yet they do intermediate money. They do loan it out, they do take deposit. That would not end. So banks would still have, in my opinion, would have a very prosperous future. The banks will be businesses like all other businesses, and will have to earn their living through providing valuable services, services which other people are willing to pay for.

All we need in the face of this oncoming first depression of the 21st century is a little education. We can make this the new civil rights movement, the new human rights movement. Nations of the world. The same applies to you. Virtually every nation now labors under the same monetary system. All money is created at interest as a debt. Once again, we’re falling for the bankers’threats of economic collapse.

Just like when Andrew Jackson tried to kill the second bank of the United States. It’s nothing but pure extortion, world extortion. Let them fail. Remember all this money we’re giving them is at interest money we are borrowing to give to the banks. Then these very same banks have the audacity to loan this money back to us at more interest. This system has got to go. I think it’ll be a very big change.

I think it will be actually an essential change. Looking to, say, the next hundred years or so in the survival of our species to get this thing straight. That’s the secret that can set humanity free. Our children won’t be saddled with any more national debt. That’s right, no more national debt. That term will cease to exist. And don’t fall for the argument that those rascals in Congress will spend too much money if they get the power to create money.

Look at what they’re doing now. They aren’t spending it, they’re just borrowing it, then giving it away. It can’t get any worse. The questions raised by the study of the symbolism embedded in the wonderful wizard of Oz are even more important when you understand that this is not just an american problem, it’s totally international. This privately owned money system is worldwide and is literally the primary cause of most of the world’s hunger, poverty, misery and disease.

After William Jennings Brian’s loss in 1896, their cause started weakening. Their ship started to sink. In 1900, L. Frank Baum’s wonderful Wizard of Oz was like a desperate flare fired into the night of history, hoping that someone across the centuries would notice, would pay attention to the greatest issue of their era, and ultimately ours, humankind’s escape from the debt money system. Let’s follow the example of Abraham Lincoln when he issued greenbacks in 1862 to save the nation from permanent division.

So before you come up, Bill, I’d just like to say on behalf of the movement, thank you for the work which you’ve done all these many years. Thank you for producing such entertaining, informative, intellectually captivating and very useful material in your very unique way. Ladies and gentlemen, Bill steel. The global economy continues to crash. Unemployment continues to spiral upwards. Government budgets are tightening dramatically in the wake of the global real estate bubble, a bubble that was specifically caused by banks being in complete control of the money supply instead of sovereign nations being in control of their national currency.

That is the basic problem that we’re facing, and until this problem is addressed, no amount of national austerity will stop this continuing cascade of negative economic events. England is trying. The last thing there is to try, that’s to dramatically cut government spending. They call it austerity, but to those of us in this room. We are all acutely aware that this austerity is not going to work. So it’s our obligation to be able to say why this is not working and offer a reasonable solution.

And we call that solution monetary reform. Monetary reform rests on two great inviolable pillars. To me. The first one is that government borrowing must be forbidden. The second one is that banks must stop lending money they do not have. On the first one, the money power. The power to create the national money is the most important power of a sovereign nation. In fact, it is the very definition of sovereignty nations do not have to borrow.

Nations can create. The problem is that when a nation borrows from a bank, as proverbs tells us, the borrower becomes servant to the lender. That is not sovereignty. So what is the result? The nation becomes addicted to the loans, and the banks then have power over it. So you no longer have a sovereign democracy. You have rule by banks. Political science has coined a term for this. It’s called plutocracy.

This is our primary problem with the economy of every nation today. They have allowed the national debt system to predominate. I say no more national debt. Let’s use the US example. Today, Mr. Obama has stimulated the economy with about $2 trillion. But here’s the problem. He’s borrowed the money. So he’s borrowed the money mostly from the big banks with interest attached. And then what has he done? He simply turned around and given this money, given it back to the banks, supposedly to lend to us.

What kind of a system is this? It’s insane. You couldn’t design a worst possible system. Banks must stop lending money they do not have. This, as we all know, is called the fractional reserve lending system. It allows banks not to lend out twice as much money, not three times as much money, but ten to twelve times as much money if they follow the rules. And as we know, with the results of the 2008 debacle, here, at least in the United States, that the big banks were leveraged 50 and 52 to one.

Freddie and Fannie were leveraged 72 to one. Goldman Sachs was leveraged 333 to one. And then just about six months ago, Mr. Obama gets on tv and says, you know, I think we should just eliminate the reserve requirement altogether. So 333 to one is not enough. Only infinity will do. If you or I did this, we would be charged with fraud and or counterfeiting. This fractional reserve system allows the banks to consolidate the wealth of the nation.

And that, combined with the national debt, allows them to use that leverage to control the politics of the nation. So this is a two pronged problem. When the wealthiest private citizens have control over the money supply, then the government is no longer sovereign, it is no longer the supreme power of the land, and can no longer operate in the public interest. Government, determined by the citizenry and directed by their elected representatives, is still all that stands between us and serfdom rule by the rich.

In today’s world, the democratic aspects of government have been significantly eroded because entirely and completely because government has lost these two great pillars of truth. They are borrowing from bankers. They have lost control over the quantity of the national money. Those are the two pillars. This is why we know that no amount of austerity or further government borrowing can possibly fix this problem. This week in England, I’ve met with some wonderful younger folks, you saw one of them just now, who have latched on to these essential truths, both formally within the monetary reform community.

And last night, up and coming students at the London School of Economics. These young, inquiring minds realize the old ways aren’t working, that something is very wrong. They can’t get jobs the way their parents could just a generation earlier. They are now propelled through both self interest as well as the normal idealism of young adults, to start looking outside the box of their traditional training for something that will work.

This is a great force. This is wonderfully encouraging. Now more than ever before, I am convinced that our reforms are inevitable. And in the relatively near future, the truth of the manipulation of our money supply can no longer be hidden. These fresh young faces will supply sufficient youthful energy to finally break humanity free of the enslaving shackles of the debt money system. That’s all. Any questions?.