The poison pill dealt the American Revolution

 Money as Debt video -- a short critique:

Several colleagues and friends have pointed out a video on Google Videos entitled Money as Debt. The link is here:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2550156453790090544&hl=en

This video is, in fairness, a good attempt to make sense of the problem in a manner that the average rube can relate to -- namely, an oversimplified cartoon. But it strikes me first as vastly inadequate because all it does is describe a problem without suggesting the solution. And, in fact, the "problem description" itself is inadequate -- oversimplified and at some points inaccurate. They're on the right track, but I personally would not recommend the video. The fundamental issue here is not credit itself ... or usury -- that isn't ever going to go away -- at least I don't believe so. The issue is WHO gets the vig  -- or interest. When the interest from currency creation goes into private hands, then the citizenry and the economy are constantly being bled and greed becomes the driving force --- thereby leading to extreme fractional reserve ratios, exotic credit and investment instruments and a host of ills. Take that away, put the benefit of currency creation back into the hands of the citizenry though development of education, infrastructure, research, medical care, etc. and the problem goes away. Take currency creation out of the hands of private capital, period. I would argue that is what Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution was intended to do ... but Hamilton talked the Congress into outsourcing the job -- from where I stand, that was the poison pill dealt to the American Revolution.



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© Kenneth W. Burchell 2011, All Rights Reserved.

Thomas Paine: schoolmasters v priests.

"One good schoolmaster is of more use than a hundred priests."
Thomas Paine, Worship and Churchbells: A letter to Camille Jordan, 1797. 

Tom Paine lays out the issues then and now

"... a remarkable series of eight letters To the Citizens of the United States and Particularly to the Leaders of the Federal Faction (1802-5) ... addressed the principal political and social controversies of the (Early Federal) era: pre-emptive war; government as a profitable monopoly; curtailment of constitutional rights in the name of security; the unitary executive; abuse of political and governmental power; the privatization of national currency creation; jingoism and war-whoop mentality; conservative retrenchment in the past versus transformational radicalism; and the place of religion in the public sphere."

Kenneth Burchell, ed. Thomas Paine and America, 1776-1809 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009), 1:x.

Thomas Paine -- "What we obtain to cheap ..."

"Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this
consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious
the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is
dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to
put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if
so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated."
Thomas Paine, The American Crisis I, December 23, 1776.

Sophia Rosenfeld takes a stab at understanding the lack of a Paine statue in Washington, DC

Sophia Rosenfeld takes a stab at understanding the lack of a statue for Thomas Paine in Washington, DC and while she makes some good points about the historic invocation of Paine's memory by the leaders of American democratic reform (sounds as though she may have read Harvey J. Kaye's fine work on Paine), she misses the central issue surrounding Paine's execration by the Federalists of the early 19th c.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/06/29/the-fight-over-common-sense-how-the-tea-party-and-the-right-get-tom-paine-wrong.html

Paine wouldn't WANT a statue in DC. In his strafing attack "Letter to George Washington" Paine said he had a right to call himself "the first federalist" because of his early proposal for a union of the colonies, but by the time he returned from France in 1802 he had become a staunch anti-federalist and a hero to those who opposed the Adams/Hamilton version of American greed-based government with private banking in the driver's seat. That's the underlying reason why there's no statue to Paine in Washington, DC. He wouldn't  bow to the "wise" financial geniuses of American government of the greedy, by the greedy and for the greedy.

The unfinished American Revolution and a proposal for a new political party

The United States of America needs a new political party born of the unfinished business of the American Revolution -- much like Horace Greeley said of the Republican Party when it was created back in the mid 1850s. The Republican Party was originally created to resolve the issue of slavery versus free labor, free land, free speech and free people. The Whig and Democratic Parties failed to resolve the issue and both shattered over internal divisions. The Republican Party that arose in their stead was originally pro-tariff and anti-slavery. The two great American political issues of the Nineteenth Century were slavery and banking. The slavery issue -- at least chattel slavery -- was solved, but the issue of wage-slavery and banking exploitation was never resolved. In fact, I would argue that the bank monopolies prevailed. Study the debates that surrounded creation of Hamilton's first Bank of the United States. The Congress of the United States farmed out its constitutional currency creating powers to a private banking corporation, setting off a two-hundred year struggle that still threatens to collapse the remains of the republic. Unless we mobilize the citizenry, the international banking/financial interests will extinguish the U. S. before the U. S. can begin to extinguish the banking cartels.

Thomas Paine neither said nor wrote "lead, follow or get out of the way."

Every work and letter of Paine's has been digitally searched for this. It's all here on my computer and I've been reading and pondering Paine for much of my 61 years. Factually, it doesn't even SOUND like Paine who was rarely, if ever,  bullying or brusque in print or in person. Bottom line, he never said nor wrote it and I'll send $20 US to anyone who can come up with a legitimate citation that he did. Paine never said it.