STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
Why Aren't EU Protests Aimed at Central Banks?
By Staff News & Analysis - May 26, 2011

ECB presses battle against Greek restructuring … The European Central Bank kept up its attacks on the idea of letting Greece restructure its crushing debt load, even as a top ratings agency argued that Germany's banks would probably survive losses from such a move with credit ratings intact. Juergen Stark, the European Central Bank's chief economist, said at a conference in Berlin on Wednesday that cutting Greece's debt by letting it pay later or less than the full amount owed to banks and other bondholders was not the simple solution some think it is. "To think that there is an easy way out, in that a country's debts are largely or fully relieved, is an illusion," Stark said. "Debt relief cannot and must not be the solution … We should think one connection further when we use this miracle word debt relief, or debt restructuring," he told a conference organized by a group linked to Chancellor Angela Merkel's party. – AP

Dominant Social Theme: Central banks simply are not important. Remember that!

Free-Market Analysis: We can see from the above article excerpt that it is the ECB mainly that is behind the European Union's "immoveable rigor" when it comes to enforcing austerity measures on Greece, and other EU PIGS as well. It is always this way with central banks. Their members and operators tend to be the most holy about fiscal integrity because they are the least so in practice.

The ability to print money from nothing is the singular achievement of modern elites and the single most ruinous practice of the modern state. It is responsible for most if not all of the abuses of modern history, from torture, to war, to genocide. Money-printing (not money) is at the root of all evil.

It is strange that EU protests and Greek protests in particular have not in particular taken aim at central bankers and their banks. (At least not that we can tell.) Government buildings, police stations, private and commercial banks, all these have been targeted. But in our view, if EU protests over austerity are to be effective, it is central banks that have to be peacefully targeted on a consistent basis. A message needs to be sent and only physical protests around central banks can do that.

The ECB, for instance, needs to be targeted intensively. National central banks as well, even if they have lost power. Only by showing that Greeks actually understand what is going on – and who is to blame – shall austerity and other oppressive measures be overcome. That goes for Ireland and Portugal (and Spain). Imagine if citizens of Ireland, Portugal and Greece gathered peacefully at the door of the ECB and stayed there day-after-day, night-after-night in all their swelling thousands. Imagine the shock. Imagine, eventually, the dialogue that would take place. Imagine what the mainstream media, eventually, would be forced to write.

When long ago the Irish Republican Army – as one feedbacker pointed out yesterday – began to take aim at the City of London with bombings, negotiations suddenly, surprisingly began. That's because the City of London is where the real power lies – central banking power in particular. The power to create money-from-nothing is the main power of mercantilism. The City of London exercises it. It has loaned its power to the ECB and the BIS as well.

A protest in Switzerland aimed at the BIS would be effective. It is a pretty trip at this time of year. Switzerland is full of flowers – and bankers. The flowers it has had always; central bankers only these past 400 years or so.

Of course, we do not advocate bombing of anyone under any circumstances; but showing the power elite where the blame lies via peaceful protest could be remarkably effective. One does not, in fact, need to sleep on sidewalks; or confront army tanks of water cannon. One simply needs to start to organize peaceful, sit-down protests outside the West's larger central banks.

John Maynard Keynes said famously that not one person in a million understands the fundamental crime of central banking, the ability to print money-from-nothing that lies at its heart. Of course central banks have put up as many lines of defense as they can, including spreading the meme we have worked hard to defeat, that central banks owned by the nation-state itself are somehow less loathsome than the private kind. It is not so. Central banking and the concomitant printing of money from nothing is always ruinous (sooner or later) when blessed by law in any manner. The less law, therefore, the better.

Again, whether quasi private or fully public, central bankers remain a breed apart; their professional loyalties are to their own class; their banks are likely part of the larger mass reporting to the BIS (close to 100). It is useless to believe that central banking can be reformed. India and China both run their own central banks and more loathsome bureaucracies have seldom been seen. Inflation, too, in both countries is a problem.

There are no good central banks. There is only honest money – gold and silver – and PRIVATE banking (run privately by private individuals) with or without fractional reserve lending: money competition, in other words. What is necessary if EU citizens want the "austerity torture" to stop is for individuals to target central banks with peaceful protests.

Not private banks. Not commercial banks. Not savings banks.

CENTRAL BANKS! …

Of course, we expect this proposal to generate complaints. The Brownians will complain that the wretched central banking concept can be properly utilized by the state itself, when there is no real historical record to prove it. Even Benjamin Franklin apparently admitted later in life that his various state-monopoly schemes for money would cause price inflation. This is surely true. Here is the law, and it is unassailable one:

EVERY MONEY MANIPULATION IS A PRICE FIX …

EVERY PRICE FIX DISTORTS THE ECONOMY …

EVERY CENTRAL BANK FIXES THE PRICE OF MONEY

AND EVENTUALLY BRINGS DOWN RUIN ON ALL!

There is no way round it. it is very simple. Laws and regulations are price fixes. Regulate money IN ANY WAY and you surely will distort the economy, creating first a terrible boom and then an even more horrible bust. Were the Greeks to target the central banking class – not the so-called bankers (private bankers) or those who facilitate the private sector – but CENTRAL BANKS AND THEIR APOLOGISTS, the EU crisis would deflate in an instant. It would not last for another word. Not a syllable. Not a vowel.

Yes, if central bankers in all their shiny garb were confronted on the way to work with the single salient fact that they print money from nothing, as much as they want of it, for themselves and their friends, all this palaver about austerity would cease. The moralizing would halt. A great silence would descend on the monetary chattering classes. They would have nothing to say. The correction would be profound.

Bar them peacefully from going to work within the vast buildings they have erected to worship worthless paper. Confront them instantly when they proclaim they are "inflation fighters" – as their ruinous fiat currency is the motor and engine of inflation. Correct them immediately when they begin to claim that printing an overabundance of money is of benefit to all. Chastise them responsibly. Reprove them logically. Instruct them firmly.

Let them know that the greatest scam of the past half-millennium is over. The people in their millions understand. Gold and silver must circulate again as honest money. Banks must be private entities, not responsible to the state. The state must have no more power over money. None. No more government debt (except perhaps what is absolutely "necessary.") Let the Invisible Hand provide for the industrious. Let private, local charities (so much more effective and targeted than corrupt, state-run public welfare) offer help to others as they need it. Churches and spiritual spaces of all kinds are historically useful in this regard.

Only private entities – merchants and tradesmen – can provide credit. Only private entities can offer warehouses for silver and gold and issue receipts that may be honored locally as money. Interest rates are to be set by the market, and if they fluctuate from region to region or town to town, so be it. But central banking must go. (Private clearinghouses can remain.)

Gather round peacefully to explain this fundamental point. Surround them in Starbucks as they purchase lattes. Explain it over and over, joyfully. Cease, also, to use fiat money. Campaign to remove legal tender laws.

Every time a central bank shuts its doors a rainbow shall appear and a flower bloom. Gradually a calm falls over the earth. Guns cease thunder. Fighting stops. Injuries heal. The blessed shall dwell in peace without inflations, depressions, faux-depreciations or devaluations. Money, at least, shall become honest.

After Thoughts

Surround the great, granite temples of money printing and begin!

Posted in STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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