 Wallace Street Journal
The revolution is gaining steam
David Bond
Archives
Editor, Silver Valley
Mining Journal
Wallace, Idaho - The Silver Revolution now has a full head of
steam. When this baby hits the tracks there will be nothing but
sparks flying. If you're not aboard by now, you will have missed
the train and have a lot of chasing to do.
The latest passengers to board this train - dare we call it the
Silver Bullet? - are the 31 elected governors of the 31 states
of the Republic of Mexico who are calling for the re-monetization
of silver. (Read the
official announcement, from Hugo Salinas Price.)
Mexico is known for two things: silver, and revolutions. The
31 elected governors of Mexico's 31 states are calling upon Mexico's
federal government to re-monetize silver, to put silver back
into this nation's money. These are guys who agree upon almost
nothing else.
Ponder this: Mexico is a nation of 103 million people. Its adult
literacy rate is higher than 91 percent. Forty million of its
citizens are under the age of 18. A Mexican child born in 2003
can expect to live at least 74 years. This is not evidence of
some easily dismissible third-world country. Yet Mexico struggles
under an inflation rate of 16 percent. (I wonder what our rate
truly is.) Its current economic fates depend entirely upon the
goodwill and honesty of the United States banking system, because
the peso, as throughout all of Central and South America's currencies,
is valued in terms of US Fednotes.
Mr. Salinas Price wrote,
back in 2002, of Mexico's mounting frustration with the US dollar:
"Aristotle stated that everything that exists incorporates
matter and form. The dollar, since it became irredeemable for
gold at $35 dollars an ounce in August of 1971, is an abstraction
that only maintains form, without matter. Therefore, it is nothing.
"The whole financial edifice of all Latin America is constructed
upon these units of nothing, dollars. Our Mexican pesos are derived
fromnothing. Can we possibly believe that we can look forward
hopefully to an economic future built upon pesos which are derived
from dollars, which in turn are nothing? If, someday in the future
the history of the Twentieth Century is written truthfully, it
will have to record as one of its most important characteristics,
the progressive elimination of the "substance" factor
from money all over the world.
"The abuse of money creation by the U.S. is not something
that produces bad consequences only in the U.S. Since the dollar
is our money, because our currency is nothing more than a derivative
of the dollar, the abuses in money and credit creation in the
U.S. produce serious shocks in Latin America. We have mentioned
before, on these pages of the internet (www.plata.com.mx),
how credit expansion (debt expansion) in the U.S. produces the
export of monetary inflation to our countries, and forces the
devaluation of our currency-derivatives, the destruction of internal
savings denominated in such derivatives, the destruction of financial
systems with the high interest rates that come about as a consequence
of devaluations and the collapse of our productive systems."
In other words, our profligate banking practices are the root
of Mexico's inflation and a corruption of its republican democracy,
of its very humanity. Silver is Mexico's way out of this hegemony.
I wish them well. Salinas Price is a guy who has figured things
out. So, apparently, have a number of his 103 million countrymen.
Ninety-six percent of viewers of the television network Azteca
favor the re-monetization of silver in Mexico. A full-page advertisement
taken out by the Journalists' Club of Mexico City and signed
by 176 of my peers also endorsed silver's return to Mexico's
money.
And just as silver is Mexico's way out of the hegemony of the
U.S. banking system, it is also ours, here in America. We were
a free people and prosperous people until they took our wealth
away. Only with paper dollars can a bank confiscate your wealth,
your net worth. Do you want those things back? Then demand silver
in your coins.
The re-monetizing of silver is a done deal. Because what the
United Snakes is doing to Mexico, we're also doing to Argentina,
Venezuela, Bolivia, Chile, all of Central America - and Japan
and China. Why do you think the Europeans went to Euros? It was
kind of their way of saying, No Thanks. Even our hugely vaunted
military cannot put out that many revolutions should they come
in rapid fire. India clings for dear life to silver and if they
hang on for even a bit longer, it will be India calling the shots
in the Far East. China's use of the dollar is a convenience,
to keep the loading-dock prices at Wal-Mart down, but when they
go out selling serious action, like a rifle factory or a car
plant, they'll want silver and they'll expect to pay in the same.
America has in its hubris imagined a planet peopled by people
who are weaker and stupider than we are.
This is really not so, although it is informed by a congenital
disinclination on our part to - as the seniors at the Phi Delt
house at Willamette used to say to the pledges- "get around
and meet the members." Fewer than 20 percent of all Americans
at a high estimate, the lowest 7 percent, even possess a passport,
compared to about 90 percent of Europeans. And getting a U.S.
passport is considerably more difficult than getting a visa to
travel to Russia or China.
But that's OK, because we watch on average 7 hours of television
per day, sufficient to give us our world view - at least by Dan
Rather's lights. Our low passport numbers are of no small interest
to the Motherland Security fascists, who are making it ever more
difficult for Americans to travel overseas. So we do not hear
the rumblings of our foreign neighbours, who in increasing chorus
cry for the overthrow of their overseers - us.
Let us ponder, in the context of the Iraq War, the words again
of Mr. Salinas Price writ two years before we embarked upon this
bizarre mission: "When the First World War broke out in
1914, some observers thought that it could not go on for very
long, because the reserves of gold would soon run out and it
would be impossible to carry on the war for a lack of funds.
Little did these people imagine that governments would keep right
on warring, without gold, just printing money - counterfeiting
money - in the amounts required by the war."
Is there a minor coincidence that world wars and fiat currency
came into being (and went away) at about the same time in history?
That the ancient Romans went out to make Empire at about the
same time they infused lead and zinc into their coins? That before
Franklin Roosevelt waged his campaign against Europe he first
confiscated Europe's gold? That the conclusion of the American
War Between the States was effected by the South's ineffectual
efforts to issue scrip, because the North had the gold? That
in every major war, one of the chief elements of each side's
campaign was to introduce counterfeit currency into the economy
of its opponent, a thing you can only do with paper?
That when silver, or for that matter gold, are the only means
of measure, when fiat currency is eschewed, that wars are few
and the predations of one nation against another are almost nonexistent?
Perhaps for the simple reason that when people in any country
are getting paid for their work, and for what they're worth,
they are peaceful?
The actions of Hugo Salinas Price, and of the 31 Mexico governors,
to correct the errors of their banking system to restore, as
both Mohammed and Christ urged, an honest measure, a measure-for-measure
if you will, is the shot heard around the world. How violent
the ensuing war will be is entirely at the will of George W.
Bush and Alan Greenspan, or up to the perseverance of the kind
people of Mexico. Me, I'm rooting for south of the Rio Grande.
Dec 18, 2004
David Bond
Archives
Editor: Silver Valley
Mining Journal
David Bond covers gold
and silver mining equities for a number of national and international
publishers, including Platts Metals Week, a division of McGraw-Hill.
He lives in Wallace, Idaho, heart of the planet's richest silver
fields, the Coeur d'Alene Mining District. He is former editor
of the Wallace Miner, and holds regional and national firsts
in investigative journalism from the Atlantic City Press Club
(National Headliner) and from the Society of Professional Journalists
(SDX/SPJ) and has edited or written for newspapers on both coasts,
Canada and Alaska.
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