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Robert Martin's Precious Mettle Civilized SlaveryRobert Martin "I'm Spartacus I'm Spartacus I'm Spartacus." And so arrived the climax to the 1961 Stanley Kubrick film, Spartacus, starring Kirk Douglas as the Roman slave-turned-revolutionary. I'll never forget Tony Curtis shouting "I'm Spahtucus!" in his Bronx accent. Tony sure had the legs for a toga. The film was a typical Hollywood send-up, but the history behind the story was real. Spartacus was a Thracian freeman sold into slavery after trying to desert the Roman army. As a slave, he was forced to become a gladiator, a career path with a limited future. So he escaped captivity and, with a growing band of men, began a two-year rampage - from 73 to 71 BC - defeating every attempt by the Roman legions to capture him. At the height of the rebellion, Spartacus commanded a following of 120,000 former slaves. They ransacked the countryside while Rome grew nervous. After all, freedom was the right of every Roman except for those who didn't qualify. Past slave rebellions were generally simple affairs requiring the usual lopping-off of a few hands or heads until life could go back to normal. This Spartacus matter, however, was different. It could not to be tolerated. Left unchecked, it might call into question the very foundations of government authority. So the Romans threw everything but the bathhouse sink at the rebellion, and eventually Spartacus was defeated. As a measure of just how nervous Rome had become, 6,000 of his faithful were crucified along the road from Capua to Rome. Now that's what I call "setting an example." In the film, when the victorious Roman general demands to know which of the vanquished is Spartacus, he bravely steps forward and cries "I'm Spartacus." Then, one by one, each of his weary followers stands up and shouts, "I'm Spartacus! I'm Spartacus! I'm Spartacus!" Thousands of defiant voices proudly declaring their loyalty and independence. For every one of them such loyalty meant crucifixion. That was then. This is now. And from my vantage point I say "We are all Spartacus!" Born free men and women into a free American society. Yet along the way we have been sold into slavery by the untruth that is our fiat currency system. Without our knowledge or consent, we have been enslaved just as assuredly as was Spartacus and his defiant followers. "Slavery?" you ask. "That sounds a bit melodramatic." "Well yes," I reply, "civilized slavery, perhaps, but slavery none the less." Let me prove it to you. I wager that less than one American in 1,000 is aware that the Federal Reserve Bank is NOT a U.S. Government institution but rather a private bank, incorporated for the benefit of its shareholders. I would go on to wager that not one American in 100,000 knows who owns that private bank. Do you? You can read the U.S. Constitution from one end to the other, and you will not find any mention of the authority to assign the creation of U.S. legal tender to a private banking enterprise. To the contrary, a majority of the constitutional framers opposed central banks and made it clear that ONLY gold and silver were to be used in payment of obligations and for trade. (During the drafting of the Constitution it is said that Alexander Hamilton was a strong proponent of a central bank and that Thomas Jefferson vehemently opposed him, fortunately prevailing.) The framers knew that if gold and silver were the only constitutional form of money, governments could not inflate, manipulate or "manage" the economy. Herein lay the genius that was to become the American Free Enterprise System. "Free" as in free from government tyranny. Yet, since the days of our founding fathers, repeated attempts have been made to foist a central bank onto our society. In 1829, Andrew Jackson was elected President having promised to oppose all central bankers. He was as good as his word, keeping the bankers at bay throughout his two terms of office while simultaneously paying down the national debt to zero. That was the last time this country was not in debt. Unfortunately, Andy Jackson wasn't around 60 years later when a secretive cartel of European-based bankers got together and conjured up the Federal Reserve Bank, which they snuck through Congress one day before Christmas Eve, 1913. They were especially pleased with the name "Federal Reserve" since it had the ring of governmental authority and legitimacy to it. A 'ruse' by any other name would smell as sweet. Talk about a Day of Infamy! Congress blithely ratified a master plan that desecrated the constitutional directive to keep gold and silver as the only U.S. money. In its place, a permanent monopoly was granted to a cabal of individuals secretly led by the Rothschilds of Europe through their strawmen: JP Morgan, Kuhn and Loeb, the Lazard Brothers, and Paul Warburg, names which reverberate down the canyons Wall Street to this day. So if we don't own the Federal Reserve Bank, who the hell does? Well, like any corporation it has principal stockholders, and their names are (you guessed it!) Rothschilds, Lazard, Kuhn, Loeb and Morgan. It is not even set up as a non-profit corporation. Why? Because it was purposefully designed to generate handsome shareholder profits from its one-of-a-kind franchise to invent our currency. I use the word "invent" precisely. The process of making dollars is a hocus-pocus of gobbledy-gook that masks the simpler truth: Dollars are paper debt obligations created out of nothing and condemned to earning interest for as long as they exist. They used to be pieces of parchment. They are now electronic digits. The weighty and cumbersome steps by which dollars spring forth into our economy is made intentionally confusing since it would be unseemly for some accountant to simply scribble "$1 billion" on a Post-It note and hand it to a bank teller. But that, in essence, is what is involved in the creation of our currency. In return for performing this weighty task, the owners of the Federal Reserve are rewarded with a guaranteed 6% return plus expenses. And bankers around the country are rewarded with something equally wonderful. It is called "interest." Every single dollar that is invented earns bankers the right to a) re-invent ten times that same number of dollars and b) lend those hydra-headed dollars out at rates of interest often four or five times the amount they are charged. That's not a bad business to be in, this money invention business. No risk, no inventory, no quality control issues, no production lines, no redemptions. It's an endless, effortless conjuring of dollars in exchange for pyramiding interest payments. Now, for a while those early dollars actually had some intrinsic value. For in addition to the fine engraving, scrollwork and serious faces of dead Presidents which adorned our money, dollars carried the words "Silver Certificate" which meant that we could exchange these pretty pieces of paper for real money whenever we wanted. Just knowing that we could was sufficient reason not to bother, which is the idea behind a gold or silver standard. A nation would always have to keep a certain amount of real gold and silver around just in case somebody decided that the paper stuff was... well just paper. This burdensome reality kept paper dollars in check and lent credence to the "promise to pay real money." But how does a government pay for absolute necessities like political pork or endless bureaucracies or - my personal favorite - WAR, when there is a limit to the number of dollars they can print? It's downright restrictive. So, one day, out of the blue, the phrase "Silver Certificate" was erased from the pretty pieces of paper, and in its place we were offered "the full faith and credit" of these Yoonited States of Umericuh. The gold and silver backing our currency went bye-bye and in their place was nothing. Well, not exactly nothing. After all, the government always stands ready and willing to tax us citizens in order to prop up our own currency. You know, take our money away from us in order to keep it worth having. Do you sense something oddly circular about this logic? Whatevvver Finally we had a wonderful world where our government could simply ask that nice private Federal Reserve to print a whole bunch of dollars and charge us a whole bunch more interest and everybody would be happy. That was the moment we became slaves. As none other than Alan Greenspan, chief slave master, warned us 38 years ago, fiat currency is the dirty little secret whereby the government (in collusion with the European bankers who own the Federal Reserve) steals the hard-earned savings of all Americans through the invisible hand of inflation. Alan was a young idealist back then when he let slip the truth. Clearly, he has since gone over to the Dark Side. Now that he is Sir Alan, I expect him to show up at the next Humphrey-Hawkins shindig sporting a Darth Vader costume and a Light Sword. Ever wonder why the Queen of England would knight the head of the U.S. Federal Reserve? Think about it. She isn't chummy with the Rothschilds for nothing. So just how much have they stolen? Well since 1913, they have siphoned off about 97% of the value of the U.S. dollar, which means they have stolen 97% of the assets of America. They have plans to steal even more. This is why I believe that over the past 20 years, governments and bankers have plotted to convince us non-Keynesians that gold is without value. Since gold is constitutional money, they know that as long as no one believes in it, there is no way to measure the theft by inflation that they command. Gold is the Spartacus every central banker fears. So gold (together with its trusty sidekick, silver) has been systematically crucified. Otherwise, left unchecked it might call into question the very foundations of government authority. Sound familiar? What would you call a person who is forced to give 97% of his or her earnings to someone else, without permission? I call them slaves. Slaves to a falsified currency system which impoverishes the knowing and unknowing, alike. So, welcome to the slave camp. Here's your ball-and-chain, err I mean credit card. For the first five months of every year you will be working free in order to pay your government taxes. After that you can share what meager ever-debasing morsels are left with the Rothschilds, the Greenspans, and Her Majesty the Queen, along with all those snotty little royal cousins. Perhaps it is time for each of us to rebel - to throw off the yoke of slavery and reclaim our freedom. "I'm Spartacus!" And
so are you. |
