Jon Christian Ryter

Eagle

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From The Mailbag

20 years

July 8, 2002

n 1996 the Clinton Administration announced that the federal government was going to redesign the United States greenback in order to make counterfeiting American currency more difficult. The first bill that was changed was Benjamin Franklin’s $100 bill. According to the Bureau of Engraving, the $100 is the most commonly counterfeited bill outside the United States. The next year Ulysses S. Grant got a makeover, followed by Andrew Jackson, Alexander Hamilton and Abe Lincoln. Only George Washington was ignored.
     While the $100 bill is the bill of choice of foreign counterfeiters, American counterfeiters prefer the $20.
     The federal government has been floating the colorful money “trial balloon” since before the first of the year in order to more accurately gauge the reaction of the American people to exchanging their greenbacks for what may look more like “Monopoly money” than real cash. On Thursday, June 20 the Bureau of Engraving officially announced that the transition from greenbacks to a monetary system that more closely resembled the cash used by the rest of world was soon to be a reality. The transition will begin in the summer of 2003 with the introduction of a new $20—that, the Bureau of Engraving assures us—will foil counterfeiters.
     Of course, that is what the government said when they created the high tech hologram and new magnetic threads in the off-centered bills we’ve been using since 1996. Either the technology used in the new greenbacks we carry in our billfolds and handbags was not as good as Uncle Sam said it was—or the U.S. Treasury has a much different reason for discarding the American greenback at this time.
     While the government’s spin suggests that by adding “subtle background colors” they will successfully foil any counterfeiter, the Bureau of Engraving pointed out that adding color is not a security feature. In point of fact the “colorful” currencies used by our neighbors to the South and our allies in Europe and Asia are much more easily counterfeited than the new, “off-center” American greenbacks with the concealed holograms, magnetic threads and hidden watermarks that are now in circulation. The “colorful money” spinmeisters point out that after the Civil War the United States, to get rid of the Union script “fiat money” stigma of the greenbacks that were introduced by Lincoln during the Civil War (and paid for by Lincoln’s illegal income tax to ward off efforts by Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase to create a new central bank in the United States), some banknotes were so colorful that they were dubbed “rainbow notes” by the public. What they failed to point out or acknowledge was the ease by which the “rainbow notes” were counterfeited forced the government to recall them and return to the security of the greenback.
     The Bureau of Engraving has defended the decision to reintroduce “rainbow notes” by claiming that the colors would help people identify the different denominations much the way color denotes the denomination of the Euro. Each Euro, from 1 to 500 has a distinct color with no two bills utilizing the same tones.
     The arguments offered by the U.S. government and the Bureau of Engraving for changing the general appearance of the American currency at this time are deceitful since Uncle Sam is attempting to sell the American people a bill of goods for a very self-centered reason. All of the currencies of all the nations in the world (except Canada whose currencies closely emulated the American dollar) are extremely colorful. To most “world citizens” money is colorful and contains large photos of the current leaders or historic figures. In the minds of the IMF and the Fed, if you want the second and third world nations to accept the American dollar as legal tender in their nations, the transition to dollarization will be easier to achieve if the American dollar at least partially resembles their current national currencies.
     The International Monetary Fund [IMF], the World Bank and the U.S. Federal Reserve System, working in tandem with the United Nations to ultimately achieve a fluid global economy utilizing a single global monetary unit, had originally planned to begin dollarizing the currencies of Central and South America at the end of this year as a condition for allowing those nations to participate in an expanded North American Free Trade Agreement [NAFTA]. (This is the part of the globalist plan to create five regional currencies before merging them into a single global monetary unit somewhere between 2005 and 2007.) The “single America” agreement will be called the Western Hemisphere Free Trade Agreement. George W. Bush was supposed to meet with the leaders of the nations of Central and South America at a remote, difficult-to-reach location in northern Canada in February of this year (to discourage disruptive demonstrators from showing up). Instead of going to Canada, Bush visited France, Germany and Russia...and then paid personal visits to several South American leaders who are expected to dollarize their currencies in exchange for American jobs—as even more American industrial plants shut their doors in the United States and export their entire facilities to Central and South America. But before American industry is willing to invest in these human capital-rich nations to the South, they want to make sure that the economies—and the currencies—of those nations are stable.
     While the United States has agreed to dollarize the currencies of Central and South America, our friends and trading partners in the Americas, based in part on Argentina’s experience, and in part because of America’s massive $112.5 trade deficit, the volatility of the stock market and the drastic slump in consumer sales in the United States, are not eager to be “dollarized.” Added to their fears is an American unemployment rate of 6.2%—the highest level since 1994. Those two fiscal nightmares, colliding at the same time, have impacted the US stock market and the American dollar in the international currency market. First, anticipated tax revenue (based on America’s average household incomes) is off by 40%, creating a budget shortfall for the Bush Administration and wiping out almost half of the $1.2 trillion surplus (that really never existed in the first place). That means thousands of American families that were earning incomes before NAFTA earned far less last year (if they had any earnings at all). That also means that billions of dollars in consumer products that were manufactured in the United States for consumption by Americans remained in the manufacturers warehouses as the American consumers, with less discretionary income to spend, purchased cheap goods from communist China and from the slave labor nations in the Asian rim as America’s trade deficit increased 18.3% during the last quarter.
     (Note: The importation of Asian goods into the United States over the past decade has pretty much destroyed the manufacture and sale of US made softgoods, electronics and other durable goods in this country.
     The net result for America’s premiere manufacturers from 1994 to 1997 was has plummeting stock values with America's premiere branded goods suddenly being produced in the Asian rim nations). As employment plummeted in the United States due to NAFTA’s job drain to Canada and Mexico, unemployment skyrocketed in the United States as stock prices even higher than the ;number of Americans who lost their jobs. At this moment, discounting the fact that the Dept. of Labor does not include jobless workers who no longer qualify for umemployment benefits in their statistics, nor do they include unemployed people who give up looking for jobs that no longer exist..
     As Americans have learned since the collapse of Enron and the threatened collapse of MCI-Worldcom, Corporate America’s financial shape is not as rosy pink as Wall Street made it appear. Creating the utopian’s dream of a global economy has had, and will continue to have, long term consequences for the advantaged nations. They will become disadvantaged as the jobs which supplied generational financial security for America’s communities are suddenly and surreptitiously given to the human capital of the emerging nations. As jobs leave the United States like water through a sieve pandemic unemployment results. With fewer customers available to buy American-made consumer products, sales in the retail sector necessarily had to fall. Declining retail sales (further compounded by increased buying by American consumers of cheap foreign goods) necessarily results in declining revenue and shrinking profits for those manufacturers who remained headquartered in the United States.
     Tragically the migration of America’s jobs is needed by the transnational industrialists to protect their corporate bottom lines. Over the past four decades American industrialists have watched their profits shrink to nothing because America (and the other industrialized nations) have become nothing more than “replacement markets” for existing consumers because there are not enough “first time” buyers available to sustain Corporate America’s growth needs. The United States has reached a product saturation level of 99.999%. Productivity in America’s industrial plants has to be deliberately curbed because there is no market for the consumer products that could be created. As a result, America’s factories produce goods at 48% of the capacity. Added to that dilemma is the increasing demand of American workers for company-paid fringe benefits. Lengthy vacations, stock options, enhanced retirement programs, health care and life insurance paid for by the employer, and workplace regulations mandated by the federal government combined with unemployment insurance costs add substantially to the amount Corporate America is obligated to pay for each employee on their payroll.
     The hidden costs management assumes to utilize the human capital of the United States is the reason the transnationalist industrialists urged the redefinition of wealth based on human capital in the mid-1990s. “National wealth” (for the purpose of borrowing from the IMF or the World Bank) in the 21st century will be gauged not in terms of a nation’s capital assets, natural resources or mineral wealth but by the availability of people to purchase the products created in the global work place.
     In other words, for the capitalistic global market economy to continue to grow in the 21st century new customers must be found to purchase the products created by the transnational industrialists since the industrialized nations, due in part to abortion-on-demand, are no longer replacing the population they lose through normal attrition. Those new consumers reside in the population-rich nations of the world: Mexico, Central and South America, Africa, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, China and the other Asian rim countries. The problem is that while an abundance in human capital exists in these nations, those populations, if employed, have incomes of less than $1,000 per year—and in many cases, less than $200 per year. In most third world nations the available labor pool can’t even afford to pay for basic shelter and nourishment. They have no discretionary income with which to purchase “luxury” items like a second pair of shoes, a second pair of trousers, or a jacket heavy enough to protect them from inclement weather.
     For the transnational corporations to create the utopian global economy they need to grow their companies and protect their bottom lines, they must provide jobs for the unemployed masses in the third world who have been earmarked as the new consumers of the 21st century. They are the human capital of the international bankers and transnational job providers. They have already been designated not only as the new consumers but the new taxpayers of the next three decades. But first, they need a steady job—your job.
     And, that’s the rub. The transnational industrialists who brought their factories to their third world colonies early in the 20th century and the American industrialists who financed the industrial growth of the third world nations at the end of the Empire Age at the conclusion of World War II learned, much to their dismay, that when the former European colonies declared their freedom from their colonial overlords, “freedom” was short-lived in these new nations. In most instances, even before freedom could be sampled, despots overthrew the new governments and totalitarian dictatorships—either fascist or communist—were formed. The capital investment the industrialists made in the emerging economies of those nations was lost. As the economies of those third world nations collapsed, the factories, without markets to sell their wares, closed their doors. The capital equipment needed to turn the gears of progress lay idle, rusting into piles of worthless scrap metal over the next three or four decades. Countless billions of dollars of capital expenditures were lost by the transnational industrialists who learned that before they could afford another costly social experiment in the third world they needed to control the economies of those nations.
     Since Amschel Meyer Rothschild so prophetically said during the 19th century: “Give me the power to coin the money and I care not who controls the reins of government,” the money barons of the world have learned that adage was “truth” in its purest form.
     Learning hard economic lessons during the post-war years, the transnational industrialists (who no longer profess allegiance to any nation), will not relocate their factories—and our jobs—to the emerging economies of the second and third world until they know their capital investments in those economies are secure.
      Using the World Bank and the IMF to leverage second and third world nations requiring loans, the international banking community began forcing those nations to “dollarize” their currencies as a both a condition of the loan and a condition of securing favorable trade concessions from the United States. Argentina’s experience, however, soured our Western Hemisphere neighbors on the notion of pegging their monetary system on the American dollar (since the dollar is used in Argentina as gold was used in America when the United States was on the gold standard) since it prevented Argentina from printing more currencies when the need for money arose. This led to Argentina robbing the pension funds not only held by the Argentine government but the industries of Argentina as well. Bankrupt, Argentina is now looking for a major bailout. To get it—and jobs from America—the Argentine government must agree to convert their currency from the Argentine peso to the American dollar. The IMF, the World Bank has demanded that, as a condition of participation by all Central and South American nations in the forthcoming Western Hemisphere Free Trade Agreement, those nations must agree to convert their national currencies to the America dollar. However, there has been a reluctance on the part of all of these nations—as there was with the States of Europe who resisted the Euro—to replace their national monetary systems with the American dollar since the dollar is controlled by the private bankers who own the United States Federal Reserve System. Each of these nations know that whomever controls their monetary system ultimately controls them. What the transnational money barons believe is a mistrust of the American greenback (because it looks so different from their own currencies) is, in reality, an inherent mistrust for the motives of the international bankers who are making these demands on them. The fear, which is spurring a communist renewal around the world, is that the transnational industrialists and international bankers are attempting to usurp the sovereignty of all of the governments of the world in order to line their own pockets. And, of course, that is precisely what they are attempting to do. That is the core objective in any free enterprise market economy. National borders have always served as barriers to trade—and to the profits sought by the bankers, the industrialists and the global businessmen who peddle the wares manufactured throughout the world.
     Just as the merchants of Europe understood at the ends of both World War I and World War II that for the nation-states of Europe to exist side-by-side in harmony, the national borders that interfered with free trade would have to be erased, and a single European nation created in its place. The core problem that existed with the creation of the European Economic Community was that each “partner nation” kept their own national currency and with it, sovereignty over both internal and external affairs. Variations of the EEC were born and died during the 60 years that have elapsed since the end of WWII. Each failure was attributed to the lack of a unified currency—and a superior extra-national government that would deal with multilateral sovereignty issues: those dealing with international economic, societal and political issues.
     Today 15 European nations have surrendered external sovereignty to the European Union and the Euro has supplanted their national currencies as legal tender. The Euro is the first of four or five regional currencies that will replace 185 national currencies. The “American” dollar (as opposed to the United States dollar) will be the second of four major regional currencies. (There is a question of whether there will a fifth currency for Australia, New Zealand, Borneo and the islands of the South Pacific, or if those nations will become “Euroized” because of Great Britain’s role in that area—or if Australia and New Zealand will convert their pounds to the soon-coming unified Asian or African monetary units.)
     It is the view of the money barons behind the Federal Reserve, the World Bank, the European Central Bank and the central banks of nation-states of Europe that much of the hesitation by the governments of Central and South America to accept the “American” dollar as legal tender (jointly at first, then as a replacement to their existing national currencies) is due more to the “greenback” appearance of the American dollar than it is to the risk of the loss of sovereignty to the United States since the nation-states of Europe who are member states of the European Union now seem to be prospering more than they did prior to their admission into the Union.
     The task before the bankers is a multifaceted problem. They must redesign the American dollar to make it appear similar enough in appearance that the peoples of the Western Hemisphere nations will readily accept it as their own money.
     And because of that view, the American dollar will slowly be modified to make it more compatible to the mindset of the consumers in Central and South America and, at the same time, not to adjust it too dramatically that it is rejected by the American people who are already very suspicious of the motives of its government.