The Killing Joke - Chapter 2 of 25

It's not about money. It's about sending a message.

By ICE-9

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Since the inception of the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement, the privately owned Federal Reserve System had been itching to force pure fiat money onto the world’s trading nations.  After WWII ended, Europe and Japan were industrial wastelands, mineral extraction from the European colonial empires had only scratched the surface, and the United States of America and its productive citizens stood ready with freshly printed Federal Reserve Notes to rebuild the world.  Those first twenty years of US Dollar reserve currency supremacy went smoothly as Europe and Japan had to import virtually everything they needed, and paid for much of it in gold backed US Dollars.  Then the 1960s arrived and proved difficult due to the requirement that the public US Treasury hold physical gold to back those private Federal Reserve Notes.  Because once Europe and Japan had rebuilt their industrial bases – courtesy of American taxpayer largesse - they started generating excess foreign exchange reserves by producing and exporting stuff to the now affluent American people with discretionary income.  More and more productive nations – especially the oil producing nations - demanded to exchange their excess US Dollars for physical gold as per the black and white in that Bretton Woods Agreement.  US Treasury gold holdings quickly drained away, dollars piled up at home with nowhere to go, and the situation became dire as the economic stability of the entire free world was at risk. 

The “Freedom” side of that new world order with America atop its apex was facing imminent collapse.

As the early 1970s rolled in, the “free” world’s nascent monetary system was tottering on the brink and something had to be done to keep Europe and Japan out of the Soviet rouble foreign exchange sphere.  The Soviet Union had enough unmined gold resource to construct a competing fractional reserve global monetary system, but it had abandoned its Gold Rouble in 1924 and taken the early fiat money route so to finance industrialization and militarization throughout its sprawling yet contiguous empire.  Had the Soviets abandon their fiat money and started mining that gold in the ground, their return to the Gold Rouble would have proven a formidable competitor to those private Federal Reserve Notes in circulation with their dwindling gold supply behind them.  Thus the American economic science became a race against time to both stave off the depletion of its Treasury gold reserves while keeping the Soviet Union fully occupied so that it could never turn to mining that gold resource to back a revitalized Soviet monetary system.

But the costs to sustain the conventional American army needed to defend King Dollar to the death anywhere and everywhere in the “free” world, at any time, were growing untenable with every passing year of increasing M1 money supply.  “Freedom” after all wasn’t free, it was very expensive when priced in gold but was infinitely cheaper when priced in fiat.  If the United States wanted to print more money to fund this defense, it first had to buy more gold which would quickly get exchanged for those foreign held US Dollars piling up overseas.  This depletion of gold reserve could not continue ad infinitum as there was a bottom to this depletion and that bottom was zero gold reserve.  And that gold holding requirement took money away that could have been spent on fighting wars and expanding the “free” world empire.  But if the United States printed more dollars and did not buy more gold, the price of gold would explode and unleash hyperinflation as the monetary façade was pulled down to reveal the zero balance.  The world’s trading nations would then seek out a stable alternative to those private Federal Reserve Notes, and an opportunistic Soviet Union need only start mining its gold to accomplish that.  Something had to be done to keep the “free” world in the US Dollar sphere while keeping the Soviets fully occupied so they could never get around to mining their gold resources.

If the Vietnam War proved anything, it was that King Dollar’s defense was going to be a long, brutal, and expensive slog and every dollar was needed for the cause.  And as the gold reserves drained away, the United States could not honor the Bretton Woods Agreement and therefore could not print the money necessary to defend its king.  The American political science faced a situation of choosing between solvency and continuous war.  But there had to be a solution to this equation as the only thing standing between the private Federal Reserve System and total world domination was the requirement for the public US Treasury to hold gold reserves to back this world reserve currency.  Although Endless War had yet to commence, global war to force King Dollar on the world and displace the ruble was well under way.  Foreign vassals balked at purchasing US Treasury notes and bills, preferring instead to convert King Dollar into the barbarous relic.  Wall Street on the home front could barely squeeze another basis point of efficiency gain out of a sluggish and mollycoddled yet still productive Joe Six Pack.  And Madison Avenue found it increasingly difficult to pry another nickel out of the frugal and savings-prone American consumption unit.

If the Philosopher Kings behind the Federal Reserve System couldn’t conquer the world with the promises inherent within gold redeemable paper, then what good was that paper when the gold ran out?

King Dollar had had enough with its benevolent reign. So the Philosopher Kings came up with an ingenious plan whereby they would keep the paper and ditch the gold.  The silver was already gone, as they had already ordered President Johnson to get rid of Kennedy’s monetary meddling the Coinage Act (1965), and to get rid of Kennedy back in 1963.  And it was no coincidence that the following year President Kennedy’s face ironically appeared on the silver half-dollar to commemorate the deed and say goodbye to silver money forever.  But what nation in their right mind would exchange the likes of oil, wheat, timber, rebar, cement, sulfuric acid, and all forms of value added manufactured stuff for mere paper IOUs?  Was it that promise of Full Faith and Credit that motivated the trading nations of the world to fall in line and pledge their unwavering loyalty to King Dollar?

No, it was the constant and pervasive fear of being instantly vaporized into ashes.

The problem with privately-owned Central Bank directed “capitalism” is that a good thing is never good enough.  Like a greedy farmer who pushes his plow mule to its demise from exhaustion, the farmer always expects the revenue derived from that dead mule to facilitate not only the purchase of a fresh one, but to generate a profit as well. But to ensure an endless supply of fresh mules, the Philosopher Kings had to first get pure fiat dollars flowing.  After all, the sprawling Soviet empire was built almost entirely with fiat roubles so the precedent had been established.  And to get those pure fiat dollars flowing and accepted without protest anywhere and everywhere in the world, a global state of pervasive and permanent fear had to be conjured.  And that global state of pervasive and permanent fear was going to be a lot more difficult than conjuring up mere paper IOUs.  And it was going to drain a lot of gold out of the US Treasury coffers during the transition into Full Faith and Credit, which would thenceforth stem the drain of gold - because there would be none left to drain - and require nothing more thereafter than the wizardry of conjuring up of more and more paper money ad infinitum.

You see!  You see!  Your stupid minds!  Stupid!  Stupid…!

What the Philosopher Kings needed now was The Economic Science™.

But with every unit of pure fiat money conjured up ad infinitum, the Philosopher Kings had to also conjure up a proportional unit of pervasive and permanent fear ad infinitum.  And The Economic Science™ saw clearly that day coming when the gold ran out and Bretton Woods was obsolete.  The “allies” had inserted that gold holding failsafe in the 1944 agreement to give them time to re-industrialize, at American taxpayer expense, and then grab back the world reserve currency prize once the European Union project with its single currency went operational.  So in 1958 The Economic Science™ convinced the political science to conjure up NASA, with a occult mission to boldly go where no inter-continental ballistic missile had gone before.  It became a race against both time and Russian guidance system technology when in May 1960 these Russians had the audacity to shoot down an American U2 spy plane flying over their country and go demonstrate to the world the obsolete nature of a fixed wing nuclear payload delivery arsenal.

So in November of 1960, NASA took a Jupiter-C launch vehicle out of R&D and attached it to a US Army Redstone rocket and voila!  The American “space program” was born.  But sub-orbital flights crewed by solitary monkeys and Freemasons didn’t quite strike fear into those nations demanding gold for their foreign exchange earnings.  The world didn’t quite get the overt message either, despite the Mercury project named after the messenger of the Gods.  NASA was going to need a bigger and scarier rocket.  And it was going to cost a lot of tax payer money.  It became a race against time before the gold ran out and King Dollar’s proxy army went bankrupt.

We’re gonna need a bigger boatload of fear.

Enter a dead man walking President Kennedy in September of 1962 with his out-of-the-blue pledge to send an American to the moon that nobody ever asked for and nobody really needed.  Except the Philosopher Kings - they got low earth orbit flight with the Gemini project’s Titan-II rockets and the American people got a big yellow smiley face on a super expensive ICBM program.

Space may be the final frontier but it’s made in a Hollywood basement. Where’s the exhaust plume crater? Where’s the dust?  Where’s the stars?

The final pieces fell into place once President Kennedy was out of the way, those United States Notes were hunted down and one-by-one pulled from circulation, and the US Treasury sold off all of its silver reserves. The path to pure fiat was complete with the successful test launch of Apollo 8 and its Saturn V rocket.  The remaining Apollo missions were just public spectacle - they were not about money, they were about sending a message.  A message to the world that the Philosopher Kings aspired to attain the stature of Gods, equivalent to the likes of Apollo, and no mortal henceforth would stand in their way.  The Philosopher Kings had their unassailable ICBM nuclear payload delivery system.  The American taxpayer got Tang and the mounting bills for King Dollar’s defense.

And the world got a state of pervasive and permanent fear.  The world was ready for universal pure fiat.  The world was ready for its march towards the End of History.

I’m afraid it’s broken Mr. Peabody.  There’s just no way we can ever go back again.

And those nuclear armed ICBMs were the Philosopher Kings’ End of History failsafe.  If the Philosopher Kings could not have their End of History where they would reign as gods, then America and the world would have no more history.  One way or another, the age of history was coming to an end.

But how to initiate that united and irreversible march of over 207 million Americans across that End of History finish line?  The Philosopher Kings needed to provide the proper motivation, and that proper motivation needed to be marketed, and that marketing had to get that irreversible march going before the get up and go of The Apollo 11 Show got up and went.

The Economic Science™ had a plan...