Using the Bankers' Code Book -- 3

In answer to the worldwide Monday morning stock market blues a few days ago, the Money Changers around the world pulled several billions each out of their well-filled coffers and dumped it wherever they would put it to ease those situations. This was climaxed a day or two later when the U.S.'s big Money Changer, the Federal Reserve Bank, told the American International Group (AIG), the biggest of the insurance biggies, that should they desire to avail themselves of it, loans totaling up to 85 billion were available to help in its hour of desperate need. Yet that hasn't done much to ease the economy jitters. At least not yet.

People are calling this a Government bailout of yet another monster concern, and they're troubled, because after he sent experts to take over the two mortgage holders, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the U.S. Treasury secretary, a man named Paulson, said that was the end of it -- no more bailouts. This shows, then, that contrary to popular belief, the Fed is a government body only in the sense that wearing a pilot's hat made Mohammed Atta an airline pilot, and that in reality the Fed is extra-Governmental, over and above the elected officials, a member of the entity that Andrew Hitchcock says is really in control of things -- the network of Money Changers, the central bankers in every country big enough to serve as hosts for them.

What exactly is money anyway?

It's likely that the Changers didn't have to use much at all in the way of machinery or manpower to provide this financial relief. They didn't have to dig a bunch of gold out of their various Fort Knoxes and ship it somewhere. Instead they just punched a few computer keys and that was it. The money moved.

So, again, what exactly is money? Why is its value so capricious and arbitrary? Why are some people deemed deserving to be given millions merely for being proficient at playing a game of some kind, while many others who do something really important and crucial, such as teaching in high schools, are seen as worthy of being paid only a living wage and little more?

Money appears to be a promise and nothing more. A promise that if you sign on the dotted line, various amounts will appear in your account that others will accept as payment for goods and services, and that therefore will show your monetary worth. But if that's true, and if we all must believe in those promises, than it's no wonder that we are so much at the mercy of the Money Changers and their crews.

It wasn't so long ago that money used to be thought of as representing tangible things that you could hold in your hand and had real value, if only for use in body ornaments. We read about banks holding something called "derivatives" that are worth hundreds of trillions of dollars and that could be "called in" at any time. Just one trillion of anything is a truly enormous number. But with an ounce of gold still costing not much more than a thousand dollars, how can there be that much gold and silver in the world?

Actually it's no longer necessary to make objects out of paper and metal to represent money when you're talking about large amounts of it. That kind of thing just gets in the way. Instead the big dealers in money, the Changers with national treasuries as their handymen, can just make promises and call it money when they believe that more is needed, or they can renege on those promises and go safely back inside their well-guarded gates whenever they find it expeditious to do so.

I have never been comfortable with the whole idea of money, and the feeling must be mutual, judging by how little of it has ever seen fit to come my way. Though I can't say the same for my contemporaries, this must stem from having been born just after the Great Depression started, almost as much as from hearing so much constantly being made over it. So I can come up with notions such as that money, like religion, is only a belief that can produce results, it is true, but in the end still doesn't amount to as much as even the smallest dandelion seed puffed into the wind.

And that's another reason why I take comfort in the scenarios depicted in recent National Geographic and History shows about the world when humans suddenly vanish from it. In these, nothing is said about what remains of either money or faiths, because, unlike pets, dams, or nuclear power plants, they have no real substance. Instead all that remains that relates to them are the edifices thrown up to try to give them substance -- temples all over the place and in the Nevada desert an incredibly garish town -- all destined also to vanish inside Nature's compost piles, in relatively short order.