A FLY IN THE GLOBALIST OINTMENT: LOCAL CURRENCIES
As you might have gathered, much of my email this past week included articles about what's going on in the world of finance, and hence, my focus on it the past two days, and today is no different, because there's an intriguing little story out of the little town of Tenino in the American state of Washington, that just so happened to make the Reuters news service. In fact, quite a few people spotted this story and shared it, so thanks to you all who did so, because I suspect we'll be seeing more and more of this sort of thing:
Money talks: U.S. town prints own currency to boost coronavirus relief
There's something in this article - in fact, two things - that caught my eye:
Tucked away under lock and key in a former railroad depot turned small-town museum in the U.S. state of Washington, a wooden printing press cranked back to life to mint currency after nearly 90 dormant years.
The end product: $25 wooden bills bearing the town's name - Tenino - with the words "COVID Relief" superimposed on the image of a bat and the Latin phrase "Habemus autem sub potestate" (We have it under control) printed in cursive.
With the coronavirus pandemic plunging the United States into a recession, decimating small businesses and causing job losses across the country, some local governments are looking for innovative ways to help residents weather the storm.
For Tenino, the answer was the revival of the local currency that had bolstered the town's economy in 1931 in the wake of the Great Depression.
"It was kind of an epiphany: Why don't we do that again?" Mayor Wayne Fournier told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. "It only made sense."
So, that's the background. But why did tiny Tenino do this? The answer is an eye-opener (but it still isn't what caught my eye):
Mayor Fournier noted that, for long-time Tenino residents, the wooden notes are nothing new.
The tiny town founded around a sandstone quarry achieved national prominence in 1931 when civic leaders printed a wooden local currency to restore consumer confidence after the town's bank failed during the Great Depression.
...
Fournier views the project as the kind of initiative towns and small cities must take upon themselves to survive the coronavirus outbreak amid what he views as an inadequate federal response.
He pointed out that the federal Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), a fund of forgivable loans designed to keep businesses afloat through the pandemic, is not scaled for the businesses in Tenino that have just a handful of employees.
"A federal program dumps money from the top and these blue-chip companies steal it all," Fournier said. "If we do it from the ground up, there's no stealing. It's a direct ballast to Main Street."
In other words, the local currency arose because the federal programs simply were not fitting local circumstances (no doubt this is one reason Reuters-Mr. Globaloney took note). But how did they do it? This is where it gets very very interesting and suggestive:
Fournier said he has already fielded queries from towns across the country looking to emulate Tenino's effort.
"What if 5,000 other small cities did that same thing and took it upon themselves to put $10,000 into Main Street?" he asked.
"That's $50 million directly into small businesses. It totally hacks the system."
So far, however, Tenino's currency does not appear to be circulating much among local businesses.
At the grocery and hardware store that anchors Main Street, manager Chris Hamilton said that by mid-June customers had spent $150 in the local bills to buy necessities like groceries and a new faucet to replace a broken tap.
"I'll redeem it for cash at city hall," he said. "I hadn't thought about recirculating it."
...
Witt cautions that notes backed by U.S. dollars are only a halfway measure, because the amount of local currency available is limited by the amount of federal dollars the town has on hand to exchange it with.
"A truly independent currency would allow for issuing currency as needed," she said.
That "new" money would circulate through the local economy and then eventually go toward paying property taxes over the course of several years, she added.
So, note what we have: (1) a local currency, backed by (2) a reserve, which in this case, are the available federal reserve notes that locality has on hand, say, in its "rainy day fund," and (3) the currency is exchangeable at city hall for the federal reserve notes constituting its "reserve," and (4) because of this, the currency is not generally circulating.
And that's precisely where my high octane speculation comes in. And we may get to that speculation by asking a very simple question: What happens when the nature of the reserve is changed? Let's say a local community decides to go to a more permanent solution, and takes some of its budget to buy, say, gold or silver bullion (the real stuff, and not just paper), or for that matter, to monetize abandoned or seized property, from automobiles, or houses, or other types of hard assets sitting in its impound lots or auction warehouses? With this, the nature of the "reserve" changes from fiat currency (federal reserve notes) to hard assets. Once this decision is taken, the local currency would have material backing, and would probably begin to circulate more generally. Of course, this would instantly require protection (think police), and a thorough and accurate accounting of public assets. Over time, such currencies may consolidate, as localities pool reserves to create more regional solutions and currencies, and to widen circulation...
...well, you get the idea. In a central bankster world increasingly fraudulent, and "going dark", it's an inevitability.
So, how long do you think it will take before cities, counties, even states or provinces, wake up and start making unusual purchases, and monetizing hard assets? Tenino has shown the way. The only missing, and essential, step is changing the nature of the backing... and that, I suggest, is very easily done... and if you think it's impossible, as yourself a very simple question: would you rather do business with Tenino? Or with non-agreement-capable Swampington, D.C.?
Oh... and one more thing... what happens when pension funds jump into this?
See you on the flip side...
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Almost sounds like a “Mr Peabody, Way-Back-Machine” visitation to 2008 when the documentary, “The Money Fix,” came out on video. Current affairs with a few modifications, updates, and new money source investments.
See Goldback.com. Money for Utah. Made from Gold so valuable everywhere I would guess. Beautiful!
Local currencies are a great idea, but do we really believe the federal government will allow them? If they’re not illegal or impractical already, for the reasons OrigensChild pointed out, they’ll just create a law or regs to squash them. It comes down to who makes the rules–and who can use force to enforce them. I could see local/state currencies working in the U.S. if a state seceded from the Union, but that’s been tried before; I’m not sure the conditions today are better for asserting states’ rights than they were in the mid-19th century.
Chances are better for an “Economy of Eggs,” like Melodi describes: local systems of barter springing up spontaneously. We might end up with something like the black market in the old Soviet Union, where there was nothing in the stores but you could get anything if you knew the right people, had a foreign luxury item (like blue jeans!) to trade, or had what they called “hard currency,” which at the time was the U.S. dollar and in the future will be who knows what.
SteveM’s comment “The only true backing of a currency is available manpower” reminded me of none other than Baal G. In June 2019 his company filed a patent application for a “Cryptocurrency System Using Body Activity Data” (https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO2020060606&tab=PCTBIBLIO). The tech described in the patent sounds like something they could use to directly collateralize human manpower and user data.
The purpose of this tech, per the patent: “Human body activity associated with a task provided to a user may be used in a mining process of a cryptocurrency system. A server may provide a task to a device of a user which is communicatively coupled to the server. A sensor communicatively coupled to or comprised in the device of the user may sense body activity of the user. Body activity data may be generated based on the sensed body activity of the user. The cryptocurrency system communicatively coupled to the device of the user may verify if the body activity data satisfies one or more conditions set by the cryptocurrency system, and award cryptocurrency to the user whose body activity data is verified.”
In other words: Got no money cuz you lost your job? No problem! Put on our tracking device and we’ll give you cryptocurrency credits for walking around!
If anyone still believes cryptocurrencies will be used to decentralize, well, I’ll quote from the patent again: “Most blockchain-based cryptocurrency is decentralized in the sense that it has no central point of control. However, blockchain-based cryptocurrency can also be implemented in a centralized system having a central point of control . . .” [emphasis added].
Likely it will be implanted…and mandatory. Check out the Black Mirror episode…sorry, don’t recollect which episode since it was some time ago…living in micro-apartments and bombarded with adverts on all four walls (no, you cannot shut it down), and pedaling on a bike to earn credits.
Someone needs to drop an anvil
onto that patent’s ointment!
This is also a comment.
This is a comment.
Privatization is a code word for fools who imagine that they are gods. Once your organization has several people in it it is no longer private. Because it will be running on faith that no one in that system will betray it by stealing from it.
https://issuu.com/decentrum/docs/william_cooper_behold_a_pale_horse Read Chapter 16. The Story of Johnathan May. He tried,and was,well not treated very well at all.
There was a gentleman named Gottfried Federer. In 1920, he wrote a work called “Manifesto for the Breaking of the Interest Bondage of Money”: Monetize
available manpower combined with financing means without having to resort to bank loans (bills of exchange, e.g. MEFO bills) and there you have it: Independence
and sovereignity.
Gold & Silver are a trap. They always were. The only true backing of a currency is available manpower.
I talked about Feder notes in fact… Anyway, I agree and I guess this is what I was trying to hint at by changing the nature of the reserve. The idea of monetizing labor (productivity) I talked about in Babylon’s Banksters, and indeed, Ayn Rand – through her character Francisco D’Anconia in Atlas Shrugged – outlines a very similar “Federian” doctrine of money.
In your books you`re also making the case for a hidden system of finance. It may well be that this specific hidden system exists for 700+ years. And it might solely be based on human labor.
The pontiffs issued three decrees: in 1302 (Unam Sanctam) Boniface IIV ordered that all living beings were subordinate to him, in 1455 (Romanus Pontifex) Nicholas V separated the newborn child from the right to property, in 1481 (Aeterni Regis) Sixtus IV deprived the child of the right to his body.
I believe it was Wolfgang Eggert, who described in one of his books that each human being`s economic value (at birth) is booked into some sort of supranational collateral accounts.
The current economic value of a human life is valued (in Germany) at EUR 7.5Mio. That`s, e.g., the motor vehicle liability insurance statutory minimum amount of cover
Now, when you reflect the recent mass immigration into Europe (or all so-called first world countries), with all the propagized “highly skilled labor, engineers, doctors etc” it all of the sudden makes sense: have 5 million immigrants economic value booked in at EUR 7.5 Mio each and you clear your balance sheet with the vatican. The show can go on.
SteveM
Now that’s a dangerously good idea.
No wonder it’s been deep sixed![well, pricewise]
Amazon has it at 66 pages for just $69.99.
Now that’s why book monopolies work so well.
No doubt, a pro-monopoly work, at a 1,000 pages, would sell for around 69 cents w/free shipping!
The stock market has gone up the past couple days and gold and silver has skyrocketed at the same time. When the dollar gets stronger gold and silver get dumped for the dollar and lose value. Gold and silver is a hedge against a weakening dollar. Are we seeing the beginnings of massive inflation and the crash of the dollar? If so local currencies are more important than ever!
We’re told this is illegal. I remember the Patriot movements that hinted at this. I was active in a local Tea Party when this was discussed as a potential solution to what was then a wind down of the current Federal Reserve Treasury Act of 1913. Seven years has passed and still no “new economy”. Every time the subject was approached the mantra among monied managers was always the same: “it’s illegal not to collect taxes on bartered goods. Current law assumes these legal tenders are a form of barter. They are frowned upon because they cannot be easily taxed. That is why no state or federal agency will permit such a practice to become too large without direct intervention.” Why is there no new financial system? And, if that system had a solution to the local currency issue, what would it look like? I think these two issues are directly related. But that and $4.50 might buy you a Starbucks latte without taxes.
Sorry, but I sometimes forget the names of these beasties. It’s “Federal Reserve Act of 1913”. This was one of the US’s most egregious pieces of legislation in the history of our republican system. It was neither federal and has no reserves. But it certainly acts.
Loved your concluding…
1913 rat-a-tat, Federal Reserve salvos!
Putting your concluding rounds in my memory chamber, for target practice.
I had mentioned local currencies being in existence months ago going on in some areas of the USA in a vid chat, not addressed to you Dr Farrell but to the group and the consensus was it would not work. I still believe it can once the concept catches on to the public. It’s all about trust.
Financial warfare against the people.
Using the a mild flu as an excuse; their own governments are killing local economies across the country & her local counties.
Like the 1929 to 1939 depression brought on by the FED, the international banking cartel; and a similar treason committed on the Christmas Eve of 1913.
Here the people are again, being stabbed in their financial backs by the 1913 technocratic progenies, spawned by that cowardly act in the dead of night, where not even a mouse was stirring. But, be assured, the dirty rats were stirring black cauldrons of a witches currency brew. Now, black monolithic occulted servers a stirring w/nightmare currency laboratory tests being conducted upon the masked wannabe slaves, to fulfill that promise w/injections of currency vaccines.
Locals are battling another financial war singing, We’ve Done Before, We’ll Do It Again; against the same germ-line of financialized dirty rats.
PPP, is one of the technocrats favorites; their infamous Public Private Partnerships, which really isn’t a partnership at all; it’s neo-feudalism. So the new PPP, Payback Protection Plan is “massive $6 trillion giveaway to Wall Street, banks,, large corporations, and stockholders”
https://michael-hudson.com/2020/04/another-giveaway/
White Rabbit
The way to fight internationalism is locally; county by county; municipality by municipality; State by State; individual by individual; from the ground up resistance that will not comply.
Local currencies are the life blood of communities and have Biblical historical muscle. The Kings gold is it’s major enemy, because he fears organized local communities most.
Love your solution of a hard reserve currency; that really give muscle to the local currency’s legs to move fast and far. Why that’s a local financial virus that can really catch fire; even w/o mainstream coverage. A technocratic nightmare!
White Rabbit
The Smart cities will digitally tokenize these hard assets.
Then watch out.
It’s already being done with real estate and gold in various private businesses.
Why can’t a city entity do it?
In 2008, it was only a couple of weeks after the Irish public found out that our banks had come within about 2 hours of going bust and shutting down (no ATM for YOU!) that we started seeing what I called “The Economy of Eggs.”
It was quiet and our version seemed local to my village but I suspect was repeated in many places, people not only returned to barter, but a lot of things were quietly “priced” in eggs.
Eggs are someone almost everyone has here so it confused me why it would become a currency of sorts, but now I think I am starting to understand.
A locally produced item (cartons of eggs) becomes a way to gauge or underwrite a measure of “exchange” so how many “eggs” is that trade between you and your neighbor you just swapped firewood for hay “worth”…
Interesting times…oh the book I mentioned the other day was Stepfather Bank (I had the title wrong) everyone should read it – there’s a short story version too.
After a crash of 2008 in my neck of the woods (North-East) these local currencies were popping out everywhere. Several towns in MA, CT and upstate NY. At that time I did not follow what happened to them. My suspicion today after all these years is that 2 year unemployment benefits instituted by Obama gov helped a bit in killing them off.
Reportedly, Scrooge McDuck is the treasurer of Disney Dollars.
One would never have thought, that general exposure to Duck tales, would manifest in this way.
Nevertheless, Disney Dollars are real currency, floating in the American Duck pond.
Fantasy is always richness, in value of future potentiality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_Dollars
Benjamin Franklin quotes to contemplate on this topic:
“In the Colonies, we issue our own money. It is called Colonial Scrip. We issue it in proper proportion to the demands of trade and industry to make the products pass easily from the producers to the consumers. In this manner, creating for ourselves our own paper money, we control its purchasing power, and we have no interest to pay no one.”
“Where there is a free government, and the people make their own laws by their representatives, I see no injustice in their obliging one another to take their own paper money.”
“We have no poor houses in the Colonies, and if we had, we would have no one to put in them, as in the Colonies there is not a single unemployed man, no poor and no vagabonds.”
Thanks for finding that quotation Goshawks… if you could give a citation for it I’ll bet everyone would appreciate it.
First quote (Colonial Script):
http://libertytree.ca/quotes/Benjamin.Franklin.Quote.8FB0
“Explaining to Bank of England directors his ideas on why the colonies were so prosperous (1763); as quoted in ‘The Money Masters’ (1995).” (below the quote)
Second quote (free government):
letter from Franklin to M. Le Veillard dated Feb. 17, 1788 – within “Benjamin Franklin, Self-Revealed: A Biographical Sketch and Critical Study Based Mainly on His Own Writings” Vol. II (1917) by William Cabell Bruce
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/36897/36897-h/36897-h.htm
(easiest is to download pdf and search on ‘free government’)
Third quote (poor houses):
referenced as a quote from “Web of Debt” by Ellen Hodgson Brown
ritholtz . com/2013/03/how-the-banking-system-is-destroying-america/
Thanks Goshawks…