I can’t help but sometimes post something like this which if read by any teacher from my past would undoubtedly make them feel a miserable failure. Even still, I will brave the shame of proving I am only marginally literate because I think this thought is important.
I was thinking about what Woodrow Wilson said in his twilight years and how tilted his commentary was toward the anguish he experienced after signing the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. He regretted it, but signed it because he was scratching the backs of those who scratched his back… now we all feel, well, scratched. He said that he had ruined the country unwittingly, but I think that in itself is not quite honest. He should have said he knowingly ruined the country for his own political gain. He knew when he made the deal to sign the act it was a bad thing for the country. No doubt he probably figured it would happen sooner or later anyway because the international bankers always get their man. To read the sanctioned history, the act was supposed to provide an “elastic money supply”. This is a trick of language meant to confuse you into thinking a monetary system based on the full faith and credit of the US government cannot work. Put simply, it can.
I was thinking about our current situation and how much it feeds back to that fateful act of signing a bill into law by a President long departed. Nowadays it is a distant and ignored fact of history that our monetary policy, indeed control of our very currency, was annexed to a private organization in 1913. It is also an unknown to even the most educated among us in society that the Federal Reserve Banks are private corporations controlled by a board that is loosely tied to our government. Without spending too much time on this topic, we are now of course subject to the “business cycle” which is generally accepted now as a natural economic occurrence. We also now have experienced outright depression and many harsh downturns, and a few recessions, all because of the decisions of the money changers of the federal reserve system and the central banks of the world. I’ve also laughed out loud at people who try to blame the current economy on the poor for having the GALL to buy houses using money lent to them by banks. How DARE the poor have a place to live! This is sheer lunacy, of course. Our entire economic system is Enron times 10 trillion. But this isn’t my central point. My observation is that we’re entering into a strange and terrible darkness, and I think we will be a different group of people when we find our way to enlightenment.
I have spent considerable time talking to the elders in my family about tough times in the past. The Great Depression in particular marked their upbringing and fixed in their minds the realities of life and how fleeting money can be. It made many of them regard banks with contempt. On the one side of my family there were farmers. What has always struck me was while things were tough, money was pretty well not existent, they always brighten up when they punctuate the story with how they always had plenty to eat. They worked the fields against merciless heat, from can see to can’t see, and always had plenty. They admired their fathers and mothers and appreciated the smallest things, wearing flour sacks to school. It’s something that they yearn for those days when it was so tough.
It was one of “those” times. I look at them with respect primarily because they lived through and kept their dignity. Maybe their dignity was etched by the difficulty of those times. Maybe their own relationships were realized because of the same reason. I wasn’t there, but my perspective is they had much to be thankful for in a time where much of what we habitually covet was in startlingly short supply.
Today, we are facing a terrible reality of our own and the effects are global and huge. I read today that Panasonic, a Japanese company will be letting 5% of their workforce go. 5% isn’t bad, right? Well, it’s 15,000 people. No doubt many of them will be in Japan, but many will be right here in the US and other countries. And the worst part of all is those jobs were secure in November when a profit was predicted by that company. Now they’ve lost 10’s of BILLIONS of dollars. How can so much change for so much worse in such a short time? This is really just the beginning too. We’ve already seen the list of employers cutting back growing by leaps and bounds.
I predict that in 30 years when this economic cycle is completely behind us we will have been changed by it. I predict our children and grandchildren will look at us and think to themselves that we lived through “those” times. I predict we will be forced to find new strengths in each other and ourselves before this is over. We’ve all been touched by this already. The genius reporters at CNN reported how many people are moving back in with parents, shacking up with friends and making other such arrangements because they have lost their homes. What would you do if you lost your home? Would you move in with your parents or friends? I hope you have family and friends to group together with and make things work. I think those people are the luckiest of all.
Even though I am a cynic and a skeptic about significant change coming from Washington, I believe there will be change simply because our ways of living are not sustainable in their current form.
I strongly feel it is time to get the money changers out of Washington and out of the driver’s seat. We mistakenly call countries “companies” because we do not see the line between them. We’ve worked hard to separate church and state. At the same time, we’re merging business with governance and we’re completely blind to the errors. Our answer is not in corporate welfare or even social welfare. Our answer lies in our gut and our resolve to do things differently. And yes, we’ll have to all make the change at once. That kind of unity will only come after we have hit rock bottom.