'The Symbolic Nature Of Money'

from Jim Koconis and dont tread on me...........

"All money in the current monetary system comes into being as an interest bearing  loan from a bank. Our entire money supply is,in essence,a debt obligation to the banking system and must be repaid with interest. These interest charges accrued by the banks pay for the astronomical salaries and benefits to the bank’s officers and shareholders. As grotesque as those numbers are,there are several more pernicious effects at work in the banking scheme which not only contribute to economic injustice,but actually enshrine it:

1. Because the banks do no useful labor themselves in exchange for the money they receive as profits,the nature of the money they receive must necessarily be different,in some way or form,from the nature of the money the laborer receives as payment for his labor. The difference is the difference between form and substance. The physical symbol acquired by both the laborer and the bank are identical in form,as both the laborer and the bank can employ this physical symbol,equally,as a medium of exchange.  But in substance,the money the laborer works for and the money the bank receives as usury are totally different in nature.  To the bank,money is the ‘something’- it has property in and of itself,because it is not hinged to the substance of labor. But to the laborer, money is only the honest symbol of that substance –his labor. When something has ‘substance’ it can also HAVE a value. When something is only a symbol it does not have substance;and what does not have substance CANNOT HAVE a value,it can only REPRESENT a value.  In other words,the bank has devised a method to turn money from a symbol into a ‘thing with substance and value’ in and of itself,unrelated to any useful labor.  It has created a device to impute a value to the symbol [money] itself,as though it were a valuable commodity. And not one person in a million will recognize it. This sleight of hand alchemy is at the core of the banks tremendous power and animates everything it does. This subtle foundational fraud is the reason it is so difficult for most to understand what money actually is and how to relate to it. Is it a symbol or is it the thing itself? Is money the form or is it the substance? As long as the vast majority of people are held in this state of confusion about the duplicitous nature of money the banking system will happily succeed in propagating their illusion that money has value in and of itself. Banks will leverage the public’s befuddlement about money to their tremendous advantage.  The very first tenet of economic justice should be,at the very least,that money must have only one nature and only one meaning. It cannot be one thing to the laborer who must earn it and another thing to the bank that can simply create it. Bankers and the priestly class of orthodox economists juggle the very meaning of the word ‘money’,capriciously,defining it to support whatever fraud they are trying to rationalize. Linguistic acrobatics and sloppy metaphors,so common in financial double speak,are leveraged to obfuscate the truth,not to reveal it. Because honest arithmetic is not on their side,most of the financial system’s apologists are compelled to conscript the mercenary forces of obtuse language to do their dirty work. Their rank poetry might have some entertainment value if the stakes weren’t so high for the common working man struggling to put food on the table.
2. For the banking system to exist it is crucial for it to propagate the concept that money itself has value. The banks have cleverly understood that if it is permitted to claim that money has value in and of itself [and is not simply a symbol of value] they can then,quite logically,assume the preposterous right to sell it to us as though it were a commodity with an intrinsic worth.  If money was universally acknowledged to be only a symbol,then a bank could never hope to convince anyone of its right to rent it,because a symbol,simply,has no value. To be able to charge rent for the use of money [usury],the banks must first firmly establish,in the mind of the renter,the deceptive notion that money actually has a value,because no one would agree to spend their hard earned money on the rental cost of money [usury] if what was being rented had,IN FACT,no value. The rationalization of the legitimacy of charging usury is based solely upon this deliberate and subtle misrepresentation of the very nature and meaning of money. The confusion about the nature of money in the popular mind is the thin edge of the wedge necessary for the banks to assert that usury is an appropriate and legitimate concept,when nothing could be further from the truth. Usury is the subtle fraud of counterfeiting the nature and meaning of money,to be at one and the same time,the symbol of value as well as the thing of value itself. Every religion throughout history has recognized usury to be theft by fraud – plain and simple. Any society,truly concerned about economic justice,has always outlawed usury. And so should we.
3. When banks fabricate ‘money’ and loan it at usury they only create the principal amount. The money to repay the interest is never introduced into the money supply,except through another interest bearing loan. The arithmetic demands that there will never be an adequate supply of money to repay the loans. Someone will always be in debt to the bank without the hope of ever repaying it. It is like trying to fill a bucket with water knowing there is a hole in the bucket.  Simply put,the monetary system in this country and every country in the world is rigged to guarantee that the banks have a steady and constant stream of borrowers. This insures that the banks will be making money forever through ever growing interest remittances –all unearned. To acquire the money necessary to sustain life we are obligated to enrich the banks by purchasing the symbols of our own labor at interest! As preposterous as this reality is,we accept it. We pay to the banks the cost of our own servitude. Can this ever be a tenet of economic justice?".................READ MORE