I find it's a lot livelier when folks party with liquor.

Sawzaw - Here's the thing about the paper money. You remember the old Silver Certificates? USA dollars were once called silver certificates. It said on each dollar that it was a silver certificate, redeemable therefore in silver coins of or equal to the SAME denomination. That meant that a paper dollar was redeemable at any bank for a silver dollar or 4 silver quarters or 10 silver dimes or any other such combination. That was when the dollar was actually worth somethin', cos it was backed up by a precious metal. Gold was also pegged for a long time at $24 an ounce, which meant that the dollar had a real, stable value, backed up by somethin' real.

Not any more! By about the mid-sixties the USA discontinued mintin' silver coins, replacin' 'em with nonprecious metals like copper and nickel...and the silver certificates were phased out and replaced by Federal Reserve Notes....paper money that is backed up by absolutely NOTHIN' real at all...cos it ain't redeemable in any fixed amount of any real and valuable substance. Therefore it's a mere symbol of a supposed value....kind of like Monopoly money...and the Fed (which is a private corporation) now has control of the money supply of the entire USA. The Fed has supplanted the US Government as the entity which actually creates the money...prints it...or creates it on a digital spreadsheet...and the Fed can create any amount of this phony money that it wants to, because it ain't redeemable in any fixed amount of anything real. It is NOT real money. It has no REAL value, but we all pretend that it does, and that keeps the game goin'...just like a Monopoly game.

That permits the Fed and the other big banks who work hand in glove with the Fed to run what amounts to a giant pyramid scheme with money that they create out of thin air...every time they make a loan to the government or to private industry or to another nation through the World Bank and the IMF. They're loan sharks on a giant scale, and the whole world is in hock to them, and they get rich on the interest AND control the politicians through the power of the debt they have put everyone in.

When the bubble bursts, which happens periodically, they get bailed out and the public everywhere is made to pay for THEIR failed pyramid scheme through taxes, inflation, and payin' down the public debt...which is now so huge that it probably can't ever be paid down.

This is graft on an almost unimaginable scale, and it's bankruptin' the entire world.

These bankers oughta be arrested for fraud, and the Federal Reserve Bank oughta be shut down for good, and a new US dollar started up that is created by the government, not by a private bank....and that is redeemable in a stated and fixed amount of something REAL...such as silver coins or gold coins or bullion. It was done before. For a long time. It could certainly be done again. If it was, you'd have a real currency again, a stable currency with a real value, instead of the phony Monopoly money we've got now.

The country is not poor. It has great natural resources, both material and human (plus us primates, of course)...but it's staggerin' under a massive load of unreal DEBT that was created by the bankers and their pyramid schemes of phony money that they created in a Godlike manner with the stroke of a pen. The only way to set America free is to cancel the past mountain of debts from the pyramid scheme and NEVER AGAIN allow the private banks to perpetrate such a scheme or to control the creation of the national currency.

This would require strict regulation of lending practices by banks. That can be done. It should be done.

I still remember when the beautiful silver coins we all took for granted all our lives (till then) started disappearin' out of circulation in the mid-60s and got replaced by nickel-plated copper coins that almost looked okay...only you could see the copper ring around the outside edge. That was a depressin' day. It was the end of real money in the USA, and the beginning of debt slavery to the banks and the Fed. A Federal Reserve Note ain't worth nothin' more than the paper it's printed on...meanin'...it's basically worthless...and you can trade it for the modern USA coins that are also basically almost worthless...cos they are not made out of precious metals anymore.

- Chongo