A modest proposal for a new currency

The war between fiat paper money and precious metals continues as the price of gold keeps going through the roof and the US paper debt-currency submerges.

For the uninitiated, the convenience of fiat money is that you can make it out of air with transferences of numbers from the red to the black side of the accounting page, adding usurious interest if you’re the Fed. This is aided and abetted by the sophisticated electronic computing and accounting systems of our time. You can have also have paper currency that is backed to some degree by gold, but those days are over for the US since 1971 when it was taken off the gold standard.

You see, with gold or silver you have an intrinsic value to the peg (the precious something) that holds the value of the paper or metal currency. The precious metal is valued for its rarity, utility, even its beauty. It can be used to make jewelry, or be the currency itself, as with Kadhafi’s dinar. So you’ll never be stuck holding a bag of gold the way you can lose your shirt holding a bag of deflated or hyper-inflated paper, dollar, franc, peso, etc. Of course, the relative values of gold have some volatility according to supply, manipulation, or it reaching a peak price. It can drop but it will come back sooner or later. Paper will just fall like Charmin into the bowl and flush.

This underlines the fact that with paper money, particularly fiat money (created on demand without further backing), there is no safety net. A dollar could end up needing 999,999 more dollars to have a dollar’s value, as in the Somalia million-dollar bill. That’s how depressed and/or over-inflated it has become.

This is why the oldest currencies in the world were precious metals or precious stones, with intrinsic value. The goldsmiths of 17th Europe discovered something else about gold. Since they had the strongest safes, owners of gold would keep their cache of gold with them for a slight fee. But the goldsmiths discovered that at any given time only 10 percent to 20 percent of the gold was lent out. The rest lingered there collecting expensive dust. And so they began lending out the stored gold, keeping the 10 to 20 percent reserve and the new profits. This gold tradition unfortunately became the same for gold-pegged paper or no-gold paper.

But, paper or fiat (make it as you go along) money also can multiply its value by lowering the reserve of cash or gold to cover the number of times you wish to lend a parcel of money. For instance, for every $10 that you lend, you must hold one dollar (or 10 percent of it); that is the reserve. If though, as with Goldman Sachs, your lending number goes up to 38 times the reserve number, as in $1 held for every $37 lent, then you have a vast difference. A million in reserve is capable of backing $37 million in loans. You can also make side bets with the funny money on the value of assets you don’t even own that they will go up or down in the dark world of derivatives.

Curiously, given our extreme use of fossil fuels, US currency became pegged to oil, becoming the petro-dollar. As our use of oil and the cost of our wars increased, that put pressure on the dollar’s value. Also, the massive transfer of US jobs to outsourcing created a run on jobs, which created a shortfall in consumer spending as well as a shortfall in capital for expansion, which only increased the banks’ proclivities to manufacture liquidity from sub-prime loans, and then to bundle and securitize them, so that they could be peddled as CDO’s, Credit Default Obligations as objects of investment. The massive collapse in this fraudulent liquidity scheme almost totally toppled the US economy. And it can do so again.

Thus, since we are nowhere near recreating a precious metal currency, the thought arises that we might use another of our precious commodities: our war machine. Our currency would be pegged to the value of our war machine: total guns, tanks, drones, atomic weapons, depleted uranium, side arms, rifles, cannon, trucks, name it. In fact, instead of our founding fathers on the face of dollars, we could use a drone for a $50, a shock and awe bomb for a $10,000 bill, and so on. On the reverse, instead of the pyramid (signifying the NWO top-down power structure), we could replace the open, all-seeing eye (representing intelligence), and use a mushroom cloud. It would make a striking bill. Perhaps it could be issued in tandem with Treasury and the DOD, since so much of it goes to defense. And we could fire the Fed and its usurious interest rate on our tax dollars.

A dollar could also have the face of a bullet instead of George Washington, a dum-dum bullet for a ten-spot, and so on. Think of a $500 bill with a Stealth bomber coming at you. That would be a currency that would speak for itself. Our gold is our untold wealth of weaponry. All currency could be signed by the head of the DOD, Eric Prince, and the Treasury Secretary, utilizing the magic of threes for power. US dollars would carry the force of our fighting machine, now in at least four military actions, in its hegemonic march about the globe, which would make a great quarter, a silver globe ringed by a troop movement across its diameter.

Here’s a currency that would have an intrinsic value, reminding people who we are, and serve as a collector’s item. Of course, the cost of all this weaponry and war in total might weaken its impact some, but it’s the concept that counts. As we used to say in the advertising business, it’s a “big idea.” No gold? Redesign the money to fit your world image. The money buys you respect, not to mention a bit of fear. Of course in hard times, one must think out of the barrel, so to speak. But it’s a great way to rebrand America, whose war machine is its money, whose money is its war capacity. And don’t forget it, which could be as big as “Never forget.”

Do we still call it a dollar? Or is it a Mili-dollar? Or Mi-Dol? And perhaps we put a slogan on it, “In War We Trust” for just the right bolt to the eye. Anyone who looks at our new Mili-Dollar will be reminded that if we go down, so does everyone else. That mushroom cloud on the other side will reinforce that concept. We can get the latest designer of the new Freedom Tower at the WTC to do some specs, front and back. The new bills can be filtered into the economy as the old bills (and their obligations) are phased out. Anyone who has a problem with that can call the Secretary of Defense or Mr. Prince of World-Wide R-2. He has restructured for new business.

Perhaps a naming contest is on order, too, with a prize of $1,000,000 of the newly named dollars. Also, there will a two week-vacation in Hawaii to verify President Obama’s long-form birth certificate. The only requirement is two years mandatory service in the Armed Forces, either before or after entering the contest. The winner’s drawing will be at the Aberdeen Testing Grounds in sun-filled Maryland. Contest entries are limited to one to family. The winner will be notified by guided missile. Entrants have to be 18 years of age or older. Good luck to all and God bless!

Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer, life-long resident of New York City. An EBook version of his book of poems “State Of Shock,” on 9/11 and its after effects is now available at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. He has also written hundreds of articles on politics and government as Associate Editor of Intrepid Report (formerly Online Journal). Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.