While my fellow Americans and UR students, professors and faculty spent Jan. 20 celebrating the triumph of democracy and the emotional fervor of ‘change,” I spent my day grieving the death of the Constitutional Republic. I’m sure many readers are under the impression that America was founded as a democracy, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. The words of the father of the Constitution, James Madison, stand out in bitter opposition to democracy. ‘Democracy is the most vile form of government…democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as violent in their deaths.”
These powerful words have all but lost their meaning. A republic, created by the Constitution, is a framework of government that protects an individual’s freedom from the tyranny of the majority. Inalienable rights to life, liberty and property were subject to seizure under the oppressive weight of democratic governments, where, for example, 51 percent of a misled public could enslave 49 percent. Tyranny of the majority is in full swing nowadays, as the public clamors for the Obama administration to continue with ‘economic stimulus.” I, for one, do not want my tax dollars spent on saving failed companies. Should I be forced to loan money to Wall Street?
This supposedly unforeseen economic crisis was in fact a predictable consequence of a fiat (paper as legal tender) currency in a fractional reserve banking system. Most people believe inflation is rising prices, but that is the symptom, not the cause. Inflation is artificially increasing the money supply, which then decreases the purchasing power of each dollar, thus forcing prices to rise. This steals purchasing power from every single person who is holding dollars, plain and simple. The Federal Reserve system loots the nation’s wealth. It then redistributes this wealth on a mass scale to the government and corporations suckling at the government’s tit, since they get to spend the money before the market can readjust to the increase in money supply.
The artificial lowering of interest rates by the Fed induced banks to ‘lend” (create) money while only holding a 1:10 ratio of reserves for liabilities. People then misallocated capital, because they could borrow money that should never have existed. Then this newly created money was speculated in leveraged markets (CDS, derivatives)!
The economist most widely known for engineering our financial system, John Maynard Keynes, said it best: ‘By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.” So far, the Fed has stolen 97 percent of the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar since 1913, and now they’re here for the coup de gras: the collapse of the dollar.
However, our democratically elected leaders have democratically voted to march forward with propping up a failing financial system with the ever-ready printing presses. Would a republic ever allow for this sort of wealth confiscation from the general public? Never. A currency belongs to the people, not to a private banking corporation and government regulators. The Founding Fathers were well-versed in looting strategies associated with the power to issue currency. For that reason, money was legally defined in the Constitution as gold and silver coin, which curtailed the supply of money in society, thus keeping spending and monetary abuses in check.
Thomas Jefferson said, ‘If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation then by deflation, the banks and the corporations will grow up around them, will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.” Jefferson’s words are an eerily accurate description of the record number of foreclosures and bankruptcies that America has faced the past few months and will continue for years to come, thanks to the economic policy of ‘change.”
On Jan. 20, millions of Americans unwittingly celebrated the destruction of our forefathers’ hard-earned liberty and freedom from the clutches of corporatist oppression. Ben Franklin noted that the prime cause of the revolution was the fact that King George III required the colonies to use the inflationary system of the Bank of England. Much like our forefathers, the state’s and the major international bankers’ monopoly over money has put us on the brink of disaster. Promises of hope and change are fruitless. What we need is revolution led by the principles of liberty, freedom and the Constitution.
Sukenik is a member of
the class of 2010.
