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The subversive messages hidden in The Wizard of Oz

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Re: The subversive messages hidden in The Wizard of Oz

#61
post #6

From "Debt, The First 5000 years": L. Frank Baum’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which appeared in 1900, is widely recognized to be a parable for the Populist campaign of William Jennings Bryan, who twice ran for president on the Free Silver platform – vowing to replace the gold standard with a bimetallic system that would allow the free creation of silver money alongside gold. … [O]ne of the main constituencies f…

How far we've drifted as a nation. People then seemed to realize the danger of fiat money, yet The Federal Reserve Act was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson on December 23, 1913, when most lawmakers had already left the Capital for their home states -- and it passed on a simple majority of those present vote. The Federal Reserve (a cabal of international banks that is not part of the…

Hi. Recovered crackpot here. You're stuck on a few ideas, routinely propagated by people overwhelmed by the complexity of the interface between global economics and politics, and made attractive by their apparent simplicity, that I have previously considered, and already thought myself out of.

The Fed:

The Fed is a pseudo-governmental organization, like the Postal Service or the Federal National Mortgage Association ("Fannie Mae"). It has a variety of member banks, but they do not control the Fed. They disproportionately benefit from it, but they are not directly in charge. The Fed is their cartel enforcer; none of them could trust the others to run it fairly. It has to be independent of the banks. And it has to be independent of politics. It is its own selfish little entity, with a [public] dual mandate of ensuring full employment and low [demand-pull] inflation. It can never truly succeed at both, but it can certainly fail at both.

Your concerns seem to be focused on fiat money. The actual danger, adequately managed by the Fed, is fractional reserve banking. When left un-cartelized, fractional reserve wreaks havoc on the money supply, and asymmetric settlements eventually cause banks that are too profligate with their lending to fail, and those not profligate enough to be outcompeted. The Fed standardized the reserve fraction, so that the member banks could lend money that did not previously exist and charge interest on it, making debt into the largest part of the monetary basis, and real savings and production into a minority contributor.

The secondary private mandate of the Fed is to manage the reserve ratio and settlement rates such that no individual bank can get greedy, go rogue, and destroy the whole system that otherwise makes a whole lot of people a whole lot of money for doing very little actual work.

Don't get me wrong. The Federal Reserve System is a great way for the rich to stay rich and keep the poor from rising, and there is no social justice in the system it manages. But it is a perfectly reasonable technical solution for greedy bankers destroying the whole economy via exuberant overreach--which they would otherwise do (more frequently) if left unchecked. If you assume greedy bankers will always exist, the Fed is the lesser evil. They actually are stealing some of your hard work and giving it away to rich people, but probably nowhere near as much of it as you think, and you do benefit from their work more than you may expect.

There is nothing inherently bad about fiat money. Money in its purest form is just a mutually agreeable unit of accounting. As long as there exists some fair process for matching the size of the money supply to the current level of economic activity, fiat money works fine for everyone. Counterfeiting is what spoils it. And lending additional money into existence based on fractional reserves of currency is counterfeiting-by-the-law. It's a similiar unethical con to "naked short-selling".

JFK:

The exact reason why JF Kennedy was assassinated is now indeterminate. There isn't enough forensically-reliable evidence remaining to support any postulated conspiracy, or ascribe motive to any of their principals. Personally, I favor the hypothesis that he was killed by racists to delay or reverse civil rights gains for minorities. The red-sealed direct-issue US notes, to replace green-sealed Fed notes, are a long-shot motive hypothesis, at best.

We don't know why JFK was killed. It is no longer possible to answer those questions or verify those claims. Thinking about JFK is probably going to be a time-wasting distraction from questions you can actually answer via independent analysis. There are just so many holes in the JFK story now, you can easily project onto it, which is only going to tell you more about yourself than anything about the real world. So drop it, if you can. There are plenty of stories from this century that you can look into. Why not try to prove that SCotUS justice Scalia was murdered?

Spending:

The spending free-for-all is... wait... what spending free-for-all? Rich folks are stockpiling cash, loaning it, and investing it, not spending it. There's no [demand-pull] inflation, because the money the Fed (and its member banks) is creating is never actually making it to the pockets of consumers.

Re: The subversive messages hidden in The Wizard of Oz

#62
post #45
post #6

From "Debt, The First 5000 years": L. Frank Baum’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which appeared in 1900, is widely recognized to be a parable for the Populist campaign of William Jennings Bryan, who twice ran for president on the Free Silver platform – vowing to replace the gold standard with a bimetallic system that would allow the free creation of silver money alongside gold. … [O]ne of the main constituencies f…

About as reliable a theory as this part: >Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other’s garages. https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2012/02/gabriel-rosser-on-dav...

I stopped reading Debt when he described the Susan B. Anthony dollar coin as "made of a copper-nickel alloy designed to look vaguely like gold". The Susan B. Anthony dollar is the same color as all the other circulating coinage of the time excluding pennies obviously. Did he seriously confuse Susan B. Anthony dollars from the early 80s with the currently circulating Sacagawea dollars? I know numismatics is only tangentially related to the history of finance, but it's related enough that he could have taken five minutes to check. I remember when he got denied tenure by Yale he went on Charlie Rose and had all these conspiracy theories about union organizing. Maybe his research was just shoddy.

Re: The subversive messages hidden in The Wizard of Oz

#63
post #6

From "Debt, The First 5000 years": L. Frank Baum’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which appeared in 1900, is widely recognized to be a parable for the Populist campaign of William Jennings Bryan, who twice ran for president on the Free Silver platform – vowing to replace the gold standard with a bimetallic system that would allow the free creation of silver money alongside gold. … [O]ne of the main constituencies f…

> The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which appeared in 1900, is widely recognized to be a parable for the Populist campaign of William Jennings Bryan, who twice ran for president on the Free Silver platform – vowing to replace the gold standard with a bimetallic system that would allow the free creation of silver money alongside gold. This is more "crackpot theory" than "widely recognized". > the Scarecrow represented the f…

> It's a major theme of the novel that they all already have the things they claim to need.

But that still fits the message. They needed to learn that they have what they're looking for.

(which isn't to say I have any opinion about whether it's a crackpot theory or not)

Re: The subversive messages hidden in The Wizard of Oz

#65
post #6

From "Debt, The First 5000 years": L. Frank Baum’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which appeared in 1900, is widely recognized to be a parable for the Populist campaign of William Jennings Bryan, who twice ran for president on the Free Silver platform – vowing to replace the gold standard with a bimetallic system that would allow the free creation of silver money alongside gold. … [O]ne of the main constituencies f…

> The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which appeared in 1900, is widely recognized to be a parable for the Populist campaign of William Jennings Bryan, who twice ran for president on the Free Silver platform – vowing to replace the gold standard with a bimetallic system that would allow the free creation of silver money alongside gold. This is more "crackpot theory" than "widely recognized". > the Scarecrow represented the f…

> the Scarecrow is the intelligent one, who solves all the problems the group encounters. The Tin Woodman is the empathetic one, who constantly worries about inadvertently harming anything else. And the Cowardly Lion is the brave one, always volunteering to put himself at risk for the benefit of the group.

I saw that once a year on TV in the 60's, but didn't notice this until much, much later. Heck, I didn't even notice the poppies on the wallpaper on the farm until someone pointed it out to me.

(Hangs head in shame)

Re: The subversive messages hidden in The Wizard of Oz

#66
post #6

From "Debt, The First 5000 years": L. Frank Baum’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which appeared in 1900, is widely recognized to be a parable for the Populist campaign of William Jennings Bryan, who twice ran for president on the Free Silver platform – vowing to replace the gold standard with a bimetallic system that would allow the free creation of silver money alongside gold. … [O]ne of the main constituencies f…

How far we've drifted as a nation. People then seemed to realize the danger of fiat money, yet The Federal Reserve Act was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson on December 23, 1913, when most lawmakers had already left the Capital for their home states -- and it passed on a simple majority of those present vote. The Federal Reserve (a cabal of international banks that is not part of the…

Claim:

> The Federal Reserve Act was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson on December 23, 1913, when most lawmakers had already left the Capital for their home states

The bill passed the House of Representatives by an overwhelming majority of 298 to 60 on December 22, 1913. The bill passed the Senate by a vote of 43 to 25 on December 23, 1913. That's 60% of those voting.

There were 96 Senate seats in 1913, and 71 senators were present for the vote on the final version of the bill. Of those present, 43 voted for the bill, 25 voted against, and 3 did not vote because of vote pairing. 24 senators were absent and 1 seat was empty because of a recent death.

The pages from the Congressional Record that show the vote and the vote pairing are here (PDF): http://www.llsdc.org/assets/FRAdocs/fra-lh_v51-cr-1487-1488-...

An earlier version of the bill passed the Senate on December 19 by a vote of 54 to 34 (an absolute majority). Only one Senator who voted for the bill on December 19 changed his vote to nay on December 23. This was George Perkins (R), Calif.

If all senators had voted, the vote would have been 57 votes in favor of the bill. There would be 50 Democrats, plus one Progressive —Miles Poindexter— and 6 Republicans: Jones, Norris, Weeks (who all voted for the bill), as well as Crawford, Fall, and Sterling (who were absent but would have voted for the bill).

Of course, any Congress could repeal the Federal Reserve Act. It has been amended dozens of times since 1913.

Claim:

> The Federal Reserve (a cabal of international banks that is not part of the US Government) seized control of the US monetary system

The Federal Reserve System includes an indepent federal agency, the Board of Governors, led by 7 governors who are nominated by the president of the United States and approved by the United States Senate.

It also includes 12 regional Federal Reserve Banks, each a separate corporation. Each district Bank has 9 directors, 6 chosen by the member banks in the district, and 3 chosen by the Board of Governors (the federal agency). Each bank gets two votes for directors. If there are multiple banks in the district owned by the same company, only one of those banks can vote for directors.

Federal Reserve member banks consist of all national banks plus those state-chartered banks that choose to belong. There were more than 1,600 member banks at the end of 2018: https://pastebin.com/iiDR4Za4

Claim:

> Even though the constitution still describes the value of a dollar as a specific weight of gold

Nope. https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcri...

Claim:

> President John F. Kennedy voiced support for returning America to the Gold Standard.

Sounds like the Executive Order 11110 myth. This was part of JFK's plan to eliminate silver certificates.

Re: The subversive messages hidden in The Wizard of Oz

#67
post #50
post #17

How does all of this connect with The Dark Side Of The Moon?

Watch Wizard of Oz with the sound off. Just as the MGM lion finishes roaring, drop the needle[1] onto the Dark Side of the Moon LP, and watch as the songs sync up to the imagery. -- [1] Or un-pause the CD/MP3 etc.

Or, you know, YouTube[0].

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtExVJlgEC0

Re: The subversive messages hidden in The Wizard of Oz

#68
post #51

This kind of thing is why I love that JRR Tolkien spent a whole introduction page lambasting people who read too much into symbolism in books and stating explicitly that Lord of the Rings was written as an exercise in long-form storytelling with no hidden meaning.

That just sounds like a (very) elaborate troll. Write a three part book stuffed full of symbolism and then write an essay complaining how people read into the symbolism. And surely what the reader sees in a work is at least as valid as what the author intended. If I see Mordor as Stalinist Russia, isnt that my prerogative? Its selling the art form short if the only possible interpretation is the authors own. /rant (a…

>And surely what the reader sees in a work is at least as valid as what the author intended.

I'm going to have to agree to disagree with you on that one.

Re: The subversive messages hidden in The Wizard of Oz

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How far we've drifted as a nation. People then seemed to realize the danger of fiat money, yet The Federal Reserve Act was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson on December 23, 1913, when most lawmakers had already left the Capital for their home states -- and it passed on a simple majority of those present vote. The Federal Reserve (a cabal of international banks that is not part of the…

Hi. Recovered crackpot here. You're stuck on a few ideas, routinely propagated by people overwhelmed by the complexity of the interface between global economics and politics, and made attractive by their apparent simplicity, that I have previously considered, and already thought myself out of. The Fed: The Fed is a pseudo-governmental organization, like the Postal Service or the Federal National Mortgage Association…

> And lending additional money into existence based on fractional reserves of currency is counterfeiting-by-the-law. It's a similiar unethical con to "naked short-selling".

Are you referring to debt monetization, QE, something else? I'm unsure if you're referring to something the Fed prevents or actively practices. QE helps to heat up a faltering economy, at the expense of contributing to income inequality.

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