Paying It Forward : G.A.G.P.O.P.

No, it doesn’t mean that your father’s going to be choking (at least, not directly), even if it sounds that way.

This is one of those things that I categorize to myself as a message from God.

And why shouldn’t I receive messages from God? The unelected President of the US claims to receive messages from God. Theoretically, I have as much right to be President as he does - even though I didn’t get a legacy leg-up into Harvard, and I not only was not a cheerleader (go ahead, laugh - you could look it up), but I would rather cut off my nutsack and staple it to my chin and change my name to Cleo, than even think about becoming a cheerleader. Oh, and for those of you fellows who are, or have been, or are thinking about becoming, cheerleaders - not only do I not apologize, I urge you to seriously consider following the examples of the Vietnamese Buddhist monks and immolate yourself… and you might consider my half-joking druther above and emasculate yourself prior to sparking up.

Now, where was I?

Oh, yes: GAGPOP, the message from God.

I’ve been pondering about money lately - how to explain what it is, and isn’t.

I think the best example I’ve ever seen was a story by a guy who grew up in a farming community in Washington (maybe it was Oregon), in which he recounted his epiphany early in life about the actuality of money, when he discovered that the chits he received for picking fruit in the local apple and cherry orchards were actual, real, no-shit money. I don’t recall the actual amount, but let’s suppose it was $1.00 for the apple chits and $0.25 for the cherry chits. He found that the barber would happily take a yellow piece of paper with a farmer’s signature on it - an apple chit - that said it was worth $1.00, instead of a green piece of paper with George Washington’s picture on it… and with that one stunning realization, he found that he had grokked “money” in its fullness.

Money is nothing more than something that we can all use to make it easier for us to obtain goods or services from one another. Without money, we’re pretty much restricted to simple trading. If I want some of your tomatoes, I have to give you something you want. If I don’t have something you want, I have to go trade someone else to get one of those somethings. With money, though, all we have to do is agree on “how much money” for “how many tomatoes”… much, much easier.

If we both live in a town where there are apple and cherry orchards, and the farmers hand out pieces of paper that is delimited in dollars, and everyone knows those farmers are good for the dollars, then pretty much everyone will take a farmer’s chit for $1.00 just as quick as they’d take a piece of paper that has a picture of George Washington on it.

That makes them both… money.

One of them’s a simple farmer’s chit, the other is a Federal Reserve Note… but they’re both money. The first one is just a piece of ordinary paper, any color at all. The second one is a (here it comes) GAGPOP - Government Approved Green Piece Of Paper.

But what if, instead of a farmer’s apple chit, I make my own “money”? What if I make a piece of paper that I say is worth $1.00? Would you take it? If you know me and trust me, you might. Or if someone you did know and trust said it was okay, you’d probably take it.

Actually, I do make pieces of paper like that - sort of… I write checks. And pretty much anybody in the town where I live will take my check.

Of course, it isn’t quite the same thing, because my “check” looks more official than the apple chit - it has a bank’s name on it, and some secret mystery numbers, and what not. And it has the Majesty of the Law with it, because if I write you a check, and you take it to the bank whose name is on it, and they say I don’t have any “money” in that bank… well, then I may well be a criminal… and in fact, if I don’t make that check good to your satisfaction (within the M of the L), then I am a criminal.

But there’s a side issue here, which really gets into the all-too-slippery definitions of “money”… if you don’t take that check to the bank directly, if you give it to someone else… if you exchange it for goods or services, or even GAGPOP… and then that person takes it to the bank… guess what? Now things become much less clear. The last person in line can’t call the M of the L down upon you, because you didn’t write the check; he can’t call it down on me, because I didn’t write the check to him. That is, in a nutshell, why you have so much trouble trying to cash a check someone else wrote to you, anywhere but at your bank (or the writer’s bank) - that’s why grocery stores and other merchants won’t take that “third-party” check… because it’s not actually “money”, it’s only an order to a bank to PAY money from your account at the bank.

Now, if I make a fancy enough piece of paper, very official looking, and put a number on it - say, $20.00 - then it may or may not be usable. Under the right circumstances, if enough people believe it’s “good”, it can be just as useful as a GAGPOP is.

There are a number of communities who have gone together to create their own money - Ithaca, New York, is one (they came up with the idea of “hours” as a denominator instead of “dollars”) - the last time I looked, the Ithaca Hour was going strong. You could google them and see how they’re doing and get some links to all the other dozens, if not hundreds, of communities doing the same thing. The interesting thing is that all of these various moneys have “backing” them exactly the same thing: faith and credit… it’s really pretty funny, when you think about it, that the Federal Reserve assets (Treasury Bonds) are described as being backed by the “full faith and credit of the United States”, which - as we know from reading the daily nooze - is completely bankrupt, many trillions of “dollars” in debt (to whom? to those very same banksters), and busily spending nearly a half BILLION dollars a day on the completely failed War on Terror.

You’re going to be shocked to know that the banksters hate this - the idea of people making their own damn money, since that very creation of money is what allows the banksters to control everything. So far, they haven’t made the effort to do much about it… but they always have a bill trying to get through Congress to make it illegal for anyone but them to make “money”, and they may be able to push it through someday. In the meantime, they just make do with the so-called Federal Reserve system, which is about as “federal” as, say, Federal Express, and has little to no reserves at all.

There are, of course, lots of stories about how banking got started and how it has reached the point where the private club of the banksters, masquerading as part of the government in almost every country in the world has come to control the supply of money. Nearly every country has a “central bank” which has been given the authority to create money in that country. In no country is that “central bank” actually owned by the government, although in nearly every country, the bank’s name makes it appear that it is. And in nearly every country the ultimate owners of the central bank are impossible to determine. This is because of the global reach of corporationism, in which the ownership of shares of all fictitious personages is not public record. At least in most latin countries, the name of such a creation used to end in “S.A.”, which, depending on the particular descendant of Latin was spoken in a country, was variously “Societe Anonyme”, “Sociedad Anonymo”, and so on - and I’m betting that even if you don’t speak any latin at all, you’ve probably got a pretty good idea what that “S.A.” means, don’t you? Yeah, I thought so. Despite the anonymity of the owners, it seems quite clear that the real owners - usually filtered back through god-awful numbers of layers of additional corporations - turn out to be the Banksters of Europe, and in particular one family above all others.

“Amazingly enough, it turns out that the