What Is The Gold Standard? 

Written by Jeff Nielson (CLICK HERE FOR FULL WHITE PAPER)

 

What is “the gold standard?” Many readers would consider this a simple question and perhaps even an obsolete one. It is for precisely this reason that a mere definition is inadequate as an answer. A definition conveys no understanding and thus does nothing to eliminate the many misconceptions surrounding this concept.

In order to provide sufficient context so that the definition provides meaning to readers, it is necessary to explore several, tangential subjects. As such, this discussion will contain:

 1) A brief review of the abolition of our gold standard.

 2)    An examination (and assessment) of the criticisms of the gold standard, past and present.

 3)    An examination of the monetary system that resulted from the abolition of the gold standard.

 4)    An examination of the financial system that resulted from the abolition of the gold standard.

 5)    A chronicling and explanation of the extreme price suppression of the gold market, a situation which has persisted for most of the post-gold standard era.

In its simple definition, a gold standard a monetary system based upon the “hard” backing of our currencies – that is, backing them with gold. It is a “standard” in that the price of gold is fixed, and thus all currencies, and (by implication) all goods are valued in relation to that fixed price.

 

The “gold standard” in its modern form was a monetary system that existed for roughly a century. While many nations (and empires) have based their monetary systems upon precious metals, this was most often done directly, via the usage of gold and/or silver money.

Real “money” is distinct from currency because, among other reasons, money preserves the wealth of the holder, while currency does not. Thus, we get our first inkling of why any nation would want to use a gold standard as their monetary system: to preserve and protect the wealth of the citizens of that nation, and thus the nation itself.

 

The End of an Era

On August 15^th, 1971, the Nixon administration “closed the gold window,” which effectively put an end to the last vestige of our gold standard. Further elaboration is necessary. In the final decades of our “gold standard,” we no longer had a full gold standard, but rather only “partial convertibility” in our monetary system. What does that mean?

With a true, hard gold standard, where official currency is fully and directly backed by gold, these (paper) currencies can be fully converted into gold at the option of the currency-holder. However, in the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944, the global monetary system was officially altered.

It became a system of partial convertibility, with the U.S. dollar as “reserve currency,” meaning that only one currency – the U.S. dollar – was still convertible to gold. Thus the only mechanism to convert paper to gold was for nations to exchange their U.S. dollars with the U.S. government in exchange for some of its gold reserves. Therefore, when the U.S. government “closed the gold window” in 1971, it defaulted on its gold obligations to the rest of the world, and the requirement that it convert U.S. dollars to gold at the option of the currency-holder. What caused this system to implode?

Here it is essential for readers to grasp that, in a monetary system of perfect integrity, there would have been zero incentive for other nations to redeem or convert their U.S. dollars into gold; each would be equally valuable. Only one possible factor could have provided nations with an incentive to engage in such conversion: the fear (and knowledge) that the system had lost its integrity.

In order to finance the war in Vietnam, the U.S. government had been printing too many U.S. dollars for several years. This meant it was expanding the supply of money beyond the corresponding size of its gold reserves.

U.S. dollars were officially convertible to gold, but because of this deliberate over-supply they were no longer fully “backed” by gold. The currency was being debauched, so the gold was worth significantly more than the actual value of the U.S. dollar. It was effectively monetary fraud. As the fraud became larger and more apparent, the drain on the U.S.’s gold reserves relentlessly grew.

This left only two options for the U.S. government: re-impose monetary discipline (on itself) and thus restore the integrity of the U.S. dollar, or default on its international obligations. The U.S. government chose the latter.

It is important to note that former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker has since stepped forward to claim personal credit for abolishing the gold standard. It is here where readers are introduced to the love/hate relationship between central bankers and gold.

 

This was one of history’s most emphatic (and prophetic) warnings against monetary crime. But what, precisely, does it mean?

 

Here readers must first forget everything they think they know about the word “inflation.” “Inflation” (verb: to inflate) means to expand, or inflate, the supply of money. This is the correct, economic definition of that term.

 

What most people think of as “inflation,” the increase in the price of goods, is simply the inevitable consequence of inflating the supply of money. It is very important that readers never forget this crucial distinction. As an academic, Alan Greenspan was fully cognizant of the correct definition of inflation, and was using it in that context.

There is no way to protect the confiscation of savings (theft of wealth) via an increase in the supply of money. Why? As more, new currency is printed, all existing currency is worth less, effectively confiscating some of the wealth of those existing currency-holders. This is nothing more than the concept of dilution.

If you add water to lemonade, you dilute all the lemonade, and each unit of lemonade is worth less. If a company prints more shares, it dilutes its share structure, and each share is worth less, and some of the wealth of existing shareholders has been “confiscated.” More importantly, it is the company that prints these new shares that has confiscated that shareholder wealth. This is why the (corporate) concept of “dilution” is utterly despised by shareholders.

If a government (i.e., central bank) prints new currency, thus diluting the money supply, each existing unit of currency is worth less. The principle is identical. Each time our central banks print more “money” (i.e., our paper), they dilute the value of all existing currency and confiscate some of the wealth of existing currency-holders.

When we go to the supermarket and pay $2 or $3 more for a dozen eggs, it’s still the same dozen eggs. The eggs haven’t changed. It’s the paper currency in our wallets that has lost half of its value due to “inflation” – the inflation of the supply of money, and the dilution (in value) that must accompany it.

Where does this confiscated wealth go? How and why is this confiscation of our wealth (via inflating the supply of money) an act of theft? It’s very simple. When our central banks print new currency, they don’t distribute it evenly amongst the entire population. They hand every single unit of that new currency (virtually for free) to the Big Bank syndicate.

Give me control of a nation’s money supply, and I care not who makes the laws.

–         

Mayer Amschel Rothschild, banker  (1744 – 1812)

Our monetary system has been criminalized. Instead of a tool of commerce, our monetary system is now a weapon used to systemically plunder the wealth of our populations (as per Greenspan’s warning). This weapon is then placed into the hands of the recipients of all this new, central bank funny money: the Big Banks.

When new currency is printed, it reduces the value of all existing currency. All of this new currency is handed to the Big Banks (by the central banks). These Big Banks then “lend” roughly 30 times that amount of currency to us (via “fractional-reserve banking”) at usurious rates of interest, which dilutes and reduces the value of all existing currency even further (thus increasing the rate of theft).

This is but the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the financial crime that has been unleashed upon us as a direct result of the abolition of the gold standard. How could we have sacrificed our only “protection” from such systemic, monetary crime?

Thank the critics of the gold standard. It is their attacks (which are relentlessly repeated by the corporate media oligopoly) on the one possible form of Honest Money that made possible first the abolition of the gold standard, and then the collective refusal (by corrupted governments) to reinstitute the only legitimate form of monetary system.

 

Future Chapters:

Criticisms of the Gold Standard

Fiat Currency Ponzi Scheme

Crime in Banking

Post-Gold Standard Price Suppression

Conclusion

 

 

This whitepaper is 23 pages and over 8,300 words long. Please CLICK HERE to read the rest and find the entire file.

 

For questions on this article or precious metals, please contact HERE

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Gold Up 12%, Silver Up 11% YTD As Stocks Crash … Again

Gold jumped 2 percent to a 7-1/2-month high yesterday, briefly touching the psychological level of $1,200 an ounce. Falling bank shares and stock markets and worries over global economic growth and a new financial crisis prompted investors to seek the safety of gold.

After surging over 5% last week, gold and silver continue to move higher as concerns about the U.S. and global economy saw more sharp stock market falls and reduced expectations of the Fed increasing interest rates.

Gold finished the week at $1,173.40 an ounce and has built on those gains today rising another 0.4% to $1,178.10 an ounce – taking its year-to-date gain to 11 per cent.

Stocks had another torrid week with the S&P 500 falling 3.1% and the Nasdaq down 5.4% while gold rose by 5.04% and silver by 5.4%. Gold had its best week since July 2013.

Technically, gold is looking better and better and the gains last week were the third consecutive week of gains. The weekly higher close above the 200 day moving average ($1,129/oz) is leading to increasing conviction that gold prices have bottomed and we are in the early stages of a new bull market.

Momentum buyers and trend following funds are again making the “trend their friend.” This is seen in the increase in gold ETF holdings which have increased now for 15 consecutive days as retail and institutional investors diversify into gold to protect from increasing market volatility and concerns of new bear markets in stocks.

Gold has seen similar gains in euro and larger gains in sterling terms (+13% year to date) again showing gold’s currency hedging properties.

LBMA Gold Prices

8 Feb: USD 1,173.40, EUR 1,050.16 and GBP 810.44 per ounce
5 Feb: USD 1,158.50, EUR 1,035.58 and GBP 797.40 per ounce
4 Feb: USD 1,146.25, EUR 1,027.29 and GBP 782.16 per ounce
3 Feb: USD 1,130.00, EUR 1,034.04 and GBP 781.25 per ounce
2 Feb: USD 1,123.60, EUR 1,029.65 and GBP 780.01 per ounce

Gold and Silver News and Commentary – Click here

by Mark O’Byrne

http://ift.tt/1T2GLSk;

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1PirxGa GoldCore

Last Thursday, January 28, there was a flash crash on the price chart for silver. Here is a graph of the price action.

   The Price of Silver, Jan 28 (All times GMT)

If you read more about it, you will see that there was an irregularity around the silver fix. At the time, the spot price was around $14.40. The fix was set at $13.58. This is a major deviation.

Many silver bugs are up in arms about how unfair the new silver fix is. That’s nothing new. They were up in arms about the old one. The old one was supposedly manipulated

One thing is for sure, tactical manipulations can occur. A gold trader in London was found to have pushed the price down in the gold fixing by a few pennies. He had sold a multimillion dollar option, and he wanted it to expire worthless to avoid having to pay. Right after the fix, he bought back the gold he sold, pushing the price back up to where it was. He took a loss on the round trip of the gold, of course, but saved millions on the option which he did not have to pay.

This is not the long-sought proof that nefarious forces are keeping gold from attaining $20,000.

Anyways, because the silver and gold fixes were deemed to be benchmarks by regulatory changes post the LIBOR manipulations, a new process for the gold and silver fixes was implemented. Before we look at what changed, let’s consider why there is a fix price. Couldn’t they just take the price at 12:00 noon?

No, it wouldn’t work because in a live market there is not just one price. There are always two prices: bid and offer. Which would you use as the benchmark? Either price could misrepresent the current state of the market. What’s more, those prices are just quotes, not executed trades.

To be useful as a benchmark—a price that third party contracts and derivatives can be based on—there has to be a single price based on real executed trades. So they need to get buyers and sellers together, and find the price at which the most metal clears. If there is a better way than that, it hasn’t been discovered yet.

This leads to a question. How do two prices that are supposed to track each other actually, you know, stay matched? This occurs in Exchange Traded Funds that move with an index of stocks (such as SPX or GLD). It occurs in gold futures and spot.

It should also occur between the fixing process and the spot market. What use is a silver fix at $13.58 while the spot price was $14.40? We’ll get back to market action on that day, in a bit. First, we need to look at the force that keeps two prices close to each other.

It is arbitrage. Let’s use GLD as an example. Each share represents a known quantity of gold. Suppose the price of the share rises relative to the price of gold metal in the spot market, and the metal in a share of GLD is $1 per ounce higher. The arbitrageur buys gold metal, creates shares of GLD, and sells them. This tends to pull up the price of gold metal, and mostly pushes down the price of GLD.

Note that the arbitrageur takes no price risk. He is simply acting to profit from a spread (usually a very small one). Arbitrageurs will keep doing this trade, until GLD and gold metal get close enough that the small remaining profit is not worth the effort.

The arbitrageur is motivated, of course, by profit. He is as greedy as the next guy (admit it, if you could demand a 300% raise from your boss, you would). However, his activity is self-limiting. The more he puts on his trade, the more he compresses the spread. In our example, the arbitrageur buys some gold metal and sells some GLD shares, to make $1. That is the initial profit. However, he compresses that spread, perhaps to 50 cents. He can have another go, but then the spread narrows to 25 cents. Soon enough, he walks away (these are illustrative numbers only for this example).

It’s a textbook case of the Invisible Hand described by Adam Smith. The arbitrageur, seeking his own profit, ends up serving other market participants. He keeps two different prices locked tightly together. Everyone else can take for granted that GLD works as it’s supposed to.

For example, suppose you run a small gold coin store. You need to hedge your inventory just as a large dealer does. However, you sell gold one ounce at a time. Big dealers might use 100-ounce gold futures, but you use GLD. You can thank the actions of this arbitrageur.

Now let’s get back to the fix. The old process was conducted by the major market makers in each metal. They got together in one room, and each had major clients on various phone lines. The chairman would put out a price, and the market makers would talk to their clients to determine who wanted to sell at that price and who wanted to buy. Then they add up all selling and buying, and see if there’s a close match. They would keep moving the price until selling matched buying within tolerance. That was the fix price.

There was just one problem, at least so far as the gold bugs were concerned: the market maker. Since the first market maker walked into a coffee house in London where shares were being traded, most people have misunderstood the market maker. Back in the coffee house days, all potential sellers would line up on one side of the room, in order from lowest offer price to highest. On the other side, buyers would line up, from highest bid to lowest.

If one had to sell, that meant taking the best bid presented in the room. Likewise, if one wanted to buy right now, one paid the best offer price. As you would imagine, the bid-ask spread could get pretty wide, and perhaps worse yet, it was unpredictable.

Until the market maker walked in. Unlike all the others, he was both a potential buyer and a potential seller. He had an inventory of both shares and cash. He published a better price if you wanted to buy or sell and as it turns out, he was the only one who could consistently buy at the bid price and sell at the ask price.

Of course, the guy with the best bid price—or what had been the best price until the market maker strolled into the room—was upset. Who is this dodgy bloke? Why is he allowed to mess about like this? Surely it’s unethical, immoral, and maybe even illegal?

In fact, he is serving all market participants (except the few who hoped to sell and make a buyer pay a premium and the equally small few who hoped to buy from someone desperate to raise cash). The market maker is motivated by profit, sure, but in making money he is narrowing the bid-ask spread whilst also reducing its volatility.

Today, the market maker is aka High Frequency Trader, and he uses technology that the coffee house fellows could not have imagined. Nevertheless, he too encounters the same exact suspicion, if not resentment, if not envy and anger.

Now let’s tie this to the silver fix. In the old fixing process, bullion bank dealers could place orders in the spot market during the fix. For example, if the fix price looked like it might settle at $14.30, but the spot price was $14.34, the dealers would buy the fix and sell spot, happy to make four cents.

Many objected to this because it looked like information was leaking into the market. They claimed it’s so unfair, perhaps even a gateway drug to insider trading? If other market participants can’t have this privilege, the bullion banks shouldn’t have it either. And besides, they’re supposed to be just brokers and not trading their own proprietary positions. The truth was that there was nothing stopping other market participants from also trading in the spot market during the fixing process, it was just that the bullion banks’ dealers were more efficient at being market maker.

Well, in part due to the agitation of the gold and silver bugs, government regulators came down on the market makers. They fixed it so that market makers were no longer allowed to arbitrage the fix to the spot and futures markets.

Before you think “yeah, this is what we want,” let’s revisit one of our favorite and recurrent themes, namely: be careful what you wish for.

As it stands today, if the fix price is starting to deviate from the market price, the market makers’ hands are tied. Ross Norman, CEO of bullion dealer Sharps Pixley in London, expressed his frustration with this. “The real problem as we see it is that banks are increasingly unwilling or unable to place corresponding orders where they perceive a mis-pricing because of fears of being accused of abusing a situation and facing the wrath of the regulator or their compliance departments.”

The big clients who participate in the fixing process may be freer to trade. However, they don’t have the same information. Market making is hard because you’re playing for pennies or fractions of a penny, but if you screw up you can lose dollars. The clients may know how many rounds into the fixing process they are, and the order imbalance of each round. But they can’t react as quickly as the bullion banks who are making markets in the spot, futures, and ETF markets, and they don’t know as much about market conditions either. They can’t arbitrage a few pennies. They need a much bigger spread.

© 2016 Monetary Metals

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1PLvqVv Monetary Metals

Submitted by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“If you can’t say ‘Fuck’ you can’t say, ‘Fuck the government.’” ? Lenny Bruce

Not only has free speech become a four-letter word – profane, obscene, uncouth, not to be uttered in so-called public places – but in more and more cases, the government deems free speech to be downright dangerous and in some instances illegal.

The U.S. government has become particularly intolerant of speech that challenges the government’s power, reveals the government’s corruption, exposes the government’s lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.

Indeed, there is a long and growing list of the kinds of speech that the government considers dangerous enough to red flag and subject to censorship, surveillance, investigation and prosecution: hate speech, bullying speech, intolerant speech, conspiratorial speech, treasonous speech, threatening speech, incendiary speech, inflammatory speech, radical speech, anti-government speech, right-wing speech, extremist speech, etc.

Yet by allowing the government to whittle away at cherished First Amendment freedoms – which form the backbone of the Bill of Rights – we have evolved into a society that would not only be abhorrent to the founders of this country but would be hostile to the words they used to birth this nation.

Don’t believe me?

Conduct your own experiment into the government’s tolerance of speech that challenges its authority, and see for yourself.

Stand on a street corner—or in a courtroom, at a city council meeting or on a university campus—and recite some of the rhetoric used by the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, John Adams and Thomas Paine without referencing them as the authors.

For that matter, just try reciting the Declaration of Independence, which rejects tyranny, establishes Americans as sovereign beings, recognizes God as a Supreme power, portrays the government as evil, and provides a detailed laundry list of abuses that are as relevant today as they were 240 years ago.

My guess is that you won’t last long before you get thrown out, shut up, threatened with arrest or at the very least accused of being a radical, a troublemaker, a sovereign citizen, a conspiratorialist or an extremist.

Try suggesting, as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin did, that Americans should not only take up arms but be prepared to shed blood in order to protect their liberties, and you might find yourself placed on a terrorist watch list and vulnerable to being rounded up by government agents.

“What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance. Let them take arms,” declared Jefferson. He also concluded that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Observed Franklin: “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!”

Better yet, try suggesting as Thomas Paine, Marquis De Lafayette, John Adams and Patrick Henry did that Americans should, if necessary, defend themselves against the government if it violates their rights, and you will be labeled a domestic extremist.

“It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government,” insisted Paine. “When the government violates the people’s rights,” Lafayette warned, “insurrection is, for the people and for each portion of the people, the most sacred of the rights and the most indispensable of duties.” Adams cautioned, “A settled plan to deprive the people of all the benefits, blessings and ends of the contract, to subvert the fundamentals of the constitution, to deprive them of all share in making and executing laws, will justify a revolution.” And who could forget Patrick Henry with his ultimatum: “Give me liberty or give me death!”

Then again, perhaps you don’t need to test the limits of free speech for yourself. One such test is playing out before our very eyes in Portland, Oregon, where radio “shock jock” Pete Santilli, a new media journalist who broadcasts his news reports over YouTube and streaming internet radio, is sitting in jail.

Santilli, notorious for his controversial topics, vocal outrage over government abuses, and inflammatory rhetoric, is not what anyone would consider an objective reporter. His radio show, aptly titled “Telling You the Truth…Whether You Like It or Not,” makes it clear that Santilli has a viewpoint (namely, that the government has overstepped its bounds), and he has no qualms about sharing it with his listeners.

It was that viewpoint that landed Santilli in jail.

In early January 2016, a group of armed activists, reportedly protesting the federal government’s management of federal lands and its prosecution of two local ranchers convicted of arson, staged an act of civil disobedience by occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Burns, Oregon. Santilli, who has covered such protests in the past, including the April 2014 standoff in Nevada between the Bundy ranching family and the federal government over grazing rights, reported on the occupation in Burns as an embedded journalist, albeit one who was sympathetic to the complaints (although not the tactics) of the occupiers.

When asked to clarify his role in relation to the occupation, Santilli declared, “My role is the same here that it was at the Bundy ranch. To talk about the constitutional implications of what is going on here. The Constitution cannot be negotiated.”

Well, it turns out that the Constitution can be negotiated, at least when the government gets involved.

Long a thorn in the side of the FBI, Santilli was arrested by the FBI following its ambush and arrest of key leaders of the movement. He was charged, along with the armed resistors, with conspiracy to impede federal officers from discharging their duties by use of force, intimidation, or threats—the same charge being levied against those who occupied the refuge—which carries a maximum sentence of six years in prison.

Notably, Santilli is the only journalist among those covering the occupation to be charged with conspiracy, despite the fact that he did not participate in the takeover of the refuge, nor did he ever spend a night on the grounds of the refuge, nor did he ever represent himself as anything but a journalist covering the occupation.

Of course, the government doesn’t actually believe that 50-year-old Santilli is an accomplice to any criminal activity.

Read between the lines and you’ll find that what the government is really accusing Santilli of is employing dangerous speech. As court documents indicate, the government is prosecuting Santilli solely as a reporter of information. In other words, they’re making an example of him, which is consistent with the government’s ongoing efforts to intimidate members of the media who portray the government in a less than favorable light.

This is not a new tactic.

During the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland, numerous journalists were arrested while covering the regions’ civil unrest and the conditions that spawned that unrest. These attempts to muzzle the press were clearly concerted, top-down efforts to restrict the fundamental First Amendment rights of the public and the press.

As The Huffington Post reports:

The Obama administration's treatment of reporters has caused controversy before. In 2009, the Department of Justice targeted a Fox News reporter in an investigation. Three years later, DOJ seized Associated Press reporters’ phone records. After that, former Attorney General Eric Holder ordered a review of the Justice Department's news media policies. DOJ employees must consult with a unit within the Criminal Division before they arrest someone when there is a “question regarding whether an individual or entity is a ‘member of the news media,’” according to a January 2015 memo from Holder to DOJ employees.”

That the government is choosing to target Santilli for prosecution, despite the fact that they do not recognize new media journalists as members of the mainstream media, signals a broadening of the government’s efforts to suppress what it considers dangerous speech and stamp out negative coverage.

The message is clear: whether a journalist is acting alone or is affiliated with an established news source, the government has no qualms about subjecting them to harassment, arrest, jail time and trumped up charges if doing so will discourage others from openly opposing or exposing the government.

You see, the powers-that-be understand that if the government can control speech, it controls thought and, in turn, it can control the minds of the citizenry.

Where the government has gone wrong is in hinging its case against Santilli based solely on his incendiary rhetoric, which is protected by the First Amendment and which bears a striking resemblance to disgruntled patriots throughout American history.

Here’s what Santilli said: “What we need, most importantly, is one hundred thousand unarmed men and women to stand together. It is the most powerful weapon in our arsenal.”

Now compare that with the call to action from Joseph Warren, a leader of the Sons of Liberty and a principal figure within the American Revolution: “Stain not the glory of your worthy ancestors, but like them resolve never to part with your birthright; be wise in your deliberations, and determined in your exertions for the preservation of your liberties. Follow not the dictates of passion, but enlist yourselves under the sacred banner of reason; use every method in your power to secure your rights.”

Indeed, Santilli comes across as relatively docile compared to some of our nation’s more outspoken firebrands.

 Santilli: “I’m not armed. I am armed with my mouth. I’m armed with my live stream. I’m armed with a coalition of like-minded individuals who sit at home and on YouTube watch this.”

Now compare that to what George Washington had to say: “Unhappy it is, though, to reflect that a brother's sword has been sheathed in a brother's breast and that the once-happy plains of America are either to be drenched with blood or inhabited by slaves. Sad alternative! But can a virtuous man hesitate in his choice?”

And then there was Andrew Jackson, a hothead if ever there was one. He came of age in the early days of the republic, served as the seventh president of the United States, and was not opposed to shedding blood when necessary: “Peace, above all things, is to be desired, but blood must sometimes be spilled to obtain it on equable and lasting terms.”

This is how freedom rises or falls.

There have always been those willing to speak their minds despite the consequences. Where freedom hangs in the balance is when “we the people” are called on to stand with or against individuals who actually exercise their rights and, in the process, push the envelope far enough to get called out on the carpet for it.

Do we negotiate the Constitution, or do we embrace it, no matter how uncomfortable it makes us feel, no matter how hateful or ugly it gets, and no matter how much we may dislike its flag-bearers?

Comedian Lenny Bruce laid the groundwork for the George Carlins that would follow in his wake: foul-mouthed, insightful, irreverent, incredibly funny, and one of the First Amendment’s greatest champions who dared to “speak the unspeakable” about race, religion, sexuality and politics. As Village Voice writer Nat Hentoff attests, Bruce was “not only a paladin of free speech but also a still-penetrating, woundingly hilarious speaker of truth to the powerful and the complacent.”

Bruce died in 1966, but not before being convicted of alleged obscenity for challenging his audience’s covert prejudices by brandishing unmentionable words that, if uttered today, would not only get you ostracized but could get you arrested and charged with a hate crime. Hentoff, who testified in Bruce’s defense at his trial, recounts that Lenny used to say, “What I wanted people to dig is the lie. Certain words were suppressed to keep the lie going. But if you do them, you should be able to say the words.”

Not much has changed in the 50 years since Bruce died. In fact, it’s gotten worse.

What we’re dealing with today is a government that wants to suppress dangerous words—words about its warring empire, words about its land grabs, words about its militarized police, words about its killing, its poisoning and its corruption—in order to keep its lies going.

As I document in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, what we are witnessing is a nation undergoing a nervous breakdown over this growing tension between our increasingly untenable reality and the lies being perpetrated by a government that has grown too power-hungry, egotistical, militaristic and disconnected from its revolutionary birthright.

The only therapy is the truth and nothing but the truth.

Otherwise, there will be no more First Amendment. There will be no more Bill of Rights. And there will be no more freedom in America as we have known it.

As the insightful and brash comedian George Carlin observed:

“Rights aren’t rights if someone can take them away. They’re privileges. That’s all we’ve ever had in this country, is a bill of temporary privileges. And if you read the news even badly, you know that every year the list gets shorter and shorter. Sooner or later, the people in this country are gonna realize the government does not give a fuck about them! The government doesn’t care about you, or your children, or your rights, or your welfare or your safety. It simply does not give a fuck about you! It’s interested in its own power. That’s the only thing. Keeping it and expanding it wherever possible.”

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1XeRYQ9 Tyler Durden