Alternative CurrencyExcerpts of a Conversation
between David Icke and Jon RappoportJR: This [discussion about the way the current official economic systems are operated and manipulated] reminds me of a conversation I had with a researcher who told me that during the American depression of 1929, there were somewhere between 1,200 to 1,500 private currencies issued. People had gotten together and they had looked around and said, well, Washington may be broke and those dollars may be useless, but there's nothing wrong with us intrinsically. So they began to print their own money. This is a great chapter of untold history in America where people traded, bartered in a sense, but they used their own money and they survived by not hooking into that whole federal system.
DI: This is a very good point. This is about taking power back and not just accepting like a sheep the structure that you are told you must conform to. The final scene of this fishing line out, fishing line in, scam is that when people can no longer pay back their loans because of the manipulated depression they go bankrupt. When this happens the banks have the right to take possession of wealth that does exist, their customers' land, homes, and businesses.
In this way, the wealth of the world, the real wealth, has been sucked to the top of this pyramid and this is why so few hands now control the real wealth of the world. They've been playing this game -- boom-bust, boom-bust -- for centuries.
DI: What we can do is start stepping out of the system. When I wrote a book in the late 1980s, I found in Britain two LETS (Local Exchange and Trading System) groups, systems of barter, in which people in effect created their own currency.
JR: There are many of those in the United States.
DI: Sure: Now they are all over Britain. This is why information about how the financial system really works is so important -- so that people can de-link from it. Basically what happens during a depression is that people who need work and services are disconnected from people who have the skills to provide those services simply because there is no piece of paper (money) to exchange between the parties. So what we need to do in our communities is work out schemes by which one person's contribution to another person can be rewarded. You can do that if you get together with a determination to do it.
JR: What is the government response to do this?
DI: They are trying to work out ways of taxing it, of course, because they have a real problem. The way this system works is that you get one person in the community who sets himself up as the person who administers the organization and you invent a currency.
Money is not the root of all evil actually; it's the means to overcome the limitations of barter so that you can reward contributions to society without having to do a like-for-like exchange which can get complicated. So the unit of exchange called money, exchanging an energy for contributions to society, is extremely positive. It's not an evil. Where the problem comes in is when you start having interest on money, because then purely by controlling the unit of exchange you can control the world and suck people's wealth into your hands -- which is what's happened.
So you invent a currency.
Someone provides a list of the skills that everyone in the group has and then people say, right, I want my front room painted. Here's a painter on the list. Will you do it? Okay. Yes, done. Then you ring the central administrator and you say, right, so many units to this man, the painter. And you've agreed on the price beforehand. Now this painter can go to someone else in the group and get services for himself to that extent without making any more contributions to the group. Basically you're earning money by the work that you are doing for other people which allows you to have units of exchange to use in that group for work that you need doing.
This helps you delink from the rigged financial system and provide your own method of exchanging contributions to each other. It's actually very simple and it works very well.
JR: I know a group in Ithaca, New York, which is founded by Paul Glover, and it works on that principle. They have their own newspaper now, in which they publish stories of people who have gotten into their network and have actually changed their lives. They've decided, well, I think I will do what I actually want to do instead of doing the thing that I thought I had to do to make that money over there. Now doing this instead I suddenly discover there are a few people, at least to begin with, who want what I do. Lo and behold, I can become part of an economic network. They have, at last count, 2000 individuals and business who have signed on, including a bank in Ithaca that is taking their money. They call the money "Ithaca Hours" paper. They claim it is less counterfeitable than American money.
So this guy sells his how-to kit to people for a very small amount and other people have started to introduce this currency too.
DI: It's a way of stepping out of the system. Meyer Amschel Rothschild, the man who founded the Rothschild empire, once said very memorably, "Give me control of a nation's currency and I care not who makes the laws." Control the currency and you control the country. And what we're talking about here is actually taking back control of the units of exchange. If we can't get control immediately of the units of exchange that are being used to manipulate us, then let's create our own and let's step out of this system as best we can.