Every one who studies the United States’ monetary & banking system quickly sees its crucial weaknesses. The dollar is a confidence game, the banks are bankrupt (with less than a 1% reserve against deposits), and the economy is addicted to debt. If the inflation ever stops, everybody goes bankrupt because they can’t pay the interest on the debt – all the money is borrowed into existence.

Deeper you dig, crazier it gets. Now I can’t stand hearing people use what I call the "guilt-manipulating we," as in "we" have too low a savings rate in America, "we" spend too much money, "we" don’t work hard enough, "we" consume too much. Maybe those folks have a mouse in their pockets, but they’re not talking about me. I’m not the one driving the American economy into the ground. The Fed, Wall Street, and the US government are doing that just fine without me

But when it comes to monetary reform, "we" – all Americans – are our own worst enemy. We have all the law on our side, we simply don’t use it. Let me explain.

LEGAL TENDER ISN’T LEGAL

In 1913 Congress granted to a private corporation – the Federal Reserve banks – the privilege not only to create money out of thin air, but also to make their money "legal tender." That is, to force everyone in America to accept their scrip as money.

Unless, of course, they refuse.

What? I thought that "legal tender" meant that the law forced you to accept Federal Reserve notes or the person who owed you money could get off scot free!

No, that’s not what it means at all. Rather, it means that when no other form of payment is specified, you must accept federal reserve notes as money. If however, you specify in advance that you will only accept constitutional silver or gold money, and that you will not accept federal reserve notes – by posting a big sign in your barbecue joint, for example – then you are contracting out of the legal tender system and standing on your common law and constitutional right to silver & gold money.

The Federal Reserve knows this, and congress, and the US government. That’s the reason they make it so hard for you to get your hands on silver & gold money. They know you have a common law, constitutional, and statutory right to use silver & gold money. However, they rely on your ignorance and most especially, your laziness.

Right, laziness. It is simply too hard to use silver and gold money. First, you have to take the federal reserve notes and exchange them for silver and gold, then you have to convince some monetarily-ignorant merchant or tradesman to take silver or gold for your purchase. All that’s just too much trouble.

Right. It’s also our only way out of this mess, because the present system cannot be reformed. Eventually, it will self-destruct.

LOCAL ECONOMIES DESTROYED

Since the federal reserve was spawned in 1913, America’s local economies have been destroyed one by one, sacrificed to some abstract "national" economy that profits somebody, but not anybody who lives here where I do. The so-called national economy with GM & Ford & Citibank & Wal-Mart and Home Depot and McDonald’s and the legion of other franchises and chain stores have sucked the life – and the money -- out of local economies all over the country. Local businesses have found themselves unable to compete against this massive buying power. As they’ve gone out of business every one of us has been forced to content ourselves with quality that falls day after day.

Until now.

REVIVING LOCAL ECONOMIES

Very simply, people want to get out of dollars. As yet, most of them don’t even understand silver & gold as a safe haven from the falling dollar. There’s a way for them to get into silver & gold, and to revive our local economies at the same time.

Very simply, we start doing business with each other using silver & gold money. Hand to hand. Unlike bank deposits and federal reserve notes, the money we use locally with our neighbours stays with our neighbours in our community. Don’t think that the Wal-marts of the world will begin to accept silver & gold money, because they won’t. But if your local merchants do, suddenly they will offer an advantage to trading with them instead of the big chains. And since silver and gold money are Appreciating, that is, since the money they will be receiving will be worth more tomorrow than it is today, they can afford to charge a little less.

Better still, unlike paper dollars silver and gold money are growing more valuable every day.

Everybody gets a better deal, money stays in the community to circulate locally and keep our local economies humming, and we escape the Federal Reserve and legal tender tyranny.

It’s a revolution without a war. A coup without casualties. Entirely legal. Best of all, we don’t have to form mass movements, or assemble armies of agreers or build huge political parties and wage expensive campaigns to elect politicians so they can go to Washington to betray us . No, all we have to do is to persuade our neighbour that using silver & gold money daily will build his prosperity.

HOW DO I START?

The biggest hurdle to using silver and gold as money is calculating the exchange rate. How much should I pay for a $5 hammer in silver?

Facing this problem, Catherine Austin Fitts of Solari.com and I teamed up to solve it with a website called www.silverandgoldaremoney.com. You only need to type in the US dollar amount you want to pay or receive, hit the "calculate" button, and the website automatically figures the equivalents in US 90% silver coin, American Eagle gold coins, or a host of other gold and silver coins. It has a 24-hour live spot gold and silver feed from GoldMoney.com.

Monetary reform is just that simple. Are you ready to take the first step? Ask your favourite local businessman if he’ll accept silver and gold. Carry a silver dollar with you. Hold that out next to a $20 bill and see which he prefers.

It’s only one step.

-- Franklin Sanders