Destruction
April 6, 1942
Ezra Pound speaking in the name of a little sanity and human intelligence. The mere distruction of vast amount of goods, tools, ships, etc. solves NO problem, save the temporary, artificial and man-made problem of: GLUT on the market.
It does NOT solve the market problem as a whole. The mere absence of GLUT does NO good either to marketer, maker or would-be buyer if the absence of GLUT is accompanied by the absence of everything else, or even of nearly everything else.
Sumner Welles and company have, I admit, opened up a market for tankers. Anybody who can make tankers can now sell them. IF he is con tent to receive Morgenthau dollars as recompense, regardless of what the Kike dollar will buy. The continuance of destruction does NOT remedy the effects of destruction.
You have lent some more “Money” as you call it to Chile, a country notoriously in default. The confessions of a bond-salesman, an informative work, written by an author who had learned very little from his own tribulations, might be reprinted. The author was pretty much of an ass, but an intelligent reader might derive benefit from his revelations. The Loeb Chart of Plenty, the Chart of United States potential production has just been reprinted here. That shows the opportunity that the United States once HAD. Shows the abundance that might have been if Lehman’s damn son-in-law had never been born, or if the American people had had sense enough to keep him and his likes OUT of the American Treasury, and if our lunacy commissions were more effective. NOW the American money system is cuckoo. It is dishonest. It is unethical, it is blitheringly idiotic, and every man fit to be called human knows it.
There are simple means of remedying it. Had they been applied, you would not now be at war. Applying them now will not mend all the harm already done by Kuhn, Cohen, and Company to the American people, but the LONGER you put off starting, the worse rotted the whole country will be by the financial syphilis, whose out-in-front chief protractor is Franklin Delano.
And NO war promises have ever been kept by usurers’ governments, not since Cain took a pot shot at Abel. IF the monetary reformers IN the United States of America don’t get busy NOW, the opportunities offered ’em at the end of the war will be NIL.
If you can’t learn from England’s experience in homes for heroes, and war veterans trying to sell matches in the gutters of the Strand, after the last war, then God help you.
A system wherein the public is MILKED and bilked of TWO dollars for every dollar spent by the government is not the way to win either a war or a peace.
And the usury (now the Warburg) system is as old as the gold brick wheeze. The money system practiced by Monty Norman, and by Baruch’s fireside cronies is the system of claiming MORE than there is.
The CLAIMS are printed on paper (in the old days they were printed on metal), they are also partly printed on paper, and those forms filled in with ink.
Twenty dollars printed on a gold piece will NOT buy eggs on a desert raft, where no eggs are. It is as impotent to get tungsten out of grass in your back yard, as is a claim for 20 bucks printed on a Treasury note.
The value of money, as Aristotle observed, is determined by what it will BUY.
Hence, the howls about INFLATION. I’ll say inflation. Baruch will NOT want inflation until he has got out money and put it into something else, or until he is two jumps ahead of the public in unloading a dying currency like the British STERLING, and getting into Pesos or [some thing able to rise if anything in the western hemisphere] can be considered as rising or promising.
OVER a hundred years of stealing and cheating the South Americans is NOT [the] basis for lasting delight. Morgenthau’s government can pump money OUT of the AMERICAN people and spend it on Brazilian Ambassadors, it can LEND it to insolvent countries, who have neither the intention nor the capacity to REPAY it.
The banks can UNLOAD some of the bonds onto suckers, of whom the United States seems to possess a super-Loeb-chart supply. CHEAP agricultural products can be BOUGHT in South America and dumped into North America to the ruin of North American farmers so long as the ships will carry the stuff. BUT you can not get tungsten or even petroleum out of the carcasses of Brazilian ambassadors.
In fact your chief purchases in South America seem to be GOVERNMENTS, and you have yourself got more government than you can use.
You are tied up to Moscow and you have not yet the faintest conception of what that union means. You are tied up to England in a somewhat de pressing hour. BUT the knot either may or may not prove a slip knot or noose. When the strangulation becomes excessively painful, Winston’s name may be spelled PAUL REYNAUD.
You should keep an open eye on these possibilities. I know Franklin has his EYE on Australia and on Madagascar and on the African gold coast the Belgian Congo, Liberia, and the whatnots.
BUT the dawg in the fable also had his eye on the meat, reflected meat in the water. The aqueous metaphor may be invidious.
If I start on all the whatnots and the might have beens, this talk may start gettin’ depressin’.
God Almighty, you go get out your readin’ books. They say no man knows more than his grandad. If you can’t learn about money from Jackson, Adams (I mean John Adams) and Van Buren, I dunno when you are I going to start learning to read. Of course, very few people HAVE read any history and it will become increasingly difficult for you to get the real books. Henry Adams’ Life of Gallatin cost 35 dollars last time I heard: and was out of print, nacterly, at that time. So I don’t even know what is in it. But you MUST someday either DIE or learn the nature of money.
I told you about that chap in a prison camp, writin’ to ME for some of my books on economics. Seemed to me a bit late. But anyhow, he is still livin’. You CAN read about money in a Gefangenenlager, but you can’t read about it in Davy Jones s locker. You can NOT. When are you startin?
INTEREST on money. When does it become a title to what don’t exist ? When can you divide the fruits of nature and Labor?
You can divide ’em AFTER the harvest. England, by REFUSIN’ to put that into law, is now losing India. Hong Kong, Singapore, Rangoon, Bombay tomorrow. CAUSE she would collect taxes before the harvest. Farmer hadn’t got any money. Even TITHES can not be paid before harvest, so Hindoo had to borrow MONEY from the bunyah, the kike, to PAY taxes, and got more and more into debt.
DEBT. Debt, or the white man’s burden. The people of the United States may be fairly low in the scale. I doubt if they are much lower than others, but your Washington government still HOPES that South American Indians are and WILL STAY sufficiently ignorant of how bank swindles are swoggled, to keep a gang of theives above water, for the next twenty years.
The last hope of [the] North American war party is a victory in South America.
