Trillion Dollar Coin

Whether the Federal Reserve creates debt money, or the Treasury creates fiat money, both methods are inflationary. However, who gets to control the creation of money is a definite source of contention with potentially deadly results.

Could the US get a $1tn platinum coin?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20951417

09 Jan 2012

A petition urging the creation of platinum coin worth $1tn (£624bn) has attracted nearly 7,000 signatures and the support of some heavyweight economists such as Nobel prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, and Philip Diehl, the former director of the United States Mint. Experts say the plan would be lawful and should allow the government to keep spending if President Barack Obama fails to convince lawmakers to raise the "debt ceiling" - a cap, set by Congress, on the US government's borrowing ability. This brinksmanship could threaten the US's credit rating if the country's debt reaches or breaks through this ceiling. Walden said he feared the practice would be "very inflationary".

Crossfire, The Plot That Killed Kennedy by Jim Marrs, 1989, Excerpts

Another overlooked aspect of Kennedy's attempt to reform American society involves money. Kennedy apparently reasoned that by returning to the Constitution, which states that only Congress shall coin and regulate money, the soaring national debt could be reduced by not paying interest to the bankers of the Federal Reserve system, who print paper money then loan it to the government at interest.

He moved in this area on June 4, 1963, by signing Executive Order 11,110 which called for the issuance of $4,292,893,815 in United States notes through the U.S. Treasury rather than the traditional Federal Reserve System. A number of "Kennedy bills" were indeed issued but were quickly withdrawn after Kennedy's death.

Considering that the battle over U.S. monetary control by a monolithic central bank is an issue that dates back to the founding of the Republic, some assassination researchers believe Kennedy's little-noted efforts to reform the money supply and curtail the Federal Reserve System may have cost him much more than just the enmity of the all-powerful international bankers.

Executive Order 11110

Federal Reserve Conspiracy

Mayer Amschel Rothschild, 1743-1812, International Banker

Give me control of a nation’s currency, and I care not who makes its laws.

United States Intervenes

Coffee Series

Uncommon Grounds by Mark Pendergrast, 1999, Excerpts

The Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, together with leftist guerilla movements in el Salvador and Guatemala, heightened fears that communism would triumph in the troubled coffee countries of Latin America. With Brazilian production recovering and world consumption stagnant, another coffee glut loomed.

Fearful that all of Central America would fall to Communist influence [as had Nicaragua], the United States supported the repressive governments of El Salvador and Guatemala with helicopters and anti-insurgency training while trying to nudge them toward mile reforms. 

Disaffected expatriates formed the Contra movement and supported by the US government made incursions from bases just across the Honduran border. The Contras stepped up raids to disrupt the coffee harvest, killing not only Sandinistas but lowly harvesters, including women and children. Both sides committed their share of atrocities.

Having ceded power to the military years ago in order to maintain repressive order, the coffee oligarchy found that it had created a monster over which it had insufficient control. The coffee elite were now divided. None wanted major agrarian reform, of course, and all deplored the guerillas.

Simmering Peace

Early in 1992, the twelve-year civil war that had killed eighty thousand people and sent over a million into exile finally ended. As part of the settlement, about 20 percent of El Salvador’s coffee lands were given to compesinos in areas already controlled by the guerillas anyway, providing at least a modicum of hope and reform.

The violence, social inequities, and land distribution problems of Central America were far from over, but at least for the time being, the worst of the atrocities had stopped. Coffee growers now could worry about such mundane matters as producing quality beans and securing a decent price for them.

Coffee and Central America Unrest

Coffee Series

Uncommon Grounds by Mark Pendergrast, 1999, Excerpts

In El Salvador, the people’s Revolutionary Army [ERP] challenged the repressive regime of General Carlos Humberto Romero. Right wing death squads roamed the countryside. The entire country descended into a bloodbath, with over fifty thousand people killed by one side or the other in the next few years. The coffee-growing oligarchy loathed the rebels but were split politically, with some supporting the death squads, others seeking moderate reforms. The chaotic violence inevitably reduced the coffee harvest, as many laborers were killed or joined the rebels. In November 1989, six Jesuit priests and two women workers were slain by death squads in El Salvador.

In Nicaragua, a small group of Marxist intellectuals, the Sandinistas, led the fight against longtime president Anastasio Somoza, with the entire country rallying behind them, eager to get rid of the dictator. In July 1979 Somoza fled and the Sandinistas took over, promising a better life for all, including coffee growers and laborers. The Sandinistas launched their revolution by commandeering Somoza’s coffee plantations.

The new government seized the vast Somoza family holdings, which included 15 percent of the coffee fincas, while dedicating itself to renovating selected farms. At first, Nicaraguan coffee workers and farm owners were enthusiastic about these programs; over the next few years, however, it became clear that the urban Marxists didn’t know much about coffee. The Sandinistas called coffee farmers who cooperated with them “patriotic producers.” Anyone who questions their politics or policies was labeled a “capitalist parasite.”

Coffee, United States and Guatemala

Coffee Series

Uncommon Grounds by Mark Pendergrast, 1999, Excerpts

After the 1944 overthrow of Guatemalan dictator Ubico, new President Arevalo finally abolished ”vagrancy” laws and other forms of forced labor, and the state assumed ownership of the coffee plantations that had been expropriated from Germans during the war.

When former general Jacobo Arbenz Guzman assumed the presidency in 1951, he vowed to transform Guatemala from a dependent nation with a semi-colonial economy into an economically independent country. The following year Guatemala passed the Law of Agrarian reform, which called for the redistribution of public lands.

Those forced to sell would be recompensed based on tax assessments. The Arbenz government began to hand over more than one hundred former German coffee plantations to peasant cooperatives. The United Fruit Company was the hardest-hit foreign corporation, since much of its potential banana land lay fallow. Its land also had been undervalued to avoid taxation, so that the company was forced to sell land far below its fair market value.

US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was trying to force through a resolution aimed at Guatemala, where social reform threatened American business interests. As a private lawyer, the new Secretary had represented the United Fruit Company. His brother, Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA, had served on the United Fruit board of directors for several years. Even more than concern for the banana company, however, the United States perceived Arbenz as a threat to American influence in Latin America. Communism provided a convenient excuse to attack radical nationalist regimes. In August 1953 they convinced President Eisenhower to approve Operation Success, a clandestine CIA plan to overthrow the Arbenz regime.

Although Operation Success was indeed a success in the short term, it was a long-term disaster for Guatemala. The country’s new president, General Carlos Castillo Armas, had been hand picked by the CIA. He swiftly reversed the progressive tide. He canceled the agrarian reform legislation, disenfranchised illiterates, restored the secret police, and outlawed all political parties, labor groups, and peasant organizations. Within a year and a half Castillo Armas had driven most of the peasants off the land they had gained under Arbenz.

Unfortunately, that laboratory would breed discontent, starvation, and dictatorship rather that happiness, economic boon, and democracy. Castillo Armas was assassinated in 1957. The country descended into three decades of repression, violence, and terror as governmental death squads and guerilla bands roamed the countryside – a direct legacy of the US intervention. The coffee elite continued to rely on cheap peasant labor, and even though many plantation owners deplored the violence and uncertainty under the repressive military regime, it allowed them to keep their land and status.

See also the Public Relations Campaign by United Fruit Company

United Fruit Company in Guatemala

Guatemala Redistributes Land

Guatemala Overthrow Campaign

Coffee, Germany and Guatemala

Coffee Series

Uncommon Grounds by Mark Pendergrast, 1999, Excerpts

During the last two decades of the 1800s enterprising Germans, many fleeing Bismarck’s militarism, flocked to Guatemala and to the rest of Central America. Private capital from Germany to build a railroad line to the sea was the beginning of a trend in which the Germans brought capital and modernization to the Guatemalan coffee industry. In many Latin American countries Germans held significant positions in the coffee industry.

On September 1, 1939, Hitler’s blitzkrieg stormed across the Polish border. With startling German military successes early in the war, the prospect of nazified neighbors to the south seemed all too real. On contemporary map of Guatemala identified German-owned coffee fincas with red swastikas, which dominated the cartography.

Many of the five thousand Germans in Guatemala were open Nazi sympathizers. In the northern province of Coban, Germans owned 80 percent of all arable land and lived well, with sports fields, swimming pools, and private movie houses, while their paid workers as little as 3 cents a day.

Local Gestapo members brought increasing pressure to bear on non-Nazi Guatemalan Germans, sometimes threatening them with violence if they did not comply. The Nazis compiled a secret list of forty “unpatriotic” Germans who were to be executed once Germany won the war and took over Guatemala.

In Guatemala, pragmatic dictator Jorge Ubico abandoned his German coffee friends in the wake of Pearl Harbor. Under the United States coercion, German, Italian, and Japanese settlers in Latin America – many of whom were coffee growers – were subjected to official blacklists. With Ubico suddenly assuming a strong pro-American posture, a blacklist of German coffee concerns went into effect on December 12, 1941. A total of 4,058 Latin American Germans were kidnapped, shipped to the United States, and interned. Their farms and businesses were confiscated.

Motivation may have been to eliminate business competition.