Brilliant, dead-on analysis of the current state of play on the chessboard we call life by Chris Hedges at Truthdig–“Let’s Get This Class War Started“:

“For every dollar that the wealthiest 0.1 percent amassed in 1980 they had an additional $3 in yearly income in 2008, David Cay Johnston explained in the article ‘9 Things the Rich Don’t Want You to Know About Taxes.’ The bottom 90 percent, Johnson said, in the same period added only one cent. Half of the country is now classified as poor or low-income. The real value of the minimum wage has fallen by $2.77 since 1968. Oligarchs do not believe in self-sacrifice for the common good. They never have. They never will. They are the cancer of democracy.“

This class war Hedges is describing is only nominally about money–it’s really about control.  Control of the vast many by the very few.  It’s about control via money rather than control through naked force, although the threat of naked force is always there, just over the horizon–but it’s getting ever closer.  But the oligarchs Hedges is talking about know that money is much more effective than force as a mechanism of control, if only for the simple reason that the oligarchs are overwhelmingly outnumbered and would obviously badly lose any straight-up literal shootin’ match.  This principle was summed up brilliantly in the children’s classic “A Bug’s Life”:

But how do the oligarchs control us with money?  Simple–THEY are allowed to 1) create the money and 2) sell it to us.  They have taught us to call this, respectively, 1) a “loan” and 2) “interest.”  They have taught us this since birth, to the point where it really doesn’t even need to be taught anymore, it’s just accepted as the natural state of things.  In fact, the oligarchy’s mind control about money is so complete that they feel perfectly comfortable admitting, in public documents, that money is created from nothing, and has no real value except that which we give to it in our own imaginations (see “9 Mind-Blowing Facts About Money” just as a starting point).  So whether we want to admit it or not, we are in fact living under the heel of a system that keeps us in constant desperation and compliance because we have been made to believe that we must perform intense labor for the benefit of someone else in exchange for tokens that have value only because we imagine them to have such value.  In other words, we create the money and give it value, but we are told that it is banks and governments that do that and that is the reason we are told that they must have power over us.

Win the war without firing a shot

So what’s the answer?  The peaceful, non-violent answer?  It’s so simple, as stated at The Air Standard blog:

“It is beyond dispute that money can be–and has been–anything: gold, paper, shells, sticks, salt, binary code, cigarettes, fabric, etc., etc.  So it stands to reason that money can (and arguably ought to) be the following:  a check written by a buyer for any amount requested by a seller and drawn on a fictional, non-existent account.   In other words, self-issued currency.  And everyone would have this same check-writing power.  The only problem with this scenario?  No more poverty, no more control of the masses, no more larceny, no more want, no more war, no more prostitution, no more slavery, no more debt.  Oh wait, those aren’t problems at all–unless you’re one of the few people benefiting from the present system of rapaciously fraudulent currency.”

In other words, the way to win the class war totally peacefully is to simply acknowledge, by law, that money is now created and always has been created and given value by the people, not by banks and governments.  And because that is true now and always has been, each person ought to be legally given the power to issue their own currency, for any amount.  The day that happens–class war over.  Problem solved.

Wouldn’t that make money worthless?  Yes, of course–but it already is worthless.  The dollar has lost essentially all of its purchasing power since 1913.

(above graphic taken from: http://visual.ly/purchasing-power-us-dollar-1913-2013)

And again, remember that it is an open secret that money is given value only by the belief of the people that the money has value, even when, as in our current system, the money admittedly has no intrinsic value at all.