Pat Shannan's MUSINGS
An Eyewitness To Counterfeiting
In every nation in the history of the world, has it not always ended up a war between the ruling class and the people? The king wants more and more, and the people continually settle for less and less. In 20th century America, the bureaucracy reversed the roles of master and servant by absconding with the wealth -- lawful money -- and silently became that ruling class. The currency switch was one chimerical sleight-of-hand, the installation of slug coins another which was not so easy. Here is how it was done.
In late 1959, National Rejectors of St. Louis, Missouri -- the manufacturer of ninety-seven per cent of the coin acceptance devices in the United States -- received an unannounced visit from several agents of the U.S. Treasury Department officiously flashing their badges and credentials. The company's top inventor-designer was a brilliant New Yorker from Brooklyn by the name of Merrill Jenkins. The officers desired an interview with Mr. Jenkins regarding a subject that was normally kept under tight corporate security.
"What techniques," the government agents asked him, "might a counterfeiter use to deceive state-of-the-art coin acceptance machines?" Believing that he was helping to protect the interests of the United States Treasury and, therewith, the American people, Jenkins revealed over the course of the interview that the counterfeiter who could manufacture a copper slug sandwiched between two faces of nickel would have himself a coin costing between one and two cents (depending upon its size). The mechanical acceptors would then mistakenly read the coin as being made of the silver the machines were designed to receive.
"But don't worry about it," Jenkins assured the officials. "We are talking about a complicated process. Only a very sophisticated syndicate with unlimited resources could turn out these coins in quantity." Little did he realize that he was revealing secrets of national security to that very syndicate, the actual one with its eye on discovering the method of creating unlimited resources. "The counterfeiter the Treasury was pretending to guard against," he later constantly told lecture audiences for the rest of his life, "was the Treasury Department itself."
When the Coinage Act of 1965 began turning those coins out in dime, quarter, half-dollar, and dollar denominations, the middle-aged inventor was shocked. Merrill Jenkins felt his confidence had been betrayed. Eventually, he quit the firm and began exploring the historical relationship of governments to money, and he spent the rest of his life writing books and speaking publicly in an attempt to help ordinary mortals comprehend the gravity of the situation. Strange to him at the time, no major publishing house would touch his writings, and he had to self-publish each piece as he could afford it. After his death in 1979, a handful of followers picked up his torch.
At the time of Mr. Jenkin's death, America had endured more than a decade of the infusion of fiat money. Both the coins and currency in circulation were irredeemable in gold or silver for the first time since the "Not worth a Continental" days of the 1780s. Predictably, the once great nation had plunged itself into the very kind of economic chaos the Constitution had been written to cure and prevent. Inflation began to creep like never before in their lifetimes, but the people swallowed all the economic propaganda without question.
THE JFK RUMOR
In 1981, a rumor was circulated that President Kennedy had been assassinated by agents of the hidden money powers because he had signed Executive Order #11110 instructing the Treasury to print $4.3 billion in United States Notes -- paper bills without gold or silver backing issued by the government, not the Federal Reserve. According to the rumor, the bankers were furious because they would lose interest payments on the money supply. In actuality, the Order was not for United States Notes but ". . .to issue Silver Certificates against any silver bullion, silver, or standard silver dollars in the Treasury not then held for redemption of any outstanding silver certificates. . ."
Others later said that the very first presidential act by Lyndon Johnson was the rescinding of that Kennedy order on Saturday morning, November 23, 1963. However, there is no existing record of such action in the law library. Considering the apparent devious removal of other documents, as well as the surreptitious insertion of even more, this void of available data does not mean the subterfuge did not take place, but we suspect it was another ungrounded rumor.
Some researchers have attempted to obtain a copy of Executive Order #11110 and have been told it does not exist. We have found it but without any mention of the amount -- $4.3 billion or any other figure. Was it "deep-sixed," as apparently was the original Thirteenth Amendment? Can anyone produce a certified copy of either the Kennedy Order or the Johnson Rescission? The one copy we have seen of the Kennedy Order contained the (rumored) wording, the date, the amounts, etc., but no signature or seal. Except for these discrepancies, it appeared to have been copied from an original. However, we could not prove its authenticity with anything found in the law books. There we found only the Executive Order for the silver certificates with no specific amount mentioned.
Longtime researcher and author G. Edward Griffin offers a tasty piece of logic. From page 570 of his The Creature from Jekyll Island, we find: "Kennedy had been a life-long socialist and internationalist. He had attended the Fabian London School of Economics; became a political scientist who cooperated with the monetary scientists in the destruction of the American money supply; and, as President, enthusiastically participated in the transfer of American wealth to foreign nations. There is little reason to believe that he had suddenly "seen the light" and was preparing to reverse his life-long beliefs and commitments."
The erudite Griffin goes on to say, "The persistent rumor regarding the bankers' role in JFK's death was reinforced by several books circulated in conservative circles." He's right! Yours truly is one of those authors. And while I have for now satisfied myself to the contrary of certain, long held suspicions, it still bothers some of us that those Fed notes would have been released so soon after Kennedy's assassination. To assume that the machinations went into motion on Friday afternoon - the designers, the engravers, the printers - and a new note was produced the following Monday or Tuesday is ludicrous. Was Kennedy part of the new money plot or was he totally in the dark about the whole operation?
A few things are certain. John F. Kennedy was killed on Friday and buried the following Monday, November 25th. The 1963 Series of irredeemable (and patently counterfeit) Federal Reserve "Notes" was released that week, and the news was buried in the back pages of the nation's newspapers at a convenient time when nobody cared anyway. Johnson ascended to the Presidency and buried the assassination facts beneath the shield of his own hand-picked Warren Commission. In 1965, cupronickel coins began to replace the silver ones and worked perfectly in the vending machines. In 1968, the United States Government reneged on its obligation to exchange lawful money for the millions of outstanding notes in circulation among the people.
For years we have been warned by those who have been there: "Don't try to explain the money issue to a jury. They just can't get it in one short lesson." Agreed. But if the "Paper Money" scheme seems tough to sort out, believe it that the coinage fraud is even tougher.
Merrill Jenkins understood it better than anyone. After all, he lived the deception first hand. From his masterpiece, Money - The Greatest Hoax on Earth, from which there is an education on every page, we glean a tidbit: "If it were possible to educate the people, and if it were possible to go back to wealth media, the extraction of wealth would cease and our nation would resume its progress toward ever greater individual standards of living. That is why they outlawed gold and silver coins, this was our wealth media. That is why they melted our silver coins and sold our silver at auction. They don't want us to use wealth media. If we use our wealth media, we own our wealth and the elected officials become servants of the people. The public would regain the power to direct the policies of their government." ========
Merrill Jenkins works are a "must" for the bookshelf of any monetary realist. Send $18 p.pd. to Oceana Investigations, Suite 163, 6069 Old Canton Road, Jackson, Miss. 39211 for a copy of MONEY - The Greatest Hoax on Earth.