Editor's note: Following is Paul Grignon's script for his recent presentation at the TRUTH CONVERGENCE conference held in Nanaimo on November 29th.See also my related article A Tornado of Truth Seekers.

With all the dire topics there are to pay attention to, people used to say why is reforming the money system even a priority? But since the financial crisis that has changed. People are starting to see that there is a pattern to almost everything going on in the world, and, as it has for centuries, this pattern almost always leads, in some way, back to the money power. Where does the money come from for all these wars? security measures? Olympic Games? vaccine campaigns? In fact where does money come from? To answer that question, I made my movie Money as Debt. Those of you have you who have seen it will be familiar some of the ideas I will be presenting today. I hope that the others will be able to get the idea from today’s brief explanations. There will be lots of time for questions.

When Raymond gave me a deadline for choosing a title for this presentation, I came up with Money: Jailor or Liberator?

That isn’t really a question as it can be and simultaneously is both. Money, in whatever form, liberates us from the extremely frustrating limitations of barter. Money is what makes possible the specialization of labour, and thus the advancement of specialized knowledge, skills and technology, without which even ancient civilizations could not have existed. This is truer now than ever before, when our entire population of specialists is built upon the 2% or so who are farmers.

Idealists who say we should get rid of money don’t seem to grasp that money is an essential element of freedom, the freedom to acquire what we want and need by trade. Even stone age people without the first glimmer of the wheel, had already invented items of commonly understood symbolic value to use as money. Just because the marvelous and fundamental invention of money has been stolen from us through our own ignorance of how it works, is no reason to reject the invention. It means it is high time that more people understood money for what it really is, their own credit, and find a will and a way to take the power of their credit back from those who pretend to be lending it.

I am certain that many people in this audience don’t need much educating as to how money is a jailor. The national central bank has a monopoly on creating legal tender. And the banking system has a monopoly on creating money as promises to pay this legal tender. Our entire system runs almost exclusively on bank credit, created as loans. In other words the people who create all the real value in the world must always in be in debt to the banks in order to create the money that represents the wealth the people create. Banks decide who gets money as loans and for what purposes.

This can be seen as a service to society, determining who is credit worthy, keeping records and enforcing payments. It is all in the intention. The same power is also easily abused.

Recent events have demonstrated how this system works at its worst. Our debts are the bank's assets. When we don't pay, and the collateral doesn't cover the bank's liability, the banks take a loss on their books that can put them out of business. Recently, starting with the sub-prime crisis, billions in failed private debt has had to be replaced with taxpayer debt in the form of government bailouts.

This can be seen as a transfer from one level of securing payment to the next.
Failed private debt means loss of collateral and credit rating. Failing to pay taxes can land you in jail. So you could say that today’s new bailout money is ultimately backed by the government’s ability to put the taxpayer in jail.

These bank bailouts have created a new ripple of awareness amongst people that our money system seems to be some kind of rigged game where certain financial interests always win.

The egregious example being Goldman Sachs, the company that routinely has their former executives and connected proteges running the US Treasury, the Federal Reserve AND the Bank of Canada. You might recall at one point that it was announced that the financial emergency was over, Goldman Sachs had returned to profitability. AIG had to be rescued because they were insuring bets made by Goldman Sachs.

So, in simplest terms, our current money system is really the private banking system. Money is bank credit. Our governments long ago surrendered their sovereign power to create money to private interests. And these private interests use money crises to crush weaker competitors, put governments even further into debt, and consolidate more and more financial power into fewer and fewer hands. They also bring about major social transformations.

Humans are easily herded by fear. And the fear of having no money and thus no survival power is pretty universal. Thus control of the money supply is control of us through fear.

I am sure most of us here are familiar with mark of the beast prophecies. There will be a one-world banking system to which all will be in debt from birth to death and none shall buy or sell without the mark on their forehead or hand. You don’t need to be a Christian or believe in Revelations to see that this has almost happened already. So far the mark of the beast is still on a plastic card. and it is still possible to do business with anonymous cash. But people have, for the most part, willingly given up the use of cash in exchange for the convenience and security of debit/credit cards. In an increasingly insecure world, most people will probably give up the plastic cards for the same reasons. No one can steal your credit card if your credit card is YOU!

In so many ways, with an inexorable logic, the walls of this globalist prison are closing in. "There is no alternative" is the conditioning mantra repeated endlessly in the consensus media, to make us imprison ourselves without the actual application of force.

Some people insist that , to escape this debt-money prison, we must return to gold and/or silver as money. Precious metals are “honest money” because they can’t just be printed or typed in on a computer screen. THAT argument is completely TRUE. But promises of gold and silver CAN be. And, as is reported recently, much of the world's gold may actually be fake.

Currently, gold and silver are just commodities, they are not legal money. However, there are already far more promises to deliver gold and silver than there is gold and silver in existence and there are now emerging reports, buried by the media, that the US may have tried to pass off billions in gold bars that were actually tungsten, gold-plated.

The precious metals idea of honest money only works if payment is actually made in the real thing. This was found to be unworkably inconvenient and clumsy for the commerce of 300 years ago. There is no doubt that promises to pay would again become functional money. And promises can multiply.

The fact is, our current debt-money system is a direct descendent of the promise-to-pay precious metals system and is not so fundamentally different. How so? Because money’s value is still determined as if it were a single commodity. It’s value is relative to its total abundance in relation to the total goods and services for sale.

To my mind, this IS the prison. This basic idea of money as a commodity. Let me illustrate.

Imagine we are all at some huge Nanaimo Market of the future. The financial system has crashed, paper money and bank accounts are worthless. Farmers have brought food. Craftspeople have brought clothing, metal goods and what-have-you to the market. Clearly, producers have production that is excess to them and is desired by others. But there is no gold or silver to be found. So, are we stuck? Back to clumsy barter? Or do we invent something else to serve the purpose?

Does this example make it clear to you that money should, at its root, be viewed as a
“technology challenge" ? The problem to be solved is to overcome the limitations of barter.

All of our other technologies have changed enormously, but the money technology is still the commodity amongst other commodities model that has been prevalent for centuries.

Do the math. In this system, the more scarce money is, the more the owners of money benefit. Conversely, when flooding the market with new money, the issuers of money get to spend it at full value before the resulting inflation devalues it. Then they get to pay it back in devalued money. When money is a commodity it can be manipulated, monopolized and gamed.

This was true when gold and silver were money. It was true when most money was physical cash. And it is even more true today. Today's debt -money technology makes the quantity power of money even more powerful by making it hugely elastic. The supply can be enlarged or contracted very quickly by those who control the supply, with predictable ensuing effects. Easy money, low interest, high volume of loans leads to escalating prices and more borrowing against higher property evaluations. Tight money, high interest, falling prices lead to defaults and seizures of real property.

It can easily be argued that today's money technology was an act of fraud from its inception. This fraud was committed for two main reasons:
1. It made the bankers rich through interest payments on money created from thin air, and gave them control over government.
2. It allowed governments to borrow all the money they wanted to fight wars and suppress their citizens, and just pay interest on an ever-growing debt.

The citizens, of course paid twice. Once through interest to the bankers and second through inflation as this debt money enlarged the circulation beyond the limits of the economy to keep up.

The citizens paid again, because their government was thus usurped by hidden financial interests who controlled both government and industry through debt, while keeping up the pretense of government rule.

Is there a path to freedom? Maybe not. I don’t come here offering any hope that we can stop the globalist machine if we just do this or that. But it seems to me that the globalist machine is run by competitive, ruthless people who may destroy themselves by infighting. Also, their economic model depends on cheap energy resources and is destroying the life-support system of the planet at a breakneck pace.

So it would seem almost certain that, at some point, it will all fall apart as all empires before us have done, and the survivors may be left to “re-localize” as best we can with what is left of the planet. What is impossible now may become unavoidable in changed circumstances.

In that spirit I offer this 8 minute movie which you can also find on my website www.digitalcoin.info
Self-issued credit seems to me the only basis on which money can be truly liberated, and worth something. That is why it is the principle behind all alternative currencies. It is also what really underlies our current money system. The only difference is that we think the bank is lending us money, whereas in alternative systems we know we are self-issuing credit.

If you understand the point I make in my movies then you understand that when you sign for a loan you give the bank the asset from which the loan is made. Money is backed by the borrower’s promise to pay back even more money. This makes the ability to pay both principal and interest from only principal somewhat problematic. It also makes the ability to repay dependent on the overall availability of money,as the debt is payable only in money.

In my little cartoon, The Essence of Money, which I am going to put in a minute or so, I illustrate how money can be nothing more than a common value unit in which individual barter offerings are priced. Barter offerings can be quantified in these units and used as money. This also is “debt” money in a sense, because the offering spent as money must be honoured with real product or service in the future.

However, it is not a “money” debt. This debt is ONLY payable in the product or service of the debtor, which means the creditor must purchase from or employ the debtor in order to collect.

Another vital difference is that the value of this “money” is defined. It is set by the real goods and services promised. Money is no longer a commodity amongst other commodities, it is a delivery contract for specific goods and/or services. This may or may not be at a guaranteed price as well.

In this way money credit and debt are all solidly anchored to real productivity and the essential nature of money is fundamentally transformed.

Watch my 8 minute cartoon, "The Essence of Money" for more information.