Excerpt from "Lifting the Veil: David Icke interviewed by Jon Rappoport,"
pp.54-57, Copyright © 1998, Truth Seeker Books, San Diego, CA
Alternative Currency
Excerpts of a Conversation
between David Icke and Jon Rappoport
JR: This [discussion about the way the current official economic
systems are operated and manipulated] reminds me of a conversation
I had with a researcher who told me that during the American
depression of 1929, there were somewhere between 1,200 to 1,500
private currencies issued. People had gotten together and they had
looked around and said, well, Washington may be broke and those
dollars may be useless, but there's nothing wrong with us
intrinsically. So they began to print their own money. This is a
great chapter of untold history in America where people traded,
bartered in a sense, but they used their own money and they
survived by not hooking into that whole federal system.
DI: This is a very good point. This is about taking power back and
not just accepting like a sheep the structure that you are told
you must conform to. The final scene of this fishing line out,
fishing line in, scam is that when people can no longer pay back
their loans because of the manipulated depression they go
bankrupt. When this happens the banks have the right to take
possession of wealth that does exist, their customers' land,
homes, and businesses.
In this way, the wealth of the world, the real wealth, has been
sucked to the top of this pyramid and this is why so few hands now
control the real wealth of the world. They've been playing this
game -- boom-bust, boom-bust -- for centuries.
DI: What we can do is start stepping out of the system. When I
wrote a book in the late 1980s, I found in Britain two LETS (Local
Exchange and Trading System) groups, systems of barter, in which
people in effect created their own currency.
JR: There are many of those in the United States.
DI: Sure: Now they are all over Britain. This is why information
about how the financial system really works is so important -- so
that people can de-link from it. Basically what happens during a
depression is that people who need work and services are
disconnected from people who have the skills to provide those
services simply because there is no piece of paper (money) to
exchange between the parties. So what we need to do in our
communities is work out schemes by which one person's contribution
to another person can be rewarded. You can do that if you get
together with a determination to do it.
JR: What is the government response to do this?
DI: They are trying to work out ways of taxing it, of course,
because they have a real problem. The way this system works is
that you get one person in the community who sets himself up as
the person who administers the organization and you invent a
currency.
Money is not the root of all evil actually; it's the means to
overcome the limitations of barter so that you can reward
contributions to society without having to do a like-for-like
exchange which can get complicated. So the unit of exchange called
money, exchanging an energy for contributions to society, is
extremely positive. It's not an evil. Where the problem comes in
is when you start having interest on money, because then purely by
controlling the unit of exchange you can control the world and
suck people's wealth into your hands -- which is what's happened.
So you invent a currency.
Someone provides a list of the skills that everyone in the group
has and then people say, right, I want my front room painted.
Here's a painter on the list. Will you do it? Okay. Yes, done.
Then you ring the central administrator and you say, right, so
many units to this man, the painter. And you've agreed on the
price beforehand. Now this painter can go to someone else in the
group and get services for himself to that extent without making
any more contributions to the group. Basically you're earning
money by the work that you are doing for other people which allows
you to have units of exchange to use in that group for work that
you need doing.
This helps you delink from the rigged financial system and provide
your own method of exchanging contributions to each other. It's
actually very simple and it works very well.
JR: I know a group in Ithaca, New York, which is founded by Paul
Glover, and it works on that principle. They have their own
newspaper now, in which they publish stories of people who have
gotten into their network and have actually changed their lives.
They've decided, well, I think I will do what I actually want to
do instead of doing the thing that I thought I had to do to make
that money over there. Now doing this instead I suddenly discover
there are a few people, at least to begin with, who want what I
do. Lo and behold, I can become part of an economic network. They
have, at last count, 2000 individuals and business who have signed
on, including a bank in Ithaca that is taking their money. They
call the money "Ithaca Hours" paper. They claim it is less
counterfeitable than American money.
So this guy sells his how-to kit to people for a very small amount
and other people have started to introduce this currency too.
DI: It's a way of stepping out of the system. Meyer Amschel
Rothschild, the man who founded the Rothschild empire, once said
very memorably, "Give me control of a nation's currency and I care
not who makes the laws." Control the currency and you control the
country. And what we're talking about here is actually taking back
control of the units of exchange. If we can't get control
immediately of the units of exchange that are being used to
manipulate us, then let's create our own and let's step out of
this system as best we can.