 Two, well, that is if you were gone, House of Poo Corner, part two of an interview with John Root on independence. And one of our points is that independence ain't worth a hill of beans if it is not financial and monetary independence. So that is what the Bank of England since 1694 has been trying to crush and has been very successful at that, including the independent colonies who created their own currencies during the period of the continent of the colonial script. And then, oh, I know what I wanted to mention last time. The continental dollar became in later years, 200 years later, it's a joke. Oh, it ain't worth a continental. That's because it was counterfeited and counterfeited and counterfeited by the Brits in order to devalue it on purpose. So there was so much continental currency that flooded the market. So for those of you who've been paying attention and thinking about the last interview and those of you who said, aha, got them there, well, you don't because the continental currency was working perfectly until the massive counterfeiting that went on in order to destroy it. So welcome back, everybody. And again, the websites to pay attention to here are the MassachusettsRepublic.org, the USARepublic.info, and they spell it with a CK. And I will add one, VermontIndependent.net, where for many, many years we have written articles about banking, the history of banking, the history of the Vermont Republic. And I will mention that I have a very long article there from a couple of years ago about the Vermont State Bank that was in existence since 1806 for a few years. Until the banking powers managed to shut it down. The out-of-state banking powers managed to shut it down. And one of the devices they used to shut it down is still tried and true. You can read it in the papers every day that this idea of paper money is really silly and it doesn't work. And they use that in order to stop people from creating an independent currency. But John Root is going to go forward now and explain the wonderful benefits and how we can bring that about and why it is socially responsible to do so and how it gets us out of the web of debt. So off we go. Okay, so the first thing that I want to describe is how insidious the existing banking system is. So at the end of the revolution, Hamilton organized his cronies to fan out through the colonies and buy up Continentals for a nickel on the dollar. It wasn't always a nickel, sometimes it was two cents, sometimes it was ten cents. But basically they bought up Continentals. John Hamilton persuaded President George Washington, this is much later, to redeem the Continentals at face value, to demonstrate that this new United States with its new constitution was a honorable, significant new member of the nations of the world that are all controlled by a central bank. So you had the currency idea in the Constitution then subverted coin, never mind I can't remember the exact phrase, Congress has the power to coin money, regulate the value thereof and establish the weights and measures. So the point that I'm making is that the banking system without our being able to understand it has managed things. So the Eastern establishment was the wealth of the Eastern establishment, including the Boston Brahmins and that whole thing, it all came about out of that original fortune that was made with the Continentals being redeemed at face value. The difficulty that we're in is that this idea that you have to borrow the money in order for there to be money in circulation, which the banks don't represent, I mean they never tell you that, is what's creating the conditions. So everybody has to do whatever they have to do in order to be able to make the payments in order to have a house, in order to have a car, in order to get an education. You have to do what the banking system is requiring in order to be able to live the way you expect it. In the idea of organic law, everything is based on what you could say, what you could call is genuine common sense. And our common sense is always based on our sense of justice. So if any of us sit together and we have a conversation about what would be just and all kinds of things come up, it doesn't take very long to get to that point where, yes, we do understand what justice is. So in common law, going way, way back to the Magna Carta, the idea of justice is that you need to be judged if you've been accused of a crime. You need to be judged by people who know you. You need to be judged by a jury of your peers. And back in the day, before the most of American history actually, but after the Constitution, juries always knew that they were not only judging what the facts were and applying the law or justice to the facts, but they were also determining the justice of the law. This is a very important thing because it's been lost. It's not been lost because people didn't know about it. It's because the banking cartel is absolutely dead set against anybody ever recognizing that juries can determine the justice of the law. Slavery ended simply because juries in the north were unwilling to convict the members, the people who operated the Underground Railroad, and they just wouldn't. So I don't care what the facts are, not guilty. Prohibition ended because juries refused to convict the operators of the speakeasies, they just refused to convict them. We don't care what the facts are. This is not just. This is what we need to get back to. So there are two things that come to us from common law. One is the grand jury, which we're all familiar with. But the point about the grand jury is that just like the regular jury, what we call the petite jury, had the power to judge the justice of the law. So the grand jury, in its tradition, also was responsible for issuing presentments. A presentment is an accusation against some aspect of the government, a government agency or what have you, that would then have to be investigated. Once the grand jury had come up with the presentment, then it would need to be investigated by the police or the sheriff or what have you and handed over to the prosecution. Well, presentments are gone. Grand juries have a tendency to be specially selected, seated for a long time and do exactly what the prosecutor wants. There's very little recollection or understanding that if we, the people, are to be sovereign, not only will we have to issue the money to create the conditions in which we want to live, but we will also need to be a real serious check on whatever the government around us is. Now, we know from our experience, and both Jim and I have been involved in protests of one kind or another, most of our lives, it doesn't do anything. We have this idea that we can petition Congress for redress of grievances is totally useless. Nothing never happens. And there we were, a million people in Washington, D.C., protesting the war in Vietnam and what do we get? Well, okay, sort of. Well, we also got beaten by the Vietnamese. That was a big help to ending the war. Yeah, exactly. I mean, the extinction rebellion right now, all these people willing to throw their bodies on the line to get a real commitment to genuine reduction in carbon dioxide, the extinction rebellion is doomed to failure. Just, I mean, all those people who were totally convinced. Now, what we need to do is recreate that experience of individual sovereignty. We can make agreements with each other. We can sit together in what we're calling a Jural Assembly. In our township, in our ward, where we know each other. And if we understand that money is always an agreement to use something as the means of exchange, we do not have to use the dollar as the means of exchange. We can use the dollar as the unit of value, right? Because we all know what a dollar is worth. We can make up for the inflation in the dollar, but we do not have to use the dollar as the means of exchange. So there are a number of national organizations that are working on this. One is Liberty Dollar, libertydollar.net. And the other is Common Good, CommonGood.Earth. There's also time banking. There are also numerous local currencies like Berkshires and the Berkshires. And there are lots of people who are working on this issue of how can we actually assume the sovereignty that's necessary in order for us to create the conditions in which we want to live? Well, we can do that by joining the Common Good payment system, where we use the dollar as the unit of value. But we issue Common Good as the means of exchange. So transfer from your bank account dollars, from your bank account, no challenge to the existing, into the community's account. And the community will issue Common Good, which you then spend at all the participating businesses. We have some 400 people in the Greenfield, Western Massachusetts, Northern Western Massachusetts, Greenfield area, beginning in Northampton and Amherst, as well as in Greenfield, Massachusetts. And we have over 40 businesses, including grocery stores and what have you, no gas stations yet, but biodiesel. And we begin to have the experience of sovereignty. So to the extent that people don't need to cash out their Common Good back to dollars and put them back in their bank account, we can also allocate the dollars in the community's account. So we now have federal reserve dollars in the community account that we can allocate to the extent that they're not needed to cash out. And we can issue Common Good to the extent that we judge it will be safe and won't lead to too much cashing out. We have a sovereign monetary system. Do you have any examples of having issued Common Good currency for a project or anything like that? So in the first year that we were able to, we funded 10 different organizations with 10,000. And then the second year, last year, we funded almost 20 with 20,000. It wasn't 20, it was another 10 or so. I can't remember. I mean, it was a lot of fun. We have a very good online democracy system. So we use what we call liquid democracy. Everybody's voice counts. Everybody's vote counts. Because if you fail to vote, the person that you've selected is your proxy, their vote counts for you. It's always a ranking of the choices. So this is my first choice. This is my second. This is my third. Then you can use a system called Condersant Pairs to figure out what the really preferred option is. If a significant number of people say 5% veto something, no, no, that's not good. That's unjust or there's a problem with that. Then we have to totally reconsider it. So we've also created a democracy system that makes us sovereign. And we conduct all of our meetings sociocratically. Sociocracy is another way of creating a juror assembly so that in sociocracy, every voice matters. It's really important that everybody has a chance to come to expression. So if there's a proposal on the table for something that we should issue money for and there's an objection, we want to go into the objection. It's not, okay, consensus is stymied. No, no, no. You need to use a rational argument to explain what your objection is. We need to pursue that objection because when we get to the bottom of it, to the heart of the matter, it will make the proposal that much stronger. It will create. So we're now in an entirely different relationship, not competitive. Let's not ever elect somebody, right? Let's not ever have a sealed ballot, anonymous vote, right? Let's always select the best person for the role, for the job. We had a very interesting experience at the end of August. The group of us in Massachusetts who've been working on the Republic on this re-establishment of common law, natural law, God's law, maxims of law, treaty law, not corporate, not uniform commercial code, right? We got together and we went through a process of deciding who would be the best person to be commissioner. The idea of the commissioner is, and this is all just very beginning, right? But the idea of the commissioner is he needs to decide how to distribute the money. He needs to be the one where the buck stops. We need a sheriff. Who would be the best person to be the sheriff? We need a community builder because we actually have to build this whole thing from the ground up. We need a notary. We need somebody to watch, to be responsible for the process. So the notary is not just signing that what has been presented is being presented by this person, but can really create an affidavit to help somebody to create an affidavit that they swear to, that is the basis for truth in common law. And who can oversee the process? Both the judges, hopefully we will never have any lawyers. It's another wonderful thing that we don't know from our history. The Constitution actually banned lawyers, the lawyers have taken over. Anyway, that disappeared after the Civil War, just wasn't there anymore. Anyway, oversee the court and the grand jury and the petite jury. And then we need the historian or the scribe. We need somebody who will take the notes and make sure that everybody stays on task. And we went around the group and we talked about why we thought so-and-so should be the commissioner or the sheriff. And it was remarkable. The person that, just as an example, the person that we selected, just on the basis of listening to what everybody, the person that we selected for the sheriff is the most non-confrontational person in that group. The one that you would least suspect would be, why? Because that's what the sheriff needs to do. The sheriff needs to diffuse the situation rather than impose or compel. And we started talking about Andy of Mayberry and Barney who had the bullet in his pocket, not in the gun, and always was able to diffuse. That's the sheriff that we need. We need to totally rethink the entire way in which we go about governing ourselves. And if we do it in local jury assemblies, the jury assembly is the idea that when you step in, everybody belongs to the jury assembly in a neighborhood or a township or a village or a ward or whatever the district is that we're using. Everybody belongs to the jury assembly. How do you spell that? Jural? Jural. J-U-R-A-L. Jural assembly. Jural assembly. It's the jury. It's the jury pool, basically. So we all belong to the jury pool and you get the notice, show up for juries. The point about the jury assembly, which we don't have now, it's supposed to be the city council or the county or the state legislature or the national congress, but when you step into the jury assembly, you are assuming the responsibility to be a sovereign citizen. So you will be guided by your healthy sense of justice and the common good. Now, because the world, the entire world, but also particularly our own experience, there is this huge distortion of human nature that's brought about by the unconscious way in which we have to relate to the money. Money is always scarce. Everybody is waiting for money in order to be able to do the really great, wonderful thing that they know that they could do. You can only get money for things that will be profitable to banks. There is no justice in, just to give you a little example, the reason that the business goes out of business is because the bank created a bubble now with expansion of credit. Now there's contracting the credit and they won't renew your line of credit. That's why you go out of business. Well, guess what? Because you weren't one of these mega corporations, you were personally liable for that loan. Your entire life is determined by what you can get money for from a bank. What a bank will lend you money for. And it's true for all of us. I have to earn my living. Now, I am not in the least bit interested in earning my living. What I am interested in doing is realizing the spirit that animates me. I want to discover and serve the transcendent purpose that I feel called to serve. Now, if we're sitting together in a rural assembly and we're asking each other what would be just and somebody were to suggest, like my good self were to suggest, well the only thing that would really create justice is if everybody had the money that they need as a matter of right so that they can pursue the transcendent purpose they feel called to serve. Now, human nature has been represented entirely as, you know, vile, venal. We're all greedy. We're all, you know, willing to compromise. There's no morals, et cetera. That's all a result of the monetary system. Once we recognize that everybody would like to be in a position to do what they feel called to do with the possibility of educating themselves, of developing their capacity to do it increasingly well, autonomously, the way that they want to do it, and the money, if I got the check at the beginning of the month, there was an equitable distribution of the overall productivity of the economy so that I could do what I want to do. Everything would change. And if I experienced myself as a sovereign individual responsible for my community, I am responsible for the common good of this community, as are you, as are what sort of agreements would we make? We would make the agreement to make sure that everybody has what they need. As soon as everybody has what they need, all of this greed and hoarding and avarice and keeping up with the Joneses and all the rest of it goes away. Everybody would only ever do what they're inspired to do voluntarily. So now you're in a position to think about the ideal of the American Revolution all over again. Governments are instituted among men in order to secure their rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If I want to secure life, I have to make sure that everybody has the money they need to provide all the things that they need to sustain their life. If we want to secure our life, it's not about abortion. It's about making sure that everybody has what they need so that they can live. Once you have what it is that you need to live, you are at liberty to pursue happiness. What is the only thing that reliably creates happiness that is only one thing? And that is being able to pursue the transcendent purpose that you feel called to serve with the opportunity to develop your capacities autonomously. Plato. That is what creates the only genuine experience of happiness. That is what the Republic is aiming to create the opportunity for us as a people to realize the ideal of the American Revolution and to secure our life so that we are at liberty to pursue happiness as sovereign individuals in sovereign states in a sovereign nation. At some other point, we'll talk about the Replic, which is the name of the currency that the Republic is issuing. We'll talk about how Liberty Dollar works. We'll talk about how common good works. We'll talk about time banks. We'll talk about some of those other things. If you want to join us, if you want to join the Republic idea, you can let them know at usarepublic.info, that's with a CK, republic.info. Those of you who know me can just look it up in the phone book and call me and let me know that you're interested because the positions that you mentioned are all positions that need to be filled, sheriff, commissioner, all that sort of thing. Scribe, notary, community builder. That sort of thing will make it work. And then we can attract more and more people to this concept. So we only have about 10 seconds. So thank you very much for joining part two of this discussion with John Root on independent currencies, independence in general, and the new republic that some of us are trying to create. See you next time.