Speaking of cancer, the world financial system has it

5:20p CT Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

Dennis Gartman of The Gartman Letter, a speaker at the Vancouver Resource Investment Conference the other day and a guest at GATA's reception afterward, today asked in his newsletter why all the painstaking effort that has been put into the work of the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee has not been put instead into humanitarian undertakings like curing cancer.

One could entertain the same wonder about the efforts that go each day into Gartman's own newsletter, which, excellent as it is, also might happily be sacrificed in favor of efforts to reduce human suffering.

Of course none of us at GATA fell into the medical line of work any more than Gartman himself did, and it would be a little late for us to try to make a career of curing anything worse than a hangover. But as GATA's longtime supporter, dear friend, and hero, Jeff Dahl, CEO of Samex Mining Corp., observes, the world's financial system may have a sort of cancer, what with money metastasizing all over the place and causing great suffering for hundreds of millions of people who are not positioned to cope with inflation. Then there is the inflationary threat to everyone else, even those whose assets so far have shielded them from monetary debasement.

It is this metastasizing of money that enables what U.S. Rep. Ron Paul has called the welfare-warfare state, government that does things people would never tolerate if they had to pay for them with real money in the here and now, things like imperial wars and subsidizing childbearing outside marriage.

Suppose the U.S. military adventure in Iraq, conceived in lies, had to be financed with war taxes on current voters instead of borrowing from foreigners, borrowing that will be repaid by future generations who will have had no say in the debt incurred in their name. Without infinite money, money borrowed against the future, the adventure in Iraq would not have been undertaken. The tens of thousands of people killed in that adventure and its consequences would still be alive, including many doctors and medical researchers. The efforts of the thousands of medical people who care for the war's maimed and wounded could be diverted to cancer research or something else. An incalculable amount of the world's capital, sunk in the war, would remain available for constructive purposes.

And suppose the world's main reserve currency was not under the control of a single nation and thus was not a weapon of imperial power as well as a threat of expropriation of those who have trusted in it. Suppose the world's main reserve currency was something international of independent and enduring value. Then no nation could lord it over any other nation.

GATA set out to try to right what it first perceived as an ordinary wrong and stumbled upon a cosmic wrong, the secret knowledge of the financial universe -- the manipulation of the currency and precious metals markets in support of an empire. Exposing and stopping that manipulation may not cure cancer but it still may have benefits that someday could impress even the most cynical and world-weary financial letter writers.

CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.

* * *

Help Keep GATA Going

GATA is a civil rights and educational organization based in the United States and tax-exempt under the U.S. Internal Revenue Code. Its e-mail dispatches are free, and you can subscribe at www.GATA.org. GATA is grateful for financial contributions, which are federally tax-deductible in the United States.