An op-ed from Sam Gerrans has been getting a bit of attention – Switzerland: Poised for a revolution?

When Iceland jailed its bankers something changed. The unthinkable had happened: the real criminals had been held to account. Now Switzerland is also threatening to go off the fiat-bankster reservation. But will it happen?

In an article entitled “Switzerland to vote on banning banks from creating money” the Telegraph reports: “Switzerland will hold a referendum to decide whether to ban commercial banks from creating money.

The Swiss federal government confirmed on Thursday that it would hold a plebiscite, after more than 110,000 people signed a petition calling for the central bank to be given sole power to create money in the financial system.

The campaign – led by the Swiss Sovereign Money movement and known as the Vollgeld initiative – is designed to limit financial speculation by requiring private banks to hold 100pc reserves against their deposits.”

This sounds incredibly dull, doesn’t it? But the idea behind it is what revolutions are made of.

The article continues: “Banks won’t be able to create money for themselves any more, they’ll only be able to lend money that they have from savers or other banks, said the campaign group.”

I’ll repeat that bit: they’ll only be able to lend money that they have from savers or other banks.

That’s probably what you think banks do: lend money they acquire from savers or other banks.

But no! They are busy creating money (albeit by a circuitous route); that is, they are busy magicking that thing the rest of us spend our lives working so hard to obtain – money – into existence. They do it by means of the creation of an imaginary thing called debt. We then undertake to pay these fictional notions back, and do so with interest.

Not only is this outright fraud and theft against the poor sap who signed the original credit agreement, it also debases the value of every single unit of the currency in which the transaction takes place.

Put in business terms, it is equivalent to printing more shares.

The article continues: “The SNB (Swiss National Bank) was established in 1891, with exclusive power to mint coins and issue Swiss banknotes.

However, over 90 percent of money in circulation in Switzerland now exists in the form of “electronic” cash created by private banks, rather than the central bank.

‘Due to the emergence of electronic payment transactions, banks have regained the opportunity to create their own money,’ said the Swiss Sovereign Money campaign.

‘The decision taken by the people in 1891 has fallen into oblivion.’”

That is correct: if we had access to the same computer terminals the banks have, we could magic in or out of existence all the imaginary stuff we are trained to think of as important – money – in whatever quantities we liked.

This is how it works: when they print quite a lot of this stuff there is a boom. When they print too much of it, there is inflation (actually, the printing of money is inflation). When they stop printing it or simply hold on to it, there is a depression.

As long as the people keep slaving away and let the bankers give them pieces of paper or blips on a computer screen in exchange for their blood, sweat and tears, everything is fine.

But if a nation begins to wake up to the con and starts pushing back it is visited by a color revolution, cultural invasion, or simply bombed back into the Stone Age.

That’s it. You now understand economics.

Maybe.

Now back to the prospective plebiscite in Switzerland.

I am skeptical that this duck will get airborne without being shot down. The democracy the Swiss think they have is a pleasant enough fiction, but I am sure it will never be allowed to interfere with business.

And if we read the article carefully, it does say that the central bank should be given sole right to create money. This would essentially leave the creation of money in the same hands as those who control the Federal Reserve or the Bank of England rather than allow them to farm out the process. But at least it shows that people are beginning to wake up to where the true power lies.

In the unlikely event that this grass-roots movement in Switzerland should get its way and its proposed legislation be enacted, and then begin to morph into something which really does threaten the banking elite, we must not be surprised if Switzerland is shortly discovered to be harboring weapons of mass destruction, or to have masterminded 9/11, or to be financing Islamic State.

Yes, we will need to brace ourselves to be educated by a Western media unanimous in pointing out the connections to be made between the production of precision watches, pavements so clean you can eat your lunch off them, and the evil of an irrational hatred of freedom – one with roots in a culture which tacitly supports jihad against all non-eaters of expensive confectionery.

Freedom. You’ve got to love it!

Here’s something else from Gerrans, from eleven years ago:

I don’t believe in democracy. In some liberal circles this makes me a heretic who should be shot.

I suggest that – internal squabbles notwithstanding – the strong and powerful do more or less what they want, and the rest is just PR. This view is unflattering to the rabbits caught in the headlights of Democratic rhetoric, but I can’t help that. Still, happily for me, as things get worse in the Middle East, the liberals will find it increasingly difficult to justify their worldview to themselves. It’s small comfort in the circumstances, but it’s something.

Democracy’s key attraction for those who truly wield power is the fact that widespread belief that we are free is a cost-efficient means of control. But democracy is not and never has been Freedom; merely dictatorship-lite. And now the Totalitarian infrastructure is in place our rulers can opt to dispense with the spin.

Democracy will, of course, cling to its touchy-feely slogans for as long as it is expedient. But since the real U.S. game plan is to ratchet up the stakes in the Middle East to the level of war necessary to complete the project for Greater Israel – from the Nile to the Euphrates – and since the history of the last hundred years shows that no sacrifice to this end is too great, don’t be surprised if our rulers drop the pretence that this is anything but a good old fashioned massacre and start levelling whole Iraqi cities.

My point here is not to draw moral conclusions. I have my opinion of course. But, for me, the bottom line is this: The strong and the sneaky do what they do and the rest of us need to decide what – if anything – we are going to do about it.

Just don’t wave the democracy dogma in my face because I don’t believe in it.

So shoot me.

• http://www.antiwar.com/orig/gerrans.php?articleid=2439