Hi,
I am a staff-member of a well-known Italian counter-information website's (www.luogocomune.net). We deal with a wide range of topical subjects, among which is economics, above all libertarian-oriented matters.
I have just ended watching the 1996 documentary "Money Banking & the Federal Reserve" and I find it would be very useful to translate it and add with Italian subtitles to share and spread it as broadly as possible: in fact people usually prefer video- rather than paper-reading. Furthermore, it seems to me easy understandable for very beginners too.
These are the reasons why I am searching for the english transcript of its dialogues in order to ease my translation. Could anyone please help me out?
No one else done a transcript, not to my knowledge, and I'm quite certain that we couldn't drum one up. It was so long ago.
Publisher, Laissez-Faire Books
I wa trying to find some information on it on the web but surprisingly I didin't find any, maybe I'm just too tired. Does anyone perhaps no any links to where I could find something on the documentary?
One night I dreamed of chewing up my debetcard - there simply is nothing like hard cash in your pocket!
Tonight, I started transcribing the documentary into text (English). I'm going to bed now, but assuming I return to this project, and assuming I finish the transcript, I'll be sure to email it to Mr. Tucker with the hope that he will be able to post it on Mises.org for those wish to read it or for those who, like you, wish to translate it into other languages.
Here's the first eight minutes:
Transcript of Money, Banking, and the Federal Reserve
NARRATOR: “The Federal Reserve System virtually controls the nation’s monetary system, yet it is accountable to no one. It has no budget. It is subject to no audit, and no Congressional Committee knows of, or can truly supervise its operations.”
These are the words of the late professor Murray N. Rothbard, economist and academic advisor of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. The Institute is dedicated to the ideals of a free market and sound money. This programme is dedicated to the memory of Murray N. Rothbard and his prolific work on money and banking.
For more than twenty years, the living standards of middle class Americans have steadily declined. Incomes have remained flat or fallen, and the opportunities and security we once took for granted have begun to fade. For most families, one income no longer pays the bills. It requires two or more incomes to afford a home, pay medical and child care expenses, and put children through school.
Unless present trends change, young workers are unlikely to ever live as well as their parents. Good jobs with a future are harder to come by. Education doesn’t count for what it once did. Taxes continue to rise, while Social Security is going bankrupt. Private pensions are no longer reliable. Economic volatility and uncertainty are on the rise. Politicians espouse numerous theories about the cause of this country’s economic woes; seldom, however, do these officials look below the surface. The roots of our economic ills can be traced to central banking and our present monetary system.
The Federal Reserve claims to manage our money; instead, it makes our money worth less and less every day. It has generated continuous and worsening business cycles, and lowered our living standards.
LEW ROCKWELL: It’s really no different than a burglar in your house wanting to steal your money. That is what the Federal Reserve does. It depreciates your savings, it takes away your economic security, and it ought to be treated as an institution that does that rather than something of alleged benefit.
NARRATOR: Money is supposed to serve as a reliable standard of economic value, not a source of instability. Until we restore sound money and take away the government’s ability to debase it, we have little hope of restoring the freedom and prosperity that made America great.
LEW ROCKWELL: And, we really have a choice of what we want in money. Do we want money that’s going to be losing its value every year, or do we want money that’s going to be gaining in value? If you are happy with your money losing value, then you want the present system. If you want money to increase in value, then you want a gold standard.
NARRATOR: What is money? As the good that makes exchange possible, it’s the foundation of every economic activity. In the earliest times, people traded goods and services directly; this form of exchange is known as barter.
JOSEPH SALERNO: That is, if a fishing tribe decided to have, maybe, wheat—which they themselves did not produce—they would seek out other individuals that produce wheat. And then they would exchange there for fish.
NARRATOR: But barter had limitations in the market place.
JOSEPH SALERNO: Well, actually, people perceived pretty quickly problems with that direct exchange. If you wanted, for example, fish—and you had wheat—but the people who had fish didn’t desire the wheat, you were stuck. Unless you went out and found some other good, possibly berries, that everyone in that society consumed: then you would trade your wheat for the berries in full confidence that you could turn around and trade the berries for the fish or anything else that you desired.
NARRATOR: Eventually, the most widely-accepted goods in a society became valued for their use in indirect exchange. “Money” is simply another name for the most generally-accepted medium of exchange.
Throughout history, many goods have served as money. Feathers from the Ketzel bird were used for exchange by the Mayan Indians up to the fifteenth century in Central America. Tea leaves, compressed into bricks, were traded in East Asia through the eighteen-hundreds. Wampum shells were money to North American Indians, while early American colonists traded beaver pelts, which had a high value, both at home and abroad.
Metal coins first emerged in Greece and Asia Minor, during the seventh century B.C. Gold and silver were valued for their use in beauty and jewellery, and the decorative arts. They were durable, easily divisible, and limited in supply. These precious metals also had a high value-to-weight ratio, making them easily transportable.
JOSEPH SALERNO: You can think back to a time when iron was used as money, for example in Africa. But imagine going into Sears Roebuck and trying to purchase, let’s say, a lawn mower for three hundred and fifty dollars; that would take a ton of iron, whereas it would only take an once of gold.
NARRATOR: In 1536, less than fifty years after Christopher Columbus set foot on American soil, a Spanish mint in Mexico City struck the first coins made in the New World. These silver coins eventually found their way into the British colonies.
Great Britain’s mercantilist policies deliberately tried to keep precious metals out of America, so the Spanish Milled Dollar became the unofficial currency. It was often divided into eight pieces for smaller transactions, hence the term “pieces of eight,” with one quarter of the coin being two bits.
In 1792, Thomas Jefferson adopted the dollar as this country’s official monetary unit.
LEW ROCKWELL: He looked around, he investigated to see what were the American people using as money: that was the dollar. And so that’s why that dollar became the standard of the United States. We went onto a gold and silver standard, and started minting gold coins with the America Eagle: the ten dollar gold coin.
NARRATOR: Jefferson in particular spoke eloquently of the dangers of paper money. During the war for independence, the Continental Congress printed vast sums of paper money out of thin air to finance the army. The diluted money supply naturally depreciated to almost nothing, leading to the phrase, “Not worth a Continental.”
LEW ROCKWELL: People who held on to these notes, who tended to be patriotic Americans [and] wanted America to be free of British control, lost everything. Whereas the Tories, who wanted nothing to do with this American government money, immediately got rid of it [and] were benefited. Pelatiah Webster, the first American economist, and others who looked at this saw that this paper money, un-backed by gold, was extremely dangerous.
NARRATOR:
I should note that I don't know if I spelled the bird correctly.
Mr. Venzo:
If and when the Italian transcript becomes available online, please let us here know. I would like to add a link to the transcript here.
Sincerely,Alex Peak
Ok, it's here
Dear Sirs,it was a big surprise to find the english transcript of the documentary in LvMI's home page and blog this morning.To profit from the broad echo this site is giving to such a video, right this morning our italian website decided to publish an article on its blog, listing both the italian complete transcript and the subtitled video. They can be found at the same link, here: http://www.luogocomune.net/site/modules/news/article.php?storyid=2442.The high-quality subtitled video is also freely available via torrent (485 Mb): http://download.luogocomune.net/torrents/Money.Banking.and.the.Federal.Reserve-sottotitoli.ita.avi.torrentFor anyone willing to use the english transcript to translate it as we did, I strongly suggest to copy the text currently published in home page (https://www.mises.org/story/2870) since it has been cleaned from those (so rare!) mis-spells due to our being non english-speaking persons.°°°To Mr. Peak:the link you are searching for is the one I just gave above in this post, but I can surely email you a ".pdf" file version of the same italian transcript, should you find it more useful for your website. Just let me know, in case you would like to.
°°°Yours sincerely,Giorgio Venzo.