The subversive messages hidden in The Wizard of Oz
bbc.com
bbc.com
The Lion gets his courage from a bottle in the original (the joke being a reference to a common joke at the time that some people get their courage from a bottle of liquor) But 1939 was so close to the prohibition fiasco, it seems the producers did not like this joke.
Likewise, the scene in the field of (presumably opium) poppies that put everyone to sleep was only added in 1939. It's hard to imagine that joke being added in, say, the time of height of the war on drugs: could Bart Simpson play with opium poppies and pass out to audience laughter 1980's?
One of my economics textbooks contained an explanation of the theory that the yellow brick road was a reference to monetary policy (gold standard), but that theory seems to have been heavily challenged (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_interpretations_of_T...).
Bill Still: The Secret of Oz
L. Frank Baum’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which appeared in 1900, is widely recognized to be a parable for the Populist campaign of William Jennings Bryan, who twice ran for president on the Free Silver platform – vowing to replace the gold standard with a bimetallic system that would allow the free creation of silver money alongside gold. … [O]ne of the main constituencies for the movement was debtors: particularly, Midwestern farm families such as Dorothy’s, who had been facing a massive wave of foreclosures during the severe recession of the 1890s. According to the Populist reading, the Wicked Witches of the East and West represent the East and West Coast bankers (promoters of and benefactors from the tight money supply), the Scarecrow represented the farmers (who didn’t have the brains to avoid the debt trap), the Tin Woodsman [sic] was the industrial proletariat (who didn’t have the heart to act in solidarity with the farmers), the Cowardly Lion represented the political class (who didn’t have the courage to intervene). The yellow brick road, silver slippers, emerald city, and hapless Wizard presumably speak for themselves. “Oz” is of course the standard abbreviation for “ounce.”
Edited to reflect a pronunciation, not necessarily a correct or accurate one, from which it's easy to derive 'oz'.
Compare Aussie, which is also pronounced with a /z/.
His treatment was just a recap of what I already knew or at least was familiar with.
People then seemed to realize the danger of fiat money, yet The Federal Reserve Act was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson on December 23, 1913, when most lawmakers had already left the Capital for their home states -- and it passed on a simple majority of those present vote. The Federal Reserve (a cabal of international banks that is not part of the US Government) seized control of the US monetary system and their policy of deliberate inflation has eroded purchasing power 97+% (50% reduction since just 1970!). Even though the constitution still describes the value of a dollar as a specific weight of gold, like most other things in that document it is ignored.
Private ownership of gold was decreed to be illegal just 20 years later -- Presidental Executive Order 6102, signed on April 5, 1933, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt "forbidding the hoarding of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates within the continental United States" was designed to prevent an internation run on our (drastically less valuable) dollar. Silver was removed from the coin in 1965, completing the transition to fiat money.
President John F. Kennedy voiced support for returning America to the Gold Standard. He was assassinated soon after. His Vice President, who assumed the Presidency, wasn't so foolish as to express support for that idea.
Now it seems to be a spending free-for-all, as if there is no concern whatsoever for the peril that debt (national or private) presents.
What a dangerous time we live in. "Ignore that man behind the curtain!" Who, then, was Glenda, the Good Witch meant to represent?
He also voiced a million other things that you might as well pin his assassination on, if you're so willing to jump to conclusions.
You can literally spin a wheel of different motivations for groups who wanted JFK dead and they all have their own convincing reasons. Except hackjack's little conspiracy here, which seems to be missing a final paragraph about why we need to switch to using Bitcoin as our standard currency.
even more so if those reasons are connected, no?
for starters, mr. unexplained downvote.
Note the odds calculation is slightly wrong due to a rounding error.
I checked the dates and locations (3,4,5 are unchecked and not included in the calc in the vid. I have the book... somewhere) http://dpaste.com/048G3AZ.txt
The body that controls the US monetary system is the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. The Board of Governors are Senate-confirmed Presidential appointees. I'm not quite seeing how this is not part of the US government.
Sure, the Federal Reserve System involves private member banks, who have some role on governing the regional fed banks, but those don't control monetary policy, the Board of Governors does.
> Even though the constitution still describes
> the value of a dollar as a specific weight of
> gold, like most other things in that document
> it is ignored.
Article 1, Section 10 is the only place I can recall saying anything about gold:
No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility.
_My_ reading opens up a door for "Texas Bucks" issued with backing/redemption of some volume of gold/silver. But I'll wait on expounding more to give you the opportunity to show me where I am mistaken.
You can make a contract denominated in gold in those states, and I believe that the state won't levy capital gains taxes on Gold or Silver.
The Fed:
The Fed is a pseudo-governmental organization, like the Postal Service or the Federal National Mortgage Association ("Fannie Mae"). It has a variety of member banks, but they do not control the Fed. They disproportionately benefit from it, but they are not directly in charge. The Fed is their cartel enforcer; none of them could trust the others to run it fairly. It has to be independent of the banks. And it has to be independent of politics. It is its own selfish little entity, with a [public] dual mandate of ensuring full employment and low [demand-pull] inflation. It can never truly succeed at both, but it can certainly fail at both.
Your concerns seem to be focused on fiat money. The actual danger, adequately managed by the Fed, is fractional reserve banking. When left un-cartelized, fractional reserve wreaks havoc on the money supply, and asymmetric settlements eventually cause banks that are too profligate with their lending to fail, and those not profligate enough to be outcompeted. The Fed standardized the reserve fraction, so that the member banks could lend money that did not previously exist and charge interest on it, making debt into the largest part of the monetary basis, and real savings and production into a minority contributor.
The secondary private mandate of the Fed is to manage the reserve ratio and settlement rates such that no individual bank can get greedy, go rogue, and destroy the whole system that otherwise makes a whole lot of people a whole lot of money for doing very little actual work.
Don't get me wrong. The Federal Reserve System is a great way for the rich to stay rich and keep the poor from rising, and there is no social justice in the system it manages. But it is a perfectly reasonable technical solution for greedy bankers destroying the whole economy via exuberant overreach--which they would otherwise do (more frequently) if left unchecked. If you assume greedy bankers will always exist, the Fed is the lesser evil. They actually are stealing some of your hard work and giving it away to rich people, but probably nowhere near as much of it as you think, and you do benefit from their work more than you may expect.
There is nothing inherently bad about fiat money. Money in its purest form is just a mutually agreeable unit of accounting. As long as there exists some fair process for matching the size of the money supply to the current level of economic activity, fiat money works fine for everyone. Counterfeiting is what spoils it. And lending additional money into existence based on fractional reserves of currency is counterfeiting-by-the-law. It's a similiar unethical con to "naked short-selling".
JFK:
The exact reason why JF Kennedy was assassinated is now indeterminate. There isn't enough forensically-reliable evidence remaining to support any postulated conspiracy, or ascribe motive to any of their principals. Personally, I favor the hypothesis that he was killed by racists to delay or reverse civil rights gains for minorities. The red-sealed direct-issue US notes, to replace green-sealed Fed notes, are a long-shot motive hypothesis, at best.
We don't know why JFK was killed. It is no longer possible to answer those questions or verify those claims. Thinking about JFK is probably going to be a time-wasting distraction from questions you can actually answer via independent analysis. There are just so many holes in the JFK story now, you can easily project onto it, which is only going to tell you more about yourself than anything about the real world. So drop it, if you can. There are plenty of stories from this century that you can look into. Why not try to prove that SCotUS justice Scalia was murdered?
Spending:
The spending free-for-all is... wait... what spending free-for-all? Rich folks are stockpiling cash, loaning it, and investing it, not spending it. There's no [demand-pull] inflation, because the money the Fed (and its member banks) is creating is never actually making it to the pockets of consumers.
Are you referring to debt monetization, QE, something else? I'm unsure if you're referring to something the Fed prevents or actively practices. QE helps to heat up a faltering economy, at the expense of contributing to income inequality.
Quantitative easing smells like Keynesian claptrap to me, but I'm not an economist, and it might be one of those things that works if it's needlessly complicated, only because if it were simple, the markets would immediately adjust to it such that it would have no real effect. I have a sneaking suspicion that QE is what happens when you don't have enough value-backed money left in the economy to pay the interest on all the debt-backed money, and all rational actors stop borrowing. So the answer is to create dummy debt and let people use it as the backing for the money used to pay the interest on their real debt? I don't know. That science is too dismal for me.
QE is buying debt on the public market and removing it from circulation, while injecting newly created money into the economy, in order to increase liquidity.
What is "dummy debt" and how does QE create it?
This is backwards. The private banks decide to lend first. They then acquire the central bank reserves needed to meet the requirements. The central bank reserves are created on demand, so to speak.
The Fed policy influences the lending decisions of the banks, of course, but it's not as direct as creating reserves and then pushing them out there to be lent out.
Source: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-...
Banks lend more when the Fed creates more reserves, and the Fed creates more reserves when banks lend more. And also the opposite.
Looking at it at a time-fixed instant, the amount that banks lend is a multiple of the reserves they have, equal to the multiplicative inverse of the reserve requirement. If any one factor adjusts, one of the other two must likewise adjust to compensate, at a later time. If one member bank independently decides the money supply needs to be bigger, and lends more, and borrows more Fed notes as the banking reserves, yes, the Fed will probably just virtually print more virtual notes and transfer it to the bank's reserve account. But it also might say, "whoa, there," and also increase the interest rate on the loans it makes to member banks, thereby saying, "we don't actually want to increase the money supply that much".
If the Fed decides the money supply needs to expand by 1%, they can't just print up new notes equal to 1% of the current money supply. They have no way to get them into circulation directly. They generally only lend new notes to banks, for use as reserves. And whatever banks borrow as reserves get multiplied as loans. If the reserve requirement is 10%, the Fed could print 0.1% of the existing supply, lower its lending rate to -0.01% so banks will actually borrow all the new notes, and then banks might lend based on that to expand the money supply to the target amount.
But the banks also might just sit on the reserves and collect the -0.01%.
So the interest rate the Fed charges to banks is also involved. Too high, and the reserves the Fed created won't be borrowed at all. Too low, and the banks have less incentive to actually lend on those reserves.
Deciding on the correct amount of fiat to be in existence is a bit of a balancing act, when part of your system is built around allowing all banks to cheat by exactly the same amount.
If the reserve requirement is 100% or higher, nobody can lend what they don't have, so that mushy multiplier goes away, and the Fed needn't worry so much about what the member banks are doing or not doing. But then the banks would be pissed about losing their license to print money, and would probably find some other way to cheat, that the Fed doesn't know about.
These are all factors that encourage various political types to jump onto things like e-Gold or Bitcoin with both feet, without hesitation. The Fed system has banker graft built into it. The hates-the-bankers groups are fine with fiat, as evidenced by support of Bitcoin; they just don't want greedy bankers able to manipulate the size of the money supply for their own profit. They haven't exactly thought through much of the rest of it, but screw those greedy bankers, right? It turns out that when you establish a monopoly on scamming, each of the monopoly cartel's scammers get more unearned money, but less money is sucked out of the economy by scams in total. Who knew? The shitty Fed system is less horrible than the open-market alternative. It's like the Thieves' Guild in Ankh-Morpork. As long as you pay your monthly mugging and burglary franchise fee, you won't get your stuff stolen at random.
> The Federal Reserve Act was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson on December 23, 1913, when most lawmakers had already left the Capital for their home states
The bill passed the House of Representatives by an overwhelming majority of 298 to 60 on December 22, 1913. The bill passed the Senate by a vote of 43 to 25 on December 23, 1913. That's 60% of those voting.
There were 96 Senate seats in 1913, and 71 senators were present for the vote on the final version of the bill. Of those present, 43 voted for the bill, 25 voted against, and 3 did not vote because of vote pairing. 24 senators were absent and 1 seat was empty because of a recent death.
The pages from the Congressional Record that show the vote and the vote pairing are here (PDF): http://www.llsdc.org/assets/FRAdocs/fra-lh_v51-cr-1487-1488-...
An earlier version of the bill passed the Senate on December 19 by a vote of 54 to 34 (an absolute majority). Only one Senator who voted for the bill on December 19 changed his vote to nay on December 23. This was George Perkins (R), Calif.
If all senators had voted, the vote would have been 57 votes in favor of the bill. There would be 50 Democrats, plus one Progressive —Miles Poindexter— and 6 Republicans: Jones, Norris, Weeks (who all voted for the bill), as well as Crawford, Fall, and Sterling (who were absent but would have voted for the bill).
Of course, any Congress could repeal the Federal Reserve Act. It has been amended dozens of times since 1913.
Claim:
> The Federal Reserve (a cabal of international banks that is not part of the US Government) seized control of the US monetary system
The Federal Reserve System includes an indepent federal agency, the Board of Governors, led by 7 governors who are nominated by the president of the United States and approved by the United States Senate.
It also includes 12 regional Federal Reserve Banks, each a separate corporation. Each district Bank has 9 directors, 6 chosen by the member banks in the district, and 3 chosen by the Board of Governors (the federal agency). Each bank gets two votes for directors. If there are multiple banks in the district owned by the same company, only one of those banks can vote for directors.
Federal Reserve member banks consist of all national banks plus those state-chartered banks that choose to belong. There were more than 1,600 member banks at the end of 2018: https://pastebin.com/iiDR4Za4
Claim:
> Even though the constitution still describes the value of a dollar as a specific weight of gold
Nope. https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcri...
Claim:
> President John F. Kennedy voiced support for returning America to the Gold Standard.
Sounds like the Executive Order 11110 myth. This was part of JFK's plan to eliminate silver certificates.
Sadly, none of the other authors quite captured the surrealism, magic, and originality of the original 14, but many of them were still fun to read.
http://www.halcyon.com/piglet/Populism.htm
I'll just quote a bit from the end:
> Thomas A. Bailey once suggested that we set up a computer network to keep track of misinformation that has been corrected--sort of a national clearinghouse for discredited myths. Is it time to move Littlefield to the computer trashpile of misinformation? Given the mounting evidence against it--given that Littlefield himself has admitted that it has "no basis in fact"--should we forget the whole notion of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as a parable on Populism? That would be a big mistake. Perhaps we can no longer say that Baum wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz "as an allegory of the silver movement," but we can still read it as an allegory of the silver movement--or, as Henry Littlefield noted just two years ago, "we can bring our own symbolism to it." Recent scholarship might have taken away Baum's intent, but the images are still there, vivid as ever.
Its so sad how few people are aware of this and the fact that we were FUCKED when 1913 Fed Reserve happened....
and after the fact Woodrow Wilson the scumbag wrote a letter regretting the decision and signing of the act.
This is more "crackpot theory" than "widely recognized".
> the Scarecrow represented the farmers (who didn’t have the brains to avoid the debt trap), the Tin Woodsman [sic] was the industrial proletariat (who didn’t have the heart to act in solidarity with the farmers), the Cowardly Lion represented the political class (who didn’t have the courage to intervene)
This, on the other hand, doesn't even meet that standard. If you read the book, the joke about those three characters is very clear -- the Scarecrow is the intelligent one, who solves all the problems the group encounters. The Tin Woodman is the empathetic one, who constantly worries about inadvertently harming anything else. And the Cowardly Lion is the brave one, always volunteering to put himself at risk for the benefit of the group. It's a major theme of the novel that they all already have the things they claim to need.
But that still fits the message. They needed to learn that they have what they're looking for.
(which isn't to say I have any opinion about whether it's a crackpot theory or not)
I saw that once a year on TV in the 60's, but didn't notice this until much, much later. Heck, I didn't even notice the poppies on the wallpaper on the farm until someone pointed it out to me.
(Hangs head in shame)
>Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other’s garages.
https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2012/02/gabriel-rosser-on-dav...
That seems like a really glaring oversight on the part of the author.
And surely what the reader sees in a work is at least as valid as what the author intended. If I see Mordor as Stalinist Russia, isnt that my prerogative? Its selling the art form short if the only possible interpretation is the authors own. /rant (against a dead guy)
I'm going to have to agree to disagree with you on that one.
Lets take the example of Farenheit 451, wikipedia [1] suggests an evolution (at least) in Bradbury's own interpretation of his own book:
"In a 1956 radio interview, Bradbury said that he wrote Fahrenheit 451 because of his concerns at the time (during the McCarthy era) about the threat of book burning in the United States. In later years, he described the book as a commentary on how mass media reduces interest in reading literature."
So which is right? And neither of those seem to match up with the popular interpretation of it being against state surveillance and censorship. If that's what it says to so many people, if that's why it's so popular it seems strange to discount that interpretation.
Then we look at older works where the cultural nuance passes us by. Should we not be allowed to enjoy Shakespeare on our cultural terms instead of (always) through the prism of Elizabethan culture?
Then you've got things like Anne Franks diary. I suppose half the point is getting inside her head, but on the other hand you're reading it knowing what's going to happen, and interpreting it as the author intended is, impossible?
You can definitely make any interpretation you want. They will be valuable as long as you can take something from them, regardless of the author intent. As you have just shown, even authors might change or make additional interpretations as time passes. The world keeps changing, the contexts change, and we make new interpretations. That's pretty cool. But the other thing is whether they are true or not (whether they reflect something that the author really attempted to express). In this case, it's not strange to me that many authors want to explicitly say that they didn't attempt to hide some political meaning or similar behind their works. The problem is not that people reads into what they write, but that they attribute to them things they never meant. And that's an imposition on an author, which is not nice, and that's what a lot of people will discuss with you when you say that any interpretations are "valid".
The text is the truth. What the author says about it is useful but not the end of the story.
And if that isn't enough, it is established that nothing in Oz ever dies. Including all his chopped off parts...
Planning to turn Tip into a statue and the threat of beating him black and blue made it a non-starter.
Reading into the story like this ruins the escapism.
> “I don't understand this at all. I don't understand any of this. Why does a story have to be socio-anything? Politics... culture... history... aren't those natural ingredients in any story, if it's told well? I mean...' [...] 'I mean... can't you guys just let a story be a story?”
> - Stephen King, "It"
Not a very good man.
https://www.peterdavid.net/2002/07/25/bid-3-pay-no-attention...
Funny how BBC's view remains true whether it's 2019 or 2009.
Until then, I'd taken the Wizard of Oz at face value.
Money, get away
Get a good job with good pay and you're okay
Money, it's a gas
Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash
New car, caviar, four star daydream
Think I'll buy me a football team
Money, get back
I'm all right Jack keep your hands off of my stack
Money, it's a hit
Don't give me that do goody good bullshit
I'm in the high-fidelity first class traveling set
And I think I need a Lear jet
Money, it's a crime
Share it fairly but don't take a slice of my pie
Money, so they say
Is the root of all evil today
But if you ask for a raise it's no surprise that they're
Giving none away, away, away--
[1] Or un-pause the CD/MP3 etc.