Gold

 

"….The people are wild about it, and the senseless nations worship the useless and heavy metal like a divinity. Is this what will help our forthcoming redemption and our future hopes?"

Philalethes

 

"Gold is most excellent; gold constitutes treasure; and he who has it does all he wants in the world, and can even lift souls up to Paradise."

-Christopher Columbus, 1503 letter to the king and queen of Spain

 

   "Abbess Hildegard of Bingen, the Benedictine nun, mystic and preacher, had written at length in the twelfth century about the powers and curative properties of gold. She raised its spiritual and aesthetic appeal for the many ordinary men and women who knew of her visions and teaching through anthologized snippets. Gold, she wrote in her medical treatise Physica is hot and its nature is like the sun's. anyone suffering from 'virgichtiget' (arthritis) should reduce a piece of gold to a powder, knead it with flour and water into a cake and cook it for eating before breakfast. Even the deaf, she claimed, could be cured with gold: 'prepare a paste with gold dust and fine flour, and stick a little of it in the ears.' the heat will pass into the ear and if he does this often he will recover his hearing'-either that or his ears will be fatally and expensively blocked."

Joanna Pitman

On blondes

 

"Up on the Madison Fork, the Wasiches had found much of the yellow metal that they worship and makes them crazy."

-Black Elk Speaks

 

"In the long run, digging for truth has always proved not only more interesting but more profitable than digging for gold."

-George R. Harrison

 

"Gold is the root of all evil, it’s the cause of most of the world’s troubles. It makes bankers commit suicide, and good women go wrong. Gold! That’s what them damn lawyers are after. That’s what’s back of it. Somebody wants to see my hole card!"

Death Valley Scotty

 

"Beyond the Equator a man is neither English, Dutch, French, Spanish, nor Portuguese. He retains only those principles and prejudices of his native country which justify or excuse his conduct. He crawls when he is weak; he is violent when strong; he is in a hurry to acquire, in a hurry to enjoy, and capable of every crime which will lead him most quickly to his goals. He is a domestic tiger returning to the forest; the thirst for blood takes hold of him once more. This is how all the Europeans, every one of them, indistinctly, have appeared in the countries of the New World. There they have assumed a common frenzy-the thirst for gold."

-Diderot

 

"(Gold) which does not change its nature, which has no nationality, which is eternally and universally accepted as the unalterable fiduciary value par excellence."

-Charles de Gaulle (Press Conference,1965)

 

"The whole money complex is rooted in the psychology of guilt, and gold is the absolute symbol of sublimation. Money is "condensed wealth; condensed wealth is condensed guilt. But guilt is essentially unclean"

Norman Brown

 

"Dr. Freud relates that there are peculiar reasons deep in our sub consciousness why gold in particular should satisfy strong instincts and serve as a symbol

-John Maynard Keynes 

'The Return to Gold', in Essays in Persuasion,1933

 

 

"The abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit....

   The law of supply and demand is not to be conned. As the supply of money (of claims) increases relative to the supply of tangible assets in the economy, prices must eventually rise. Thus the earnings saved by the productive members of the society lose value in terms of goods. When the economy's books are finally balanced, one finds that this loss in value represents the goods purchased by the government for the welfare or other purposes...

   In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holdings illegal, as was done in the case of gold....The financial policy of the welfare state  requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.

   This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the "hidden" confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights."

Alan Greenspan  "Gold and Economic Freedom," in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal by Ayn Rand

(He certainly changed his mind now that he is President of the World Bank...He now claims that the bank makes money behave like gold...some Alchemy)

 

"With a stiffening of his spine and with a bizarre smile playing on his lips, Bill picked up the mahogany box full of gold and handed it to me.

"This is for you," he said, his voice crackling.

"What do you mean?" I said, genuinely puzzled, although at the same time it was as though a great eagle had soared into my chest with the knowledge of what he was doing. 

"It's a gift," he said.

Inside my chest, I calmly and instantly understood everything; I even understood, without any words, how to respond, how to feel. I sensed a quiet light and warmth coming down into me like the light of the sun. But in my mind there was pure chaos and bewilderment, and the muscles in my shoulders were suddenly filled with devils, tensions of every kind. I don't know what moved me to open the box, but I can remember my thoughts just before I saw the gold. Somehow, my head was telling me that I could coolly look at the gold and politely acknowledge it, as though I were being offered nothing more than a pound of chocolates.

   The radiance of the gold blazed into my brain and powerful bolt of electricity snaked down the length of my torso igniting everything in its path, especially in the region of the solar plexus and genitals. My legs started trembling as though filled with nervous sparrows. My breathing became rough and coarse like the panting of a hungry wolf."

Jacob Needleman

Money and the Meaning of Life

 

"In the United States, my own work shows that between 1945 and 1971, when the dollar was fixed to gold at $35 or under the 1944 Breton Woods arrangement, the real economy in the US grew by 4 percent per year" From 1971 when the dollar was floated to 2004, real growth of the US economy has been only a pitiful 1.3 percent per year."

-Jude Wanniski

 

   "In July 1914, all the major belligerents were on the gold standard--along with 44 other countries. The system was simple and effective. It had fostered an international financial climate so conducive to the growth of capital and trade that most of the West had never been more prosperous. Central banks of the various nations held gold in their coffers. The gold was used to back up the paper currencies. If a nation spent too much on external products, its currency flowed to foreign countries. It came back in payment for either goods or services supplied by the home country. In the even of an imbalance, that is to say when a foreign nation found itself with more of the nation's currency than it could spend on goods and services from that nation, the resulting surplus currency was presented into the central bank to be replaced by gold. Every nation's imbalances were settled in the one thing that none of them could print or counterfeit: gold! If a nation ran a persistent trade deficit, it would find its gold pulled away. This would encourage the central bank to do something to protect it. Usually, interest rates rose, which had the effect of rewarding savings and discouraging the outflow of funds.

   The system was neat. It was honest. Which made it ill-suited to the needs of war and empire-builders. War, particularly, was distressingly expensive. Politicians noticed-as monarchs had long ago-that people might be enthralled by the cannon fire, but they hated to pay for it. Typically, according to R.S. Hamilton-Grace, who studied English war financing, about a third of the cost of war had to be recovered by borrowing."

-Bill Bonner

Empire of Debt

 

"See, sons, what things you are!

How quickly nature falls into revolt

When gold becomes her object!

For this the foolish over-careful fathers

have broke their sleep with thoughts, their brains with care,

Their bones with industry;

For this they have engrossed and piled up

The canker'd heaps of strange-achieved gold;

For this they have been thoughtful to invest

Their sons with arts and martial exercises:

When, like the bee, culling from every flower

The virtuous sweets,

Our thighs pack'd with wax, our mouths with honey,

We bring it to the hive, and, like the bees,

Are murdered for our pains."

Shakespeare
-Henry Iv, Part 2

 

   "One metric ton of circuit boards can contain....40 to 800 times the concentration of gold contained in gold ore mined in the United States,' says the USGS. The same agency estimates that one metric ton of discarded PCs contains more gold than can be recovered from seventeen metric tons of gold ore, making discarded electronics a more reliable source of gold than mining. Yet even with gold's recyclability and its high value, only about 30 percent or so of the gold used throughout the world comes from scrap. And the majority of gold that gets recycled is scrap from jewelry rather than from used electronics. Imagine if it were possible to retrieve every ounce of gold from all of the world's 660 million computers. That would yield about 41.25 million pounds of gold, which from a mining company's point of view is infinitely more accessible than ore that must be blasted out of a mountain. Instead, most of the reusable precious metal is ending up in landfills, and open pit mines continue to be worked all over the world."

-Elizabeth Grossman

High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics, and Human Health

 

"In all of history, only 161,000 tons of gold have been mined, barely enough to fill two Olympic pools. More than half has been extracted in the past 50 years."

 

"In small-scale mines, searching for gold is a family affair. Of the world's 12 to 15 million artisanal gold miners, an estimated 30 percent are women and children"

 

"Japan has discovered there's more gold in sewage than in some of the world's best mines. Reuters reported that the Suwa sewage treatment facility in Nagano prefecture recorded finding 1,890 grams of gold per ton of ash from incinerated sludge. The official noted that japans' Hishikari Mine, one of the world's most productive, yields 20 to 40 grams of gold per ton of ore. Speculating that the facility's gold is the result of precision-equipment manufacturers in the vicinity that use the metal, the official said the prefecture expects to earn more than $167,000 for its gold this fiscal year."

 

   "Bacteria have also been useful in the mining of gold. Gold is occasionally found stuck firmly (occluded, to use the technical term) inside certain minerals. A number of different microbes can perform a similar oxidation on these minerals, converting them into soluble ions, and thereby exposing the gold inside. it's not as if there's a wee nugget hidden inside there, though-this exposure is still at the level of single atoms; but now, the standard chemical processes can be applied for extracting the precious metal. The microbes may not swing the hammers or operate the heavy machinery, but they can save a lot of chemical tinkering, and keep low-grade metal ore commercially exploitable.

   It's a hard way to get rich, all that digging and extracting. Thankfully, gold is also found in more easily reached places, like in ordinary water. Yes, there's a tiny amount of gold dissolved in there-all we have to do is find a way to concentrate it, and we'll be rich! Ha, ha!

   One lucky bacteria, Psuedomonas stutzeri knows the secret. This bacterium is able to oxidize the gold ions floating around, and convert them into solid gold-a living philosopher's stone, even better than the one that medieval alchemists searched for in vain. Sadly, this application is not very profitable. The amounts of gold that can be recovered in this way are far too small to bother with. We'll just have to find some other way of making those millions."

-Idan Ben-Barak

The Invisible Kingdom

 

****************************

Book: "Ashanti Gold" by Edward S Ayensu

Book: "The Gold of the World" by George Ch. Chourmouziadis

See article "Is It Goodbye to Gold, or just ‘See ya later?’ by George Melloan

Wall Street Journal Tues, July 13,1999

*******************

Book: "The Power Of Gold: The History of an Obsession" by Peter Bernstein

Book: "Gold Seeking: Victoria and California in the 1850s" by David Goodman

Book: "Timbuktu; The Sahara's Fabled City of Gold" by Marq de Villiers & Sheila Hirtle

Book: "Rooted in Barbarous Soil: People, Culture, and Community in Gold Rush California" Ed. by K. Starr & R.J. Orsi

Book: "The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream" by H.W. Brands

Book: "Gold Dust" by Donald Dale Jackson

Book: "A Year of Mud & Gold: San Francisco Diaries 1849-1850" bEd. by William Benemann

Book: "Riches For All: The California Gold Rush and the World" Ed. by Kenneth N. Owens

Book: "Gold Warriors: America's Secret Recovery of Yamashita's Gold" by Sterling & Peggy Seagrave

Book:" Ancient Gold: The Wealth of the Thracians-Treasure from the Republic of Bulgaria" Ed. by Ivan Marazov

Book: "Gold, Dollars, and Power; The Politics of International Monetary Relations, 1958-1971" by Francis J. Gavin

Book: "The Gold Crusaders, Revised Edition: A Social History of Gold Rushes, 1849-1929" By Doublas Fethering

Book: "The Gold of Troy: Searching for Homer's Fabled City" by Irina Antonova et. al.

Back to Chrestomathy             Next Page