"…Babylon System is the vampire."
-Bob Marley
Stephanie Meyer is a crafty one! Just like L. Frank Baum (The Wizard of Oz ) before her, she tells two stories at once. For over a century now, kids have adored Baum’s dancing Munchkins, and freaked out over his flying monkeys, but how many people know that he wrote The Wizard as an allegorical commentary about the important economic issues of his day? While kids read Oz for a great story about a talking...more
"…Babylon System is the vampire."
-Bob Marley
Stephanie Meyer is a crafty one! Just like L. Frank Baum (The Wizard of Oz ) before her, she tells two stories at once. For over a century now, kids have adored Baum’s dancing Munchkins, and freaked out over his flying monkeys, but how many people know that he wrote The Wizard as an allegorical commentary about the important economic issues of his day? While kids read Oz for a great story about a talking scarecrow, their parents read it for a humorous editorial on the Populist party, agricultural reform and the silver standard. To learn more about that, check out this link! So, too, it is with Twilight.
Meyer knows everybody loves a good vampire story. They’ve been the stuff of folklore for centuries, and have been featured in a bunch of commercially successful films,, television shows and novels. Who wouldn't want to read about perpetually young supermodels who have god-like powers, and live glamorous, aristocratic lives? Sign me up! Meyer puts a twist in Twilight by making the Cullen family somewhat sympathetic characters, but they're still vampires. But that's how it is with a lot of dangerous monsters, isn't it? They can catch you off guard; make you think "Oh, he's not such a bad guy."
They're still dangerous. They're still predators who suck the blood of the living. They want to either kill you or turn you into one of them. Sorry if you're "Team Edward", and think he's super hot, but he's still a soul-less, undead corpse, and Stephanie Meyer couldn’t have possibly picked a better creature to embody today’s modern central banker. While you and I slave away at a productive job, our taxes go to a few ruling-class families whose wealth derives from printing paper money from nothing! That’s the vampire system Bob Marley sang about. It’s also the vampire economy so many financial writers are reporting on these days. Let’s dig deeper into Twilight, and see what’s on Ms. Meyer’s mind.
This is the story of Bella and Edward.
“Bella” is Italian for beautiful. America the Beautiful. And so she is: amber(?) waves of hair, er- purple mountains, etc. She’s as virginal as the Eden Christopher Columbus first set foot on. Her family name, Swan, is a symbol of purity. At the story’s opening, she hails from Arizona- the Old West; hallowed American ground, rife with associations of rugged individualism and self-reliance. Bella’s the girl next door; feminine, but not weak or helpless. She’s independent, and she’s got confidence, substance. What substance has associations with the Old West, with beauty, and with purity? Just one: Gold. Bella is young, independent America on the gold standard. She's America back in a time when people spoke unironically about things like Mother, baseball, and apple pie. That’s where the story begins: when her mother departs with a baseball player, and things begin to change. Bella has to leave her sunny origins, and travel to Forks, where she meets Edward.
The name Edward comes from Old English, and means “protector of wealth”. He’s a vampire- an icon of the banking elite. What does a vampire see when he looks into a mirror? Nothing. Where Bella represents substance, Edward represents anti-substance: worthless paper dollars, unbacked by any material commodity. This is called fiat currency, and it is printed by the Federal Reserve Bank- a bank whose name is meant to give the impression of being governmental, but which is actually privately owned by a few ruling-class families, including: the Morgans, Rockefellers, and Rothschilds. In the book, we learn that Edward was seventeen years old in 1918, when he got bitten by Dr. Cullen. That means Edward was born in 1901. When was the Federal Reserve Bank started? You guessed it: 1901. If you’d like to read more about how the Fed steals wealth from American citizens, and traps us in an inescapable cycle or debt, check out my review of The Case for Gold, or The Creature from Jekyll Island. In this whole metaphorical scheme, blood is a natural symbol for currency. It circulates. Economists use terms like “liquidity”, “cash flow“ and “trickle down” to describe its movements. Just like blood, dollars circuit through the economy, changing hands for goods and services, bringing vital buying power like oxygen to every business it perfuses.
What are the dynamics of Bella and Edward's relationship? How does America regard its vampire money masters? With misguided, perverse trust, naturally! Bella finds Edward exciting, seductive. While America on the gold standard had to grow wealth slowly, through hard work, fiat vampire dollars can be created instantly, out of nothing, giving the appearance of super-strength.
Consider America's super strength: her military. We'd never be able to pay for such a mammoth network of overseas bases and fancy high-tech hardware, if we were using gold-standard dollars. It's done with deficit spending, selling bonds and T-bills to essentially bring imaginary wealth from the future into the present. That requires a money supply more elastic than the gold standard can manage. It's also the road to ruin, because nobody can resist printing money, creating the illusion of wealth, when it's so easy to do.
The imagry here is inspired, and works on multiple levels. Edward prevents a car from crashing into Bella, just as the vampire Fed was sold to the public as a mechanism to prevent market crashes. So banker Edward is super-strong. What else? He sparkles, like another false icon of wealth: diamonds. Unlike gold, whose price is determined by the cost of mining it, and the real supply of it in the world, diamonds are actually far overpriced. The supply of diamonds worldwide is kept artificially low by the DeBeers diamond monopoly, so they can charge far over the fair price of a diamond. That’s the Babylon system too, and if you really want a tie-in with vampires, the term “blood diamonds” and learn about how much human suffering Cecil Rhodes’ diamond monopoly has caused over the past 100 years. It may be off-topic for this review, but it's well worth your time to investigate.
Part of Edward's mystique is he can do all sorts of things the mortal boys in Bella's life can’t: he can read minds, he can fly and he can protect Bella from a whole gang of attackers. Who can blame her for being taken?
Okay, fine, but what does Edward see in Bella? When he first meets her, is it love at first site? Nothing of the sort. He is attracted by her smell. He's a predator, remember, and it's Bella's blood he craves. Likewise Central Bankers (those which issue currency) crave true forms of wealth: real estate, gold, infrastructure, and productive industries. It uses worthless paper money to aquire these. That's the biggest scam in human history. How can there be love between such predator and prey? Nature won't allow it. One must win, and the other lose.
Here's a synopsis of Edward's courtship of Bella:
Edward: Don’t be impressed by my flying and super-strength. You should stay away from me. I’m really bad for you, in an alluring, mysterious, forbidden-fruit kind of way.
Translation- Feast your eyes on my ostentatious wealth and power, America! You could have material possessions far beyond what your actual wealth merits, if you just give up the gold standard, and start spending yourself into debt. Our Federal Reserve Bank will print the money for you, and our bought-off politicians will expand the military-industrial complex with expensive new wars. Sure, we have to make sure not to print too much money, too fast. But don't worry; just leave it to us. We’re the experts!
Bella: I can see what a great guy you really are, deep down. You wouldn’t hurt me. You rescue me from my drab, pedestrian life.
Translation- We believe you, that a course of controlled inflation can support an ever-growing stock market and sustainable deficit spending. Please take away the public's ability to manage the money supply through the U.S. Treasury Dept, and give that power to a few private banks owned by mega-rich families. We know you won't abuse it.
Edward: No, seriously, it is very dangerous for you. I’m scared I’m not strong enough to resist the temptation.
Translation- Wow- By controlling both credit and the money supply, I can engineer boom/bust market cycles, to whipsaw the general public out of their investments! Are you really going to let us get away with this?
Bella: Just a little kiss? We can go farther. I know you can restrain yourself. I trust you.
Translation- Oh, can’t you just expand the money supply a little bit, to increase capitalization, and reduce unemployment? We know you won’t print too much. Since you have first use of newly-minted money, we notice a growing wealth gap between the super-rich and the rest of society, but as long as our needs are met, we won't complain much.
Edward: You don’t know how hard it is to restrain myself.
Translation- Shut up.
Bella: