SIXTEEN TONS by M. Travis, performed by Tennessee Ernie Ford (1955) "...Load sixteen tons and what do you get? Another day older and the deeper in debt. Saint Peter don'tcha call me cause I can't go. I owe my soul to the company store...."

An Editorial Commentary by
Michael Trudeau, Economic Advisor
and Monetary Specialist - ColonialResources.Com

     The above chorus has been sung by many Americans over the years. Indeed, it’s a sad state of affairs when one ponders how true-to-life this song really is. In the 1800’s companies that owned coal mines hit on a novel concept when confronted with how to keep Cheap Labor working the mines.
     Mine owners would hire the unemployed men who owned nothing other than the shirts on their backs and offer them an opportunity for employment. Of course, most of these men jumped at the chance to make an honest living and accepted what looked like a generous offer.
     What was this generous offer?
     Well the application process may have gone something like this:
          “Howdy, mister, I noticed yer sign lookin’ for strong men to work the mines.”
          “Yes we’re hiring on a few strong men for the mines. You looking for work?”
          The prospective employee would respond that he was and the mine owner would
       then offer the job and ask, “Do you have the necessary tools to mine the coal?
          The new employee would answer no, being pretty well destitute.
          The mine operator would then answer, “Not to worry, friend, we’ll get you outfitted.
       Go up yonder, there, on the hilltop, to the company store. Tell them you’ve been
       hired on. They’ll get you all the things you’ll need on credit, and you can pay it back
       when you get paid.”
           So off went our happy, young gainfully employed individual to the company store
       to be outfitted. The store operator would hand our young hero a shovel, a pickaxe,
       a hat with a lantern, and a pair of coveralls.
           The store operator would then ask, “Got yerself a place to sleep?”
           “No sir.”
           “Not to worry (by now a familiar refrain). We’ll getcha set up at the company
       bunkhouse and you can take yer meals there with the rest of the boys. We’ll just
       add that to yer bill.”

......Boy, life is pretty good, the young man thought.
Mining coal was hard work, but, alas, our hero was a strapping young lad with his entire future ahead of him. What he didn’t understand was that, with the inflated prices and exorbitant interest rate charged by the company store, his paychecks would never be enough to pay off his debt.
     He had just been duped and was now a slave to the company. He’d never leave unless he could pay off his debt in its entirety. He may have been condemned to toil in the mines for the rest of his natural life.
     Today, luckily, nobody could be duped into taking such a foolhardy journey. We,
as a society in today’s politically correct world, would never allow for such cruel
treatment of our fellow man, right?
     Well, although that sounds good, it unfortunately isn’t true. In fact, it’s not only the “poor-unemployed-desperate-for-any-job-that-might-come-along” guy who’s being duped, it’s almost every single citizen in America who inadvertently took a job working for the “new” company store known as the Federal Reserve.
Now for us to tell this terrible tale of deception and wanton theft, we need to lay some groundwork to explain a little about the Federal Reserve.
     The Federal Reserve is a privately owned corporation owned by private citizens.
It is no more federal than Federal Express.
Here’s another dirty little secret:
. . . They have no reserves!
     For all intents and purposes, the Federal Reserve System and central banks were created in 1913 off the coast of Georgia on Jekyll Island. A group of the richest bankers of the day got together and decided they could form the biggest monopoly ever created.
This would actually be a very simple plan to implement. They needed only to muscle a few smaller banks to join their hideous scheme. These smaller banks were told to “join the family” and be directed as to whom they would lend money and at what interest rates, or they would
be forced out of business by the banking cartel.
     As soon as the “new company store” opened for business, it began systematically stripping each and every citizen of every single penny’s worth of wealth and property they “owned.”
     Turns out, the banksters were and are extremely efficient at their task and, at this point in time, they have confiscated almost all of the nation’s wealth. What the creators of the Fed did was simply to tear a page out of the old mine owners’ book and implement it not only on a grander scale, but with a few improvements.
     Like the mine owners, the Fed understood that when we citizens strike out on our own to carve out our niche in the world, we wouldn’t be able to afford life’s little necessities—the tools—with our very first paycheck i.e., housing, transportation, health care etc.
When our young people today get their first jobs, they basically only own the clothes on their backs.
     So along comes the Fed, who says, “Not to worry, friend, head up to the company store— It’s the one marked “Bank”—and tell them you’ve been hired and that we sent you. They’ll get you set up with all the things you’ll need, like a house to live in, a shiny new, red Saab to park
in the driveway, and a new big screen TV to watch Monday Night Football on.
You can simply pay us back slowly over time as you get paid.”
     “Boy, life is pretty good,” the young people think, as they gladly sign on the dotted line.
     Now, as mentioned previously, the Fed had some improvements for this age-old con.
The Fed, with the ability to create money from nothing, manipulates the economy
through a series of events such as raising and lowering interest rates. This flux, in turn,
leads to upswings and downturns or—booms and busts—that are used to speed up the
theft of today’s wealth.
     When times are good, economically speaking, consumer confidence rises and we begin
to feel rather invincible. We also begin to feel that, since we work so hard and the times seem good, maybe we deserve a bigger house and perhaps a little fancier car. So we extend ourselves to the limit of our earnings.
     However, the Fed pulls the rug out from under us by creating a recession, and we
begin to struggle to make ends meet.
     Then comes the triage: The actual act of going through what we own to see what we could
do without. First, it’s the second car that has to go. No, not the red Saab yet, but soon enough
even that prize will be too much to finance. But when employers begin downsizing due to the
negative economic growth, sadly, now the Saab must go and, next, it’s the house and . . .
Once this part of the cycle is complete, we’re left asking the question: “Where did all of our
stuff go?
     It went to the banks, which sent it to the Federal Reserve, which sent it to the various
families of finance, most of whom are foreign and the very one who had extended the
generous offer of credit to begin with.
     Yes, they now own our wealth--the very wealth that we had amassed through hard labor
over many years. So what is to become of us after the bust?
     Not to worry, friend, because the cartel has plans for us. You see, the next boom cycle is
just around the corner, and we’ll start all over again
     The moral of this story is best represented by that old cliché: Power corrupts, and
absolute power corrupts absolutely.
     So what can we do to combat the Fed and their systematic theft of your wealth? Fed head
Alan Greenspan states: “In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect
savings from confiscation through inflation. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the hidden
confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process.”
     Simply put: begin to divest yourself of the Fed-created fiat paper and move a portion of your
wealth into the private, physical possession of gold coins. That’s right, keep the coins with you. There is no such thing as a safe safe-deposit box.

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