The FFRF is back in town so of course there all sorts of debates that go along with the whole church/state issue, including that phrase that is printed on our money. Someone mentioned that they have a stamp they put over the offensive phrase so “it’s not technically” on the money they use.
I went over to the site selling the stamps, and they said that stamping money is basically illegal, but the US Treasury isn’t going to hassle them about it as long as they agreed to stop selling the stamps directly, but they now just tell people where to buy them from 3rd parties and encourage the practice, but they’re not “providing the means.” They used wheresgeorge as an example of the same problem, the US Treasury supposedly told them they wouldn’t hassle them about it but didn’t want them selling the stamps to the public.
Now I’m not afraid to mark bills, especially with political messages, but some of the advice they had seemed over the top, such as stamping a stack of 20s, taking them to the bank, getting 1s, and then stamping them. Now of course if I just mark the currency I normally come into contact with and layer it around at different stores, no one would probably ever figure out the bills are originating from me. But to walk into banks and always ask for change and always have stacks of marked bills, it seems like someone would figure out who is marking the bills, and if they are offended by the message, they might try to make trouble for that individual by reporting it to the treasury.
So my question is–I am familiar with some organizations like Where’s George have been threatened by the Treasury and warned to stop providing the means for ordinary citizens to mark bills. But have any private citizens marking a few hundred bills every month ever been hassled by the Treasury? If I do decide to mark bills, I wouldn’t go out of my way to get change and mark an obscene amount, and I’d probably spend most of them at stores where the clerks are always different or I don’t go to more than once a week. I wouldn’t want to gain a reputation based solely upon being “that guy that always has the marked bills.” I don’t know if the waitress I see every week or more often would agree with my message or not, I wouldn’t want her spitting in my food. There was the argument that the bill stamping isn’t rendering the currency unfit for circulation, and it’s not “advertising–” since presumably no one profits financially from the messages that are put on the bills, it’s usually a demand for political change or a harmless kid’s activity.
It seems to me that the more important question is whether stamping currency ever did any good or made any positive change? I know that I barely look at my currency – every once in a while I notice that there’s something strange about a bill, like it has something on it in red ink, but I don’t pay much attention to the message. Even if no one is going to hassle you, I think you’d be better off putting time and energy into contacting your representatives and trying to convince them to make a change to the currency. Stamping bills may feel subversive, but it’s not really going to have any effect, especially because it’s unlikely that you’ll be noticed or punished for it.
What’s illegal about stamping bills? I thought that defacing currency was only illegal if it was done with fraudulent intent. If you mark up a $1 bill so that the numbers in the corners look like $10, then that’s obviously a crime, but what fraud would there be in saying “In God We Don’t Trust”, or whatever?
SpoilerVirgin–Does stamping bills effect a change? No, probably not. It obviously made the one guy feel better, since he now claims by stamping over an image that offends him makes the statement that he doesn’t use currency with “that” phrase on it true. I do get bills with the other side of the argument on them sometimes, usually hand-scrawled. I guess that made someone feel better, as well. But it’s not always about bringing about change, like I said the bill tracking service Where’s George used to sell stamps so you could put “this bill is registered on wheresgeorge, please update its progress” or something like that. It was really just something fun for kids to do, and the Treasury Department apparently had a fit over that.
SamClem- Yeah, like I mentioned, making the bill unfit or placing advertising on the bills angers the Treasury. Apparently the Treasury is also angered by organized efforts to stamp bills. If the Treasury has such low standards about “defacing” money, why are they pressuring organizations like wheresgeorge or others to stop promoting the practice?
My question isn’t really is this an effective use of time, but has any one individual ever been hassled by the Treasury Department because they are stamping a large volume of bills? Like so many bills month after month that Rita over at the bank finally got fed up and complained? According to the various causes that promote stamping, they seem to claim the Treasury leaned on them from one time to another over the whole issue. Perhaps they would’ve won had they cared to fight the issue, but I can see why a small non-profit would be hesitant to take on the Government.
Some time back, a local strip club owner was marking the edges of $2 bills with red and distributing them to his customers. That is, he encouraged customers to buy the marked twos to give to the girls as tips. He was severely frowned at by the Secret Service and stopped doing it. The bills were still valid even with the marking. Bill counting machines at the bank did not reject the notes.
I did see and get some of them since I buy $2 bills from the bank. There was a rather inaccurate newspaper article about the affair (it claimed the marking made the bills invalid or something like that), so I started the thread here about it. Can’t find the thread, or I’d post a link.
That’s a good example of an individual on a small scale getting leaned on. I wonder what he thought he was accomplishing with the red mark? I guess word would get around in a small area that red $2 bills came from this strip club, so instead of just suspecting your bill was once stuck in a sweaty G-string and used to snort coke, you now have confirmation! $2 bills would have to be the worst bill to mark, the girls would go spend them and the businesses would most likely dump them in an odd compartment in their drawer and take them straight to the bank, individuals would either hoard them or once spent, they’d be turned back in, without much circulation.
So the guy was staining the bills to create an “atmosphere.” Did he predict that other local businesses and banks would figure out the origin of the bills and ultimately render the bills rather useless except for recirculation at his strip club? Guy walks in, gets change for $100, they give it all to him in marked $2s. He spends half, leaves with half and no other local businesses or banks will accept the money. That sounds like they really got the guy, except for the fact that he could leave town with the bills and cash out, and next time he goes back to the strip club, makes sure he brings small bills so he doesn’t have to buy the “company money” in order to play.
It sounds to me like the goal was “See what a big part of the local economy we are? Our bills are everywhere! Surely, you can’t run such a fine economic enterprise out of this town!”.
There was an adult bookstore that located at this interstate off-ramp near me about a decade back. The extremely small Podunk town’s church decided to take pics of the patrons as they went in. Of course the clientele were truckers and 20-something males from neighboring towns that went there mainly because they heard about the church’s harassment on the news (I was 20-something at the time).
I guess the church thought that all these family men from around town were the main patrons, which simply wasn’t the case and all these random men from all over didn’t care one bit if the church took their pic and put it on their website identifying them as porn patrons. A lot of the men actually posed and made obscene gestures, reveling in telling the church what they thought of them. I could see the same being said for the men at the strip club, just because they have a bill doesn’t mean they got it there, and a lot of men that didn’t even get the red bill from there might act like they did because they would enjoy the statement they think they are making.
The adult bookstore finally put up a privacy fence, forbid the church from coming in the parking lot proper, so the church erected a watchtower to loom over the fence so they could get their pics. Trouble is, they had to do this in the right-of-way so the town stepped in and made them remove it.
An early Civil Rights trick in a Southern town not noted for progressive politics consisted of marking every bill or currency that went through a black person’s hands.
Being a smallish town with limited banking systems, the currency tended to stay in the same town for several months.
Soon, about every bill in circulation in that town bore the ‘paid by a black person’ mark.
Marking a bill for ‘a cause’ goes way back - note the vigorous prosecutions you learned of in school.
Thanks for hunting that down. For some reason I couldn’t come up with a set of search words that would find it. (“strip” and “club” didn’t occur to me. :smack:)
I’m fairly sure that the bills were still valid even with the marking. After all, the WheresGeorge bills, which are marked at least as much, are never rejected. I think it was the combination of the rare denomination and the marking that freaked people out. If he’d done it to ones, people probably wouldn’t have had a problem.
Note the article refers to the “Stamp Stampede” campaign launched that year. Doesn’t look like the SS has managed to suppress that, since the web page still offers to sell the stamps. No doubt they’ve been frowning hard at it though.
I don’t see how stamping money is any more or less “illegal” than marking the notes with a counterfeit pen, which banks and merchants do all the time. The only substantive difference is in the interpretation of the meaning of the markings, which become a First Amendment issue.
Freedom From Religion Foundation. They’re the ones you occasionally hear about campaigning to get “In God We Trust” removed from money and “Under God” removed from the Pledge of Allegiance and what-not.
Although it’s very rare here, I’ve come across something similar to this in Ireland and/or EU .
Some people write messages onto € notes (Bills) too circulate a message.
Stuff like “Topaz is Shell” during the Corrib Gas Controversy or more general stuff like “No Bailout”, “No EU”, “No IMF”.
It gets usually suggested in idiotic Facebook groups like this.
It’s rare, but some just keep doing it.
However, once that money goes to a bank, it gets taken out of circulation.