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What's going on in America today?
Why are we over our heads in debt?
Why can't the politicians bring debt under control?
Why are so many people - often both parents now
working at low-paying, dead-end jobs and still making do with less?
What's the future of the American economy and way of life?
Why does the government tell us inflation is low when the buying power of our paychecks
is declining at an alarming rate?
Only a generation ago, bread was a quarter and you could get a new car for $1,995!
The problem is that since 1864 we’ve had a debt-based banking system.
All our money is based on government debt.
We cannot extinguish government debt without extinguishing our money supply.
That’s why talk of paying off the national debt,
without reforming our banking system, is an impossibility.
That’s why the solution does not lie in discussing the size of national debt
rather than lies in reforming our banking system.
This is the Federal Reserve headquarters in Washington, D.C.
It sits on a very impressive address
right on Constitution Avenue, right across from the Lincoln Memorial.
But is it "Federal"?
Is it really part of the United States government?
Well, what we are about to show you
is that there is nothing federal about the Fed Reserve,
and there are no reserves.
The name is a deception
created back before the Fed Reserve Act was passed in 1913
to make Americans think that America's new central bank
operates in the public interest.
The truth is that the Fed is a private bank,
owned by private stockholders,
and run purely for their private profit.
"That's exactly correct,
the Fed is privately-owned, for-profit corporation which has no reserves,
at least no reserve to back up the Federal Reserve notes
which are our common currency.
Well, absolutely. The Fed is neither federal and has doubtful reserves.
It’ a private bank that is owned by member banks
and it was chartered under the guys of the seat by an act of congress in 1913.
If there's still any doubt whether the Federal Reserve is a part of the U.S. government,
check your local telephone book.
In most cities, it's not listed in the blue "government pages."
It is listed in the "business" white pages,
right next to Federal Express, another private company.
But more directly, U.S. Courts have ruled time and time again
that the Fed is a private corporation.
Why can't Congress do something about the Fed?
Most members of Congress just don't understand the system,
and the few who do are afraid to speak up.
For example, initially a veteran Congressman from Chicago
asked us if he could be interviewed for this video.
However, both times our camera crew arrived at his office to do the interview,
this was all we were able to film.
The Congressman never appeared,
and eventually he decided he no longer wanted to participate.
But a few others in Congress have been bolder over the years.
Here are three quick examples.
In 1923, Representative Charles A. Lindbergh, a Republican from Minnesota,
the father of famed aviator, "Lucky" Lindy, put it this way:
One of the most outspoken critics in Congress of the Fed
was the former Chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee
during the Great Depression years, Louis T. McFadden said in 1932:
Senator Barry Goldwater was a frequent critic of the Fed:
"The Fed really, even though it’s not part of the federal government,
is more powerful than the federal government.
It is more powerful than the President, Congress or the courts.
A lot of people challenges me on that. Let me prove my case.
The Fed determines what the average person's car payment is going to be
what their house payment is going to be
and whether they have a job or not.
And I submit to you - that is total control.
The Fed is the largest single creditor of the U.S. government.
What does Proverbs tell us? The borrower is servant to the lender.
What one has to understand is that, from the day the Constitution was adopted,
the folks who profit from privately owned central banks,
as President Madison called them, the "Money Changers",
have fought a running battle for control over who gets to print America's money.
Why is who prints the money so important?
Think of money as just another commodity.
If you have a monopoly on a commodity that everyone needs, everyone wants,
and nobody has enough of, there are lots of ways to make a profit
and also exert tremendous political influence.
That's what this battle is all about.
Throughout the history of the United States,
the money power has gone back and forth between Congress
and some sort of privately-owned central bank.
The founding fathers knew the evils of a privately-owned central bank.
First of all, they had seen how the privately owned British central bank,
the Bank of England, had run up the British national debt
to such an extent that Parliament had been forced
to place unfair taxes on the American colonies.
In fact, as we'll see later, Ben Franklin claimed
that this was the real cause of the American Revolution.
Most of the founding fathers realized the potential dangers of banking,
and feared bankers' accumulation of wealth and power.
Jefferson put it this way:
That succinct statement of Jefferson is, in fact,
the solution to all our economic problems today.
It helps repeating: the issuing power should be taken from the banks
and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs.
James Madison, the main author of the Constitution, agreed.
Interestingly, he called those behind the central bank scheme "Money Changers".
Madison strongly criticized their actions:
The battle over who gets to issue our money
has been the pivotal issue through the history of the United States.
Wars are fought over it.
Depressions are caused to acquire it.
Yet after World War I, this battle was rarely mentioned
in newspapers or history books.
Why?
By World War I, the Money Changers with their dominant wealth,
had seized control of most of the nation's press.
Throughout U.S. history,
the battle over who gets the power to issue our money has raged.
In fact it has changed hands back and forth eight times since 1764.
Yet, this fact has virtually vanished from public view for over three generations
behind a smoke screen emitted by Fed cheerleaders in the media.
Until we stop talking about "deficits" and "government spending"
and start talking about who controls how much money we have,
it's just a shell game - a complete and utter deception.
It won't matter if we pass an iron-clad amendment to the Constitution
mandating a balanced budget.
Our situation is only going to get worse until we root out the cause at its source.
What’s the solution for our national problem?
First of all, education.
This is what this presentation is all about.
But secondly, we must act,
we must take back the power to issue our own money.
Issuing our own money is not a radical solution.
It's the same solution proposed at different points in U.S. history
by men like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson,
Martin Van Buren, Abraham Lincoln
So, to sum it up: in 1913, Congress gave an independent central bank,
deceptively named the Federal Reserve,
a monopoly over issuing America's money,
and the debt generated by this quasi-private corporation
is what is killing the American economy.
Though the Federal Reserve is now one of the two
most powerful central banks in the world, it was not the first.
So where did this idea come from?
To really understand the magnitude of the problem,
we have to travel back to Europe.
Just who are these "Money Changers" James Madison spoke of?
The Bible tells us that two thousand years ago,
Jesus Christ drove the Money Changers from the Temple.
It was the only times Jesus used force during his ministry.
What were Money Changers doing in the Temple?
When Jews came to Jerusalem to pay their Temple tax,
they could only pay it with a special coin, the half shekel of the sanctuary.
This was a half-ounce of pure silver, about the size of a quarter.
It was the only coin around at that time
which was pure silver and of assured weight,
without the image of a pagan Emperor.
Therefore, to Jews the half-shekel was the only coin acceptable to God.
But these coins were not plentiful.
The Money Changers had cornered the market on them.
Then, they raised the price of them - just like any other commodity
to whatever market would bear.
In other words, the Money Changers were making
exorbitant profits because they held a virtual monopoly on money.
The Jews had to pay whatever they demanded.
To Jesus, this totally violated the sanctity of God's house.
But the money changing scam did not originate in Jesus' day.
Two hundred years before Christ,
Rome was having trouble with Money Changers.
Two early Roman emperors had tried to diminish the power of the Money Changers
by reforming usury laws and limiting land ownership to 500 acres.
They both were assassinated.
In 48 B.C., Julius Caesar took back the power to coin money from the Money Changers
and minted coins for the benefit of all.
With this new, plentiful supply of money,
he built great public works projects.
By making money plentiful, Caesar won the love of common man.
But the Money Changers hated him.
Some believe this was an important factor in Caesar's assassination.
One thing is for sure: with the death of Caesar
came the demise of plentiful money in Rome.
Taxes increased, as did corruption.
Just as in the case of America today, usury and debased coin became the rule.
Eventually, the Roman money supply was reduced by 90%.
As a result, the common people lost their lands and homes
just as is about to happen soon in America.
With the demise of plentiful money,
the masses lost confidence in Roman government and refused to support it.
Rome plunged into the gloom of the Dark Ages.
A thousand years after the death of Christ,
Money Changers - those who exchange, create and manipulate the quantity of money
were active in medieval England.
In fact, they were so active that acting together
they could manipulate the English economy.
These were not bankers, per se.
The Money Changers generally were the goldsmiths.
They were the first bankers because they started
keeping other people's gold for safekeeping in their vaults.
The first paper money in Western Europe
was merely receipts for gold left at the goldsmiths.
Paper money caught on because it was more convenient and safer
than carrying around a lot of heavy gold and silver coins.
Eventually goldsmiths noticed that only a small fraction of the depositors
ever came in and demanded their gold at any one time.
Goldsmiths started cheating on the system.
They discovered that they could print more money than they had gold
and usually no one would be the wiser.
Then, they could loan out this extra paper money and collect interest on it.
This was the birth of fractional reserve lending that is,
loaning out many times more money than you have assets on deposit.
So, for example, if $1,000 in gold were deposited with them,
they could loan out about $10,000 in paper money and charge interest on it,
and no one would discover the deception.
By this means, goldsmiths gradually accumulated more and more wealth
and used this wealth to accumulate more and more gold.
Today, this practice of loaning out more money than there are reserves
is known as fractional reserve banking.
Every bank in the U.S. is allowed to loan out at least
ten times more money they actually have.
That's why they get rich on charging let's say 8% interest.
It's not really 8% per year, which is their profit. It's 80%.
That's why bank buildings are always the largest in town.
But does that mean that all interest or all banking should be illegal?
No. In the Middle Ages, Canon law, the law of the Catholic Church,
forbade charging interest on loans.
This concept followed the teachings of Aristotle
as well as of Saint Thomas Aquinas.
They taught that the purpose of money was to serve the members of society
to facilitate the exchange of goods needed to lead a virtuous life
Interest, in their belief, hindered this purpose
by putting an unnecessary burden on the use of money.
In other words, interest was contrary to reason and justice.
Reflecting Church Law in the Middle Ages,
Europe forbade charging interest on loans and made it a crime called usury.
As commerce grew and therefore opportunities for investment
arose in the late Middle Ages,
it came to be recognized that to loan money had a cost to the lender
both in risk and in lost opportunity.
So, some charges were allowed, but not interest per se.
But all moralists, no matter what religion, condemn fraud,
oppression of the poor and injustice as clearly immoral.
As we will see, fractional reserve lending is rooted in a fraud,
results in widespread poverty
and reduces the value of everyone else's money.
The ancient goldsmiths discovered that extra profits could be made
by "rowing" the economy between easy money and tight money.
When they made money easier to borrow,
then the amount of money in circulation expanded.
Money was plentiful.
People took out more loans to expand their businesses.
But then the money changers would tighten the money supply.
They would make loans more difficult to get.
What would happen?
Just what happens today.
A certain percentage of people could not repay their previous loans,
and could not take out new loans to repay the old ones.
Therefore they went bankrupt, and had to sell their assets to the goldsmiths
for pennies on the dollar.
The same thing is still going on today,
only today we call this rowing of the economy, up and down, the "Business Cycle".
Like Caesar, Henri I of England finally resolved
to take the money power away from the goldsmiths, about 1100 A.D.
Henri could have used anything as money, seashells, feathers, or even ?
as is often done in remote provinces.
But he invented one of the most unusual money systems in history.
It was called the “tally stick” system.
Here I have one of the few surviving examples of this form of British money
which lasted 726 years, until 1826
a tally stick.
This system was adopted to avoid the monetary manipulation of the goldsmiths.
Tally stick were money fabricated out of stick of polished wood.
Notches were cut along one edge of the stick to indicate the denomination.
Then the stick was split lengthwise through the notches
so that both pieces still had a record of the notches.
The king kept one half to protect against counterfeiting.
Then he would “spend” the other halves into the economy
and they would circulate as money.
This particular Tally Stick is huge and represented £25,000.
One of the original stockholders in the Bank of England
purchased his original shares with this stick.
In other words, he bought shares in the world's richest
and most powerful corporation, with a stick of wood.
It's ironic that after its formation in 1694
the Bank of England attacked the Tally Stick system
because it was money issued outside the control of the Money Changers
just as king Henri had wanted it to be.
Why would people accept sticks of wood for money?
That's a great question.
Throughout history, people have traded anything
they thought had value and used that for money.
You see, the secret is that money is only what people agree on to use as money.
What's our paper money today?
It's really just paper.
But here's the trick: King Henry ordered that Tally Sticks
had to be used to pay the king’s taxes.
This built in demand for tallies
and immediately made them circulate and be accepted as money.
And they worked well.
In fact, no other money worked so well and for so long as tally sticks.
Keep in mind: the British empire was built under the tally stick system.
The tally stick system succeeded despite the fact
that the money changers constantly attacked it
by offering the metal coin system as competition.
In other words, metal coins never went completely out of circulation
but tally stick hung on because they were good for the payment of taxes.
Finally, in the 1500's,
King Henry VIII relaxed the laws concerning usury
and the Money Changers wasted no time reasserting themselves.
They made their gold and silver money plentiful for a few decades.
But when Queen Mary took the throne and tightened the usury laws again
the Money Changers renewed the hoarding of gold and silver coin,
forcing the economy to plummet.
When Mary's half-sister, Queen Elizabeth I, took the throne
she was determined to regain control over English money.
Her solution was to issue gold and silver coins from the public treasury
and thus take the control over the money supply, away from the Money Changers.
Although control over money was not the only cause of the English Revolution in 1642
- religious differences fuelled the conflict –
monetary policy played a major role.
Financed by the Money Changers
Oliver Cromwell finally overthrew King Charles
purged Parliament, and put the King to death.
The Money Changers were immediately allowed to consolidate their financial power.
The result was that for the next fifty years
the Money Changers plunged Great Britain into a series of costly wars.
They took over a square mile of property in the centre of London
known as The City.
This area today is still known
as one of the three predominant financial centres of the world.
Conflicts with the Stuart kings led the Money Changers in England
to combine with those in the Netherlands
to finance the invasion of William of Orange
who overthrew the Stuarts in 1688 and took the English throne.
By the end of the 1600s, England was in financial ruin.
Fifty years of more or less continuous wars with France and Holland had exhausted her.
Frantic government officials met with the Money Changers
to beg for the loans necessary to pursue their political purposes.
The price was high:
a government-sanctioned, privately-owned bank
which could issue money created out of nothing.
It was to be the modern world's first privately owned, central bank
the Bank of England.
Although it was deceptively called the Bank of England
to make the population think it was part of the government
it was not.
Like any other private corporation
the Bank of England sold shares to get started.
The investors, whose names were never revealed,
were supposed to put up one and a quarter million in gold coin
to buy their shares in the Bank.
But only £750,000 pounds was ever received.
Despite that, the Bank of England was duly chartered in 1694
and started out in the business of loaning out several times
the money it supposedly had in reserves, all at interest.
In exchange, the new bank would loan British politicians
as much as they wanted
as long as they secured the debt by direct taxation of the British people.
So, legalization of the Bank of England amounted to nothing less
than legal counterfeiting of a national currency for private gain.
Unfortunately, nearly every nation now
has a privately controlled central bank
using the Bank of England as the basic model.
Such is the power of these central banks
that they soon take total control over a nation's economy.
It soon amounts to nothing but a plutocracy ruled by the rich.
It would be is like putting control of the army
in the hands of the mafia.
The danger of tyranny would be extreme.
Yes, we need central banks
no, we do not need them in private hands!
The central bank scam is really a hidden tax.
The nation sells bonds to the central bank
to pay for things for which the government does not have
the political will to raise taxes to pay for.
But the bonds are purchased with money the central bank creates out of nothing.
More money in circulation makes your money worth less.
The government get as much money as it needs
and the people pay for it in inflation.
The beauty of the plan is that not one person in a thousand can figure it out
because it's usually hidden behind complex-sounding economics gibberish.
With the formation of the Bank of England,
the nation was soon awash in money.
Prices throughout the country doubled.
Massive loans were granted for just about any wild scheme.
One venture proposed draining the Red Sea to recover gold
supposedly lost when the Egyptian army drowned
pursuing Moses and the Israelites.
By 1698, government debt grew from the initial 1-1/4 million pounds
to 16 million.
Naturally, taxes were increased and then increased again to pay for all this.
With the British money supply firmly in their grip,
the British economy began a wild roller coaster series of booms and depressions,
exactly the sort of thing a central bank claims it is designed to prevent.
"There are two things which are intrinsic
not just to the Bank of England, but to central banking generally.
The first is an involvement in the formulation of monetary policy
with the specific objective of achieving monetary stability."
However, since the Bank of England took control,
the British pound has rarely been stable.
Now, let’s take a look at the role of the Rothschilds family,
believed the wealthiest in the world.
This is Frankfort, Germany.
Fifty years after the Bank of England opened its doors,
a goldsmith named Amschel Moses Bauer
opened a coin shop - a counting house - in 1743,
and over the door he placed a sign depicting a Roman eagle on a red shield.
The shop became known as the Red Shield firm,
or, in German, Rothschild.
When his son, Amschel Meyer Bauer, inherited the business,
he decided to change name to Rothschild.
Meyer soon learned that loan money to governments and kings
was more profitable than loaning to private individuals.
Not only were the loans bigger
but they were secured by the nation's taxes.
Meyer Rothschild had five sons.
He trained them all in the skills of money creation,
then sent them to the major capitals of Europe
to open branch offices of the family banking business.
His first son, Amschel, stayed in Frankfort to mind the hometown bank.
His second son, Salomon was sent to Vienna.
His third son, Nathan was clearly the most clever.
He was sent to London at age 21 in 1798, a hundred years after the founding
of the Bank of England.
His fourth son, Karl, went to Naples.
His fifth son, Jakob, went to Paris.
In 1785, Meyer Amschel moved his entire family to this larger house,
a five story dwelling he shared with the Schiff family.
This house was known as the "Green Shield" house.
The Rothschilds and the Schiffs would play a central role
in the rest of European financial history
and in that of the United States.
The Rothschilds broke into dealings with European royalty here at Wilhelmshohe,
the palace of the wealthiest man in Germany
in fact, the wealthiest monarch in all of Europe,
prince William of Hesse-Kassel.
At first, the Rothschilds were only helping William speculate in precious coins.
But when Napoleon chased Prince William into exile, he sent £550,000
- a gigantic sum at that time –
to Nathan Rothschild in London
with instructions from him to buy Consola -
British government bonds also called government stock.
But Rothschild used the money for his own purposes.
With Napoleon on the loose
the opportunities of wartime investments were nearly limitless.
William returned here, sometime prior to the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.
He summoned Rothschilds and demanded his money back.
The Rothschilds returned William's money,
with the 8% interest the British Consols would have paid him
had the investment actually been made.
But the Rothschilds kept all the past profits they had made using Wilhelm' s money.
Nathan Rothschild later brag that
in the seventeen years he had been in England,
he had increased his original £20,000 stake given to him by his father
by 2,500 times.
By cooperating within the family, the Rothschilds soon grew unbelievably wealthy.
By the mid-1800s, they dominated all European banking,
and were certainly the wealthiest family in the world.
They financed Cecil Rhodes,
making it possible for him to establish a monopoly
over the diamond and gold fields of South Africa.
In America, they financed the Hermans in railroads,
the Van Der Bilt in railroad and the press,
the Carnegie in the steel industry,
among many others.
In fact, during WWI, J.P. Morgan was thought to be the richest man in America.
But after his death, it was discovered
that he was actually only a lieutenant of the Rothschilds.
Once Morgan’s will became public, it was discovered
that he owned only 19% of J.P. Morgan’s companies.
By 1850, James Rothschild, the heir of the French branch of the family,
was said to be worth 600 million French francs 150 million more
than all the other bankers in France put together.
He built this mansion, called Ferrières, 19 miles northeast of Paris.
Wilhelm I, on seeing it exclaimed
"Kings couldn't afford this. It could only belong to a Rothschild."
Another 19 century French commentator put it this way;
"There is but one power in Europe and that is Rothschild."
There is no evidence that their predominant standing
in European or world finance has changed.
Now let's take a look at the results
the Bank of England produced on the British economy
and how that later was the root cause of the American Revolution.
By the mid-1700s
the British Empire was approaching its height of power around the world.
Britain had fought four wars in Europe since the creation
of its privately-owned central bank, the Bank of England.
The cost had been high.
To finance these wars, the British Parliament had borrowed heavily from the Bank.
By the mid-1700s, the government's debt was £140,000,000
a staggering sum for those days.
Consequently, the British government embarked on a program
of trying to raise revenues from its American colonies
in order to make the interest payments to the Bank.
But in America, it was a different story.
The scourge of a privately-owned central bank had not yet hit.
This is independence hall in Philadelphia
where the declaration of independence and constitution were signed.
In the mid-1700s, pre-Revolutionary America was still relatively poor.
There was a severe shortage of precious metal coins to trade for goods,
so the early colonists were forced to experiment
with printing their own home-grown paper money.
Some of these experiments were successful.
Franklin was a big supporter of the colonies printing their own paper money.
In 1757, Franklin was sent to London.
He ended up staying for the next 18 years,
nearly until the start of the American Revolution.
During this period, the American colonies began to issue their own money.
Called Colonial Scrip, the endeavour was very successful.
It provided a reliable medium of exchange
and it also helped to provide a feeling of unity between the colonies.
Remember, most Colonial Scrip was just paper money
- debt-free money –
printed in the public interest and not backed by gold or silver coin.
In other words, it was a totally fiat currency.
One day, officials of the Bank of England
asked Franklin how he would account for the new-found prosperity of the colonies.
Without hesitation he replied:
This was just common sense to Franklin
but you can imagine the impact it had on the Bank of England.
America had learned the secret of money
and that genie had to be returned to its bottle as soon as possible.
As a result, Parliament hurriedly passed the Currency Act of 1764.
This prohibited colonial officials from issuing their own money
and ordered them to pay all future taxes in gold or silver coins.
In other words, it forced the colonies on a gold or silver standard.
For those who still believe that a gold standard is the answer
for America's current monetary problems,
look what happened to America after that.
Writing in his autobiography, Franklin said:
Franklin claims that this was even the basic cause for the American Revolution.
As Franklin put it in his autobiography:
By the time the first shots were fired
in Lexington, Massachusetts on April 19, 1775
the colonies had been drained of gold and silver coin by British taxation.
As result, the Continental government had no choice
but to print its own paper money to finance the war.
At the start of the Revolution, the U.S. money supply stood at $12 million.
By the end of the war, it was nearly $500 million.
As a result, the currency was virtually worthless.
Shoes sold for $5,000 a pair.
Colonial scrip had worked because just enough was issued to facilitate trade.
As G. Washington lamented, a wagonload of money
was scarcely purchase of a wagonload of provisions.
Today, those who support a gold-backed currency
point to this period during the Revolution
to demonstrate the evils of a fiat currency.
But remember, the same currency had worked so well
twenty years earlier during times of peace
that the Bank of England had Parliament outlaw it.
Towards the end of the Revolution, the Continental Congress
meeting at Independence Hall, grew desperate for money.
In 1781, they allowed Robert Morris, their Financial Superintendent
to open a privately-owned central bank.
Incidentally, Morris was a wealthy man
who had grown wealthier during the Revolution
by trading in war materials.
Called the Bank of North America, the new bank was closely modelled
after the Bank of England.
It was allowed to practice fractional reserve banking
- that is, it could lend out money it didn't have
then charge interest on it.
If you or I were to do that, we would be charged with fraud, a felony.
The Bank's charter called for private investors
to put up $400,000 worth of initial capital.
But when Morris was unable to raise the money
he brazenly used his political influence to have gold deposited in the bank
which had been loaned to America by France.
He then loaned this money to himself and his friends
to reinvest in shares of the bank.
And, like the Bank of England, the bank was given a monopoly of the nation currency.
Soon, the dangers became clear.
The value of American currency continued to plummet
so, four years later, in 1785
the Bank's charter was not renewed.
The leader of the successful effort to kill the Bank
William Findley, of Pennsylvania
explained the problem this way:
The men behind the Bank of North America
- Alexander Hamilton, Robert Morris, and the Bank's President, Thomas Willing
did not give up.
Only six years later, Hamilton - then Secretary of the Treasury
and his mentor, Morris
rammed a new privately-owned central bank through the new Congress.
Called the First Bank of the United States
Thomas Willing again served as the Bank's President.
The players were the same, only the name of the Bank was changed.
In 1787, colonial leaders assembled in Philadelphia
to replace the ailing Articles of Confederation.
As we saw earlier, both Thomas Jefferson and James Madison
were unalterably opposed to a privately-owned central bank.
They had seen the problems caused by the Bank of England.
They wanted nothing of it.
As Jefferson later put it:
During the debate over the future monetary system,
another one of the founding fathers, Gouverneur Morris,
castigated the motivations of the owners of the bank of North America.
Gouverneur Morris headed the committee that wrote
the final draft of the constitution.
Morris knew the motivations of the bank well.
Along with his old boss, Robert Morris,
Gouverneur Morris and Alexander Hamilton were the ones
who had presented the original plan for the Bank of North America
to the Continental Congress in the last year of the Revolution.
In a letter he wrote to James Madison on July 2, 1787
Gouverneur Morris revealed what was really going on:
Despite the defection of Gouverneur Morris from the ranks of the Bank
Hamilton, Robert Morris, Thomas Willing, and their European backers
were not about to give up.
They convinced the bulk of the delegates to the Constitution Convention
to not give Congress the power to issue paper money.
Most of the delegates were still reeling
from the wild inflation of the paper currency during the Revolution.
They had forgotten how well Colonial Scrip had worked before the War.
But the Bank of England had not.
The Money Changers could not stand
to have America printing her own money again.
The Constitution is silent on this point.
This defect left the door wide open for the Money Changers
just as they had planned.
In 1790, less than three years after the Constitution had been signed
the Money Changers struck again.
The newly-appointed first Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton
proposed a bill to the Congress
calling for a new privately-owned central bank.
Coincidentally, that was the very year that Amschel Rothschild
made his pronouncement from his flagship bank in Frankfort:
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes its laws."
Alexander Hamilton was a tool of the international bankers.
He wanted to create the Bank of the United States, and did so.
Interestingly, one of Hamilton's first jobs after graduating from law school in 1782
was as an aide to Robert Morris, the head of the Bank of North America.
In fact, the year before, Hamilton had written Morris a letter, saying:
"A national debt, if it is not excessive, will be to us a national blessing".
A blessing to whom?
After a year of intense debate, in 1791
Congress passed the bill and gave it a 20-year charter.
The new bank was to be called the First Bank of the United States, or BUS.
Here we are in front of the first Bank of the United States in Philadelphia.
The Bank was given a monopoly on printing U.S. currency
even though 80% of its stock would be held by private investors.
The other 20% would be purchased by the U.S. Government
but the reason was not to give the government a piece of the action,
it was to provide the capital for the other 80% owners.
As with the old bank of North America and the Bank of England before that,
the stockholders never paid the full amount for their shares.
The U.S. government put up their initial $2,000,000 in cash,
then the Bank through the old magic of fractional reserve lending,
made loans to its charter investors so they could come up
with the remaining $8,000,000 in capital
needed for this risk-free investment.
Like the Bank of England
the name of the Bank of the United States was deliberately chosen
to hide the fact that it was privately controlled.
And like the Bank of England, the names of the investors in the Bank
were never revealed.
Many years later it was a common saying
that the Rothschilds were the power behind the old Bank of the U.S.
The Bank was sold to Congress as a way to bring stability
to the banking system and to eliminate inflation.
So what happened?
Over the first five years, the U.S. government borrowed $8.2 million
from the Bank of the United States.
In the same period, prices rose by 72%.
Jefferson, as the new Secretary of State,
watched the borrowing with sadness and frustration,
unable to stop it.
Millions of Americans feel the same way today.
They watch in helpless frustration as the Federal government
borrows the American economy into oblivion.
So, although it was called the First Bank of the U.S.,
it was not the first attempt at a privately-owned central bank in this country.
As with the Bank of North America,
the government put up the cash to get this private bank going,
then the bankers loaned that money to each other
to buy the remaining stock in the bank.
It was a scam, plain and simple.
And they wouldn't be able to get away with it for long,
but first we have to travel back to Europe to see
how a single man was able to manipulate the entire British economy
by obtaining the first news of Napoleon's final defeat.
Here in Paris, the Bank of France was organized in 1800
just like the Bank of England.
But Napoleon decided France had to break free of debt
and he never trusted the Bank of France.
He declared that when a government is dependent upon bankers for money,
the bankers, not the leaders of the government are in control:
Back in America, unexpected help was about to arrive.
In 1800, Thomas Jefferson narrowly defeated John Adams
to become the third President of the United States.
By 1803, Jefferson and Napoleon had struck a deal.
The U.S. would give Napoleon $3,000,000 in gold
in exchange for a huge chunk of territory west of the Mississippi River
- the Louisiana Purchase.
With that three million dollars, Napoleon quickly forged an army
and set off across Europe, conquering everything in his path.
But the Bank of England quickly rose to oppose him.
They financed every nation in his path, reaping the enormous profits of war.
Prussia, Austria, and finally Russia
all went heavily into debt in a futile attempt to stop Napoleon.
Four years later, with the main French Army in Russia,
30-year-old Nathan Rothschild
- the head of the London office of the Rothschild family –
personally took charge of a bold plan
to smuggle a much-needed shipment of gold right through France
to finance an attack by the Duke of Wellington from Spain.
Nathan later bragged at a dinner party in London
that it was the best business he’d ever done.
Little did he know that he would do much better business in the near future.
Wellington's attacks from the south, and other defeats,
eventually forced Napoleon to abdicate,
and Louis XVIII was crowned King.
Napoleon was exiled to Elba, a tiny island off the coast of Italy,
supposedly exiled from France forever.
While Napoleon was on Elba,
temporarily defeated by England with the financial help of the Rothschilds
America was trying to break free of its central bank as well.
In 1811, a bill was put before Congress to renew
the charter of the Bank of the United States.
The debate grew very heated
and the legislature of both Pennsylvania and Virginia
passed resolutions asking Congress to kill the Bank.
The press corps of the day attacked the Bank openly,
calling it "a great swindle", a "vulture", a "viper", and a "cobra".
Oh, to have an independent press once again in America!
A Congressman named P.B. Porter
attacked the bank from the floor of Congress,
saying that if the bank's charter were renewed,
Congress "will have planted in the *** of this Constitution a viper,
which one day or another will sting the liberties of this country to the heart."
Prospects didn't look good for the Bank.
Writers have claimed that Nathan Rothschild warned
that the United States would find itself involved in a most disastrous war
if the Bank's charter were not renewed.
But it wasn't enough.
When the smoke had cleared,
the renewal bill was defeated by a single vote in the House
and was deadlocked in the Senate.
By now, America's fourth President, James Madison, was in the White House.
Remember, Madison was a staunch opponent of the Bank.
His Vice President, George Clinton, broke a tie in the Senate
and sent the Bank into oblivion.
Within 5 months England attacked the U.S.
and the War of 1812 was on.
But the British were still busy fighting Napoleon,
and so the war of 1812 ended in a draw in 1814.
Though the Money Changers were temporarily down, they were far from out.
it would take them only another two years to bring back their bank
- bigger and stronger than ever.
But now let's return to Napoleon.
Because nothing else in history more aptly demonstrates
the cunning of the Rothschild family then their control
of the British stock market after Waterloo.
In 1815, a year after the end of the War of 1812 in America,
Napoleon escaped his exile and returned to Paris.
French troops were sent out to capture him,
but such was his charisma that the soldiers rallied around their old leader
and hailed him as their Emperor once again.
In March of 1815 Napoleon equipped an army
which Britain's Duke of Wellington defeated
less than 90 days later at Waterloo.
Some writers claim Napoleon borrowed 5 million pounds
from the Bank of England to rearm.
But it appears these funds actually came from the Ouvrard banking house in Paris.
Nevertheless, from about this point on,
it was not unusual for privately-controlled central banks
to finance both sides in a war.
Why would a central bank finance opposing sides in a war?
Because war is the biggest debt-generator of them all.
A nation will borrow any amount for victory.
The ultimate looser is loaned just enough
to hold out the vain hope of victory,
and the ultimate winner is given enough to win.
Besides, such loans are usually conditioned upon the guarantee
that the victor will honour the debts of the vanquished.
This is the Waterloo battlefield about 200 miles northeast of Paris,
in what today is Belgium.
Here, Napoleon suffered his final defeat,
but not before thousands of French and English men
gave their lives on a steamy summer day in June of 1815.
Right over there, on June 18, 1815,
74,000 French troops met 67,000 troops
from Britain, and other European nations.
The outcome was certainly in doubt.
In fact, had Napoleon attacked a few hours earlier,
he would probably have won the battle.
But no matter who won or lost, back in London,
Nathan Rothschild planned to use the opportunity to try to seize control
over the British stock and bond market,
and possibly even the Bank of England.
Rothschild stationed a trusted agent, a man named Rothworth,
on the north side of the battlefield - closer to the English Channel.
Once the battle had been decided, Rothworth took off for the Channel.
He delivered the news to Nathan Rothschild a full 24 hours
before Wellington's own courier.
Rothschild hurried to the Stock Market and took up his usual position
in front of an ancient pillar.
All eyes were on him.
The Rothschilds had a legendary communication network.
If Wellington had been defeated and Napoleon were loose on the Continent again,
Britain's financial situation would become grave indeed.
Rothschild looked saddened.
He stood there motionless, eyes downcast.
Then suddenly, he began selling.
Other nervous investors saw that Rothschild was selling.
It could only mean one thing. Napoleon must have won. Wellington must have lost.
The market plummeted.
Soon, everyone was selling their Consols - their British government bonds
and prices dropped sharply.
But then Rothschild started secretly buying up the Consols
through his agents at a fraction of their worth hours before.
Myths, legends, you say?
One hundred years later, the New York Times ran a story
which said that Nathan's grandson had attempted
to secure a court order to suppress a book with this stock market story in it.
The Rothschild family claimed the story was untrue and libellous.
But the court denied the Rothschilds' request
and ordered the family to pay all court costs.
What's even more interesting about this story
is that some authors claim that the day after the Battle of Waterloo,
in a matter of hours, Nathan Rothschild came to dominate not only the bond market,
but the Bank of England as well.
Whether or not the Rothschild family seized control of the Bank of England
- the first privately-owned central bank in a major European nation, and the wealthiest
one thing is certain
by the mid-1800s, the Rothschilds were the richest family in the world, bar none.
They dominated the new government bond markets
and branched into other banks and industrial concerns.
In fact, the rest of the 19th century was known as the "Age of Rothschild".
Despite this overwhelming wealth,
the family has generally cultivated an aura of invisibility.
Although the family controls scores of industrial, commercial, mining
and tourist corporations, only a handful bear the Rothschild name.
By the end of the 19th century, one expert estimated
that the Rothschild family controlled half the wealth of he world.
Whatever the extent of their vast wealth,
it is reasonable to assume that their percentage of the world's wealth
has increased since then.
But since the turn of the century, the Rothschilds have cultivated the notion
that their power has somehow waned, even as their wealth increases.
Just one year after Waterloo and Rothschilds' alleged takeover of the Bank of England,
the American Congress passed a bill
permitting yet another privately-owned central bank.
This bank was called the Second Bank of the United States.
The new Bank's charter was a copy of the previous Bank's.
The U.S. government would own 20% of the shares.
Of course, the Federal share was paid by the Treasury up front, into the Bank's coffers.
Then, through the magic of fractional reserve lending,
it was transformed into loans to private investors
who then bought the remaining 80% of the shares.
Just as before, the primary stockholders remained secret.
But it is known that the largest block of shares - about one-third of the total
was sold to foreigners.
As one observer put it:
"It is certainly no exaggeration to say that the Second Bank of the United States
was rooted as deeply in Britain as it was in America."
So by 1816, some authors claim the Rothschilds
had taken control over the Bank of England
and backed the new privately-owned central bank in America as well.
After 12 years of manipulations of the U.S. economy
on the part of the 2nd bank of the U.S.,
the American people, had had just about enough.
Opponents of the Bank nominated a dignified senator from Tennessee, Andrew Jackson
the hero of the Battle of New Orleans, to run for president.
This is his home, "The Hermitage".
No one gave Jackson a chance initially.
The Bank had long ago learned how the political process could be controlled with money.
To the surprise and dismay of the Money Changers,
Jackson was swept into office in 1828.
Jackson was determined to kill the Bank at the first opportunity,
and wasted no time in trying to do so.
But the Bank's 20 year charter didn't come up for renewal until 1836,
the last year of his second term - if he could survive that long.
During his first term, Jackson contented himself
with rooting out the Bank's many minions from government service.
He fired 2,000 of the 11,000 employees of the federal government.
In 1832, with his re-election approaching, the Bank struck an early blow,
hoping Jackson would not want to stir up controversy.
They asked Congress to pass a renewal bill four years early.
Congress complied, and sent it to the President for signing.
But Jackson weighed in with both feet.
"Old Hickory," never a coward, vetoed the bill.
His veto message is one of the great American documents.
It clearly lays out the responsibility of the American government
towards its citizens - rich and poor.
Later that year, in July 1832, Congress was unable to override Jackson's veto.
Now Jackson had to stand for re-election.
Jackson took his argument directly to the people.
For the first time in U.S. history,
Jackson took his presidential campaign on the road.
Before then, presidential candidates stayed at home and looked presidential.
His campaign slogan was " Jackson and no Bank!"
The National Republican Party ran Senator Henry Clay against Jackson.
Despite the fact that the Bank poured in over $3,000,000 into Clay's campaign,
Jackson was re-elected by a landslide in November of 1832.
Despite his presidential victory, Jackson knew the battle was only beginning:
"The hydra of corruption is only scotched, not dead,"
said the newly-elected President.
Jackson ordered his new Secretary of the Treasury, Louis McLane,
to start removing the government's deposits from the Second Bank
and to start placing them in state banks.
McLane refused to do so.
Jackson fired him and appointed William J. Duane
as the new Secretary of the Treasury.
Duane also refused to comply with the President's requests,
and so Jackson fired him as well,
and then appointed Roger B. Taney to the office.
Taney did withdraw government funds from the bank, starting on October 1st, 1833.
Jackson was jubilant:
"I have it chained. I am ready with screws to draw every tooth and then the stumps"
But the Bank was yet done fighting.
Its head, Nicholas Biddle,
used his influence to get the Senate to reject Taney's nomination.
Then, in a rare show of arrogance, Biddle threatened
to cause a depression if the Bank were not re-chartered.
Next, in an unbelievable fit of honesty for a central banker,
Biddle admitted that the bank was going to make money scarce
to force Congress to restore the Bank:
What a stunning revelation!
Here was the pure truth, revealed with shocking clarity.
Biddle intended to use the money contraction power of the Bank
to cause a massive depression until America gave in.
Unfortunately, this has happened time and time again throughout U.S. history,
and is about to happen in today’s world.
Nicholas Biddle made good on his threat.
The Bank sharply contracted the money supply
by calling in old loans and refusing to extend new ones.
A financial panic ensued, followed by a deep depression.
Predictably, Biddle blamed Jackson for the crash, saying that it was caused
by the withdrawal of federal funds from the Bank.
Unfortunately, his plan worked well.
Wages and prices sagged.
Unemployment soared along with business bankruptcies.
The nation quickly went into an uproar.
Newspaper editors blasted Jackson in editorials.
The Bank threatened to withhold payment
which then could be made directly to key politicians for their support.
Within only months, Congress assembled in what was called the "Panic Session"
Six months after he had withdrawn funds from the bank,
Jackson was officially censured by a resolution
which passed the Senate by a vote of 26 to 20.
It was the first time a President had ever been censured by Congress.
Jackson lashed out at the Bank.
"You are a den of vipers. I intend to rout you out
and by the Eternal God I will rout you out."
America's fate teetered on a knife edge.
If Congress could muster enough votes to override Jackson's veto,
the Bank would be granted another 20-year monopoly or more over America's money
- time enough to consolidate its already great power.
Then, a miracle occurred.
The Governor of Pennsylvania came out supporting President Jackson
and strongly criticized the Bank.
On top of that, Biddle had been caught boasting in public
about the Bank's plan to crash the economy.
Suddenly the tide shifted.
In April of 1834, the House of Representatives voted 134 to 82
against re-chartering the Bank.
This was followed up by an even more lopsided vote
to establish a special committee to investigate whether the Bank had caused the crash.
When the investigating committee arrived at the Bank's door in Philadelphia,
armed with a subpoena to examine the books, Biddle refused to give them up.
Nor would he allow inspection of correspondence with Congressmen
relating to their personal loans and advances.
Biddle refused to testify before the committee back in Washington.
On January 8, 1835, Jackson paid off the final instalment
on the national debt which had been necessitated by allowing the banks
to issue currency for government bonds,
rather than simply issuing Treasury notes without such debt.
He was the only President to ever pay off the debt.
A few weeks later, on January 30, 1835,
an assassin by the name of Richard Lawrence tried to shoot President Jackson.
Both pistols misfired.
Lawrence was later found not guilty by reason of insanity.
After his release, he bragged to friends that powerful people in Europe
had put him up to the task and promised to protect him if he were caught.
The following year, when its charter ran out,
the Second Bank of the United States ceased functioning as the nation's central bank.
Biddle was later arrested and charged with fraud.
He was tried and acquitted, but died shortly thereafter while still tied up in civil suits.
After his second term as President,
Jackson retired to The Hermitage outside Nashville to live out his life.
He is still remembered for his determination to "kill the Bank".
In fact, he killed it so well that it took the Money Changers 77 years to undo the damage.
When asked what his most important accomplishment had been, Jackson replied.
"I killed the Bank."
Unfortunately, even Jackson failed to grasp the entire picture and its root cause.
Although Jackson had killed the central bank,
the most insidious weapon of the Money Changers - fractional reserve banking
remained in use by the numerous state-chartered banks.
This fuelled economic instability in the years before the Civil War.
Still, the central bankers were out
and as a result America thrived as it expanded westward.
During this time, the principal Money Changers
struggled to regain their lost centralized power, but to no avail.
Finally they reverted to the old central banker's formula - finance a war,
to create debt and dependency.
If they couldn't get their central bank any other way,
America could be brought to its knees by plunging it into a civil war
just as they had done in 1812, after the First Bank of the U.S. was not re-chartered.
One month after the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln,
the first shots of the American Civil War were fired
at Fort Sumter, South Carolina on April 12, 1861.
Certainly slavery was a cause for the Civil War, but not the primary cause.
Lincoln knew that the economy of the South depended upon slavery
and so (before the Civil War) he had no intention of eliminating it.
Lincoln had put it this way in his inaugural address only one month earlier:
Even after the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter,
Lincoln continued to insist that the Civil War was not about the issue of slavery:
So what was the Civil War all about?
There were many factors at play.
Northern industrialists had used protective tariffs
to prevent their southern states from buying cheaper European goods.
Europe retaliated by stopping cotton imports from the South.
The Southern states were in a financial bind.
They were forced to pay more for most of the necessities of life
while their income from cotton exports plummeted. The South was angry.
But there were other factors at work.
The Money Changers were still stung by America's withdrawal from their control
25 years earlier.
Since then, America's wildcat economy had made the nation rich
a bad example for the rest the world.
The central bankers now saw an opportunity to split the rich new nation
to divide and conquer by war.
Was this just some sort of wild conspiracy theory?
Well, let's look at what a well placed observer of the scene had to say at the time.
This was Otto von Bismarck, Chancellor of Germany,
the man who united the German states a few years later.
Within months after the first shots here at Fort Sumter,
the central bankers loaned Napoleon III of France
(the nephew of the Waterloo Napoleon)
210 million francs to seize Mexico and station troops
along the southern border of the U.S.,
taking advantage of the War to violate the Monroe Doctrine
and return Mexico to colonial rule.
No matter what the outcome of the Civil War,
a weakened America, heavily indebted to the Money Changers,
would open up Central and South America once again
to European colonization and domination
the very thing America's Monroe Doctrine had forbade in 1823.
At the same time, Great Britain moved 11,000 troops into Canada
and positioned them menacingly along America's northern border.
The British fleet went on war alert should their quick intervention be called for.
Lincoln knew he was in a double bind.
That’s why he agonized over the fate of the Union.
There was a lot more to it than just differences between the North and the South.
That's why his emphasis was always on "Union" and not merely the defeat of the South.
But Lincoln needed money to win.
In 1861, Lincoln and his Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase,
went to New York to apply for the necessary loans.
The Money Changers, anxious to see the Union fail,
offered loans at 24-36% interest.
Lincoln said thanks, but no thanks, and returned to Washington.
He sent for an old friend, Colonel *** Taylor of Chicago,
and put him onto the problem off financing the War.
During one meeting, Lincoln asked Taylor what he discovered.
Taylor put it this way:
When Lincoln asked if the people of the United States would accept the notes,
Taylor said:
So that's exactly what Lincoln did.
In 1862-63, he printed up $432 million of the new bills.
In order to distinguish them from other bank notes in circulation,
he printed them in green ink on the back side.
That's why the notes were called "Greenbacks."
With this new money, Lincoln paid the troops, and bought their supplies.
During the course of the war, nearly 450 million dollars of Greenbacks
were printed at no interest to the federal government.
Lincoln realized who was really pulling the strings
and what was at stake for the American people.
This is how he explained his rationale:
A truly incredible editorial in the London Times
explained the Bank of England's attitude towards Lincoln's Greenbacks.
This scheme was effective
so effective that the next year, 1863, with Federal and Confederate troops
beginning to mass for the decisive battle of the Civil War,
and the Treasury in need of further Congressional authority
to issue more Greenbacks,
Lincoln allowed the bankers to push through the National Banking Act.
These new national banks would operate under a virtual tax-free status
and collectively have the exclusive monopoly power to create
the new form of money - Bank Notes.
Though Greenbacks continued to circulate, their number were not increased.
But most importantly, from this point on, the entire U.S. money supply
would be created out of debt by bankers buying U.S. government bonds,
and issuing them for reserves for Bank Notes.
As historian John Kenneth Galbraith explained:
In 1863, Lincoln got some unexpected help from Czar Alexander II of Russia.
The Czar, like Bismarck in Germany,
knew what the international Money Changers were up to
and had steadfastly refused to let them set up a central bank in Russia.
If America survived and was able to remain out of their clutches,
his position would remain secure.
If the bankers were successful at dividing America
and giving the pieces back to Great Britain and France
(both nations under control of their central banks)
eventually they would threaten Russia again.
So, the Czar gave orders that if either England or France
actively intervened and gave aid to the South,
Russia would consider such action as a declaration of war.
He sent his Pacific fleet to port in San Francisco.
Lincoln was re-elected the next year, 1864.
Had he lived, he would surely have killed
the National Banks' money monopoly extracted from him during the war.
On November 21, 1864, he wrote a friend the following:
Shortly before Lincoln was assassinated,
his former Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase,
bemoaned his role in helping secure the passage
of the National Banking Act only one year earlier:
On April 14, 1865, 41 days after his second inauguration,
and five days after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox,
Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth, at Ford's theatre.
Bismarck Chancellor of Germany lamented the death of Abraham Lincoln:
Bismarck well understood the Money Changers' plan.
Allegations that international bankers were responsible for Lincoln's assassination
surfaced in Canada 70 years later, in 1934.
Gerald G. McGeer, a popular and well-respected Canadian attorney,
revealed this stunning charge in a 5-hour speech
before the House of Commons
blasting Canada's debt-based money system.
Remember, it was 1934, the height of the Great Depression
which was ravaging Canada as well.
McGeer had obtained evidence deleted from the public record,
provided to him by Secret Service agents,
from the trial of John Wilkes Booth, after Booth's death.
McGeer said it showed that Booth was a mercenary
working for the international bankers.
According to an article in the Vancouver Sun of May 2, 1934:
Interestingly, McGeer claimed that Lincoln was assassinated not only
because international bankers wanted to re-establish a central bank in America,
but because they also wanted to base America's currency on gold
gold they controlled
in other words, put America on a "gold standard"
Lincoln had done just the opposite by issuing U.S. Notes – Greenbacks
which were based purely on the good faith and credit of the United States.
The article quoted McGeer as saying:
Not since Lincoln has the U.S. issued debt-free United States Notes.
These red-sealed bills, which were issued in 1963,
were not a new issue from president Kennedy,
but merely the old Greenbacks reissued year after year.
In another act of folly and ignorance, the 1994 Reigle Act
actually authorized the replacement of Lincoln's Greenbacks with debt-based Notes.
In other words, Greenbacks were in circulation in the United States until 1994.
Why was silver bad for the bankers and gold good?
Simple. Because silver was plentiful in the United States,
it was relatively hard to control.
Gold was, and always has been scarce.
Throughout history it has been relatively easy to monopolize gold,
but silver has historically been 15 times more plentiful.
With Lincoln out of the way, the Money Changers' next objective
was to gain complete control over America's money.
This was no easy task.
With the opening of the American West, silver had been discovered in huge quantities.
On top of that, Lincoln's Greenbacks were generally popular.
Despite the European central bankers' deliberate attacks on Greenbacks,
they continued to circulate in the United States, until a few years ago.
According to historian W. Cleon Skousen:
It is clear that the concept of America printing her own debt-free money
sent shock-waves throughout the European private-central-banking elite.
They watched with horror as Americans clamoured for more Greenbacks.
They may have killed Lincoln, but support for his monetary ideas grew.
On April 12, 1866, nearly one year to the day of Lincoln's assassination,
Congress went to work at the bidding of the European central-banking interests.
It passed the Contraction Act, authorizing the Secretary of the Treasury
to begin to retire the Greenbacks in circulation and to contract the money supply.
Authors Theodore R. Thoren and Richard F. Warner
explained the results of the money contraction in their book on the subject,
"The Truth in Money Book":
"The hard times which occurred after the Civil War
could have been avoided if the Greenback legislation had continued
as President Lincoln had intended.
Instead, there were a series of 'money panics' - what we call 'recessions'
which put pressure on Congress to enact legislation
to place the banking system under centralized control.
Eventually the Federal Reserve Act was passed on December 23, 1913."
In other words, the Money Changers wanted two things:
1) the re-institution of a central bank under their exclusive control,
and, 2) an American currency backed by their gold.
Their strategy was two-fold:
first, to cause a series of panics to try to convince the American people
that only centralized control of the money supply could provide economic stability;
and secondly, to remove so much money from the system
that most Americans would be so desperately poor
that they either wouldn't care or would be too weak to oppose the bankers.
In 1866, there was $1,8 billion in circulation in the United States
about $50.46 per capita.
In 1867 alone, $500 million was removed from the U.S. money supply.
Ten years later, in 1876, America's money supply
was reduced to only $600 million.
In other words, two-thirds of America's money had been called in by the bankers.
Only $14.60 per capita remained in circulation.
Ten years later, the money supply had been reduced to only $400 million,
even though the population had boomed.
The result was that only $6.67 per capita remained in circulation,
an 84% decline in buying power in just 20 years.
Today, economists try to sell the idea that recessions and depressions
are a natural part of something they call the "business cycle".
The truth is, our money supply is manipulated now,
just as it was before and after the Civil War.
How did this happen?
How did money become so scarce?
Simple - bank loans were called in and no new ones were given.
In addition, silver coins were melted down.
In 1872, a man named Ernest Seyd was given £100,000
(about $5,000,000 then)
by the Bank of England and sent to America to bribe
the necessary Congressmen to get silver "demonetised".
He was told that if this was not sufficient, to draw an additional £100,000,
"or as much more as was necessary"
The next year, Congress passed the Coinage Act of 1873
and the minting of silver dollars abruptly stopped.
In fact, Rep. Samuel Hooper, who introduced the bill in the House
acknowledged that Mr. Seyd actually drafted the legislation.
But it gets worse than that.
In 1874, Seyd himself admitted who was behind the scheme:
But the contest over control of America's money was not yet over.
Only three years later, in 1876,
with one-third of America's workforce unemployed,
the population was growing restless.
People were clamouring for a return to the Greenback money system of President Lincoln,
or a return to silver money
anything that would make money more plentiful.
That year, Congress created the United States Silver Commission to study the problem.
Their report clearly blamed the monetary contraction on the National Bankers.
The report is interesting because it compares
the deliberate money contraction by the National Bankers after the Civil War,
to the Fall of the Roman Empire.
Despite this report by the Silver Commission, Congress took no action.
The next year, 1877, riots broke out from Pittsburgh to Chicago.
The torches of starving vandals lit up the sky.
The bankers huddled to decide what to do.
They decided to hang on.
Now that they were back in control to a large extent they were not about to give it up.
At the meeting of the American Bankers Association that year,
they urged their membership to do everything in their power
to put down the notion of a return to Greenbacks.
The ABA Secretary, James Buel, authored a letter to the members
which blatantly called on the banks
to subvert not only Congress, but the press:
As political pressure mounted in Congress for change,
the press tried to turn the American people away from the truth.
The New York Tribune put it this way on January 10, 1878:
"The capital of the country organized at last, and we will see
whether Congress will dare to fly in its face."
But it didn't work entirely.
On February 28, 1878, Congress passed the Sherman Law
allowing the minting of a limited number of silver dollars,
ending a 5-year hiatus.
This did not end gold-backing of the currency, however.
Nor did it completely free silver.
Previous to 1873, anyone who brought silver to the U.S. mint
could have it struck into silver dollars free of charge.
No longer.
But at least some money began to flow back into the economy again.
With no further thread to their control, the bankers loosened up on loans
and the post-Civil War depression was finally ended.
Three years later,
the American people elected Republican James Garfield President.
Garfield understood how the economy was being manipulated.
As a Congressman, he had been chairman of the Appropriations Committee,
and was a member of the Banking and Currency Committee.
After his inauguration, he slammed the Money Changers publicly in 1881:
Within a few weeks of making this statement, on July 2 of 1881,
President Garfield was assassinated.
The Money Changers were gathering strength fast.
They began a periodic fleecing of the flock by creating economic booms,
followed by further depressions,
so they could buy up thousands of homes and farms for pennies on the dollar.
In 1891, the Money Changers
prepared to take the American economy down again
and their methods and motives were laid out with shocking clarity in a memo
sent out by the American Bankers Association
an organization in which most bankers were members.
Notice that this memo called for bankers to create a depression on a certain date
three years in the future.
According to the congressional record, here is how it read in part:
These depressions could be controlled because America was on the gold standard.
Since gold is scarce, it's one of the easiest commodities to manipulate.
People wanted silver money legalized again so they could escape
the stranglehold the Money Changers had on gold-backed money.
People wanted silver money reinstated, reversing Mr. Seyd's Act of 1873,
by then called the "Crime of '73".
By 1896, the issue of more silver money had become
the central issue in the Presidential campaign.
William Jennings Bryan, a Senator from Nebraska
ran for President as a Democrat on the "Free Silver" issue.
At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago,
he made an emotional speech,
which won him the nomination entitled "Crown of Thorns and Cross of Gold."
Though Bryan was only 36 years old at the time,
this speech is widely regarded as the most famous oration
ever made before a political convention.
In the dramatic conclusion, Bryan said:
The bankers lavishly supported the Republican candidate, William McKinley,
who favoured the gold standard.
The resulting contest was among the most fiercely contested
Presidential races in American history.
Bryan made over 600 speeches in 27 states.
The McKinley campaign got manufacturers and industrialists
to inform their employees that if Bryan were elected,
all factories and plants would close and there would be no work.
The ruse succeeded. McKinley beat Bryan by a small margin.
Bryan ran for president again in 1900 and in 1908,
but fell short each time.
During the 1912 Democratic Convention,
Bryan was a powerful figure who helped Woodrow Wilson win the nomination.
When Wilson became President he appointed Bryan as Secretary of State.
But Bryan soon became disenchanted with the Wilson administration.
Bryan served only two years in the Wilson administration
before resigning in 1915 over the highly suspicious sinking of the Lusitania,
the event which was used to drive America into World War I.
Although William Jennings Bryan never gained the Presidency,
his efforts delayed the Money Changers for seventeen years
from attaining their next goal
a new, privately-owned central bank for America.
Now it was time for the Money Changers to get back to the business
of a new, private central bank for America.
During the early 1900s, men like J.P. Morgan led the charge.
One final panic would be necessary to focus the nation's attention
on the supposed need for a central bank.
The rationale was that only a central bank could prevent bank failures.
Morgan was clearly the most powerful banker in America
and a suspected agent for the Rothschilds.
Morgan had helped finance John D. Rockefeller standard oil empire
he had also helped finance the monopolies of Edgar Herman in railroads,
of Andrew Carnegie in steel and of others in numerous industries.
But, on top of that, J.P. Morgan's father, Junius Morgan,
had been American financial agent to the British.
After his father's death, J.P. Morgan took on a British partner,
Edward Grenfell, a long-time director of the Bank of England.
In fact, upon Morgan's death, his estate contained only a few million dollars.
The bulk of the securities most people thought he owned,
were in fact owned by others.
In 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt allegedly went after Morgan and his friends
by using the Sherman Anti-Trust Act to try to break up their industrial monopolies.
Actually, Roosevelt did very little to interfere in the growing monopolization
of American industry by the bankers and their surrogates.
For example, Roosevelt supposedly broke up the Standard Oil monopoly.
But it wasn't really broken at all.
It was merely divided into seven corporations,
all still controlled by the Rockefellers.
The public was aware of this thanks to political cartoonists
like Thomas Nast who referred to the bankers as the "Money Trust."
By 1907, the year after Teddy Roosevelt's re-election,
Morgan decided it was time to try for a central bank again.
Using their combined financial muscle,
Morgan and his friends were secretly able to crash the stock market.
Thousands of small banks were vastly overextended.
Some had reserves of less than one percent (1%),
thanks to the fractional reserve principle.
Within days, banks runs were commonplace across the nation.
Now Morgan stepped into the public arena
and offered to prop up the faltering American economy
by supporting failing banks with money he manufactured out of nothing.
It was an outrageous proposal,
far worse than even fractional reserve banking,
but Congress let him do it.
Morgan manufactured $200 million worth
of this completely reserveless, private money
and bought things with it, paid for services with it,
and sent some of it to his branch banks to lend out at interest.
His plan worked.
Soon, the public regained confidence in money in general
and quit hoarding their currency.
But as a result, banking power was further consolidated
into the hands of a few large banks.
By 1908 the panic was over and Morgan was hailed as a hero
by the president of Princeton University,
a man by the name of Woodrow Wilson:
Economics textbooks would later explain
that the creation of the Federal Reserve System
was the direct result of the panic of 1907:
"with its alarming epidemic of bank failures,
the country was fed up once and for all
with the anarchy of unstable private banking."
But Minnesota Congressman Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr.,
the father of the famous aviator, "Lucky Lindy,"
later explained that the Panic of 1907 was really just a scam:
So, since the passage of the National Banking Act of 1863,
the Money Chnagers had been able to coordinate a series of booms and busts.
The purpose was not only to fleece the American public of their property,
but to later to claim that the banking system was basically so unstable
that it had to be consolidated into a central bank once again.
After the crash, Teddy Roosevelt, in response to the Panic of 1907,
signed into law a bill creating something called
the National Monetary Commission.
The Commission was to study the banking problem
and make recommendations to Congress.
Of course, the Commission was packed with Morgan's friends and cronies.
The Chairman was a man named Senator Nelson Aldrich from Rhode Island.
Aldrich represented the Newport, Rhode Island homes
of America's richest banking families.
His daughter married John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and together they had five sons:
John, Nelson (who would become the Vice-President in 1974),
Laurence, Winthrop, and David
(the head of the Council on Foreign Relations
and former Chairman of Chase Manhattan bank).
As soon as the National Monetary Commission was set up,
Senator Aldrich immediately embarked on a two-year tour of Europe,
where he consulted at length with the private central bankers
in England, France and Germany.
The total cost of his trip alone to the taxpayers was $300,000
an astronomical sum in those days.
Shortly after his return, on the evening of November 22, 1910,
some of the wealthiest and most powerful men in America
boarded Senator Aldrich's private rail car
and in the strictest secrecy journeyed to this place,
Jekyll Island, off the coast of Georgia.
With the group came Paul Warburg.
Warburg had been given a $500,000 per year salary
to lobby for the passage of a privately-owned central bank in America
by the investment firm, Kuhn, Loeb & Company.
Warburg's partner in this firm was a man named Jacob Schiff,
the grandson of the man who shared the Green Shield house
with the Rothschild family in Frankfort.
Schiff, as we'll later find out, was in the process of spending $20 million
to finance the overthrow of the Tsar of Russia.
These three European banking families, the Rothschilds, the Warburgs, and the Schiffs
were interconnected by marriage down through the years,
just as were their American banking counterparts,
the Morgans, Rockefellers and Aldrichs.
Secrecy was so tight that all seven primary participants were cautioned
to use only first names to prevent servants from learning their identities.
Years later one participant, Frank Vanderlip,
president of National City Bank of New York
and a representative of the Rockefeller family, confirmed the Jekyll Island trip
in the February 9, 1935 edition of the Saturday Evening Post:
The participants came here to figure out how to solve their major problem
how to bring back a privately-owned central bank
but there were other problems that needed to be addressed as well.
First of all, the market share of the big national banks was shrinking fast.
In the first ten years of the century,
the number of U.S. banks had more than doubled to over 20,000.
By 1913, only 29% of all banks were National Banks
and they held only 57% of all deposits.
As Senator Aldrich later admitted in a magazine article:
Therefore, something had to be done to bring these new banks under their control.
As John D. Rockefeller put it: "Competition is a sin"
Secondly, the nation's economy was so strong
that corporations were starting to finance their expansions out of profits
instead of taking out huge loans from large banks.
In the first 10 years of the new century,
70% of corporate funding came from profits.
In other words, American industry was becoming independent of the Money Changers,
and that trend had to be stopped.
All the participants knew
that these problems could be hammered out into a workable solution,
but perhaps their biggest problem was a public relations problem,
the name of the new central bank.
That discussion took place right here in this room,
one of the many conference rooms in this sprawling hotel
today known as the Jekyll Island Club Hotel.
Aldrich believed that the word "bank" should not even appear in the name.
Warburg wanted to call the legislation
the National Reserve Bill or the Federal Reserve Bill.
The idea here was to give the impression that the purpose of the new central bank
was to stop bank runs, but also to conceal its monopoly character.
However, it was Aldrich, the egotistical politician,
who insisted it be called the Aldrich Bill.
After nine days at Jekyll Island, the group dispersed.
The new central bank would be very similar to the old Bank of the United States.
It would eventually be given a monopoly over U.S. currency
and create that money out of nothing.
How does the Fed "create" money out of nothing?
It is a four-step process. But first a word on bonds.
Bonds are simply promises to pay - or government IOUs.
People buy bonds to get a secure rate of interest.
At the end of the term of the bond, the government repays the bond, plus interest,
and the bond is destroyed.
There are about 3.6 trillion dollars worth of these bonds at present.
Now here is the Fed moneymaking process:
Step 1. The Fed Open Market Committee approves
the purchase of U.S. Bonds on the open market.
Step 2. The bonds are purchased by the Fed Bank
from whoever is offering them for sale on the open market.
Step 3. The Fed pays for the bonds with electronic credits to the seller's bank,
which in turn credits the seller's bank account.
The trick is that these credits are based on nothing. The Fed just creates them.
Step 4. The banks use these deposits as reserves.
They can loan out over ten times the amount of their reserves
to new borrowers, all at interest.
In this way, a Fed purchase of, say a million dollars worth of bonds,
gets turned into over 10 million dollars in bank accounts.
The Fed, in effect, creates 10% of this totally new money
and the banks create the other 90%.
To reduce the amount of money in the economy, the process is just reversed:
the Fed sells bonds to the public, and money flows out of the purchaser's local bank.
Loans must be reduced by ten times the amount of the sale.
So a Fed sale of a million dollars in bonds,
results in 10 million dollars less money in the economy.
So how does this benefit the bankers whose representatives huddled at Jekyll Island?
1st - it totally misdirected banking reform efforts from proper solutions.
2nd - it prevented a proper, debt-free system of government finance
like Lincoln's Greenbacks - from making a comeback.
The bond-based system of government finance,
forced on Lincoln after he created Greenbacks,
was now cast in stone.
3rd - it delegated to the bankers the right to create 90% of our money supply
based on only fractional reserves
which they could then loan out at interest.
4th - it centralized overall control of our nation's money supply
in the hands of a few men.
5th - it established a central bank with a high degree of independence
from effective political control.
Soon after its creation, the Fed's Great Contraction in the early 1930s
would cause the Great Depression.
This independence has been enhanced since then, through additional laws.
In order to fool the public into thinking the government retained control,
the plan called for the Fed to be run by a Board of Governors
appointed by the President and approved by the Senate.
But all the bankers had to do was to be sure that their men
got appointed to the Board of Governors.
That wasn't hard. Bankers have money, and money buys influence over politicians.
Once the participants left Jekyll Island, the public relations blitz was on.
The big New York banks put together an "educational" fund
of five million dollars to finance professors
at respected universities to endorse the new bank.
Woodrow Wilson at Princeton was one of the first to jump on the bandwagon.
But the bankers' subterfuge didn't work.
The Aldrich Bill was quickly identified as the bankers bill
a bill to benefit only what become known as the "Money Trust."
As Congressman Lindbergh put it during the Congressional debate:
Seeing they didn't have the votes to win in Congress,
the Republican leadership never brought the Aldrich Bill to a vote.
The bankers quietly decided to move to track two, the Democratic alternative.
They began financing Woodrow Wilson as the Democratic nominee.
As respected historian James Perloff put it,
Wall Street financier Bernard Baruch was put in charge of Wilson's education:
So now, the stage was set. The Money Changers were poised to install
their privately-owned central bank once again.
The damage president Andrew Jackson had done 67 years earlier
had been only partly repaired
with the passage of the national bank act during the civil war.
Since then, the battle had raged on across the decades.
The "Jacksonians" became the "Greebackers"
who became the hard-core supporters of William Jennings Bryan.
With Bryan leading the charge, these opponents of the Money Changers,
ignorant of Baruch's tutelage, now threw themselves behind democrat Widrow Wilson.
They and Bryan would soon be betrayed.
During the Presidential campaign,
the Democrats were careful to pretend to oppose the Aldrich Bill.
As Rep. Louis McFadden, himself a Democrat as well as chairman
of the House Banking and Currency Committee, explained it 20 years after the fact:
Once Wilson was elected, Morgan, Warburg,
Baruch and company advanced a "new" plan,
which Warburg named the Federal Reserve System.
The Democratic leadership hailed the new bill, called the Glass-Owen Bill,
as something radically different from the Aldrich Bill.
But in fact, the bill was virtually identical in every important detail.
In fact, so vehement were the Democratic denials of similarity
that Paul Warburg - the father of both bills –
had to step in to reassure his paid friends in Congress
that the two bills were virtually identical:
But that admission was for private consumption only.
Publicly, the Money Trust trotted out Senator Aldrich and Frank Vanderlip,
the president of Rockefeller's National City Bank of New York
and one of the Jekyll Island seven,
to oppose the new Federal Reserve System.
Years later, however, Vanderlip admitted in the Saturday Evening Post
that the two measures were virtually identical:
As Congress neared a vote, they called Ohio attorney Alfred Crozier to testify.
Crozier noted the similarities between the Aldrich Bill and the Glass-Owen Bill:
During the debate on the measure,
Senators complained that the big banks were using their financial muscle
to influence the outcome.
"There are bankers in this country who are enemies of the public welfare,"
sayd one Senator. What an understatement!
Despite the charges of deceit and corruption,
the bill was finally rammed through the Senate on December 22, 1913,
after must Senators had left town for the Holidays,
after having been assured by the leadership that nothing would be done
until long after the Christmas recess.
On the day the bill was passed, Congressman Lindbergh
prophetically warned his countrymen that:
On top of all this, only weeks earlier,
Congress had finally passed a bill legalizing income tax.
Why was the income tax law important?
Because bankers finally had in place a system
which would run up a virtually unlimited federal debt.
How would the interest on this debt be repaid, never mind the principal?
Remember, a privately-owned central bank creates the principal out of nothing.
The federal government was small then.
Up to then, it had subsisted merely on tariffs and excise taxes.
Just as with the Bank of England,
the interest payments had to be guaranteed by direct taxation of the people.
The Money Changers knew that if they had to rely
on contributions from the states,
eventually the individual state legislatures would revolt
and either refuse to pay the interest on their own money,
or at least bring political pressure to bear to keep the debt small.
It is interesting to note that in 1895 the Supreme Court
had found a similar income tax law to be unconstitutional.
The Supreme Court even found a corporate income tax law unconstitutional in 1909.
As a result, Senator Aldrich hustled a bill
for a constitutional amendment allowing income tax through the Congress.
The proposed 16th Amendment to the Constitution
was then sent to the state legislatures for approval,
but some critics claim that the 16th Amendment was never ratified
by the necessary 3/4s of the states.
In other words, the 16th Amendment may not be legal.
But the Money Changers were in no mood to debate the fine points.
By October of 1913, senator Aldrich had hustled the income tax bill through Congress.
Without the power to tax the people directly and bypass the states,
the Federal Reserve Bill would be far less useful to those
who wanted to drive America deeply into their debt.
A year after the passage of the Federal Reserve Bill,
Congressman Lindbergh explained how the Fed created
what we have come to call the "Business Cycle"
and how they use it to their advantage:
Congressman Lindbergh was correct on all points.
What he didn't realize was that most European nations
had already fallen prey to the central bankers decades or centuries earlier.
But he also mentions the interesting fact that only one year later,
the Fed had cornered the market in gold; this is how he put it:
"Already the Federal Reserve banks have cornered the gold and gold certificates..."
But Congressman Lindbergh was not the only critic of the Fed.
Congressman Louis McFadden, the Chairman
of the House Banking and Currency committee from 1920 to 1931
remarked that the Federal Reserve Act brought about:
Notice how McFadden saw the international character
of the stockholders of the Federal Reserve.
Another chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee in the 1960s,
Wright Patman from Texas, put it this way:
Even the inventor of the electric light, Thomas Edison,
joined the fray in criticizing the system of the Federal Reserve:
Three years after the passage of the Federal Reserve Act,
even President Wilson began to have second thoughts
about what had been unleashed during his first term in office.
Before his death in 1924, President Wilson realized
the full extent of the damage he had done to America, when he confessed:
"I have unwittingly ruined my government."
So finally, the Money Changers,
those who profit by manipulating the amount of money in circulation,
had their privately owned central bank installed again in America.
The major newspapers (which they also owned)
hailed passage of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, telling the public that
"now depressions could be scientifically prevented."
The fact of the matter was that now depressions could be scientifically created.
Power was now centralized to a tremendous extent.
Now it was time for a war - a really big war - in fact, the first World War.
Of course, to the central banker,
the political issues of war don't matter nearly as much as the profit potential,
and nothing creates debts like warfare.
England was the best example up to that time.
During the 119-year period between the founding of the Bank of England
and Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo,
England had been at war for 56 years.
And much of the remaining time, she'd been preparing for war.
In World War I, the German Rothschilds loaned money to the Germans,
the British Rothschilds loaned money to the British,
and the French Rothschilds loaned money to the French.
In America, J.P. Morgan was the sales agent for war materials
to both the British and the French.
In fact, six months into the war, Morgan became the largest consumer on earth,
spending $10 million a day.
His offices at 23 Wall Street
were mobbed by brokers and salesmen trying to cut a deal.
In fact, it got so bad that the bank had to post guards at every door
and at the partners' homes as well.
Many of the New York bankers made out as well from the war.
President Wilson appointed Bernard Baruch to head the War Industries Board.
According to historian Jarnes Perloff, both Baruch and the Rockefellers
profited by some $200 million during the war.
But profits were not the only motive. There was also revenge.
The Money Changers never forgave the Tsars
for their support of Lincoln during the Civil War.
Also, Russia was the last major European nation
to refuse to give in to the privately owned central bank scheme.
Three years after World War I broke out,
the Russian Revolution toppled the Tsar and installed the scourge of communism.
Jacob Schiff of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. bragged on his deathbed
that he had spent $20 million towards the defeat of the Tsar.
Money was funnelled from England to support the revolution as well.
Why would some of the richest men in the world financially back communism,
the system that was openly vowing to destroy the so-called capitalism
that made them wealthy?
Researcher Gary Allen explained it was this way:
As W. Cleon Skousen put it in his 1970 book "The Naked Capitalist":
But what if these revolutionaries get out of control
and try to seize power from the super rich?
After all, it was Mao Tse Tung who in 1938 stated his position concerning power:
"Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."
The Wall Street/London axis elected to take the risk.
The master-planners attempted to control revolutionary communist groups
by feeding them vast quantities of money when they obeyed,
and contracting their money supply, or even financing their opposition,
if they got out of control.
Lenin began to understand that
although he was the absolute dictator of the new Soviet Union,
he was not pulling the financial strings;
someone else was silently in control:
Who was behind it?
Rep. Louis T. McFadden, the Chairman of the House Banking
and Currency Committee throughout the 1920s
and into the Great Depression years of the 1930s, explained it this way:
In other words, the Fed and the Bank of England,
at the behest of the international bankers who controlled them,
were creating a monster, one which would fuel seven decades
of unprecedented Communist revolution, warfare, and most importantly - debt.
In case you think there is some chance that the Money Changers
got communism going and then lost control,
in 1992, The Washington Times reported that Russian President Boris Jeltsin
was upset that most of the incoming foreign aid was being siphoned off
"straight back into the coffers of Western banks in debt service."
No one in his right mind, would claim that a war as large as World War I
had a single cause. Wars are complex things with many causative factors.
But on the other hand it would also be equally foolish
to ignore as a prime cause of WWI those who would profit the most from the war.
The role of the Money Changers is no wild conspiracy theory.
They had a motive - a short-range, self-serving motive
as well as a long-range, political motive of advancing totalitarian government,
with the Money Changers maintaining the financial clout
to control whatever politicians might emerge as the leaders.
Next, we'll see what the Money Changers' ultimate political goal is for the world.
Shortly after WWI, the overall political agenda
of the Money Changers began to be clear.
Now that they controlled national economies individually,
the next step was the ultimate form of consolidation:
world government.
The new world government proposal was given top priority
at the Paris peace conference after WWI.
It was called the League of Nations.
But much to the surprise of Paul Warburg and Bernard Baruch,
who attended the peace conference with president Wilson,
the world was not yet ready to dissolve national boundaries.
Nationalism still beats strong in the human breast.
For example, Lord Curzon, the British foreign secretary
called the League of Nations a good joke.
Even though it was the stated policy of the British government to support it.
To the humiliation of president Wilson,
the U.S. Congress wouldn't ratify the League either.
Despite the fact that it had been ratified by many other nations,
without money flowing from the U.S. treasury, the League died.
After WWI, the American public had grown tired
of the internationalist policies of democrat Woodrow Wilson.
In the presidential election of 1920,
republican Warren Harding won a landslide victory with over 60% of the votes.
Harding was an ardent follower of both bolshevism and the League of Nations.
His election, which opened a 12 year run
of republican presidents in the White House,
lead to an unprecedented era of prosperity known as the "roaring twenties".
Despite the fact that war had brought America a debt
ten times larger than its civil war debt,
still the American economy surged.
Gold had poured into the country during the war
and it continued to do so afterwards.
In the early 1920's, the governor of this bank,
the Federal Reserve Bank of New York,
a man named Benjamin Strong,
met frequently with the secretive and eccentric governor of the Bank of England,
Montague Norman.
Norman was determined to replace the gold
England had lost to the U.S. during WWI
and returne the Bank of England to its former position of dominance in world finance.
On top of that, rich with gold,
the American economy might get out of control again,
just like it had done after the civil war.
During the next 8 years, under the president seize of Harding and Coolidge,
the huge federal debt built up during WWI
was cut by 38%, down to $16 billion.
The greatest percentage drop in U.S. history.
During the election of 1920, Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge
ran against James ***, the governor of Ohio,
and the little known Franklin D. Roosevelt,
who had previously risen to no higher post
than president Wilson's assistant secretary of the navy.
After his inauguration, Harding moved quickly to formally kill the League of Nations.
Then he quickly moved to reduce domestic taxes
while raising tariffs to record heights.
Now, this was a revenue policy of which most of the founding fathers
would certainly have approved.
His second year in office, Harding took ill on a train trip in the West
and suddenly died.
Although no autopsy was performed
the cause was said to be either pneumonia or food poisoning.
When Coolidge took over, he continued Harding's domestic economic policy
of high tariffs on imports while cutting income taxes.
As a result, the economy grew at such a rate that net revenue still increased.
Now, that had to be stopped.
So, just as they had done so frequently before,
the Money Changers decided it was time to crash the American economy.
The Fed began flooding the country with money.
They increased the money supply by 62% during these years.
Money was plentiful.
This is why it was known as the "roaring twenties".
Before his death in 1919, former president Teddy Roosevelt
warned the American people what was going on.
As reported in the March 27th, 1922 edition of the NY Times, Roosevelt said:
Just one day before, in the NY Times, the major of NY, John Highland
quoted Roosevelt and blasted those he saw as taking control of America,
its political machinery and its press:
Why didn't people listen to such strong warnings and demand
that Congress reverse its 1913 passage of the Federal Reserve Act?
Because remember: it was the 1920s:
a steady increase in bank loans contributed to a rising market.
In other words, just as it is today, in times of prosperity,
no one wants to worry about economic issues.
But there was a dark side to all this prosperity.
Businesses expanded and became strong out on credit.
Speculation in the booming stock market became rampant.
Although everything looked rosy, it was a castle made of sand.
When all was in readiness, in April of 1929, Paul Warburg,
the father of the Fed, sent out a secret advisory
warning his friends that a collapse and nationwide depression was certain.
In August of 1929, the Fed began to tighten money.
It is not a coincidence that the biographies
of all the Wall Street giants of that era,
John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Bernard Beruch etc.
all marvelled that they got out of the stock market just before the crash
and put all their assets in cash or gold.
On October 24th, 1929, the big NY bankers
called in their 24-hour broker call loans.
This meant that both stockbrokers and customers
had to dump their stocks on the market to cover their loans,
no matter what price they had to sell them for.
As a result, the market tumbled and that day was known as "black Thursday".
According to John Kenneth Galbraith, writing in "The great crash 1929",
at the height of the selling frenzy, Bernard Beruch brought Winston Churchill
into the visitors gallery of the NY stock exchange here,
to witness the panic and impress him with his power
over the wild events down on the floor.
Congressman Louis McFadden,
chairman of the House Committee on banking and currency from 1920 to 1931,
knew whom to blame.
He accused the Fed and the international bankers of orchestrating the crash.
But McFadden went even farther:
he openly accused them of causing the crash
in order to steal America's gold.
In February 1931, in the midst of the depression, he put it his way:
Curtis Dall, a broker for Lehman brothers,
was on the floor of the NY stock exchange the day of the crash.
In his 1970 book, "FDR: my exploited father in law",
he explained that the crash was triggered
by the planned sudden shortage of call money in the NY money market.
Within a few weeks, $3 billion of wealth simply seemed to vanish.
Within a year, $40 billion had been lost.
But did it really disappear? Or was it simply consolidated in fewer hands?
And what did the Fed do?
Instead of moving to help the economy out,
by quickly lowering interest rates to stimulate the economy,
the Fed continued to broodily contract the money supply further,
deepening the depression.
Between 1929 and 1933,
the Fed reduced the money supply by an additional 33%.
Although most Americans have never heard
that the Fed was the cause of the depression,
this is well known among top economists.
Milton Friedman, the Nobel price-winning economist, now at Stanford University,
said the same thing in a national public radio interview in January of 1996:
But the money lost by most Americans during the depression,
didn't just vanish.
It was just re-distributed into the hands of those
who had gotten out just before the crash and had purchased gold,
which is always a safe place to put your money just before a depression.
But America's money also went overseas.
Incredibly, as president Hoover was heroically trying to rescue banks
and prop up businesses,
with millions of Americans starving as the great depression deepened,
millions of dollars were being spent re-building Germany
from damage sustained during WWI.
Eight years before Hitler would invade Poland,
representative Louis McFadden,
chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee,
warned Congress that Americans were paying for Hitler's rise to power.
Franklin D. Roosevelt was swept into office during the 1932 presidential election.
Once Roosevelt was in office, however,
sweeping emergency banking measures were immediately announced,
which did nothing but increase the Fed's power over the money supply.
Then, and only then, did the Fed finally began
to loosen the purse strings and feed new money
out to the starving American people.
At first, Roosevelt railed against the Money Changers
as being the cause of the depression.
Believe it or not, this is what he said on March 4th, 1933 in his inaugural address:
But two days later, Roosevelt declared a bank holiday and closed all banks.
Later that year, Roosevelt outlawed private ownership of all gold bullion
and all gold coins with the exception of rare coins.
Most of the gold in the hands of the average American
was in the form of gold coins.
The new decree was, in effect, a confiscation.
Those who didn't comply risked as much as ten years in prison
and a $10,000 fine, the equivalent of a $100,000 today.
Out in small town America, some people didn't trust Roosevelt's order.
Many were torn between keeping their hard earned wealth
or obeying the government.
Those who did turn in their gold, were paid the official price for it:
$20.66 per ounce.
So unpopular was the confiscation order,
that no one anywhere in government would take credit for authoring it.
No congressman claimed it.
At the signing ceremony, president Roosevelt made it clear to all present
that he was not the author of it and publicly stated
that he had not ever read it.
Even a secretary of the Treasury said he had never read it either,
saying it was "what the experts wanted".
Roosevelt convinced the public to give up their gold
by saying that pulling the nation's resources was necessary
to get America out of the depression.
With great fanfare, he ordered a new bullion depository,
built to hold the mountain of gold the U.S. government
was illegally confiscating.
By 1936, the U.S. bullion depository of Fort Knox was completed
and in January 1937 the gold began to flow into it.
The rip-off of the ages was about to proceed.
In 1935, once the gold had all been turned in,
the official price of gold was suddenly raised to $35 per ounce.
But the catch was, only foreigners could sell their gold at the new higher price.
The Money Changers, who had headed Warburg's note
and gotten out of the stock market just before the crash
and bought gold at $20.66 per ounce and then shipped it to London,
could now bring it back and sell it back to the government
nearly doubling their money
while the average American starved.
The Fort Knox bullion depository
sits here in the middle of the Fort Knox military reservation,
30 miles southwest of Louisville, Kentucky.
This is as close as we were permitted to get to the depository
despite years of letters from members of Congress to allow our film crew inside.
The 4-acre grounds immediately surrounding the building
are guarded by an electrified steel fence,
an open moat and four machine gun-armed guard pillboxes at the structure's corners.
When the gold began arriving, on January 13th 1937,
there was unprecedented security.
Thousands of official guests watched the arrival
of a nine-car train from Philadelphia,
guarded by armed soldiers, postal inspectors, secret servicemen
and guards from the U.S. mint.
It was all great theatre:
America's gold supply from across the land had been pulled,
supposedly for the public benefit,
and then safely tucked into Fort Knox.
But all that security would soon be breached by the government itself.
Now the stage was set for a really big war,
one which would pile up death far beyond that of WWI.
For example, in 1944 alone, the U.S. national income was only $183 billion,
yet $103 billion was spent on the war.
This was 30 times the spending rate during WWI.
In fact, the American taxpayer picked up 55% of the total allied cost of the war.
But, equally important, virtually every nation involved in WW-II
greatly multiplied their debt.
In the U.S. for example, federal debt went from $43 billion in 1940
up to $257 billion in 1950, an increase of 598%.
Between 1940 and 1950, Japanese debt swelled 1348%.
French debt grew 583% and Canadian debt swelled 417%.
After the war, the world was now divided into two economic camps.
Communist-command economies on one hand
vs monopoly capitalists on the other,
set to fight it out in one perpetual and highly profitable arms raise.
It was finally time for the central bankers to embark in earnest
on their three-step plan to centralize the economic systems
of the entire world
and finally bring about their global government or New World Order.
The phases of this plan were:
Step 1: central bank domination of national economies worldwide.
Step 2: centralize regional economies through organizations
such as the European Monetary Union and regional trade unions such as NAFTA.
Step 3: centralize the world economy through a World Central Bank,
a world money and ending national independence through abolition
of all tariffs by treaties like GATT.
Step 1 was completed long ago.
Steps 2 and 3 are far advanced, nearing completion.
What about gold?
Amongst central banks, the largest holder of gold is now the IMF.
It and central banks now control 2/3 of the world gold supply,
giving them the ability to manipulate the gold market.
Remember the Money Changers' golden rule:
"He who has the gold makes the rules".
But before we get into solutions to our problem,
let's take a look to what happened to all that gold in Fort Knox.
Because if we don't understand that the gold has been stolen,
we will allow ourselves to be stampeded into the wrong solution:
a gold-backed currency.
Most Americans still believe that the gold is still here, at Fort Knox.
At the end of WW-II, Fort Knox contained over 700 million ounces of gold,
an incredible 70% of all the gold in the world.
How much remains? No one knows.
Despite the fact that federal law requires
an annual physical audit of Fort Knox gold,
the treasury has consistently refused to conduct one.
The truth is that a reliable audit of whatever remains here,
has not been conducted since president Eisenhower ordered one in 1953.
Where did America's gold in Fort Knox go?
Over the years, it was sold off to European Money Changers
at the $35 per ounce price.
Remember: this was during the time when it was illegal for Americans
to buy any of their own gold from Fort Knox.
In fact, there was a very infamous case
where the Firestone family set up a string of dummy corporations
to purchase Fort Knox's gold and keep it in Switzerland,
never hitting U.S. shores.
They were eventually caught, however, and successfully prosecuted.
Finally, by 1971, all the pure gold had been secretly removed from Fort Knox,
drained back to London.
Once the gold was gone from Fort Knox,
president Nixon closed the gold window
by repealing Roosevelt's gold reserve act of 1934,
finally making it legal once again for Americans to buy gold.
Naturally, gold prices immediately began to soar:
nine years later, gold sold for $880 per ounce,
25 times what the gold in Fort Knox was sold for.
One would think that eventually, someone in the government
would get wind of what was happening and blow the whistle.
The largest fortune in the history of the world, stolen.
Shades of the old James Bond film "Goldfinger".
Well, as a matter of fact, Ian Flaming, the author of the James Bond series,
was head of the British counter-intelligence service MI5.
Some believed in the intelligence community
that he wrote much of his fiction as a warning as many authors of fiction do.
If the removal of all the good delivery gold from Fort Knox
can be viewed as a deliberate raid on the U.S. treasury,
then such an operation might well have been years in the making.
Namely, 40 years.
Certainly enough time for Fleming to get wind of it and try to prevent it.
So just how did the story of the Fort Knox gold robbery get out?
It all started with an article in a NY periodical in 1974.
The article charts that the Rockefeller family was manipulating the Fed
to sell off Fort Knox gold at bargain-basement prices
to anonymous European speculators.
Three days later, the anonymous source of the story,
Louise Auchincloss Boyer, mysteriously fell to her death
from the window of her 10th floor apartment in NY.
How had Mrs. Boyer known
of the Rockefeller connection to the Fort Knox gold heist?
She was the long-time secretary of Nelson Rockefeller.
For the next 14 years, this man Ed Durell, a wealthy Ohio industrialist,
devoted himself to a quest for the truth concerning the Fort Knox gold.
He wrote thousands of letters to over 1000 government and banking officials
trying to find out how much gold was really left
and where the rest of it had gone.
Edith Roosevelt, the granddaughter of president Teddy Roosevelt,
questioned the actions of the government in a March 1975 edition
of the New Hampshire's Sunday news:
Unfortunately, Ed Durell never did accomplish his primary goal:
a full audit of the gold reserves in Fort Knox…
It's incredible that the world's greater treasure has had little accounting or auditing.
This gold belonged to the American people,
not to the Federal Reserve and their foreign owners.
One thing is certain: the government could blow all of this speculation away
in a few days with a well publicized audit
under the searing lights of media cameras.
It has chosen not to do so.
One must conclude that they are afraid of the truth
such an audit would reveal.
What is the government so afraid of?
Here is the answer: when president Ronal Reagan took office in 1981,
his conservative friends urged him to study the feasibility
of returning to a gold standard
as the only way to curb government's spending.
It sounded like a reasonable alternative,
so president Reagan appointed a group of men called the "Gold Commission",
to study the situation and report back to Congress.
What Reagan's Gold Commission reported back to Congress in 1982,
was the following shocking revelation concerning gold:
the U.S. treasury owned no gold at all.
All the gold that was left in Fort Knox,
was now owned by the Federal Reserve,
a group of private bankers, as collateral against the national debt.
The truth of the matter is that never before
had so much money been stolen from the hands of the general public
and put into the hands of a small group of private investors:
the Money Changers.
I'm standing in front of the headquarters of the International Monetary Fund,
located in Washington D.C.
Across the street, right over there, is the headquarters of the World Bank.
What are these organizations? Who controls them?
And, most importantly, are they about to create
a huge worldwide depression?
Let us step back in time for a moment to the aftermath of WWI.
People were tired of war.
So, under the guys of peacemaking,
the international banker devised the plan
to consolidate power even further.
Claiming only an international government would stand the tide of world wars,
the Money Changers pushed forward a proposal for world government,
As Pope Pius XI put it: