Congress set up the Silver Commission to study the problem and, in their report, outlined this history: "The disaster of the Dark Ages was caused by decreasing money and falling prices... Without money, civilization could not have had a beginning, and with a diminishing supply, it must languish and unless relieved, finally perish. At the Christian era, the metallic money of the Roman Empire amounted to $1,800 million. By the end of the fifteenth century, it had shrunk to less than $200 million. History records no other such disastrous transition as that from the Roman Empire to the Dark Ages..." I have no idea where they got their figures, but it’s an interesting story, nonetheless.
United States Silver Commission was aware of the problems being caused by the constrictive money supply, but Congress took no action. In 1877, riots broke out all over the country. The bank's response was to campaign against the idea that greenbacks should be reissued. The American Bankers Association wrote: "It is advisable to do all in your power to sustain such prominent daily and weekly newspapers, especially the Agricultural and Religious Press, as will oppose the greenback issue of paper money and that you will also withhold patronage from all applicants who are not willing to oppose the government issue of money. To repeal the Act creating bank notes, or to restore to circulation the government issue of money will be to provide the people with money and will therefore seriously affect our individual profits as bankers and lenders. See your congressman at once and engage him to support our interest that we may control legislation." James Buel, Secretary, American Bankers Association. Once again, we find that bankers are more than willing to see our nation and its people suffer to make a profit.
With bankers, 'less is more' and every need is an opportunity to exploit. James Garfield became President in 1881 with a firm grasp of where the problem lay. "Whoever controls the money of a nation, controls that nation." and "Whosoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce... And when you realize that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate." James Garfield 1881. Within weeks of his statement, President Garfield was assassinated (some say, by his doctors.)
"Fleecing of the flock" is the term bankers use for the process of booms and depressions which make it possible for them to repossess property at a fraction of its worth. By providing money at low interest rates, people naturally take advantage by buying homes, farms, and businesses. Then by contracting the money supply, the bankers are able to foreclose on these properties when the owners are suddenly unable to make their payments. Recall Thomas Jefferson’s warning about inflation and deflation. In 1891 the American Bankers Association was planning a major fleecing – three years in the future! "On Sept 1st, 1894, we will not renew our loans under any consideration. On Sept 1st, we will demand our money. We will foreclose and become mortgagees in possession. We can take two-thirds of the farms west of the Mississippi and thousands of them east of the Mississippi as well, at our own price... Then the farmers will become tenants as in England..." 1891 Letter from the American Bankers Association read into the Congressional Record of April 29, 1913. The letter speaks for itself, but take a moment to reread and reflect upon it. Think about all the families affected by such as dastardly plan. It’s obvious to me that the moral makeup of these people is substantially different from us normals. If you don’t think so, you may want to consider a career in banking.
Since gold was scarce and silver and greenbacks were out of the equation, the bankers, acting in unison, effectively squeezed the nation’s money supply. In 1896, Democrat William Jennings Bryan ran for president with a “Free Silver” platform. In his acceptance speech, Bryan said, “We will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” The bankers and industrialists supported the gold standard and the Republican nominee, William McKinley. Many manufacturers told their employees that if Bryan were elected, all factories would close and there would be no work for anyone. This was a very serious threat to the workers in depressed times. McKinley won.
The Panic of 1907 – The Trap is Set.
Early in 1907, banker Jacob Schiff of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. warned in a speech to the New York Chamber of Commerce, "Unless we have a central bank with adequate control of credit resources, this country is going to undergo the most severe and far reaching money panic in its history." Then, as if by magic, the Panic of 1907!
The Panic of 1907, also known as the “Bankers' Panic,” caused stocks to fall 50% from the previous year. The panic eventually spread throughout the nation and many banks and businesses fell into bankruptcy. Primary causes include a retraction of market liquidity by a number of New York City banks (surprise!) and a loss of confidence among depositors. Runs on banks occur when people feel they won’t be able to retrieve their funds when they want and in 1907, there was no F.D.I.C. to insure deposits or central bank to inject liquidity into the system.
The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis attributed the Panic of 1907 to financial manipulation from the banking establishment. "If Knickerbocker Trust would falter, then Congress and the public would lose faith in all trust companies and banks would stand to gain, the bankers reasoned." Major banks, including J.P. Morgan (Rothschild) and Chase (Rockefeller), launched an all-out attack on the Knickerbocker Trust. They sold off assets in their competitor and planted stories about bad loans in their newspapers. The run on Knickerbocker Trust turned into a panic and, just like today, the Federal Government came to the rescue of the privately owned "National Banks."
During the depositors 'run' on the Knickerbocker Trust, J.P. Morgan and James Stillman of First National City Bank acted as a "central bank," providing liquidity to stop the bank run. President Theodore Roosevelt provided Morgan with $25 million in government funds to control the panic. Morgan, acting as a one-man central bank, decided which firms failed and which firms survived." His, of course, survived.
Although Morgan was briefly seen as a hero, widespread fears of his enormous wealth and influence soon eroded this view. The trust companies that were growing rivals to traditional banks (such as Morgan’s) were badly damaged. Some analysts believed that the panic was engineered to damage confidence in trust companies so that banks would benefit. The chair of the House Committee on Banking and Currency, Arsène Pujo, convened a special committee to investigate what had come to be called, the "Money Trust," the virtual monopoly of Morgan and New York's other powerful bankers. The committee issued a scathing report on the banking trade, and found that the officers of J.P. Morgan & Co. also sat on the boards of directors of 112 corporations with a market capitalization of $22.5 billion (the total capitalization of the New York Stock Exchange was then estimated at $26.5 billion.) The final report of the committee stated: “Your committee is satisfied from the proofs submitted, even in the absence of data from the banks, that there is an established and well defined identity and community of interest between a few leaders of finance...which has resulted in great and rapidly growing concentration of the control of money and credit in the hands of these few men... ...and that a small group of men and their partners and associates have now further strengthened their hold upon the resources of these institutions by acquiring large stock holdings therein, by representation on their boards and through valuable patronage, we begin to realize something of the extent to which this practical and effective domination and control over our greatest financial, railroad and industrial corporations has developed, largely within the past five years, and that it is fraught with peril to the welfare of the country.” The Pujo Committee acknowledged that America, contrary to the tenets of her Free Enterprise Credo, had come under the control of a few powerful – interconnected – bankers and industrialists.
President Teddy Roosevelt added the newspapers to this list when he said, “These international bankers and Rockefeller-Standard Oil interests control the majority of newspapers and the columns of these papers to club into submission or drive out of public office officials who refuse to do the bidding of the powerful corrupt cliques which compose the invisible government.”
“The warning of Theodore Roosevelt has much timeliness today, for the real menace of our republic is this invisible government which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy length over City, State, and nation... It seizes in its long and powerful tentacles our executive officers, our legislative bodies, our schools, our courts, our newspapers, and every agency created for the public protection... To depart from mere generalizations, let me say that at the head of this octopus are the Rockefeller-Standard Oil interest and a small group of powerful banking houses generally referred to as the international bankers. The little coterie of powerful international bankers virtually run the United States government for their own selfish purposes. They practically control both parties, write political platforms, make cats paws of party leaders, use the leading men of private organizations, and resort to every device to place in nomination for high public office only such candidates as will be amenable to the dictates of corrupt big business... These international bankers and Rockefeller-Standard Oil interests control the majority of newspapers and magazines in this country." - John Hylan, Mayor of New York, March 27, 1927.
"Three hundred men, all of whom know one another, direct the economic destiny of Europe and choose their successors from among themselves." Walter Rathenau, who in 1909 controlled German General Electric, “Fifty men have run America and that's a high figure." Joseph Kennedy, July 26, 1936 - New York Times.
It’s interesting to note that”... J.P. Morgan, had only $19 million in securities in his estate when he died in 1913, and securities handled by Morgan were actually owned by his employer, Rothschild." New York Times, April 1, 1915. Morgan, it seems, far from being the dominant force in American industry, was acting merely as an “employee” of the Rothschilds. Just how powerful are these Rothschilds? It has been estimated that, by the start of the 20th century, they controlled about half of the world’s wealth. Of course, nobody will ever really know.
President Theodore Roosevelt had signed into law a bill creating the National Monetary Commission in 1908, after the Panic of 1907 had resulted in a public outcry that the nation’s monetary system be stabilized. One purpose of The National Monetary Commission was to propose legislation to break the grip of the “Money Trust” and Senator Nelson Aldrich was chosen as chairman of that committee. Curiously, Nelson Aldrich was a very close associate of J. P. Morgan, the father-in-law of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., (and grandfather to Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller and his brothers.) Aldrich led the members of the Commission on a two-year tour of the central banks of Europe, spending some three hundred thousand dollars of taxpayer money.
On the night of November 22, 1910, Senator Aldrich and a small delegation representing some of the nation’s leading financiers slipped anonymously, one by one into Aldrich’s private rail car at the Hoboken, New Jersey station and headed south to the privately owned, Jekyll Island, Georgia. It is estimated that the seven men who boarded Aldrich’s private rail car represented 1/4 of the wealth of the entire world. Nelson Aldrich was the Republican "whip" in the Senate, Chairman of the National Monetary Commission, and business associate of J.P. Morgan; Abraham Piatt Andrew, Assistant Secretary of the United States Treasury; Frank A. Vanderlip, president of the National City Bank of New York, the most powerful of the banks at that time, representing William Rockefeller and the investment banking house of Kuhn, Loeb & Company; Henry P. Davison, senior partner of J.P Morgan Company; Charles D. Norton, president of J.P. Morgan's First National Bank of New York; Benjamin Strong, head of J.P. Morgan's Bankers Trust Company (and, later, first head of the Federal Reserve Bank); and Paul M. Warburg, a partner in Kuhn, Loeb & Company, a representative of the Rothschild banking dynasty in England and France, and brother to Max Warburg who was head of the Warburg banking consortium in Germany and the Netherlands. (By the way, Paul Warburg was the role model for “Daddy Warbucks” of “Little Orphan Annie” fame and J.P. Morgan was the model for the chubby little mustachioed banker in the Monopoly game.)
The purpose of the Jekyll Island meeting was to formulate an agreement on the structure and operation of a banking cartel. The goal of this cartel, as is true with all cartels, was to maximize profits by minimizing competition between members, to make it difficult for new competitors to enter the field, and to utilize the police power of government to enforce the cartel agreement. These banking competitors sat around a table of the Jekyll Island Clubhouse and devised the Federal Reserve System to best suit their needs. Security was tight and the first information regarding this meeting found its way into print in 1916. It appeared in Leslie's Weekly, written by the financial reporter, B.C. Forbes, who later founded Forbes Magazine. While interviewing Paul Warburg, Warburg told him this story: “Picture a party of the nation's greatest bankers stealing out of New York on a private railroad car under cover of darkness, stealthily heading hundreds of miles South, embarking on a mysterious launch, sneaking on to an island deserted by all but a few servants, living there a full week under such rigid secrecy that the names of not one of them was once mentioned lest the servants learn the identity and disclose to the world this strangest, most secret expedition in the history of American finance. I am not romancing. I am giving to the world, for the first time, the real story of how the famous Aldrich currency report, the foundation of our new currency system, was written.” In 1930, Paul Warburg wrote in his massive, 1750 page book, "The Federal Reserve System, Its Origin and Growth:" "The results of the conference were entirely confidential. Even the fact there had been a meeting was not permitted to become public." "Though eighteen years have since gone by, I do not feel free to give a description of this most interesting conference concerning which Senator Aldrich pledged all participants to secrecy."
Another participant, Frank Vanderlip, wrote in an article that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post on February 9, 1935: “I do not feel it is any exaggeration to speak of our secret expedition to Jekyll Island as the occasion of the actual conception of what eventually became the Federal Reserve System. We were told to leave our last names behind us. We were told further that we should avoid dining together on the night of our departure. We were instructed to come one at a time and as unobtrusively as possible to the railroad terminal on the New Jersey littoral of the Hudson where Senator Aldrich’s private car would be in readiness attached to the rear-end of a train to the south. Once aboard the private car we began to observe the taboo that had been fixed on last names. We addressed one another as Ben, Paul, Nelson and Abe. Davison and I adopted even deeper disguises abandoning our first names. On the theory that we were always right, he became Wilbur and I became Orville after those two aviation pioneers the Wright brothers. The servants and train crew may have known the identities of one or two of us, but they did not know all and it was the names of all printed together that would’ve made our mysterious journey significant in Washington, in Wall Street, even in London. Discovery we knew simply must not happen.”
So, why all the secrecy? Vanderlip further wrote, “If it were to be exposed publicly that our particular group had gotten together and written a banking bill, that bill would have no chance whatever of passage by Congress.” Why would Vanderlip state this? Because the expressed purpose of the bill was to break the grip of the “Money Trust” and it was written for and by the “Money Trust.” Competing bankers got together in secret to form a cartel insuring they would always have the money they needed to run their businesses, stifle competition, and bail themselves out whenever they made a mistake. Had the public known that fact, there would have never been a Federal Reserve System. The fact that the Federal Reserve System was formulated, not in the halls of Congress with open debate and public news coverage, but on a small, private island, by a few of the world’s wealthiest bankers, in complete secrecy, and designed to perpetuate their wealth at the expense of the taxpayers, to me at least, makes this a conspiracy... Not a conspiracy theory, a conspiracy fact.
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