This Week in the Sign of the Times Brief
Wars, Inflation and Circuses: How Central Banks Ruin Nations and People
In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks.
– Spencer Bachus, chairman, House Financial Services Committee
This week I detailed key points from a book which describes how the federal reserve system came into being and how hundreds of years of European central bankers’ consolidation of power led to that fateful and secret meeting on Jekyll island in 1910. The author of ’The Creature From Jekyll Island”, G. Edward Griffin, writes a comprehensive work on the meeting which spawned the federal reserve system. He includes not only the account of the secretive meeting at Jekyll Island which created a banking cartel under the guise of a government agency (among other deceptions), but also presents compelling evidence that the devastation wrought in both world wars could not have occurred without the hidden hand of the central banks, who profited immensely from apocalyptic levels of death and destruction on both sides.
As the title suggests, this piece will overview how the central banks in Europe and America brought in a system which would centralize power over banking into the hands of a few, leading to massive wars, rampant loss of purchasing power (inflation) and bloated bureaucratic systems which, combined, would spell the demise of the free enterprise system and the beginning of the end of American sovereignty by way of the organized looting of the wealth and influence of America’s productive masses. Before summarizing in 3 parts the war, inflation and circuses, here are the links to the two videos from this week.
Competition is a Sin?! Debt Empire Pt. 1
The Great Duck Dinner: Debt Empire Pt. II
They provide more insights from ‘Creature From Jekyll Island’ about how:
1. The once-prosperous farmers in the South and Midwest became targets of the bankers’ wrath when they refused to play ball in compliance with the bankers by having their own banks and no need for central bank credit. So the bankers retaliated with loan schemes which offered easy credit to the farmers to lure them heavily into debt and then these bankers created a recession which would reduce the farmers’ income and lead to banks seizure of their assets
2. The sales pitch for the federal reserve system was designed to mislead the public and politicians into believing that it was a government institution and that it would stop the excesses of the Wall Street Money Interests
War
The challenge here is to condense chapters, and volumes (as far as published work since WW1 and WW2) into paragraphs and convey some of the scale and scope of the meddling which forced the hand of the US populace into the devastating tragedies of both World Wars. This passage from the congressional record, cited on page 244 of ‘Creature From Jekyll Island’ sets the stage:
In March, 1915, The J.P. Morgan interests, the steel, shipbuilding, and powder interests, and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press…. They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greater papers…. An agreement was reached’ an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies, and other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interest of the purchasers.
The next passages go on to recount how support for war with the people in the US was still not sufficient despite the major PR push: (page 245)
It is not surprising, therefore, that a large part of the nation’s press, particularly in the East, began to editorially denounce Germany. The cry spread across the land to take up arms against ‘the enemy of western civilization’. Editors became eloquent on the patriotic duty of all Americans to defend world democracy. Massive ‘preparedness’ demonstrations and parades were organized.
But it was not enough. In spite of this massive sales campaign, the American people still were not buying. Polls conducted at the time showed popular sentiment continuing to run ten to one in favor of staying out of the war. Clearly, what was needed was something both drastic and dramatic to change public opinion.
Griffin goes on to describe in detail the planned events which finally took the US into the first world war. And again on page 429:
Although not covered in this chapter, it must be remembered that the same forces were responsible for American involvement in both world wars to provide the economic and military resources England needed to survive.
Inflation
People are aware of inflation because they see it in the prices of goods and services they buy. However, the mechanisms leading to inflation are not widely known, and this where the purpose of these articles comes in, along with research and reading. We aren’t taught about this in schools, and there’s a reason for that.
Since I’ve written previously just on the topic of inflation and it’s effects on prosperity, health and general well-being, I’ll keep this section brief by providing these informative links and offering another way to look at inflation, which is:
When prices rise we tend to think that’s what inflation is: prices rise, making life harder to afford. That’s not incorrect, but there’s another way to look at it, which is:
Prices rising are a superficial manifestation of a deeper, more insidious problem which is that the purchasing power of the currency is being destroyed over time and by design. Goods and services did not magically become more valuable- a loaf of bread is the same as it always was- The problem is that the currency quietly has become less valuable, making these things appear more valuable because they are more expensive.
Check out this one hundred-year chart of US dollar’s worth/ loss of purchasing power (over 95% gone!)
Circuses
A significant part of this monetary system we’ve been discussing operates through deceiving the public and the politicians into supporting initiatives which are in effect scams and frauds serving to part people from their wealth and productivity and transfer it through various means back into the hands of the central planners. Since these initiatives of large-scale wealth transfer are often couched as ‘for-the-people’ social programs or patriotic actions (getting Americans to buy war bonds to finance WW1 and WW2 which essentially were ‘bankers’ wars’), the large-scale propaganda and distraction to accomplish these nefarious ends can be likened to a giant circus.
Here are some supportive passages: (page 429)
After the Civil War, America experienced a series of expansions and contractions of the money supply leading directly to economic booms and busts. This was the result of the creation of fiat money by a banking system which, far from being free and competitive, was a half-way house to central banking. Throughout the chaos, one banking firm, the House of Morgan, was able to prosper out of the failure of others. Morgan had close ties with the financial structure of England and was, in fact, more British than American.
Benjamin Strong was a Morgan man and was appointed as the first Governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New york which rapidly assumed dominance over the System. Strong immediately entered into close alliance with Montagu Norman, Governor of the Bank of England, to save the English economy from depression. This was accomplished by deliberately creating inflation in the US which caused an outflow of gold, a loss of foreign markets, unemployment and speculation in the stock market, all of which were factors that propelled America into the crash of 1929 and the great depression of the 30s.
[And once again]
Although not covered in this chapter, it must be remembered that the same forces were responsible for American involvement in both world wars to provide the economic and military resources England needed to survive…
Until next week, Happy Independence Day!
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