Lies the government told you by Andrew Napolitano (best e reader for epub TXT) 📗

always be more money to print and someone there to pick up after their mess. They envisioned one giant central bank creating regulations, ensuring maximum profits, and insulating them from the consequences of their own negligence and their own excess. Sounds familiar.

But in order to create their behemoth, the bankers needed to derail the opposition: politicians who opposed a central bank and wanted to retain the decentralized system. The first step was the creation of committees in Indianapolis and New York, in 1897 and 1898, respectively, which would be composed of disinterested experts, many from the heartland of the country. The chief goal was to ensure a grassroots-type movement without the outward involvement of the bankers, as people would assume that any plan extolled by bankers would be bad for everyone but the bankers. The committees’ neutral evaluators included representatives of the Rockefellers and the Morgans who sent out questionnaires to financial executives and traveled to Europe to interview heads of European central banks. No one consulted those who would be most affected by the creation of a central bank, the persons who would be paying for it. At the end of their time, both committees predictably called for the establishment of a central bank.

Less than a year after the committees decided that a central bank was the only way to ensure economic stability and prosperity for all, the inflationary tendencies of the secretary of treasury caught up with America. Some noted that J. P. Morgan, returning from a European vacation with the Rothschilds, was the originator of rumors that the Knickerbocker Bank could not afford to pay its debts. This was the same Rothschild family whose patriarch once stated, “Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws.”7

Once a run began at the Knickerbocker, panic quickly spread, and the inflationary spending habits of the country had a predictable result: The Panic of 1907.8 Soon after, politicians and the media called for federal regulations of the banks, claiming that those in charge could not be trusted with even local finances if they could adversely affect national liquidity. In essence, one well-placed rumor, stating only the truth that no bank could survive a run on its money, collapsed all relevant opposition to a central bank as the American people forgot their history and forgot their Constitution in the panic of the fear of losing their life savings. The American financial system was ripe for the taking.

Legally Sanctioned Cartels

This brings us back to the fateful train ride in 1910, and the secret passengers making their way from Hoboken to Jekyll Island, a privately owned island off the coast of Georgia. On that day, six men boarded that train, in furtive secrecy and deception. Only first names, and in some cases nicknames, were used to ensure secrecy. If one man saw another on the platform, he was instructed to feign ignorance of the other’s identity. No one was to know that they were traveling together or even where they were traveling. And if questions were asked, all men answered that they were to go on a hunting trip. One man even carried a shotgun with him, to ensure the deception appeared genuine; the shotgun was borrowed from one of his friends, and an autobiography would later note that the man had never in his life fired a gun.

The question is, why such deception? Why did it matter that no one knew that the men were together? The associations of these men, and not their names, speak to this question. As one of the men later stated, if it was known that these men had drafted the banking bill, Congress would never have passed it, given that the stated purpose of the bill was to ensure that the grip of the few large banks controlling the banking industry was broken, yet it was they who were writing it.

The list of passengers on that train reads like a Who’s Who of banking: Senator Nelson Aldrich, father-in-law of John D. Rockefeller; Frank Vanderlip, vice president of Rockefeller’s National City Bank of New York, the largest bank in America; Charles Norton, president of Morgan’s First National Bank of New York, America’s second-largest bank; Henry Davison, senior partner of J. P. Morgan Company; Benjamin Strong, head of J. P. Morgan’s Banker’s Trust Company; Paul Warburg, representative of the Rothschilds; and of course Abraham Andrew, the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, ensuring that the federal government would have some say.

These men represented approximately one-quarter of the wealth of the entire world. Yet they were willing to create the Federal Reserve, an entity whose stated purpose was to wrest away from them the control of America’s money. These men were not the types who would willingly part with the power they had thus far attained. And, given that the names of Morgan, Rockefeller, and Rothschild are recognizable to this day, it is apparent that they did not.

Purportedly each other’s biggest competitors, having spent their lives fighting for dominance in banking and the financial markets, the men were able to come together for a week and agree on a draft of what was to become the Federal Reserve System. Their only debate was whether to choose partial or full centralization. With the knowledge that Congress would not approve an entirely banker-controlled central bank, they chose the politically astute partial centralization, realizing correctly that once legally passed, the Act could easily be revised in the future as people adapted to the idea.

They were not, as stated, preparing banking reform that was to ensure prosperity for the American people. Rather, they were able to come together so as to form a partnership that would secure their positions in the market and enhance their bottom lines. In other words, these bankers that day formed a cartel, a cartel that would ensure their continued dominance and survival: a cartel with legitimacy granted by the federal government and sold by deception.

In order to ensure acceptance