Friday 15 June 2012

Banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies

Thomas Jefferson, (1743 - 1826), generally recognised as the principal author of the Declaration of Independence and third American President, said this in a letter to George Logan of November 1816:
"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country."
Jefferson also said:
"The modern theory of the perpetuation of debt has drenched the earth with blood and crushed its inhabitants under burdens ever accumulating." (Letter to John Wayles Eppes - 1813)
And:
"It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world." (Letter to Antoine Destutt, comte de Tracy - 1820)
And:
"The system of banking we have... I contemplate it as a blot left in all our constitutions which, if not covered, will end in their destruction, which is already hit by the gamblers in corruption, and is sweeping away in its progress the fortunes and morals of our citizens...

I sincerely believe, with you, that BANKING ESTABLISHMENTS ARE MORE DANGEROUS THAN STANDING ARMIES; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale." (Letter to John Taylor, 26 May 1816)
John Adams, (1735 - 1826) the second American President and father of the sixth, said the following in a letter to Jefferson, of 25 August 1787.
“All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arises not from deficits in the Constitution or Confederation, nor from want of honor and virtue, so much as downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation...

BANKS HAVE DONE MORE INJURY TO RELIGION, MORALITY, TRANQUILLITY, PROSPERITY, AND EVEN WEALTH OF THE NATION THAN THEY HAVE DONE OR EVER WILL DO GOOD.”
With uncanny coincidence, Adams and Jefferson both died on Independence Day 1826.

These fiscal concerns don't go away. Later in the nineteenth century, the eminent Catholic thinker and MP, John Dalberg-Acton, the first Baron Acton, (1834 - 1902), is on record as having said this:
“The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks.”

Lord Acton, rather more famously, also said this:

"Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." 
 In 1913, Woodrow Wilson (1856 – 1924), the 28th President of the United States, said:
"Our system of credit is privately concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men who, even if their action be honest and intended for the public interest, are necessarily concentrated upon the great undertakings in which their own money is involved and who necessarily, by very reason of their own limitations, chill and check and destroy genuine economic freedom.

This is the greatest question of all, and to this statesmen must address themselves with an earnest determination to serve the long future and the true liberties of men." ('The New Freedom: Monopoly, Or Opportunity,' a compilation of Wilson's Presidential campaign speeches)
The Federal Reserve was created in the year Wilson opined thus. Almost everyone on the planet thinks the Fed Res is an arm of the U.S. government. It isn't, it's a private bank and is, and always has been, much more concerned with the concentration and consolidation of wealth and power into the hands of the elite few than the fiscal wellbeing of the unsophisticated and foolishly trusting many.

Wall Street Crashes, sub primes, credit crunches and worldwide 2008 - 2013 recessions (and, for that matter, catastrophic wars no one but the monied few ever seem to want) occur because of this elite/unsophisticated disparity.

With supreme irony, it was Wilson who, despite the misgivings cited above, signed the Federal Reserve Act into law.

Go here for A once-in-a-century credit tsunami.

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