Ellen Brown

100 Years Is Enough: Time to Make the Fed a Public Utility

Guest post by Ellen Brown.

December 23rd, 2013, marks the 100th anniversary of the Federal Reserve, warranting a review of its performance.  Has it achieved the purposes for which it was designed?

The answer depends on whose purposes we are talking about.  For the banks, the Fed has served quite well.  For the laboring masses whose populist movement prompted it, not much has changed in a century.

Thwarting Populist Demands

The Federal Reserve Act was passed in 1913 in response to a wave of bank crises, which had hit on average every six years over a period of 80 years. The resulting economic depressions triggered a populist movement for monetary reform in the 1890s.  Mary Ellen Lease, an early populist leader, said in a fiery speech that could have been written today:

Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street. The great common people of this country are slaves, and monopoly is the master. . . . Money rules . . . .Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags. The parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us. . . .

We want money, land and transportation. We want the abolition of the National Banks, and we want the power to make loans direct from the government. We want the foreclosure system wiped out.

That was what they wanted, but the Federal Reserve Act that they got was not what the populists had fought for, or what their leader William Jennings Bryan thought he was approving when he voted for it in 1913. In the stirring speech that won him the Democratic presidential nomination in 1896, Bryan insisted:

[We] believe that the right to coin money and issue money is a function of government. . . . Those who are opposed to this proposition tell us that the issue of paper money is a function of the bank and that the government ought to go out of the banking business. I stand with Jefferson . . . and tell them, as he did, that the issue of money is a function of the government and that the banks should go out of the governing business.

Cover article published on the Understanding Deep Politics Conference

This article by Byron Belitsos is now available in the May Issue of the Connection Magazine, Santa Cruz, CA. Thank you Byron for your thoughtful article, and thanks to the Connection Magazine for covering our event in your May issue.

Face the Shadow First:
Seeking the Hidden Dimensions of American and Global Politics

Probe Beneath the Surface of the Obama Era at the “Understanding Deep Politics” Conference
in Santa Cruz, May 14-16

http://understandingdeeppolitics.org/news-article

By Byron Belitsos

Some say it began with the invasion of Iraq. Others, with the inauguration of George W. Bush for his second term. Many point to the day of 9/11. But those in the know—including ten distinguished speakers headlining the “Understanding Deep Politics” Conference in Santa Cruz this May 14-16—trace the era of deep politics further back: some to JFK’s assassination; others, to the aftermath of World War II. And a few speakers in Santa Cruz will stretch us back to Hitler, Lenin, Weishaupt, or Machiavelli, from there to ancient secret societies, and even back to the dawn of human governance itself—in the belief that conscious political deception is an inescapable feature of human nature. But all agree on the general definition of deep politics: It refers to government in which two dimensions of action always coexist: overt and covert, or benign and utterly ruthless.

Big Development in Unraveling the Truth About Dishonest Banking

I always thought Truth recovery might just get a big boost from unraveling the deceit and manipulations in the financial sector. This is big news friends and it could very well lead to the discovery of more Truth. Just think about the put options on United and American weeks before 9-11. Please dear God send the best and brightest and most funded legal teams to efforts like this in the Kansas Supreme Court! Great reporting from Ellen Brown, as usual.

John

Ellen Brown

Author, "Web of Debt"
Posted: September 21, 2009 03:03 PM

Landmark Decision Promises Massive Relief for Homeowners and Trouble for Banks

RSS