corbett century of enslavement the history of the federal reserve

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download a **color information pamphlet** on The Federal Reserve.

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download a **black and white information pamphlet** on The Federal
Reserve.

|Century of Enslavement DVD|

TRANSCRIPT:

**Part One: The Origins of the Fed**

“ *The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial
element in the larger centers has owned the Government ever since the
days of Andrew Jackson.* ” – `FDR letter to Colonel Edward House, Nov.
21 1933 `__

All our lives we’ve been told that economics is boring. It’s dull. It’s
not worth the time it takes to understand it. And all our lives, we’ve
been lied to.

War. Poverty. Revolution. They all hinge on economics. And economics all
rests on one key concept: money.

Money. It is the economic water in which we live our lives. We even call
it ‘currency’; it flows around us, carries us in its wake. Drowns those
who are not careful.

We use it every day in nearly every transaction we conduct. We spend our
lives working for it, worrying about it, saving it, spending it,
pinching it. It defines our social status. It compromises our morals.
People are willing to fight, die and kill for it.

But what is it? Where does it come from? How is it created? Who controls
it? It is a remarkable fact that, given its central importance in our
lives, not one person in a hundred could answer such basic questions
about money `as these `__.

**Interviewer:** So if you were planning a family, you’d want to
know where babies come from. And this is a lot about banking. So let
me ask you: where does money come from?

**Interviewee 1:** Where does the money come from? The government
prints it. It’s printed off.

**Interviewer:** How is new money created?

**Interviewee 2:** By labor. People work and produce wealth, and the
money is supposed to match that wealth.

**Interviewee:** Where does money come from?

**Interviewee 3:** Well I have a pretty different outlook on money.
It actually comes from, like, trees, right?

**SOURCE**: `Occupy Vancouver answers “Where does money come
from?” `__

But why is this? How could we be so ignorant about a topic of such
importance? “Where does money come from?” is a basic, childlike
question. So why is our only response the childlike answer, meant as a
joke: “It grows on trees”?

Such a profound state of ignorance could not come about naturally. From
the time we are children, we are curious about the world and eager to
learn about the way it works. And what could lead to a better
understanding of the way the world works than a knowledge of money, its
creation and destruction? Yet discussion of this topic is fastidiously
avoided in our school years and ignored in our daily life. Our monetary
ignorance is artificial, a smokescreen that has been erected on purpose
and perpetrated with the help of complicated systems and insufferable
economic jargon.

But it doesn’t take an economist to understand the importance of money.
Deep down we all know that the wars, the poverty, the violence we see
around us hinges on this question of money. It seems like a thousand
piece jigsaw puzzle just waiting to be solved. And it is.

The puzzle pieces, taken together, create an image of the Federal
Reserve, America’s central bank and the heart of the country’s banking
system. Despite its central importance to the economy, relatively few
have heard of it, and fewer still know what it is, despite the bank’s
attempts at self-description:

Our economy runs on a complex system of exchange of goods and
services in which money plays a key part. Coin, currency, savings,
and checking accounts; the overall supply of money is managed by the
Federal Reserve. Money is the medium through which economic
exchanges take place, and money as a standard of value helps us to
set prices for goods and services. The job of managing
money–monetary policy–is to preserve the purchasing power of the
dollar while ensuring that a sufficient amount of money is available
to promote economic growth.

The Federal Reserve also promotes the safety and soundness of the
institutions where we do our banking. It ensures that the mechanisms
by which we make payments, whether by cash, cheque, or electronic
means, operates smoothly and efficiently.

And in its fiscal role acts as the banker for the United States
government.

Now these duties comprise the major responsibilities of our central
bank.

**SOURCE**: `The Fed: Our Nation’s Central
Bank `__

But in order to understand the Federal Reserve, we must first understand
its origins and context. We must deconstruct the puzzle.

The first piece of that puzzle lies here, in the White House. This is
where the Federal Reserve Act, then known as the Currency Bill, was
signed into law after passing the House and Senate in late December,
1913.

`The New York Times of Christmas Eve,
1913 `__,
described the festive scene:

“The Christmas spirit pervaded the gathering. While the ceremony was a
little less impressive than that of the signing of the Tarriff act on
Oct. 3 last in the same room, the spectators were much more enthusiastic
and seized every occasion to applaud.”

There in the White House that fateful December evening, President Wilson
signed away the last veneer of control over the American money supply to
a cartel; a well-organized gang of crooks so successful, so cunning, so
well-hidden that even now, a century later, few know of its existence,
let alone the details of its operations. But those details have been
openly admitted for decades.

Of course, just as we have been taught to find economics boring, we have
been taught that this story is boring. This is the way the Federal
Reserve itself tells it:

The United States was facing severe financial problems. At the turn
of the century, most banks were issuing their own currency called
“bank notes.” The trouble was, currency that was good in one state
was sometimes worthless in another. People began to lose confidence
in their money, since it was only as sound as the bank that issued
it. Fearful that their bank might go out of business, they rushed to
exchange their bank notes for gold or silver. By attempting to do
so, they created the panic of 1907.

**SOURCE**: `Where The Bankers
Bank `__

During the panic, people streamed to the banks and demanded their
deposits. The banks could not meet the demand; they simply did not
have enough gold and silver coin available. Many banks went under.
People lost millions of dollars, businesses suffered, unemployment
rose, and the stability of our economic system was again threatened.

Well, this couldn’t go on. If the country was going to grow and
prosper, some means would have to be found to achieve financial and
economic stability.

To prevent financial panics like the one in 1907, President Woodrow
Wilson signed The Federal Reserve Act into law in 1913.

**SOURCE**: `Too Much, Too
Little `__

But this is history as told by the victors: a revisionist vision in
which the creation of a central bank to control the nation’s money
supply is merely a boring historical footnote, about as important as the
invention of the zipper or an early 20th century hoola-hoop craze. The
truth is that the story of the secret banking conclave that gave birth
to that Federal Reserve Act is as exciting and dramatic as any Hollywood
screenplay or detective novel yarn, and all the more remarkable for the
fact that it is all true.

We pick up the story, appropriately enough, under cover of darkness. It
was the night of November 22, 1910, and a group of the richest and most
powerful men in America were boarding a private rail car at an
unassuming railroad station in Hoboken, New Jersey. The car, waiting
with shades drawn to keep onlookers from seeing inside, belonged to
Senator Nelson Aldrich, the father-in-law of billionaire heir to the
Rockefeller dynasty, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. A central figure on the
influential Senate Finance Committee where he oversaw the nation’s
monetary policy, Aldrich was referred to in the press as the “General
Manager of the Nation.” Joining him that evening was his private
secretary, Shelton, and a who’s who of the nation’s banking and
financial elite: A. Piatt Andrew, the Assistant Treasury Secretary;
Frank Vanderlip, President of the National City Bank of New York; Henry
P. Davison, a senior partner of J.P. Morgan Company; Benjamin Strong,
Jr., an associate of J.P. Morgan and President of Bankers Trust Co., and
Paul Warburg, heir of the Warburg banking family and son-in-law of
Solomon Loeb of the famed New York investment firm, Kuhn, Loeb &
Company.

The men had been told to arrive one by one after sunset to attract as
little attention as possible. Indeed, secrecy was so important to their
mission that the group did not use anything but their first names
throughout the journey so as to keep their true identities secret even
from their own servants and wait staff. The movements of any one of them
would have been reason enough to attract the attention of New York’s
voracious press, especially in an era where banking and monetary reform
was seen as a key issue for the future of the nation; a meeting of all
of them, now that would surely have been the story of the century. And
it was.

Their destination? The secluded Jekyll Island off the coast of Georgia,
home to the prestigious Jekyll Island Club whose members included the
Morgans, Rockefellers, Warburgs and Rothschilds. Their purpose? Davison
told intrepid local newspaper reporters who had caught wind of the
meeting that they were going duck hunting. But in reality, they were
going to draft a reform of the nation’s banking industry in complete
secrecy.

G. Edward Griffin, the author of the bestselling `The Creature from
Jekyll Island `__ and a
long-time Federal Reserve researcher, explains:

What happened is the banks decided that since there was going to be
legislation anyway to control their industry, that they wouldn’t
just sit back and wait and see what happened and cross their fingers
that it would be OK. They decided to do what so many cartels do
today: they decided to take the lead. And they would be the ones
calling for regulations and reform.

They like the word “reform.” The American people are suckers for the
word “reform.” You just put that into any corrupt piece of
legislation, call it “reform” and people say “Oh, I’m all for
‘reform’,” and so they vote for it or accept it.

So that’s what they were doing. They decided, “We will ‘reform’ our
own industry.” In other words, “We will create a cartel and we will
give the cartel the power of government. We’ll take our cartel
agreement so we can self-regulate to our advantage and we’ll call it
‘The Federal Reserve Act.’ And then we’ll take this cartel agreement
to Washington and convince those idiots there to pass it into law.”

And that basically was the strategy. It was a brilliant strategy. Of
course we see it happening all the time, certainly in our own day
today we see the same thing happened in other cartelized industries.
Right now we’re watching it unfold in the field of healthcare, but
at that time it was banking, alright?

And so the banking cartel wrote their own rules and regulations,
called it “The Federal Reserve Act,” got it passed into law, and it
was very much to their liking because they wrote it. And in essence
what they had created was a set of rules that made it possible for
themselves to regulate their industry, but they went even beyond
that. In fact, it’s clear to me when I was reading their letters and
their conversation at the time, and the debates, that they never
dreamed that Congress would go along and also give them the right to
issue the nation’s money supply. Not only were they now going to
regulate their own industry, which is what they started out as
wanting to do, but they got this incredible gift that they didn’t
dream would be given to them (although they were negotiating for
it), and that was that Congress gave them the authority to issue the
nation’s money. Congress gave away the sovereign right to issue the
nation’s money to the private banks.

And so all of this was in The Federal Reserve Act, and the American
people were joyous because they were told, and they were convinced,
that this was finally a means of controlling this big creature from
Jekyll Island.

**SOURCE**: `Interview with G. Edward
Griffin `__

Amazingly enough, they were successful, not just in conspiring to write
the legislation that would eventually become the Federal Reserve Act,
but in keeping that conspiracy a secret from the public for decades. It
was first reported on in 1916 by Bertie Charles Forbes, the financial
writer who would later go on to found Forbes magazine, but it was never
fully admitted until a full quarter century later when Frank Vanderlip
wrote a casual admission of the meeting in the `February 9, 1935
edition `__
of The Saturday Evening Post:

“I was as secretive—indeed, as furtive—as any conspirator.[…]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.”

Over the course of their nine days of deliberation at the Jekyll Island
club, they devised a plan so overarching, so ambitious, that even they
could scarcely imagine that it would ever be passed by congress. As
Vanderlip put it,

“Discovery [of our plan], we knew, simply must not happen, or else all
our time and effort would be wasted. If it were to be exposed publicly
that our particular group had got together and written a banking bill,
that bill would have no chance whatever of passage by Congress.”

So what, precisely, did this conclave of conspirators devise at their
Jekyll Island meeting? A plan for a central banking system to be owned
by the banks themselves, a system which would organize the nation’s
banks into a private cartel that would have sole control over the money
supply itself. At the end of their nine day meeting, the bankers and
financiers went back to their respective offices content in what they
had accomplished. The details of the plan changed between its 1910
drafting and the eventual passage of the `Federal Reserve
Act `__, but
the essential ideas were there.

But ultimately, this scene on Jekyll Island, too, is just one piece of a
larger puzzle. And like any other puzzle piece, it has to be seen in its
wider context for the bigger picture to become visible. To understand
the other pieces of the puzzle and their importance in the creation of
the Federal Reserve, we have to travel backward in time.

The story begins in late 17th century Europe. The Nine Years’ War is
raging across the continent as Louis XIV of France finds himself pitted
against much of the rest of the continent over his territorial and
dynastic claims. King William III of England, devastated by a stunning
naval defeat, commits his court to rebuilding the English navy. There’s
only one problem: money. The government’s coffers have been exhausted by
the waging of the war and William’s credit is drying up.

A Scottish banker, William Paterson, has a banker’s solution: a proposal
“to form a company to lend a million pounds to the Government at six
percent (plus 5,000 “management fee”) with the right of note issue.” By
1694 the idea has been slightly revised (a 1.2 million pound loan at 8
percent plus 4000 for management expenses), but it goes ahead: the
magnanimously titled Bank of England is created.

The name is a carefully constructed lie, designed to make the bank
appear to be a government entity. But it is not. It is a private bank
owned by private shareholders for their private profit with a charter
from the king that allows them to print the public’s money out of thin
air and lend it to the crown. What happens here at the birth of the Bank
of England in 1694 is the creation of a template