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Don't know much about history

by melo Sat Apr 14th, 2012 at 06:19:05 AM EST

Rhymes, without reason.

"If the American people ever allow the banks to control the issuance of their currency (instead of Congress), first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers occupied. The issuing power of money should be taken from the banks and restored to Congress and the people to whom it belongs."


-Thomas Jefferson, letter to then Secretary of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin, 1802

 "The eyes of our citizens are not sufficiently open to the true cause of our distress. They ascribe them to everything but their true cause, the banking system"
- Thomas Jefferson

 "All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise not from defects in our Constitution; not from want of honour or virtue, so much as from downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit and circulation."
- President John Adams, 2nd U.S. President

 "The few who understand the system will either be so interested in its profits or so dependent on its favours that there will be no opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body of the people mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that capital derives from the system will bear its burdens without complaint and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests."

 John Sherman letter sent to New York bankers, Morton, and Gould, in support of the then proposed National Banking Act, 1863"

How can the present tragedy be written so our descendants avoid falling in the same trap?


 "Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce." President James A. Garfield, assassinated 1881

 "People who will not turn a shovel of dirt on the project, nor contribute a pound of material, will collect more money, from the United States, than will the people, who supply all the material and do all the work. This is the terrible thing about interest... But here is the point: If the nation can issue a dollar bond, it can also issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good, makes the bill good, also. The difference, between the bond and the bill, is that the bond lets the money-broker collect twice the amount of the bond, and an additional 20%. Whereas the currency, the honest sort, provided by the Constitution, pays nobody, but those, who contribute in some useful way. It is absurd, to say that our country can issue bonds, and cannot issue currency. Both are promises to pay, but one fattens the usurer and the other helps the people."

 Thomas Edison, on the absurdity of allowing the Federal Reserve Bank the monopoly privilege of lending us our own money.

 "The Morgan interests took advantage... to precipitate the panic [of 1907], guiding it shrewdly as it progressed."

- Life Magazine, 1907, explaining the events that led to the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank.

 "Let me control a peoples currency and I care not who makes their laws."
- Meyer Nathaniel Rothschild in a speech to a gathering of world bankers February 12, 1912, a requote of his ancestor Mayer Amschel.

 "This [Federal Reserve Act] establishes the most gigantic trust on earth. When the President Wilson signs this bill, the invisible government of the monetary power will be legalized....the worst legislative crime of the ages is perpetrated by this banking and currency bill. From now on, depressions will be scientifically created."

 Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr., 1913

 "I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is now controlled by its system of credit... We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the world - no longer a Government of free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of small groups of dominant men."

  Woodrow Wilson

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Is there an attribution for the last quote?

'tis strange I should be old and neither wise nor valiant. From "The Maid's Tragedy" by Beaumont & Fletcher
by Wife of Bath (kareninaustin at g mail dot com) on Sun Apr 15th, 2012 at 02:27:24 AM EST
Woodrow Wilson. Suddenly realized I, too, was sitting at a computer. Thanks for the wonderful and scary diary.

'tis strange I should be old and neither wise nor valiant. From "The Maid's Tragedy" by Beaumont & Fletcher
by Wife of Bath (kareninaustin at g mail dot com) on Sun Apr 15th, 2012 at 02:28:52 AM EST
Wilson was well intentioned. In The Economic Consequences of the Peace Keynes described his as being like a dissenting Protestant Minister. But he was succeeded by a string of business friendly, to say the least, Republicans until Herbert Hoover, who was a well intentioned Republican. As they say of the road to Hell...

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
by ARGeezer (ARGeezer a in a circle eurotrib daught com) on Sun Apr 15th, 2012 at 03:21:36 PM EST
[ Parent ]
"I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be." (Thomas Jefferson)

and perhaps my all-time favorite quote ever:

"I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself.  Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent.  If I could not go to Heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all."  (Thomas Jefferson)

by sgr2 on Sun Apr 15th, 2012 at 07:01:57 AM EST
jefferson is one hero to me too, warts forgiven.

those quotes are priceless too, as befits a philosopher-king.

with all the wise warnings we have had in plain sight, and the stirrings of intuition that the system is so seriously fucked up as to have made a crapshoot of some fine thing that should and could be honoured, instead of betrayed.

we just have to find our truths the hard way usually, but it's always worth trying to make it easier!

hopefully it's incremental, and we can eventually tip the scales back into balance, grain by grain.

thanks for your posts, folks, i couldn't think of what to say as a seed comment, the quotes had bereft me of words... how can we say again what has been said so elegantly already?

i keep hoping we will find a magic lever to lift off the burden of ignorance that keeps us acting against our own species' interests, how did we get so dumb?

descarte's split vision?

 

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

by melo (melometa4(at)gmail.com) on Sun Apr 15th, 2012 at 07:24:10 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Well we all got warts of one sort or another, and Jefferson is no different. I'm not sure that at all times his actions and deeds were such that I'd want to think of him as one of my heros, but the words he spoke about "independent thinking" to arrive at the right choice, rather than being committed to certain ideas without thought, always made sense to me.
by sgr2 on Sun Apr 15th, 2012 at 10:01:13 AM EST
[ Parent ]
he impressed me with his vision of a nation of small farms connected by canalways.

if only... :)


'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

by melo (melometa4(at)gmail.com) on Sun Apr 15th, 2012 at 12:52:04 PM EST
[ Parent ]
And yet the Louisiana Purchase guaranteed that the Pioneer System of farming as a capitalist investment of sweat equity in pursuit of capital gain would face no natural boundary until the Pioneer had swept across the continent from ocean to ocean like some kind of slow motion but inexorable wildfire.

And that system, along with its inevitable near genocide of the original nations of North America, is reckoned the better of the two political economies that the Louisiana Purchase helped sustain.

I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.

by BruceMcF (agila61 at netscape dot net) on Mon Apr 16th, 2012 at 11:29:59 PM EST
[ Parent ]
It was a rolling genocide, it is just that it was not total. And over and over nations were given the choice of abandoning their culture and language or loosing their lives.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
by ARGeezer (ARGeezer a in a circle eurotrib daught com) on Tue Apr 17th, 2012 at 08:27:13 PM EST
[ Parent ]
And that's a bad thing?

Align culture with our nature. Ot else!
by ormondotvos (ormond.otvosnospamgmialcon) on Fri Apr 20th, 2012 at 08:56:27 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Of course.

"Politics is like making sausages, first you knead the dough."

     -- DJ Mix Metaphor

Dear Over Over Loard, let not this Blurt Sinn neither impede nor interrupt the enjoyment of melo's fine compilation.

(For they Joyceans amongst you, Blurt Sinn comes from the German phrase  Blödsinn, nonsense; or the phrase  Blühender Unsinn, rank nonsense.)

Paint not the Devil on the Wall.

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaďs Nin

by Crazy Horse on Sun Apr 15th, 2012 at 08:26:20 AM EST
Yes, of course, John Adams quote can be easily read as a rebuke of Thomas Jefferson's. Congress has the power to appoint the entirety of the Federal Reserve Board and so the majority of the Federal Open Market Committee ~ but given the way that they have chosen to use that power, its not credible that with the power to directly issue currency rather than the power to select those who direct its issue, they would do anything but pander to the big banks even more than the Federal Reserve Board does.

I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
by BruceMcF (agila61 at netscape dot net) on Mon Apr 16th, 2012 at 02:46:39 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Speaking of warts -- despite having defied the Supreme Court and having 'relocated' the Indian Nations to Oklahoma, including some of my ancestors, in violation of treaty obligations, on the subject of the National Bank Andrew Jackson was dead on. Good arguments have been made for having a National Bank, but the manner in which all to date have operated is a weak justification at best. We need some form of national bank, but ensuring that it operates in the interest of more than a few very wealthy people is a fundamental problem that remains. I do not believe that we will get out of the current crisis without making substantial progress in establishing a national central bank that is run in the interests of the majority of the citizens.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
by ARGeezer (ARGeezer a in a circle eurotrib daught com) on Sun Apr 15th, 2012 at 03:30:45 PM EST
Well, then, the first thing is that the "majority of the citizens" need to do is notice that the rich are running things. I don't see much evidence of that going on anywhere these days...
by asdf on Mon Apr 16th, 2012 at 12:36:24 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Which is to say that it has nothing to do with the institutional structure of the Federal Reserve System and everything to do with the thorough corruption of the American political system.

After all, during the Great Compression of wealth distribution and the rise of the Great American Middle Class, in the era of tightly regulated banking operations engaging in the boring business of prudent lending to good credit risks ...
... it was exactly the same Federal Reserve system.

I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.

by BruceMcF (agila61 at netscape dot net) on Mon Apr 16th, 2012 at 02:50:56 PM EST
[ Parent ]
As Montesquieu long ago noted, with good people and good intent almost any system can be made to work well, without those two as givens, almost no system will work well. The problem comes down to the daunting task of finding a way to open they eyes of enough citizens sufficiently that they learn to disregard the massive distractions thrown their way and concentrate on securing their future well being by electing representatives that will act in the interests of the majority and insisting that those representatives appoint judges and administrators who share those views. Unfortunately this requires that a majority of the electorate develop a considerable degree of sophistication so as to see which policies and programs merely offend their moral sensibilities and which threaten their well being and that of their children.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
by ARGeezer (ARGeezer a in a circle eurotrib daught com) on Mon Apr 16th, 2012 at 04:45:03 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Though when we actually made the policy gains that resulted in the Great Compression ~ it was not on the back of a wise population of citizen-philosophers, it was rather the leverage available to those who understood what was going on by their participation in effective movements pushing for change.

I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
by BruceMcF (agila61 at netscape dot net) on Mon Apr 16th, 2012 at 05:15:20 PM EST
[ Parent ]
And it was fortuitous that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was not a tool or captive of high finance, even though he had some background there.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
by ARGeezer (ARGeezer a in a circle eurotrib daught com) on Mon Apr 16th, 2012 at 07:24:27 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Well, fortuitous that when he said it, he mostly meant what he said rather than using it as a cover story for a different agenda. Things could have gone very badly with someone as skilled as a communicator but looking for something other than radical reform in order to save the system from its own worst excesses.


I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
by BruceMcF (agila61 at netscape dot net) on Mon Apr 16th, 2012 at 11:24:26 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Kennedy, at a minimum, was willing to take on TPTB, as with the steel industry, Johnson was distracted by his dual agenda of 'guns and butter', no president since has even tried to rein in finance and finance has taken care of business since that time.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
by ARGeezer (ARGeezer a in a circle eurotrib daught com) on Tue Apr 17th, 2012 at 11:14:52 AM EST
[ Parent ]
BruceMcF:
it was rather the leverage available to those who understood what was going on

 because they were demanded by the first generation of so many thousands of families using the GI bill to become educated enough (especially in history!!) to be able to understand the forces behind the facades, causes behind effects, and thus become empowered to candidate themselves, become more activist in demanding rights.

there was a quid pro quo, as many had died in a WW that did not directly threaten america, the american public was not that keen on going over in droves to sort out europe's thanatic urges with their kids' blood.

those who survived and entered through that portal to a system which had hitherto remained too closed to access for the ordinary joe blow. this was probably the period, the great compression as you aptly name it, when there was a greater majority of working- and lower middle class with experience of other cultures through travel, eyes wide open with respect to the now great number of americans who are disinterested in the world beyond their nation's borders.

they had civics classes back then, more pride in democracy, and the post-war boom was about to shower all the modern conveniences of suburban life, gas at 10c. a gallon, brand new roads leading out to everywhere the trains didn't reach, home markets expanding, incomes outpacing inflation, opportunities everywhere, even for minorities, who made much progress educationally and economically, even before their basic rights were legally enshrined and segregation banished.

everyone loved capitalism on the way up hubbert's curve, enough to be happily incurious as to what had caused the crash before the wartime keynesianism had saved them.

this is the mythic golden age conservatives harken back to, and feel betrayed at losing. the crunch of their titanic sense of entitlement onto the bergs of reality makes them bitter and ready to lash out at phantom demons like 'liberals', gays, anything different than their chosen set of narrow canons that reigned so effortlessly those years.

nostalgia is a powerful thing... the ex-slave-owning class is barely getting over abolition.

that happy incuriosity is changing, now strange smells and sounds are coming from under the hood, more folks are getting curious as to what the engine of the economy really runs on. it's shocking to think that rackets like deathware, the military and security are such a big part of the 'job market'. deathware including big ag and big pharma, tbtf banking and those financial weapons of mass destruction that then justify austerity measures.

i don't think they want to kill the consumer economy, but they're stuck with the lack of vision to see beyond the resource crunch, so conditioned are they to waste and growth, slash and burn, boom and bust.

all to vainly clutch onto a reality that is slipping through their fingers anyway...

there will be a window, as the world pseudo-economy crashes, for new ideas to take root and thrive. that moment may be very soon. the better we understand why the old way went south, the better we will navigate it, and possibly aid in the creation of something better out of its ashes.

the ultimate irony is that it might take a world economic crash to save us from the effects of runaway climate change...

 

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

by melo (melometa4(at)gmail.com) on Mon Apr 16th, 2012 at 07:43:15 PM EST
[ Parent ]
But the Great Compression itself, the dramatic turn from the distribution of wealth of the First Gilded Age to the distribution of wealth of the Post WWII Fordist era ...

... the Great Compression took place between 1935 and 1945. It was the New Deal and the New Dealers that done it. It wasn't done on the back of the GI Bill, as the GI Bill has not yet happened.

I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.

by BruceMcF (agila61 at netscape dot net) on Mon Apr 16th, 2012 at 11:19:47 PM EST
[ Parent ]
... early instance of the impulse that led to the repeal of Glass-Steagall ~ the troubling demands of the Eastern Money Center banks for sound collateral for loans interfered with the desire of the Western Pioneers for liquidity and for state chartered banks willing to provide that liquidity through extreme leverage.

Wasn't it in Michigan where there were two barrels of gold bullion, which did a leap frog along the path of the bank inspector, with the one barrel at the bank that the bank inspector was inspecting, and the other barrel making the journey from the bank that had just been visited to the bank about to be visited next.

There are also the stories of the reserves of hard currency, also in barrels, with the top fifth of the barrel full of silver and the bottom four fifths full of nails.


I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.

by BruceMcF (agila61 at netscape dot net) on Mon Apr 16th, 2012 at 11:39:01 PM EST
[ Parent ]
I don't argue that a National Bank is not necessary, but just that all three versions in the USA have proven highly problematic at providing for the common good, as opposed to the good of the bankers. We need one, but, so far, every attempt has turned malignant. The one positive out of this sorry history is that FDR and Marriner Eccles have demonstrated that an existing bank can be reformed. So we now have to demonstrate anew the ability to again generate such a reform, but this time it will be against a financial complex that also knows that it can be done.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
by ARGeezer (ARGeezer a in a circle eurotrib daught com) on Tue Apr 17th, 2012 at 11:22:56 AM EST
[ Parent ]
My point is that saying that they are "problematic" seems for some reason to suggest that the "no build option" is superior, when in my view, the No Bank Option was worse than both the Second Bank of the United States and the Federal Reserve System, warts and all ...

... and all too often the warts are put under a magnifying glass bought and paid for by those who want to in fact make the problems worse and instead eliminate either the good that they do do, or guarantee that they do not start doing the good that they might do.

I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.

by BruceMcF (agila61 at netscape dot net) on Tue Apr 17th, 2012 at 12:47:25 PM EST
[ Parent ]
... and all too often the warts are put under a magnifying glass bought and paid for by those who want to in fact make the problems worse and instead eliminate either the good that they do do, or guarantee that they do not start doing the good that they might do.
This ties in with Metatone's recent writing on learned helplessness.

guaranteed to evoke a violent reaction from police is to challenge their right to "define the situation." --- David Graeber citing Marc Cooper
by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Wed Apr 18th, 2012 at 04:17:37 AM EST
[ Parent ]
... system are not things that can be fixed by assuming that the current actions of the Federal Reserve are the best that is possible from the system as current designed, because then the structural reform proposals will omit the parts that can and in the past have worked quite well, where the problem is not structural at all but rather regulatory capture by the regulated industry.

Not only could we have better, but we could have better under the existing rules. Regulatory capture does not automatically or even necessarily require some systemic reform: it may, instead, require a movement committed to capturing the regulator back in the interest of the affected community rather than the regulated industry.


I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.

by BruceMcF (agila61 at netscape dot net) on Wed Apr 18th, 2012 at 09:36:55 AM EST
[ Parent ]
"We need one, but, so far, every attempt has turned malignant."

Thoughtless growth, as required by capitalism, often turns malignant.

Maybe the system is wrong, not the tweaks.

Align culture with our nature. Ot else!

by ormondotvos (ormond.otvosnospamgmialcon) on Tue Apr 17th, 2012 at 06:42:59 PM EST
[ Parent ]
The Federal Reserve From Creation in 1913 To Destruction in 2013 | Video Rebel's Blog

The Federal Reserve was created in 1913 to do four things which the FED is still engaged in today.  The Panic of 1907 was caused by speculators who used borrowed money to buy stock and by bucket shops which defrauded investors.  The Monetary Reform Commission  run by Senator Nelson Aldrich wanted an elastic currency so  the financial blunders of the 0.1% could be covered up by passing the costs onto the 99.9% through inflation. An elastic currency also allowed the costs of wars to be disguised  by inflation. The Federal Reserve also set up a fractional reserve banking system which permitted ten dollars to be loaned out for every one in deposit. This intentionally created an exaggerated credit cycle so bankers could profit from the wild swings in the prices of stocks and mortgages. And finally the Federal Reserve Note is an interest bearing currency which requires us to give the banks 500 billion dollars a year in interest payments for debts which are fictions created by a law passed in 1913. The Federal Reserve was designed to transfer our wealth to the bankers.

The Federal Reserve Act's elastic currency made it possible for President Wilson to promise to enter WW I. Wall Street wanted to enter the war so they could bankrupt England, overthrow the Czar killing 60 million Russians in the process and set up Palestine as a Jewish colony to be protected by the British Army. This was similar to WW II. The Japanese Emperor had  promised to withdraw from China and to even become an ally against Stalin as early as 1936. The German General staff under Beck and Canaris sent two men in March of 1938 to negotiate a treaty with the English offering to arrest Hitler. This means that World War II from the Rape of Nanking to the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and from the invasion of Poland to the fall of Berlin need not have happened. That 58 million people died for nothing does not merit a footnote in the stories told by the victorious Allies.

After WW II the US gave north Korea to Joe Stalin so they could set up the Korean war to get anti-Communists killed while running America into ground. On 11-22-1963 President Kennedy was killed on the 53rd anniversary of the first meeting to create the Federal Reserve as a message to the voters  to leave the FED alone. JFK's death also allowed Israel to develop the nuclear weapons he had opposed. It also allowed the US to be led into the Vietnam war so America could lose it while killing a generation of anti-Communists and anti-Globalists, That millions of people died in Korea and Indo-China and even more Unpayable Debts were piled onto America which  was very good in the eyes of bankers.



'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty
by melo (melometa4(at)gmail.com) on Tue Apr 17th, 2012 at 10:12:56 PM EST
[ Parent ]
That's an excellent example of what Bruce was talking about.

Everything in that quote is wrong.

Oh, and the language is Breivikesque.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

by JakeS (JangoSierra 'at' gmail 'dot' com) on Wed Apr 18th, 2012 at 04:07:59 AM EST
[ Parent ]
I didn't know until I looked it up just now that there was a pre-Henry Luce-1936 Life magazine.

Reading these quotes, I rather have to agree with your title.

by Mnemosyne on Tue Apr 17th, 2012 at 09:20:06 PM EST
The Federal Reserve Turns Left | The Nation

"Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve. I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You're right, we did it. We're very sorry. But thanks to you, we won't do it again."

by Federal Reserve Governor Ben S. Bernanke, At the Conference to Honor Milton Friedman, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois November 8, 2002



'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty
by melo (melometa4(at)gmail.com) on Fri Apr 20th, 2012 at 06:54:34 PM EST
There's always the ECB to do it this time.

guaranteed to evoke a violent reaction from police is to challenge their right to "define the situation." --- David Graeber citing Marc Cooper
by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Sat Apr 21st, 2012 at 03:47:54 AM EST
[ Parent ]


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