corbett century of enslavement the history of the federal reserve

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|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 <http://tree3.com/dmquote/fdr/final.jpg>`__

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 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ahx-LPIkY4>`__.

**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?” <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ahx-LPIkY4>`__

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 <https://archive.org/details/gov.frb.sf.thefed>`__

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 <http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9B04E3DB173DE633A25757C2A...`__,
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 <https://archive.org/details/gov.frb.stlouis.fr-36-f>`__

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 <https://archive.org/details/gov.frb.ny.toomuch>`__

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 <http://www.realityzone.com/creature.html>`__ 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 <http://www.corbettreport.com/interview-794-g-edward-griffin-unmasks-the-...`__

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 <http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2012/05/24/archives/banking.html>`__
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 <http://fraser.stlouisfed.org/publication-series/?id=966>`__, 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 that will be repeated
in country after country around the world: a privately controlled
central bank lending money to the government at interest, money that it
prints out of nothing. And the jewel in the crown for the international
bankers that creates this system is the future economic powerhouse of
the world, the United States.

In many important respects, the history of the United States is the
history of the struggle of the American people against the bankers that
wish to control their money. By the 1780s, with colonies still fighting
for independence from the crown, the bankers will get their wish.

In 1781 the United States is in financial turmoil. The Continental, the
paper currency issued by the Continental Congress to pay for the war,
has collapsed from overissue and `British
counterfeiting <http://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/region_focus/2012/q1/pd...`__.
Desperate to find a way to finance the end stages of the war, Congress
turns to Robert Morris, a wealthy shipping merchant who was
`investigated for war
profiteering <http://www.counterpunch.org/2007/02/01/our-founding-war-profiteers/>`__
just two years earlier. Now as “Superintendent of Finance” of the United
States from 1781 to 1784 he is regarded as the most powerful man in
America next to General Washington.

In his capacity as Superintendent of Finance, Morris argues for the
creation of a privately-owned central bank deliberately modeled on the
Bank of England that the colonies were supposedly fighting against.
Congress, backed into a corner by war obligations and forced to do
business with the bankers just like King William in the 1690s,
acquiesces and `charters the Bank of North
America <http://fraser.stlouisfed.org/docs/bankunitedstates/firstsecondbank_clark...`__
as the nation’s first central bank. And exactly as the Bank of England
came into existence loaning the British crown 1.2 million pounds, the
B.N.A. started business by loaning $1.2 million to Congress.

By the end of the war, Morris has fallen out of political favor and the
Bank of North America’s currency has failed to win over a skeptical
public. The B.N.A. is downgraded from a national central bank to a
private commercial bank chartered by the State of Pennsylvania.

But the bankers have not given up yet. Before the ink is even dry on the
constitution, a group led by Alexander Hamilton is already working on
the next privately-owned central bank for the newly formed United States
of America.

So brazen is Hamilton in the forwarding of this agenda that he makes `no
attempt to hide <http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/1380/64322>`__ his
aims or those of the banking interests he serves:

“A national debt, if it is not excessive, will be to us a national
blessing,” he wrote in a letter to James Duane in 1781. “It will be a
powerful cement of our Union. It will also create a necessity for
keeping up taxation to a degree which, without being oppressive, will be
a spur to industry.”

Opposition to Hamilton and his debt-based system for establishing the
finances of the US is fierce. Led by Jefferson and Madison, the bankers
and their system of debt-enslavement is called out for the force of
destruction that it is. As Thomas Jefferson
`wrote <http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/presidents/thomas-jefferson/letters-of-thomas-...`__:

“[T]he spirit of war and indictment, […] since the modern theory of the
perpetuation of debt, has drenched the earth with blood, and crushed its
inhabitants under burdens ever accumulating.”

Still, Hamilton proves victorious. The First Bank of the United States
is chartered in 1791 and follows the pattern of the Bank of England and
the Bank of North America almost exactly; a privately-owned central bank
with the authority to loan money that it creates out of nothing to the
government. In fact, it is the very same people behind the new bank as
were behind the old Bank of North America. It was Alexander Hamilton,
Robert Morris’ former aide, who first proposed Morris for the position
of Financial Superintendent, and the director of the old Bank of North
America, Thomas Willing, is brought in to serve as the first director of
the First Bank of the United States. Meet the new banking bosses, same
as the old banking bosses.

In the first five years of the banks’ existence, the US government
borrows 8.2 million dollars from the bank and prices rise 72%. By 1795,
when Hamilton leaves office, the incoming Treasury Secretary announces
that the government needs even more money and sells off the government’s
meager 20% share in the bank, making it a fully private corporation.
Once again, the US economy is plundered while the private banking cartel
laughs all the way to the bank that they created.

By the time the bank’s charter comes due for renewal in 1811, the tide
has changed for the money interests behind the bank. Hamilton is dead,
shot to death in a duel with Aaron Burr. The bank-supporting Federalist
party is out of power. The public are wary of foreign ownership of the
central bank, and what’s more don’t see the point of a central bank in
time of peace. Accordingly, the charter renewal is voted down in the
Senate and the bank is closed in 1811.

Less than a year later, the US is once again at war with England. After
2 years of bitter struggle the public debt of the US has `nearly
tripled <http://www.publicdebt.treas.gov/history/1800.htm>`__ from $45.2
million to $119.2 million. With trade at a standstill, prices soaring,
inflation rising and debt mounting, President Madison signs the charter
for the creation of another central bank, the Second Bank of the United
States, in 1816. Just like the two central banks before it, it is
majority privately-owned and is granted the power to loan money that it
creates out of thin air to the government.

The 20 year bank charter is due to expire in 1836, but President Jackson
has already vowed to let it die prior to renewal. Believing that Jackson
won’t risk his chance for reelection in 1832 on the issue, the bankers
forward a bill to renew the bank’s charter in July of that year, 4 years
ahead of schedule. Remarkably, Jackson vetoes the renewal charter and
stakes his reelection on the people’s support of his move. In his `veto
message <http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/ajveto01.asp>`__,
Jackson writes in no uncertain terms about his opposition to the bank:

“Whatever interest or influence, whether public or private, has given
birth to this act, it can not be found either in the wishes or
necessities of the executive department, by which present action is
deemed premature, and the powers conferred upon its agent not only
unnecessary, but dangerous to the Government and country. It is to be
regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of
government to their selfish purposes.[…]If we can not at once, in
justice to interests vested under improvident legislation, make our
Government what it ought to be, we can at least take a stand against all
new grants of monopolies and exclusive privileges, against any
prostitution of our Government to the advancement of the few at the
expense of the many, and in favor of compromise and gradual reform in
our code of laws and system of political economy.”

The people side with Jackson and he’s reelected on the back of his
slogan, “Jackson and No Bank!” The President makes good on his pledge.
In 1833 he announces that the government will stop using the bank and
will pay off its debt. The bankers retaliate in 1834 by staging a
financial crisis and attempting to pin the blame on Jackson, but it’s no
use. On January 8, 1835, President Jackson succeeds in `paying off the
debt <http://www.publicdebt.treas.gov/history/1800.htm>`__, and for the
first and only time in its history the United States is free from the
debt chain of the bankers. In 1836 the Second Bank of the United States’
charter expires and the bank loses its status as America’s central bank.

It is 77 years before the bankers can regain the jewel in their crown.
But it is not for lack of trying. Immediately upon the death of the
bank, the `banking oligarchs in England
react <http://eh.net/book_reviews/the-jacksonian-economy/>`__ by
contracting trade, removing capital from the U.S., demanding payment in
hard currency for all exports, and tightening credit. This results in a
financial crisis known as the Panic of 1837, and once again Jackson’s
campaign to kill the bank is blamed for the crisis.

Throughout the late 19th century the United States is rocked by banking
panics brought about by wild banking speculation and sharp contractions
in credit. By the dawn of the 20th century, the bulk of the money in the
American economy has been centralized in the hands of a small clique of
industrial magnates, each with a near monopoly on a sector of the
economy. There are the Astors in real estate, the Carnegies and the
Schwabs in steel, the Harrimans, Stanfords and Vanderbilts in railroads,
the Mellons and the Rockefellers in oil. As all of these families start
to consolidate their fortunes, they gravitate naturally to the banking
sector. And in this capacity, they form a network of financial interests
and institutions that centered largely around one man, banking scion and
increasingly America’s informal central banker in the absence of a
central bank, John Pierpont Morgan.

John Pierpont Morgan, or “Pierpont” as he prefers to be called, is born
in Hartford, Connecticut in 1837 to Junius Spencer Morgan, a successful
banker and financier. Morgan rides his father’s coattails into the
banking business and by 1871 is partnered in his own firm, the firm that
was eventually to become J.P. Morgan and Company.

It is Morgan who finances Cornelius Vanderbilt’s `New York Central
Railroad <https://www.jpmorgan.com/pages/jpmorgan/about/history/month/nov>`__.
It is Morgan that finances the launch of nearly every major corporation
of the period, from AT&T to General Electric to General Motors to
Dupont. It is Morgan who buys out Carnegie and
`creates <http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/united-states-steel-cor...`__
the United States Steel Corporation, America’s first billion dollar
company. It is Morgan who `brokers a
deal <http://projects.vassar.edu/1896/morganbonds.html>`__ with
President Grover Cleveland to “save” the nation’s gold reserves by
selling 62 million dollars worth of gold to the Treasury in return for
government bonds. And it is Morgan, who, in 1907, sets in motion the
crisis that leads to the creation of the Federal Reserve.

That year, Morgan begins `spreading
rumors <http://books.google.co.jp/books?id=IE4EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA122&source=gbs_toc_...`__
about the precarious finances of the Knickerbocker Trust Company, a
`Morgan
competitor <http://econ.as.nyu.edu/docs/IO/23161/Hilt_03232012.pdf>`__
and one of the largest financial institutions in the United States at
the time. The resulting crisis, dubbed the Panic of 1907, shakes the
U.S. financial system to its core. Morgan puts himself forward as a
hero, boldly offering to help underwrite some of the faltering banks and
brokerage houses to keep them from going under. After a bout of
hand-wringing over the nation’s finances, a `Congressional
Committee <http://fraser.stlouisfed.org/publication/?pid=80>`__ is
assembled to investigate the “money trust,” the bankers and financiers
who brought the nation so close to financial ruin and that wield such
power over the nation’s finances. The public follows the issue closely,
and in the end a handful of bankers are identified as key players in the
money trust’s operations, including Paul Warburg, Benjamin Strong, Jr.,
and J.P. Morgan.

Andrew Gavin Marshall, editor of `The People’s Book
Project <http://thepeoplesbookproject.com/>`__, explains:

At the beginning of the 20th century there was an investigation
following the greatest of these financial panics, which was in 1907,
and this investigation was on “the money trust.” It found that three
banking interests–J.P. Morgan, National City Bank, and the City Bank
of New York–basically controlled the entire financial system. Three
banks. The public hatred toward these institutions was
unprecedented. There was an overwhelming consensus in the country
for establishing a central bank, but there were many different
interests in pushing this and everyone had their own purpose behind
advocating for a central bank.

So to represent most people, you had farmer interests, populists,
progressives, who were advocating a central bank because they
couldn’t take the recurring panics, but they wanted government
control of the central bank. They wanted it to be exclusively under
the public control because they despised and feared the New York
banks as wielding too much influence, so for them a central bank
would be a way to curb the power of these private financial
interests.

On the other hand, those same financial interests were advocating
for a central bank to serve as a source of stability for their
control of the system, and also to act as a lender of last resort to
them so they would never have to face collapse. But also, in order
to exert more control through a central bank, the private New York
banking community wanted a central bank under the exclusive control
of them. There’s a shocker.

So you had all these various interests which converged. Of course,
the most influential happened to be the New York financial houses
which were more aligned with the European financial houses than they
were with any other element in American society. The main individual
behind the founding of the Federal Reserve was Paul Warburg, who was
a partner with Kuhn, Loeb and Company, a European banking house. His
brothers were prominent bankers in Germany at that time, and he had
of course close connections with every major financial and
industrial firm in the United States and most of those existing in
Europe. And he was discussing all of these ideas with his fellow
compatriots in advocating for a central bank. In 1910, Warburg got
the support of a Senator named Nelson Aldrich, whose family later
married into the Rockefeller family (again, I’m sure just a
coincidence). Aldrich invited Warburg and a number of other bankers
to a private, secret meeting on Jekyll Island just off the coast of
Georgia where they met in 1910 to discuss the construction of a
central bank in the United States, but one which would of course be
owned by and serve the interests of the private bank. Aldrich then
presented this in 1911 as the “Aldrich Plan” in the U.S. Congress,
but it was actually voted out.

The public, suspicious of Senator Aldrich’s banking connections,
ultimately reject the Jekyll Island cabal’s “Aldrich Plan.” The cabal
does not give up, however. They simply revise and rename their plan,
giving it a new public face, that of Representative Carter Glass and
Senator Robert Owen.

In the end, the money trust that was behind the Panic of 1907 uses the
public’s own outrage against them to complete their consolidation of
control over the banking system. The newly-retitled Federal Reserve Act
is signed into law on December 23, 1913 and the Fed begins operations
the next year.

**Part Two: How the Scam Works**

“\ *The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in
which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to
reveal it.*\ ” -`John Kenneth
Galbraith <http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Banking>`__

So how does the Federal Reserve system work? What does it do? Who owns
and controls it? These are the basic questions that would get to the
heart of the fundamental question: ‘what is money?’ And that is why the
answer to these questions have been shrouded in impenetrable economic
jargon.

Even the Federal Reserve’s own educational propaganda, which has an
unusual tendency toward cutesy animation and talking down to its
audience, has a difficult time summarizing the Fed’s mission and
responsibilities. According to the Fed:

To achieve [its] goals, the Fed, then and now, combines centralized
national authority through the Board of Governors with a healthy
dose of regional independence through the reserve banks. A third
entity, the Federal Open Market Committee, brings together the first
two in setting the nation’s monetary policy.

**SOURCE**: `In Plain
English <https://www.stlouisfed.org/education_resources/in-plain-english-video/>`__

Precisely what imaginary gaggle of schoolchildren is this economic
gibberish aimed at?

The simple truth, hidden behind the sleight of hand of economic jargon
and magisterial titles, is that a banking cartel has monopolized the
most important item in our entire economy: money itself.

We are taught to think of money as the pieces of paper printed in
government printing presses or coins minted by government mints. While
this is partially true, in this day and age the actual notes and coins
circulating in the economy represent only a tiny fraction of the money
in existence. Over 90% of the money supply is in fact created by private
banks as loans that are payable back to the banks at interest.

Although this simple fact is obscured by the wizards of Wall Street and
gods of money who want to make the money creation process into some
special art of alchemy carefully overseen by the government, the truth
is not hidden from the public.

In December 1977, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York published another
of its dumbed-down cartoon-ridden `information
pamphlets <http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED175743.pdf>`__ for the
general public attempting to explain the functions of the Federal
Reserve System. There in black and white they carefully explain the
money creation process:

“Commercial banks create checkbook money whenever they grant a loan,
simply by adding new deposit dollars to accounts on their books in
exchange for a borrower’s IOU.[...]Banks create money by ‘monetizing’
the private debts of businesses and individuals. That is, they create
amounts of money against the value of those IOUs.”

There it is, in plain English: the vast majority of money in the
economy, the “checkbook” money in our accounts at the bank and that we
use in our electronic transfers and digital payments, is created not by
a government printing press, but by the bank itself. It is created out
of thin air as debt, owed back to the bank that created it at interest.
This means that bank loans are not money taken from other bank
depositors, but new money simply conjured into existence and placed into
your account. And the bank is able to create much more money than it has
cash to back up those deposits.

The Fed claims to be the entity overseeing and backing up the banking
industry. It was established, according to its own propaganda, to
stabilize the system and prevent bank runs like the Panic of 1907 from
happening again:

Throughout much of the 1800s, almost any organization that wanted
could print its own money. As a result, many states, banks, and even
one New York druggist, did just that. In fact at one time there were
over 30,000 different varieties of currency in circulation. Imagine
the confusion.

Not only were there multitudes of currencies, some were redeemable
in gold and silver, others were backed by bonds issued by regional
governments. It was not unusual for people to lose faith both in the
value of their currency and in the entire financial system. With
many people trying to withdraw their deposits at once, sometimes the
banks didn’t have enough money on hand to pay their depositors. Then
when the funds ran out the banks suspended payment temporarily and
some even closed. People lost their entire savings. Sometimes
regional economies suffered.

Obviously something had to be done. And in 1913, something was. In
that year, President Woodrow Wilson signed into effect the Federal
Reserve Act. This act created the Federal Reserve system to provide
a safer and more stable monetary and banking system.

**SOURCE:** `The Fed
Today <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1OJlJ9COg0>`__

If that was indeed its aim, it signally failed to do so in running up
one of the greatest bubbles in American history to that point in the
1920s, just a decade after its creation. The popping of that bubble, of
course, lead directly into the Great Depression and one of the greatest
periods of mass poverty in American history. Economists have long argued
that the Fed itself was the cause of the depression by its complete
mismanagement of the money supply. As former Federal Reserve Chairman
Ben Bernanke
`admitted <http://www.federalreserve.gov/BOARDDOCS/SPEECHES/2002/20021108/>`__
in a speech commemorating Fed critic Milton Friedman’s 90th birthday:
“Regarding the Great Depression. You’re right, we did it. We’re very
sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.”

“Price stability” is another cited tenet of the Federal Reserve’s
mandate. But here, too, the Fed has completely failed to live up to its
own standards:

Aside from the banking system, the Federal Reserve has another
responsibility that’s probably even more important. It’s in charge
of something called “monetary policy.” Basically, it means trying to
keep prices stable to avoid inflation. Say you buy a CD today for
$14. But what if next year the price of the CD jumped to $20 or $50,
not because of a change in supply or demand, but because all prices
were going up. That’s inflation.

There are a lot of different causes of inflation, but one of the
most important is too much money. The Fed can adjust the money
supply by injecting money into the system electronically, or by
withdrawing money from the economy.

Think of it: the Federal Reserve has the ability to create money, or
make it disappear. What’s most important is what happens as a
result. Any time the supply of money is altered, the effects are
felt throughout the economy.

The Fed’s methods have changed over time to take advantage of the
latest computers and electronics, but its mission remains the same:
to aim for stable prices, full employment and a growing economy.

**SOURCE:** `Inside The
Fed <https://archive.org/details/gov.frb.fr62.04>`__

100 years ago, in 1913, the Fed was created, and we’ve marked it
with a vertical line there. Consumer prices now are about 30 times
higher than they were when the Fed was created in 1913.

**SOURCE:**
`Bloomberg <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cikT5DdvGj4>`__

Paper money, too, is the responsibility of the Federal Reserve. Hence
the dollars in circulation are not Treasury notes, not bills of credit,
but Federal Reserve Notes, debt-based notes backed up ultimately by the
government’s own promise to pay, its “sovereign bonds” secured by the
taxpayers themselves. At one time, the Federal Reserve Banks were
legally required to keep large stockpiles of gold in reserve to back up
these notes, but that requirement was abandoned and today the notes are
backed up mostly by government securities. The Fed `no longer keeps any
actual
gold <http://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/does-the-federal-reserve-own-or-hold-...`__
on its books, but gold “certificates” issued by the treasury and valued
not at the spot price of $1300 per troy ounce, but an arbitrarily fixed
“statutory price” of $42 2/9 per ounce.

**Ron Paul**: But I do have one question: During the crisis or at
any time that you’re aware of, has the Federal Reserve or the
Treasury participated in any gold swap arrangements?

**Scott Alvarez**: The Federal Reserve does not own any gold at all.
We have not owned gold since 1934 so we have not engaged in any gold
swaps.

**Ron Paul**: But it appears on your balance sheet that you hold
gold.
**Scott Alvarez**: What appears on our balance sheet is gold
certificates. When we turned in…before 1934, we did…the Federal
Reserve did own gold. We turned that over by law to the Treasury and
received in return for that gold certificates.

**Ron Paul**: If the Treasury entered into…because under the
Exchange Stabilization Fund I would assume they probably have the
legal authority to do it…they wouldn’t be able to do it then because
you have the securities for essentially all the gold?

**Scott Alvarez**: No, we have no interest in the gold that is owned
by the Treasury. We have simply an accounting document that is
called “gold certificates” that represents the value at a statutory
rate that we gave to the Treasury in 1934.

**Ron Paul**: And still measured at $42 an ounce which makes no
sense whatsoever.

SOURCE: `House Financial Services Subcommittee
Hearings <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psagxfZ4K0UF>`__

Clearly, there is a discrepancy between what we are led to believe is
motivating the Fed and what it actually does. To understand what the Fed
is actually intended to do, it’s first important to understand that the
Federal Reserve is not a bank, per se, but a system. This system
codifies, institutionalizes, oversees and undergirds a form of banking
called fractional reserve banking, in which banks are allowed to lend
out more money than they actually have in their vaults.

The process of decay and corruption starts with something called
“fractional reserve banking.” That’s the technical name for it. And
what that really means is that as the banking institution developed
over several centuries, starting of course in Europe, it developed a
practice of legalizing a certain dishonest accounting procedure.

In other words, in the very, very beginning (if you want to go all
the way back), people would bring their gold or silver to the banks
for safe keeping. And they said, “give us a paper receipt, we don’t
want to guard our silver and our gold because people could come in
in the middle of the night and they could kill us or threaten us and
they’ll get our gold and silver so we can ‘t really guard it so
we’ll take it to the bank and have them guard it and we just want a
paper receipt. And we’ll take our receipt back and get our gold
anytime we want.” So in the beginning money was receipt money. Then,
instead of changing or exchanging the gold coins, they could
exchange the receipts, and people would accept the receipts just as
well as the gold, knowing that they could get gold. And so these
paper receipts being circulated were in essence the very first
examples of paper money.

Well the banks learned early on in that game that here they were
sitting on this pile of gold and all these paper receipts out there.
People weren’t bringing in the receipts anymore, very few of them,
maybe five percent maybe seven percent of the people would bring in
their paper receipts and ask for the gold. So they said, “Ah ha! Why
don’t we just sort of give more receipts out then we have gold?
They’ll never know because they only ask for, at the best, seven
percent of it. So we can create more receipts for gold then we have.
And we can collect interest on that because we’ll loan that into the
economy. We’ll charge interest on this money that we don’t really
have. And it’s a pretty good gimmick don’t ya think?” And they go,
“Well, yeah, of course.” And so that’s how fractional reserve
banking started.

And now it’s institutionalized and they teach it in school. No one
ever questions the integrity of it or the ethics of it. They say,
“Well, that’s the way banking works, and isn’t it wonderful that we
now have this flexible currency and we have prosperity” and all
these sorts of things. So it all starts with this concept of
fractional reserve banking.

The trouble with that is that it works most of the time. But every
once and a while there are a few ripples that come along that are a
little bit bigger than the other ripples. Maybe one of them is a
wave. And more than seven percent will come in and ask for their
gold. Maybe twenty percent or thirty percent. And well, now the
banks are embarrassed because the fraud is exposed. They say, “well
we don’t have your gold” “What do you mean you don’t have my gold!!
I gave it to you and put it on deposit and you said you’d safe guard
it.” “Well we don’t have it, we loaned it out.” So then the word
gets out and everyone and their uncle comes out and lines up for
their gold. And of course they don’t have it, the banks are closed,
and they have bank holidays. Banks are embarrassed, people lose
their savings. You have these terrible banking crashes that were
ricocheting all over the world prior to this time. And that is what
caused the concern of the American people. They didn’t want that
anymore. They wanted to put a stop to that.

And that was the whole purpose, supposedly, of the Federal Reserve
system. Was to put a stop to that. But since the people who designed
the plan to put a stop to it were the very ones who were doing it in
the first place, you can not be surprised that their solution was
not a very good one so far as the American people were concerned.
Their solution was to expand it. Not to control it, to expand it.
See, prior to that time, this little game of fractional reserve
banking was localized at the state level. Each state was doing its
own little fractional reserve banking system. Each state, in
essence, had its own Federal Reserve. Central banks were authorized
by state law to do this sort of thing. And that was causing all this
problem. So the Federal Reserve came along and said, “No no, we’re
not going to do this at the state level anymore, because look at all
the problem it’s causing. We’re going to consolidate it all together
and we’re going to do it at the national level.”

**SOURCE**: `Interview with G. Edward
Griffin <http://www.corbettreport.com/interview-794-g-edward-griffin-unmasks-the-...`__

The key to the system, of course, is who controls this incredible power
to “regulate” the economy by setting reserve requirements and targeting
interest rates. The answer to this question, too, has been deliberately
obscured.

The Federal Reserve system is a deliberately confusing mish-mash of
public and private interests, reserve banks, boards and committees,
centralized in Washington and spread out across the United States.

The reason that the Federal Reserve goes to such great lengths to make
its organizational structure as confusing as possible is to cover up the
massive conflicts of interest that are at the heart of that system. The
fact is that the Federal Reserve system is comprised of a Board of
Governors, 12 regional banks, and an open market committee. The
privately-owned member banks of each Federal Reserve Bank vote on the
majority of the Reserve Bank’s directors, and the directors vote on
members to serve on the Federal Open Market Committee which determines
monetary policy. What’s more, Wall Street is given a prime seat at the
table, with tradition holding that the President of the powerful New
York Federal Reserve Bank be given the Vice Chairmanship of the FOMC and
be made a permanent committee member. In effect, the private banks are
the key determinants in the composition of the FOMC which regulates the
entire economy.

`According to the
Fed <http://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/about_14986.htm>`__ “its
monetary policy decisions do not have to be approved by the President or
anyone else in the executive or legislative branches of government, it
does not receive funding appropriated by the Congress, and the terms of
the members of the Board of Governors span multiple presidential and
congressional terms.”

Or, in the `words of Alan
Greenspan <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CM2vMHx46ww>`__: “The Federal
Reserve is an independent agency and that means there is no other agency
of government that can overrule actions that we take.”

The Fed goes on in its self-mythologization to state that it is “not a
private, profit-making institution.” This characterization is dishonest
at best, and an outright lie at worst.

The regional banks are themselves private corporations, as noted in a
`1928 Supreme Court ruling <http://openjurist.org/275/us/415>`__:
“Instrumentalities like the national banks or the federal reserve banks,
in which there are private interests, are not departments of the
government. They are private corporations in which the government has an
interest.” This point is even
`admitted <http://www.c-span.org/video/?c3668281/clip-freedom-information-cases>`__
by the Federal Reserve’s own senior counsel.

These private corporations issue shares that are held by the member
banks that make up the system, making the banks the ultimate owners of
the Federal Reserve Banks. Although the Fed’s profits are returned to
the Treasury each year, the member banks’ shares of the Fed do earn them
a 6% dividend. According to the Fed, the fixed nature of these returns
mean that they are not being held for profit.

Despite the dishonest nature of this description, however, it is
important to understand that the bankers who own the Federal Reserve
indeed do not make their money from the Fed directly. Instead, the
benefits are much less obvious, and much more insidious. The simplest
way that this can be understood is that, as a century of history and the
specific example of the last financial crisis shows, the Fed was used as
a vehicle to bail out the very bankers who own the Fed banks in the most
obvious example of fascistic collusion imaginable.

The 2008 crisis and subsequent bailouts are merely the latest and most
brazen examples of the fundamental conflicts of interest at the heart of
America’s privately-owned central banking system.

Beginning with the collapse of Lehman Bros. in September of that year,
the Federal Reserve embarked on an unprecedented program of bailouts and
special zero interest lending facilities for the very banks that had
caused the subprime meltdown in the first place. By the cartelization of
the Federal Reserve structure, and thus not by accident, it was the very
bank presidents who had overseen their banks’ lending practices that
ended up in the director positions of the Federal Reserve Banks that
voted on where to direct the trillions of dollars in bailout money. And
unsurprisingly, they directed it toward their own banks.

A stunning `2011 Government Accountability Office
report <http://www.scribd.com/doc/60553686/GAO-Fed-Investigation#outer_page_144>`__
examined $16 trillion of bailout facilities extended by the Fed in the
wake of the crisis and exposed numerous examples of blatant conflicts of
interest. Jeffrey Immelt, chief executive of General Electric served as
a director on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York at the
same time the Fed provided $16 billion in financing to General Electric.
JP Morgan Chase chief executive, Jamie Dimon, meanwhile, was also a
member of the board of the New York Fed during the period that saw $391
billion in Fed emergency lending directed to his own bank. In all,
Federal Reserve board members were tied to $4 trillion in loans to their
own banks. These funds were not simply used to keep these banks afloat,
but actually to return these Fed-connected banks to a period of record
profits in the same period that the average worker saw their real wages
actually decrease and the economy on main street slow to a standstill.

Then Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke was
`confronted <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dhwmfOX9qk>`__ about these
conflicts of interest by Senator Bernie Sanders upon the release of the
GAO report in June 2012.

Bernanke is completely right. These conflicts are in fact a part of the
institution itself. A structural feature of the Federal Reserve that was
baked into the Federal Reserve Act itself over 100 years ago by the
bankers who conspired to cartelize the nation’s money supply. You could
not ask for a more succinct reason why the Federal Reserve itself, this
admitted cartel of banking interests, needs to be abolished…but you
could get one.

**Part Three: End the Fed**

“\ *They who control the credit of a nation, direct the policy of
Governments and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the
people.*\ ” – `Reginald
McKenna <http://tree3.com/dmquote/mckenna/final.jpg>`__

We now know that for centuries the people of the United States have been
at war with the international banking oligarchs. That war was lost,
seemingly for good, in 1913, with the creation of the Federal Reserve.
With the passage of the Federal Reserve Act, President Woodrow Wilson
consigned the American population to a century in which the money supply
itself has depended on the whims of the banking cabal. A century of
booms and busts, bubbles and depressions, has led to a wholesale
redistribution of wealth toward those at the very top of the system. At
the bottom, the masses toil in relative poverty, single-income
households becoming double-income households out of necessity, their
quality of life being slowly eroded as the Federal Reserve Notes that
pass for dollars are themselves devalued.

Worse yet, the fraud itself perpetuates Alexander Hamilton’s persistent
myth that a national debt is necessary at all. The US is now locked into
a system whereby the government issues bonds to generate the funds for
their operations, bonds that are backed up by the taxation of the
public’s own labor.

The perpetrators of this fraud, meanwhile, remain in the shadows,
largely ignored by a general public that could instantly recognise the
latest Hollywood heartthrob or pop idol, but have no clue what the head
of Goldman Sachs or the New York Fed does, let alone who they are. This
cabal bear allegiance to no nationality, no philosophy or creed, no code
of ethics. They are not even motivated by greed, but power. The power
that the control of the money supply inevitably brings with it.

It did not take long for this lust for power to rear its head. In 1921,
just 7 years after the Fed began operations, the same J.P.
Morgan-connected banking elite that founded the Federal Reserve
incorporated an organization called The Council on Foreign Relations
with the goal of taking over the foreign policy apparatus of the United
States, including the State Department. In this quest, it was remarkably
successful. Although there are only about 4000 members in the
organization today, its membership has included 21 Secretaries of
Defense, 18 Treasury Secretaries, 18 Secretaries of State, 16 CIA
directors and many other high-ranking government officials, military
officers, business elite, and, of course, bankers. The first Director of
the CFR was John W. Davis, J.P. Morgan’s personal lawyer and a
millionaire in his own right.

Together with its sister organizations in Britain and elsewhere around
the world, these groups would work together toward what they called a
“New World Order” of total financial and political control directed by
the bankers themselves. As Carroll Quigley, noted Georgetown historian
and mentor of Bill Clinton,
`wrote <http://tree3.com/dmquote/quigley/final.jpg>`__ in his 1966 work,
Tragedy and Hope: A History of The World In Our Time:

“The powers of financial capitalism had [a] far-reaching aim, nothing
less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands
able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of
the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist
fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret
agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The
apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in
Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s
central banks which were themselves private corporations.”

This is why the bankers and their partners in government and business
conspired to bring about the 2008 crisis. Not for the pursuit of money,
but power. In the same way the bankers used the Panic of 1907 to
consolidate their control over the money supply, they hope to use the
2008 crisis and subsequent panics, which they themselves have created,
to consolidate their political control.

The inevitable conclusion, one that flows necessarily from the true
understanding of this situation, is that the Federal Reserve system
needs to be consigned to the dustbin of history. After a century of
enslavement, it is time for the American public to finally throw off the
bankers’ debt chains.

If you’ve made it this far, congratulations. You are now better informed
on the economic history of the United States and the truth about the
Federal Reserve than 99% of the population. If you do nothing else, then
just working to get those around you educated on this information alone
will have a profound effect. Once they learn of the scam, many are
motivated to do something about it, and they, in turn, inform others.
This is the viral nature of suppressed truth, and it is the reason that
more people are aware of and energized by the issue of the Federal
Reserve and the nature of money than ever before.

Perhaps even more amazingly, this movement is spreading to other parts
of the globe. Recognizing the interlocking nature of the modern global
economy, and the international nature of the banking oligarchy,
movements to abolish the Federal Reserve have `sprung up in
Europe <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIjYjkJt2us>`__, where protests
against the cartelized central banking system are taking place in over
100 cities attracting 20,000 people on a weekly basis.

But what if the burgeoning movement to End The Fed is successful? What
system do people propose as the answer? There have been several
proposals along different lines by various researchers. `Some
argue <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0p1b8OPDH8>`__ for a return to
America’s colonial roots of debt-free money issued by state run banks,
pointing to the Bank of North Dakota as one already functioning,
successful model of this approach.

`Others
advocate <http://grtv.ca/2013/04/avoiding-economic-collapse-complementary-currencies>`__
a decentralized system of alternative and competing currencies that
greatly reduce or even eliminate altogether the need for a central bank.

`Some argue <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z440p2i8wJU>`__ for
currencies whose mathematical nature prevent them from being merely
conjured into existence whenever a federal government wants to wage
another war of aggression or forge another link in the seemingly endless
train of governmental tyranny and abuse.

Other, even more innovative ideas have been forwarded to harness current
technologies to bring credit creation back to the individual level and
revolutionize our concept of money altogether:

Sound money. Cryptocurrencies. State banks. LETS programs. Self-issued
credit. These and many other solutions have all been proposed and many
of them are in use in different localities today. Information on all of
these ideas and how they are being applied in various parts of the world
are widely available online today. The point is that the question of
what money is and how it should be created is perhaps the single
greatest question facing humanity as a whole, and yet it is one that has
been almost completely eliminated from the national conversation…until
recently.

For the first time in living memory, people are once again rallying
around the monetary issue, and American politics stands on the threshold
of a transformation almost unimaginable just two decades ago.

And so the rest of the story is now in our hands. Once we understand the
scam that has taken place, the gradual consolidation of wealth and power
in the hands of an elite few banking oligarchs and the growing
impoverishment of the masses, all in the name of banking funny money
created out of nothing and loaned to the public at interest, we can
choose to get active or to do nothing at all.

For those who choose to get active, there are some steps that you can
take to help change the course of this system:
1) Follow the links and resources from the transcript of this
documentary at
`corbettreport.com/federalreserve <http://www.corbettreport.com/?p=10679>`__
to familiarize yourself with the history, the connections and the
functions of the Federal Reserve system. If you can’t explain this
material to yourself then you will never be able to teach it to others.

2) Begin reaching out to others to bring them up to speed on the issue.
It can be as simple as broaching this conversation in the Monday morning
water cooler talk or passing out a copy of this documentary or sending
out links to this information to your email list. Insert this topic into
your conversations. When people start talking about the national debt or
the state of the economy or other political talking points, get them to
question the roots of these issues, and why there is a national debt at
all.

3) When you are able to find or create a group of like-minded people in
your area who are engaged with the issue, start a study group on the
issue and its solutions. The study group can help source alternative or
complementary currencies in the local area, or, if none exist already,
the group can form the basis for a community of local businesses and
customers who are willing to start experimenting with ways to wean
themselves off of the Federal Reserve notes.

4) Use the resources at corbettreport.com, including the Federal Reserve
information flyer, or hold DVD screenings, to attract interest in your
group and draw others into studying the true nature of the monetary
system.

The work of building up an alternative to the current system can seem
daunting, even at times overwhelming. But it’s important to keep in mind
that the Federal Reserve system that seems so monolithic today has only
been around for one century. Central banks have been defeated in America
before and they can be defeated again.

The question of how we decide to change this system is not rhetorical;
it will either be answered by an informed, engaged, active population
working together to create viable alternatives and to dismantle the
current system, or it will be answered by the same banking oligarchy
that has been controlling the money supply, and indeed the lifeblood of
the country, for generations.

Now, one century after the creation of the Federal Reserve system, we
have a choice to make: whether the next century, like the one before it,
It can be as simple as broaching this conversation in the Monday morning
water cooler talk or passing out a copy of this documentary or sending
out links to this information to your email list. Insert this topic into
your