The Trillion-Dollar Conspiracy (9 page)

Jefferson knew from British and European history that a central bank trading on interest could quickly become the master of a nation, noting to John Taylor in 1816 that “…the other nations of Europe have tried and trodden every path of force or folly in fruitless quest of the same object, yet we still expect to find in juggling tricks and banking dreams, that money can be made out of nothing…. [B]anking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.” Jefferson added, “Already they have raised up a money aristocracy…. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs.”

Jefferson believed that instituting a central bank would be unconstitutional. “I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground [enshrined in the Tenth Amendment]: That ‘all powers not delegated to the United States, by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States or to the people.’ To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition. The incorporation of a bank, and the powers assumed by this bill, have not, in my opinion, been delegated to the United States, by the Constitution.”

Despite Jefferson’s lobbying, the financial chaos that resulted from the War of 1812 prompted Congress to issue a twenty-year charter to the Second Bank of the United States in 1816. Andrew Jackson, the first president from west of the Appalachian Mountains, denounced the central bank as unconstitutional and as “a curse to a republic; inasmuch as it is calculated to raise around the administration a moneyed aristocracy dangerous to the liberties of the country.” This central bank ended in 1836, after President Jackson vetoed a congressional bill to extend its charter.

Much to bankers’ dismay, Jackson fully eliminated the national debt by the end of his two terms as president. It was probably no coincidence that America’s first assassination attempt was made on Jackson by a man named Richard Lawrence, a man who claimed to be in touch with “the powers in Europe,” who had promised to intervene if any attempt was made to punish him. Lawrence was a painter, and many speculate that at the time the lead in his paints had caused him to become mentally unbalanced and fancy himself the rightful king of England. After stalking Jackson for several weeks, on January 30, 1835, a particularly humid day, he approached the president coming from a funeral. Stepping suddenly from behind a pillar, Lawrence pulled two pistols but both misfired, most likely due to damp powder. Lawrence was swiftly wrestled to the ground by onlookers, including Congressman Davy Crockett aided by Jackson. At his trial, Lawrence was prosecuted by Francis Scott Key, author of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The jury took only five minutes to find Lawrence insane and he spent the rest of his life in mental institutions, dying in 1861. Although many persons, including Jackson, believed Lawrence was part of a larger conspiracy, at the time there was no evidence to prove whether he was merely a lone-nut assassin or an early-day patsy somehow manipulated into attacking Jackson, an implacable enemy of the international bankers. However, it might be worth noting that in two successful presidential assassinations—those of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy—both men were attempting to thwart the international bankers—Lincoln by issuing his own money, greenbacks, and Kennedy in bypassing the Fed with U.S. notes in 1963.

“While most people understand what took place when the American Revolution was fought, many are not aware of the permanent financial revolution that [was] being fought over the world’s monetary system since 1694 when the Bank of England was created,” explained international reporter Joan Veon. “At that time, a group of private individuals decided that they could make a great deal of money if they changed the laws of the land to shift control of the country’s finances from the government to them. The Bank of England, which is England’s ‘central bank,’ is a private corporation which earns a continuous stream of income when the British government borrows from them to run the country. England was the ingenious country that recognized they could run the world’s finances if they established private corporations in all the countries of the world. The combined debt of all the world’s country’s [
sic
] would create an income stream of unbelievable amounts. In 1913, Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act creating our central bank. Most Americans don’t know that this organization is a private corporation established to control America’s monetary system through the banking industry.”

Other attempts were made to resurrect a central bank in America but none succeeded until the creation of the Federal Reserve System at the hands of a well-documented conspiracy. “The situation we are confronted with did not happen in the last few years, but began in 1913 when a group of cunningly deceitful legislators passed the Federal Reserve Act on December 24 at 11:45 p.m., after those who were opposed went home for Christmas,” Veon noted.

“[T]here was an occasion near the close of 1910, when 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…,” wrote Frank A. Vanderlip, one of the men who created the Fed. He went on to become president of New York’s National City Bank, a forebear of today’s Citibank.

What Vanderlip was referring to was a secretive trip on the night of November 22, 1910, by seven men who perhaps held as much as one-fourth of the world’s wealth. Jekyll Island was J. P. Morgan’s fashionable hunting retreat off the coast of Georgia, and the men went under secrecy so strict that they only used first names when addressing one another and brought in new servants who were unaware of their identities.

During their week on Jekyll Island, the men worked on a plan for a banking reform that the government deemed necessary after a series of financial panics in 1879, 1893, and 1907. In fact, Princeton University president and future U.S. president Woodrow Wilson proclaimed that the solution to the financial panics laid in the appointment of “a committee of six or seven public-spirited men like J. P. Morgan to handle the affairs of our country.” Cries arose for a stable national system that could regulate banking and prevent crises and panics. Today, many researchers believe these panics were artificially created as a pretext for the “reforms.”

The seven men were Vanderlip, who represented William Rockefeller and Jacob Schiff’s investment firm of Kuhn, Loeb & Company; Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Abraham Piatt Andrew; senior partner of J. P. Morgan Company Henry P. Davison; First National Bank of New York (a Morgan-dominated institution) president Charles D. Norton; Morgan lieutenant Benjamin Strong; Kuhn, Loeb & Company partner Paul Moritz Warburg; and Rhode Island Republican senator Nelson W. Aldrich. Though Aldrich was not technically a banker, he was an associate of J. P. Morgan. He was also the father-in-law of John D. Rockefeller Jr. Paul Warburg, an original founder of the Council on Foreign Relations, was the brother of Max Warburg, chief of the M. M. Warburg Company banking consortium in Germany and the Netherlands. In just a few years, Max Warburg would aid Lenin in crossing wartime Germany to found communism in Russia.

It must also be noted that senator Aldrich was chairman of the National Monetary Commission, charged with stabilizing the U.S. monetary system. Aldrich and his commission toured Europe at taxpayer expense and consulted with the top central banks of England, France, and Germany, which were all dominated by the Rothschilds. After spending $300,000 of tax dollars, the commission subsequently released a thirty-eight-volume history of European banking, focusing on the German Reichsbank, whose principal stockholders were the Rothschilds and M. M. Warburg Company.

The National Monetary Commission’s final report was prepared by the very men who had secretly journeyed to Morgan’s Jekyll Island Hunt Club ostensibly to hunt ducks. These men concluded that having one central bank in the United States was insufficient. Rather, several would be needed, and they would have to operated under the auspices of what would look like an official agency of the U.S. government. They also agreed that no one was to utter the words “central” or “bank,” a pact that held up well—the Fed was never publicly referred to as “the central bank” until well into the 1980s, when the term was no longer as loaded.

Speaking before the American Banker’s Association, Aldrich stated, “The organization proposed is not a bank, but a cooperative union of all the banks of the country for definite purposes.” Paul Warburg had conceived of constructing a cooperative banking union in which restrictions on the banker would be removed in a manner palatable to both the bankers and the public.

But too many people saw the Aldrich Plan as a transparent attempt to create a system by the bankers and for the bankers. “The Aldrich Plan is the Wall Street plan,” warned Representative Charles A. Lindbergh, father of the famed aviator. When Aldrich proposed his plan as a bill, it never got out of committee.

Aldrich needed a new tactic. It came by way of the House Banking and Currency Committee chairman, Representative Carter Glass of Virginia, who attacked the Aldrich Plan by openly stating it lacked government control and created a banking monopoly. Glass drafted an alternative, the Federal Reserve Act. Jekyll Island planners Vanderlip and Aldrich spoke out venomously against Glass’s bill, even though entire sections of the bill were identical to the Aldrich Plan. By putting on a front of banker opposition, Aldrich and Vanderlip ingeniously garnered public support for the Glass bill in the major newspapers.

Meanwhile, another tactic was being played out in the political arena—dethroning the president. President William Howard Taft was already on the record pledging to veto any legislation creating a central bank. A more compliant leader was needed by the bankers. This leader was Woodrow Wilson, the academic who had been retained as president of Princeton University by his former classmates Cleveland H. Dodge and Cyrus McCormick Jr., both directors of Rockefeller’s National City Bank of New York.

“For nearly 20 years before his nomination, Woodrow Wilson had moved in the shadow of Wall Street,” wrote author Ferdinand Lundberg. Wilson, who had praised J. P. Morgan in 1907, had been made governor of New Jersey. With the approval of the nation’s bankers, Wilson’s nomination for president was secured by Colonel Edward Mandell House, a close associate of Warburg and Morgan. House would go on to become Wilson’s constant companion and adviser. “The Schiffs, the Warburgs, the Kahns, the Rockefellers and the Morgans [all] had faith in House,” noted Professor Charles Seymour, who edited House’s papers.

But there was a problem. Early polling indicated that the Democrat Wilson could not defeat the Republican Taft. In a political maneuver that has been used successfully several times since, former president Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt—also a Republican—was encouraged to run as a third-party candidate. Large sums of money were provided to his Progressive Party by two major contributors closely connected to J. P. Morgan.

The maneuver worked as well with the 1912 campaign as it would with the subsequent campaigns of George Wallace, John B. Anderson, Ross Perot, Ralph Nader, and Chuck Baldwin. Roosevelt pulled enough votes away from Taft for Wilson to be elected by a narrow margin.

Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act on December 23, 1913, the same day a House-Senate conference committee had passed it along and the day before Christmas Eve. Congress was already home and the average citizen’s attention was focused on the holidays. “Congress was outflanked, outfoxed and outclassed by a deceptive, but brilliant, psycho-political attack,” commented G. Edward Griffin.

Today, the Federal Reserve System is composed of twelve Federal Reserve banks that operate under the New York Federal Reserve bank. Each serves a different section of the country. These banks are administered by a board of governors, which is appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. The confirmation is usually a rubber-stamp procedure.

As previously noted, the current chairman of the Fed’s board of governors is Ben Shalom Bernanke, who succeeded Alan Greenspan in 2006 and was renamed chairman by President Obama in August 2009. In 2008, Bernanke was photographed leaving the yearly meeting of that secretive globalist group known as the Bilderbergers (see Jim Marrs’s
Rule by Secrecy
for the history of the Bilderbergs) in Chantilly, Virginia. Also on the board of governors is Daniel Tarullo, a Georgetown law professor who specializes in international economic regulation, banking law, and international law, and who has served as a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

The youngest governor in the history of the board is Kevin Maxwell Warsh, a vice president of Morgan Stanley, who was age thirty-five at his appointment in February 2006. Warsh was trained as a lawyer, not as an economist.

Today, most people recognize that the Fed is a pivotal force in the world economy, but few understand who controls it and why. It is a private organization owned by its member banks, which are owned by private stockholders. And who are these stockholders?

“An examination of the major stockholders of the New York City banks shows clearly that a few families, related by blood, marriage, or business interests, still control the New York City banks which, in turn, hold the controlling stock of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York,” wrote Eustace Mullins. In his 1983 book
The Secrets of the Federal Reserve,
Mullins presented charts connecting the Fed and its member banks to the families of the Rothschilds, Morgans, Rockefellers, Warburgs, and others.

It is interesting to note that those who sit at the very top of the corporate, academic, and labor power hierarchy are listed as 2009 directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. This list includes James Dimon, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co.; Charles V. Wait, president, CEO, and chairman of the Adirondack Trust Company of Saratoga Springs, New York; Jeffrey R. Immelt, chairman and CEO of General Electric Company, Fairfield, Connecticut; Lee C. Bollinger, president of Columbia University; Kathryn S. Wylde, president and CEO of Partnership for New York City; and board chairman Denis M. Hughes, president of the New York State AFL-CIO.