by Jim Marrs
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.
Some suspicious researchers have speculated on why so many secret society members—Greenspan, Bernanke, Tarullo (all members of the CFR)—and attorneys are needed to supervise the U.S. monetary system. It might be that bankers need their legal expertise. According to early conspiracy researcher and author Gary Allen, “Using a central bank to create alterna
te periods of inflation and deflation, and thus whipsawing the public for vast profits, had been worked out by the international bankers [aided by legal and public opinion experts] to an exact science.”
In 1913, Congressman Charles A. Lindbergh said that the Federal Reserve System “establishes the most gigantic trust on earth…. When the President signs this act, the invisible government by the money power…will be legitimized. The new law will create inflation whenever the trusts want inflation. From now on, depressions will be scientifically created,” he warned.
“Most Americans understand that the Fed controls our money system, but they believe its [sic] part of our government, as would be expected of any organization holding that much power over the destiny of our country,” explained Stephen Zarlenga, director of the American Monetary Institute in New York State. “Americans also erroneously believe the banking business consists of accepting deposits from clients and then re-loaning them to borrowers at a higher rate of interest.
“Though the number is definitely growing, most Americans have no idea that money (or more accurately interest-bearing bank credits [acting as a] purchasing media which serves as money) is created by the banking system when loans are made, through the fractional reserve provisions. This is understood by few novices, and often economists and even bankers fail to comprehend that they function as part of a money creation system, when they issue credits, and deposit them into their client’s accounts when loans are extended. Therefore most Americans would be surprised to learn that almost all of what we use for money is not issued by our government, but by private banks. They have been ‘allowed’ to form erroneous assumptions about our money and banking system that are far from reality and that serves to shield from closer scrutiny [from questions such as] whether the Fed is truly operating in the public interest or advancing more private agendas, either on purpose or by default.”
Bruce Wiseman, president of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights and former chairman of the history department at John F. Kennedy University, explained the Fed’s operations: “When the Fed prints the money or clicks the mouse, they have no money themselves. They are just creating it out of thin air. They just print it, or send it digitally. And then they charge interest on the money they lent to the Treasury. A hundred-dollar bill costs $0.04 to print. But the interest is charged on the $100. Go ahead: read it again; the words won’t change.
“The interest on the national debt last year [2008] was $451,154,049,950.63. That’s $1.23 billion a day. These are the same people that are now running our banks, insurance companies and automobile manufacturers. Reason weeps. Sure, I oversimplified it. The Fed doesn’t own all the debt and they do some other things. But these are the basics. That is how a central bank works.”
Wiseman and many others believe the goal of the current financial crisis is to destroy the U.S. dollar as the currency of world finance and, in the resulting chaos, put in its place a globalist-run monetary authority that pledges such a crisis shall not happen again.
FINANCIAL STABILITY BOARD
THE GLOBAL FINANCIAL AUTHORITY Wiseman alluded to may be found in the Financial Stability Board (FSB), created in April 2009 during the G-20 London Summit. The acronym G-20 refers to the group of twenty finance ministers and central bank governors from nineteen nations and the European Union. The FSB includes representatives from all G-20 nations.
The FSB evolved from the Financial Stability Forum (FSF), which was established in 1999 as a group within the Bank for International Settlements to “promote international financial stability.” It is clear now that the Forum’s agenda of stability did not work out so well. Following the G-20 London Summit, this group expanded from the discussion group forum (FSF) to a policy-making board (FSB) that can set standards, policies, and regulations and then pass them on to the respective nations. Today, the FSB is made up of the central bankers from Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Singapore, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States plus representatives of the World Bank, the European Union, the IMF, and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Europe, in other words, has six of the twelve national members.
It has been noted that the G-20 will enlarge the FSB to include all its member nations. However, observers see a definite pro-European bias. The United States will have one vote, equal to that of Italy.
The governor of Italy’s central bank, Mario Draghi, chairs the FSB and is former executive director of the World Bank. Like former Treasury secretary Henry Paulson, Draghi is a former executive with Goldman Sachs. Both Paulson and Draghi left the global investment firm in 2006 when Paulson went to Washington to head the up the Treasury and Draghi went to Rome to oversee Italy’s financial system and the FSF.
America’s commitment to the FSB was made on April 2, 2009, when President Obama signed the G-20 communiqué in London and announced America’s agreement to the new global economic union. “Henceforth, our SEC [Securities and Exchange Commission], Commodities Trading Commission, Federal Reserve Board and other regulators will have to march to the beat of drums pounded by the Financial Stability Board, a body of central bankers from each of the G-20 states and the European Union,” warned Dick Morris, bestselling author and former adviser to President Clinton. “The Europeans have been trying to get their hands on our financial system for decades. It is essential to them that they rein in American free enterprise so that their socialist heaven will not be polluted by vices such as the profit motive. Now, with President Obama’s approval, they have done it.”
Morris also opined on the FSB’s ability for “implementing…tough new principles on pay and compensation and to support sustainable compensation schemes and the corporate social responsibility of all firms…. That means that the FSB will regulate how much executives are to be paid and will enforce its idea of corporate social responsibility at ‘all firms.’” Bruce Wiseman interprets President Barack Obama’s signing of the United States into the FSB as “essentially turn[ing] over financial control of the country, and the planet, to a handful of central bankers, who, besides dictating policy covering everything from your retirement income to shareholder rights, will additionally have access to your health and education records.”
Although the Fed is technically owned through shares held by its twelve regional banks, these banks are entirely owned by the private member banks within their respective districts. And who controls these banks? Their investors, many of whom may not even be Americans. Stephen Zarlenga argues that there may not be reason for concern here, however. “Stories that the Federal Reserve is ‘owned’ by foreign bankers…are not accurate and these types of rumors have mainly served to discredit wholesome criticism of the banking system…. The control of the Federal Reserve System is more difficult to untangle and is not just a matter of counting shareholder votes. While foreign bankers might indirectly own shares of the regional Federal Reserve Banks through ownership of American banking companies, such ownership would be reported to the SEC if any entity held more than 5 percent of the American corporation.”
But, according to Zarlenga, there is one significant caveat: “The strong, potentially undue foreign influence, for example through the Bank for International Settlements (BIS).” Bringing the BIS into the financial mix is cause for further concern.
INTO A BIS
IN A 2003 ARTICLE titled “Controlling the World’s Monetary System: The Bank for International Settlements,” Joan Veon noted that the BIS is “where all of the world’s central banks meet to analyze the global economy and determine what course of action they will take next to put more money in their pockets, since they control the amount of money in circulation and how much interest they are going to charge governments and banks for borrowing from them…. When you understand that the BIS pulls the strings of the world’s monetary system, you then understand that they have the ability to create a financial boom or bust in a country. If that country is not doing what the money le
nders want, then all they have to do is sell its currency.”
The BIS has even seemed to be cryptically signaling that it may try to exert more global financial control. In September 2009, a BIS report stated, “The global market for derivatives rebounded to $426 trillion in the second quarter [2009] as risk appetite returned, but the system remains unstable and prone to crises.” Within days of this report, the former chief economist for the BIS, William White, warned that the world has not tackled the problems at the heart of the economic downturn and is likely to slip back into recession. He added, “The only thing that would really surprise me is a rapid and sustainable recovery from the position we’re in.”
Considering the growing power of the BIS over the U.S. economy and the bank’s Nazi history, BIS developments should be of serious concern to all Americans. It deserves much closer scrutiny than that provided by the corporate mass media. For one, the public should be aware that the BIS is essentially a sovereign state. Its personnel have diplomatic immunity for their persons and papers. No taxes are levied on the bank or the personnel’s salaries. The grounds on which BIS offices sit are sovereign, as are the buildings and offices. No government has legal jurisdiction over the bank, nor do any governments have oversight over its operations.
It should also be noted that the BIS was originally owned in part by the Fed, the Morgan-affiliated First National Bank of New York, the Bank of England, Germany’s Reichsbank, the Bank of Italy, the Bank of France, and other major central banks. The BIS, considered a “central bankers’ bank,” was created in 1930 in Basel, Switzerland, ostensibly to handle German war reparations.
The BIS was also heavily manipulated by secret societies. According to Carroll Quigley, a historian and a mentor to former President Bill Clinton, it was part of a plan “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…to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences.”