[size="4"][color="#008080"]Part X[size="2"] (of XVIII)[/size] : The Noose Tightens -- The return of the gold standard[/color][/size]
Why was silver bad for the bankers and gold good?
Simple because silver was plentiful in the United States, it was very hard to control.
Gold was, and always has been, scarce. Throughout history it has been relatively easy to monopolize gold, but silver has historically been 15 times more plentiful.
With Lincoln out of the way, The Money Changers next objective was to gain complete control over America's money. They wanted two things: (1) the reinstitution of a central bank under their exclusive control, and (2) an American currency backed by gold.
[size="3"][color="#008080"]# Contraction of the Greenbacks[/color][/size]
This was no easy task. With the opening of the American West, silver had been discovered in huge quantities. On top of that, Lincoln's greenbacks were generally popular.
Despite the European central bankers deliberate attacks on greenbacks, they continued to circulate in the United States.
According to historian W. Cleon Skouson:
[indent]"Right after the Civil War there was considerable talk about reviving Lincoln's brief experiment with the Constitutional monetary system. Had not the European money trust intervened, if would have no doubt become an established institution."
[/indent]
It is clear that the concept of America printing her own debt-free money, sent shockwaves throughout the European central banking elite.
They watched with horror as Americans clammered for more greenbacks.
They may have killed Lincoln, but support for his monetary ideas grew.
On April 12 1866, at the bidding of European central banking interest, congress passed the Contraction Act authorizing the secretary of the treasury to begin to retire some of the greenbacks in circulation and thereby contract the money supply.
Authors Theodore R. Thoren and Richard F. Warner explain the result of the money contraction in their classic book on the subject 'The truth in Money':
[indent]"The hard times which occurred after the civil war could have been avoided if the greenback legislation had continued as president Lincoln has intended it. Instead, there were a series of money panics, what we call recessions, which put pressure on the congress to enact legislation the banking system under centralized control. Eventually the federal reserve act was passed on December 23rd 1913."
[/indent]
[color="#008080"][size="3"]# Post Civil War Depression
[/size][/color]
The Money Changersââ¬â¢ strategy was twofold:
(1) [color="#ff0000"]cause a series of panic to try to convince the American people that only centralized control of the money supply could provide economic stability[/color], and
(2) [color="#ff0000"]remove so much from the system that most Americans would be so desperately poor that they either wouldn't care or would be too weak to oppose the bankers.[/color]
[color="#ff00ff"]{ Note: {Timeline: Present} For those who have noticed, in the current depression sweeping the West, the point (2) above is being effected in US as well as progressively in the PIIGS countries of Europe. Techniques to do so have just gotten sophisticated with time. For example, you pay for the fraudulent derivatives, which the bankers created out of thin air in the first place, through devaluations and taxation }[/color]
In 1866, there was $1.8 billion in currency in circulation in the US, about $50.46 per capita.
In 1867 alone, $500 million was removed from the money supply.
Ten years later, in 1876, America's money supply was reduced to only $6 billion. In other words 2/3 of America's money had been called in by the bankers. Only $14.60 per capita remained in circulation.
Ten years later, in 1886, the money supply had been reduced to only 4 million dollars, even though the population had boomed. The result was that only $6.67 per capita remained in circulation.
A 700% loss in buying power over 20 years.
[color="#ff0000"]
Today economist try to sell the idea that recessions and depressions are a natural part of something they call the business-cycle.[/color]
[size="3"]The truth is our money supply is manipulated now just as it was before and after the civil war.[/size] [size="3"] How did this happen? How did money become so scarce?
Simple.[/size] [size="3"] Bank loans were called in, and no new ones were given.
In addition, silver coins were melted down.[/size]
[color="#008080"][size="3"]# The mauling of Silver[/size][/color]
In 1872 a man named Ernest Seyd, was given 100,000 pounds by The Bank of England, and sent to America to bribe necessary congressman to get silver demonetised. He was told if that was not sufficient, to draw as much more as was necessary.
The next year congress passed The Coinage Act of 1873, and the minting of silver abruptly stopped.
In fact representative Samuel Hooper who introduced the bill in the house, acknowledged that Mister Seyd actually drafted the legislation.
Worse, In 1874 Seyd himself admitted who is behind the scheme:
[indent]"I went to America in the winter of 1872-73, authorized to secure, if I could, the passage of the bill demonetising silver. [color="#ff0000"]It was in the interest of those I represented - the governors of The Bank of England - to have it done[/color]. By 1873, gold coins were the only form of coin money."
[color="#008080"] [/color][/indent][color="#008080"][size="3"]# Silver Commission & Riots[/size][/color]
By 1876, with 1/3 of America's workforce unemployed, the population was growing restless.
People were clammering for a return to the greenback money system of president Lincoln or a return to silver money.
Anything that would make money more plentiful.
That year congress created the United States Silver Commission to study the problem.
Their [color="#ff0000"]report clearly blame the monetary contraction on the national bankers.[/color]
The report is interesting, because it compares the deliberate money contraction by the national bankers after the civil war to the fall of the Roman Empire:
[indent]"The disaster of the Dark Ages was caused by decreasing money and falling prices.... Without money, civilization could not have had a beginning, and with a diminishing supply, it must languish and unless relieved, finally perish."
"At the Christian era the metallic money of the Roman Empire amounted to $1,800,000.000. By the end of the Fifteenth century it had shrunk to less than $200,000.000... History records no other such disastrous transition as that from the Roman Empire to the Dark Ages"
[/indent] Despite this report by the Silver Commission, congress took no action.
The next year 1877, riots broke out from Pittsburgh to Chicago.
[color="#008080"][size="3"]# Subversion of congress and press[/size][/color]
Now that the Money Changers were back into control to a certain extent, they were not about to give it up.
At the meeting of the American Banking Association that year, they urged their membership to do everything in their power to put down the notion of a return to greenbacks.
The ABA secretary James Buel offered a letter to the members which blatantly called on the bank to subvert not only the congress but the press:
[indent]"It is advisable to [color="#ff0000"]do all in your power to sustain such prominent daily and weekly newspapers, especially the Agricultural and Religious Press, as will oppose the greenback issue of paper money[/color] and that you will also [color="#ff0000"]withhold patronage from all applicants who are not willing to oppose the government issue of money[/color]."
"... [color="#ff0000"]To repeal the Act creating bank notes, or to restore to circulation the government issue of money will be to provide the people with money and will therefore seriously affect our individual profits as bankers and lenders.[/color]"
"[color="#ff0000"]See your Congressman at once and engage him to support our interests that we may control legislation[/color]"
[/indent]As political pressure mounted in congress for change, the press tried to turn the American people away from the truth.
The New York Preview put it this way on January 10th 1878:
[indent]"The capital of the country is organized at last and we will see whether the congress will dare to fly in its face"
[/indent]
But it didn't work entirely.
On February 28th 1878 congress passed the Sherman law, allowing the minting of limited number of silver dollars.
This did not end gold backing the currency however, nor did it completely free silver.
Previous to 1873 anyone who brought silver to the US mint could have it struck into silver dollars free of charge. No longer.
But at least some money began to flow back into the economy again.
With no further threat to their control, the bankers loosened up loans and the post civil war depression finally ended.
[color="#008080"][size="3"]# Assassination of James Garfield[/size][/color]
Three years later the American people elected republican James Garfield president.
Garfield understood how the economy was being manipulated.
As a congressman he had been chairman of the appropriations committee and was a member of banking and currency.
After his inauguration he slammed The Money Changers publicly in 1881:
[indent]"Whosoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce.... and when you realize that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate."
[/indent]
Unfortunately within a few week of making the statement on July 2nd of 1881 [color="#ff0000"]he was assassinated[/color].
[size="3"][color="#008080"]# The 'periodic fleecing of the flock'[/color][/size]
The Money Changers began a [color="#ff0000"]'periodic fleecing of the flock', as they called it, by creating economic booms followed by further depressions,[/color] so they could buy up thousands of homes and farms for pennies on the dollar.
In 1891 The Money Changers prepared to take the American economy down again and their methods and motives were laid out with shocking clarity in a memo send out by the American Bankers Association, the ABA, an organisation in which most bankers were members.
Notice that this memo called for bankers to create a depression on a certain day 3 years in the future.
According to the congressional record here is how it read in part:
[indent]"[color="#ff0000"]On Sept. 1st 1894, we will not renew our loans under any consideration. On Sept. 1st we will demand our money. We will foreclose and become mortgages in possession. We can take two-thirds of the farms west of the Mississippi, and thousands of them east of the Mississippi as well, at our own price.... Then the farmers will become tenants as in England....[/color]"
[/indent]These depressions could be controlled because America was on the gold standard.
Since gold is scarce, it is one of the easiest commodities to manipulate.
People wanted silver money legalized again so they could escape the stranglehold The Money Changers had on gold money.
[size="3"][color="#008080"]# William Jennings Bryan[/color][/size]
By 1896 the issue of more silver money had become the central issue in the presidential campaign.
William Jennings Bryan a senator from Nebraska ran for president as a democrat on the free silver issue.
At the democratic national convention in Chicago he made an emotional speech widely regarded as they most famous oration ever made for a political convention. In the dramatic conclusion Bryan said:
[indent]"We will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: You shall not press down upon the brow of labour this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold."
[/indent]
The bankers lavishly supported the republican candidate William McKenley who favoured the gold standard.
The resulting contest was amongst the most fiercely contested presidential races in American history.
The McKenley campaign got manufacturers and industrialists to inform their employees that if Bryan was elected, all factories and plants would close and there would no work.
The ruse succeeded.
McKenley beat Bryan by small margin.
Bryan ran for president again in 1900 and 1908 but felt short each time.
During the 1912 democratic convention Bryan was a powerful figure who helped Woodrow Wilson win the nomination. When Wilson became president he appointed Bryan as secretary of state.
But Bryan soon became disenchanted with the Wilson administration.
Bryan served for only 2 yrs under the Wilson administration before resigning in 1915 over the [color="#ff0000"]highly suspicious sinking of the Lucitania, the event which was used to drive America into WWI.[/color][color="#ff0000"]
[/color]
Although William Jennings Bryan never gained the presidency, his efforts delayed The Money Changers for 17 years from attaining their next goal, a new privately owned central bank for America.
Stay tuned...
Why was silver bad for the bankers and gold good?
Simple because silver was plentiful in the United States, it was very hard to control.
Gold was, and always has been, scarce. Throughout history it has been relatively easy to monopolize gold, but silver has historically been 15 times more plentiful.
With Lincoln out of the way, The Money Changers next objective was to gain complete control over America's money. They wanted two things: (1) the reinstitution of a central bank under their exclusive control, and (2) an American currency backed by gold.
[size="3"][color="#008080"]# Contraction of the Greenbacks[/color][/size]
This was no easy task. With the opening of the American West, silver had been discovered in huge quantities. On top of that, Lincoln's greenbacks were generally popular.
Despite the European central bankers deliberate attacks on greenbacks, they continued to circulate in the United States.
According to historian W. Cleon Skouson:
[indent]"Right after the Civil War there was considerable talk about reviving Lincoln's brief experiment with the Constitutional monetary system. Had not the European money trust intervened, if would have no doubt become an established institution."
[/indent]
It is clear that the concept of America printing her own debt-free money, sent shockwaves throughout the European central banking elite.
They watched with horror as Americans clammered for more greenbacks.
They may have killed Lincoln, but support for his monetary ideas grew.
On April 12 1866, at the bidding of European central banking interest, congress passed the Contraction Act authorizing the secretary of the treasury to begin to retire some of the greenbacks in circulation and thereby contract the money supply.
Authors Theodore R. Thoren and Richard F. Warner explain the result of the money contraction in their classic book on the subject 'The truth in Money':
[indent]"The hard times which occurred after the civil war could have been avoided if the greenback legislation had continued as president Lincoln has intended it. Instead, there were a series of money panics, what we call recessions, which put pressure on the congress to enact legislation the banking system under centralized control. Eventually the federal reserve act was passed on December 23rd 1913."
[/indent]
[color="#008080"][size="3"]# Post Civil War Depression
[/size][/color]
The Money Changersââ¬â¢ strategy was twofold:
(1) [color="#ff0000"]cause a series of panic to try to convince the American people that only centralized control of the money supply could provide economic stability[/color], and
(2) [color="#ff0000"]remove so much from the system that most Americans would be so desperately poor that they either wouldn't care or would be too weak to oppose the bankers.[/color]
[color="#ff00ff"]{ Note: {Timeline: Present} For those who have noticed, in the current depression sweeping the West, the point (2) above is being effected in US as well as progressively in the PIIGS countries of Europe. Techniques to do so have just gotten sophisticated with time. For example, you pay for the fraudulent derivatives, which the bankers created out of thin air in the first place, through devaluations and taxation }[/color]
In 1866, there was $1.8 billion in currency in circulation in the US, about $50.46 per capita.
In 1867 alone, $500 million was removed from the money supply.
Ten years later, in 1876, America's money supply was reduced to only $6 billion. In other words 2/3 of America's money had been called in by the bankers. Only $14.60 per capita remained in circulation.
Ten years later, in 1886, the money supply had been reduced to only 4 million dollars, even though the population had boomed. The result was that only $6.67 per capita remained in circulation.
A 700% loss in buying power over 20 years.
[color="#ff0000"]
Today economist try to sell the idea that recessions and depressions are a natural part of something they call the business-cycle.[/color]
[size="3"]The truth is our money supply is manipulated now just as it was before and after the civil war.[/size] [size="3"] How did this happen? How did money become so scarce?
Simple.[/size] [size="3"] Bank loans were called in, and no new ones were given.
In addition, silver coins were melted down.[/size]
[color="#008080"][size="3"]# The mauling of Silver[/size][/color]
In 1872 a man named Ernest Seyd, was given 100,000 pounds by The Bank of England, and sent to America to bribe necessary congressman to get silver demonetised. He was told if that was not sufficient, to draw as much more as was necessary.
The next year congress passed The Coinage Act of 1873, and the minting of silver abruptly stopped.
In fact representative Samuel Hooper who introduced the bill in the house, acknowledged that Mister Seyd actually drafted the legislation.
Worse, In 1874 Seyd himself admitted who is behind the scheme:
[indent]"I went to America in the winter of 1872-73, authorized to secure, if I could, the passage of the bill demonetising silver. [color="#ff0000"]It was in the interest of those I represented - the governors of The Bank of England - to have it done[/color]. By 1873, gold coins were the only form of coin money."
[color="#008080"] [/color][/indent][color="#008080"][size="3"]# Silver Commission & Riots[/size][/color]
By 1876, with 1/3 of America's workforce unemployed, the population was growing restless.
People were clammering for a return to the greenback money system of president Lincoln or a return to silver money.
Anything that would make money more plentiful.
That year congress created the United States Silver Commission to study the problem.
Their [color="#ff0000"]report clearly blame the monetary contraction on the national bankers.[/color]
The report is interesting, because it compares the deliberate money contraction by the national bankers after the civil war to the fall of the Roman Empire:
[indent]"The disaster of the Dark Ages was caused by decreasing money and falling prices.... Without money, civilization could not have had a beginning, and with a diminishing supply, it must languish and unless relieved, finally perish."
"At the Christian era the metallic money of the Roman Empire amounted to $1,800,000.000. By the end of the Fifteenth century it had shrunk to less than $200,000.000... History records no other such disastrous transition as that from the Roman Empire to the Dark Ages"
[/indent] Despite this report by the Silver Commission, congress took no action.
The next year 1877, riots broke out from Pittsburgh to Chicago.
[color="#008080"][size="3"]# Subversion of congress and press[/size][/color]
Now that the Money Changers were back into control to a certain extent, they were not about to give it up.
At the meeting of the American Banking Association that year, they urged their membership to do everything in their power to put down the notion of a return to greenbacks.
The ABA secretary James Buel offered a letter to the members which blatantly called on the bank to subvert not only the congress but the press:
[indent]"It is advisable to [color="#ff0000"]do all in your power to sustain such prominent daily and weekly newspapers, especially the Agricultural and Religious Press, as will oppose the greenback issue of paper money[/color] and that you will also [color="#ff0000"]withhold patronage from all applicants who are not willing to oppose the government issue of money[/color]."
"... [color="#ff0000"]To repeal the Act creating bank notes, or to restore to circulation the government issue of money will be to provide the people with money and will therefore seriously affect our individual profits as bankers and lenders.[/color]"
"[color="#ff0000"]See your Congressman at once and engage him to support our interests that we may control legislation[/color]"
[/indent]As political pressure mounted in congress for change, the press tried to turn the American people away from the truth.
The New York Preview put it this way on January 10th 1878:
[indent]"The capital of the country is organized at last and we will see whether the congress will dare to fly in its face"
[/indent]
But it didn't work entirely.
On February 28th 1878 congress passed the Sherman law, allowing the minting of limited number of silver dollars.
This did not end gold backing the currency however, nor did it completely free silver.
Previous to 1873 anyone who brought silver to the US mint could have it struck into silver dollars free of charge. No longer.
But at least some money began to flow back into the economy again.
With no further threat to their control, the bankers loosened up loans and the post civil war depression finally ended.
[color="#008080"][size="3"]# Assassination of James Garfield[/size][/color]
Three years later the American people elected republican James Garfield president.
Garfield understood how the economy was being manipulated.
As a congressman he had been chairman of the appropriations committee and was a member of banking and currency.
After his inauguration he slammed The Money Changers publicly in 1881:
[indent]"Whosoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce.... and when you realize that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate."
[/indent]
Unfortunately within a few week of making the statement on July 2nd of 1881 [color="#ff0000"]he was assassinated[/color].
[size="3"][color="#008080"]# The 'periodic fleecing of the flock'[/color][/size]
The Money Changers began a [color="#ff0000"]'periodic fleecing of the flock', as they called it, by creating economic booms followed by further depressions,[/color] so they could buy up thousands of homes and farms for pennies on the dollar.
In 1891 The Money Changers prepared to take the American economy down again and their methods and motives were laid out with shocking clarity in a memo send out by the American Bankers Association, the ABA, an organisation in which most bankers were members.
Notice that this memo called for bankers to create a depression on a certain day 3 years in the future.
According to the congressional record here is how it read in part:
[indent]"[color="#ff0000"]On Sept. 1st 1894, we will not renew our loans under any consideration. On Sept. 1st we will demand our money. We will foreclose and become mortgages in possession. We can take two-thirds of the farms west of the Mississippi, and thousands of them east of the Mississippi as well, at our own price.... Then the farmers will become tenants as in England....[/color]"
[/indent]These depressions could be controlled because America was on the gold standard.
Since gold is scarce, it is one of the easiest commodities to manipulate.
People wanted silver money legalized again so they could escape the stranglehold The Money Changers had on gold money.
[size="3"][color="#008080"]# William Jennings Bryan[/color][/size]
By 1896 the issue of more silver money had become the central issue in the presidential campaign.
William Jennings Bryan a senator from Nebraska ran for president as a democrat on the free silver issue.
At the democratic national convention in Chicago he made an emotional speech widely regarded as they most famous oration ever made for a political convention. In the dramatic conclusion Bryan said:
[indent]"We will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: You shall not press down upon the brow of labour this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold."
[/indent]
The bankers lavishly supported the republican candidate William McKenley who favoured the gold standard.
The resulting contest was amongst the most fiercely contested presidential races in American history.
The McKenley campaign got manufacturers and industrialists to inform their employees that if Bryan was elected, all factories and plants would close and there would no work.
The ruse succeeded.
McKenley beat Bryan by small margin.
Bryan ran for president again in 1900 and 1908 but felt short each time.
During the 1912 democratic convention Bryan was a powerful figure who helped Woodrow Wilson win the nomination. When Wilson became president he appointed Bryan as secretary of state.
But Bryan soon became disenchanted with the Wilson administration.
Bryan served for only 2 yrs under the Wilson administration before resigning in 1915 over the [color="#ff0000"]highly suspicious sinking of the Lucitania, the event which was used to drive America into WWI.[/color][color="#ff0000"]
[/color]
Although William Jennings Bryan never gained the presidency, his efforts delayed The Money Changers for 17 years from attaining their next goal, a new privately owned central bank for America.
Stay tuned...