Looking for the source of the current financial crisis?
It came from Jekyll Island…
“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible
government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to
the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the
unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the
first task of the statesmanship of the day.” Teddy Roosevelt, 1906
On the cold Hoboken evening of November 22, 1910, Frank Vanderlip
glanced warily at the group of news reporters milling around at the
other end of the train platform and darted quickly on board a private
railway car parked on a dark siding. The opulently furnished and
well-staffed car, its curtains tightly drawn against prying public
eyes, belonged to Senator Nelson Aldrich (R-Rhode Island), the
presiding ‘whip’ of the Senate, father-in-law of John D. Rockefeller
Jr., and a business partner of J.P. Morgan. The two arch rivals
were joining forces for their own nefarious common interests.
Known as ‘the Wall Street Senator,’ Aldrich was head of the National
Monetary Commission created the year before by President Theodore
Roosevelt in response to the Morgan-manipulated bank Panic of 1907.
According to Congressman Charles Lindberg Sr. (father of the future
pilot): “The Money Trust caused the 1907 panic…[T]hose not favorable
to the Money Trust could be squeezed out of business and the people
frightened into demanding changes in the banking and currency laws
which the Money Trust would frame.”
Vanderlip, the president of Rockefeller’s powerful National City Bank
of New York – now Citybank – had been summoned with other luminaries
like the heads of Morgan’s Bankers Trust Company, the Assistant
Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, and Paul Warburg of Rothchild’s main
U.S. bank, Kuhn-Loeb, to a secret meeting to be held far from the
public eye on an island off the Georgia coast. Called Jekyll Island,
it was owned by J.P. Morgan, who had equipped it as a plush ‘hunting
lodge.’
Vanderlip would later write: “We were instructed to come one at a
time and as unobtrusively as possible to the railroad terminal…where
Senator Aldrich’s private car would be in readiness… Discovery, we
knew, simply must not happen… If it were to be exposed publicly that
our particular group had written a banking bill, that bill would have
no chance whatever of passage by Congress….”
Six years later, a financial writer named Bertie Charles Forbes (who
later founded Forbes Magazine) wrote:
"Picture a party of the nation’s greatest bankers stealing out of New
York on a private railroad car under cover of darkness, stealthily
hieing hundreds of miles South, embarking on a mysterious launch,
sneaking onto an island deserted by all but a few servants, living
there a full week under such rigid secrecy that the names of not one
of them was once mentioned lest the servants learn the identity and
disclose to the world this strangest, most secret expedition in the
history of American finance. I am not romancing; I am giving to the
world, for the first time, the real story of how the famous Aldrich
currency report, the foundation of our new currency system, was
written.... The utmost secrecy was enjoined upon all. The public must
not glean a hint of what was to be done. Senator Aldrich notified
each one to go quietly into a private car of which the railroad had
received orders to draw up on an unfrequented platform…. New York’s
ubiquitous reporters had been foiled . . . Nelson (Aldrich) had
confided to Henry, Frank, Paul and Piatt that he was to keep them
locked up at Jekyll Island, out of the rest of the world, until they
had evolved and compiled a scientific currency system for the United
States, the real birth of the present Federal Reserve System, the
plan done on Jekyll Island in the conference with Paul, Frank and
Henry…. " (quoted in The Secrets of the Federal Reserve by Eustice
Mullins)
Long story short - three years after the meeting, on December 22,
1913, the legislation designed in secret by the Jekyll Islanders was
moved through a stacked Congressional Conference Committee meeting
held between 1:30 and 4:30 AM. With most members of Congress already
gone home for the Christmas holidays, and those who remained having
no time to read the text, the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 was passed
in a skeleton vote and President Woodrow Wilson signed it into law
the next day.
Why the secrecy and the Congressional end run? Because the entity
established by the bill, the Federal Reserve, is neither ‘federal,’
nor does it have any ‘reserve.’ It is a private, for profit monopoly
designed to serve its owners interests, even – and especially, as in
the current ‘meltdown’ - when those are totally antithetical to the
public interest.
As Ellen Brown, author of the excellent “Web of Debt; The Shocking
Truth About Our Money System And How We Can Break Free” describes it:
The ‘Federal’ Reserve is actually an independent, privately-owned
corporation. It consists of twelve regional Federal Reserve banks
owned by many commercial member banks. The amount of Federal Reserve
stock held by each member bank is proportional to its size. The
Federal Reserve Bank of New York holds the majority of shares in the
federal Reserve System (53 percent). The largest shareholders of the
Federal Reserve Bank of New York are the largest commercial banks in
the district of New York.
In arguable violation of Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution,
which gives the Congress the sole and - according to a 1935 ruling by
the Supreme Court - the un-delegatable power to ‘coin’ money, the
Federal Reserve Act delegates to the Fed the authority to create
money out of thin air and lend it to the U.S. government at interest,
thus immediately saddling American taxpayers with an essentially un-
repayable debt.
So, as former Wall Street banker (Goldman Sachs), now Treasury
Secretary Hank Paulson serves as the meat puppet for string-puller
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke in announcing the biggest
bailouts of private bankers with public funds in the history of
finance, it may be useful to remember the conclusion Woodrow Wilson
came to at the end of his life. He reportedly said of his signing
the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, ‘I have unwittingly ruined my country.’
The solution? We need to do what both assassinated presidents
Lincoln and Kennedy tried unsuccessfully to do: take back from the
private bankers the Constitutionally granted power of the government
to create money, thus canceling the un-repayable debt and making
control of the money supply a matter of public, not private,
interest. Until that happens the debacle of ‘Wall Street Socialism’
will only get worse. But my guess is that neither the McCain nor
Obama campaigns will ever dare mention the five-hundred-pound Wall
Street Fox – ‘the Creature from Jekyll Island’ - licking his fat
chops in the corner of America’s financial henhouse.
For more on the Fed and how it works:
Web of Debt: The Shocking Truth About Our Money System And How We Can
Break Free by Ellen Hodgson Brown,
Web of Debt and
Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country by
William Greider, and
The Creature from Jekyll Island by G. Edward Griffin,
Jekyll video,
The Secrets of the Federal Reserve by Eustace Mullins
and Dirty Secrets of the Temple - by Stephen Lendman,
Dirty Secrets of the Temple.
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James Heddle is a documentary filmmaker based in California. His e-
mail:
Jim@eon3.net.
