My friend Gordon collected/selected the following quotes. It is such a good, coherent collection that I couldn’t separate them back out. They just work too well together to do it that injustice.
“The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson.”
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, November 23, 1933, in a letter to Colonel Edward Mandell House
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“Some people think the Federal Reserve Banks are U.S. government institutions. They are not……..they are private credit monopolies which prey upon the people of the U.S. for the benefit of themselves and their foreign and domestic swindlers, and rich and predatory money lenders. The sack of the United States by the Fed is the greatest swindle in history. Every effort has been made by the Fed to conceal its powers, but the truth is the Fed has usurped the government. It controls everything here and it controls all of our foreign relations. It makes and breaks governments at will.”
Congressman Louis McFadden, Chairman, House Banking and Currency Committee, June 10, 1932
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“The modern Banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was ever invented. Banks can in fact inflate, mint and unmint the modern ledger-entry currency.”
Major L.L.B. Angus
Billions for the Bankers, Debt for the People by Sheldon Emry
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“In March, 1915, the J.P. Morgan interests, the steel, shipbuilding, and powder interest, and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press. … They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greatest papers. An agreement was reached; the policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies, and other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interests of the purchasers.”
Congressional Record of February 9, 1917, page 2947, as entered by Representative Oscar Callaway of Texas
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“The sovereignty fetish is still so strong in the public mind, that there would appear to be little chance of winning popular assent to American membership in anything approaching a super-state organization. Much will depend on the kind of approach which is used in further popular education.”
Council on Foreign Relations
“American Public Opinion and Postwar Security Commitments”, 1944
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“The ruling class has the schools and press under its thumb. This enables it to sway the emotions of the masses.”
Albert Einstein
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“I am myself persuaded, on the basis of extensive study of the historical evidence, that… the severity of each of the contractions – 1920-21, 1929-33, and 1937-38 – is directly attributable to acts of commission and omission by the Reserve authorities and would not have occurred under earlier monetary and banking arrangements.”
Milton Freidman, (1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan
‘Capitalism and Freedom’
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“… we conclude that the [Federal] Reserve Banks are not federal …but are independent privately owned and locally controlled corporations…without day to day direction from the federal government.”
9th circuit court
Lewis vs United States, June 24, 1982
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“The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks.”
Lord Acton
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“All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise not from defects in their Constitution or Confederation, nor from want of honor or virtue, so much as downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation.”
John Adams, (1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President in a letter to Thomas Jefferson in 1787
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“Nothing did more to spur the boom in stocks than the decision made by the New York Federal Reserve bank, in the spring of 1927, to cut the rediscount rate. Benjamin Strong, Governor of the bank, was chief advocate of this unwise measure, which was taken largely at the behest of Montagu Norman of the Bank of England… At the time of the Banks action I warned of its consequences… I felt that sooner or later the market had to break.”
Bernard Baruch, (1870-1965) American financier, stock market speculator, and presidential adviser to Woodrow Wilson and FDR in Baruch: The Public Years (1960)
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“When you or I write a check there must be sufficient funds in our account to cover that check, but when the Federal Reserve writes a check, it is creating money.”
Boston Federal Reserve Bank
in a publication titled “Putting It Simply”
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“In a small Swiss city sits an international organization so obscure and secretive…. Control of the institution, the Bank for International Settlements, lies with some of the world’s most powerful and least visible men: the heads of 32 central banks, officials able to shift billions of dollars and alter the course of economies at the stroke of a pen.”
Keith Bradsher, New York Times bureau chief in Detroit (1996-2001) and Hong Kong (2001- )
New York Times, August 5, 1995
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“No legal tender law is ever needed to make men take good money; its only use is to make them take bad money.”
Steven T. Byington
September 1895, American Federationist
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“The legal tender quality [of money] is only valuable for the purposes of dishonesty.”
Justice Salmon Chase, Chief Justice, formerly Secretary of Treasury in President Lincoln’s administration in dissent of Knox vs. Lee (The Legal Tender Cases, 1871)
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“The Great Depression was not caused by laissez faire but by the actions of well-intended politicians and bureaucrats. The Federal Reserve System, after all, was not created in response to the Great Depression, but in 1913. Soon thereafter it began experimenting with its awesome powers, expanding the money supply during the roaring ‘20s, propping up the pound sterling in London, extending credit so Europeans could buy American agricultural products. All the while, Congress was becoming more and more protectionist. When the Fed reversed policies in 1929 and actually shrunk the money supply by a third over the next three years and Congress culminated its protectionist tendencies with the Smoot-Hawley tariff, the collapse was underway. The fact that Hoover then raised taxes and Roosevelt kept wages artificially high guaranteed the massive unemployment that marked the 1930s. Government caused and exacerbated the Great Depression.”
Edward H. Crane, Founder and president of the CATO institute April 6, 1995, at a meeting of the Philanthropy Roundtable
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“I have never seen more senators express discontent with their jobs. … I think the major cause is that, deep down in our hearts, we have been accomplices to doing something terrible and unforgivable to this wonderful country. Deep down in our hearts, we know that we have bankrupted America and that we have given our children a legacy of bankruptcy. … We have defrauded our country to get ourselves elected.”
John C. Danforth, (1936- ) US Senator (MO-R)
in an interview in The Arizona Republic on April 22, 1992
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“Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom. But the tumult soon subsides.”
Thomas Paine
Common Sense, January 1776