Read The Trillion-Dollar Conspiracy Online
Authors: Jim Marrs
Such concern intensified with a 2005 letter to GATA in which the former chief counsel for the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, Sean M. Thornton, explained the scope of the government’s power in making financial seizures. “It took GATA six months and a little prodding to get answers from the Treasury, but the Treasury’s reply, when it came, was remarkably comprehensive and candid.
“The government’s authority to interfere with the ownership of gold, silver, and mining shares arises…from the Trading with the Enemy Act, which became law in 1917 during World War I and applies during declared wars, and from 1977’s International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which can be applied without declared wars.
“While the Trading with the Enemy Act authorizes the government to interfere with the ownership of gold and silver particularly, it also applies to all forms of currency and all securities. So the Treasury official stressed that it could be applied not just to shares of gold and silver mining companies but to the shares of all companies in which there is a foreign ownership interest. Further, there is no requirement in the law that the targets of the government’s interference must have some connection to the declared enemies of the United States, or, really, some connection to foreign ownership. Anything that can be construed as a financial instrument, no matter how innocently it has been used, is subject to seizure under the Trading with the Enemy Act and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.”
“U
SURY” IS A TERM
that has all but disappeared from our language. Once, “usury” was defined as any interest charged for a loan, but modern dictionaries softened this definition to merely “excessive” interest. The Texas Constitution once defined “usury” as any interest in excess of 6 percent. This ceiling was increased over the years until the whole concept was deleted.
Those who know the Bible recall that Jesus was crucified by those in power for chasing “money changers” out of the temple. Public anger today is being directed at the financial moguls of both Wall Street and Washington, D.C.
“Charging interest on pretended loans is usury, and that has become institutionalized under the Federal Reserve System,” argued G. Edward Griffin, author of
The Creature from Jekyll Island
. This has been accomplished by masking the operations of the Fed in secrecy and arcane economic terms. “The…mechanism by which the Fed converts debt into money may seem complicated at first, but it is simple if one remembers that the process is not intended to be logical but to confuse and deceive,” Griffin added.
Former
Washington Post
editor William Greider wrote, “The details of [the Fed’s] actions were presumed to be too esoteric for ordinary citizens to understand.” Some believe this ignorance may be a blessing. Henry Ford was quoted as saying, “It is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system for, if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”
“Most Americans have no real understanding of the operation of the international moneylenders,” stated the late senator Barry Goldwater.
“The bankers want it that way. We recognize in a hazy sort of way that the Rothschilds and the Warburgs of Europe and the houses of J. P. Morgan, Kuhn, Loeb and Company, Schiff, Lehman and Rockefeller possess and control vast wealth. How they acquire this vast financial power and employ it is a mystery to most of us. International bankers make money by extending credit to governments. The greater the debt of the political state, the larger the interest returned to the lenders. The national banks of Europe are actually owned and controlled by private interests.” These same “private interests” now own and control the Federal Reserve System.
A
CCORDING TO
W
ILLIAM
G
REIDER
, the Fed has assumed a cult-like power: “To modern minds, it seemed bizarre to think of the Federal Reserve as a religious institution…. Yet the conspiracy theorists, in their own demented way, were on to something real and significant…. [The Fed] did also function in the realm of religion. Its mysterious powers of money creation, inherited from priestly forebears, shielded a complex bundle of social and psychological meanings. With its own form of secret incantation, the Federal Reserve presided over awesome social ritual, transactions so powerful and frightening they seemed to lie beyond common understanding….
“Above all, money was a function of faith. It required implicit and universal social consent that was indeed mysterious. To create money and use it, each one must believe and everyone must believe. Only then did worthless pieces of paper take on value.”
Money today is increasingly mere electronic blips in a computer accessed by plastic cards at ATMs. There is nothing to back it up. As money is loaned at interest by great institutions, its worth decreases as more and more of it comes into existence. This is called inflation, which in some ways is a built-in tax on the use of money. And inflation can be manipulated upward or downward by those who control the flow of money, whether it be through paper or the electronic blips.
“The result of this whole system is massive debt at every level of society today,” wrote author William Bramley. “The banks are in debt to the depositors, and the depositors’ money is loaned out and creates indebtedness to the banks. Making this system even more akin to something out of a maniac’s delirium is the fact that banks, like other lenders, often have the right to seize physical property if its paper money is not repaid.”
I
N
A
MERICA, THE BANKERS
of the Federal Reserve System have the greatest control of the nation’s money. Because the Fed is at the center of U.S. monetary policy control, it has become the central bank of the United States. By changing the supply of money in circulation, the Fed influences interest rates, which in turn affects millions of families’ mortgage payments. It also can cause financial markets to boom or collapse and the economy to expand or contract into recession.
The Fed is “the crucial anomaly at the very core of representative democracy, an uncomfortable contradiction with the civic mythology of self-government,” wrote William Greider. His 1987 book
Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country
disparages “nativist conspiracy theories” yet presents an eloquent conspiracy argument for the Fed’s control.
Consider that a paper bill is simply a promissory note to be traded at some point for something of value. It thus makes sense to perceive paper money as valuable as real goods or services. This viewpoint worked well before the invention of interest. The early goldsmiths in Europe who warehoused gold coins used their stockpiles as the basis for issuing paper money. Since it was highly unlikely that everyone would demand their gold back at the same time, the smiths became bankers, loaning out a portion of their stockpile at interest for profit. This practice—loaning the greater portion of wealth while retaining only a small fraction for emergencies—became known as fractional reserve, or fractional banking. This system worked well until everyone suddenly wanted their deposits back and started a “run” on the bank. Bank runs, or depositors demanding their money back all at one time, were a major cause of financial damage during the Great Depression of the 1930s. But runs are not just history. In early 2008, Northern Rock Bank, the fifth-largest bank in the United Kingdom, was nationalized by the government due to financial problems created by the subprime mortgage crisis and a run on its branch banks.
After the invention of fractional banking came the implementation of “fiat” money—intrinsically worthless paper money made valuable by law or decree of government. An early example of this system was recorded by Marco Polo during his visit to China in 1275. Polo noted the emperor forced his people to accept black pieces of paper with an official seal on them as legal money under pain of imprisonment or death. The emperor then used this fiat money to pay all his foreign debts.
“One is tempted to marvel at the [emperor’s] audacious power and the subservience of his subjects who endured such an outrage,” wrote G. Edward Griffin, “but our smugness rapidly vanishes when we consider the similarity of our own Federal Reserve Notes. They are adorned with signatures and seals; counterfeiters are severely punished; the government pays its expenses with them; the population is forced to accept them; they—and the ‘invisible’ checkbook money into which they can be converted—are made in such vast quantity that it must be equal in amount to all the treasures of the world. And yet they cost nothing to make. In truth, our present monetary system is an almost exact replica of that which supported the warlords of seven centuries ago.”
Nowhere was the art of making money out of money more developed than in the ancient Khazar Empire, which evolved from nomadic raider-clans operating on the east-west caravan routes in the Caucasus Mountain region north of Iraq and between the Black Sea and Caspian Sea. By the tenth century, the Khazars had created a wealthy empire that stretched from north of the Black Sea to the Ural Mountains and west of the Caspian Sea to the Dnieper River.
The warlords of the Khazars thought that exchanging and loaning money would be more profitable and less hazardous than raiding caravans. There was one problem. The Khazar Empire was almost evenly divided among Christians, Muslims, and Jews. Both Christians and Muslims believed that charging interest on a loan, then called usury, was a sin. Only Jews could openly charge interest on loans. Whether they did it out of pragmatism or actual religiosity, the Khazar aristocrats professed a conversion to Judaism. According to the
Random House Encyclopedia,
“Some scholars believe they [the Khazars] are the progenitors of many Eastern European Jews.” This would include the renowned Rothschild family, who financially ruled Europe for more than a century. Conspiracy researchers claim they still dominate the world financial order and have been the financial backers of the Rockefellers and other wealthy families. It might be noted that none of these converted Khazarians had any connection whatsoever to Palestine, yet these were among the Russian progenitors of the political movement known as Zionism.
The 1917 Balfour Declaration, a statement by British foreign secretary Alfred Balfour that guaranteed a Jewish home in Palestine and was later approved as a mandate by the League of Nations, is acknowledged as the foundation for the creation of the state of Israel. This letter originally was a reply to a leading Zionist, Baron Walter Rothschild, the first unconverted Jewish peer in England’s House of Lords.
The money-management methods of the Rothschild banking dynasty have been emulated for decades by the globalist financiers, whether Jewish or otherwise. One key component of this management is secrecy. Utilizing bought-off politicians, who catch the public rage and scrutiny, major globalists are able to operate out of the public eye almost with impunity. Derek Wilson, who chronicled the Rothschild empire in his 1988 book
Rothschild: The Wealth and Power of a Dynasty,
wrote, “Even when, in later years, some of them [Rothschilds] entered parliament, they did not feature prominently in the assembly chambers of London, Paris or Berlin. Yet all the while they were helping to shape the major events of the day: by granting or withholding funds; by providing statesmen with an official diplomatic service; by influencing appointments to high office; and by an almost daily intercourse with the great decision makers.”
The invention of the printing press, which allowed for the printing of paper money as well as the Bible, led to the Age of Enlightenment and the decline of the Roman Church. Money replaced religion as the new control mechanism of the wealthy elite. And despite the popular myth, the American colonial revolt against England occurred more over concern for its own currency than a small tax on tea. Benjamin Franklin wrote, “…the inability of the colonists to get the power to issue their own money permanently out of the hands of George III and the international bankers was the prime reason for the Revolutionary War.” As previously discussed, wealth equals power. And the American revolutionists knew that to gain true freedom, they had to break the power of the Rothschild-dominated Bank of England, which had outlawed their money—colonial script.
Once America’s freedom was secured, Founding Fathers Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton began arguing over whether or not to adopt a central bank. Hamilton believed in a strong central government with a central bank overseen by a wealthy elite. “No society could succeed which did not unite the interest and credit of rich individuals with those of the state,” Hamilton wrote. Supporters of Hamilton’s elitism formed America’s first political party, the Federalists. Hamilton, once described as a “tool of the international bankers,” argued that “A national debt, if it is not excessive, will be to us a national blessing. It will be a powerful cement to our nation. It will also create a necessity for keeping up taxation to a degree which, without being oppressive, will be a spur to industry.”
America’s first central bank, the Bank of North America, was created in 1781 by Continental congressman Robert Morris, who modeled the bank after the Bank of England. The bank was formed before the Constitution was drafted and was wrought with fraud and plagued by inflation caused by the creation of baseless “fiat” currency. The bank lasted for three years. Morris’s former aide, Alexander Hamilton, became secretary of the Treasury and in 1791 headed the next attempt at a central bank by establishing the First Bank of the United States. He was strongly opposed by Jefferson and his followers. In 1811, the charter of the First Bank of the United States was not renewed.