Flamingcheeze's Journal: How Well Do You Know Your Friendly Federal Reserve?

"It was finally decided, by the vote of nine states against New Jersey and Maryland, that the power to issue inconvertible paper should not be granted to the federal government. An express prohibition, such as had been adopted for the separate states, was thought unnecessary. It was supposed that it was enough to withhold the power, since the federal government would not venture to exercise it unless expressly permitted in the Constitution. "Thus," says Madison, in his narrative of the proceedings, "the pretext for a paper currency, and particularly for making the bills a tender, either for public or private debts, was cut off." Nothing could be more clearly expressed than this. As Mr. Justice Field observes, in his able dissenting opinion in the recent case of Juilliard vs. Greenman, "if there be anything in the history of the Constitution which can be established with moral certainty, it is that the framers of that instrument intended to prohibit the issue of legal-tender notes both by the general government and by the states, and thus prevent interference with the contracts of private parties." Such has been the opinion of our ablest constitutional jurists, Marshall, Webster, Story, Curtis, and Nelson. There can be little doubt that, according to all sound principles of interpretation, the Legal Tender Act of 1862 was passed in flagrant violation of the Constitution."
--JOHN FISKE

"Madison, agreeing with the journal of the convention, records that the grant of power to emit bills of credit was refused by a majority of more than four to one. The evidence is perfect; no power to emit paper money was granted to the legislature of the United States."
--GEORGE BANCROFT

"The Central Bank is an institution of the most deadly hostility existing against the principles and form of our Constitution."
--THOMAS JEFFERSON

"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a money aristocracy that has set the government at defiance. This issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of the moneyed corporations which already dare to challenge our Government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country"
--THOMAS JEFFERSON

"Every lover of his country will therefore be solicitous to find out some speedy remedy for this alarming evil. There is no possible substitute for the loss of commerce. Our first grand object, therefore, it its restoration. I presume not to dictate or direct. It is a subject that will require the deepest deliberations and researches of the wisest and more experienced men in America to fully comprehend. It probably belongs to no one man existing to possess all the qualifications required to trace the course of American commerce through all intricate paths and to those and only those that shall lead the United States to future glory and prosperity I am sanguine in the belief of the possibility that we may one day become a great commercial and flourishing nation. But if in the pursuit of the means we should unfortunately stumble again on unfunded paper money or any similar species of fraud, we shall assuredly give a fatal stab to our national credit in its infancy. Paper money will invariably operate in the body of politics as spirit liquors on the human body. They prey on the vitals and ultimately destroy them."
"Paper money has had the effect in your state that it will ever have, to ruin commerce, oppress the honest, and open the door to every species of fraud and injustice."
--GEORGE WASHINGTON, in a letter to J. Bowen, Rhode Island, Jan. 9, 1787

"If ever again our nation stumbles upon unfunded paper, it shall surely be like death to our body politic. This country will crash."
--GEORGE WASHINGTON

"To emit an unfunded paper as the sign of value ought not to continue a formal part of the Constitution, nor even hereafter to be employed; being, in its nature, pregnant with abuses, and liable to be made the engine of imposition and fraud; holding out temptations equally pernicious to the integrity of government and to the morals of the people."
--ALEXANDER HAMILTON

"If congress has the right under the Constitution to issue paper money, it was given them to use themselves, not to be delegated to individuals or corporations.
"The bold efforts that the present bank has made to control the government and the distress it has wantonly caused, are but premonitions of the fate which awaits the American people should they be deluded into a perpetuation of this institution or the establishment of another like it...If the people only understood the rank injustice of our money and banking system there would be a revolution before morning."
--ANDREW JACKSON

"No State shall enter into any treaty, alliance, or confederation; grant letters of marquee and reprisal; coin money; emit letters of credit; make any thing but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts; pass any bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law impairing the obligation of contracts, or grant any title of nobility." (Article I, Section 10)
--THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

"Emitting bills of credit, or the creation of money by private corporations, is what is expressly forbidden by Article 1, Section 10 of the U.S. Constitution."
--U.S. Supreme Court, Craig v. Missouri, 4 Peters 410.

"The 12 regional reserve banks aren't government institutions, but corporations nominally 'owned' by member commercial banks."
--Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Modern Money Mechanics, p. 27

"My agency, in promoting the passage of the National Bank Act, was the greatest mistake in my life. It has built up a monopoly, which affects every interest in the country. It should be repealed, but before that can be accomplished, the people should be arrayed on one side, and the banks on the other, in a contest such as we have never seen before in this country."
--SALMON P. CHASE, (Lincoln's Secretary to the Treasury, who was the pilot of the 1863 banking act in the US)

"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it."
--FREDERIC BASTIAT, THE LAW

"I set to work to read the Act of Parliament by which the Bank of England was created in 1694. The inventors knew well what they were about. Their design was to mortgage by degrees the whole of the country, all the lands, all the houses, and all other property, and even all labor, to those who would lend their money to the State-the scheme, the crafty, the cunning, the deep scheme has produced what the world never saw before-starvation in the midst of plenty."
--WN. COBBETT

"If all the bank loans were paid, no one could have a bank deposit, and there would not be a dollar of coin or currency in circulation. This is a staggering thought. We are completely dependent on the commercial banks. Someone has to borrow every dollar we have in circulation, cash, or credit. If the banks create ample synthetic money we are prosperous; if not, we starve. We are absolutely without a permanent money system. When one gets a complete grasp of the picture, the tragic absurdity of our hopeless situation is almost incredible-but there it is."
--ROBERT HEMPHILL, former Credit Manager of the Federal Reserve Bank in Atlanta.

"By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens"
"If governments should refrain from regulation..... The worthlessness of the money becomes apparent and the fraud upon the public can be concealed no longer"
"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalistic System was to debauch the currency. . . Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million can diagnose."
--JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES

"Ever since the Civil War, Congress has allowed the bankers to control financial legislation. The membership of the Finance Committee in the Senate (now the Banking and Currency Committee) and the Committee on Banking and Currency in the House have been made up chiefly of bankers, their agents, and their attorneys. ...In this way the committees have been able to control legislation in the interests of the few."
"This Act (Federal Reserve Act) establishes the most gigantic trust on earth. When the President signs this bill, the invisible government by the Monetary Power will be legalized... The worst legislative crime of the age is perpetrated by this banking and currency bill. The caucus of the party bosses have again operated and prevented the people from getting the benefits of their own government."
--CHARLES LINDBERG

"The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; second is war. Both bring a temporary (and false) prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunities."
--ERNEST HEMINGWAY

"I am afraid the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that the banks can, and do, create and destroy money. The amount of finance in existence varies only with the action of the banks in increasing or decreasing deposits and bank purchases. We know how this is effected. Every loan, overdraft or bank purchase creates a deposit, and every repayment of a loan, overdraft or bank sale destroys a deposit."
"And they who control the credit of the nation direct the policy of governments, and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people."
--THE RT. HON. REGINALD MCKENNA (one-time British Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Chairman of the Midland Bank)

"Of all the contrivances devised for cheating the laboring classes of mankind, none has been more effective than that which deludes him with paper money."
"We are in danger of being overwhelmed with irredeemable paper, mere paper, representing not gold nor silver; no sir, representing nothing but broken promises, bad faith, bankrupt corporations, cheated creditors and a ruined people."
--DANIEL WEBSTER

"People who will not turn a shovel of dirt on the project, nor contribute a pound of material, will collect more money, from the United States, than will the people, who supply all the material and do all the work. This is the terrible thing about interest (usury) ... But here is the point: If the nation can issue a dollar bond, it can also issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good, makes the bill good, also. The difference, between the bond and the bill, is that the bond lets the money-broker collect twice the amount of the bond, and an additional 20%. Whereas the currency, the honest sort, provided by the Constitution, pays nobody, but those, who contribute in some useful way. It is absurd, to say that our country can issue bonds, and cannot issue currency. Both are promises to pay, but one fattens the usurer and the other helps the people. If the currency issued by the people were no good, then the bonds would be no good, either. It is a terrible situation, when the Government, to insure the national wealth, must go in debt and submit to ruinous interest charges, at the hands of men, who control the fictitious value of gold. Interest is the invention of Satan."
--THOMAS A. EDISON

"Capital must protect itself in every possible manner by combination and legislation. Debts must be collected, bonds and mortgages must be foreclosed as rapidly as possible. When, through a process of law, the common people lose their homes they will become more docile and more easily governed through the influence of the strong arm of government, applied by a central power of wealth under control of leading financiers. This truth is well known among our principal men now engaged in forming an imperialism of Capital to govern the world. By dividing the voters through the political party system, we can get them to expend their energies in fighting over questions of no importance. Thus by discreet action we can secure for ourselves what has been so well planned and so successfully accomplished."
--USA Banker's Magazine, August 25 1924

"Where would we be if we had I.O.U.'s scrip and certificates floating all around the country?" Instead he decided to "issue currency against the sound assets of the banks. The Federal Reserve Act lets us print all we'll need. And it won't frighten the people. It won't look like stage money. It'll be money that looks like real money."-- Treasury Secretary Woodin, 3/7/1933
--The Bank Holiday of 1933', p20

"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 D. Roosevelt

"The gold standard acted as a silent watchdog to prevent 'unlimited public spending.' Our finances will never be brought in order until Congress is compelled to do so. Making our money redeemable in gold will create this compulsion."
". . . When you recall that one of the first moves by Lenin, Mussolini and Hitler was to outlaw individual ownership of gold, you begin to sense that there may be some connection between money, redeemable in gold, and the rare prize known as human liberty. Also, when you find that Lenin declared and demonstrated that a sure way to overturn the existing social order and bring about communism was by printing press paper money, then again you are impressed with the possibility of a relationship between a gold-backed money and human freedom."
--REP. HOWARD BUFFETT

"In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold.... The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.

"This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the 'hidden' confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights."
--ALAN GREENSPAN; "Gold and Economic Freedom"

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