John Dunn

First posted on Sunday, 30 June 2013 at 10:30



President James Garfield.

He argued that it was the 'chief duty of the national government', not the banks, to issue currency.







Only 16 years after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, President James Garfield met the same bloody fate, even though he did not support the greenback and conceded that paper should be backed by silver and gold. He was resolute in affirming however that Congress should be master of the money supply. In his inaugural address he insisted that it was ‘the chief duty of the National Government in connection with the currency of the country is to coin money and declare its value’.

In the same year, Tzar Alexander II was assassinated, following several attempts on his life since 1866, shortly after Lincoln’s death. However, Russia remained beyond the clutches of Usura, and the murdered Tzar was succeeded by his son, Alexander III.

When the time came to formalise and monopolise an American economy based on government debt, the outcome was almost anti-climactic. On 23rd December 1913 the house of representatives passed the Federal Reserve Act, but it was still having difficulty in its passage through the senate. Most members of congress had gone home for the holidays, but the senate had not adjourned and was technically still in session. There were only three members still present. On a unanimous consent voice vote, the 1913 Federal Reserve Act was passed. No objection was made, because there was no one there to object.

Anti-climactic this may have been, but the impact of America’s formal assumption into Usura’s empire of central banking was to be devastating and world-changing in the century of world wars ahead. The First World War started almost immediately after the US was securely within the banking system.

Ezra Pound made the insightful observation that ‘A nation that will not get itself into debt drives the usurers to fury’. And it would indeed appear that the allied powers of Usura (Britain, France and USA) have waged war against countries that have resisted the debt-based financing of central banks, more recently Iraq, Libya and now Syria.

World War One started between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, but quickly turned into a war between Usura and Germany. Although pre-war Germany had a private central bank, it was heavily restricted and inflation kept to reasonable levels. Under government control, investment was guaranteed to internal economic development, and, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Germany’s economic growth was outstripping those of Britain and France. Put simply, Germany was a threat to Usura’s dominance.

America’s late entry to the war was for no other reason than to kill off the external threat to Usura’s global empire ambitions. Committing aid to its two former colonial masters would otherwise have been perverse, as indeed it appeared to many Americans at the time.

In the aftermath of war, Germany's private central bank, to which Germany had gone deeply into debt to pay the reparations exacted by the Treaty of Versailles, broke free of government control and massive inflation followed (mostly triggered by currency speculators), permanently trapping the German people in endless debt. When the Weimar Republic collapsed economically, it opened the door for economic renewal.

Obtaining dispassionate historical analyses of the German economy as it stood before the Second World War is impossible. The control over the interpretation of the events of that era is central to the current political settlement and will not be relinquished by the official historians in a hurry.

What everyone does agree upon is the fact that from 1933 Germany experienced an economic growth spurt. It appears that this coincided with an abandonment of a gold-backed currency, with the result that barter - the direct exchange of goods - became possible in international trade. An example of this is Germany’s exchanging locomotives for Argentinean beef, which did not require international trading credits or a reserve currency.

The underpinning principle of economic policy was one established by Gottfried Feder, which was that labour creates value, not gold. In an attempt to apply this principle, the German government introduced bills of credit called mefo-wechsel to the value of 5.5 billion Reichsmarks. This was added to the 4.5 billion Reich marks allowed under the Treaty of Versailles until 1933. German heavy industry including Siemens, Krupp, and AEG etc. undertook to cover these bills of exchange in such a way that their fixed industrial assets provided security for the newly created money. This enabled the creation of up to 10 billion Reich marks, the minimum amount required to boost the economy in a work-for-work exchange system.

After this medium was established, contracts for residential construction, superhighways and modernisation of agriculture were immediately undertaken.

The problem with this state-issued value-based currency was that it placed Germany outside of the global economic system. Once again, Germany was re-emerging as a threat to the dominance of Usura.

It was also in the context of similar economic developments in Italy that Ezra Pound drew a comparison between the country that he had chosen to make his home before the Second World War and the America of the Jefferson years. The United States in its post-revolutionary era had once stood against the expanding might of Usura. Pound in his infamous radio broadcasts wanted to remind the American public of that lost history. He had long despaired of the ‘laziness of whole generations!’, All the back-bone of Jefferson’s thought and of Van Buren’s forgotten! Benefits of the latter, lost in civil war and post civil war finance!’ (ABC of Economics, 1933)

As early as 1933, a global boycott was organised against Germany to counter a regime that attempted to operate outside the purview of the central bankers. In 1939, as Germany’s full-employment economy began to flex its muscles in a world hostile to its continued growth, Usura felt compelled to declare war in response.

In the context of this analysis, I do not think it unreasonable to add the following oft-quoted observation by Winston Churchill.

Germany's unforgivable crime before WW2 was its attempt to loosen its economy out of the world trade system and to build up an independent exchange system from which the world-finance couldn't profit anymore. (The Second World War)