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History See other History Articles Title: History has lessons politicians would do well to learn I am indeed grateful to Iain A D Mann for his kind words (Letters, October 28), and for elaborating on Thomas Jefferson's sage words concerning banking and its threat to liberty. Mr Mann will no doubt be aware that Jefferson's sentiments were widely shared by his fellow founding fathers and subsequent Presidents (not all of them early), and that the American Revolution was as much about shaking off the tyranny of English fractional reserve banking as it was about taxation without representation (they are but two heads of the same serpent) - a historical fact largely omitted from contemporary history books. Until J P Morgan, champion of Wall Street's old-world bankers, and the gold standard triumphed, there was in the US a competing political economy established in Benjamin Franklin's Philadelphia, where a state loan office issued and loaned money, collected the interest and returned it to the provincial office, to be used instead of taxes. During the civil war, Lincoln - who in an earlier speech stated: "These capitalists generally act harmoniously, and in concert, to fleece the people, and now that they have got into a quarrel with themselves, we are called upon to appropriate the people's money to settle the quarrel"(speech to the Illinois legislature, January 1837) - returned to government-issued, debt-free paper money (the greenback). He was later assassinated. President Andrew Jackson called the "banking cartel" a "hydra-headed monster eating the flesh of the common man", later prompting President F D Roosevelt to state: "The real truth is that a financial element in the large centres has owned the government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson." The last US national leader openly to oppose the "cartel" was William Jennings Bryan, whose Populist Party had absorbed the Greenback Party that arose in the depression of 1890s, caused then, as now, by Jefferson's alternate "inflation and deflation" and who won the Democratic nomination from outgoing President Grover Cleveland (an agent of J P Morgan). In his nomination speech he stated: "We believe the right to coin money and issue money is a function of government. Those who are opposed tell us that the issue of paper money is a function of the bank and ought to go out of the banking business. I stand with Jefferson and tell them, as he did, that the issue of money is the business of government and that the banks should go out of the governing business When we have restored the money of the Constitution all other necessary reforms will be possible, and until that is done there is no reform that can be accomplished. You shall not press down upon the brow of labour this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold." Jefferson had been instrumental in Congress's refusal to renew the charter of the first US Bank in 1811, rightly suspecting that the bank was, in fact, owned by old-world bankers. When it was liquidated, it was discovered that 18,000 of its 25,000 shares were owned by foreigners, mainly English and Dutch, leading Congressman Desha of Kentucky to declare: "This accumulation of foreign capital was one of the engines for overturning civil liberty" and he had "no doubt King George III was a principal stockholder". The Congressman was right only up to a point - for others knew better where the real power lay: "I care not what puppet is placed on the throne of England to rule the empire on which the sun never sets. The man who controls Britain's money supply controls the British Empire, and I control the British money supply." These were the words of Nathan Rothschild. Not the one who so kindly entertained Lord Mandelson, the Shadow Chancellor and Oleg Deripaska so splendidly in Corfu last summer, but the one who controlled the bank of England after 1820. Tony Blair now works for J P Morgan. Oh the symmetries of history. Dr John O'Dowd Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 2.
#2. To: bluegrass (#0)
The lesson that We learn from History is that We learn nothing from History.
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