Bernanke’s neck on the line

November 25, 2009 by Infowars Ireland

By Julian Delasantellis
Asia Times Online

They’re back, the huge, hulking city sized spacecraft that suddenly appear from the blackness of deep space to take positions above the metropolises of America and around the world.

In Robert Wise’s 1951 The Day the Earth Stood Still, Klaatu (Michael Rennie) seemed peaceful enough; it was his butt-kicking, robot supervisor Gort that drove audiences home with nightmares. In George Pal’s 1953 adaptation of the 1898 HG Wells novel, The War of the Worlds, the spaceships weren’t that big, nor were the Martian invaders who piloted them; they just had real big hungers to kill (and eat) the human race.

In Roland Emmerich’s 1996 Independence Day, the big ships are over major US and world cities once more, spending a few hours calibrating their communications before laserblasting the cities out of existence. Finally, the current US ABC television network drama V revisits the story first told by NBC’s similarly named 1983 miniseries, about how seemingly friendly aliens appear over the cities in their spaceships; they promise great technological advance to the human race, but their reality is anything but.

In 1962, Rod Serling’s CBS network science fiction anthology, The Twilight Zone, looked at the concept of alien races traveling to Earth to help the human race with a touch of whimsy. An alien race, the Kannamits, has landed on Earth; their ambassador tells the United Nations that his people’s lofty ambitions to help humanity are contained in a book, To Serve Man, written in the alien’s own indecipherable language. A military linguist, unknowingly on his way to the Kannamits’ meat lockers, learns the secret too late – To Serve Man is a cookbook.

Away from the silver screen and the idiot box, some people, including apparently a majority in the US Congress, believe that the alien invaders have never been vanquished, that they are here and that they rule, in poorly cloaked obscurity. They’re there, in every bank in America, from the vaults in the basement to the executive boardrooms in the penthouses. Looking horizontally, the belief is that the aliens are there as well, from every truck-stop ATM right to your banking website.

But unlike the Kannamits, these aliens’ language is perfectly decipherable. They call themselves the “Federal Reserve Bank”, and the weapon of choice for the homegrown resistance movement that has arisen to fight the bank is not neutron bombs or laser pistols, but the audit – a weapon they feel will overthrow the tyrants’ rule and return freedom and democracy to the people.

It’s normal for any mortal creature to view the new and inexperienced with good measures of awe, wonderment and perhaps fear; this must be the explanation for the now almost century of hostility that has attended upon the creation and operation of America’s third central bank, the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States.

The Fed was born from the fire of the panic of 1907, what would come to be the nation’s worst financial crisis until the Great Depression 22 years later. It was during this crisis that it became obvious that, under a private sector, gold-based system, the liquidity needed to fuel a complex, industrially based economy could disappear virtually instantaneously.

In 1907, America was saved from total financial ruination only through the intervention of industrialist (more frequently described at the time as “robber baron”) JP Morgan, who pledged resources of his own to backstop the government’s accounts, and strong-armed some of his fellow oligarchs to do likewise.

But money under a central banking system would turn out to be a far different construct than before. Here it was called “fiat money”, money backed by no other storehouse of value than the government’s pledge and word to maintain its value.

This was what was so hard for many to be accustomed to, for the use of a physical standard of exchange, which in the vast majority of times meant gold, seemed to be older than human civilization itself; the history of its usage as a medium of exchange and storehouse of value stretched so far back into ancient times that one might actually have reason to believe that its place in history was a matter of divine intervention.

There are dozens of references to gold in both the Bible’s Old and New testaments, from Genesis 13:2, “Now Abram was very rich in livestock, in silver and in gold” to Revelation 9:20, “And the rest of the men which were not killed by these plagues yet repented not of the works of their hands, that they should not worship devils, and idols of gold, and silver, and brass, and stone, and of wood: which neither can see, nor hear, nor walk.”

In those ancient times, the tents where pure gold was measured and assayed into coinage was seeped by kings in mystery and cloaked with religious obscurantism; the hope being that some of the majesty of the infinite might accrue to this most mundane but vital of earthly pursuits.

In 1717, Sir Isaac Newton advised the British Mint that “I humbly represent that a pound weight Troy of Gold, eleven ounces fine & one ounce allay, is cut into 44ฝ Guineas, & a pound weight of silver, 11 ounces, 2 pennyweight fine, & eighteen pennyweight allay is cut into 62 shillings, & according to this rate, a pound weight of fine gold is worth fifteen pounds weight six ounces seventeen pennyweight & five grains of fine silver, recconing a Guinea at 1ฃ, 1s. 6d. in silver money.”

Perhaps the founders of the Federal Reserve had this in mind when they seemed to deliberately go out of their way to make the operating structure, ownership and management of the new central bank as hard to understand as possible.

The only way to really explain what the Federal Reserve System is is to explain what it is not. It is not a traditional member of the executive branch; neither the president nor a congressional leader can order it to raise or lower interest rates. It is not a member of the private sector’s banking system like a standard commercial bank, and its core function is not to generate a profit.

From Boston to San Francisco, America has been carved up into 12 distinct Federal Reserve “regions” with a Federal Reserve regional bank (as in the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, or the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City) exercising some measure of regulatory supervision over the banks in their areas. Further adding to the confusion is that each of the regional Federal Reserve banks is structured as a private corporation, with its stock “owned” by its private members, but, since the private banks cannot trade or sell the stock, the private banks exercise no operational control over operations or policies of the Fed regional banks.

Over the years, these deliberate ambiguities, which defined the Fed’s relations with the private banking system, along with the innate suspicion that was always destined to accrue to any institution that seemed to steal the Promethean thunder of seigniorage from the gods, meant that those with a more conspiratorial frame of mind would always look at the Fed with a raised eye of suspicion.

Most of these resided in the dark passageways of American political ultra-conservatism, even today. “Federal Reserve” and “Bolshevik Revolution” returns 73,000 hits on Google, while the various organizations the extreme right considered to be nothing but Bolshevik Trojan Horses operating in the West – the Rothschilds, the Bilderburgs, the 33rd degree Masons, and the Council on Foreign Relations – returned 431,000, 283,000, 2,010,000 and 195,000 hits with “Federal Reserve” respectively. Read more…