The following is a transcript of the final section of “Century of Enslavement: The History of the Federal Reserve,” the forthcoming documentary from corbettreport.com.
We now know that for centuries the people of the United States have been at war with the banking oligarchs. That war was lost, seemingly for good, in 1913, with the creation of the Federal Reserve. With the passage of the Federal Reserve Act, President Woodrow Wilson consigned the American population to a century in which the money supply itself has depended on the whims of the banking cabal. A century of booms and busts, bubbles and depressions, has led to a wholesale redistribution of wealth toward those at the very top of the system. At the bottom, the masses toil in relative poverty, single-income households becoming double-income households out of necessity, the quality of life and purchasing power of the dollar being quietly robbed from them through the most secretive and regressive tax imaginable: the inflation tax.
As Ron Paul—the retired Congressman who spent most of his congressional career challenging the Federal Reserve and its stranglehold over the money supply—explained in a House Financial Services Committee meeting with Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke: “It's the destruction of the currency that destroys the middle class. There is a principle in free market thinking that says if you destroy the value of the currency through inflation, you transfer the wealth from the middle class and it gravitates to the very wealthy. The bankers, the government, the politicians, they all love this.[...]Everybody who loves big government loves the Fed, because they can finance the wars and all the welfare you want. But it doesn't work and it eventually ends up in a crisis.”
And as he elaborated at a committee meeting on the Fed's inflationary monetary policy on March 17, 2011: “I believe that the inflation of prices are most damaging to the poor and low-middle income people, because they suffer the consequences much more so than those who can protect themselves. And therefore it is a tax on the poor and the middle class. They tend to lose their jobs and pay the higher prices.”
Worse yet, the fraud itself perpetuates Alexander Hamilton's persistent myth that a national debt is necessary at all. Shunning the true American tradition of colonial debt-free money and Lincoln greenbacks, the US is now locked into a system whereby the government issues bonds to generate the funds for their operations, bonds that are backed up by the taxation of the public's own labor.
It should come as no surprise that the first federal income tax was also passed in 1913, the same year as the Federal Reserve came into being. But the most outrageous fact of all is that not one cent of the money collected by the income tax goes toward payment of government services. This startling admission was confirmed by the Private Sector Survey on Cost Control, better known as the Grace Commission, a Congressional investigation that was appointed by President Reagan in 1982 and concluded:
“With two thirds of everyone’s personal income taxes wasted or not collected, 100 percent of what is collected is absorbed solely by interest on the federal debt and by federal government contributions to transfer payments. In other words, all individual income tax revenues are gone before one nickel is spent on the services [that] taxpayers expect from their government.”
Even more worrying, without the Federal Reserve's current “quantitative easing” operations keeping interest rates on the federal debt artificially low, almost the entirety of income taxes would go toward paying the interest alone on that fraudulent debt. If interest rates were to return to their twenty year average of 5.7 percent, interest alone on the government's $17 trillion debt would account for over 85% of the roughly $1.1 trillion the IRS collects in income taxes each year.
The debt chains that have been placed on the American people by the banking cabal are not even real. And yet, hundreds of millions of Americans continue to be born into this system, already saddled with the debt of previous generations, growing up, living, working, paying taxes, and dying under the delusion that this system is legitimate, slaves to a monetary system and banking infrastructure that they are almost uniformly unaware of and can but dimly comprehend. The perpetrators of this fraud, meanwhile, remain in the shadows, largely ignored by a general public that can instantly recognize the latest Hollywood heartthrob or pop idol, but have no clue what the head of Goldman Sachs or the New York Fed does, let alone who they are. This cabal bear allegiance to no nationality, no philosophy or creed, no code of ethics. They are not even motivated by greed, but power. The power that the control of the money supply inevitably brings with it.
Federal Reserve researcher and critic G. Edward Griffin explains: “When you go back to the beginning of all of this, if you go back prior to the Federal Reserve, it's pretty clear to me, at least, that the name of the game was financial power and wealth. That was it. How do you make more money? How do you beat out your competition? How do you forge partnerships with politicians that give you privileges and advantages that give you more power so you can buy more politicians, and so forth. That was pretty much the game.
“But starting with the era of the Federal Reserve, starting at the turn of the last century, there was a new element that started to creep into it.[...]Suddenly the motivation for these people was amplified a bit. Yes, they still wanted to make money. They still wanted to have monopolistic control over the economy. They wanted to control the money supply so they could determine who gets credit and who doesn't so they could have access to an infinite supply themselves. But now they're beginning to think about world power. After a person has all the money in the world that you could possibly use to buy anything you want, what's left to capture your imagination? The answer of course is power. Power over people.
“Now money is power over people, but there's another power over people as well, and that's the political power, the social power. And I think this has now become the dominant, driving force of these people. They've already got the money. They've got it locked down. Now they're striving for this 'New World Order' (that's their name for it). They want all of the world [bound] into one political unit which they dominate, not only with money but with military and psychological means and education and media propaganda. They want total control over every human on the planet. And by golly they're moving pretty rapidly in that direction.”
The inevitable conclusion, one that flows necessarily from the true understanding of this situation, is that the Federal Reserve system needs to be consigned to the dustbin of history. After a century of enslavement, it is time for the American public to finally throw off the bankers' debt chains.
According to author and researcher Andrew Gavin Marshall: “You have about 18 million people who die from poverty every year, 9 million of which are under the age of 12. Most of the earth's population is in abject poverty. You have one in every seven people on earth, over 1 billion people living in urban slums, which is essentially larger than the population of western Europe and North America combined. And imagine that population just in slums. That's the reality of our world, where you have the 0.01% controlling nearly 50% if not more of the world's wealth. This is an entirely sociopathic, insane way in which to structure the world. And the current trajectory in which we are going leads to the inevitable outcome of human extinction. If we continue to destroy everything we depend upon in the name of markets and growth and profit, then we will die out.
“So if there was ever a point in human history to start questioning alternatives, this would be it. And to think that where we are is the best of our options, how many of the 'best' options lead to self-destruction? That doesn't sound like a best option. I think that with a world of 7 billion people we can probably come up with something better than a system in which a few thousand people benefit so much at the expense of everything else on this world and at the expense of the potential for the future of mankind. They're leveraging our future and so long as we accept this way of thinking, so long as we accept these institutions as having done this, that's the direction we'll be going.”
If you've made it this far, congratulations. You are now better informed on the economic history of the United States and the truth about the Federal Reserve than 99% of the population. If you do nothing else, then just working to get those around you educated on this information alone will have a profound effect. Once they learn of the scam, many are motivated to do something about it, and they, in turn, inform others. This is the viral nature of suppressed truth, and it is the reason that more people are aware of and energized by the issue of the Federal Reserve and the nature of money than ever before.
But what if the burgeoning movement to End The Fed is successful? What system do people propose as the answer? There have been several proposals along different lines by various researchers. Some argue for a return to America's colonial roots of debt-free money issued by state run banks, pointing to the Bank of North Dakota as one already functioning, successful model of this approach. Others advocate a decentralized system of alternative and competing currencies that greatly reduce or even eliminate altogether the need for a central bank. Other, even more innovative ideas have been forwarded to harness current technologies to bring credit creation back to the individual level and revolutionize our concept of money altogether.
Sound money. Cryptocurrencies. State banks. LETS programs. Self-issued credit. These and many other solutions have all been proposed and many of them are in use in different localities today. Information on all of these ideas and how they are being applied in various parts of the world are widely available online. The point is that the question of what money is and how it should be created is perhaps the single greatest question facing humanity as a whole, and yet it is one that has been almost completely eliminated from the national conversation…until recently. For the first time in living memory, people are once again rallying around the monetary issue, and American politics stands on the threshold of a transformation almost unimaginable just two decades ago.
And so the rest of the story is now in our hands. Once we understand the scam that has taken place, the gradual consolidation of wealth and power in the hands of an elite few banking oligarchs and the growing impoverishment of the masses, all in the name of banking funny money created out of nothing and loaned to the public at interest, we can choose to get active or to do nothing at all.
For those who choose to get active, there are some steps that you can take to help change the course of this system:
1) Familiarize yourself with the history, the connections and the functions of the Federal Reserve system. If you can't explain this material to yourself then you will never be able to teach it to others.
2) Begin reaching out to others to bring them up to speed on the issue. It can be as simple as broaching this conversation in the Monday morning water cooler talk or passing out a copy of this report or sending out links to this information to your email list. Insert this topic into your conversations. When people start talking about the national debt or the state of the economy or other political talking points, get them to question the roots of these issues, like the question of how money is created and why the government is in debt at all.
3) When you are able to find or create a group of like-minded people in your area who are engaged with the issue, start a study group on the issue and its solutions. The study group can help source alternative or complementary currencies in the local area, or, if none exist already, the group can form the basis for a community of local businesses and customers who are willing to start experimenting with ways to wean themselves off of the Federal Reserve note system.
The work of building up an alternative to the current system can seem daunting, even at times overwhelming. But it's important to keep in mind that the Federal Reserve system that seems so monolithic today has only been around for one century. It hasn't always been this way, and it doesn't have to be this way. The question of how we decide to change this system is not rhetorical; it will either be answered by an informed, engaged, active population working together to create viable alternatives and to dismantle the current system, or it will be answered by the same banking oligarchy that has been controlling the money supply, and indeed the lifeblood of the country, for generations.
Now, one century after the creation of the Federal Reserve system, we have a choice to make: whether the next century, like the one before it, will be a century of enslavement, or, transformed by the actions and choices that we make in the light of this knowledge, a century of empowerment. It's our decision to make.