 
              Conspiracy Nation -- Vol. 12  Num. 09
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                     ("Quid coniuratio est?")
 
 
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BIG TROUBLE
===========

                  Ill fares the land,
                  To hastening ills a prey,
                  Where wealth accumulates
                  And men decay.
                                 -- Oliver Goldsmith

First there is money.  Then someone  gets the idea, "Why not turn
the money itself into a commodity?"  From its  normal  use  as  a
medium  of  exchange,  the  very  money  becomes  something to be
trafficked in and profitable in itself.

Writes Aristotle in *On Politics*:

  Money being naturally  barren,  to  make  it breed money is
  preposterous  and  a  perversion  from  the  end   of   its
  institution,  which  was  only  to  serve  the  purpose  of
  exchange and not of increase.

  Usury  is  most  reasonably detested as the increase arises
  from the money  itself,  and  not  by  employing  it to the
  purpose for which it was intended.

In Rome, in 48 B.C., the issuing of money was done privately by a
few wealthy families.  "Julius Caesar took  this  privilege  from
them and restored it to the government to whom it belonged."  [1]
For this, Julius Caesar was assassinated.

Jesus Christ dared to oppose  the  "money changers," and for that
he was murdered.  "As long as Christ confined  his  teachings  to
the  realm  of morality and righteousness, He was undisturbed; it
was not until  He  assailed  the  established economic system and
'cast out' the profiteers and 'overthrew the tables of the  money
changers,' that He  was  doomed."   [2]  Jesus accused the "money
changers"  of  turning  the  Temple  into  a  "den  of  thieves."
Subsequently, "the scribes and the chief priests  heard  it,  and
sought  how  they  might  destroy  him."  [3] The day after Jesus
challenged the money system, He  was interrogated.  The next day,
He was betrayed.  The following day, He was  tried,  and  on  the
fourth day He was executed.

Private  banks  such  as  the "Bank of England," "The Bank of the
United States," and  the  "Federal  Reserve" are given misleading
names, implying they are government banks.  The  First  "Bank  of
the  United  States" was owned by private interests, most of them
British, including Mayer Amschel  Rothschild who said, "Permit me
to issue and control the money of a nation and  I  care  not  who
makes its laws."

When  the  charter  for the First "Bank of the United States" was
not renewed in  1811,  the  bank's  British  owners were enraged.
There followed the War of 1812, during which the British  invaded
the  U.S.  and  burned  Washington,  D.C. to the ground.  Shortly
thereafter, in 1816, a charter for the Second "Bank of the United
States" was  approved  by  Congress.   Vehemently  opposed to the
First "Bank of the United States" had been Thomas Jefferson,  who
warned,  "I  believe that banking institutions are more dangerous
to our liberties than standing armies."

When the time approached for  renewal  of the Second "Bank of the
United  States'"  charter,  our  president  was  Andrew  Jackson.
President Jackson called the Second B.U.S. "that thing," and felt
it was a menace.  Said Jackson, "If Congress has the right  under
the  Constitution  to  issue paper money, it was given them to be
used  by  themselves,  not  to  be  delegated  to  individuals or
corporations."  The big money interests  fought  Jackson  through
their newspapers and by withdrawing money from circulation.  With
less  money in circulation, there was an economic depression and,
of course, Jackson was blamed.   Nonetheless, the People stood by
Andrew Jackson and the Second B.U.S. was defeated.

In 1861, President Abraham Lincoln went to the New  York  bankers
to  obtain  loans with which to fund the Union armed forces.  The
bankers told him, "Sure.  We'll  lend  the money -- at 30 percent
interest."   Disgusted,  Lincoln  turned  down  their  offer  and
devised a plan of his own.  He persuaded Congress to pass a  bill
authorizing the issuance of legal tender treasury notes.  The new
money, called "greenbacks" because of the green ink used to print
them, worked.  They were taken "at par" and stayed "at par" until
the Money Barons used the legislators they owned to hurry through
a  "refinement"  on  the  greenback  law.   On  Feb. 25, 1862, an
"Exception Clause" Act  was  passed.   Henceforth, the greenbacks
would be "good for all debts both public  and  private"  =except=
duty  on  imports  and interest on government debts.  =Then=, the
banksters had an excuse to discount the greenbacks by 30 percent;
if you paid the banker a  greenback dollar, he only allowed it to
count for 70 cents.

During the Civil War, the Money Power bought up government bonds.
They paid greenbacks for these bonds.  When the Civil War  ended,
the government owed these ultra-rich a bonded debt worth billions
of dollars.   And  these  super-wealthy  manipulators  controlled
things  so that, instead of being repaid with the same greenbacks
with which they had bought the bonds, they were repaid with gold.
In  April  of  1866  "The  Contraction  Act"  was  passed.   U.S.
currency, including greenbacks, was  to  be burned.  Between 1866
and 1879, the amount of  money  in  circulation  evaporated.   In
1873,  an  "Act  Revising  and  Amending the Laws Relative to the
Mints, Assay Offices, and the  Coinage  of the United States" was
passed.  Hidden within the law was a clause  which  repealed  the
"unit  clause,"  previously passed by Congress in 1792.  Up until
1873, the monetary unit had been  based on silver.  Gold was also
money, but its value was based =on silver=.  We were =not=  using
a  "bi-metallic"  system.   (The  wisdom  in having silver as the
monetary  unit  was  that  silver  was  less  easy  to  hoard  by
unscrupulous persons wishing to  make  money scarce.)  Thus, gold
became, for awhile, the only official money and the Money  Barons
who  had  bought government bonds for greenbacks were repaid with
gold.

As  always happens, the shrinking of available money brought on a
severe economic  depression.   In  1873  alone,  500,000 men lost
their jobs.  For those lucky breadwinners  who  still  had  work,
their  wages  were  drastically  reduced.  But the hard times led
many to a political awakening.  "A  large number of people in the
United States discovered that  the  economic  premises  of  their
society  were  working  against  them."  [4] In the South and the
West, the Farmers Alliance was  born.   More than a political and
economic movement, the Farmers Alliance was "a new way of looking
at  society,  a way of thinking that represented a shaking off of
inherited  forms  of   deference."    [4]  With  their  political
awakening came self-respect  and  self-education.   The  Alliance
"pioneered  a  new  political  language  to  describe  the 'money
trust,' the  gold  standard,  and  the  private  national banking
system that underlay all of their troubles." [4]

In August of 1886, the allied farmers issued what became known as

                      The Cleburne Demands

(Excerpts)
1.  All land held for speculative purposes (much of  it  held  by
foreign  syndicates  and  domestic railroad syndicates) should be
taxed.

2. Laws to prevent foreigners from speculating in American land.

3.  Certain railroad  lands  to  revert  to the government (which
had, through bribed legislators, originally given away the  lands
to  the  railroads)  and  be  declared open to purchase by actual
settlers.

4.  A  halt  to  "the  dealing  in  futures  of  all agricultural
products."

5.  "A federally administered national banking system embracing a
flexible currency, to be achieved  through  the  substitution  of
legal tender treasury notes."

In  the  latter  19th  century, besides the money monopoly, a new
power group  emerged:   The  Associated  Press.   "In  an  era of
trusts, it was one of the nation's  most  effective  monopolies."
[5] Most Americans were "aghast,"  writes J. Anthony Lukas in his
magnificent book, *Big Trouble*, "that a 'great octopus' like the
AP  could  embrace  eight  hundred  member  papers."   Wrote  one
independent newspaper editor of  the  time,  "Here  is  the  most
tremendous  engine for Power that ever existed in this world.  If
you can  conceive  all  that  Power  ever  wielded  by  the great
autocrats of history... to be massed together into one vast  unit
of  Power,  even this would be less than the power now wielded by
the Associated Press."  [5]  And controlling the Associated Press
was, of course, the Money Monopoly.

The Oliver Stone movie,  "JFK," reportedly financed by Rothschild
family funds, focused on the  Vietnam  angle  as  the  motivation
behind  President  Kennedy's  murder.   Not  well  known is that,
shortly before he died, John  F. Kennedy had quietly overseen the
issuance of interest-free notes  (some  of  which  are  still  in
circulation).    [6]   And  Oliver  Stone,  although  a  talented
film-maker, portrayed Henry Kissinger as  if  he was the icon for
elder statesmen in his movie, "Nixon."  Why would  "rebel"  Stone
show  Kissinger  in  such  a  good light?  And why is it that the
high-power  public  relations  firm,  Hill  and  Knowlton,  which
coordinated propaganda favoring U.S.  entry into the Persian Gulf
War, handled the publicity for Stone's film, "JFK"?  [6] Could it
be that, on the road to success, Oliver Stone  has  had  to  make
little  "compromises"?   To  paraphrase Mayer Amschel Rothschild:
"Permit me to issue and control the  money of a nation and I care
not who makes its movies."

When the late J. Anthony Lukas decided  to  call  his  book  "Big
Trouble,"  was  he thinking, "Big Trouble THEN; Big Trouble NOW"?
The Money Power has gone hog  wild  lately.   Citicorp  illegally
merges  with  Travelers  Group  and  takes  it  for  granted that
the Executive branch will not  enforce  the law and that Congress
will even =re-write= the law and get the  newly-formed  Citigroup
off  the hook.  And get ready now for "SuperMarket Banks" allowed
to handle all  financial  transactions  under one roof, including
the  buying  and  selling  of  stocks.   Meanwhile,  the  average
American  worker  begs  for  decent  employment,  competes   with
imported  foreign  labor  for  survival  wages,  has  little  job
security  --  AND  turns  on  his TV to hear that "the economy is
good." 

Ill fares the land.

---------------------------<< Notes >>---------------------------
[1]   *Lincoln:   Money  Martyred*  by  Dr.  R.E.  Search.   Omni
Publications, PO Box 900566, Palmdale, CA 93590
[2]  *Money  and  Its  True  Function*  by  F.R.  Burch.  qtd. in
*Lincoln: Money Martyred*.
[3] Mark 11: 18.
[4] *The Populist Moment* by Lawrence Goodwyn.   London:   Oxford
University Press, 1978. ISBN: 0-19-502417-6.
[5]  *Big  Trouble*  by  J.  Anthony  Lukas.   New York:  Simon &
Schuster, 1997. ISBN: 0-684-80858-7.
[6]  *...And  The Truth Shall Set You Free* by David Icke.  ISBN:
0-952-6147-1-5.

 +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +

For related stories, visit:
http://www.shout.net/~bigred/cn.html
http://www.netcom.com/~feustel

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Aperi os tuum, decerne quod justum est, et judica inopem et 
  pauperem.                    -- Liber Proverbiorum  XXXI: 8-9 




