On May 23, 1933, Congressman, Louis T. McFadden, brought formal charges against the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve Bank system, The Comptroller of the Currency and the Secretary of United States Treasury for numerous criminal acts.
Extracts from the speech From the Floor of the House of Representatives by the Honorable Louis T. McFadden of Pennsylvania, Chairman of the Banking and Currency Committee:
"Mr. Chairman, we have in this Country one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever known. I refer to the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Banks, hereinafter called the Fed. The Fed has cheated the Government of these United States and the people of the United States out of enough money to pay the Nation's debt. The depredations and iniquities of the Fed have cost enough money to pay the National debt several times over.
"This evil institution has impoverished and ruined the people of these United States, has bankrupted itself, and has practically bankrupted our Government. It has done this through the defects of the law under which it operates, through the maladministration of that law by the Fed and through the corrupt practices of the moneyed vultures who control it.
"Some people who think that the Federal Reserve Banks are United States Government institutions. They are private monopolies which prey upon the people of these United States for the benefit of themselves and their foreign customers.
"These twelve private credit monopolies were deceitfully and disloyally foisted upon this Country by the bankers who came here from Europe and repaid us our hospitality by undermining our American institutions. Those bankers took money out of this Country to finance Japan in a war against Russia. They created a reign of terror in Russia with our money in order to help that war along. They instigated the separate peace between Germany and Russia, and thus drove a wedge between the allies in World War.
They financed Trotsky's passage from New York to Russia so that he might assist in the destruction of the Russian Empire. They fomented and instigated the Russian Revolution, and placed a large fund of American dollars at Trotsky's disposal in one of their branch banks in Sweden so that through him Russian homes might be thoroughly broken up and Russian children flung far and wide from their natural protectors. They have since begun breaking up of American homes and the dispersal of American children.
"Mr. Chairman, there should be no partisanship in matters concerning banking and currency affairs in this Country, and I do not speak with any.
"In 1912 the National Monetary Association, under the chairmanship of the late Senator Nelson W. Aldrich, made a report and presented a vicious bill called the National Reserve Association bill.
This bill is usually spoken of as the Aldrich bill. Senator Aldrich did not write the Aldrich bill. He was the tool, if not the accomplice, of the European bankers who for nearly twenty years had been scheming to set up a central bank in this Country and who in 1912 has spent and were continuing to spend vast sums of money to accomplish their purpose.
"We were opposed to the Aldrich plan for a central bank. The men who rule the Democratic Party then promised the people that if they were returned to power there would be no central bank established here while they held the reigns of government. Thirteen months later that promise was broken, and the Wilson administration, under the tutelage of those sinister Wall Street figures who stood behind Colonel House, established here in our free Country the worm-eaten monarchical institution of the "King's Bank" to control us from the top downward, and from the cradle to the grave.
"The Federal Reserve Bank destroyed our old and characteristic way of doing business. It discriminated against our 1-name commercial paper, the finest in the world, and it set up the antiquated 2-name paper, which is the present curse of this Country and which wrecked every country which has ever given it scope; it fastened down upon the Country the very tyranny from which the framers of the Constitution sought to save us.
"One of the greatest battles for the preservation of this Republic was fought out here in Jackson's time; when the second Bank of the United States, founded on the same false principles of those which are here exemplified in the Fed was hurled out of existence. After that, in 1837, the Country was warned against the dangers that might ensue if the predatory interests, after being cast out should come back in disguise and unite themselves to the Executive and through him, acquire control of the Government.
"The draughtsman who was employed to write the text of the Aldrich bill [wrote], in general, a translation of the statues of the Reichsbank and other European central banks. One-half million dollars was spent … for the purpose of misleading public opinion and giving Congress the impression that there was an overwhelming popular demand for it and for the asset currency based on human debts and obligations.
"A few days before the bill came to a vote, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, of Massachusetts, wrote to Senator John W. Weeks as follows:
New York City,
December 17, 1913
"'My Dear Senator Weeks:
"'Throughout my public life I have supported all measures designed to take the Government out of the banking business. This bill puts the Government into the banking business as never before in our history. "'The powers vested in the Federal Reserve Board seen to me highly dangerous especially where there is political control of the Board. I should be sorry to hold stock in a bank subject to such dominations.
The bill as it stands seems to me to open the way to a vast inflation of the currency. "'I had hoped to support this bill, but I cannot vote for it cause it seems to me to contain features and to rest upon principles in the highest degree menacing to our prosperity, to stability in business, and to the general welfare of the people of the United States.
Very Truly Yours,
Henry Cabot Lodge.'"
"In eighteen years that have passed since Senator Lodge wrote that letter of warning all of his predictions have come true. The Government is in the banking business as never before … Through the Fed the riffraff of every country is operating on the public credit of the United States Government.
"Meanwhile and on account of it, we ourselves are in the midst of the greatest depression we have ever known.
"In 1913, before the Senate Banking and Currency Committee, Mr. Alexander Lassen made the following statement:
"The whole scheme of the Fed with its commercial paper (an impractical, cumbersome machinery) is simply a cover to secure the privilege of issuing money, and to evade payment of as much tax upon circulation as possible and then control the issue and maintain, instead of reducing interest rates. It will prove to the advantage of the few and the detriment of the people. It will mean continued shortage of actual money and further extension of credits, for when there is a shortage of money people have to borrow to their cost.'
"A few days before the Fed passed, Senator Root denounced the Fed as an outrage on our liberties. He predicted:
'Long before we wake up from our dream of prosperity through an inflated currency, our gold- which alone could have kept us from catastrophe- will have vanished and no rate of interest will tempt it to return.'
"If ever a prophecy came true, that one did.
"The Fed became law the day before Christmas Eve, in the year 1913, and shortly afterwards, the German International bankers, Kuhn, Loeb and Co. sent one of their partners here to run it.
"The Fed Note is essentially unsound. It is the worst currency and the most dangerous that this Country has ever known. When the proponents of the act saw that the Democratic doctrine would not permit them to let the proposed banks issue the new currency as bank notes, they should have stopped at that.
They should not have foisted that kind of asset currency on the United States Government. They should not have made the Government [liable on the private] debts of individuals and corporations, and, least of all, on the private debts of foreigners.
"As Kemerer says:
'The Fed Notes, therefore, in form, have some of the qualities of Government paper money, but in substance, are almost a pure asset currency possessing a Government guarantee against which contingency the Government has made no provision whatever.'
"Hon. L.J.Hill, a former member of the House, said:
"They are obligations of the Government for which the United States received nothing and for the payment of which at any time, it assumes the responsibility: looking to the Fed to recoup itself.'
"Before the Banking and Currency Committee, when the bill was under discussion Mr. Crozier of Cincinnati said:
'The imperial power of elasticity of the public currency is wielded exclusively by the central corporations owned by the banks. This is a life and death power over all local banks and all business. It can be used to create or destroy prosperity, to ward off or cause stringencies and panics.
By making money artificially scarce, interest rates throughout the Country can be arbitrarily raised and the bank tax on all business and cost of living increased for the profit of the banks owning these regional central banks, and without the slightest benefit to the people. The 12 Corporations together cover and monopolize and use for private gain every dollar of the public currency and all public revenue of the United States.
Not a dollar can be put into circulation among the people by their Government, without the consent of and on terms fixed by these 12 private money trusts.'
"In defiance of this and all other warnings, the proponents of the Fed created the 12 private credit corporations and gave them an absolute monopoly of the currency of these United States- not of the Fed Notes alone- but of all other currency! The Fed Act providing ways and means by which the gold and general currency in the hands of the American people could be obtained by the Fed in exchange for Fed Notes- which are not money- but mere promises to pay.
"Mr. Chairman, if a Scottish distiller wishes to send a cargo of Scotch whiskey to these United States, he can draw his bill against the purchasing bootlegger in dollars and after the bootlegger has accepted it by writing his name across the face of it, the Scotch distiller can send that bill to the … open discount market in New York City where the Fed will buy it and use it as collateral for a new issue of Fed Notes.
Thus the Government of these United States pay the Scotch distiller for the whiskey before it is shipped, and if it is lost on the way, or if the Coast Guard seizes it and destroys it, the Fed simply write off the loss and the government never recovers the money that was paid to the Scotch distiller.
"While we are attempting to enforce prohibition here, the Fed are in the distillery business in Europe and paying bootlegger bills with public credit of these United States.
"Mr. Chairman, by the same process, they compel our Government to pay the German brewer for his beer. Why should the Fed be permitted to finance the brewing industry in Germany either in this way or as they do, by compelling small and fearful United States Banks to take stock in the Isenbeck Brewery and in the German Bank for brewing industries?
"Mr. Chairman, if Dynamit Nobel of Germany, wishes to sell dynamite in Japan to use in Manchuria or elsewhere, it can draw its bill against the Japanese customers in dollars and send that bill to the … open discount market in New York City where the Fed will buy it and use it as collateral for a new issue of Fed Notes- while at the same time the Fed will be helping Dynamit Nobel by stuffing its stock into the United States banking system.
"Why should we send our representatives to the disarmament conference at Geneva- while the Fed is making our Government pay Japanese debts to German Munitions makers?
"Mr. Chairman, if a German wishes to raise a crop of beans and sell them to a Japanese customer, he can draw a bill against his prospective Japanese customer in dollars and have it purchased by the Fed and get the money out of this Country at the expense of the American people before he has even planted the beans in the ground.
"Mr. Chairman, why should the currency of these United States be issued on the strength of German Beer? Why should these United States be compelled to issue many billions of dollars every year to pay the debts of one foreigner to another foreigner?
"Was it for this that our National Bank depositors had their money taken out of our banks and shipped abroad? Was it for this that they had to lose it?
Why should the public credit of these United States and likewise money belonging to our National Bank depositors be used to support foreign brewers, narcotic drug vendors, whiskey distillers, wig makers and Chilean bean growers, to finance the munition factories of Germany and Soviet Russia?
"The United States has been ransacked and pillaged …Our markets were swamped with unneeded and unwanted imported goods priced far above their value and made to equal the dollar volume of our honest exports, and to kill or reduce our favorable balance of trade.
As Agents of the foreign central banks the Fed try by every means in their power to reduce our favorable balance of trade. They act for the foreign principal and they accept fees from foreigners for acting against the best interests of these United States. Naturally there has been great competition among foreigners for the favors of the Fed.
"What we need to do is to send the reserves of our National Banks home to the people who earned and produced them and who still own them and to the banks which were compelled to surrender them to predatory interests.
"Mr. Chairman, there is nothing like the Fed pool of confiscated bank deposits in the world. It is a public trough of American wealth in which the foreigners claim rights, equal to or greater than Americans. The Fed are the agents of the foreign central banks. They barter the public credit of the United States Government and hire it our to foreigners at a profit to themselves.
"All this is done at the expense of the United States Government, and at a sickening loss to the American people. Only our great wealth enabled us to stand the drain of it as long as we did.
"We need to destroy the Fed, wherein our national reserves are impounded for the benefit of the foreigners.
"We need to save America for Americans.
"Mr. Chairman, when you hold a $10 Fed Note in your hand, you are holding a piece of paper which sooner or later is going to cost the United States Government $10 in gold (unless the Government is obliged to go off the gold standard). It is based on limburger cheese in foreign warehouses or in cans purported to contain peas or horse meat, illicit drugs, rags and bones from Soviet Russia, wines whiskey, natural gas, goat and dog fur, garlic on the string, and Bombay ducks.
"If you like to have paper money- which is secured by such commodities- you have it in Fed Note. If you desire to obtain the thing of value upon which this paper currency is based, that is, the limburger cheese, the whiskey, the illicit drugs, or any of the other staples- you will have a very hard time finding them.
"Many of these worshipful commodities are in foreign Countries. Are you going to Germany to inspect her warehouses to see if the specified things of value are there? I do not think that you would find them there if you did go.
"On April 27, 1932, the Fed outfit sent $750,000 belonging to American bank depositors in gold to Germany. A week later another $300,000 in gold was shipped to Germany. About the middle of May $12,000,000 in gold was shipped to Germany by the Fed. Almost every week there is a shipment of gold to Germany. These shipments are not made for profit on the exchange since the German marks are blow parity with the dollar.
"Mr. Chairman, I believe that the National Bank depositors of these United States have a right to know what the Fed are doing with their money. There are millions of National Bank depositors in the Country who do not know that a percentage of every dollar they deposit in a Member Bank of the Fed goes automatically to American Agents of the foreign banks and that all their deposits can be paid away to foreigners without their knowledge or consent by the questionable practices of the Fed.
"The Fed have been International Banks from the beginning, with these United States as their enforced banker and supplier of currency. But it is none the less extraordinary to see these twelve private credit monopolies buying the debts of foreigners against foreigners, in all parts of the world and asking the Government of these United States for new issues of Fed notes in exchange for them.
"The magnitude of the acceptance racket as it has been developed by the Fed, their foreign correspondents, and the predatory European born bankers: Fed Notes are taken from the U.S. Government in unlimited quantities. It is strange that the burden of supplying these immense sums of money to the gambling fraternity has at last proved too heavy for the American people to endure. Would it not be a national [calamity to] again bind down this burden on the backs of the American people and by means of a long rawhide whip of the credit masters, compel them to enter another seventeen years of slavery? They are trying to do that now.
"Mr. Speaker, on the 13th of January of this year I addressed the House on the subject of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. In the course of my remarks I made the following statement: In 1928 the member banks of the Fed borrowed $60,598,690,000 from the Fed on their fifteen-day promissory notes.
Think of it. Sixty billion dollars payable on demand in gold in the course of one single year. The actual amount of such obligations called for six times as much monetary gold as there is in the world. Such transactions represent a grant in the course of one single year of about $7,000,000 to every member of the Fed.
"Is it any wonder that American labor which ultimately pays the cost of all banking operations of this Country has at last proved unequal to the task of supplying this huge total of cash and credit for the benefit of the stock market manipulators and foreign swindlers?
"In 1933 the Fed presented the staggering amount of $60,598,690,000 to its member banks at the expense of the wage earners and tax payers of these United States. In 1929, the year of the stock market crash, the Fed advanced $58,000,000,000 to member banks.
"In 1930 while the speculating banks were getting out of the stock market at the expense of the general public, the Fed advanced them $13,022,782,000. This shows that when the banks were gambling on the public credit of these United States as represented by the Fed currency, they were subsidized to any amount they required by the Fed. When the swindle began to fall, the bankers knew it in advance and withdrew from the market. They got out with whole skins- and left the people of these United States to pay the piper.
"My friend from Kansas, Mr. McGugin, has stated that he thought the Fed lent money on rediscounting. So they do, but they lend comparatively little that way. The real discounting that they do has been called a mere penny in the slot business. It is too slow for genuine high flyers. They discourage it.
They prefer to subsidize their favorite banks by making them $60,000,000,000 advances and they prefer to acquire assistance in the notorious open discount market in New York, where they can use it to control the price of stocks and bonds on the exchanges.
"For every dollar they advanced on discounts in 1928, they lent $33.00 to their favorite banks for whom they do a business of several billion dollars income tax on their profits to these United States.
"This is the John Law swindle over again. The theft of Teapot Dome was trifling compared to it. What King ever robbed his subject to such an extent as the Fed has robbed us?
" Sharpers with a strong banking "fence" on this side of the water, act as receiver of a worthless paper coming from abroad, endorsing it and getting the currency out of the Fed as quickly as possible, exchanging that currency for gold and in turn transmitting the gold to its foreign confederates.
"Such were the exploits of Ivar Krueger, Mr. Hoover's friend. That is what happens when a Country forsakes its Constitution and gives its sovereignty over the public currency to private interests. Give them the flag and they will sell it.
"The nature of Kreuger's organized swindle and the bankrupt condition of Kreuger's combine was known here last June when Hoover sought to exempt Krueger's loan to Germany of $125,000,000 from the operation of the Hoover Moratorium. The bankrupt condition of Krueger's swindle was known here last summer when $30,000,000 was taken from the American taxpayers by certain bankers in New York for the ostensible purpose of permitting Krueger to make a loan to Colombia.
Colombia never saw that money.
"The nature of Krueger's swindle was known here in January when he visited his friend, Mr. Hoover, at the White House. It was known here in March before he went to Paris and committed suicide.
"Mr. Chairman, I think the people of the United States are entitled to know how many billions of dollars were placed at the disposal of Krueger and his gigantic combine by the Fed, and to know how much of our Government currency was issued and lost in the financing of that great swindle in the years during which the Fed took care of Krueger's requirements.
"A few days ago, the President of the United States with a white face and shaking hands, went before the Senate of behalf of the moneyed interests and asked the Senate to levy a tax on the people so that foreigners might know that these United States would pay its debt to them.
"Most Americans thought it was the other way around. What does these United States owe foreigners? When and by whom was the debt incurred? It was incurred by the Fed, when they peddled the signature of the Government to foreigners for a price. It is what the United States Government has to pay to redeem the obligations of the Fed.
"Are you going to let these thieves get off scot free? Is there one law for the looter who drives up to the door of the United States Treasury in his limousine and another for the United States Veterans who are sleeping on the floor of a dilapidated house on the outskirts of Washington?
"It will take twenty years to redeem our Government. Twenty years of penal servitude to pay off the gambling debts of the traitorous Fed and to vast flood of American wages and savings, bank deposits, and the United States Government credit which the Fed exported out of this country to their foreign principals.
"The Fed lately conducted an anti-hoarding campaign here. They took that extra money which they had persuaded the American people to put into the banks - they sent it to Europe - along with the rest. In the last several months, they have sent $1,300,000,000 in gold to their foreign employers and every dollar of that gold belonged to the people of these United States and was unlawfully taken from them.
"Mr. Chairman, within the limits of the time allowed me, I cannot enter into a particularized discussion of the Fed. I have singled out the Fed currency for a few remarks because there has lately been some talk here of "fiat money". What kind of money is being pumped into the open discount market and through it into foreign channels and stock exchanges?
Mr. Mills of the Treasury has spoken here of his horror of the printing presses and his horror of dishonest money. He has no horror of dishonest money. If he had, he would be no party to the present gambling of the Fed in the … open discount market of New York, a market in which the sellers are represented by 10 discount corporations owned and organized by the very banks which own and control the Fed.
"Fiat money, indeed!
"What Mr. Mills is fighting for is the preservation, whole and entire, of the banker's monopoly of all the currency of the United States Government.
"Mr. Chairman, last December, I introduced a resolution here asking for an examination and an audit of the Fed and all related matters. If the House sees fit to make such an investigation, the people of these United States will obtain information of great value. This is a Government of the people, by the people, for the people. Consequently, nothing should be concealed from the people. The man who deceives the people is a traitor to these United States.
"Every effort has been made by the Fed to conceal its powers- but the truth is- the Fed has usurped the Government. It controls everything here and it controls all of our foreign relations. It makes and breaks governments at will.
"Mr. Chairman, when the Fed was passed, the people of these United States did not perceive that a world system was being set up here which would make the savings of the American school teacher available to a narcotic-drug vendor in Acapulco.
They did not perceive that these United States was to be lowered to the position of a coolie country which has nothing but raw material and heart, that Russia was destined to supply the man power and that this country was to supply the financial power to an "international super-state, controlled by international bankers and international industrialists acting together to enslave the world for their own pleasure.
"The people of these United States are being greatly wronged. They have been driven from their employments. They have been dispossessed from their homes. They have been evicted from their rented quarters. They have lost their children. They have been left to suffer and die for lack of shelter, food, clothing and medicine.
"The wealth of these United States and the working capital have been taken away from them and has either been locked in the vaults of certain banks and the great corporations or exported to foreign countries for the benefit of the foreign customers of these banks and corporations. So far as the people of the United States are concerned, the cupboard is bare.
"It is true that the warehouses and coal yards and grain elevators are full, but these are padlocked, and the great banks and corporations hold the keys.
"Mr. Chairman, a serious situation confronts the House of Representatives today. We are trustees of the people and the rights of the people are being taken away from them … Common decency requires us to examine the public accounts of the Government and see what crimes against the public welfare have been committed.
"What is needed here is a return to the Constitution of these United States.
"The old struggle that was fought out here in Jackson's time must be fought our over again. The independent United States Treasury should be reestablished and the Government should keep its own money under lock and key in the building the people provided for that purpose.
"Asset currency should be done away with. The Fed should be abolished and the State boundaries should be respected. Bank reserves should be kept within the boundaries of the States whose people own them, and this reserve money of the people should be protected so that the International Bankers and acceptance bankers and discount dealers cannot draw it away from them.
"The Fed should be repealed, and the Fed Banks, having violated their charters, should be liquidated immediately. Faithless Government officials who have violated their oaths of office should be impeached and brought to trial.
"Mr. Chairman, the United States has been bankrupted by the corrupt and dishonest Fed. It has repudiated its debts to its own citizens. Its chief foreign creditor is Great Britain, and a British bailiff has been at the White House and the British Agents are in the United States Treasury making an inventory, arranging terms of liquidation [of U.S. assets].
"Mr. Chairman, by means of [this], Great Britain has become the financial mistress of the world. She has regained the position she occupied before the World War.
"For several years she has been a silent partner in the business of the Fed. Under threat of blackmail, or by their bribery, or by their native treachery to the people of the United States, the officials in charge of the Fed unwisely gave Great Britain immense gold loans running into hundreds of millions of dollars.
They did this against the law! Those gold loans were not single transactions. They gave Great Britain a borrowing power in the United States of billions. She squeezed billions out of this Country by means of her control of the Fed.
"As soon as the Hoover Moratorium was announced, Great Britain moved to consolidate her gains. After the … signing away of American rights at the 7-power conference at London in July, 1931, which put the Fed under the control of the Bank of International Settlements, Great Britain began to tighten the hangman's noose around the neck of the United States.
"She abandoned the gold standard and embarked on a campaign of buying up the claims of foreigners against the Fed in all parts of the world. She has now sent her bailiff, Ramsey MacDonald, here to get her war debt to this country canceled.
"Ramsey MacDonald has come here to compel the President to sign on the dotted line, and that is what Roosevelt is about to do! Roosevelt will endeavor to conceal the nature of his action from the American people. But he will obey the International Bankers and transfer the war debt that Great Britain should pay to the American people, to the shoulders of the American taxpayers.
"There was no national emergency here when Franklin D. Roosevelt took office.
"The week before the bank holiday was declared in New York State, the deposits in the New York savings banks were greater than the withdrawals. There were no runs on New York Banks. There was no need of a bank holiday in New York, or of a national holiday.
"Roosevelt did what the International Bankers ordered him to do!
"Do not deceive yourself, Mr. Chairman, or permit yourself to be deceived by others into the belief that Roosevelt's dictatorship is in any way intended to benefit the people of the United States: he is preparing to sign on the dotted line!
"He is preparing to internationalize this Country and to destroy our Constitution itself in order to keep the Fed intact as a money institution for foreigners.
"Mr. Chairman, I see no reason why citizens of the United States should be terrorized into surrendering their property to the International Bankers who own and control the Fed. The statement that it is necessary for the people to give their gold- the only real money- to the banks in order to protect the currency, is a statement of calculated dishonesty!
"By his unlawful usurpation of power on the night of March 5, 1933, and by his proclamation, which in my opinion was in violation of the Constitution of the United States, Roosevelt divorced the currency of the United States from gold, and the United States currency is no longer protected by gold. It is therefore sheer dishonesty to say that the people's gold is needed to protect the currency.
"Roosevelt ordered the people to give their gold to private interests- that is, to banks.
"By his action in closing the banks of the United States, Roosevelt seized the gold value of forty billions or more of bank deposits in the United States banks. Those deposits were deposits of gold values. By his action he has rendered them payable to the depositors in paper only, if payable at all, and the paper money he proposes to pay out to bank depositors and to the people generally in lieu of their hard earned gold values in itself, and being based on nothing into which the people can convert it the said paper money is of negligible value altogether. It is the money of slaves, not of free men.
"At noon on the 4th of March, 1933, FDR with his hand on the Bible, took an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the U.S. At midnight on the 5th of March, 1933, he confiscated the property of American citizens.
"The people of the U.S. are now using unredeemable paper slips for money. The Treasury cannot redeem that paper in gold or silver. And the Administration has since had the effrontery to raid the country for more gold for the private interests by telling our patriotic citizens that their gold is needed to protect the currency.
"It is not being used to protect the currency! It is being used to protect the Fed!
"Has Roosevelt relieved any other class of debtors in this country from the necessity of paying their debts? Has he made a proclamation telling the farmers that they need not pay their mortgages? Has he made a proclamation to the effect that mothers of starving children need not pay their milk bills? Has he made a proclamation relieving householders from the necessity of paying rent?
"Not he!
He has issued one kind of proclamation only, and that is a proclamation to relieve international bankers and the foreign debtors of the United States Government.
"Mr. Chairman, a gold certificate is a warehouse receipt for gold in the Treasury, and the man who has a gold certificate is the actual owner of a corresponding amount of gold stacked in the Treasury subject to his order.
"Now comes Roosevelt, declaring that it may no longer be converted into gold at the will of the holder.
"Next was the reduction in the pay of all Federal employees.
"Next in order are the veterans of all wars, many of whom are aged and infirm, and other sick and disabled, compelled to give up their pensions for the financial benefit of the International vultures who have looted the Treasury and bankrupted the country.
"There are many ways of raising revenue that are better than this barbaric act of injustice.
"Why not collect from the Fed the amount they owe the U.S. Treasury in interest on all the Fed currency they have taken from the Government? That would put billions of dollars into the U.S. Treasury.
"Why not compel the Fed to disclose their profits and to pay the Government its share?
"I do not like to see vivisections performed on human beings. I do not like to see the American people used for experimental purposes by the credit masters of the United States. They predicted among themselves that they would be able to produce a condition here in which American citizens would be completely humbled and left starving and penniless in the streets.
"An American stumbl[es] from hunger when he walks. "Something should be done about it, they say. Five-cent meals, or something!
But FDR will not permit the House of Representatives to investigate the condition of the Fed. FDR will not do that. He has certain International Bankers to serve. They look to him as the man Higher Up who will protect them from the just wrath of an outraged people.
"The International Bankers have always hated our pensioners. A man with a small pension is a ward of the Government. He is not dependent upon them for a salary or wages. They cannot control him. They do not like him. It gave them great pleasure, therefore, to slash the veterans.
"As a prominent Democrat lately remarked to me; "There is no new deal. The same old crowd is in control."
"We know from assertions made here by the Hon. John N. Garner, Vice-President of the U.S. that there is a condition in the [United States such as] would cause American citizens, if they knew what it was, to lose all confidence in their government.
"Roosevelt has brought with him from Wall Street, James Warburg, alien born, son of a former partner of Kuhn, Loeb and Co.
"He holds no office in our Government, but I am told that he is in daily attendance at the Treasury, and that he has private quarters there!
"The text of the Executive order which seems to place an embargo on shipments of gold permits the Secretary of the Treasury to issue licenses at his discretion for the export of gold coin, or bullion [to] a recognized foreign government or foreign central bank for international settlement.
"By the terms of this executive order, gold may be exported if it is actually required, for the fulfillment of any contract entered into prior to the date of the order, namely, April 20, 1933.
"If a European Bank should send 100,000,000 dollars in Fed currency to a bank in this country for redemption, that bank [would] ship gold to Europe in exchange for that currency. Such Fed currency would represent "contracts" entered into prior to the date of the order. "
At this point, Congressman, Louis T. McFadden formally charges each of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve Bank system, The Comptroller of the Currency and the Secretary of United States Treasury for numerous criminal acts. After some discussion and upon the motion of Mr. Byrns, the resolution and charge were referred to the Committee on the Judiciary.
In no doubt about its identity is one of the originals - Samizdata - firmly in the blog camp, with many contributors who are subordinate to the management as far as editorial control goes. Samizdata keeps on keeping on - I'm not sure if it makes money.
One I haven't seen for years is Harry's Place, which used to be ruled with a rod of iron by its manager or so the folk lore went - who knows what happens today? Like Samizdata, that's as close as one is going to get to a public blog.
The Economic Voice is, in its layout, more newspaper than blog but it is presented as a forum for your views. A great idea but it has stiff competition from so many other pundits around the sphere. TEV would decry the word competition and opt for consensus, no doubt. However, I can think of Politeia and Gates of Vienna immediately as blogs gathering their own memberships as well.
EU Referendum is half and half, as far as I can see - a blog come news service on the EU issue and the most consistent voice on the issue.
Steve Green had an interesting thing going - one half of his site was a referendum on a daily basis but two things ended that, again as far as I can see - the sheer upkeep of such a blog and the wish of the readers to treat it as a Tory blog, so that is what it became.
