Money Masters Transcripts Part 17

17. ABE LINCOLN and the CIVIL WAR

Unfortunately, even Jackson failed to grasp the entire picture and its root cause. Although Jackson had killed the privately-owned central bank, the most insidious weapon of the Money Changers - fractional reserve banking - remained in use by the numerous state-chartered banks. For example, Ln Massachusetts by 1862 the state banks had loaned out eight times as much as they had gold and silver on deposit. One state bank had issued $50,000 backed by a total of $86.48. This fueled economic instability in the years before the Civil War, particularly as no reserve ratios were mandated for most of the state banks. Still, the central bankers were out and therefore coordinated monetary manipulation on a national scale was rendered impossible. As a result, America generally thrived as it expanded westward.

During this time, the principal Money Changers struggled to regain their lost centralized power and money monopoly, but to no avail. Finally they reverted to the old central banker's formula - finance a war, to create debt and dependency. If they couldn't get their central bank any other way, America could be brought to its knees by plunging it into a War, just as they were said to have done in 1812, after the First Bank of the U.S. was not re-chartered.

One month after the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln, the first shots of the American Civil War were fired at Fort Sumter, South Carolina on April 12, 1861. The fifth and final American Bank War was beginning.

Certainly slavery was a cause for the Civil War, but not the primary cause. Lincoln knew that the economy ofthe South depended upon slavery and so (before the Civil War) he had no intention of eliminating it. Lincoln had put it this way in his inaugural address only one month earlier:

"I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it now exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so."

Even after the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, Lincoln continued to insist that the Civil War was not about the issue of slavery:

"My paramount objective is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it."

So what was the Civil War all about? There were many factors at play. Northern industrialists had used protective tariffs to prevent their southern states from buying cheaper European goods. Europe retaliated by stopping cotton imports from the South. The Southern states were in a financial bind. They were forced to pay more for most of the necessities of life while their income from cotton exports plummeted. The South grew increasingly angry.

But there were other factors at work. The Money Changers were still stung by America's withdrawal from their control 25 years earlier. Since then, America's wildcat economy, despite the presence of fractional reserve banking with its attendant booms and busts, had made the nation rich - a bad example for the rest the world.

The central bankers now saw an opportunity to use the North/South divisions to split the rich new nation - to divide and conquer by war. Was this just some sort of wild conspracy theory? Well, let's look at what a well placed observer of the scene had to say at time.

This was Otto von Bismarck, Chancellor of Germany, the man who united the German states in 1871. A few years later, in 1876, he is quoted as saying:

"It is not to be doubted, I know of absolute certainty," Bismarck declared, "that the division of the United States into two federations of equal power was decided long before the Civil War by the high financial powers of Europe. These bankers were afraid that the United States, if they remained as one block and were to develop as one nation, would attain economic and financial independence, which would upset the capitalist domination of Europe over the world."

Within months after the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, the central bankers loaned Napoleon III of France (the nephew of the Waterloo Napoleon) 210 million francs to seize Mexico and station troops along the southern border of the U.S., taking advantage of the Civil War to violate the Monroe Doctrine and return Mexico to colonial rule.

No matter what the outcome of the Civil War, it was hoped that a war-weakened America, heavily indebted to the Money Changers, would open up Central and South America once again to European colonization and domination - the very thing America's Monroe Doctrine had forbade in 1823.

At the same time, Great Britain moved 11,000 troops into Canada and positioned them along America's northern border. The British fleet went on war alert should their quick intervention be called for.

Lincoln knew he was in a bind. He agonized over the fate of the Union. There was a lot more to it than just differences between the North and the South. That's why his emphasis was always on "Union" and not merely the defeat of the South. But Lincoln needed money to win.

In 1861, Lincoln and his Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase, went to New York to apply for the necessary war loans. The Money Changers, anxious to maximize their war profits, only offered loans at 24-36% interest. Lincoln said thanks, but no thanks, and returned to Washington. He sent for an old friend, Colonel Dick Taylor of Chicago, and put him onto the problem off financing the War. At one particular meeting, Lincoln asked Taylor how else to finance the war. Taylor put it this way:

"Why, Lincoln, that is easy; just get Congress to pass a bill authorizing the printing of full legal tender treasury notes… pay your soldiers with them and go ahead and win your war with them also."

When Lincoln asked if the people of the United States would accept the notes, Taylor said:

"The people or anyone else will not have any choice in the matter, if you make them full legal tender. They will have the full sanction of the government and be just as good as any money … the stamp of full legal tender by the Government is the thing that makes money good any time, and this will always be as good as any other money inside the borders of our country. "

So that's exactly what Lincoln did. From 1862 to 1865, with Congressional authorization, he printed up $432,000,000 of the new bills.

In order to distinguish them from private bank notes in circulation, he had them printed with green ink on the back side. That's why the notes were called "Greenbacks." With this new money, Lincoln paid the troops, and bought their supplies. During the course of the war, nearly all of the 450 million dollars of Greenbacks authorized by Congress were printed at no interest to the federal government.

By now Lincoln realized who was really pulling the strings and what was at stake for the American people. Lincoln understood the matter better than even Jackson apparently had. This is how he explained his monetary views:

"The Government should create, issue, and circulate all the currency and credit needed to satisfy the spending power of the Government and the buying power of consumers… The privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of Government, but it is the Government's greatest creative opportunity… By the adoption of these principles, the long-felt want for a uniform medium will be satisfied. The taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest. The financing of all public enterprises, and the conduct of the Treasury will become matters of practical administratlon. Money will cease to be master and become the servant of humanity."

Meanwhile in Britain a truly incredible editorial in the London Times explained the Bank of England's attitude towards Lincoln's Greenbacks.

"If this mischievous financial policy, which has its origin in North America, shall become indurated down to a fixture, then the Government will furnish its own money without cost. It will pay off debts and be without debt. It will have all the money necessary to carry on its commerce. It will become prosperous without precedent in the history of the world. The brains, and wealth of all countries will go to North America. That country must be destroyed or it will destroy every monarchy on the globe."

Keep in mind, by this time the European monarchs were already chained to their private central banks, hence the bankers' concern to preserve their captive monarchs. Within four days of the passage of the law which allowed Greenbacks to be issued, bankers met in convention in Washington to discuss the situation. It was agreed that Greenbacks would surely be their ruin. Something had to be done. They devised a scheme gradually to undermine the value of the Greenbacks.

Seemingly unimportant limitations on the use of Greenbacks (printed on the green back), insisted on by the bankers, forbidding their use to pay import duties and interest on the public debt, were utilized by the banks to slap a surcharge on Greenbacks of up to 185%. This undermined the confidence of the people in Greenbacks and necessitated further concessions to the bankers to obtain more, discounted as the Greenbacks now were.

This scheme was effective - so effectivt that the next year, 1863, with Federal and Confederate troops beginning to mass for the decisive battle of the Civil War, and the Treasury in need of further Congressional authority at that time to issue more Greenbacks, Lincoln gave in to the pressure, which he described:

"They persist, they have argued me almost blind - I am worse off than St. Paul. He was in a strait between two. I am in a strait between twenty and they are bankers and financiers."

Lincoln allowed the bankers to push through the National Banking Act of 1863 in exchange for their support for the urgently needed additional Greenbacks.

This act created "National Banks" (hence the N.A. still in use after National banks' names) and gave them a virtual tax-free status. The new banks also got the exclusive power to create the new form of money - National Bank Notes. Though Greenbacks continued to circulate, their quantity was limited and no more were authorized after the war.

On June 13, 1863, according to Judge Rutherford's book, "Vindication" this letter was sent from the Rothschilds' London office, which does, in fact, accurately assess the National Banking Act of 1863:

"Rothschild Brothers, Bankers, London, June 25th, 1863

Messrs Ikleheimer, Morton and Vandergould, No 3 Wall St., New York, US.A.

Dear Sirs:

A Mr. John Sherman has written us from a town in Ohio, U.S.A., as to the profits that may be made in the National Bankng business under a recent act of your Congress, a copy of which act accompanied his letter. Apparently this act has been drawn upon the plan formulated here last summer by the British Bankers Association and by that Association recommended to our American friends as one that if enacted into law, would prove highly profitable to the banking fraternity throughout the world.

Mr. Sherman declares that there has never been such an opportunity for capitalists to accumulate money, as that presented by this act, and that the old plan of State Banks is so unpopular, that the new scheme will, by contrast, be most favorably regarded, notwithstanding the fact that it gives the National Banks an almost absolute control of the National finance.

'The few who can understand the system,' he says, 'will either be so interested in its profits, or so dependent of its favors that there will be no opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantages that capital derives from the system, will bear its burdens without complaint and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests.'

Please advise fully as to this matter and also state whether or not you will be of assistance to us, if we conclude to establish a National Bank in the City of New York. If you are acquainted with Mr. Sherman (he appears to have introduced the Banking Act) we will be glad to know something of him. If we avail ourselves of the information he furnished, we will, of course, make due compensation.

Awaiting your reply, we are

Your respectful servants, Rothschild Brothers"

From this point on, the U.S. money supply would be created in parallel with an equivalent quantity of with debt by bankers buying U.S. government bonds, which they used as reserves for National Bank Notes, the nation's new form of money, instead of by direct debt-free issue by the government, as were Lincoln's Greenbacks. The banks got interest from the government on the bonds and from borrowers of their Bank Notes - thus almost doubling their interest income. As historian John Kenneth Galbraith explained:

"In numerous years following the war, the Federal government ran a heavy surplus. It could not [however] pay off its debt, retire its securities, because to do so meant there would be no bonds to back the national bank notes. To pay off the debt was to destroy the money supply."

Predictably, the new National Banks quickly applied pressure to Congress to have state bank notes taxed out of existence. Congress complied. Thus the fifth American Bank War progressed in small stages in favor of the Money Changers, culminating in passage of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 and the National Bank Act of 1935.

In 1863, Lincoln got some unexpected help from Czar Alexander II of Russia. The Czar, like Bismarck in Germany, knew what the international Money Changers were up to and had steadfastly refused to grant them authority to set up a privately-owned central bank in Russia. If America survived and was able to remain out of their clutches, his position would be more secure. If the bankers were successful at dividing America and giving the pieces back to Great Britain and France (both nations by now under control of their privately-owned central banks), eventually they would turn on Russia.

So, the Czar gave orders that if either England or France actively intervened and gave aid to the South, Russia would consider such action as a declaration of war. He sent his Pacific fleet under Admiral Popov to port in San Francisco, where it arrived on October 12, 1863, and part of his Baltic fleet under Admiral Lisiviski to port in New York harbor on September 24, 1863, and later to Alexandria, Virginia, which lies just across the river from Washington, D.C., as a forceful show of support for Lincoln and a warning to Britain and France.

Further, the Czar was still in a revengeful mood from Russia's defeat in the Crimean War (1853-56) by Money Changer-controlled Britain and France (joined by Turkey and Sardinia).

Lincoln was re-elected the next year, 1864. Prior to the end of the war, for more Green backs, the bankers obtained more concessions in the second National Banking Act, of 1864.

Victorious in the Civil War, had he lived, as his statements quoted above and following make - abundantly clear, Lincoln would surely have killed the National Banks' money monopoly extracted from him during the war. On November 21, 1864, he wrote a friend the

"The money power preys upon the nation in times of peace and conspires against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to trem-

{p. 39} ble for the safety of my country. Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the republic is destroyed."

Shortly before Lincoln was assassinated, his former Secretary of the Treasury, Salrnon P. Chase, bemoaned his role in helping secure the passage of the National Banking Act only one year earlier:

"My agency in promoting the passage of the National Banking Act was the greatest financial mistake in my life. It has built up a monopoly which affects every interest in the country."

On April 14, 1865, 41 days after his second inauguration, and five days after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox, though the Civil War was over, Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth, at Ford's theater. Bismarck Chancellor of Germany lamented the death of Abraham Lincoln:

"The death of Lincoln was a disaster for Christendom. There was no man in the United States great enough to wear his boots…"

Bismarck well understood the Money Changers' plan. Allegations that international bankers were responsible for Lincoln's assassination surfaced in Canada 70 years later, in 1934. Gerald G. McGeer, a popular and well-respected Canadian attorney, revealed this stunning charge in a 5-hour speech before the House of Commons blasting Canada's debt-based money system. Remember, it was 1934, the height of the Great Depression which was ravaging Canada as well elsewhere.

McGeer had obtained evidence deleted from the public record, provided to him by Secret Service agents, from the trial of John Wilkes Booth, after Booth's death. McGeer said it showed that Booth was a mercenary working for the international bankers. According to an article in the Vancouver Sun of May 2, 1934:

"Abraham Lincoln was assassinated through the machinations of a group representative of the international bankers, who feared the United States President's national credit ambitions… There was only one group in the world at that time who had any reason to desire the death of Lincoln… They were the men opposed to his national currency programme and who had fought him throughout the whole Civil War on his policy of Greenback currency."

Interestingly, McGeer claimed that Lincoln was assassinated not only because international bankers wanted to re-establish a central bank in America, but because they also wanted to base America's currency on gold - gold they controlled - in other words, put America on a "gold standard." Silver was to be demonetized and all Greenbacks retired for gold. Lincoln had done just the opposite by issuing U.S. Notes - Greenbacks - which were based purely on the good faith and credit of the United States. The article quoted McGeer as saying:

"They were the men interested in the establishment of the gold standard and the right of the bankers to manage the currency and credit of every nation in the world. With Lincoln out of the way they were able to proceed with the plan and did proceed with it in the United States. Within eight years after Lincoln's assassination, silver was demonetized and the gold standard money system set up in the United States."

Not since Lincoln has the U.S. issued debt-free United States Notes. The red-sealed U.S. Notes (Federal Reserve Notes are green-sealed) have been re-issued fourteen (14) times since Lincoln's assassination. They are not new issues, but merely the old Greenbacks reissued year after year as they wear out. Their quantity was eventually limited to $300 million, eventually less than one percent of U.S. currency.

In another act of folly and ignorance, the 1994 Reigle Act actually authorized the replacement of Lincoln's Greenbacks with debt-based Federal Reserve Notes. In other words, Lincoln' s Greenbacks were in circulation in the United States until 1994, for 130 years. It was a discovery the bankers wanted carefully buried. They can now be found only in rare currency collections.

Why was silver bad for the bankers and gold good? Simple. Because silver was plentiful in the United States and elsewhere. So it was relatively hard to control. Gold was, and always has been scarce. Throughout history it has been relatively easy to monopolize gold, but silver has historically been 15 times more plentiful.


Acknowledgement and credits

The Money Masters: How International Bankers Gained Control of America

Video Script
Produced by Patrick S. J. Carmack
Directed by Bill Still
Royalty Production Company 1998

Ref: [http://users.cyberone.com.au/myers/money-masters.html]

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