You might have heard this phrase uttered recently: “The Federal Reserve is about as Federal as Federal Express.”  If you haven't before, well, now you have.  Sound ridiculous?  It is, but probably not in the way that you think.  The Federal Reserve is absolutely not an arm of the government.  It is absolutely, positively, a private bank.  Would you like proof of that?  Here is a list of the primary shareholders: Rothschild Banks of London and Berlin, Warburg Banks of Hamburg and Amsterdam, Lazard Brothers Banks of Paris, Israel Moses Seif Banks of Italy, Chase Manhattan Bank (Rockefellers) of New York, former Lehman Brothers Bank of New York, Kuhn Loeb of New York, and Goldman Sachs of New York.  From this point on, I will not capitalize the F or R when referring to "the fed".

It might interest you to know, that the present fed is not that old, relatively speaking.  The federal reserve Act was passed on December 23rd, 1913.  In fact, the entire bill was written by bankers (see aforementioned list) and was pushed through Congress by their political pal, Nelson Aldrich - who later became related to the Rockefeller family by marriage.  Why was the Act passed?  I am really going to skim over this, but the short of it is, the entire passage was precipitated by the banking panic of 1907.  So, the banks were just trying to protect themselves, right?  Wrong.  Bankers set the panic of 1907 in motion.  Oxymoronic, yes.  JP Morgan, a financial luminary at the time, used his influence to have stories published that a prominent bank was insolvent, which was a lie.  Eager to protect their deposits, people withdrew their money, forcing banks to call in loans.  It became a self-fulfilling prophecy.  So, the lie beget the panic, the panic beget Congressional investigation (led by Aldrich), the investigation beget the passage of a bill, all in the name of making sure another panic did not occur (but which always do, begetting ever more un-constitutional regulation).  Dig deep here.  A banker created the lie, a friend of the bankers (Aldrich) led the investigation, bankers wrote the bill, Aldrich then pushed the passage (on a date when most of Congress was out), and Woodrow Wilson signed the bill into law.  Wilson, by the way, had already agreed to sign the bill into law for campaign contributions.  Who does the federal reserve Act benefit?  Bankers.  Now you might be asking yourself, if the Act was signed into law, why doesn't that make it part of the government?  Because the "law" was written with the specific intent that it not be an arm of the government.  Further, the federal reserve has no oversight.  That's right, no oversight.  Nobody audits their books.  They answer to no one.  You might see the reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, grilled by Congress from time to time, but he is absolutely not accountable for any of his actions to Congress.  It is a dog and pony show.  A diversion.

Let's move on.  In “One Big Mess”, I touched on an idea that I wouldn't call cash, or federal reserve notes, money.  The reason I did that is simple enough, and now is the time to explain it.  The reason that I don't call federal reserve notes "money" is because it is not.  According to our Constitution, only gold and silver can be money as stated in Article 1, Section 10.  This was circumvented by the federal reserve Act.  Since the federal reserve is not a part of the government, the "state" is not issuing notes at all.  Most assume that we went off the Gold Standard during the Nixon administration, but this is not precisely correct.  In fact, Franklin Roosevelt declared the US Federal Government bankrupt in the Emergency Banking Act of 1933, 48 Stat. 1, Public Law 89-719.  In the EBA, US citizens were told that they had to turn in their gold bullion to the Federal Government, or face prison terms of up to 10 years.  It was legalized confiscation of the little wealth the people had left.  Nixon actually had very little left to do to completely sever the tie of the US dollar to gold.  But the difference was, the people now knew that inflation was baked into the cake.  Before 1933, a dollar bill actually said it was redeemable for gold.  Now it simply says it is legal tender.  But what is backing it?  Absolutely nothing.  A federal reserve note is a debt obligation of the United States government.  Read that again.  The US government is in perpetual debt servitude to a privately owned and run bank that answers to no one.  This is no joke.  You must understand, every federal reserve note created, from thin air (or computer keystroke), is then lent to the US government at interest.  The debt can never be repaid.  It is a perpetual pyramid of debt.  Look at the back of a dollar bill.  I have yet to verify this, but it is my theory that the pyramid and all seeing eye on the back of a dollar bill represents the federal reserve (the eye) and the pyramid is the ever-expanding debt that is our "currency cash".  Let this sink in.  The debt can never be repaid under this system.  A pyramid scheme like this is also known as a Ponzi scheme.  Bernard Madoff was famously busted for his Ponzi scheme.  How long before we bust the federal reserve for their Ponzi scheme?

Gold and silver have stood the test of time as a store of value.  They have been universally recognized as a medium of exchange, and accepted widely for millennia.  In fact, they are two of the few unifying goods of all time.  No matter what your religious beliefs, no matter what your political preference, gold and silver have always been an honest means of exchange.  Paper has not.  No fiat paper currency has ever stood the test of time.  Is it far too open to manipulation by the wants of a few.  When you control currency, you have all the power.  Mayer Amschel Rothschild is quoted as saying, "Give me the power to create a nation's money, and I care not who creates its laws."  The jig is up.  Wake up everyone, it's time to force out the federal reserve and reintroduce honest money!