http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/print.asp?ID=170
Nick Sandberg
A Brief History of Banking
A Brief History of
Banking
"Let me issue
and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws" -
Amshall Rothschild
In the recent era, the
story of "the elite" commences with the development of the modern
banking system in Middle Ages Europe. At that time, disposable wealth was
usually held in the form of gold or silver bullion. For safety, such assets
were kept in the safe of the local goldsmith, he usually being the only
individual who had a vault on his premises. The goldsmith would issue a receipt
for the deposit and, to undertake financial transactions, the buyer would
withdraw his gold and give it to the seller, who would then deposit it again,
frequently with the same goldsmith. As this was a time-consuming process, it
became common practice for people to simply exchange smiths' receipts when
conducting financial transactions. As time passed, the goldsmiths began to
issue receipts for specific values of gold, making buying and selling easier
still. The smiths' receipts thus became the first banknotes.
The goldsmiths, now
fledgling bankers, noticed that at any one time only a small proportion of the
gold held with them was being withdrawn. So they hit upon the idea of issuing
more of the receipt notes themselves, notes that did not refer to any actual
deposited wealth. By giving these receipts to people seeking capital, in the
form of loans, the goldsmiths could use the money deposited with them by others
to make money for themselves. It was found that, for every unit of gold held by
the goldsmith, ten times the sum could be safely issued as notes without anyone
usually becoming any the wiser. If a goldsmith held, say, 100 pounds of other
people's gold in his vaults, he could issue banknotes to the value of 1000
pounds. As long as no more than 10 percent of the holders of those notes wanted
their gold at any one time, no one would realize the fraud being perpetrated.
This practice, known as "fractional reserve lending," continues to
this day and is actually the backbone of the modern banking industry. Banks
typically loan ten times their actual financial holdings, meaning 90% of the
money they lend does not now, never has, and never will exist.
Loans issued by the
goldsmiths had to be paid back to them with interest, meaning non-existent
money slowly became converted to tangible assets in the form of goods and
labour. Should the loan be defaulted upon, the banker had the right to seize
the defaulter's property. As time passed, therefore, the goldsmiths became
wealthier and wealthier. They had devised a scheme to create money out of thin
air and then convert this money into real goods, labour, or property. A loan of
money at 12% interest recouped not merely 12% for the banker, but 112%, as it
does to this day.
As the industrial era
began, so the potential for furthering this scheme increased exponentially. The
goldsmiths were now fully-fledged bankers, and their ability to create money
out of thin air and then convert it into tangible assets enabled them to begin
to control whole industries to the point where the worlds of banking and
industry became, to all intents and purposes, seamless entities. Extended
family banking structures, such as the Rothschilds, acquired so much power in
this manner that the various monarchies and fledgling governments of the time
soon began to seem quite feeble by comparison.
To increase their
power and influence still further, these elite banking families would subtly
buy influence within governments or monarchies and utilise this influence to
strategically stir up unrest between nations. When the inevitable disputes
broke out, they would then lend vast sums of money, usually to both sides, so
that war could be waged. Any armaments purchased would be those manufactured by
the industrial wing of the banking-industrial cartel, and by regulating the
loan of money and the timing of the delivery of weapons, the outcome of any
conflict could effectively be controlled. If deemed necessary, monarchies and
governments could further be destabilized by generating poverty through
regulating the money supply, and by using agent-provocateur tactics to fuel any
latent desire for revolution. With such power it was easy to control the
fledgling governments of Europe and ensure that only those politicians who
would do the will of the banking families came to power.
As the twentieth
century dawned, the banking families hit upon a new means to consolidate and
increase their gains. They discovered that by periodically restricting the
money supply crashes within the emergent stock exchanges of the world could
easily be engineered. The most notable example of this was the famous Wall
Street Crash of 1929. What the history books usually fail to record is that, in
a crash, wealth is not actually destroyed, but merely transferred. The
"Crash of '29" allowed the most powerful of the banking and
industrial families to absorb the weaker elements, generating even greater
levels of centralized control.
As the technological
revolution progressed, so the buying up of TV stations and newspapers allowed
the creation and control of the mass media. This served to ensure that only a
portrayal of events that suited the interests of the elite banking families
would get to public attention - invariably one that all but denied their very
existence.
A Closer Look at
Government
The vision we're
usually given of how political power is manifest in our society typically runs
something like this: government at the top, banking, industry, media and
military, beneath, and the people beneath this. However, an independent
examination of the development of modern political power is more likely to
reveal the following arrangement: extended family banking groups at the top,
government beneath, facilitating the wishes of this hierarchy, and the media
beneath portraying the work of the government to the people as "democracy
in action."
It can thus be seen
that, in truth, most governments are little more than front organizations for
the elite banking cartels. They interface with the public via the media, acting
to facilitate social change in a manner that maintains relative social
stability, while ensuring that our culture stays in line with any course the
elite wish it to pursue. Western governments do not usually allow the public to
actually pick who becomes their political representative, merely to choose
between individuals selected by the party hierarchy. Neither do the public get
to pick the policies the representative will pursue, this is also under the
control of the party. To say that this system is open to abuse is a
considerable understatement.
America
America is, in
essence, a prototype for world consumer culture. Now that the technological revolution has facilitated the
expression of American cultural values across the world, America is, in effect,
expanding until the 50 states actually encompass the whole globe in all but
name. Our planet is slowly becoming America.
World War II
The Second World War,
a conflict which cost the lives of tens of millions of people, was entirely
manipulated into being by the elite banking and industrial cartels.
Hitler rose to power
in a country so economically crippled by the reparations imposed after the
previous war that going into another should have been inconceivable. But the
banking elite agreed to the loan of billions of dollars, and furthermore set up
a vast industrial complex within Germany, (much of it the Standard Oil
subsidiary, I.G. Farben), to manufacture the tanks, planes, arms and munitions
necessary to wage another European war. Oil pipelines and factories were built,
lines of credit extended and the war machine spent nearly a whole decade
churning out weaponry while the rest of the country remained in abject poverty
thus fuelling the desire for war. The whole thing was a set up from start to
finish, as even a cursory independent examination will confirm. The millions of
deaths that resulted were looked upon by the banking families as being simply a
sacrifice necessary to achieve greater levels of European homogeny and control.
The Third World
"Conquered
states.... can be held by the conqueror in three different ways. The first is
to ruin them, the second for the conqueror to go and reside there in person and
the third is to allow them to continue to live under their own laws, subject to
a regular tribute, and to create in them a government of the few who will keep
the country friendly to the conqueror." - Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince
I will now look at the
banking families' ambitions in the Southern Hemisphere, or so-called
"Third World." All across Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America,
the elite banking families have again pursued unrelentingly the ambition of
destabilizing a multitude of traditional cultures and creating in their place a
series of homogenized trading blocks. In recent years this task has been
undertaken chiefly by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
But the story commences many years before.
Colonization by the
European empire builders from the sixteenth century onwards and the later
granting of "independence" to conquered territories led slowly to the
forging of individual nation states with monarchies and governments. To ensure
that these institutions remained subservient to the elite, agent provocateurs
and dubious Western government agencies worked behind the scenes to displace
any leaders who showed democratic tendencies and replace them with elite
puppets from local communities and their extended families. To maintain these
hated and corrupt regimes in power, the Western banking institutions lent vast
sums of money to these "governments" and monarchies to enable them to
form armies, frequently with foreign troops, and thus prevent the people of the
country from wresting power. Loans were further granted for the purchase of
weapons, to wage various regional conflicts stirred up by elite agent
provocateurs, and to build palatial homes in which the puppet monarchs and
their officials might reside.
In the early 1970s,
the elite-manipulated Yom Kippur war resulted in a massive rise in oil prices.
The whole world found itself paying vastly increased rates for petroleum, and
the massive profits made by the oil-producing nations were invested back with
the elite-controlled Western banks. Relying on the ever-popular tactic of
loaning at least ten times their reserves, the banks now had insane sums of
money to lend. With the "Third World" countries compelled to pay
vastly increased sums for their oil, as well as service the debts already
incurred by their puppet leaders, further massive loans were advanced to them
in a banking strategy that came to be known as "petrodollar
recycling." The Western banks would send youthful reps across the world
offering gigantic loans to anyone in power who wanted them. These loans were,
of course, created out of thin air and tied to the recipient buying weapons,
machinery or goods from the industrial or military clients of the banking
cartel offering the money. In the 1980s, the bubbles began to burst, with the
Mexican debt crisis becoming the first of many "days of reckoning."
The World Bank and the IMF, elite-manufactured organizations created in the
1940s to "stimulate the conditions of world trade," stepped in. They
offered "adjustments" - strategies for repayment that involved the
countries concerned adopting economic "austerity" programmes and
commencing industrial production of Western goods and consumer products.
To commence industrial
production, the countries had to take out further loans and buy plant from -
the industrial clients of the banking cartels. To generate sufficient power for
the new industries, they had to hire companies to build hydroelectric power
plants or nuclear reactors - companies that were again the heavy industry
clients of the banking cartels.
The IMF
debt-rescheduling practices enforced on the countries experiencing major
problems paying back their loans (problems entirely generated by the elite via
their control of world interest rates and oil prices) compelled the "Third
World" nations, one after another, to commence manufacturing goods, not
for themselves but for sale on the world markets. Here, in the emergent global
marketplace, they had to compete with each other in a highly competitive market
over which they had no control. The only factor in the IMF equation that the
Southern Hemisphere countries could control was the cost of labour. The result
was cheaper goods for Western consumers and greater poverty for workers in the
"Third World."
All across the
Southern Hemisphere, small farmers were driven away from planting crops for
themselves and compelled to plant crops for export, hoping they'd get paid
enough to survive. In the 1980s, runaway inflation stimulated by Reaganomics in
America (the arrangement of vast loans for US government spending on military
and space projects that sent world interest rates skyrocketing) began to force
many local people out of the countryside altogether. They were driven into the
newly created cities where they vied with each other for work in the newly
built factories. This led to the destruction of traditional ways of life for
millions upon millions. Emergent drug cartels, invariably under the direction
of government agencies such as the CIA, began to flood the cities and
industrial areas with cheap drugs, hooking those with jobs deeper into a life
of wage slavery, and those without into lifelong street-level delinquency. In
addition, grain crops, previously used for bread, were diverted into producing
of alcohol for the relocated populations. Problems unheard of a generation
before - alcoholism, drug addiction, crime, unemployment, poverty and
malnutrition - became epidemic in proportion all across Africa, Latin America
and Southeast Asia. In Brazil, one of the biggest food exporters in the world,
approaching half a million children die annually from malnutrition or
hunger-related diseases.
In the early 1990s,
the spectre of capitalist greed proved increasingly disturbing for the people
buying the goods created in this manner. So the elite came up with
"green-washing" - the media-driven means by which images of change
within the Southern Hemisphere are bombarded upon the Western viewer,
convincing them that "the system" is adapting to moral pressure from
Western citizens. News broadcasts accepted that previous practices had been
exploitative but that, post Live Aid and similar, things were changing and any
residual problems were entirely the fault of the poorer nations themselves or
the weather. The previous "evil capitalists," the Reagans and
Thatchers, were removed from power and replaced by consumer-friendly
mouthpieces of the elite - the Clintons and the Blairs. On UK TV at the time of
writing (originally Spring 2000), one BBC programme features former Spice Girl,
Geri Halliwell, entering the world's shanty towns and meeting crowds of poor
but happy-looking children jumping up and down, thus generally promoting the
image of gradual change and improvement. What the programme neglected to reveal
is that, in many of the "Third World's" shantytowns, children now
have less than a 50% chance of making it to their first birthday. Infant
mortality rates are rising steadily throughout the Southern Hemisphere, despite
the efforts of the United Nations (UN) and World Health Organization (WHO) to
massage the figures. For those lucky enough to reach the grand old age of five,
the only prospect to look forward to is a life of begging, street crime or
child prostitution. The population of the world is currently estimated at six
billion. Three billion of these are existing in poverty, one third of them at
near-starvation level. For the majority of the world's citizens, life is
now demonstrably worse than at any time in recorded history.
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