Statement on the 100th Anniversary of the US Federal Reserve, December 23, 2013
Issued by the Office of the Chairperson
International League of Peoples’ Struggle
On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the U.S. Federal Reserve this December 23, the International League of Peoples’ Struggle (ILPS) calls on the people of the world to expose and condemn the US Federal Reserve as the instrument of the US finance oligarchy. It is in fact a central bank privately-owned by the bankster plutocracy, contrary to the widespread notion that it is a publicly owned federal state institution.
The U.S. Federal Reserve was created by the Federal Reserve Act signed by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson on December 23, 1913. It was an imposition on the people by the handful of finance oligarchs who had conceived it at a Jekyll Island meeting and railroaded it in the U.S. Congress for signing by the top politico who was notorious for being an agent of high finance.
The masterminds behind the creation of the U.S. Fed included Senator Nelson Aldrich, who had John D. Rockefeller Jr as his son-in-law; assistant Treasury secretary Abram Piatt Andrew; JP Morgan business partner Henry P. Davison; First National Bank of New York president Charles D. Norton; Benjamin Strong, top honcho at Bankers Trust and another Morgan pal; Frank A. Vanderlip, National City Bank president; and German banker Paul M. Warburg, partner in Kuhn, Loeb & Co.
The U.S. Fed is not answerable to any U.S. public authority. It is a central bank that is over 95% privately-owned. And it is strictly not functioning as a bank would normally do in an economy—a financial institution with a public responsibility to promote the credit needs of the real economy for the benefit of the populace, the overwhelming majority of whom consist of the toiling and middle classes and small business owners.
Instead, as its historical record has shown, the U.S. Federal Reserve has unswervingly served the interests of the private bankers, who hold its very special type of shares and stocks. While the U.S. Fed has a dual legal mandate to maintain low, stable inflation and promoting maximum sustainable employment, it has fostered massive unemployment and has failed to thwart inflation. The U.S. Fed and the banker cartel that owns it has played a crucial role in pushing the rise of the United States as an imperialist power and in engendering the supercrises endemic to monopoly capitalism since the last century.
The U.S. Federal Reserve is at the center of what has gone wrong with the capitalist world. The megabanksters that own it in turn have brought under their roof the central banks of other countries and ensured perpetual debt slavery of the vast swath of humanity. They have wantonly created, issued and circulated money as debt owed to private banks by the US government and other national governments that regard the US dollar as the world currency. Thus, the headquarters of global private central banking reside in the U.S. Fed-Bank of International Settlements-IMF-WB axis.
The U.S. Fed cartel discarded the banks’ vital role as economic institutions vested with public responsibility and instead used them as prime instruments for runaway private greed. The U.S. Fed played the key role in hyperinflating the U.S. Economy, generating financial speculation and leading to the bubble burst that set in the Great Depression of the 1930’s. Despite the catastrophic consequences of the financial hyperspeculation dealt on the American people and the world at large, the U.S. Fed would play the same role again and again, mocking and riding roughshod over strict regulations put into U.S. law since 1933.
As neoliberalism soared to dramatic heights in the 1980s—the Yuppie Decade and the first of successive Decades of Greed—even the token restrictions would be cast away in 1999, propelling successive and simultaneous massive financial bubbles like the dot-com, U.S housing, credit card, student debt, derivatives and other asset and credit bubbles.
These bubbles manifested the “irrational exuberance” of the handful of banksters and stirred illusions of prosperity for multitudes, but deceitfully masked the criminal manipulations of corporate and financial behemoths to squeeze superprofits from nothing or next to it like toxic assets, to the full detriment of the stability of the whole capitalist global economy.
The banksters generated the crisis of the overaccumulation of capital (especially fictitious capital) on top of the crisis of overproduction which they pretended to solve by expanding money supply and credit supposedly to stimulate consumption and production in that sequence. Thus, they unleashed increasingly large financial bubbles whose bursting became more devastating.
The bursting of financial bubbles have bared colossal corporate and financial crimes committed at the commanding economic heights, from the exceptional cooking of accounting books, wholesale dumping of fundamental loan and credit regulations, noxious multi-billion-dollar transactions comprising the shadow banking system, to downright manipulation of currency and other financial markets.
None of the perpetrators and masterminds of these high crimes against humanity have been jailed. In fact, regulatory authorities led by the U.S. Fed itself have merely slapped the wrists of those found responsible for a number of these heinous offenses, charging penalties amounting only to a pitiful fraction of the illegal megaprofits of these power-dressed gangsters. Worse, the U.S. Fed has engaged in mass hypnosis via Big Media with deceitful branding of these billion-dollar kleptocrats as “Too Big To Fail” entities and therefore, Too Big To Jail.
The U.S. Fed cartel superprofited from instigating and bankrolling ever rising levels of war production and history’s most destructive wars and campaigns of superterrorism which include World Wars 1 and 2, the so-called “Cold” War with the Soviet Union and the local hot wars like the Korean War, the Vietnam war, the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War, the war in Kosovo in 1998, and the Global War of Terrorism since its opening salvo on 9/11 of 2001.
In many of the invasions and subversions carried out by the US, one of the major objectives has been to seize the central banks which either are not part of the U.S Fed-BIS global private central banking axis or have conducted business assertive of their countries’ national interest and independent of U.S. imperialism. The efforts to expand the global private central banking axis hand-in-hand with the U.S. imperial offensive since 9/11 jibe with the U.S. superbanking cartel’s intimate historical ties to the U.S. covert action establishment that has long driven U.S. foreign policy.
Prominent previous heads of the CIA were top bankers linked to the U.S. Fed like Allen Dulles in the 1950s and 1960s, and William J Casey in the 1980s. From the side of the U.S. Fed, ex-Fed chairman Alan Greenspan was a protégé of U.S. foreign policy ideologue Henry Kissinger. Clearly then, this cartel is a key prime beneficiary of the military Keynesianism and financialization of the world economy since the last century. Such economic trends have spelled doom and gloom for billions of people.
The U.S. Federal Reserve and the financial oligarchy owning it have consigned the global financial and economic system to a protracted global economic depression. The bankster clique commanding the U.S. Fed continues the unsustainable course of trying to shore up the moribund U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency, serve the top financial firms with trillions of dollars to cover their bottomless insolvencies, and keep the deeply corrupt global financial system unreformed and unpurged of even the most conspicuous kleptocrats and criminals.
These financial machinations have had most devastating effects on the G7B – the Group of Seven Billion human inhabitants of this planet, consisting overwhelmingly of the toiling and middle classes. Among a whole host of economic atrocities, the G7B have suffered mass unemployment, evisceration of public social services and social benefits like pension funds, and destruction of primordial livelihoods of farmers, workers, the middle-class, and even small businessmen and small banks.
The megabanksters are often depicted as the sources of funds for reviving and running the economy. In fact they are culpable for the supercrisis that has beset the world capitalist system. They must be taken to account for their crimes. While they commit their crimes with impunity, we the 99.9% can only expect the worst economic meltdowns to come, while they, the 0.1%, continue to amass wealth.
We urge the people of the people of the world to exert all efforts to resist and dismantle the system of imperialism, including the U.S. Federal Reserve and its international web of subordinate banks. They must liberate themselves from the monsters that exploit and oppress them. They must seek the punishment of the megabanksters among the imperialist criminals.
We enjoin all ILPS member organizations, national chapters and global region committees to conduct online and offline study/sharing sessions, teach-ins, petitions, forums, pickets, and other related activities today and beyond to spread awareness on the real nature and role of the U.S. Federal Reserve in the exploitation and oppression of the people.
Carrying out this task is a necessary part of the anti-imperialist and democratic movement to build a fundamentally new and better world of greater freedom, democracy, social justice, all-round development, international solidarity and peace. ###
