The Secret Of Oz Page #7

The result was that only $6 and 67 cents per capita remained in circulation. An 84% decline in just 20 years.

The people suffered terribly in a protracted severe depression.

Now let's put these percentage figures into perspective:

on Januray 28 2009 the world's business and government leaders met in Davos, Switzerland at annual the World Economic Forum which they optimistically titled: "Shaping the post-crisis world" as if someone had already fixed the problem!

According to Reuters, the world's largest news service, the world's money supply had nearly been cut in half in the previous 15 months.

"Forty percent of the world's wealth was destroyed in the last five quarters. It is an almost incomprehensible number."

And how does that compare to the great depression of the 1930's? Nobel prize winning economist Milton Friedman put it this way in this 1996 interview with the national public radio:

"The Federal Reserve definitely caused the Great Depression by contracting the amount of currency in circulation by one-third from 1929 to 1933."

In other words, by January of 2009 the world's money supply had been contracted more than that which caused the great depression in America in the 1930s.

Some believe the economic crisis that began in 2008 is still being completely manipulated by the big banks, but it is more likely that their debt-money system has finally spiraled out of even their control.

In 2008 and 2009 nations poured unprecedented money into the system to prevent its collapse.

At the very least unprecedented inflation will surely follow.

After Lincoln's death the big bankers began returning America to the yellow brick road of financial serfdom. But first they had to get rid of the silver slippers.

But the bankers were not done bringing post civil-war america to its knees. They wanted to take all silver money out of the system making only gold be money.

In 1872 a British banker named Earnest Seyd was given a hundred thousands pounds, about 5 million dollars in today's money, by the Bank of England, and sent to America to bribe the necessary congressmen to get silver demonetized to further reduce the money supply.

The Bank Of England wanted america's money in their control and what better way to achieve that than mandating a gold-only money system?

The next year the Congress passed The Coinage Act of 1873 and the minting of silver dollars abruptly stopped.

In 1874 Seyd himself admitted who was behind the scheme:

"I went to America in the winter of 1872-1873, authorized to secure, if I could, the passage of a bill demonetizing silver. It was in the interest of those I represented - the governors of the Bank of England - to have it done."

Newspapers derided at the act as "The Crime of '73", everybody knew about it, the average american hated it.

Demonetizing silver made money even more scarce: it put the bankers who were the primary holders of gold in even greater control of America.

It's been a puzzle to a lot of economic historians this obsession with keeping the amount of currency so strictly limited.

It didn't seem to comport with the expanding economy of the time, you know, this rapidly expanding economy

you have immigration that imparts fueling, and you have westwards expansion and you have new industries, new technologies,

and yet you have a restricted money supply which makes it increasingly difficult for people to engage in consumption and purchases and other types of economic activity.

By 1873 L. Frank Baum was just 17 years old but he was already publishing a local newspaper in his hometown of Chittenango, New York.

By 1877 the nation was in a uproar over the headed "Crime of '73", riots broke out from Pittsburgh to Chicago, the torches of starving vendles lit up the sky.

The bankers huddled to decide their next move. They decided to hang tough. At the 1877 meeting of the american bankers association - the ABA - they urged their membership to do everything in their power to put down the notion of a return to greenbacks.

The ABA secretary James Buel authored a letter to the members that blightingly called on the banks to subvert not only Congress but the press:

"It is advisable to do all in your power to sustain such prominent daily and weekly newspapers, especially the Agricultural and Religious press, as will oppose the greenback issue of paper money and that you will also withhold patronage from all applicants who are not willing to oppose the government issue of money. To repeal the Act creating bank notes, or to restore to circulation the government issue of money will be to provide the people with money and will therefore seriously affect our individual profits as bankers and lenders. See your congressman at once and engage him to support our interests that we may control legislation."

Political parties advocating a return to greenback money sprung up and ran candidates for Congress and President. In the 1878 elections 21 independents were swept into Congress, mostly greenbackers.

Two years later on 1880 the american people elected general James Garfield president.

Garfield understood how the economy was being manipulated. As a congressman he had been chairman of the appropriations committee and was a member of the banking and currency committee.

Garfield understood the ability of the very wealthy to manipulate gold money.

He investigated it because of the black friday gold-market scandal of 1869 when financier Jay Gould and others cornered the gold market causing wild fluctuations in the price.

This is a photograph of the actual quote-board from the New York Gold Trading Room which Garfield introduced as evidence during a congressional investigation the following year.

This is Garfield's handwriting. After his inauguration he slammed the money changers publicly in 1881:

"Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce....and when you realize that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate."

Garfield understood! Perhaps only coincidentally however, within a few weeks of making this statement on July 2nd 1881, president Garfield was assassinated.

"After Garfield's assasination, the depression deepened, leaving the unemployed to face poverty and starvation.

Produce was left to rot in the fields.The country was facing poverty amidst plenty, because there was insufficient money in circulation to keep the wheels of trade turning.

The country sorely needed the sort of liquidity urged by Lincoln and the Greenbackers; but the bankers insisted that allowing the government to print its own money would be dangerously inflationary. That was their argument but critics called it humbuggery."

The big bankers finally had complete control of the money supply again by killing off the last competitor to their yellow brick road. Now they had to hold on against the rising anger of the average America.

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