On May 23, 1933,
Congressman, Louis T. McFadden, brought formal charges against the Board of
Governors of the Federal Reserve Bank system, The Comptroller of the Currency
and the Secretary of United States Treasury for numerous criminal acts,
including but not limited to, CONSPIRACY, FRAUD, UNLAWFUL CONVERSION, AND
TREASON.
The petition for Articles of Impeachment was thereafter referred to
the Judiciary Committee and has YET TO BE ACTED ON. So, this ELECTRONIC BOOKLET
should be reprinted, reposted, set up on web pages and circulated far and
wide.
Congressman McFadden's Speech On the Federal Reserve
Corporation
Quotations from several speeches made on the Floor of the
House of Representatives by the Honorable Louis T. McFadden of Pennsylvania. Mr.
McFadden, due to his having served as Chairman of the Banking and Currency
Committee for more than 10 years, was the best posted man on these matters in
America and was in a position to speak with authority of the vast ramifications
of this gigantic private credit monopoly. As Representative of a State which was
among the first to declare its freedom from foreign money tyrants it is fitting
that Pennsylvania, the cradle of liberty, be again given the credit for
producing a son that was not afraid to hurl defiance in the face of the
money-bund. Whereas Mr. McFadden was elected to the high office on both the
Democratic and Republican tickets, there can be no accusation of partisanship
lodged against him. Because these speeches are set out in full in the
Congressional Record, they carry weight that no amount of condemnation on the
part of private individuals could hope to carry.
The Federal Reserve-A
Corrupt Institution
"Mr. Chairman, we have in this Country one of the
most corrupt institutions the world has ever known. I refer to the Federal
Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Banks, hereinafter called the Fed. The Fed
has cheated the Government of these United States and the people of the United
States out of enough money to pay the Nation's debt. The depredations and
iniquities of the Fed has cost enough money to pay the National debt several
times over.
"This evil institution has impoverished and ruined the people
of these United States, has bankrupted itself, and has practically bankrupted
our Government. It has done this through the defects of the law under which it
operates, through the maladministration of that law by the Fed and through the
corrupt practices of the moneyed vultures who control it.
"Some people
who think that the Federal Reserve Banks United States Government institutions.
They are private monopolies which prey upon the people of these United States
for the benefit of themselves and their foreign customers; foreign and domestic
speculators and swindlers; and rich and predatory money lender. In that dark
crew of financial pirates there are those who would cut a man's throat to get a
dollar out of his pocket; there are those who send money into states to buy
votes to control our legislatures; there are those who maintain International
propaganda for the purpose of deceiving us into granting of new concessions
which will permit them to cover up their past misdeeds and set again in motion
their gigantic train of crime.
"These twelve private credit monopolies
were deceitfully and disloyally foisted upon this Country by the bankers who
came here from Europe and repaid us our hospitality by undermining our American
institutions. Those bankers took money out of this Country to finance Japan in a
war against Russia. They created a reign of terror in Russia with our money in
order to help that war along. They instigated the separate peace between Germany
and Russia, and thus drove a wedge between the allies in World War. They
financed Trotsky's passage from New York to Russia so that he might assist in
the destruction of the Russian Empire. They fomented and instigated the Russian
Revolution, and placed a large fund of American dollars at Trotsky's disposal in
one of their branch banks in Sweden so that through him Russian homes might be
thoroughly broken up and Russian children flung far and wide from their natural
protectors. They have since begun breaking up of American homes and the
dispersal of American children. "Mr. Chairman, there should be no partisanship
in matters concerning banking and currency affairs in this Country, and I do not
speak with any.
"In 1912 the National Monetary Association, under the
chairmanship of the late Senator Nelson W. Aldrich, made a report and presented
a vicious bill called the National Reserve Association bill. This bill is
usually spoken of as the Aldrich bill. Senator Aldrich did not write the Aldrich
bill. He was the tool, if not the accomplice, of the European bankers who for
nearly twenty years had been scheming to set up a central bank in this Country
and who in 1912 has spent and were continuing to spend vast sums of money to
accomplish their purpose.
"We were opposed to the Aldrich plan for a
central bank. The men who rule the Democratic Party then promised the people
that if they were returned to power there would be no central bank established
here while they held the reigns of government. Thirteen months later that
promise was broken, and the Wilson administration, under the tutelage of those
sinister Wall Street figures who stood behind Colonel House, established here in
our free Country the worm-eaten monarchical institution of the "King's Bank" to
control us from the top downward, and from the cradle to the grave.
"The
Federal Reserve Bank destroyed our old and characteristic way of doing business.
It discriminated against our 1-name commercial paper, the finest in the world,
and it set up the antiquated 2-name paper, which is the present curse of this
Country and which wrecked every country which has ever given it scope; it
fastened down upon the Country the very tyranny from which the framers of the
Constitution sough to save us.
PRESIDENT JACKSON'S TIME
"One of
the greatest battles for the preservation of this Republic was fought out here
in Jackson's time; when the second Bank of the United States, founded on the
same false principles of those which are here exemplified in the Fed was hurled
out of existence. After that, in 1837, the Country was warned against the
dangers that might ensue if the predatory interests after being cast out should
come back in disguise and unite themselves to the Executive and through him
acquire control of the Government. That is what the predatory interests did when
they came back in the livery of hypocrisy and under false pretenses obtained the
passage of the Fed.
"The danger that the Country was warned against came
upon us and is shown in the long train of horrors attendant upon the affairs of
the traitorous and dishonest Fed. Look around you when you leave this Chamber
and you will see evidences of it in all sides. This is an era of misery and for
the conditions that caused that misery, the Fed are fully liable. This is an era
of financed crime and in the financing of crime the Fed does not play the part
of a disinterested spectator.
"It has been said that the draughtsman who
was employed to write the text of the Aldrich bill because that had been drawn
up by lawyers, by acceptance bankers of European origin in New York. It was a
copy, in general a translation of the statues of the Reichsbank and other
European central banks. One-half million dollars was spent on the part of the
propaganda organized by these bankers for the purpose of misleading public
opinion and giving Congress the impression that there was an overwhelming
popular demand for it and the kind of currency that goes with it, namely, an
asset currency based on human debts and obligations. Dr. H. Parker Willis had
been employed by Wall Street and propagandists, and when the Aldrich measure
failed- he obtained employment with Carter Glass, to assist in drawing the
banking bill for the Wilson administration. He appropriated the text of the
Aldrich bill. There is no secret about it. The test of the Federal Reserve Act
was tainted from the first.
"A few days before the bill came to a vote,
Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, of Massachusetts, wrote to Senator John W. Weeks as
follows:
New York City, December 17, 1913
"'My Dear Senator
Weeks:
"'Throughout my public life I have supported all measures designed
to take the Government out of the banking business. This bill puts the
Government into the banking business as never before in our history.
"'The
powers vested in the Federal Reserve Board seen to me highly dangerous
especially where there is political control of the Board. I should be sorry to
hold stock in a bank subject to such dominations. The bill as it stands seems to
me to open the way to a vast inflation of the currency.
"'I had hoped to
support this bill, but I cannot vote for it cause it seems to me to contain
features and to rest upon principles in the highest degree menacing to our
prosperity, to stability in business, and to the general welfare of the people
of the United States.
Very Truly Yours, Henry Cabot
Lodge.'"
"In eighteen years that have passed since Senator Lodge
wrote that letter of warning all of his predictions have come true. The
Government is in the banking business as never before. Against its will it has
been made the backer of horse thieves and card sharps, bootlegger's smugglers,
speculators, and swindlers in all parts of the world. Through the Fed the
riffraff of every country is operating on the public credit of the United States
Government.
THE GREAT DEPRESSION
"Meanwhile and on account of it,
we ourselves are in the midst of the greatest depression we have ever known.
From the Atlantic to the Pacific, our Country has been ravaged and laid waste by
the evil practices of the Fed and the interests which control them. At no time
in our history, has the general welfare of the people been at a lower level or
the minds of the people so full of despair.
"Recently in one of our
States, 60,000 dwelling houses and farms were brought under the hammer in a
single day. 71,000 houses and farms in Oakland County, Michigan, were sold and
their erstwhile owners dispossessed. The people who have thus been driven out
are the wastage of the Fed. They are the victims of the Fed. Their children are
the new slaves of the auction blocks in the revival of the institution of human
slavery.
The Scheme of the Fed
"In 1913, before the Senate Banking
and Currency Committee, Mr. Alexander Lassen made the following statement: "The
whole scheme of the Fed with its commercial paper is an impractical, cumbersome
machinery- is simply a cover to secure the privilege of issuing money, and to
evade payment of as much tax upon circulation as possible and then control the
issue and maintain, instead of reducing interest rates. It will prove to the
advantage of the few and the detriment of the people. It will mean continued
shortage of actual money and further extension of credits, for when there is a
shortage of money people have to borrow to their cost.' "A few days before the
Fed passed, Senator Root denounced the Fed as an outrage on our liberties. He
predicted: 'Long before we wake up from our dream of prosperity through an
inflated currency, our gold- which alone could have kept us from catastrophe-
will have vanished and no rate of interest will tempt it to return.'
"If
ever a prophecy came true, that one did.
"The Fed became law the day
before Christmas Eve, in the year 1913, and shortly afterwards, the German
International bankers, Kuhn, Loeb and Co. sent one of their partners here to run
it.
"The Fed Note is essentially unsound. It is the worst currency and
the most dangerous that this Country has ever known. When the proponents of the
act saw that the Democratic doctrine would not permit them to let the proposed
banks issue the new currency as bank notes, they should have stopped at that.
They should not have foisted that kind of currency, namely, an asset currency,
on the United States Government. They should not have made the Government
[liable on the private] debts of individuals and corporations, and, least of
all, on the private debts of foreigners. "As Kemerer says: 'The Fed Notes,
therefore, in form, have some of the qualities of Government paper money, but in
substance, are almost a pure asset currency possessing a Government guarantee
against which contingency the Government has made no provision
whatever.'
"Hon. L.J.Hill, a former member of the House, said, and truly:
"They are obligations of the Government for which the United States received
nothing and for the payment of which at any time, it assumes the responsibility:
looking to the Fed to recoup itself.'
"If this United States is to redeem
the Fed Notes, when the General Public finds it costs to deliver this paper to
the Fed, and if the Government has made no provisions for redeeming them, the
first element of unsoundness is not far to seek.
"Before the Banking and
Currency Committee, when the bill was under discussion Mr. Crozier of Cincinnati
said: 'The imperial power of elasticity of the public currency is wielded
exclusively by the central corporations owned by the banks. This is a life and
death power over all local banks and all business. It can be used to create or
destroy prosperity, to ward off or cause stringencies and panics. By making
money artificially scarce, interest rates throughout the Country can be
arbitrarily raised and the bank tax on all business and cost of living increased
for the profit of the banks owning these regional central banks, and without the
slightest benefit to the people. The 12 Corporations together cover y and
monopolize and use for private gain- every dollar of the public currency and all
public revenue of the United States. Not a dollar can be put into circulation
among the people by their Government, without the consent of and on terms fixed
by these 12 private money trusts.'
"In defiance of this and all other
warnings, the proponents of the Fed created the 12 private credit corporations
and gave them an absolute monopoly of the currency of these United States- not
of the Fed Notes alone- but of all other currency! The Fed Act providing ways
and means by which the gold and general currency in the hands of the American
people could be obtained by the Fed in exchange for Fed Notes- which are not
money- but mere promises to pay.
"Since the evil day when this was done,
the initial monopoly has been extended by vicious amendments to the Fed and by
the unlawful and treasonable practices of the Fed.
Money for the Scottish
Distillers
"Mr. Chairman, if a Scottish distiller wishes to send a cargo
of Scotch whiskey to these United States, he can draw his bill against the
purchasing bootlegger in dollars and after the bootlegger has accepted it by
writing his name across the face of it, the Scotch distiller can send that bill
to the nefarious open discount market in New York City where the Fed will buy it
and use it as collateral for a new issue of Fed Notes. Thus the Government of
these United States pay the Scotch distiller for the whiskey before it is
shipped, and if it is lost on the way, or if the Coast Guard seizes it and
destroys it, the Fed simply write off the loss and the government never recovers
the money that was paid to the Scotch distiller.
"While we are attempting
to enforce prohibition here, the Fed are in the distillery business in Europe
and paying bootlegger bills with public credit of these United States. "Mr.
Chairman, by the same process, they compel our Government to pay the German
brewer for his beer. Why should the Fed be permitted to finance the brewing
industry in Germany either in this way or as they do by compelling small and
fearful United States Banks to take stock in the Isenbeck Brewery and in the
German Bank for brewing industries? "Mr. Chairman, if Dynamit Nobel of Germany,
wishes to sell dynamite in Japan to use in Manchuria or elsewhere, it can drew
its bill against the Japanese customers in dollars and send that bill to the
nefarious open discount market in New York City where the Fed will buy it and
use it as collateral for a new issue of Fed Notes- while at the same time the
Fed will be helping Dynamit Nobel by stuffing its stock into the United States
banking system.
"Why should we send our representatives to the
disarmament conference at Geneva- while the Fed is making our Government pay
Japanese debts to German Munitions makers?
"Mr. Chairman, if a German
wishes to raise a crop of beans and sell them to a Japanese customer, he can
draw a bill against his prospective Japanese customer in dollars and have it
purchased by the Fed and get the money out of this Country at the expense of the
American people before he has even planted the beans in the ground. "Mr.
Chairman, if a German in Germany wishes to export goods to South America, or any
other Country, he can draw his bill against his customers and send it to these
United States and get the money out of this Country before he ships, or even
manufactures the goods.
"Mr. Chairman, why should the currency of these
United States be issued on the strength of German Beer? Why should it be issued
on the crop of unplanted beans to be grown in Chili for Japanese consumption?
Why should these United States be compelled to issue many billions of dollars
every year to pay the debts of one foreigner to another foreigner? "Was it for
this that our National Bank depositors had their money taken out of our banks
and shipped abroad? Was it for this that they had to lose it? Why should the
public credit of these United States and likewise money belonging to our
National Bank depositors be used to support foreign brewers, narcotic drug
vendors, whiskey distillers, wig makes, human hair merchants, Chilean bean
growers, to finance the munition factories of Germany and Soviet
Russia?
THE UNITED STATES HAS BEEN RANSACKED
"The United States
has been ransacked and pillaged. Our structures have been gutted and only the
walls are left standing. While being perpetrated, everything the world would
rake up to sell us was brought in here at our expense by the Fed until our
markets were swamped with unneeded and unwanted imported goods priced far above
their value and make to equal the dollar volume of our honest exports, and to
kill or reduce our favorite balance of trade. As Agents of the foreign central
banks the Fed try by every means in their power to reduce our favorable balance
of trade. They act for their foreign principal and they accept fees from
foreigners for acting against the best interests of these United States.
Naturally there has been great competition among among foreigners for the favors
of the Fed.
"What we need to do is to send the reserves of our National
Banks home to the people who earned and produced them and who still own them and
to the banks which were compelled to surrender them to predatory
interests.
"Mr. Chairman, there is nothing like the Fed pool of
confiscated bank deposits in the world. It is a public trough of American wealth
in which the foreigners claim rights, equal to or greater than Americans. The
Fed are the agents of the foreign central banks. They use our bank depositors'
money for the benefit of their foreign principals. They barter the public credit
of the United States Government and hire it our to foreigners at a profit to
themselves.
"All this is done at the expense of the United States
Government, and at a sickening loss to the American people. Only our great
wealth enabled us to stand the drain of it as long as we did.
"We need to
destroy the Fed wherein our national reserves are impounded for the benefit of
the foreigners. "We need to save America for Americans.
SPURIOUS
SECURITIES
"Mr. Chairman, when you hold a $10.00 Fed Note in your hand,
you are holding apiece of paper which sooner or later is going to cost the
United States Government $10.00 in gold (unless the Government is obliged to go
off the gold standard). It is based on limburger cheese (reported to be in
foreign warehouses) or in cans purported to contain peas (but may contain salt
water instead), or horse meat, illicit drugs, bootleggers fancies, rags and
bones from Soviet Russia (of which these United States imported over a million
dollars worth last year), on wines whiskey, natural gas, goat and dog fur,
garlic on the string, and Bombay ducks.
"If you like to have paper money-
which is secured by such commodities- you have it in Fed Note. If you desire to
obtain the thing of value upon which this paper currency is based, that is, the
limburger cheese, the whiskey, the illicit drugs, or any of the other staples-
you will have a very hard time finding them.
"Many of these worshipful
commodities are in foreign Countries. Are you going to Germany to inspect her
warehouses to see if the specified things of value are there? I think more, I do
not think that you would find them there if you did go.
"On April 27,
1932, the Fed outfit sent $750,000 belonging to American bank depositors in gold
to Germany. A week later another $300,000 in gold was shipped to Germany. About
the middle of May $12,000,000 in gold was shipped to Germany by the Fed. Almost
every week there is a shipment of gold to Germany. These shipments are not made
for profit on the exchange since the German marks are blow parity with the
dollar.
"Mr. Chairman, I believe that the National Bank depositors of
these United States have a right to know what the Fed are doing with their
money. There are millions of National Bank depositors in the Country who do not
know that a percentage of every dollar they deposit in a Member Bank of the Fed
goes automatically to American Agents of the foreign banks and that all their
deposits can be paid away to foreigners without their knowledge or consent by
the crooked machinery of the Fed and the questionable practices of the
Fed.
[Ed. Note- Problem with next paragraph in original] "Mr. Chairman,
the American people should be told the truth by their servants in office. In
1930, we had over a half billion dollars outstanding daily to finance foreign
goods stored in or shipped between several billion dollars. What goods are these
on which the Fed yearly pledge several billions of dollars. In its yearly total,
this item amounts to several billions of dollars of the public credit of these
United States?
"What goods are those which are hidden in European and
Asiatic stores have not been seen by any officer of our Government but which are
being financed on the public credit of the United States Government? What goods
are those upon which the 17 United States Government is being obligated by the
Fed to issue Fed Notes to the extent of several billions of dollars a
year?
The Bankers' Acceptance Racket
"The Fed have been
International Banks from the beginning, with these United States as their
enforced banker and supplier of currency. But it is none the less extraordinary
to see these these twelve private credit monopolies, buying the debts of
foreigners against foreigners, in all parts of the world and asking the
Government of these United States for new issues of Fed notes in exchange for
them. "The magnitude of the acceptance racket as it has been developed by the
Fed, their foreign correspondents, and the predatory European born bankers, who
set up the Fed here and taught your own, by and of pirates, how to loot the
people: I say the magnitude of this racket is estimated to be in the
neighborhood of 9,000,000,000 per year. In the past ten years it is said to have
amounted to $90,000,000,000.00. In my opinion it has amounted to several times
that much. coupled to this you have to the extent of billions of dollars, the
gambling in the United States securities, which takes place in the same open
discount market- a gambling on which the Fed is now spending $100,000,000.00 per
week.
"Fed Notes are taken from the U.S. Government in unlimited
quantities. Is is strange that the burden of supplying these immense sums of
money to the gambling fraternity has at last proved too heavy for the American
people to endure? Would it not be a national [calamity to] again bind down this
burden on the backs of the American people and by means of a long rawhide whip
of the credit masters, compel them to enter another seventeen years of
slavery?
"They are trying to do that now. They are trying to take
$100,000,000.00 of the public credit of the United States every week, in
addition to all their other seizures and they are sending that money to the
nefarious open market in a desperate gamble to reestablish their graft as a
going concern.
"They are putting the United States Government in debt to
the extent of $100,000,000 a week, and with the money they are buying our
Government securities for themselves and their foreign principals. Our people
are disgusted with the experiences of the Fed. The Fed is not producing a loaf
of bread, a yard of cloth, a bushel of corn, or a pile of cordwood by its
check-kiting operations in the money market.
"Mr. Speaker, on the 13th of
January of this year I addressed the House on the subject of the Reconstruction
Finance Corporation. In the course of my remarks I made the following statement:
In 1928 the member banks of the Fed borrowed $60,598,690,000. from the Fed on
their fifteen-day promissory notes. Think of it. Sixty billion dollars payable
on demand in gold in the course of one single year. The actual amount of such
obligations called for six times as much monetary gold as there is in the world.
Such transactions represent a grant in the course of one single years of about
$7,000,000 to every member of the Fed.
"Is it any wonder that American
labor which ultimately pays the cost of all banking operations of this Country
has at last proved unequal to the task of supplying this huge total of cash and
credit for the benefit of the stock market manipulators and foreign swindlers?
"In 1933 the Fed presented the staggering amount of $60,598,690,000 to its
member banks at the expense of the wage earners and tax payers of these United
States. In 1929, the year of the stock market crash, the Fed advanced
$58,000,000,000 to member banks.
"In 1930 while the speculating banks
were getting out of the stock market at the expense of the general public, the
Fed advanced them $13,022,782,000. This shows that when the banks were gambling
on the public credit of these United States as represented by the Fed currency
they were subsidized to any amount they required by the Fed. When the swindle
began to fall, the bankers knew it in advance and withdrew from the market. They
got out with whole skins- and left the people of these United States to pay the
piper. "My friend from Kansas, Mr. McGugin, has stated that he thought the Fed
lent money on rediscounting. So they do, but they lend comparatively little that
way. The real discounting that they do has been called a mere penny in the slot
business. It is too slow for genuine high flyers. They discourage it. They
prefer to subsidize their favorite banks by making them $60,000,000,000 advances
and they prefer to acquire assistance in the notorious open discount market in
New York, where they can use it to control the price of stocks and bonds on the
exchanges.
"For every dollar they advanced on discounts in 1928, they
lent $33.00 to their favorite banks for whom they do a business of several
billion dollars income tax on their profits to these United
States.