Page 1 of
2 FDR's dream comes true as
nightmare By Antal E Fekete
Seventy-five years ago this month,
president Franklin Delano Roosevelt was
inaugurated as the 32nd president of the United
States. Within days after swearing to uphold the
US constitution, through a Presidential
Proclamation, he closed the US Mint to gold.
Recall that the Mint had been established by the
constitution to protect the people's right to
sound money.
Roosevelt had been elected on
a platform of sound money. Barely in office, he
reversed himself. He grabbed the gold of the
people, marked up its value, leaving Federal
Reserve notes in the hands of the people that were
to lose 95% of their value during subsequent
years. They stand poised to lose their remaining
value before long.
That experience left
behind a moral trauma that returns to haunt
us 75 years later, even
if the establishment, the media, as well as
academia, want us to forget the anniversary. They
will not succeed. Roosevelt's chickens will not
let them. It has taken the chickens 75 years to
come home to roost. Come home they will with a
vengeance. The past 75 years were a period of
unprecedented turbulence in the financial markets.
Yet never during those 75 years has the nation
faced a graver monetary crisis than it is facing
now. The banking system of the country threatens
to seize up. The credit system is facing a violent
collapse.
You will hear a lot of ad hoc
explanations of what has happened, from subprime
mortgages to loose Federal Reserve monetary policy
to profligate government fiscal policy. However,
one explanation you will never hear from the
establishment, from mainstream economics, or from
the media. They will never ever mention the real
culprit, the irredeemable dollar.
Going
with the tide The tendency of virtually all
businessmen, legislators, jurors and even pastors
to go with the tide is thoroughly established.
Perhaps such men confuse position and power with
wisdom or with competence in fields where they are
not competent.
As it stands, not one of
our political leaders, judges, not one captain of
business is competent in the field of money. They
do not understand that a monetary crisis, such as
the one threatening the irredeemable dollar right
now, could totally wipe out its value. It is
abundantly clear that the United States is in most
serious trouble as it can no longer produce the
goods necessary for survival, nor can it buy them
in the world's markets, in a high degree because
of its use of irredeemable currency.
Worse
still, in consequence of embracing irredeemable
currency we have unprecedented dishonesty in
government. Standards of dishonesty in government
spread like cancer throughout the nation, as
support is given by unwise men to the use of such
currency.
It is difficult to think of an
unsound monetary practice that has not been
embraced in some manner since 1933 by our modern
John Law of finance. The 18th century Scottish
adventurer John Law should have felt thoroughly at
home among the latter-day adventurers at the helm
in the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve.
When the US Mint was closed to gold in
March, 1933, by Roosevelt and the country embarked
on the sea of managed currency, a very large
number of individuals and organizations urged a
prompt return to the gold standard (which, believe
it or not, included the Federal Reserve Board, the
Federal Advisory Council, 37 members of the
faculty of Columbia University, and 710 members of
the American Economic Association, to mention but
a few).
The question arises as to what has
become of those opposing voices in the intervening
years. Why, some were silenced through bribe and
blackmail. They were simply corrupted by a
political movement which they found inexpedient to
oppose. The upright individuals among them, on the
other hand, were silenced through attrition and
death. They were not allowed to pass on the torch
to the next generation. All knowledge about gold
money was systematically purged from university
curricula and from institutes of advanced studies,
replaced by a claptrap of pseudo-mathematical
bunk.
Principles and fashion Of
course, one may expect groups, usually controlled
by expediency, to shift their position with the
changing political tides. But there is no valid
defense that can be offered for men who pretend to
be scientists and who adjust their so-called
principles of science in accordance with the
changes of political fashions, or invent
fraudulent differential equations purportedly
describing the behavior of money in the hands of
the people.
The monetary policies of the
advocates of irredeemable currency have in the
main been those of charlatans. Those who are
passing themselves off today as monetary
economists either have not understood the lessons
of the past; or have been willing to junk them in
the interest of expediency, for such personal
gains as they may expect to realize for parroting
the official propaganda line.
A deep,
searing corruption has afflicted monetary science
during the past 75 years, comparable to Lysenkoism
in the Soviet Union, now defunct. The only
apparent difference is that opponents of the
enfant terrible of Soviet genetics, Trofim
Denisovich Lysenko, were carted off to the Gulag
Archipelago, never to be heard from again. Still,
it may take many decades of painful effort to
overcome the damage caused by Lysenkoism, American
style, that has expunged the once world-famous and
respected American monetary science from the map.
The well-being of our nation, nay, of the
whole world, has been seriously undermined by this
affliction. Whether the scientists who know the
lessons of the past and the prescriptions
suggested by evidence accumulated over centuries
can do anything of importance to correct this sad
state of affairs remains to be seen. The reception
of the candidacy of Ron Paul does not leave us
with a great deal of hope in this regard.
In his book Hell Bent for Election
(Garden City, NJ, 1935) James P Warburg quotes
from a campaign speech given by Roosevelt in
Butte, Montana, on September 19, 1932, as a basis
for appraising the man who would violate his
pledge on a matter as important as the people’s
monetary standard:
Remember that attitude and method -
the way we do things, not just the way we say
things - is nearly always the measure of one’s
sincerity.
This self-indicting speech
was omitted from the Published Papers and
Addresses of Franklin Delano Roosevelt
compiled by Samuel I Rosenman, as was another
speech given by Roosevelt in Brooklyn. I quote
Warburg: "On November 4, 1932, Mr Roosevelt made
this striking statement:
One of the most commonly repeated
misrepresentations by Republicans, including the
president, has been the claim that the
Democratic position with regard to money has not
been made sufficiently clear. The president is
seeing visions of rubber dollars. This is only a
part of his campaign of fear. I am not going to
characterize these statements. I merely present
the facts. The Democratic platform specifically
declares: "We advocate a sound currency to be
preserved at all hazards."
Warburg
concludes: "That is plain English."
That
statement could only mean, if it meant anything to
the millions of people who voted for Roosevelt, a
gold standard
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
