Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one” - A.J. Liebling
My father Bob Wilson took this to heart, and bought one and started his own newspaper, the Prairie Post of Maroa, Illinois in 1958, and ran it until he died in 1972. It never had a circulation of more than 2500 or so, but every week, he would fire off editorials at everyone and everything from local events to the actions of the nations of the world.
He may have been a Quaker peace activist in a Republican district, but his love and support of the farming communities garnered him enough respect that he eventually ran for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1962, though he lost. (He might have tried again, had he not died of an accident while only 49.) Many of his views ring true today. And he might have been willing to change the ones that fell behind the times. Although raised in the casual racism of the 1920s and 1930s, at the age of 15 he took stock of what he was being taught and discarded much of it as being wrong, and lived his life with respect for all. [well, almost all. I have found that his views on homosexuality were those common to his time. Would he have been able to change again? Maybe...]
I decided to transcribe his old editorials (I may make a book for some of my relatives) and every once in a while I will repost one here, as a view of how the world has changed wildly, or remained stubbornly the same.
September 24, 1964
OUR MONEY SYSTEM
There are two kinds of conspiracies, those that succeed and those that do not. Only those which fail are actually known as conspiracies. Those that succeed become respected institutions, because they rewrite history and remold public opinion with massive propaganda campaigns.
Unsuccessful conspirators, the only ones really thought of as conspirators, plot in untidy garrets. Your successful conspirator is at the country club or the yacht basin.
He is president of some concern which through hard work and virtue (to hear them tell it) have attained to a monopoly position. Government, as the servant of the people, has no recourse but to call them a “public utility” and legislate controls upon their operations.
Thus you have a constant warfare between public and government on the one hand, and the monopoly on the other. To the degree which the conspirators continue to succeed, they use the public as consumers and even the public as taxpayers, to further increase their profits.
The warfare is carried on by subverting officials in the public agencies set over them as watchdogs; by corrupting legislators into passing favorable legislation; and by saturating all public media with the idea that profit is holy.
An example is the Bell Telephone Company (A.T.&T.) which has gotten its hands on the satellite communications operation (as we predicted it would) and now is preparing to reap gigantic profits from something that was developed, almost to the last dollar, on the taxpayer's money.
The Honorable Wright Patman of Texas, Chairman of the House Committee on Banking and Currency, released in an August 3rd speech the facts gathered by his committee concerning one of the most powerful and successful conspiracies in America today, the control of our money system for their own purposes by a handful of giant banks.
Neither Congressman Patman nor this writer has any criticism to offer of the country and small-town banks that serve the nation's farmers. These people are among the most civic-minded of small-community businessmen. They must take the regulations laid out for them, and the basic interest rates set elsewhere, and work within these limits to serve the credit needs of local people. A comparison with the actions of finance companies and short-loan companies should convince anyone that the banker is his friend.
Our quarrel is with the giants, and with their lobbying organization, the American Bankers Association. The Independent Bankers Association, to which many small banks belong, is a different organization entirely.
The nature of money is a great mystery to most citizens. Chaos would result if all banks were permitted to create as much money (or credit, which is the same thing) as they cared to. The Federal Reserve System was instituted in 1913 to establish orderly control of credit.
Banks are no longer permitted to print their own notes, but they still create money under authority from the Federal Reserve System.
Bank funds which must be held in reserve go not create new money. One dollar must be held in reserve out of every ten available for loan. Money loaned out is spent, and deposited in some other bank by someone else. It increases their capital by that much, and they are permitted to re-loan nine of the ten dollars.
The ripples spread a long way from that first loan. Therefore, the Federal Reserve, in principle, is supposed to control the percentage of reserves necessary, and the interest rates, in order to provide steady growth without inflation.
It is a gigantic power. Curiously, the Federal Reserve, as it has developed is not even an agency of government. It is, through the operations of its Open Market Committee, nothing but a committee of big bankers. They manage the currency and the credit system of this nation, almost independent of what they haughtily refer to as “political” control.
The evidence shows, according to the investigative report, that these men have been using those awesome powers, not in the national interest but in the interest of fattening their own purses.
It is a curious commentary that, when the Federal Reserve was formed in 1913, the big bankers were violently against it. Now they are passionately for it. Have they changed? No, the Federal Reserve system has been changed, step by step, until what was once a watch dog is now a lap dog.
Woodrow Wilson said that appointing bankers to this agency would be like appointing railroad presidents to the interstate commerce commission; but bankers and their close allies now control it; board members serve fourteen year terms, carefully staggered; they are answerable to no-one but themselves for their actions, and they make no financial audits of their operation to the taxpayers or anyone else.
In order to affect interest rates, the Federal Reserve buys and sells government bonds. It does so with brand-new currency printed by the Treasury Department and given to the Federal Reserve. At the present time, Patman reports, they have succeeded in accumulating thirty-four billion dollars worth of government bonds. Then... and this is the Alice-in-Wonderland part... this “Banker's Club” collects interest of one billion dollars per on bonds they got for nothing! Out of their billion, they spend what they please (no report, remember) and turn the remainder to the Treasury.
Most of the Federal Reserve's work is now carried on by the New York Bank to which the other eleven regional branches have given up their original powers. (The President of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, a man you never heard of, gets a $70,000 salary per year. Only the President of the U.S. is paid more by the taxpayers. Still, the other eleven banks continue in operation, with 15,000 employees and a budget of $100,000,000 per year. Their only job is to act as a clearing house for checks, and according to Chairman Patman, “they are desperate for something to do with their time.”
The mockery of setting wolves to guard the henhouse becomes apparent when we permit the big banks themselves to set the interest rate which everyone, including government, shall pay them. This nation now pays seventy-five billion dollars a year for interest, eleven of it on the national debt and the remainder on other debts including private ones.
The high-interest, tight-money policies of the Federal Reserve set off three minor depressions in ten years, those of 1953-54, 1957-58, and 1960-61. These depressions only dissipated when the bankers admitted they were trying to squeeze too much too fast out of the economy, and eased off on interest rates.
A handful of New York bankers, through the workings of this unique system, upped the interest rates on money when Mr. Eisenhower came in and thereby added forty billion dollars to the national debt. Because of these increases, the yearly carrying charges on the national debt are a staggering eleven billion dollars rather than the six billion dollars they would otherwise have been!
And in the face of this, Millionaire Bankers such as William Springer of Champaign go to Congress and have the nerve to complain with a straight face about the size of the public debt!
His constituents have a right to treat his protestations with utter contempt until such time as he joins the honest congressmen of both parties who file a voluntary audit each year setting forth what they hold of this world's goods. This nation is being ill-served by too many pious thieves and political Liberaces.
The size and the smoothness of the operation leave people unaware of its existence. Their propaganda machine is ready to hurl charges of “dangerous radical” at anyone who asks questions about the sacred American banking system.
At the big banker's conventions, some ventriloquists dummy from the Farm Bureau generally appears to tell them what an evil thing it is to give subsidies to farmers. Bankers, of course, do not have subsidies... unless you count the curious arrangements called “tax and loan accounts”. Federal income tax deducted from wage checks does not go at once to the government. First it is deposited in banks (all over the country) where it lies WITHOUT INTEREST until the government decides to call for it. Last year an average of 5.3 billion in such funds lay on deposit in banks. At 4% interest, this lost the taxpayers 212 million dollars in twelve months time. What do they do with these funds? They either lend them to you, or buy U.S. bonds. When they buy bonds, they collect interest from the government ON THE GOVERNMENT'S OWN MONEY!
What is your definition of a subsidy?
The Domestic Finance Subcommittee of the Banking and Currency Committee has now concluded “the most revealing and penetrating investigation that has taken place in the Fed's 50-year existence.”
Their recommendations will go to Congress next January in a bill which will put an end to private control of the Government's monetary affairs.
This nation can no longer afford to have a central banking system that goes its own way while ignoring the President and the Congress. The Washington Post recently pointed out that we are the only great nation where this is true, and “The time for thoroughgoing reform has arrived.”
“Political” control – by democratically elected officials – is always superior to control by private-profit interests or even by “experts”. When the “experts” become corrupted how may they be removed? The “politician” who goes bad may be replaced by the electorate.
We continue, as before, deeply impressed by the integrity and helpfulness of the “country” bankers we know; but we also continue to be astonished by what goes on at the national level in the name of American monetary policy.