Ellen Brown

December 23rd, 2013, marks the 100th anniversary of the Federal Reserve, warranting a review of its performance. Has it achieved the purposes for which it was designed?

The answer depends on whose purposes we are talking about. For the banks, the Fed has served quite well. For the laboring masses whose populist movement prompted it, not much has changed in a century.

Thwarting Populist Demands

The Federal Reserve Act was passed in 1913 in response to a wave of bank crises, which had hit on average every six years over a period of 80 years. The resulting economic depressions triggered a populist movement for monetary reform in the 1890s. Mary Ellen Lease, an early populist leader, said in a fiery speech that could have been written today:

Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street. The great common people of this country are slaves, and monopoly is the master...Money rules...Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags. The parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us...

We want money, land and transportation. We want the abolition of the National Banks, and we want the power to make loans direct from the government. We want the foreclosure system wiped out.

That was what they wanted, but the Federal Reserve Act that they got was not what the populists had fought for.

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John Pilger

In the late 1960s, I was given an usual assignment by the London Daily Mirror's editor in chief, Hugh Cudlipp. I was to return to my homeland, Australia, and "discover what lies behind the sunny face". The Mirror had been an indefatigable campaigner against apartheid in South Africa, where I had reported from behind the "sunny face". As an Australian, I had been welcomed into this bastion of white supremacy. "We admire you Aussies," people would say. "You know how to deal with your blacks."

I was offended, of course, but I also knew that only the Indian Ocean separated the racial attitudes of the two colonial nations. What I was not aware of was how the similarity caused such suffering among the original people of my own country. Growing up, my school books had made clear, to quote one historian: "We are civilised, and they are not". I remember how a few talented Aboriginal Rugby League players were allowed their glory as long as they never mentioned their people. Eddie Gilbert, the great Aboriginal cricketer, the man who bowled Don Bradman for a duck, was to be prevented from playing again. That was not untypical.

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Stephen Lendman

On December 18, The New Times ran a full-page anti-Iranian ad. It did so disgracefully. On December 19, the Wall Street Journal published it. It's an Elie Wiesel rant. It's hateful. It's racist. It's malicious misinformation.

It's typical Wiesel. It's titled "Iran Must Not Be Allowed To Remain Nuclear." Wiesel is no humanitarian. He's a shameless self-promoter. He's a holocaust exploiter. He made a career as a pseudo-official spokesman.

Norman Finkelstein calls him the "resident clown" of the holocaust circus. He described him as "vain, arrogant, gullible, naive about international affairs, (and defender of) the worst excesses of previous Israeli governments."

Noam Chomsky calls him "one of the major frauds of our time." He's an apologist for Israel's worst crimes. His "shameful subservience to the State of Israel (is) all the more grotesque in his case because of the pretense of saintliness," Chomsky explained.

He's a notorious Islamophobe. He ignores Palestinian suffering. "I cannot say bad things about Jews," he stresses. He claims Jerusalem "belongs (exclusively) to the Jewish people." He dismissively ignores its Islamic and Christian importance. He ignores history. Other times he reinvents it.

He perpetuates the myth about Arab nations attacking Israel in 1967. IDF forces launched premeditated aggression. It was planned long in advance. When it was too late to matter, Israeli generals admitted it.

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