by johnny nemo » Tue Aug 29, 2006 3:24 pm
smithtalk mentioned Jekyll Island, and so I thought I'd present an analysis of the most important facts presented in the book <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second look at the Federal Reserve.</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--> © 2004 by G. Edward Griffin. <br><br>(Edward Flaherty is a Ph.D. of Economics who has been critical of the aforementioned book.)<br><br><!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>Griffin: <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong> Bankers and senators met in secret on Jekyll Island, Georgia in 1910 to design a central bank that would give New York City banks control over the nation’s money supply</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br><br>Flaherty's reply: The meeting did take place, but plans for a return to central banking were already widely known. Regardless, the proposal that came out of the Jekyll Island meeting never passed Congress. The one that did, the Federal Reserve Act, placed control over monetary policy with a public body, the Federal Reserve Board, not with commercial banks. <br><br>Griffin's reply: Here again we have a half-truth that functions as a deception.<br>Plans for a return to central banking, indeed, were already known, but they were unpopular with the voters and large blocks of Congress. That was the very problem that led to the great secrecy.<!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong> Frank Vanderlip, one of the participants at the Jekyll Island meeting, later confirmed that, if the public had known that the bankers were the ones creating legislation to supposedly “break the grip of the money trust,” the bill would never have been passed into law.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> The facts presented in my book, and fully documented by references from original sources, show that my version is historical fact. Flaherty attempts to minimize these facts by implying that the original, secret meeting was not important because the first draft of the legislation was rejected.<!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong> What he does not say is that the second draft that was passed into law was essentially the same as the first. The primary difference was that Senator Aldrich’s name was removed from the title of the bill and replaced by the names of Carter Glass and Robert Owen. This was to remove the stigma of Aldrich as an icon for “big-business Republicans” and replace it with the more popular image of Democrats, “defenders of the working man.” </strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END-->It was a strategy advocated by Paul Warburg, one of the participants at the Jekyll Island meeting. The fact that Flaherty makes no mention of this suggests that he has not made an objective analysis but, instead, has presented a biased critique in the guise of scholarship. His statement that “the Federal Reserve Act, placed control over monetary policy with a public body, the Federal Reserve Board, not with commercial banks” cannot be taken seriously. The Federal Reserve is not a public body in any meaningful sense of the phrase.</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--> <br><br>If you like, you can read a point-by-point refutation by the book's author here.<br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.freedom-force.org/freedomcontent.cfm?fuseaction=meetflaherty&refpage=issues">www.freedom-force.org/fre...age=issues</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--> <p></p><i></i>
