From: TruthOut
By Ellen Brown
By 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, or what their leader William
Jennings Bryan thought he was approving when he voted for it in 1913. In
the stirring speech that won him the Democratic presidential nomination
in 1896, Bryan insisted:
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