Anthony Wile
The Daily Bell
Sunday, October 9, 2011
It is interesting to watch the expansion of the
Occupy Wall Street movement. As I wrote last week, I hoped it would provide an opportunity for people to proclaim clearly that
central banking was the fundamental problem with the Western world today.
The article, “Blaming Wall Street is Wrong,” received wide play. The
idea was that the emphasis on attacking corporations and Wall Street
itself – a transactional business – was taking energy and focus off the
real issue, which was central banking. Central banking, controlled by
elite families in my view, is the
power elite‘s
dominant social theme. It provides the endless streams of money that support the elite’s ever-expanding
New World Order.
We seemed to have touched a nerve. The article was mentioned by
Infowars, Prison Planet, the Drudge Report and numerous other media
outlets.
Alex Jones, in fact, announced he was starting a movement to focus on ways to protest not just
Federal Reserve activities but the institution itself.
Unfortunately, a week later, Occupy Wall Street continues to be a
kind of “mixed bag.” This, therefore, must of necessity be a “good
news/bad news” kind of follow-up.
Good news: Occupy Wall Street has raised the issue of central banking
and performed an increasingly serious educative service. It’s given
libertarian concerns a platform which maybe able to support a serious
discussion about central banking. Occupy Wall Street in this fashion,
can be looked on as a beginning not an end.
Bad news: Occupy Wall Street itself continues to be a confused,
unfocused protest. There seem to be too many dissonant voices, and
increasingly they seem of the Leftist variety. In fact, unions,
Democratic politicians and leftists of every stripe and variety are
seemingly trying to reconfigure Occupy Wall Street in order to claim it
for themselves.
Occupy Wall Street SHOULD be a good vehicle to use to protest central
bank practices, first-and-foremost. Private banks and trading firms
have been around for thousands of years, at least since Greek times. But
modern,
fiat-money central-banking has drastically increased the ruin of the West’s industrial and economic system.
Remove central banking and many of the rest of the problems of
Western economics gradually go away or become less severe. Surely, there
are abuses at every level of the Western economy, but the fundamental
issue remains central banking. That’s where it all starts. Young people
should be made aware of the truth about the system that dominates their
lives and restrains the promise of their future.
It’s a bad system that leaves the control of the world’s money in a
few (fairly anonymous) hands. It’s an economically illiterate one as
well. Central bankers fix the price of money via interest rates and
printing presses. No decent economist will try to argue that price
fixing is anything other than an economic distortion, transferring
wealth from those who have earned it to those who have not.
Unfortunately, one cannot massage a movement. Occupy Wall Street has
managed to find numerous other windmills at which to tilt. We reported
yesterday on a worldwide protest planned for October 15th. It is to be a
“worldwide demonstration for global change.” The iconography and
rhetoric sound suspiciously
socialist – aimed at such targets as greedy corporations, corrupt government officials, etc. Nothing about central banks, though.
And then there’s this: Bank Transfer Day. Cadie Thompson, a producer
at CNBC, has reported on a movement to remove all funds from banks and
into credit unions starting on November 5. Here’s an excerpt from her
article:
The Facebook page for the event states the following: “Together
we can ensure that these banking institutions will ALWAYS remember the
5th of November! If the 99% remove our funds from the major banking
institutions on or by this date, we will send a clear message and give
the 1% a taste of the fear that we experience every day when we aren’t
able to pay for our rent, food, medication, utilities, student loans,
etc.”
So far over 6,500 people have RSVP’ed for the event. The
protestors take issue with the Durbin Amendment, which is an addition to
the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act that caps
the debit interchange fees banks can charge merchants. The protestors
oppose the amendment because they claim the banks will begin to charge
their customers $3-$5 fees to off-set the money they will lose because
of the interchange fee cap.
… This is a blatant attack on the 99% that cannot & will not
be tolerated. In a stand of solidarity, on November 5th we will transfer
our money & close our accounts with these major banking
institutions to take our business to credit unions (or local banks if a
credit union isn’t available) … Bank of America has already announced it will start to charge customers $5 a month for using their debit card starting next year.
Honestly, this is the kind of thing that makes you want to tear your hair out. The US and
NATO
have irradiated vast portions of central Asia and Iraq with depleted
uranium weapons that have caused massive death and birth defects. There
is famine in Somalia and drought throughout Africa.
The West generally is slipping into a Depression and China and Japan
may not be far behind. Unemployment, thanks to central bank booms and
busts, is horribly high and going higher.
But participants in the Occupy Wall Street demos “will not tolerate” surcharges on their debit cards.
(CONTINUE READING)
The
Occupy Wall Street crowd has become predictably focused on issues like
taxing the middle class and moderately “rich,” ending capitalism and
even re-electing Obama to ‘fight’ the very elites who pushed him into
power. Focus should instead be on the real source of power for the
out-of-control bankster class- the private, unaccountable Federal
Reserve bank that creates money out of thin air, issues secret loans to
insiders and foreign governments and systematically institutes debt on
the American people through their undue powers.
