Greedy Bankers Triggered The American Revolution
By James Donahue
History
books skim over the forces that stirred the early American colonists to revolt against England and eventually fight a war
of independence. We are told how a group of angry revolutionists boarded English ships in Boston harbor, dumped a cargo of
tea, and declared it was all about taxation without representation.
Those things happened, but the anger went deeper than this. It seems that the British government began imposing
a new law, the Currency Act of 1764 on the colonists. This law forced the people to conduct all commerce using bank notes
borrowed with interest from the Bank of England. Prior to this, the colonies issued their own currency which circulated interest
free.
The interest rates charged by the
Bank of England plunged the American people into poverty and mass unemployment because of a growing irrevocable debt. The
people found themselves struggling under a financial crunch very similar to what Americans are facing today.
Benjamin Franklin, who was among the rebels operating in the colonies
at that time, later wrote that “the refusal of King George Third to allow the colonies to operate an honest money system,
which freed the ordinary man from the clutches of the money manipulators, was probably the prime cause of the revolution.”
After winning independence the new Republic of the United States found
itself deep in debt from the war. To resolve this problem the Congress commissioned the First Bank of the United States. It
was a privately owned bank. The money was again borrowed at interest under a 20-year charter. The charter drained the treasury
and threw the new nation into near financial ruin.
At the end of the 20 years Congress was opposed to renewing the charter and planned instead to return to state
issued currency which could be issued without interest. This angered the Rothschild dynasty that controlled the powerful Bank
of England and may have had interest in the First Bank of the United States. British Prime Minister Spencer Perceval was opposed
to demands by Nathan Mayer Rothschild to send troops to America to "bring those impudent Americans back to colonial status."
Then Perceval was assassinated, and replaced by Robert Banks Jenkinson, the Second Earl of Liverpool, who supported an assault
on the states. This sparked the War of 1812.
This
brief but ugly war was reportedly financed by the Bank of England. American forces won the war, but were plunged so deeply
back in debt they were forced to accept a new private central bank. Thus we had the Second Bank of the United States, with
private bankers in control.
It wasn't until
Andrew Jackson was in the White House, some 20 years later, that the nation was able to break free of the grip of the banksters.
Jackson was the first and only U.S. president to operate the government in the black.
The influence of the banks on those two wars was taught in the schools throughout the rest of the Nineteenth Century,
and the nation operated with stable currency based on silver and gold standards. But slowly, and strangely the story changed. By the time the bankers pulled off the creation of the Federal
Reserve Bank and took control of the nation's currency in 1913, people believed that the Revolution was fought over the king's
taxation without representation. The role of the greedy banksters was by then erased from school textbooks.
America plunged into the Great Depression
in 1928, and our banking system has been going deeper into debt ever since. The Republican (and Tea Party) plan for erasing
the debt by stripping welfare programs for the poor and putting more money into the pockets of the rich is a trap. If we don't
get this issue under control, Americans may be forced once agan to choose between another revolt or submit to continued enslavement
through debt.
