Recently, in an attempt to generate some calm in the wake of the IndyMac Bank failure, I published an article (on another website) about FDIC insurance and how it works. My intent was to settle some of the rampant fear that kicked off the week of July 15, 2008. I work in a bank, and trust me, people all across America were freaking out, worried about their money and whether or not it was safe.
Almost immediately after publishing (what I thought was) a very basic, purely informational piece, I began to receive e-mails advising me that I was ‘misinformed’ about the history behind FDIC insurance and the Great Depression, and that specifically, the Great Depression was intentionally created by a worldwide banking cartel so that this selfsame cartel could buy up smaller banks and entire corporations at discount rates and eventually run the whole world. FDIC, I was told, was created by this cartel to give the ordinary people the illusion of deposit security so the cartels could control their money unmolested.
Oh. Really?
Well, no, not really. I mean, I really did get the e-mails. But no, the corrections the e-mailers made to my piece were themselves incorrect. These ideas are the brainchild of filmmaker Peter Joseph, who released the ideas (and so many others) in the form of a 2007 film entitled Zeitgeist. After circulating on the internet for the past year (it is also one of the most popular YouTube videos) the film has earned a degree of respect and credibility that it in no way deserves.
Zeitgeist doesn’t restrict itself to a single conspiracy theory involving bank presidents, world wide banking cartels, and the Federal Reserve, nor does it limit its historical rewrites to America in the 20th century. If you watch the film, you will also learn that the historical Jesus was a myth, that our own government planned and staged the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks, and that income taxes are unconstitutional and you don’t have to pay them. This argument, you will be told, holds up perfectly in a court of law, but most Americans are too stupid to know this, so we just keep paying.
Wow.
How can a person with an interest in finance and economics not love a movie that right off the bat explains not-so-patiently that the viewer is stupid and gullible? Usually it takes a conversation a few minutes of give and take to get around to name calling, but in this case, we get the abuse right up front: “Listen up: First of all, you’re stupid. Secondly, Jesus never existed and last but not least, a worldwide banking cartel controls your life. Stop paying your taxes right now you moron you. Any by the way your Mom made up that whole tooth fairy thing. Gimme that cookie.”
If you take the time to watch this movie, it becomes immediately apparent that the loosely constructed, wide-ranging premise is wacko to the n-th degree, but what really bothers me is the credibility that this particular piece of sludge has gained with otherwise sane, intelligent people who, in most other cases, are able to read books and do their own thinking. It’s kind of like the notion that Eskimos have 100 different words for snow. That idea was repeated in a few academic papers fifteen years back with no reliable documentation to back it up, and soon it became accepted fact even though Eskimos do NOT have 100 words for snow. Seriously, they don’t.
To this day people still repeat that ‘fact’ without thinking twice. Eskimos have a couple words for snow instead of the single word snow with modifiers, like we have (wet snow, dry snow, and so forth) but factually speaking, for Eskimos and most other people in the world, snow is snow.
The idea of snow jobs does apply here though.
Something about Zeitgeist’s outrageous revisionism seems to appeal to the worst in all of us; our darkest fears and suspicions, and most of all our very visceral need to that believe someone, anyone, is in control during chaotic times, even if that controlling entity is itself dark and menacing. Better the Devil writ large than some kind of amorphous, hard-to-grasp chaos created by ordinary human folly and greed. A well-defined, coherent Devil is easier to understand and thus, to fight. That’s the idea anyway.
A popular quotation exhorts:
“No good of himself does a listener hear,
Speak of the devil he’s sure to appear”
[Stevens Point Journal, Wisconsin, February 1892]
Invoke the Devil and you will always see him forthwith, but among all his more romantic titles (Prince of Darkness, etc and so forth) is one we would do well to remember: “Prince of Lies.” Some would go so far as to say that the Devil himself is a lie, a human invention, a device whereby human weakness and deceit is projected outside the self and personified. The Devil is nothing other than our own weakness, writ large and reflected back to us in the magic mirror of fear, hatred, and blame.
Using this sort of familiar conjuring, the fact that people are by nature sometimes greedy and short-sighted becomes a worldwide banking cartel. The reality that ordinary people on the other side of the globe have reason to want to blow us up because of their own beliefs and frustrations becomes a vast conspiracy created by a worldwide banking cartel. And should you feel inclined to think this through a bit more carefully and be cautious and kind, remember that all of your religion is the invention of a worldwide banking cartel and you keep believing it because you are stupid.
I did watch the movie. I’m (obviously) not impressed. It takes more than insults and pumped-up rhetoric to persuade me that nonsense is reality, and I hope it takes more than that to convince Amateur Economists’ readers too. But I’ll tell you what does scare me.
The title.
Zeitgeist?
Does anyone recall another time in history when a Western nation, once respected and powerful, but by and by battered by war and economically damaged, saw its currency plummet in value so rapidly that people became afraid and angry and many of them, especially the youth, backed a tyrannical, radical political sect as a way to re-empower themselves?
Most of the young people today who buy into the ideas in Zeitgeist probably don’t remember much about Nazi Germany. They weren’t born yet. The internet didn’t even exist. So why should they care about it?
The Great Depression was brought about by greed and unbridled speculative trading on Wall Street, the same kind of greed and unbridled speculative trading that went on during the housing bubble that preceded our current economic problems.
Pure unfettered Capitalism will always create this drama. Karl Marx knew that, but so did our own government for much of our country’s history. That’s why we regulate banks and financial institutions. We don’t regulate them to just to be irritating, we do it to put some brakes on a train that has a known tendency to run off the tracks. Over the course of the past 25 years we’ve witnessed the removal of those brakes by two major Republican administrations, and now its deja vu all over again.
Are some people way too rich right now? Definitely. Do they collectively comprise a worldwide banking cartel that goes back centuries?
No. Sadly, they are not nearly that smart.
So keep let’s them away from YouTube, OK?
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First sorry for my bad english as it isn’t my mother tongue.
You should forget about these ridiculous and untrusted sources REAL Sources of history i.e. Primary sources from people who did make the History. For example do you know who Frank Vanderlip was ? He was the protege of Rockefeller and President of his bank (see wikipedia or elsewhere). He did participate in the creation of the FED at Jekyll Island in 1910 well before the official setup of 1913. Do you want historical proof ? Then get an archive of the Saturday Evening Post of February 9, 1935 where Frank Vanderlip revealed 25 years later after the fact: “…it would have been fatal to Senator Aldrich’s plan to have it known that he was calling on anybody from Wall Street to help him in preparing his bill…I do not feel it is any exaggeration to speak of our secret expedition to Jekyll Island as the occasion of the actual conception of what eventually became the Federal Reserve System.”
Do you want another proof ? Buy on Amazon “The Federal Reserve System, Its Origins and Growth” by Paul Warburg the famous banker himself. He did also participate to the creation of the FED in secrecy as he does state (Vol. 1, p. 58):
“But then the conference closed, after a week of earnest deliberation, the rough draft of what later became the Aldrich Bill had been agreed upon, and a plan had been outlined which provided for a ‘National Reserve Association,’ meaning a central reserve organization with an elastic note issue based on gold and commercial paper.”
On page 60, he wrote:
“The results of the conference were entirely confidential. Even the fact there had been a meeting was not permitted to become public.” He adds in a footnote, “Though eighteen [sic] years have since gone by, I do not feel free to give a description of this most interesting conference concerning which Senator Aldrich pledged all participants to secrecy.”
I have plenty of other primary sources but lack of time and place so I will stop now.
Hi Laurent, I’m a bit confused about what you are saying here. Are you saying that the meeting was secret and that proves there is in fact a “worldwide banking cartel”? If so, there are all kinds of secret meetings going on in the world of finance for all kinds of reasons: It’s hardly a given that a) the meeting was secret and b) therefore there really is a worldwide banking cartel plotting the totalitarian overthrow of humanity.
Maybe that’s not what you are saying though. It is true that lots of good solid reading material is available on this topic. I was just critiquing the internet flick, which I think is wacko. Thank you for taking the time to comment.
I don’t know of conspiracies regarding a worldwide banking cartel. However the passage of the Federal Reserve Act
aligned the interests of two powerful groups:
The big NY bankers got a lender of last resort, finally resolving those pesky bank runs. Scenes of a carriage loaded with gold being transported from bank to bank ahead of the bank examiner was over. Just picture it.
And—-
The federal governments deep desire to fund their new economic ideas without having to collect taxes.
It was a win win situation.
Hi Raymond, good point. Especially today, as I wake to read reports of the government bail-out of AIG. If we had to back our currency with anything at all it would never be an option. What a mess. Thank you for your comments.
forget the word “conspiracy” for a minute…powerful people have always planned to grab more power, for all kinds of reasons, and in all kinds of ways. personally, i have no idea what happened leading up to 9-11, or on jekyll island in 1910. but there are “official” stories. and oddly they always are culturally acceptable, within the boundaries of how we are educated to think, and very often extremely short on evidence. so what is the basis for these cultural boundaries? not that the “conspiracy” theories are correct, but perhaps our “official” theories are just more of the same? a researcher can quote, footnote, argue, unearth any kind, or type, of evidence, but if it flies outside of the traditional boundaries of cultural acceptability, it will never be enough. all someone has to do is chuckle and the floodgates are opened–everyone starts laughing.
Thank you for this article. I saw Zeitgeist (three times), and, at one point, got pretty hysterical. I thought I had finally been revealed to the truth. Without even knowing or understanding the Fed as it has been operating over the past century.
What I see now, is thousands of self-proclaimed “authorities” of this subject, spouting out their own interpretations of conspiracies. It’s maddening, wading through the mountains of junk facts on the web.
My point is: to all the Alex Joneses and other nuts, simmer down. It actually is very tiresome listening to your rhetoric. Especially when some people have real work to do.