From the foreword to SECRETS OF THE FEDERAL RESERVE - The London Connection by Eustace Mullins:
In 1949, while I was visiting Ezra Pound who was a political prisoner at St. Elizabeth's Hospital, Washington, D.C. (a Federal institution for the insane), Dr. Pound asked me if I had ever heard of the Federal Reserve System. I replied that I had not, as of the age of 25. He then showed me a ten dollar bill marked "Federal Reserve Note" and asked me if I would do some research at the Library of Congress on the Federal Reserve System which had issued this bill. Pound was unable to go to the Library himself, as he was being held without trial as a political prisoner by the United States government. After he was denied broadcasting time in the U.S., Dr. Pound broadcast from Italy in an effort to persuade people of the United States not to enter World War II. Franklin D. Roosevelt had personally ordered Pound's indictment, spurred by the demands of his three personal assistants, Harry Dexter White, Lauchlin Currie, and Alger Hiss, all of whom were subsequently identified as being connected with Communist espionage.
I had no interest in money or banking as a subject, because I was working on a novel. Pound offered to supplement my income by ten dollars a week for a few weeks. My initial research revealed evidence of an international banking group which had secretly planned the writing of the Federal Reserve Act and Congress' enactment of the plan into law. These findings confirmed what Pound had long suspected. He said, "You must work on it as a detective story." I was fortunate in having my research at the Library of Congress directed by a prominent scholar, George Stimpson, founder of the National Press Club, who was described by The New York Times of September 28, 1952: "Beloved by Washington newspapermen as 'our walking Library of Congress', Mr. Stimpson was a highly regarded reference source in the Capitol. Government officials, Congressmen and reporters went to him for information on any subject."
I did research four hours each day at the Library of Congress, and went to St. Elizabeth's Hospital in the afternoon. Pound and I went over the previous day's notes. I then had dinner with George Stimpson at Scholl's Cafeteria while he went over my material, and I then went back to my room to type up the corrected notes. Both Stimpson and Pound made many suggestions in guiding me in a field in which I had no previous experience. When Pound's resources ran low, I applied to the Guggenheim Foundation, Huntington Hartford Foundation, and other foundations to complete my research on the Federal Reserve. Even though my foundation applications were sponsored by the three leading poets of America, Ezra Pound, E.E. Cummings, and Elizabeth Bishop, all of the foundations refused to sponsor this research. I then wrote up my findings to date, and in 1950 began efforts to market this manuscript in New York. Eighteen publishers turned it down without comment, but the nineteenth, Devin Garrity, president of Devin Adair Publishing Company, gave me some friendly advice in his office. "I like your book, but we can't print it," he told me. "Neither can anybody else in New York. Why don't you bring in a prospectus for your novel, and I think we can give you an advance. You may as well forget about getting the Federal Reserve book published. I doubt if it could ever be printed."
This was devastating news, coming after two years of intensive work. I reported back to Pound, and we tried to find a publisher in other parts of the country. After two years of fruitless submissions, the book was published in a small edition in 1952 by two of Pound's disciples, John Kasper and David Horton, using their private funds, under the title Mullins on the Federal Reserve. In 1954, a second edition, with unauthorized alterations, was published in New Jersey, as The Federal Reserve Conspiracy. In 1955, Guido Roeder brought out a German edition in Oberammergau, Germany. The book was seized and the entire edition of 10,000 copies burned by government agents led by Dr. Otto John.
The burning of the book was upheld April 21, 1961 by judge Israel Katz of the Bavarian Supreme Court. The U.S. Government refused to intervene, because U.S. High Commissioner to Germany, James B. Conant (president of Harvard University 1933 to 1953), had approved the initial book burning order. This is the only book which has been burned in Germany since World War II. In 1968 a pirated edition of this book appeared in California. Both the FBI and the U.S. Postal inspectors refused to act, despite numerous complaints from me during the next decade. In 1980 a new German edition appeared. Because the U.S. Government apparently no longer dictated the internal affairs of Germany, the identical book which had been burned in 1955 now circulates in Germany without interference.
I had collaborated on several books with Mr. H.L. Hunt and he suggested that I should continue my long-delayed research on the Federal Reserve and bring out a more definitive version of this book. I had just signed a contract to write the authorized biography of Ezra Pound, and the Federal Reserve book had to be postponed. Mr. Hunt passed away before I could get back to my research, and once again I faced the problem of financing research for the book.
My original book had traced and named the shadowy figures in the United States who planned the Federal Reserve Act. I now discovered that the men whom I exposed in 1952 as the shadowy figures behind the operation of the Federal Reserve System were themselves shadows, the American fronts for the unknown figures who became known as the "London Connection." I found that notwithstanding our successes in the Wars of Independence of 1812 against England, we remained an economic and financial colony of Great Britain. For the first time, we located the original stockholders of the Federal Reserve Banks and traced their parent companies to the London Connection.
This research is substantiated by citations and documentation from hundreds of newspapers, periodicals and books and charts showing blood, marriage, and business relationships. More than a thousand issues of The New York Times on microfilm have been checked not only for original information, but verification of statements from other sources.
It is a truism of the writing profession that a writer has only one book within him. This seems applicable in my case, because I am now in the fifth decade of continuous writing on a single subject, the inside story of the Federal Reserve System. This book was from its inception commissioned and guided by Ezra Pound. Four of his protégés have previously been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, William Butler Yeats for his later poetry, James Joyce for "Ulysses", Ernest Hemingway for "The Sun Also Rises", and T.S. Elliot for "The Waste Land". Pound played a major role in the inspiration and in the editing of these works--which leads us to believe that this present work, also inspired by Pound, represents an ongoing literary tradition.
Although this book in its inception was expected to be a tortuous work on economic and monetary techniques, it soon developed into a story of such universal and dramatic appeal that from the outset, Ezra Pound urged me to write it as a detective story, a genre which was invented by my fellow Virginian, Edgar Allan Poe. I believe that the continuous circulation of this book during the past forty years has not only exonerated Ezra Pound for his much condemned political and monetary statements, but also that it has been, and will continue to be, the ultimate weapon against the powerful conspirators who compelled him to serve thirteen and a half years without trial, as a political prisoner held in an insane asylum a la KGB. His earliest vindication came when the government agents who represented the conspirators refused to allow him to testify in his own defense; the second vindication came in 1958 when these same agents dropped all charges against him, and he walked out of St. Elizabeth's Hospital, a free man once more. His third and final vindication is this work, which documents every aspect of his exposure of the ruthless international financiers to whom Ezra Pound became but one more victim, doomed to serve years as the Man in the Iron Mask, because he had dared to alert his fellow-Americans to their furtive acts of treason against all people of the United States.
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Thursday, June 17, 2010
'The only book which has been burned in Germany since World War II'
An interview with Charlotte Dennett: Bringing G.W. Bush to justice
In this interview, author and attorney Charlotte Dennett talks about her new book, The People V. Bush: One Lawyer's Campaign to Bring the President to Justice and the National Grassroots Movement She Encounters Along the Way, what led her to run for Vermont state attorney general on a platform to prosecute George W. Bush, the current movement to bring Bush to justice, and connections between the US accountability movement and similar movements around the world.
Charlotte Dennett has been practicing law since 1997, with an emphasis on personal injury litigation and suing the government under the Freedom of Information Act. She's also been a reporter in the Middle East and is the coauthor with her husband, Gerard Colby, of Thy Will Be Done-The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil. She and her husband live in Cambridge, Vermont.
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TF: Please describe the current state of the movement to prosecute Bush.
CD: The movement to prosecute Bush is now part of a growing Accountability Movement in the U.S. and abroad. In the U.S. people are just fed up with government officials (whether elected or appointed) acting above the law, as they are with corporations (whether oil companies or giant media conglomerates) heeding the bottom line instead of serving the public interest. A group of us who recently attended a conference in Santa Cruz California called "Understanding Deep Politics" will soon be releasing a Declaration of Accountability which provides some suggested actions, and prosecuting Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld (among others) remains high on the list of priorities.
Vincent Bugliosi is making progress on finding a DA to prosecute Bush in a state criminal court, and as I said, I may run again or I may focus on building the accountability movement. The point is this: there is now far more evidence of Bush's culpability than when I embarked on my campaign, especially in the area of war crimes.
Last week, Physicians for Human RIghts are calling on Attorney General Eric Holder to open a criminal investigation into human experimentation on detainees held at Guantanamo, which is a war crime.
Meanwhile, thanks to the release of the so-called "torture memos" a year ago, two Spanish prosecutors have launched a criminal investigation in the US that goes beyond a Special Prosecutor's investigation of CIA interrogators to include a) the lawyers who devised bogus laws in the Justice Department to exculpate the CIA and b) the people who authorized the torture: Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, for starters. They have the right to do that because Spanish citizens were tortured in Guantánamo. (Their court filings refer to a systematic plan of torture that took on “almost an official nature and therefore entails criminal liability in the different structures of execution, command, design and authorization.”)
One of the prosecutors, Baltasar Garzón, has recently been brought up on professional misconduct charges in Spain, a decidedly political act by the right wing which is hoping to cripple him nationally and internationally. They do not want him to further his ongoing investigation into war crimes that occurred during the Spanish Civil law and went after him for violating a Spanish law that gave immunity to those who engaged in war crimes during that time. Garzón claims a higher authority to prosecute, including international law. He has broad international support. The other lawyer doing the US investigation, Eloy Velasco, is still at it as far as I know.
Meanwhile, Frances Boyle, a professor of international law at University of Illinois, has filed a criminal complaint with the ICC against Bush, Cheney et al for authorizing extraordinary renditions (kidnapping of terrorism suspects and sending them to secret black sites for torture) and that investigation is ongoing, with Boyle delivering more and more evidence. Former U.S. Attorney General was recently chosen to head an international commission to investigate Bush-era crimes. And as I write, he is in Calgary, Canada, defending the Canadian Mohawk protester Splitting the Sky for his attempted citizen's arrest last year of Bush.
All of this shows that the effort to hold Bush et al accountable for war crimes has gone global, and it will not end until justice is done.
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Britain to expand central bank's powers
Britain's Treasury chief announced an overhaul of his country's financial regulatory system Wednesday, one which dissolves the country's finance watchdog and hands broad new powers to its central bank.
George Osborne said the Bank of England would soon be responsible for keeping an eye on lenders, insurance companies and investment banks in addition to supervising the health of the economy overall, something he said would help avoid a repeat of the credit crisis that nearly brought the British economy to its knees.
"Because central banks are the lenders of last resort, the experience of the crisis has also shown that they need to be familiar with every aspect of the institutions that they may have to support," Osborne told a gathering of financiers at Mansion House in central London.
Osborne said his reforms would dismantle the three-point regulation system — comprising the central bank, the Financial Services Authority, and the Treasury — set up by former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown while the latter was Treasury chief in 1997.
The FSA has long been criticized by Osborne and others for failing to foresee the near collapse of Britain's banking system in the wake of the credit crunch. The treasurer said the authority would be broken into three smaller units — one which retained responsibility for consumer protection, another responsible for fighting economic crime, and a third unit that would be folded into the Bank of England.
Hector Sants, the FSA's chief executive, will remain at the organization's helm before moving to the Bank of England, where he will become the chief executive of its bank oversight unit, Osborne said.
Osborne said more details of the reorganization would be made public by Financial Secretary Mark Hoban on Thursday. The changes would have to be ratified by Britain's parliament, and could take as long as 2012 to come into effect.
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image from http://www.spitting-image.net
