“The effect of monetary control is more powerful than mega-tons of atomic energy. It reaches into every shop and home, a feat that could never be accomplished by standing armies.

“It can be used with precision against one nation, one group, or even one person while sparing or benefitting all others.”

These words have a haunting ring, evoking images of cold marbled floors and flashing financial numbers on electronic screens, and long line-ups of servile customers at the mercy of the bank tellers.

They were written by California-based writer and documentary film producer G. Edward Griffin 10 years ago.

The name is not recognizable to the untrained eye, but Google searches reveal a wealth of reviews and links, showing that the work still has much resonance today.

Griffin, who took a course in financial planning to prepare for this book, felt the time was right some years ago to address the mysticism behind the United States Federal Reserve.

He traces it from creation in 1913, when large financial giants like J.P. Morgan, the Rockefellers and Kuhn, Loeb and Company (also representing the Rothschilds from the UK) helped get it off the ground.

Since that time it has led from the front as a central banking cartel that sits atop the world's pyramid currency (though the Europeans are now desperate to get up there.)

Hence, the review of the reserve is not glowing, and a read of Griffin's book The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve brings to the fore a fresh imperative to get the subject of the Federal Reserve and the monetary system out in the open.

It is a daunting task indeed, as nobody has the time or the inclination to see where money comes from or where it goes, or what is being paid for in various forms in our names.

Too few are aware, for example, that large central banking cartels are a huge enabler in times leading up to war, as Britain and France found out in 1815, when the Rothschild dynasty was able to manipulate contacts in both countries during heightened war times and use the knowledge to its advantage while the common man was spilling blood on both sides, supposedly to topple Napoleon or defeat Wellington.

Griffin has done as good a job as anyone in his 600-page opus, published through American Media, to drag this mind-bending slab of doom through the channels of consciousness.

If nothing else, it is recommended that people read the succinct summaries at least just to see what makes the world go round, and maybe down, says Griffin, if the monetary policies that are inflating currency and driving up debt are not soon run into the rocks.

The first lesson to learn is, spiralling debt has not happened by accident. Years of banking policy and government complicity have resulted in a staggering level of national debt in the US—as of July 18, 2004 it was at US$7.27 trillion.

The debt in Canada is at $500 billion thus far, hardly giving us any reason to cheer.

Americans are on the hook for the interest on these staggering debts, as are Canadians for ours.

That means that, on average, citizens of the US and Canada are forking out thousands a year each to pay off the vast interest charged by the banking institutions lending the money, mainly through the reserve and other government bonds south of the border.

To pay these debts privately would lead to a revolution, rightly, so the tax is hidden by constant inflation and eroded purchase power for all.

It is tough to accept government spending at all levels, and citizens and politicians in opposing ranks slam it at every turn, while nobody looks at what is really being done in their names.

The root cause of most of the difficulties is once again traced back to the creation of money, something that (in the US) has been at the behest of the Federal Reserve since 1913, though it is Congress that carries this out officially in accordance with the Constitution.

While currency used to be backed fully by silver and gold, it became “fractionally” backed, until finally “fiat” paper money with no actual value (beyond the printing on the paper) was flushed through the system by the reserve as gold reserves and “real” money diminished.

What this did was to take real spending power from the citizens through the hidden inflation that resulted and when the loans came to be repaid, ones that could not be honoured were “restructured”—again at interest.

When no real progress is made on rolling loans (no principal and only interest paid off), the banks swoop in and repossess cars and homes (and the sanity of impoverished Third World countries) in a flash.

But it is governments that have allowed failing banks to survive, conferring on to them the types of privileges citizens electing the governments cannot enjoy.

It only gets more ugly, we learn, as Griffin talks about how the Great Depression could have been avoided if the money supply were not manipulated and constricted to strangle purchase power and production.

We see that, ultimately, financial institutions are wielding too big a stick to do good. How, for example, can a private bank possibly get away with lending money (usually just numbers on a screen) that has no worth, but which is charged out at interest?

How did the big financial conglomerates ever get to steer expensive loans to nations with no hopes of repayment, resulting in more ballooning debt through the supranational IMF?

Getting through this book is tough, but it is Oot & Aboot's belief that it is a necessary exercise, even for non-geekers, so we can question just why we have structured our lives for so long around the futile acquisition of money, when in fact it has such negligible value.

As books like Griffin's have shown, we are better off buying solid, tangible goods (do I hear co-ops and credit unions anyone?) than we are in trusting to the stamina of the fickle money supply and debt financing.

As long as we are using the currency decided for us by national governments, we cannot opt out of the system, no matter how much we may abhor it.

Because the debt is a national debt, accrued in our name, it is our name that we must pay the interest and the principal.

As Griffin says, there is “hell to pay” and we are all going to have to chip in, as long as we are paid in dollars, maintain a bank account, and pay taxation, which we are obligated to do by law.

Reading Griffin's book is a good blue-chip investment, and there are some websites that offer mental gymnastics up front:

www.justiceplus.org/bankers.htm

www.realityzone.com/creature.html

www.brillig.com/debt_clock/faq.html

****