What Past Presidents Thought About Big Banks

Stephen D. Foster Jr.
June 3, 2012
http://www.addictinginfo.org/2012/06/03/what-past-presidents-thought-about-big-banks

The Occupy Wall Street protesters have been standing against the big banks for a few months now. They are protesting the greed, irresponsibility, and fraud that banks like Bank of America, Citigroup, and JPMorgan Chase commit on a daily basis. The big banks of Wall Street caused an economic collapse. As a result of that collapse, Americans suffered job losses and money losses while the banks got a bail out on the taxpayer’s dime. Not one banker has been arrested for stealing billions of dollars from the American people.

Throughout American history, big banks have sought to fleece the people and control government. They have a caused economic turmoil, social injustice, war, hunger, and crises too numerous to mention, all because of greed and a lust for absolute power. Many American Presidents have risen to challenge them and hold them accountable for their actions. So which Presidents would cheer on Occupy Wall Street? What did past Presidents think about big banks? I’ll let the quotes speak for themselves.

1. “Banks have done more injury to the religion, morality, tranquility, prosperity, and even wealth of the nation than they can have done or ever will do good.”
~John Adams

2. “The central bank is an institution of the most deadly hostility existing against the Principles and form of our Constitution. I am an Enemy to all banks discounting bills or notes for anything but Coin. If the American People allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the People of all their Property until their Children will wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered.”
~Thomas Jefferson to Albert Gallatin, 1803.

3. “History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling money and its issuance.” ~James Madison

4. “I have had men watching you for a long time and I am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the Bank. … You are a den of vipers and thieves.”
~Andrew Jackson, 1834, on closing the Second Bank of the United States

5. “I have two great enemies, the southern army in front of me and the financial institutions, in the rear. Of the two, the one in the rear is the greatest enemy….. I see in the future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of the war.”
~Abraham Lincoln

6. “Whosoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce… And when you realise that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate.”
~James Garfield (assassinated within weeks of release of this statement during first year of his Presidency in 1881)

7. “Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.”
~Theodore Roosevelt, April 19, 1906

8. “A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the world– no longer a government of free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of small groups of dominant men.”
~Woodrow Wilson

9. “We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace-business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hatred for me – and I welcome their hatred. I should like to have it said of my first administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second administration that in it these forces met their master.”
?~Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Speech at Madison Square Garden

10. “All problems, depressions, wars, disasters, assassinations, all of them were planned, caused, instigated, and implemented by the International Bankers and their attempt to establish a central bank in every country in the world, which they have now done, thanks to corrupt politicians who have been bought and paid for. This is all you need to know about the history of the world.”
~John F. Kennedy

For more than a decade now, banks have brought this country to near economic ruin. They have successfully lobbied to repeal key regulations that have prevented them from employing the harmful tactics they use to fleece the American people in the name of profit. The big banks bet against America and then expect taxpayers to bail them out when they fail. They then gamble with that money and pay their executives millions. It’s wrong and should not be tolerated. The above Presidents knew how dangerous and harmful big private banks can be. Presidents like Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt fought hard against the “den of vipers,” and the “invisible government,” and FDR had finally put the banks in their place during his own Presidency. These Presidents would most certainly stand with the Occupy protesters and would fiercely call for breaking up and regulating the big banks. The banks have grown powerful and corrupt once again and it will take another great President to rein them in. The question is, who will be that great President?