Another online scandal has been gathering pace recently. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, deleted an article by a Russian researcher, who wrote about the USA’s losses in the Great Depression of 1932-1933. Indignant bloggers began to actively distribute the article on the Russian part of a popular blog service known as Livejournal. The above-mentioned article triggered a heated debate.
Famine killed 7 million people in USA
Photo: Famine killed 7 million people in USA
The researcher touched upon quite a hot topic in the article – the estimation of the number of victims of the Great Depression in the USA. The material presented in the article apparently made Wikipedia’s moderators delete the piece from the database of the online encyclopedia.
The researcher, Boris Borisov, in his article titled “The American Famine” estimated the victims of the financial crisis in the US at over seven million people. The researcher also directly compared the US events of 1932-1933 with Holodomor, or Famine, in the USSR during 1932-1933.
In the article, Borisov used the official data of the US Census Bureau. Having revised the number of the US population, birth and date rates, immigration and emigration, the researcher came to conclusion that the United States lost over seven million people during the famine of 1932-1933.
“According to the US statistics, the US lost not less than 8 million 553 thousand people from 1931 to 1940. Afterwards, population growth indices change twice instantly exactly between 1930-1931: the indices drop and stay on the same level for ten years. There can no explanation to this phenomenon found in the extensive text of the report by the US Department of Commerce “Statistical Abstract of the United States,” the author wrote.
The researcher points out the movement of population at this point: “A lot more people left the country than arrived during the 1930s – the difference is estimated at 93,309 people, whereas 2.960,782 people arrived in the country a decade earlier. Well, let’s correct the number of total demographic losses in the USA during the 1930s by 3,054 people.”
Analyzing the period of the Great Depression in the USA, the author notes a remarkable similarity with events taking place in the USSR during the 1930s. He even introduced a new term for the USA – defarming – an analogue to dispossession of wealthy farmers in the Soviet Union. “Few people know about five million American farmers (about a million families) whom banks ousted from them lands because of debts. The US government did not provide them with land, work, social aid, pension – nothing,” the article says.
“Every sixth American farmer was affected by famine. People were forced to leave their homes and go to nowhere without any money and any property. They found themselves in the middle of nowhere enveloped in massive unemployment, famine and gangsterism.”
The then state of affairs in the US society can be seen in Peter Jackson’s movie King Kong. The movie starts with scenes of the Great Depression and tells the story of an actress who did not eat for three days and tried to steal an apple from a street vendor. There is food in the city, but many people had no money to buy it in unemployment-paralyzed New York. People starve in the streets against the background of stores selling a variety of foodstuffs.
Atthesametime,theUSgovernmenttriedtogetridofredundantfoodstuffs,whichvendorscouldnotsell.Marketruleswereobservedstrictly:unsoldgoodsshouldalwaysbecategorizedasredundantandthey could not be given away to the poor because it could cause damage to businesses. A variety of methods was used to destroy redundant food. They burnt crops, drowned them in the ocean or plowed 10 million hectares of harvesting fields. “About 6.5 million pigs were killed at that time,” the researcher wrote.
The consequences of those policies were predictable, the author of the article wrote. “Here is what a child recollected about those years: “We changed our usual food for something for available. We used to eat bush leaves instead of cabbage. We ate frogs too. My mother and my older sister died during a year.” (Jack Griffin).”
So-called public works introduced by President Roosevelt became a salvation for a huge number of jobless and landless Americans. However, the salvation was only a phantom, Boris Borisov wrote. The works conducted under the aegis of the Public Works Administration and the Civil Works Administration were about building channels, roads or bridges in remote, wild and dangerous territories. Up to 3.3 million people were involved in those works at a time, whereas the total number of people amounted to 8.5 million, not to count prisoners.
“Conditions and death rate at those works are to be studied separately. A member of public works would make $30, and pay $25 of taxes from this amount. So a person could make only $5 for a month of hard work in malarial swamps.”
The conditions, under which people were working for food, could be compared to Stalin’s GULAG camp.
“The Public Works Administration (PWA) bore a striking resemblance to GULAG. The PWA was chaired by “American Beria,” the Secretary of Interior Affairs, Harold Ickes, who threw about two million people into camps for the unemployed youth,” Borisov wrote. “Harold LeClair Ickes (1874–1952) later interned USA’s ethnic Japanesein concentration camps. The first stage of the operation took only 72 hours (1941-1942).
“In 1940, the US population was supposed to make up at least 141.856 million people upon the preservation of previous demographic trends. As a matter of fact, the USA had the 131.409-strong population in 1940, of which only 3.054 million can be explained with changes in migration dynamics. Thus, 7.394,000 people simply do not exist as of 1940. There are no official arguments to explain the phenomenon,” Boris Borisov wrote.
It is worthy of note that modern-day Russian patriotic historians reject methods of research based on the general estimation of demographic losses. They believe that demographic processes are not linear and depend on a number of factors. Such historians think that victims of communism estimations made on the base of demographic research works by Stephan Kurt and Richard Pipes, which George Bush and Helen Bonner announced at the opening of Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington, are false.
On the other hand, these methods are widely used in contemporary science of history. Ukrainian historian Stanislav Kulchitsky used the method to calculate the number of victims of the Ukrainian Holodomor (famine), which was subsequently officially recognized. Parliaments of eleven countries that recognized Holodomor use those numbers in their research works. To crown it all, the US Congress and the European Union also use Kulchitsky’s numbers considering the problem.
https://english.pravda.ru/world/105255-famine/
Famine killed 7 million people in USA
Was engineered by the Federal Reserve. A deliberate squeeze in the money supply.
The Great Depression was an inside job and the people that caused profited from it.
Archive link as YouTube does various soft shadow banning
You don’t have to believe it, but that’s the conclusion I’ve reached, and we don’t have to look very far for evidence of it, because they admit it: former two-term Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke, acknowledged in a 2002 presentation that the actions of the Fed caused, prolonged, and exacerbated the Great Depression:
“The first episode … was the deliberate tightening of monetary policy that began in the spring of 1928 and continued until the stock market crash of October 1929. This policy tightening occurred in conditions that we would not today normally consider conducive to tighter money: … the business-cycle trough had only just been reached at the end of 1927 … commodity prices were declining, and there was not the slightest hint of inflation. Why then did the Federal Reserve tighten in early 1928? [Good Question!] A principal reason was the Board's ongoing concern about speculation on Wall Street. The Federal Reserve had long made the distinction between "productive" and "speculative" uses of credit, and the rising stock market and the associated increases in bank loans to brokers were thus a major concern. [Except all through the 20s the Fed encouraged speculation through its rules and rates and never seemed to have a problem with it.]
“Moreover, Friedman and Schwartz went on to point out that this tightening of policy was followed by falling prices and weaker economic activity: ‘During the two months from the cyclical peak in August 1929 to the crash, production, wholesale prices, and personal income fell…’ Of course, once the crash occurred in October…the economic decline became even more precipitous.
“The next episode … occurred in September 1931, following the sterling crisis. In that month, a wave of speculative attacks on the pound forced Great Britain to leave the gold standard. [“Attacks” is an interesting and telling choice of words.] Anticipating that the United States might be the next to leave gold, speculators turned their attention from the pound to the dollar. Central banks and private investors converted a substantial quantity of dollar assets to gold in September and October of 1931. The resulting outflow of gold reserves (an "external drain") also put pressure on the U.S. banking system (an "internal drain"), as foreigners liquidated dollar deposits and domestic depositors withdrew cash in anticipation of additional bank failures. Conventional and long-established central banking practice would have mandated responses to both the external and internal drains, but the Federal Reserve…decided to respond only to the external drain. As Friedman and Schwarz wrote, "The Federal Reserve System reacted vigorously and promptly to the external drain. . . . On October 9 [1931], the Reserve Bank of New York raised its rediscount rate to 2-1/2 %, and on October 16, to 3-1/2 % -- the sharpest rise within so brief a period in the whole history of the System, before or since." This action stemmed the outflow of gold but contributed to what Friedman and Schwartz called a "spectacular" increase in bank failures and bank runs, with 522 commercial banks closing their doors in October alone. The policy tightening and the ongoing collapse of the banking system caused the money supply to fall precipitously, and the declines in output and prices became even more virulent. [Curious, don’t you think, that the Fed caused this by going against long-established practice?]
“[The] third episode occurred in April 1932, when the Congress began to exert considerable pressure on the Fed to ease monetary policy, in particular, to conduct large-scale open-market purchases of securities. The Board was quite reluctant; but between April and June 1932, it did authorize substantial purchases. This infusion of liquidity … as Friedman and Schwartz noted (p. 324), "… [was] followed shortly by an equally notable change in the general economic indicator…. Wholesale prices started rising in July, production in August. Personal income continued to fall but at a much reduced rate. Factory employment, railroad ton-miles, and numerous other indicators of physical activity tell a similar story. All in all, as in early 1931, the data again have many of the earmarks of a cyclical revival…. Unfortunately … most [Fed officials] did not consider the policy to be appropriate…. Hence, when the Congress adjourned on July 16, 1932, the System essentially ended the program. By the latter part of the year, the economy had relapsed dramatically.” [So they deliberately axed a policy that was clearly working.]
So as you can see, it is now a matter of orthodoxy in economics that the Fed caused and exacerbated the Great Depression. The only question really is whether you believe it was done deliberately, with malice aforethought, or whether you agree with Bernanke by chalking it up to “misguided doctrines.” It seems to me just on the basis of Bernanke’s remarks that it was deliberate: (1) they tightened the money supply without good reason; (2) they went against standard practice; and (3) they quickly abandoned policies that were proving helpful. Bernanke also says that by 1931 the Fed had “foresworn any responsibility for the U.S. banking system.” That seems odd. Why would that be? Well, Bernanke assures us that “The problem within the Fed was largely doctrinal: Fed officials appeared to subscribe to Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon's infamous 'liquidationist' thesis, that weeding out "weak" banks was a harsh but necessary prerequisite to the recovery of the banking system.” But then he goes on to explain how self-serving that doctrine really was:
“Moreover, most of the failing banks were small banks (as opposed to what we would now call money-center banks) and not members of the Federal Reserve System. Thus the Fed saw no particular need to try to stem the panics. At the same time, the large banks—which would have intervened before the founding of the Fed [and were really in control of the Fed]—felt that protecting their smaller brethren was no longer their responsibility. Indeed, since the large banks felt confident that the Fed would protect them if necessary, the weeding out of small competitors was a positive good, from their point of view.”
And they just admit that in public? Bernanke calls it a “misguided doctrine.” But that’s ridiculous. The Fed was created in order to bring stability to the banking system. That is and was its raison d’être. (Though of course the history of the Fed’s creation indicates that it, too, was a kind of racket, having been justified on the basis of a banking panic manufactured by J.P. Morgan and others.) Here's an analogy to elucidate the insanity here: imagine a few people drown at your local swimming pool. So they hire a lifeguard to stop people from drowning. Then all of a sudden a ton of people drown, and you ask him why he didn’t try to save any of them, and he just shrugs and says, “Bro, haven’t you ever heard of Darwin? Like, survival of the fittest, man.” That’s not a misguided doctrine, that’s criminal negligence. But then suppose you found out that the lifeguard had taken out insurance policies on everyone and was getting richer every time someone drowned—in other words, that he profited from their deaths. Would you just chalk that up to being misguided?
The Great Depression was an inside job and the people that caused profited from it.
Archive link as YouTube does various soft shadow banning
You don’t have to believe it, but that’s the conclusion I’ve reached, and we don’t have to look very far for evidence of it, because they admit it: former two-term Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke, acknowledged in a 2002 presentation that the actions of the Fed caused, prolonged, and exacerbated the Great Depression:
“The first episode … was the deliberate tightening of monetary policy that began in the spring of 1928 and continued until the stock market crash of October 1929. This policy tightening occurred in conditions that we would not today normally consider conducive to tighter money: … the business-cycle trough had only just been reached at the end of 1927 … commodity prices were declining, and there was not the slightest hint of inflation. Why then did the Federal Reserve tighten in early 1928? [Good Question!] A principal reason was the Board's ongoing concern about speculation on Wall Street. The Federal Reserve had long made the distinction between "productive" and "speculative" uses of credit, and the rising stock market and the associated increases in bank loans to brokers were thus a major concern. [Except all through the 20s the Fed encouraged speculation through its rules and rates and never seemed to have a problem with it.]
“Moreover, Friedman and Schwartz went on to point out that this tightening of policy was followed by falling prices and weaker economic activity: ‘During the two months from the cyclical peak in August 1929 to the crash, production, wholesale prices, and personal income fell…’ Of course, once the crash occurred in October…the economic decline became even more precipitous.
“The next episode … occurred in September 1931, following the sterling crisis. In that month, a wave of speculative attacks on the pound forced Great Britain to leave the gold standard. [“Attacks” is an interesting and telling choice of words.] Anticipating that the United States might be the next to leave gold, speculators turned their attention from the pound to the dollar. Central banks and private investors converted a substantial quantity of dollar assets to gold in September and October of 1931. The resulting outflow of gold reserves (an "external drain") also put pressure on the U.S. banking system (an "internal drain"), as foreigners liquidated dollar deposits and domestic depositors withdrew cash in anticipation of additional bank failures. Conventional and long-established central banking practice would have mandated responses to both the external and internal drains, but the Federal Reserve…decided to respond only to the external drain. As Friedman and Schwarz wrote, "The Federal Reserve System reacted vigorously and promptly to the external drain. . . . On October 9 [1931], the Reserve Bank of New York raised its rediscount rate to 2-1/2 %, and on October 16, to 3-1/2 % -- the sharpest rise within so brief a period in the whole history of the System, before or since." This action stemmed the outflow of gold but contributed to what Friedman and Schwartz called a "spectacular" increase in bank failures and bank runs, with 522 commercial banks closing their doors in October alone. The policy tightening and the ongoing collapse of the banking system caused the money supply to fall precipitously, and the declines in output and prices became even more virulent. [Curious, don’t you think, that the Fed caused this by going against long-established practice?]
“[The] third episode occurred in April 1932, when the Congress began to exert considerable pressure on the Fed to ease monetary policy, in particular, to conduct large-scale open-market purchases of securities. The Board was quite reluctant; but between April and June 1932, it did authorize substantial purchases. This infusion of liquidity … as Friedman and Schwartz noted (p. 324), "… [was] followed shortly by an equally notable change in the general economic indicator…. Wholesale prices started rising in July, production in August. Personal income continued to fall but at a much reduced rate. Factory employment, railroad ton-miles, and numerous other indicators of physical activity tell a similar story. All in all, as in early 1931, the data again have many of the earmarks of a cyclical revival…. Unfortunately … most [Fed officials] did not consider the policy to be appropriate…. Hence, when the Congress adjourned on July 16, 1932, the System essentially ended the program. By the latter part of the year, the economy had relapsed dramatically.” [So they deliberately axed a policy that was clearly working.]
So as you can see, it is now a matter of orthodoxy in economics that the Fed caused and exacerbated the Great Depression. The only question really is whether you believe it was done deliberately, with malice aforethought, or whether you agree with Bernanke by chalking it up to “misguided doctrines.” It seems to me just on the basis of Bernanke’s remarks that it was deliberate: (1) they tightened the money supply without good reason; (2) they went against standard practice; and (3) they quickly abandoned policies that were proving helpful. Bernanke also says that by 1931 the Fed had “foresworn any responsibility for the U.S. banking system.” That seems odd. Why would that be? Well, Bernanke assures us that “The problem within the Fed was largely doctrinal: Fed officials appeared to subscribe to Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon's infamous 'liquidationist' thesis, that weeding out "weak" banks was a harsh but necessary prerequisite to the recovery of the banking system.” But then he goes on to explain how self-serving that doctrine really was:
“Moreover, most of the failing banks were small banks (as opposed to what we would now call money-center banks) and not members of the Federal Reserve System. Thus the Fed saw no particular need to try to stem the panics. At the same time, the large banks—which would have intervened before the founding of the Fed [and were really in control of the Fed]—felt that protecting their smaller brethren was no longer their responsibility. Indeed, since the large banks felt confident that the Fed would protect them if necessary, the weeding out of small competitors was a positive good, from their point of view.”
And they just admit that in public? Bernanke calls it a “misguided doctrine.” But that’s ridiculous. The Fed was created in order to bring stability to the banking system. That is and was its raison d’être. (Though of course the history of the Fed’s creation indicates that it, too, was a kind of racket, having been justified on the basis of a banking panic manufactured by J.P. Morgan and others.) Here's an analogy to elucidate the insanity here: imagine a few people drown at your local swimming pool. So they hire a lifeguard to stop people from drowning. Then all of a sudden a ton of people drown, and you ask him why he didn’t try to save any of them, and he just shrugs and says, “Bro, haven’t you ever heard of Darwin? Like, survival of the fittest, man.” That’s not a misguided doctrine, that’s criminal negligence. But then suppose you found out that the lifeguard had taken out insurance policies on everyone and was getting richer every time someone drowned—in other words, that he profited from their deaths. Would you just chalk that up to being misguided?
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RepublicOfEngland
- Lieutenant
- Posts: 67
- Joined: Mon Oct 10, 2022 9:33 am
Thanks for posting the Money Masters documentary. It shows the side of Caesar acting on behalf of the poor and likely his reason for assassination... I'll likely enjoy the rest of it!
A son of the English Republic