Any was not the only prognosticator. Thomas Jefferson said “If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around (these banks) will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."1

Jefferson was not the only President to speak out against the private central bankers. There were seven others:

• Andrew Jackson, stating directly to President John Quincy Adams, “You are a den of vipers and thieves.”

• Ulysses S. Grant was put in power to defeat the forces trying to put in a central bank after the US Civil War.

• Abraham Lincoln, “The government should create, issue, and circulate all the currency and credit need to satisfy the spending power of the government and the buying power of the consumers.”

• Andrew Johnson, who opposed EUROPEAN FORCES attempting to implement a central bank.

• James A. Garfield, “Whoever controls the money of a nation, controls that nation and is absolute master of all industry and commerce.”

• William McKinley who, with his Secretary of State John Sherman, brought the war to the European bankers through a law, the “Sherman Antitrust Act”. After McKinley’s assassination, his Vice President Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt took power and dropped the lawsuits against the Northern Trust (the Rothschild supported Morgan financial empire at the time).

• John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated about five months after issuing Executive Order 11110 which allowed the Secretary of the Treasury to buy silver and issue silver certificates.

In addition to the eight Presidents openly trying to thwart the imposition of a private central bank, we observed President Trump’s mastery during 2020. In the middle of one of the greatest market declines in history, Trump temporarily rolled the operations of the Federal Reserve into the Treasury and averted a major pandemic driven financial collapse. While the other Presidents tried to tell the People, Trump showed the People the power of a nation in control of its finances.

Beside Presidents, there were many others who opposed the future Federal Reserve. There were also wealthy and powerful bankers and industrialists who opposed it. John Jacob Astor IV, the man who invested in Tesla, opposed the plan, as did Benjamin Guggenheim and Macy’s owner Isidor Straus. They were the wealthiest men of the day, and unfortunately all met their end in the fateful sinking of the Titanic in 1912. It’s the stuff of conspiracy theories, but find comfort in the fact-checkers who have spent an awful amount of time reassuring us it is simply a coincidence – albeit a huge one.

I was wearing my "now non-fiction" t-shirt at the grocery store the other day. One of the guys stocking the shelves came up to me, pointed at the logo, and said "ain't it the truth!". You never know where you might find those who are like-minded!

I will never forget that a student intern gave me a copy of Atlas Shrugged after working for me one summer. As I was reading it I was also following the failure of the New York Central-Penn Central railway merger in the daily news. When I saw the fiction was published in 1957 and it was coming true in 1970 it was chilling. Today it is like the rest is playing out before our eyes.

You will kill your liver!

Wow, it's great to hear from you, rockymountainpirate! It has been so long!

Galt's oath:
I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
My application of it:
I do my best. My students exchange their value (cash) for my education of them. However, I will admit that living up to Galt's oath is very hard.

Fiction? Really? I bought an Atlas Shrugged: Now Non-Fiction when the movies first came out. They are more relevant than ever. I put a quote from Atlas Shrugged into one of my PowerPoint slides:

No one gets to this place by faking reality in any way whatsoever.

So many people are in denial that occasionally I wonder whether they actually believe that they are in their right minds, but clearly they are in their left minds.

I am living them, too!

I listen to the book nearly monthly to help keep me positive and forward looking. I have the book on Audible. Easy to listen to while working or driving, especially on the way to the shrug job.

I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine. $$$

You may be listening to the Atlas shrugged Movies....but we are all living them! Or maybe the prequal to the "Gulag Archipelago"

I just keep reminding myself: it's a work of fiction, from the 1950's.
Seems to help. A little.

It will be a reorganization of the files within https://fit.instructure.com/courses/2....
An outline with some figures is in
https://fit.instructure.com/files/455...
Most of the text written so far, except for the lab lectures and labs for my course, is in
https://fit.instructure.com/files/455...
Narrated PowerPoint slides for Chapter 1 are in
https://fit.instructure.com/files/455...

Just make it a drinking game. Everytime reality checks one of Rand’s plot points....take a drink. I’m going through Glengoolie pretty quickly.

Wow!

"The Basics Of Making" sounds good. Can you give us an idea of what's going to be in it?

Except, I think the fictional Mr. Thompson has a bit more wherewithal than the real Xiden.

Biden is the personification of Mr. Thompson!

Nowadays it feels like CNN is playing a Shrugathon.

Indeed, the opening of Part 1 is VERY timely, but there are parts of Part 3 that are happening now, too!

I watch the trilogy a couple of times a year. The last time I started the series, the opening of Part 1 struck me as particularly timely.

The book is more detailed, but it takes a long time to get through. I go back and re-read occasionally too.