Centralized financial control is not the only hydra American conspiracy theorists have taken aim at. Targets abound: Freemasons,


Catholics, Mormons, big business, government, Jews, Communists, and more recently, Muslims


questioned king of Wall Street,” wrote Neil Irwin, author of The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire, in a 2013 Washington Post article. The plutocrats, as recounted by Irwin, aimed at solving “a problem as old as their republic”: protect the US from crises that happened with alarming regularity in 1884, 1890 and 1893, with the biggest one striking in 1907. For that, they wrote the original draſt of what would become the Federal Reserve Act in 1914. That’s the plot and its avowed intention. Now the conspiracy


theory. In a report titled Century of Enslavement: The History of the Federal Reserve on his website The Corbett Report, Cal- gary-born James Corbett writes that the conspirators of Jekyll Island draſted an act that ultimately allowed the banks “to car- telize the nation’s money supply.” One participant, reports Irwin, wrote much later: “If it were


to be exposed publicly that our particular group had got togeth- er and written a banking bill, that bill would have no chance whatever of passage by Congress.” Corbett writes as if the draſt had gone from bill to act in one


fell swoop, fully remote-controlled by Wall Street. In fact, re- ports Irwin, the bill met ferocious opposition and the “plot” to hand over the exclusive control of the money supply to bankers was heavily watered down. Today, the Fed occupies an important place in what Cor-


bett sees as the New World Order. But his view of this order is far from the monolithic “Antichrist” organization seeking to enslave the world that televangelist Robertson denounces. Corbett views it rather along the lines that David Rothkopf describes in his 2008 book The Superclass: the Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making. It is a loose organization of about 6,000 very rich, powerful and influential people who share ideas and meet, “but it is not a single group with a single plan,” says Corbett, who spoke with CPA Magazine from his home in Japan. However, it is a stratum that wields more power than any national government. So, was the Federal Reserve Act a simple banking plan, or a


dark money-grubbing conspiracy? The jury is still out. Today, one can still wonder if the bankers got their way: a powerful


institution designed to help their specialized interests, not to serve the general welfare. In the aſtermath of the 2008 finan- cial crisis, Ben Bernanke, then chairman of the Fed, argued re- peatedly that the single aim of his institution was to “save” the economy. Many other credible sources disagree, notably Simon John-


son, former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, who can hardly be accused of conspiracy-theory monger- ing. In a 2009 article in The Atlantic titled “The Quiet Coup,” he claimed that the whole bailout aimed first and foremost at saving the bankers — forget the economy. Feeding off such analyses, it is only a very short step to devel-


oping a conspiratorial view of finance, as does Pierre J. C. Allard, an economist, lawyer and author of Crisis and Beyond. “The sys- tem is rigged by the financial oligarchs,” he claims. “They con- trol Washington and the Federal Reserve and have turned the monetary system into a ‘funny money’ joke.” Does that sound conspiratorial? Oligarchs controlling Wash-


ington and the Federal Reserve — how far is that from Robert- son’s New World Order lunacies? In his article Johnson says the same thing. What he witnessed in Washington during the crisis is exactly what the IMF regularly sees in underdeveloped coun- tries: financial crises are the work of Third World oligarchs and, to save the sinking country, the IMF needs to fight them back — something that was not done in the US.


Birth of the United States of Paranoia Centralized financial control is not the only hydra that Ameri- can conspiracy theorists have taken aim at. Targets abound: Freemasons, Catholics, Mormons, big business, government, Jews, Communists, and more recently, Muslims. Is conspiracy- spinning exclusively an American pastime? Certainly not, yet conspiracy theorizing is deeply embedded


in the American genome. Take the Declaration of Independence, certainly one of the most loſty political documents in history. It is also an exercise in conspiracy theory, points out Uscinski. Aſter the soaring political rhetoric, there are a “bunch of crazy conspiracy ideas about the King of England,” who was se-


SEPTEMBER 2017 | CPA MAGAZINE | 41


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