Brannon Howse is still spreading antisemitism

In my recent podcast about the roots of Howse's perverse and conspiratorial worldview, I was generous in not speculating about the motives of the various contributors to his cash cow, Worldview Weekend. Except for one contributor, who named Jewish names and quoted antisemitic propaganda outright. That was James Quinn. Howse has apparently decided that he would continue to pander to antisemites and continue to publish this twisted and increasingly shrill botch's feeble arguments. I really did go to a library and research this guy's statements and found where they came from. I'm right about this.

Quinn's current article on Worldview Weekend is "The Federal Reserve Must Die."

I will reprint the relevant portion of the podcast and transcript below. It is important, I believe, to continue to press Howse use his discretion to drop this contributor, or, if not, to at least publicly acknowledge that he endorses the views and opinions of Quinn.

Points 6, 7, 8 [of the Protocols]: “Jews manipulate the economy, especially through banking monopolies and the power of gold;” “Jews issue paper currency not tied to the gold standard,”and "Jews promote financial speculation and use of credit.”

I have long wondered why a preacher like Howse is perennially concerned with the economy, the Federal Reserve Bank, and a preference for the gold standard to a floating currency. His amateurish preoccupation with financial matters runs throughout his website. The depressing reality is that bigots have traditionally implicated wealthy Jews with financial manipulation and unscrupulous business practices. Until the modern era, Christians have generally considered loaning on credit a sin. The Jews, as far back as Jesus' rampage through the Temple, have attached no taboo to the practice. When Jewish communities were sequestered and relegated to European ghettos, they established what might be called parallel economies. They had their own social structures and business leaders and, per force of exclusion, encountered less competition with outside businesses. When the ghettos opened up, these wealthy Jews started competing, like good capitalists, with Christians' businesses. This new source of competition was, of course, not really welcome, and many Gentiles painted their new Jewish competitors in racist terms.

More recently, people who either prefer to not think of themselves as racists or who are racists but do not want to appear to be racists, have substituted "international Jews" with "international bankers." In the context of modern conspiracies, it is perhaps impossible to miss the anti-Semitic roots of these particular concerns. This is not to say one may never speak critically about "international business" of any type, even banking, but when one posits a cabal of unreasonably powerful international money-grubbers manipulating world markets because they can, it is hard to avoid that this role was originally was assigned to Jews. Again, I need to stress that I am not saying that Howse is an antisemite. He just applies the perceived social structures described in the Protocols and reassigns responsibility to another agent.

In an article from March 25, 2008 called "Past Presidents Have Warned Us About the Danger and Corruption of a Central Bank (The Federal Reserve)" (http://www.worldviewtimes.com/article.php/articleid-3264/Brannon-Howse/Brannon-Howse), Howse is pretty explicit about his fear of a central banking system in his opening lines:

Few Americans know the truth about the Federal Reserve. The reality is it is no more a part of the federal government than is Federal Express. The Federal Reserve is a private corporation run by private bankers.

Why should you care? Because as President Thomas Jefferson, President Andrew Jackson and President Woodrow Wilson all understood, a private central bank has the power to destroy our lives and steal our freedoms.

OK, so that's not exactly true. The people who are running the Fed are a council of 12 people. 7 of these are appointed by the President. The other ones are rotating regional Reserve Bank chairs. The appointments are staggered and nobody owns it. The composition of the Central Board is such that an appointment spans administrations. They aren't the Rothschilds. The Fed is hardly in the hands of private bankers who work for their own personal gain. We'll meet the Rothschilds in a moment.

Yes, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson opposed the idea of a national bank, but relying on their advice to set modern information-age monetary policy makes as much sense as asking the last century's revolutionary genius Albert Einstein for a haircut. That is to say, it is an appeal to a false authority. At any rate, have you seen Einstein's hair? I mean, really, what were you thinking?

So, what is the Fed and what does it do? I generally take little notice of the day-to-day functioning of the Federal Reserve Bank. Arthur MacEwan, economics professor at U Mass, however, spends a good deal of time worrying about it professionally. In his Spring 2007 Dollars & Sense column (http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2007/0507drdollar.html), MacEwan sorts out some of the confusion of right-wing conspiracists with respect to the Federal Reserve. First, he patiently explains that there are a number of powerful sectors in the encomony, for instance, the energy, communication and transportation sectors, so while the Fed is important, it by no means has a monopoly on economic activity. Second, these sectors have competing and often directly contradictory interests; one example MacEwan cites is bankers' desire to be free of government regulation while reaping the benefits of the stability that is brought by regulation. Third, the Fed simply is not omnipotent; it exerts heavy influence over short term lending rates. It has no control over long-term interest rates, which heavily influence major investment planning. MacEwan explains what the Fed does:

The Fed has a variety of functions involving regulation of the banking system, including influencing the amount of money in circulation and interest rates (the price people pay to use other people's money). Of special importance, the Fed can influence the amount of loans that banks issue. When a bank issues a loan, this creates more spending power. This spending power (usually in the form of increasing the amount in the borrower's checking account) is the same thing as more money in circulation. So by influencing banks' loan actions, the Fed influences the money supp government to engage in excessive spending: the government can borrow from the public, but then, because of inflation, can repay in dollars that have less worth.

This fascination of some right-wingers with inflation and the debasement of the currency is ironic because, in fact, the Fed often (although not always) acts in exactly the opposite manner—limiting the growth of the money supply and restricting inflation.

When I came across this column, specifically looking for information about the functioning of the Federal Reserve, I was looking for a baseline understanding of the Federal banking system. But MacEwan gets to where I was going first:

Finally, while I am sure that there are many decent people who see the Fed and the bankers as the source of the world's problems, this view is often part of a larger anti-Semitism. The focus on "Jewish financiers" (the Rothschilds, for example) as the source of our economic and other problems is as old as it is wrong and offensive.

Luckily, Howse's site has never taken issue with the Rothschild family, I mean, except on May 26th of this year, when it printed James Quinn's article, "Ain't No Rest for the Wicked" (http://www.worldviewtimes.com/article.php/articleid-4964/Brannon-Howse/James-Quinn). Oh, and another Quinn article, "Grand Illusion-The Federal Reserve" (http://www.worldviewtimes.com/article.php/articleid-4717/Brannon-Howse/James-Quinn). In "Ain't no Rest for the Wicked," Quinn says that we can identify the historical roots of the current financial crisis, and he opens the section with a quote from Mayer Amschel Rothschild:

"Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws."

Quinn goes on:

When the banking cartel succeeded in creating the Federal Reserve Bank in 1913, control of money in the United States was put into the hands of bankers whose sole purpose is to enrich themselves at the expense of the citizens of the country. Their relentless printing of money has resulted in the dollar losing 96% of its value since 1913. The printing of dollars has allowed politicians to spend money today and make unfunded commitments decades into the future. The systematic inflation created by the Federal Reserve is immoral as it impoverishes the middle class and senior citizens for the benefit of bankers, the elite rich and entrenched politicians. Much of the moral decay in our nation can be traced to the manipulation of money in the last 8 decades.

In "The Grand Illusion--The Federal Reserve," Quinn exposes himself really to be a barenaked anti-Semite at heart. He quotes a letter said to be authored by the Rothschilds:

"Those few who can understand the system (check book money and credit) will either be so interested in its profits, or so dependent on it favors, that there will be little opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body of people mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that capital derives from the system, will bear it burdens without complaint, and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests."

I was unable to trace the source of the letter to a date earlier than 1933, when it was published by Father Coughlin, a virulent and open antisemite and, in a bitter irony, a founding founder of shock- and hate-radio. I was able to find the quote on page 88 of Coughlin's 1933 The New Deal in Money. In it, Coughlin writes: "In an unfortunate letter which was never intended to fall into hostile hands, the Rothschilds on June 25, 1863, confided the following admission to a firm of bankers by the name of Ikleheimer, resident of 3 Wall Street. In part," Coughlin says, "the letter reads as follows: 'the great body of people mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that capital derives from the system will bear its burdens without complaint, and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests.' The quote was picked up by the fascist poet Ezra Pound, who said the lines came from a letter in the 1860s and referred to the Jews staging the American Civil War. I personally find that hard to believe. The murky source of these dubious lines aside (I mean, really, who signs their letters “The Rothschilds?"), there can be no doubt that the anti-Semite Coughlin was the one who injected that phrase into American popular conspiracy culture.

But at least Quinn goes on to see a Jewish conspiracy in the establishment of the Fed, and what is not explicitly stated in "Ain't No Rest for the Wicked" is glaringly obvious in "The Grand Illusion":

The House of Rothschild had been the dominant banking family in Europe for two centuries. They were known for making fortunes during Panics and War. Some claimed that they would cause Panics in order to take advantage of those who panicked. The Panic of 1907 was the used as the reason for creating the Federal Reserve.

There is a logical error here, actually it is a 200-hectare logical error farm, but I'm going to let most of them rot on the vine. Let me pick two. First is that Quinn fails to point out that the Rothschild family were also making oodles of cash during the peace as well. At the same time, the Fed was created in part to alleviate some the risk of having crashes, so Jews pushing for something that would stop profitable panics seems to be something of a charity on their part. How everyone taking their money away from the banks benefits the banks, I won't understand. In this case, yes, Jews are clearly the scapegoats, and Howse should remove this disgusting antisemite from his website.

Howse has often lamented the floating currency and expresses a naive and whimsical nostalgia for the gold standard. While Howse is clearly just a pitchman for this sponsor, it seems to be in line with most of his previous statements:

[AUDIO: HOWSE AND GOLD]

Now wasn't that awful?

As I've said, Howse's interest in banking and gold makes little to no sense on its own. Like his suspicion of Masons, however, its historical antecedents are racist. Let me stress again that I am not asserting that that Howse is a racist; this facet of his worldview, however, in conjunction with these other points, clearly reflects the anti-Semitic sources of the ideology he espouses.

On a separate note, I would like to point out that buying gold now is probably a really, really bad idea. Lots of people who are selling their greatly depreciated stocks and reinvesting in gold, which is (consequentially) vastly overvaluated, are perfectly violating the most basic principle of capitalist investing, "Buy low, sell high." Don’t do it.

HJ