full: http://www.kitco.com/ind/fekete/mar282008.html - Antal Fekete

Seventy-five years ago in March, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated as the 32nd President of the United States. Within days after swearing to uphold the U.S. Constitution, through a Presidential Proclamation he closed the U.S. Mint to gold. Recall that the Mint had been established by the Constitution to protect the people’s right to sound money.

Roosevelt had been elected on a platform of sound money. Barely in office, he reversed himself. He grabbed the gold of the people, marked up its value, leaving Federal Reserve notes in the hands of the people that were to lose 95 percent of their value during subsequent years. They stand poised to lose their remaining value before long.

“Remember that attitude and method - the way we do things, not just the way we say things - is nearly always the measure of one’s sincerity.” - campaign speech given by Roosevelt in Butte, Montana, on September 19, 1932

“One of the most commonly repeated misrepresentations by Republicans, including the President [Hoover], has been the claim that the Democratic position with regard to money has not been made sufficiently clear. The President is seeing visions of rubber dollars. This is only a part of his campaign of fear. I am not going to characterize these statements. I merely present the facts. The Democratic platform specifically declares: ‘We advocate a sound currency to be preserved at all hazards.’ That is plain English.”

“The businessmen of the country, battling hard to maintain their financial solvency and integrity, were told in blunt language by President Hoover in Des Moines, Iowa, how close an escape the country had had some months ago from going off the gold standard. This, as had been clearly shown since, was a libel on the credit of the United States… No adequate answer has been made to the magnificent philippic of Senator Glass* the other night, in which he showed how unsound was this assertion. And I might add that Senator Glass made a devastating challenge that no responsible government would have sold to the country securities payable in gold if it knew that the promise, yes, the covenant embodied in these securities, was as dubious as the President of the United States claims it was.” - Roosevelt, November 4, 1932

• On March 12, 1933 - a week after Roosevelt had become President - the United States Treasury issued $800,000,000 of obligations payable “in United States gold coin of the present standard of value” - the same covenant above referred to by Roosevelt a few days before he was elected.
  

• On May 7, 1933, President Roosevelt in a radio broadcast to the people announced his intention to repudiate this covenant.

• And on June 5, 1933, the covenant was abrogated by Congress.

The point is not whether we agree or disagree with Roosevelt’s judgment or reasoning. The point is that if he had such a conviction in regard to the gold clauses and intended to act upon it, it would seem that the people had the right to know about it before they were asked to vote.’

Today a lot of people celebrate the advent of $1000 gold. In their festive mood people are liable to forget an ominous consequence of this important milestone. It is the fulfillment of Roosevelt’s design to deprive people of the liberty to shelter the fruits of their labor from the claws of the government by converting their property into gold. At $1000 an ounce, not many people can purchase gold to protect the fruits of their labor against confiscation.

$1000 gold is a milestone - on the road to hell.

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quotes from - Hell Bent for Election (Garden City, N.J., 1935) James P. Warburg

*As a Senator, Carter Glass's [D-VA] most notable achievement was passage of the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated the activities of banks and securities brokers (banks were no longer allowed to "invest" customers' money in the stock market) and created FDIC insurance, or as the Act was known at the time "too little, too late"; ok, that's what I'd have called it.

On November 12, 1999, President Bill Clinton signed into law the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which repealed the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. One of the effects of the repeal is it allowed commercial & investment banks to consolidate. *cough* subprime *wheeze* Bear Stearns *cough*