Ellen Brown: How Big Banks Manipulate and Influence Your Health

As Brown explains, the shocking truth about our money system is that virtually all of our money is created by banks when they make loans. It’s not created by the government, as most people believe. The way it works is that, while the banks create the principal, they don’t create the interest, so they’re always getting more back than they’re putting out.

“The thing that most people don’t realize is that banks don’t just take in people’s money, and then lend it out again,” Brown explains. “What they do is, literally, every time they make a loan, they create that money on their books. They need the deposits in order to clear the checks, but they’re basically double-counting the money.

“… When you’ve put your money in the bank and then you go to withdraw it, they never say, “Sorry, we just lent your money out to your neighbor for 30 years. You’ll have to come back later.” No, they always give you your money. That’s because your deposit’s still there at the same time that they’ve lent it out. So, if you need the money, then they’ll borrow it from somewhere else. But where do they borrow it from? Basically, from the very bank that the check just went into from the loan that they just made.

“It’s like a big check-kiting scheme, where you create the money; it goes into another bank; and then you borrow it back. The banks can borrow it back at 0.25 percent at the moment, which is the Fed funds rate. And of course, they lend it out at five percent, or on credit cards 18 percent… or outrageous industry rates. They get a huge spread on money that didn’t actually exist until they created the loan.

“… Their control over money is how they manage to corner politics, buy up the media, and basically monopolize the field.”

Two good primers if you want to learn more about the banking system and the link between the pharmaceutical industry and banking, are The Creature from Jekyll Island, and World Without Cancer.

To me, this link between banking and Big Pharma intuitively makes sense. It was just earlier this year that I came to appreciate what Brown is talking about here. While the focus of this web site is on the damage done by the drug companies, it’s becoming increasingly clear to me that the banking system is the behemoth backing the Goliath-like drug industry.

As explained by Brown, the drug connection goes back to the 19th century. John D. Rockefeller’s father was actually, literally, a snake-oil salesman.

“He was a patent remedy seller. The drugs, of course, are oil-based, and John D. Rockefeller was an oil magnate. He also had a bank. So did J.P. Morgan. The drug industry—the patent remedy industry—was in competition with the natural herbal remedies, and the homeopathic remedies. And the way they prevailed in the whole system was that, first of all, they funded the American Medical Association—the AMA Journal, which got their funding from advertising. And if your drug was advertised in the AMA Journal, then you’ve got the AMA’s seal of endorsement… It was a cartel.”

In this interview, Brown discusses far more than I have included here, so to learn more, I urge you to listen to this fascinating interview in its entirety. Of course, it’s virtually impossible to discuss the financial system without touching on the Federal Reserve. According to Brown, there’s an important distinction that needs to be understood regarding the role of the Federal Reserve, because while both banks and the Fed are creating money out of thin air, there are some differences:

“The Federal Reserve is the lender of last resort, so it is allowed to [create money] without actually backing the money from anywhere… There are basically two banking systems.

“This is also very complicated, but there is what’s called ‘base money,’ and that’s created by the Federal Reserve. Those are the banks’ reserves. At one time the reserves were gold. You actually, literally, had to keep a certain amount of gold for your depositors, who could cash in their dollars for gold. But in 1933, everybody stopped trusting the banks, because they knew they didn’t have enough gold, so there were runs on the banks. At that time the dollar was 40 percent backed by gold. So, every time somebody would bring two dollars and cash it in for gold, the bank had to call in three dollars’ worth of loans. The whole money supply was just closing in on itself and collapsing.

“That’s why Roosevelt finally took the dollar off the gold standard.

“Then, to back the dollar, the Fed created ‘base money’ for the banks to use as reserves. But it’s a separate system. We don’t actually get to borrow the Fed’s reserves. That’s the bankers’ money. The bankers’ bank is the Federal Reserve.”

While at UCLA law school, Brown wrote an article about the economics of California’s regulations on doctors and other medical professions, and how these regulations effectively eliminate all competition to the conventional medical paradigm. It may not be immediately apparent, but the medical profession is very cleverly manipulated and influenced in such a way as to bolster profits for the pharmaceutical industry. It’s a tightly controlled profession, and any competition—such as alternative or integrative treatments related to natural health—is more or less illegal. You cannot claim to treat disease without a medical license.

“I think what’s even worse than that is they control information. People don’t even know that there are alternative remedies. Or if they do hear about them, they think it’s quackery, and that it’s been disproven, because that’s what the conventional media says [which is largely owned by the same banking cartel as the pharmaceutical industry is]. You really have to dig to find out what’s out there, and how well natural remedies work. Also, you have to dig to find out how drugs don’t work, and how they’ve been over-hyped…”

When asked to provide some recommendations for what you can do right now to take control of your own health, and how we can win this war on health freedom and personal liberty, Brown shares the following:

“I think the first thing you need to do… is get on the Internet and research what’s [been] done before; what the downside of the drug treatment that they’re trying to recommend for your condition is, for example.

“Then we really seriously need to get organized. I was in the alternative healthcare movement for a long time. It seemed to me that the medical doctors were all literally brainwashed… They keep you up all night, because you have to do your rounds… and then, you’re force-fed this information. You want to pass the test; you haven’t had enough sleep; you’re looking at this data, and it says, “All right, give this drug for this condition.” You just accept that, because you’re sort of dazed, locked in a medical school.

“The doctors are all trained in one discipline…

“They won’t testify against each other in court. And so they’re like this strong wall of solidarity versus all the alternative people, who are all like mavericks and geniuses in their way but they all think the others are quacks. We need to, in some way, form a movement where we have to agree on some basics and worry about the details later. We need a big umbrella that accepts what we’re going to [focus on]… We want something that’s for the body; that helps the body do what it’s trying to do.

“Another thing is the cost. American medicine is the costliest in the world, and we do not get the best results. Body-supporting therapies are cheaper than the drugs that are trying to block what the body’s trying to do. Things that block what the body’s trying to do make you unhealthier, which means you have to add more treatment, which means you have to be hospitalized more often, and which means you run up more bills.

“We could save a lot of money if our whole approach was to support what the body’s trying to do.

“Natural treatments would be much cheaper for the whole country. We cannot afford our healthcare right now, so something has to be done about this whole parasitic medical system; the parasitic banking system; and the parasitic insurance scheme that is draining the profits out of our economy.”

Brown is also the president of The Public Banking Institute, which stands poised to serve as a powerful part of the solution to the financial debacle we’re currently in, not just in the US, but worldwide. From her research, she came to the conclusion that the main problem plaguing our financial system is the massive interest going into private coffers, and the remedy for that is to replace the privately owned banking system with a public one. She explains:

“After the whole system collapsed in the fall of 2008,… I became aware that there was one state that actually escaped the credit crisis, and that was the only state that had a publicly owned bank—North Dakota. The Bank of North Dakota is owned by the state. They’ve had this bank in place since 1919.

“… The private banks are always siphoning off this extra money in interest that they don’t create as principal when they make loans. But if you have a public system—if banking [and]… credit were a public utility just like water should be, or electricity or highways… these are all blood systems of the economy—if money and credit were considered public utility, owned by the public, then the interest would go back to the public.

“That is a sustainable system.

“The original model is Benjamin Franklin’s Colony of Pennsylvania, which owned its own bank. The government both printed money, the way all the colonies did… [and] it had a bank. So the bank lent the money, and the money came back to the government. The interest was sufficient to fund the government. During that period, the colonists paid no taxes, they had no government debt, and prices did not inflate. It was a sustainable model.”

From that idea, the Public Banking Institute developed the Return to Prosperity Plan.

It sounds incredible, but 40 percent of the cost of everything we buy is interest, according to research by Margrit Kennedy, a German researcher. This interest is entirely hidden, so you don’t know you’re paying it. This is because at every stage of development of a product, interest is paid, again and again. For example, a business must typically take out a loan in order to pay for raw materials and the workforce before it can have a final product to sell. The same goes for each of the businesses in the supply chain, and for each and every retailer.

“If the state owned the bank… then the people get the interest back…. For example, in North Dakota, the state’s revenues, by law, go into the Bank of North Dakota, so they have a huge deposit base and a huge capital base….

“That means the state could save 40 percent on its projects, which means we could either cut taxes by 40 percent, or we could have 40 percent more services provided with the same amount of taxes that we pay now. We just have to change bankers. Instead of banking with Wall Street, we should be banking in our own bank (where we get the profits) or cooperative system (where it all comes back). Banking, instead of feeding off the economy, should feed the economy. And it could be a sustainable system.”

According to Brown, 18 states have now introduced bills of one sort or another for state-owned banks. And the Public Banking Institute, which is run entirely by volunteers, is continuing to work on furthering this plan.

“We have a very active group. People get really excited about this idea. We’ve got representatives all over the country and groups you can join if you want.”

To learn more, please refer to their web site.

I’ve long been aware of the challenges with our whole economic model, but I’ve only recently begun to appreciate the connection between the banking industry and health, as discussed in this interview. Again, I highly recommend listening to it in its entirety, or reading through the transcript, to get a broader view.

The problem is so vast, and that’s true for just about every problem we have these days. But a large portion of it can be traced back to an unsustainable, unscrupulous, parasitic, private banking system that does not benefit those who use it! It has become a fundamental pernicious evil that’s ruining our culture. I think once people understand the concept proposed by this “Return to Prosperity Plan” at a deeper level, it’s going to be an easy step to switch over. But of course, there’s the logistics of educating the public on how it works, and then developing the funding to get these ballot initiatives passed in each individual state.

But I think it’s a marvelous model, and I applaud Brown for what she’s doing to really wake us up—both to the roots of the problem and to sustainable solutions.