Kronos: All-Devouring Federal Reserve

By Amelia Arcamone-Makinano

After the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, President Lyndon Johnson took the country in another direction when he signed the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act with his first teacher, Kathryn Deadrich, by his side.

She had watched her students thrive under her loving guidance and was invited to dinners, as a respected member of her students families. The petite, vivacious Ms. Deadrich did her job well, unimpeded by the government.

From 1946, Congress had failed to inject curriculum into classrooms.

But, where government and education met, at the passage gate of the Federal Reserve, an unholy alliance was forged.

In 1983, the damage report was published in A Nation at Risk, which quantified the loss of literacy and critical thinking skills as an act of war.

There was a desperate search for answers.

In KRONOS, the answers are revealed in a battle without time. A teacher/journalist exposes a monstrous Federal Reserve that took down education and committed other heinous acts in this historic thriller filled with international intrigue.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Jul 23, 2015
• ISBN: 9781480818125

Amelia Arcamone-Makinano

Sicilian/Napolitano, Brooklyn-born, Amelia Arcamone-Makinano worked for the New York Post, writing education articles that won praise from US Secretary of Education William Bennett; was a NYC teacher for twenty-four years; a United Federation of Teachers chapter leader; mortgage broker prior to the 2008 foreclosures; and twice-named Best NYC Attorney upon litigating before the NYS Supreme Court, pro-se.

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Copyright © 2015 Amelia Arcamone-Makinano.

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ISBN: 978-1-4808-1810-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-1811-8 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-1812-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015908608

Archway Publishing rev. date: 1/8/2016

CONTENTS

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1 Age of the Common Core Curriculum (1965--2015)

Chapter 2 Enlightenment Snuffed in Naples (1800--1922)

Chapter 3 The Spanish Inquisition Reaches Sicily (1200--1921)

Chapter 4 The Brooklyn Waterfront (1924--1968)

Chapter 5 The Forgotten Article of the Constitution, (1776--1815)

Chapter 6 President Jackson Kills Biddle's Monster (1790--1901)

Chapter 7 Biddle's Monster Resurrected on Jekyll Island (1901--1913)

Chapter 8 Elastic Currency Revives an Ancient War (600 A.D.--1917)

Chapter 9 Bonds, Bailouts, and Bribes --- the Great Depression (1924--1941)

Chapter 10 Minimum Knowledge for Stable Democracy (1954--2015)

Epilogue

Notes

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURE 1. African American and Hispanic students were hardest hit by poverty. They were gathered for resegregation in inferior schools.

FIGURE 2. The only thing the trillions of federal dollars spent on education accomplished was to apply the brakes on the nation's economic growth. Courtesy: Cato Institute

FIGURE 3. Although the often-quoted poverty rate remained steady, the number of middle-class people falling below the poverty line has climbed since 1975.

FIGURE 4. Each drop in the purchase power of Federal Reserve Notes occurred when additional banknotes were printed to purchase the federal debt. It was a hidden tax. Courtesy: Sharelynx

FIGURE 5. Like partners, the Federal Reserve banks regularly shared profits with the government, in the form of distributions from 2004 through 2013. Government-bank profits increased after the 2008 bank bailouts. Courtesy: Federal Reserve Bank of New York

FIGURE A. When government debt and taxes were reduced, jobs increased. People had more money to spend. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson took the economy in another direction.

FIGURE B. Federal grants did not provide qualified teachers for the poor, as promised, especially in math and science.

FIGURE C. Federal grants did not provide additional school supplies for the poor, as promised.

FIGURE D. There are 12 Federal Reserve banks within districts throughout the United States. Source: Federal Reserve Bulletin

FIGURE E. The United States dropped below Vietnam in Reading Literacy, in 2012.

FIGURE F. The United States dropped below the Slovak Republic in Mathematics Literacy, in 2012

FIGURE G. The Knickerbocker Trust was closed, under suspicious circumstances, thereby sparking the bank panics of 1907. Courtesy: The New York City Public Library Archives.

FIGURE H. The National Bank of Commerce stopped clearing house services to Knickerbocker Trust, in 1907. Courtesy: New York City Public Library Archives

FIGURE I. Federal Reserve banks invested in the Ballyhoo Days of stock speculation, which led to the bank panics of the Great Depression. (Digitized for FRASER. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis)

FIGURE J. The 12 Federal Reserve banks divided their booty with the federal government, following the Great Depression. (Digitized for FRASER. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis)

TO THE FOREST HILLS HIGH SCHOOL CLASS OF 2012,

WHO TOLD ME I SHOULD WRITE A BOOK,

AND TO MY HUSBAND,

BONIFACIO AGUJA MAKINANO JR.,

WHO GAVE ME THE HEART.

IN LOVING MEMORY,

SHEILA EICHENBLATT

If the arteries of credit not clogged well-nigh to choking by the obstructions created through the control of these groups are opened so that they may be permitted freely to play their important part in the financial system, competition in large enterprises will become possible and business can be conducted on its merits instead of being subject to the tribute and the good will of this handful of self-constituted trustees of the national prosperity.

---FEBRUARY 13, 1913,

BY CHAIRMAN ARSENE PAULIN PUJO,

Report of the Committee Appointed Pursuant to House Resolutions 429 and 504 to investigate the Concentration of Control of Money and Credit, ten months before the Federal Reserve Act was signed into law.

FOREWORD

In KRONOS Amelia Arcamone-Makinano has written with vigor, integrity, and brilliance an account of the Federal Reserve system, but her account is more than a mere compiling of historical facts. She has embellished her work with insightful interpretations. Her account is extended to include personalization; her direct contact with a school system and life in America.

Amelia Arcamone-Makinano excites with her authentic and detailed descriptions. Thrills with her new insights and new revelations. She endows with a new understanding and surpasses accounts of what already has been said and of what already has been discredited. She has Made it New, as a pioneer negative observer of the Federal Reserve, Ezra Pound, demanded of discourse.

There are rumors that Ezra Pound was falsely accused as being insane, and kept officially confined to keep him from exposing the mistakes, the misdirections, and the outright corruption of the Federal Reserve. The Pound situation is a matter that needs further investigation. But Amelia Arcamone-Makinano has supplied us with a very interesting and very provocative account of the Federal Reserve.

Amelia, like Ezra Pound, is basically a poet, a fine poet, and she writes with poetic insight. Her words reveal, excite, compel. She is definitely not a slave mentality, a stooge of the power structure, a lickspittle, a copy-cat. She is authentic, individual, strong, and not one of the weak obeying crowd, not a they, not a Heidegger's Das Mann.

One of the most interesting parts of her discussion is her strictures on current American education. She joins the many, such as Noam Chomsky, as seeing American education as dumbing down, as fortifying ignorance rather than developing the humanity of the human being. We have developed an education that dehumanizes by encouraging the development of human beings to imitate machines and be clogs in a machine designed to make enormous profits for the exploitive few with large handouts to their toadies.

---DUANE LOCKE, PHD

Duane Locke, PhD lives heretically in Tampa, Florida, near anhinga, gallinules, raccoons, and alligators. Publishers from all over the world have selected 6,965 of his poems for publication. This includes thirty-three books of poems, such as: Duane Locke, The First Decade, 1968--1978, published by Bitter Oleander Press; Yang Chu's Poems; Terrestrial Illuminations, First Selection, from Fowlpox Press; Imprints, Responses to the Art of Duane Locke, by Connie Stadler and Felino Soriano. His paintings have been described in Gary Monroe's Extraordinary Interpretations, published by University of Florida Press, and are in many private collections and museums. As a student of philosophy, his favorites are: Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida. Dr. Locke rekindled poetic imaginations in a new era of American literature -- Immanentist Poetry.

PREFACE

Illiteracy is the by-product of the clandestine fourth branch of the government, which has gone rogue. Set loose, it has caused unspeakable human suffering, for the sake of ill-begotten gain, for more than a century. A secret bank heist of heretofore unimaginable breadth is daily taking place, right before our eyes.

Lack of transparency, a disappearing middle class, and the rise of illiteracy to keep the people in the dark have been the consistent hallmarks of parasitic imperial governments throughout time.

Today is no exception.

It is irrefutable that illiteracy is on the rise. The reading and mathematics literacy levels for the school system of the United States of America dropped below Vietnam's and the Slovak Republic's, even though it was one of the top-five biggest spenders in education, throughout the world.

Not too long ago, our schools were at the top of industrialized nations. Then, in 1983, we became "A Nation at Risk." The sudden drop in literacy was painstakingly detailed in a shocking report that described it as tantamount to an act of war.

Why? What happened?

Why did the winds of international power make the school system of the leader of the free world take a dive?

Armed with historic documents, which have recently become available, we can finally solve the mystery.

The future of our democratic republic depends upon whether or not we have the common sense to fix our schools.

At a pivotal time in history, this is where the battleground lies.

---AMELIA ARCAMONE-MAKINANO

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

On my way home, I stopped in at nearby Holy Trinity Roman Catholic Church, on Eighty-Second Street, on the upper-west side of Manhattan for my usual visit, just to say hello. It was 1996. I was not a regular churchgoer at the time. When I kneeled on one of the pews in the near-empty sanctuary, I looked straight ahead. Then, my eyes followed upward. There was none of the familiar tenderness in His expression---only urgency. My research took a more aggressive turn.

I also joined a choir at Our Lady of Pompeii Church in the West Village.

The Church had its origins in the Saint Raphael Society for the Protection of Italian Immigrants, founded by Father Bandini in 1892. He began his work, in a little chapel at 113 Waverly Place, to help immigrants negotiate legal hurdles, contact relatives, and find work. Many migrants from Chiavari, a seacoast town near Genoa, in northwest Italy, had settled in Greenwich Village. On October 7, 1928, the first Sicilian-born bishop, Joseph Pernicone, with Patrick Joseph Cardinal Hayes, dedicated Our Lady of Pompeii Church, on the corner of Carmine and Bleeker Streets, after the building was purchased from the African American Roman Catholic congregation of Saint Benedict the Moor, the Franciscan Friar from Palermo, Sicily, who was born to African slaves in 1564. Their congregation moved uptown.

Father Antonio Demo, born in the Vicenza province of Italy, 1870, comforted grief-stricken families after the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, nearby, on Washington Place. It claimed the lives of 146 garment workers, who were recent Italian and Jewish immigrants. They jumped out the 8th, 9th, and 10th-floor windows or died in the smoke and flames because the exits were locked, a common practice to prevent workers from taking a break. The tragedy evoked tough labor laws unions, to protect the middle-class worker.

Eventually, Italian restaurants and cafes created a charming European atmosphere, which attracted artists, philosophers, and authors, who gave the West Village its identity. Masses were celebrated in English, Portuguese, Brazilian, Italian, and Tagalog. In 1983, Father Bernabe [Bobby] Bolastig Sison founded the Filipino Pastoral Ministry to provide friendship for new Filipino immigrants, like Dell Chavez, who became director of Our Lady of Pompeii Choir. I met my dear husband, Bonifacio Aguja Makinano, while singing in that choir.

This acknowledgment would not be complete without such mention of the help that naturally comes to us all.

I would like to express my appreciation of the unsurpassed resources of the Museum of American Finance; New York Historical Society; the New York Public Library staff and archives; also for the New York Public Library's July 28, 2014, to February 15, 2015, Exhibition: WWI and the FIGHT for the AMERICAN Mind (The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations, 2014) with special acknowledgment to the exhibition team of Susan Rabbiner; Kailen Rogers; Andrew Pastore; Myriam de Arteni; Caryn Gedell; Henk van Assen; Jeff Daly; Marcie Muscat; Andrew Gaylard; Thane Lund; Nicholas Ouellette; Diane Tenerelli-June; Nicholas Teti; Annie Vernot; Heather Hodge; Isabel Stauffer; and exhibition curator and curator of rare books at NYPL, Michael Inman.

The Federal Reserve Archival System for Economic Research (FRASER) began in 2004 as a data preservation and accessibility project of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. It has made the Fed's archives more accessible than ever before.

ProQuest made available transcripts and thousands of exhibits from the 1936 Hearings Before the United States Senate Special Committee Investigating the Munitions Industry.

Margaret Weber, as director of education at Old Stone House & Washington Park, in Brooklyn, site of the largest battle of the Revolutionary War, helped bring the heroism of the Maryland 400 to life, with her wealth of historic details.

English Professor Catherine Costa and history Professor Richard Lieberman, author, and director of the Laguardia and Wagner Archives at Laguardia Community College, helped create a voice and context for my grandparents' immigration stories.

I would also like to thank my cousin, Maryanne Canizio, who preserved the oral history for three generations of our maternal family's beginnings, from Naples to Brooklyn, USA.

Encouragement, served with coffee and chocolates, during those early days of publishing poetry from my West Village studio apartment came from Ladies Of The Write: Helen Haukeness, Rena Cohen, Jacqueline Alice Lorraine, and our beloved late Dorothy Sheffield.

---AMELIA ARCAMONE-MAKINANO

INTRODUCTION

The bank heist of the century took place on December 23, 1913, with the stroke of President Woodrow Wilson's pen. A scribbled note from a shaky hand was passed to the bank teller on a grand scale, thereby legislating the turnover of the nation's wealth to a group of men who were identified as a menace to the country, ten months before, by the Congressional Committee on Banking and Currency to investigate the Concentration of Control of Money and Credit pursuant to House Resolution 504 by the Sixty-Second Congress, chaired by Louisiana Senator Arse'no Pujo. From then on, if the nation needed funding, it would have to borrow from the gangsters, with interest accrued on the federal debt.

The democratic republic had prospered for the first 131 years, as the Founding Fathers intended, with a lassaiz-faire economy that put American interests first, resulting in its steepest growth phase and the envy of European imperialists, until it was turned into an international financial oligarchy, which mismanaged the economy and shipped America's gold overseas.

From then on, we became subjects of international banking families, who determined how well we lived, to the degree of the strength and character of each American president to resist the pull. A power dance began on a newly planked dance floor one century ago.

The Federal Reserve Board of Governors told a different story: that they stabilized the economy for the benefit of the country. But the record clearly showed otherwise.

Paul Warburg, of the Warburg banking family in Germany, was dispatched to New York, in 1902, when Kaiser Wilhelm II caught an itch for more expansion than he could afford. Warburg was determined to restructure the American banking system into the image of the Reichsbank, from the start.

Warburg wrote in his memoirs, The Federal Reserve System: Its Origin and Growth, that he was repulsed by America's fanatic conviction to decentralization and that individualism in banking was the gospel of the country. President Wilson appointed Warburg vice governor to the first Federal Reserve Board, in 1913, after the Pujo committee determined, about ten months before, that he and his gang---William Rockefeller, John Pierpont Morgan, James Stillman, Frank Vanderlip, Jacob H. Schiff, and others---were a menace to the country, at the conclusion of the investigation into the bank panics of 1907.

In 1914, an ancient religious war, emanating from the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans was revived through a financial allegiance with Germany. It grew into the carnage and profiteering of World War I, which Europe had not been able to afford before the Federal Reserve Act institutionalized a banking monopoly fueled by elastic currency.

Upon the demand of World War I veterans, thousands of exhibits were subpoenaed by the Hearings Before the Special Committee Investigating the Munitions Industry United States Senate, Seventy-Third Congress Pursuant to Senate Resolution 206, A Resolution to Make Certain Investigations Concerning the Manufacture and Sale of Arms and Other War Munition, from 1934 to 1936. North Dakota's Senator Gerald Nye's cross-examinations of England's son, John P. Morgan Jr., of the Morgan banking family, became legendary while investigating the influence of the commercial motive to stimulate and sustain wars.

Following the Depression of 1920 and postwar recovery, bailouts without accountability for the twelve Federal Reserve banks of last resort, which emptied their vaults for the sake of stock market speculation on margin, pushed the country over a dangerously high cliff. Although the Federal Reserve Act was said to have been legislated to stabilize the economy, the president of the New York Stock Exchange took the fall during the 1932 Stock Exchange Practices Hearings before the Committee on Banking and Currency of the US Senate Seventy-Second Congress, which followed bread lines and bank closings.

Against the will of the people, the Federal Reserve Board decided to ship America's postwar wealth to its gold-hungry partners overseas, according to Senate transcripts. The resulting bank panics of the 1930s scaled the bank panics of 1907 down to a minute bump on the economic chart when billions of depositors lost a lifetime of savings within days. People died of starvation all over the world immediately prior to the carnage of World War II.

An Act to provide for the establishment of Federal reserve banks, to furnish elastic currency, to afford means of rediscounting commercial paper, to establish a more effective supervision of banking in the United States, and for other purposes clearly empowered the twelve Federal Reserve banks to supervise their member banks. Yet, the Stock Exchange Practices Hearing transcripts show there was inadequate oversight. Instead of providing supervision, which might have headed off the epidemic of bank closings and foreclosures of the 1930s, Federal Reserve inspectors took bribes, transcripts show.

The Federal Reserve bankers, who were members and elite stockholders, doubled their profits at every twist and turn, according to the Federal Reserve Board's own newsletter. The Federal Reserve Bulletin was written for the benefit of its members.

Banking families could not have commandeered international wealth in full view, unnoticed, without generations of practice. Over time, they attained more power than flamboyant monarchs who courageously sat on thrones in full display.

The Federal Reserve banks became a piece of an international central banking system of titanic proportions. It provided the mechanism that brought into play modern-day imperialists who swelled on carnage and taxes by confiscation. They did not re-distribute wealth; they took it. Economic formulas were exchanged for divine inspiration.

Today's disappearing middle class, bank bailouts without accountability, wars, and illiteracy could be better understood by going to the Age of Enlightenment vs. Imperialism, and then examining recently accessible historic documents, especially from the first decades of the twentieth century, when the government was more transparent.

The whole story began with the question: Why are schools failing?

It necessitated a narrative of historic, international, intrigue about power and money, before the riddle could be solved.

In the end, recent internal communications revealed, for the first time, how the Federal Reserve Board took a hands-on approach to education. It considered education