by José de la Isla

HOUSTON – When a country undergoes fast and unexpected change or feels under threat, its people are subject to commit outrages. By now the list of offenses and crimes committed against immigrants that violate our own moral codes in the Unites States are worthy of a human-rights investigation.

Yet, is today different from other eras when intemperate prejudices by a loud minority shaped public attitudes?

One example some may remember hearing. It’s how Benjamin Franklin alienated German migrants to the colonies in the 1760s by calling them “Palatine Boors.” That’s the equivalent of saying they were “bad-mannered money suckers.” Franklin is now often used to illustrate how the German communities forming back then didn’t come about without rubbing the establishment the wrong way. He even had some complaints about their language and how English might be in jeopardy.

Sound slightly familiar?

The other part of the story, often left out, is that Ben Franklin, already famous and wealthy, stood for reelection to the Pennsylvania Assembly in 1764. He lost because the Germans, angry about the ethnic slur, turned out to vote against him.

A tempting moral could be one about political justice, but it actually runs deeper. That was 244 years ago. Much has happened since then.

Back then the national communities, with the exclusion of Native Americans, were getting established for the first time. It’s what we call nation-building today. But the form it took is virtually settled now, with our institutions, traditions and laws in place. Yet “community”–with over 40 working definitions making the settlement part of town, neighborhood, subdivision, identity and interest groups is a work in progress, and never really complete.

That’s just the nature of a dynamic society. It doesn’t really worry conscientious citizens. But something else is bothersome.

The editors of The Economist put their finger on it. “Countries, like people,” they said, “behave dangerously when their mood turns dark.” That darkness can result in bad law. It reflects anxiety turned into disdain. It is not fear. Fearful people cower. They run away. People act out of anxiety.

In her amazingly insightful book, “A Brief History of Anxiety,” Patricia Pearson recognizes the sense of alarm that makes up fear. She mentions dread, suspicion and anxiety.

The anxieties from 9/11 brought an end to the pop economics that had us believe we would get rich by willfulness and individualism and deregulation.

Followed by an endless war with a stateless, ununiformed enemy, it compromised civil rights and fed alien suspicions, the dread of a future continuing like our immediate past. Many today believe the more we work, the further behind we get. Ninety-nine percent of us didn’t advance economically in the last five years.

That’s what popular anxiety looks like to us. But by definition it is the result of someone new com- ing onto the scene. Plenty of people support the notion that somehow those “other people” are at least partly responsible. Even if they are not the disease, they are an unwanted symptom.

Referencing a WHO world mental health survey, Pearson points out that we are the most anxious people on earth. A person in the United States is four times more likely to experience generalized anxiety disorder than someone in Mexico. WHO reported that despite economic differences, 94.4 percent of Mexicans have never experienced depression or a major anxiety episode. (Other data show Mexicans, when they get here, get like us.) We are nine times more likely to experience anxiety than a Chinese laborer.

Pearson uses anthropological data to show that people in some cultures don’t even have a concept of fear as we know it. Others have ritual practices, which break the spells and bring relief.

Our communal cultural ritual for breaking the spell of rampant anxiety is an election. And as in colonial times, those who spur on dissention instead of encouraging civil community-building, even Benjamin Franklin, deserves to lose.

[José de la Isla writes a weekly commentary for Hispanic Link News Service. He is author of The Rise of Hispanic Political Power (Archer Books). Email him at joseisla3@yahoo.com]. ©2008

“Some people think that the Federal Reserve Banks are United States Government institutions. They are private monopolies which prey upon the people of these United States for the benefit of themselves…”

by Dr. Ellen Brown

Global Research, July 25, 2008 webofdebt.com (Part 1 of a two-parts article).

The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 was a major coup for the international bankers. They had battled for more than a century to establish a private central bank in the United States with the exclusive right to “monetize” the government’s debt; that is, to print their own money and exchange it for government securities or I.O.U.s. The Federal Reserve Act authorized a private central bank to create money out of nothing, lend it to the government at interest, and control the national money supply, expanding or contracting it at will. Representative Charles Lindbergh Sr. called the Act “the worst legislative crime of the ages.” He warned prophetically:

“[The Federal Reserve Board] can cause the pendulum of a rising and falling market to swing gently back and forth by slight changes in the discount rate, or cause violent fluctuations by greater rate variation, and in either case it will possess inside information as to financial conditions and advance knowledge of the coming change, either up or down.

“This is the strangest, most dangerous advantage ever placed in the hands of a special privilege class by any Government that ever existed. The financial system has been turned over to a purely profiteering group. The system is private, conducted for the sole purpose of obtaining the greatest possible profi ts from the use of other people’s money.

In 1934, in the throes of the Great Depression, Representative Louis McFadden would go further, stating on the Congressional record:

“Some people think that the Federal Reserve Banks are United States Government institutions. They are private monopolies which prey upon the people of these United States for the benefit of themselves and their foreign customers; foreign and domestic speculators and swindlers; and rich and predatory money lenders. In that dark crew of fi nancial pirates there are those who would cut a man’s throat to get a dollar out of his pocket; there are those who send money into states to buy votes to control our legislatures; there are those who maintain International propaganda for the purpose of deceiving us into granting of new concessions which will permit them to cover up their past misdeeds and set again in motion their gigantic train of crime.

“These 12 private credit monopolies were deceitfully and disloyally foisted upon this Country by the bankers who came here from Europe and repaid us our hospitality by undermining our American institutions.”

As for Fannie Mae – the Federal National Mortgage Association – it actually began under Roosevelt’s New Deal as a government agency. But like the Federal Reserve, Fannie Mae is now “federal” only in name. In 1968, it was re-chartered by Congress as a shareholderowned company, funded solely with private capital. If it were a bank, today it would be the third largest bank in the world; and it makes enormous amounts of money in the real estate market for its private owners.

In 1970, Freddie Mac (the Federal Home Mortgage Corporation) was created to provide competition and end Fannie Mae’s monopoly in the secondary mortgage market. But Freddie Mac too is a wholly shareholder owned, publicly-traded corporation.

Under a 1992 law, if either of these two mortgage giants is seen to be severely undercapitalized, it may be placed into government conservatorship. But the plan now being pursued is to bail out these private corporations by increasing their capital base with taxpayer money and their profi t margins with greater access to Federal Reserve loans. The result will be to privatize profi ts to their management and shareholders while socializing risk to the taxpayers. We the people will foot the bill. If the people are going to bear the risk, we should reap the benefits. Either these two mega-corporations should take their licks in the market like any other private corporation, or they should be nationalized, delivering not just their debts but their assets to the taxpayers. Not just Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac but the Federal Reserve itself should be made truly federal entities, as the voters have been led to believe and their names imply. Remove the myth that these Wall Street-controlled entities act by and for the people rather than being run for private gain, and we will soon see the outrage Mr. Grant says is curiously missing.

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