The Constitutionity of the National Bank
(July 30, 2009)

The video from which the following is transcribed is posted at http://archive.larouchepac.com/node/11196. Subheads have been added.

Leandra Bernstein: "The people of the United States have been warned that the nation was entrusted to their wisdom in selecting competent leaders, to use the powers given to them in the Constitution, to protect the nation's happiness and prosperity. They have been warned, to resist the tendency to act as a mob, easily swayed by populist demagogues, that such a tyranny of the majority would lead us to lose what was most valuable to our republic." President James Monroe spoke in his first inaugural address, that "it is only when the people become ignorant and corrupt, when they degenerate into a populace, that they are incapable of exercising their sovereignty. Usurpation is then an easy attainment, and the usurper soon found. The people themselves become the willing instruments of their own debasement and ruin. Let us then look to the great cause and endeavor to preserve it in full force. Let us, by all wise and constitutional measures, promote intelligence among the people, as the best means of preserving our liberties."

In November 1828, the populace elected Andrew Jackson, a war hero, a man for the people, who said all the right things to everyone: a traitor.

At the beginning of his Presidency, Jackson launched a populist campaign across the country attacking the United States Second National Bank. He called into question its constitutionality and rekindled populist fears, after the banking crisis of 1819, of more financial crises and corruption within the bank itself. The campaign was meant to break the sovereign power of the Federal government, and the line of nationalist Presidents up until then, and turn the United States over to foreign interests, allied to members of our own government.

Patriots, like Sen. Henry Clay, noted publicly, that after entering office, Jackson began directing attention to the question of the National Bank Charter. It quickly became a topic of popular conversation; it was discussed in the press, on the campaign trail, and raised in elections across the country. Clay remarked, in an address to the Senate, "It seemed as if a sort of general order had gone out from headquarters, to the partisans of the administration, everywhere, to agitate and make the most of the question."

And from his first address to Congress, Jackson was known for making the most of the question. In his 1829 address, he claimed that "many of our fellow citizens deprecate the bank as an infraction of the Constitution." In his 1830 State of the Nation address, Jackson charged that "the dangers of the institution are still felt by the citizens." He then questioned whether it were possible to consider the advantages of "reconstituting" the National Bank, to quell the people's fear, which he had evoked, and run national finance through the individual states, leaving the Federal government impotent to mobilize public funds for anything of necessity, or in the national interest.

Of course, Jackson's state bank plan had already proven a complete failure, following the expiration of the First National Bank Charter. After the bankruptcy of the Continental currency following the Revolutionary War, the 1791 passage of Alexander Hamilton's National Bank Act, allowed the government to charter 88 state banks, in the following 20 years, gaining a capital of over $42.5 million. This formed the core of the Hamiltonian credit system, from which we leveraged the physical development of the country. Despite the ongoing assaults, the National Bank lasted until 1811, when the charter was allowed to expire. At that time, the millions in deposits, a fifth of which belonged to the people of the country, were disbursed to state banks. In only a few short years, 120 new state banks, which could make loans for their own profit, not the nation's, were established at the time when we had to raise our Navy and our Army, in our second war against the British.

By the end of the war, with our finances in disorder, and credit scarce for reconstruction, President Madison, who had allowed the charter to expire only five years before, had a sort of Damascus Road conversion, and issued the charter for the Second National Bank of the United States. For then we knew, that every time we moved away from the National Banking Federal credit system of our Constitution, we were no longer sovereign, but subject to the whims of imperial financial control.

Sponsored by British Agents

In Jackson's case, his Presidency was the witting personal creation of such traitors who wanted to put the United States back under that control, and undermining the bank was key. The chief sponsors of Jackson's candidacy and Presidency, were the traitors Aaron Burr and Martin van Buren—who, if he wasn't Aaron Burr's illegitimate son, was at least politically the fruit of his loins. Jackson was directly under their patronage and, by extension, under the patronage of Lord Shelburne's chief intelligence officer, Jeremy Bentham, whom Jackson stayed in contact with, on the question of dissolving the Senate, while he was President, up until Bentham's death in 1832.

Beginning with the 1824 election campaign, Burr started his effort to bankroll the Tennessee Senator into the Oval Office, using his Manhattan Bank, later the Chase Manhattan Bank. This effort was after Jackson proved his merit, in collaborating with Burr in the 1806 treason plot to deliver Louisiana to the British, part of Burr's great plot to lead a secessionist coup from the South, to overthrow the sitting U.S. government. At that time, Jackson supplied Burr with hospitality, praise, recruits, and even Naval boats, to transport Burr's growing mercenary army down the Ohio River. And when Burr was caught, and tried for treason in 1807, Jackson, called as a witness, stood outside the court, rallying a crowd, and denouncing then-President Thomas Jefferson.

Van Buren, another close disciple of Burr's and those New York banking interests, had his moment of glory later, when he outshined his pupil Jackson. And after helping Jackson destroy the National Bank as his Secretary of State, he brought us the 1837 Banking Panic, the worst financial crisis in U.S. history up to that time.

Anticipating the effect of the propaganda drive against the National Bank, Henry Clay moved that the charter be brought to a vote four years early. Jackson had campaigned for it, put the populists of the country into a frenzy over it, and raised it to the attention of Congress in each of his addresses. Surely, if the President were serious about his proposals, he would have no objections to both bodies of Congress taking the question up in law.

No sooner did Clay call for the vote in 1832, but the President and his allies were entirely unnerved. Said Clay, "The friends of the President, who have been for nearly three years agitating this question, now turn around upon their opponents, who have supposed the President quite serious and in earnest, in presenting it for public consideration."

In a letter to Samuel Smith, Nicholas Biddle, the president of the Second National Bank, questioned why the President and the friends of the President would not want to quickly settle the question of the re-charter, a question which they themselves had provoked. "I am very ignorant of party tactics, and am probably too much biased to be a fit judge in the case, but such a course has always seemed to me so obvious, that I have never been able to comprehend why it was not adopted?"

Clay had called Jackson's bluff. The Congress voted to renew the charter. It was voted up in the House, it passed in the Senate, and it was sent to President Jackson, who vetoed the bill! That was July 10th, 1832, and that day, Clay spoke before the Senate, saying, that "of all the controverted questions that have sprung up under our government, not one has been so fully investigated as that of its power to establish a Bank of the United States." Since the Constitutional Convention, no question has been so long, so often, and so thoroughly scrutinized by every department of government. All aspects of the Bank's constitutionality, its benefits, and indispensability in securing the nation's sovereignty against foreign influences, have been contested before a tribunal of the greatest American minds. And it was found, that the United States required a national credit system.

The Treason Unfolds

The majority in the House and Senate who originally voted to re-charter the Bank, was not enough against Jackson's puppets in Congress, and they could not override the President's veto. Shortly after, Jackson's Treasury Secretary, Roger B. Taney, began pulling the deposits out the National Bank, and putting them into favorite state banks, anticipating the 1836 expiration of the charter. This included the Baltimore bank, where Taney was a shareholder, and Jackson sponsor Aaron Burr's own financing arm, the Manhattan Company, where the Secretary paid the bank's debt with the public funds.

John Quincy Adams, then Representative of Massachusetts, prepared a damning indictment, to deliver on the floor of the House, on April 4th, 1834. But on that day, he was denied the right to address the House, by Speaker Andrew Stevenson. Adams then published his indictment in a widely distributed pamphlet, "On the Removal of the Public Deposits, and Its Reasons," showing stepwise, the unprecedented, unlawful, and unjust act of removing the specie from the National Bank, to hand out to state banks. Adams also offered a resolution, to honor the pure and disinterested patriotism of Secretary Taney, "in transferring the use of the public funds from the Bank of the United States, where they were profitable to the people, to the Union Bank of Baltimore, where they were profitable to himself." "The transfer of the funds from the National Bank into worthless favorites," wrote Adams, "stamps with insolvency the depositories, so judiciously chosen as substitutes for the Bank of the United States. These institutions resorted to the corrupt administration for the millions of appropriated public monies, to pay their debt, and save them from breaking."

"The lying claims the President brought against the Bank could never justify his veto of the charter, and deserved him more than censure. Was it sufficient for the President to claim that the Bank was 'a monster, a tyrant, a corrupt monied aristocracy, with a bad influence on the State'? Of course not. Nor was it sufficient to make that most damned claim, and the one that has cast the longest shadows on our history: that the Bank was unconstitutional. For it has always been, and is still, today, that the opponents of the Bank are the ones who spurn the Constitution."

The Bank Ruled Constitutional

Only ten years before Jackson began his criminal campaign, claiming the unconstitutionality of the Bank, there was a famous case of McCullough v. Maryland, where Supreme Court Justice John Marshall ruled on the undenial constitutionality of the Bank. He ruled explicitly on behalf of Alexander Hamilton's Federal Constitution, that established the means that the Articles of Confederation denied, to execute the intent of the Declaration of Independence, and actually establish "the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," namely, the implied powers of Congress. "A government into whose hands the power of securing the happiness and prosperity of the nation is entrusted, must also be entrusted with the means to execute that power. And if the object it seeks is good, and in accord with the Constitution, the government must have its choice of means that are most necessary and proper for carrying out those powers." On these grounds, Justice Marshall further ruled, that the power of creating a corporation like a bank, is one appertaining to sovereignty:

"The government, which has a right to do an act, and has imposed on it, the duty of performing that act, must, according to the dictates of reason, be allowed to select the means."

And as it had been debated in the United States, the most indispensable means to promote the interests of the nation was to incorporate a bank, through which the credit of the nation could be organized and mobilized, for the public benefit.

This was a ruling arbitrarily overturned ten years later, by a traitor.

Today, over six decades since we have had a semblance of a constitutional credit system, our states are bankrupt, our people suffering unemployment, and the President now threatens their lives, by eliminating access to health care, while putting Federal funds into bank bailouts, and the financial market swindle known as "cap and trade." Any competent understanding of the United States Federal Constitution, as giving us not the right, but the obligation to establish a National Bank and secure the public credit, shows us where we must go. Today the survival of the United States, and the world, depends on a quick return to our constitutional system of credit and national banking, a reorganization in bankruptcy, and mobilization of Federal credit, to halt and reverse the ongoing physical breakdown of the economy. At this moment, anything less than that, will kill us. And anyone who has a different approach, now deserves to be removed from their position in government.

Wrote John Quincy Adams to the Congress, when they still had the chance to rectify the crimes of the administration: "The President has constituted himself the legislator, and calls upon you to execute his ordinances and decrees. Representatives of the people of the North American Union, is it for this, that you are elected the trustees of their interests, the guardians of their rights? The Bank of the United States will die, but its ghost will haunt this hall, though justice should be denied, Congress after Congress, perhaps from age to age, and your evasion of the question will be a standing recommendation of the claim, till importunity shall extort from your successors the reparations sought in vain from you."