I agree. You could have added the corruption of the rating agencies as shown nicely in the movie The Big Short. In general, the banking laws have progressed steadily toward Karl Marx's fifth commandment viz. "5. Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly."

In his book "The Housing Boom And Bust", Thomas Sowell sums this up fairly well.

The banks have a great deal of control over government actions. They have been playing this same game for a century. They knew what was going to occur and exactly what would happen. They perfected this game overseas and now have brought it to America. We have been bailing out the banks for this same kind of thing for decades. Yet we still allow these scum (banksters, politicians, and bureaucrats) to do it to us.

According to G Edward Griffin in The Creature From Jekyll Island, The 1910 secret meeting was attended by these six men:

1) Nelson W Aldrich, Republican "whip" in the Senate, Chairman of the National Monetary Commission, father-in-law to John D Rockefeller jr.

2) Henry P Davidson, Sr. Partner of J P Morgan Company

3) A Piatt Andrew, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury

4) Frank A Vanderlip, President of the National City Bank of New York representing William Rockefeller

5) Benjamin Strong, head of J P Morgan's Bankers Trust Company, later to become head of the System

6) Paul M Warburg, a partner in Kuhn, Loeb, & Company representing the Rothschilds and Warburgs in Europe.

It wasn't the bankers controlling the government, nor the government controlling the bankers. It was a team effort, a successful conspiracy between the Bankers, Socialists, and Crony Capitalists to place a large number of humans on Earth into perpetual debt slavery. The greatest theft in history which continues and will continue until it is stopped.

"(BTW, I do not agree with a lot of what the author proposes..." Thank you for adding that caveat line, freedomforall. I was beginning to think, maybe, you were advocating nationalization of the banking industry or some leftist hacked your account.

I'd rather say it was time to boot the Jekyll Island Creature back to the infernal regions from whence it came and get the elected representatives of con-gress to pick up their Constitutional responsibilities and get the country back to a real currency. Then let the banks fend for themselves.

If they had to earn it as producers, they wouldn’t be lending money, but their produce. If you are planning on building an enterprise, like a supermarket, for example, receiving a loan in the form of iron ore wouldn’t be very helpful. I would think that this is self-evident and I am surprised that you’ve stated your argument in this form. Money is the medium of exchange, not a product in itself. An iron ore producer is useless to the economy without a banking system to distribute and exchange the iron ore. Without a banking system we would still be in the Dark Ages, for it was precisely the banking system, as created by the Templars and the Jews that got the Western World moving. In any case, no one is forced to take loans. But it is quite hypocritical to take the loan, spend it, and then complain about paying back. The housing crisis was mostly the result of banks being directed by the government to give loans to people that could not pay them back. Whether the loans were used to buy more expensive houses than they could afford, or Mercedes, or vacations, or cities that financed politically dictated or promised benefits that they couldn’t afford, how convenient it is to blame the bankers. Btw, this is not new; throughout history there were many cases of kings borrowing and then chopping heads off the lenders (usually Jews), with an inevitable result of decades of economic decline or stagnation following. We’ve seen this before.

Many of Karl Marx’s criticisms were valid. It’s those solutions that are the killer. This giant government banking system was such a “solution.”

"The game is rigged."

Precisely!