FOREIGN CONTROL

Waipa Post, Volume 45, Issue 3252, 8 November 1932, Page 6

FOREIGN CONTROL

• THE NIEMEYER CENTRAL BANK BILL. A DEADLY BLOW" TO FARMERS' INTERESTS. * (By A. N. Field, author of "The Truth About the Slump.") A matter of vital concern to the farmers of New Zealand in particular, and to the whole population generally, is the decision of the Government to bring down legislation to establish a central bank on the lines proposed by Sir Otto ' Ernst Niemeyer. Banking legislation is usually hurried through Parliament with great rapidity, and immediate action is necessary if a national disaster is to be averted. The essential feature of the Niemeyer central bank proposal is control of the volume of currency and credit by a single all-powerful private corporation. This corporation, responsible to its shareholders only, will •regulate the means of payment. It will control agriculture, industry, and commerce to a far greater extent than Parliament itself. The basis of regulation is set out in chapter 5 of the proposed statute establishing the bank as printed in the Niemeyer report in the Parliamentary papers of 1931. That basis is parity of exchange between the New Zealand pound and sterling. This means the absolute control of the purchasing power of New Zealand money by .financiers in London and New York" Parity of exchange means the cancellation of even the inadequate relief given to the farming industry by the present 10 per cent depreciation of our currency as compared with sterling. The maximum exchange variation allowed under the Niemeyer proposal is H per cent. Do not be deceived by statements that this part of the plan is not to be immediately enforced. The Nie?neyer draft legislation says. "The provisions of this article shall not come into operation until a date to be fixed, at the request of the bank, by Order-in-Council and published in the Gazette." The section also provides for a gold basis to the currency. '( The object of the whole scheme is the enforcement of further deflation, which means the taking away from the people of the means of paying ' their debts. Any postponement of the ... operation of- the scheme to the full extent will be a mere matter of tactics to avoid too great a public proffcest. A pvivately-managed central bank : is simply a private money trust. Cen- .' tral banking in its modern form is a • German device, originated by inter- . national financiers for their own bene- ' fit. The present world-wide depression is due to the deliberate manipulation of the purchasing power of • ; money by the world's central banks. The most powerful central banking machinery in the world, the United ~ ■ States Federal Reserve System, consisting of a central board and twelve private central banks, was established in. that country in 1913 as the result % of agitation led by a newly-naturalised German financier. It was helcL out : as a.plan that would prevent financial ft stringencies and: panics. There, have wvbeen greater stringencies since it was ;f%tablished than were; ever before indwn in tn£ United States. Ex-

States Senate Currency and Banking Committee when the system was es- '. tablished, testified in March last that the depressions of 1920-21 and 192932 were caused by the " deliberate ' contraction of credit" by the Federal Reserve System. There is a mass of evidence showing that this statement is well founded. In the United States House of Rerepresentatives on 10th June Mr Louis T. McFadden, for 12 years up to 1931 chairman of the House of Representatives Banking and Currency Committee, referred to the American Central Banking System in the following language: " Mr Chairman, we have in this country one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever known. I refer to the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Banks. . . The depredations and the iniquities of the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Banks acting together have cost this country enough money to pay the national debt several times over. This evil institution has impoverished and ruined the people of the United States, has bankrupted itself, and has practically bankrupted our Government. It has done this through the defects of the law under which it operates, through the maladministration of that law by the Federal Reserve Board." As chairman of this great Congressional Committee, Mr McFadden had been in a position to know what he was talking about. He is a Republican (Conservative) in politics, is a banker by profession, and was formerly president of the Pennsylvania Bankers' Association. Speaking in Congress on 15th December last, Mr McFadden stated that international finance was almost exclusively German. The international financiers had enslaved the Germans to a greater extent than any other people. They then, he declared, conceived the idea of robbing the United States, and they had succeeded in doing so through the Federal Reserve System. They had poured enormous sums of American money into Germany, and through Germany into Russia, in • which country they were financing and controlling the Five Year Plan. Financial advisers have been sent out to many countries by the bankers controlling the Federal Reserve pressing for the establishment 'of central banks and the re-enslavement of I nations under the gold standard. They succeeded in enforcing these disastrous policies. The Bank of England is the private central bank of Britain. Its governor since 1920 has been Mr Montagu Norman, formerly a member of an American banking house. There was practically no unemployment in Britain when he took office. He initiated the policy of making money scarce by deflating, and this work he has carried on in the closest consultation with the United States Federal Reserve System. Under his rule Britain has suffered untold misery. The Bank of England can find immense , sums to lend to foreigners, but very little ever to help British industry. Lord Beaverbrook, in his newspapers, the London Daily Express and the Snuday Express, has been urging that a well-organised national movement, should be launched to drive Mr Montagu. Norman and the other foreign bankers off the board of the Bank of England. On Bth May he said: Mr Montagu Norman . . . sits surrbunded by his banking board,

which owes no responsibility whatever to the public. There are men sitting .... on that board who have associations with deep financial commitments in foreign countries. It is quite certain they will not remove Mr Norman. His policy suits them very well."

In 1930 this mis-called Bank of England sent two emissaries to Australia and New Zealand in the persons of Sir Otto Ernst Niemeyer and Professor Theodor Emanuel Gugenheim Gregory. It is significant in view of the foregoing statements that both these gentlemen should be obviously of foreign extraction.

It is on the advice of Sir Otto Ernst Niemeyer that our Government proposes to establish a central bank. There is not the least doubt that the only reason for establishing this bank is pressure from international financiers in London to whom we owe money.

What is the record of Sir Otto Ernst Niemeyer ? Has his advice proved sound and beneficial in the past? It has not. On the contrary, he has been closely associated with the two greatest financial disasters in British history. Together with Mr Montagu Norman, he accompanied Mr Baldwin to the United States in January, 1923, when the British debt to America was funded on terms so unfavourable that Mr Bonar Law, who was Prime Minister at the time, accepted them only because he did not wish to split his Government. This settlement not only saddled Britain with the obligation of paying to America an immensely greater value than she ever received, but also made the lot of every other allied debtor nation much harder.

Sir Otto Ernst Niemeyen was a member of the Treasury Committee which, in 1925, recommended going back on to the gold standard, and predicted great benefits from so doing. None of these benefits was realised, and Britain went from bad to worse.

As Controller of finance the British Treasury from 1922 to 1927, Sir Otto Ernst Niemeyer bears as great a share of responsibility for both these events as any man. Neither of them was beneficial to the people of Britain, and those who advocated them have no claim on our regard as possessors of exceptional financial

wisdom or as infallible guardians of the public interest.

In the Parliamentary Library in Wellington is a copy of a book entitled " The Alien Menace " (second edition, 1929), by Lieutenant-Colonel A. H. Lane., with a foreword by Lord Sydenham, formerly Governor of Victoria and later Governor of Bombay. In that book are reprinted extracts from correspondence published in a London periodical in 1921. From this' it appears that on 18th December, 1918, the late Dr Ellis Powell, then editor of the London Financial News, a well-known and reputable daily newspaper, wrote to Mr Bonar Law asking whether certain Germans of the name of Niemeyer had " a near relative, occupying a high position in the Treasury and married to a German wife."

Less than a fortnight before this—on sth December, 1918—there had been published with great 'prominence in the London papers the report of a British Government Comjmittee on the treatment of British prisoners of war in Germany. This report, was signed

by Mr Justice Younger, the chairman of the Committee, and the evidence was thus of such a nature as to satisfy a British judge. The London Times published a column summary of the report under the headings, " Torture of our Officers. Three Specimens of the German Brute. —Twin Tyrants." Two-thirds of this column were taken up with instances' of the brutalities and indignities inflicted on British prisoners of war by two Captains Niemeyer, one in command of a prison camp at Clausthal, in Germany, and the other in command of another prison camp at Holzminden. These two Captains Niemeyer were stated in the report to be twin brothers. Niemeyer of Holzminden was described as "the personification of hate." The report said of Niemeyer of Clausthal: "He appeared to take pleasure in inflicting every possible annoyance and humiliation on the officers who were in his power." To quote an instance: "A British officer taken for examination before him was stripped naked and ordered to kneel to,him, On the officer refusing he was forced down to the ground by Captain Niemeyer's orderlies. According to Captain Lane's book, the reply received by Dr Powell to his question came five days after dispatch of his letter, and was signed by Mr R. M. Gower, writing from Treasury Chambers. It read as follows: "Mr Bonar Law wishes me to' inform you that the case of Mr Niemeyer was recently considered by the committee appointed by the Government to examine the cases of persons not the children of British-born subjects who are employed in Government departments, and that the committee had decided that it was in the national interest that Mr Niemeyer should hold the post which he occupies in the Treasury."

Mr Powell is stated to have written two further letters to Mr Bonar Law, in the second of which he pointed out that no answer had been given to his question. Colonel Lane, in his book, said: "I now put to Sir Otto Niemeyer the same question. I make no reflection on the integrity and personal character of Sir Otto Niemeyer. I publish the above facts because I feel strongly that it should be known to the British people to what extent our Government services are directed by officials of alien extraction." Ac-

cording to the third edition of his book, published this year, Colonel Lane is still without an answer to his question. So long as the principle of nationality is regarded as of sufficient importance to warrant an expenditure of many millions .per annum on armaments clear and unequivocal answers should be forthcoming to such questions as were asked by Dr Powell and Colonel Lane. The war has been succeeded by economic war, more subtle in its methods but no less deadly in its consequences. In his memoirs is published a letter written by the late Sir Cecil SpringRise, British Ambassador to the United States during the war, in which he stated that in America " the GermanJewish bankers are toiling in a solid phalanx to compass our destruction." The attitude of these American-Ger-man-Jewish bankers has continued obdurately hostile to British interests. '..

We need, a, financial policy that is 100 per cent British, and our misfor-

tune is that the Bank of England is international in its associations. If

we are to have outside financiers preparing medicine for us to swallow without question, let us make certain that the previous doses they have given their patients have cured them. Let us have our advice from men of our own blood and race. Let us have men that you can ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer who their relatives are and get straight-out, satisfying answers, and not side-stepping letters.

A private central bank controlling the currency on the basis of parity of exchange with sterling means that if the financiers behind the United States Federal Reserve System restrict money and force prices down still further, and drag the Bank of England with them, we also, without question, must descend into this pit to our complete ruin.

Since the network of private central banks has been established over the world at the instigation of these financiers the value of everything except money—the stock-in-trade of the money-lenders—has been forced down and down to the ruin of nations and individuals. All ownership and power are passing to the financiers. Every member of Parliament who votes for the Niemeyer Central Bank Bill should be perpetually disqualified from ever again holding any public office.

If we desire to prevent New Zealand from being sold into complete slavery to international high finance we should leave no stone unturned to ensure the emphatic rejection by Parliament of this Bill.

The Niemeyer central bank plan is an assault upon the independence of New Zealand by high finance, and is taking away from us the control of our own affairs.

Our need is not private control of money but State control of money and its regulation and sufficiency to maintain stable conditions in agriculture, industry, and employment. The Niemeyer central bank, once established, will be an almost insuperable obstacle in the way of securing a sound and honest money system ensuring justice and prosperity. The issue is a clear one. On one side are justice, democracy, and national security. On the other side is slavery to international high finance. Our country needs our help here and now.