I had a discussion with a friend over what the biggest threat to the well-being of our nation is, besides the loss of virtue in the population.

She is a longtime political activist, especially as regards to education issues. Like many Americans, she is currently quite concerned about the threat that radical Islam poses to the nation. I took the position that the greater threat to our freedoms comes from the so-called Federal Reserve. This entity is run by big banks that are global businesses owned mostly by people with a globalist outlook. That’s why when the bailout money was traced, foreign banks were found to have gotten a significant share of the loot.

I asked her to consider all of the crazy legislation she has seen passed over the years, especially in education. Things that the common person did not want, but that the big money always seemed to be backing. Then I asked her to tell me how many of those things were done because Muslim extremists were prompting the politicians to pass them. Theanswer is none. Then I asked her to compare that to the times such measures went through because it centralized power and was favored by globalists. Truth is, the Muslim lobby isn’t very strong down in Little Rock, but the central planners are stronger than “We the People.” Central control in education moves ultimately toward international standards. Power that was once divided among many hands increasingly is held in only a few.

The reason such measures get passed is that the money and the media are all behind it. The reason the guys who want to grow government have all that money and media behind them is ultimately the Federal Reserve. They can create money out of thin air to buy off states or politicians who want to buck their will. They can, and have,bought media outlets too, so those politicians unwise enough to cross them can wind up being lambasted by the media as “kooks” for believing the exact same things that the Founding Fathers believed.

The power to issue the public currency is just like giving someone a magic money machine that can transfer wealth from other people’s pockets into yours.

Were you or I to gain control of such a machine, we would in time become all-powerful politically. The international banksters now have control of such a machine, and over time they are becoming allpowerful.

Much of the history of the U.S. is a struggle against central banking. Thomas Jefferson ended the first attempt at a Federal Reserve-like entity when he sunk the 1st Bank of the United States. They tried again a generation later. President Andrew Jackson annulled their charter, but they almost wrecked the economy in a bid to control the country before he did. That is why he said, “The bold effort the present bank had made tocontrol the government ... are but premonitions of the fate that await the American people should they be deluded into a perpetuation of this institution or the establishment of another like it.”

But the people forgot Jackson’s warning. Big bankers got the Federal Reserve Act passed on Christmas Eve of 1913. Since that time, the dollar has lost 96 percent of its purchasing power, and we have gone through one Great Depression and are heading into another. More and more wealth, and political power, is being concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. The Muslims did not do any of that to us. They just make a convenient distraction for the real looters.

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Editor’s note: Mark Moore is the lead writer for an Internet blog on matters pertaining to Arkansas culture and government, Arkansas Watch, and on Tuesday nights is the host of an Internet-based radio program, Patriots on Watch. He can be reached through The Times at [email protected].

Opinion, Pages 4 on 09/01/2010