“Ethos: A Time for Change” Film Response

The film “Ethos: A Time for Change”; though written, directed, and produced by Pete McGrain of Los Angeles’s Gypsy Film Company; could just as easily have been dictated to McGrain straight from the mind of Alex Jones, of “Info Wars” and “Prison Planet”, himself.  To be certain the film displays a mixture of misinformation and paranoid delusion that Jones and The Fox News Channel’s Glenn Beck have made their brand.

This is demonstrated when, within the first fifteen minutes of the hour-long film, McGrain has “host“ and narrator Woody Harrelson discussing the concept of unspecified “alternatives” to governance and government.

It also shows its pro-conspiracy–theory bent by featuring prominently representatives from the Center for Public Integrity [which was demonstrated in a previous paper from Tuesday June 24, 2014 to be little or nothing more than a haven for 9/11 “Truthers” and other InfoWars-like anti-government conspiracy theorists] and the like-minded Institute for Public Accuracy [which could just as easily be a clone of CPI].

Near the end of the film, McGrain plays an audio clip from an August 2007 Alex Jones interview with 2004 Libertarian Party Presidential Candidate Aaron Russo in which Russo claims not only that the terrorist attacks on New York City and the District of Columbia on September 11, 2001 were “a lie”, but also that in November 2000, someone by the name of “Nicholas Rockefeller”; supposedly a member of the family of philanthropist John Rockefeller; told him all about the Boeing 767 twin-engine jet airliners; American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 from East Boston, Massachusetts’ General Edward Lawrence Logan International Airport; that were hijacked and crashed into the North and South towers of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan on the morning of September 11^th [22].  

Among the numerous flaws with this claim is the fact that there exists no record of anyone with the first name Nicholas within the Rockefeller family.

Throughout the first half-hour of the film, McGrain repeats over and over again and again the claim that the Federal Reserve either is itself, or is owned by, a “banking cartel” and is not a “government organization”, a “group of private bankers” that are unelected and “unregulated”.

This, of course, is demonstrably untrue. The main governing body of the Federal Reserve System is the Board of Governors. The seven governors are appointed by the President of the United States and confirmed by the United States Senate. The Chairman and Vice Chairman of the Board are appointed by the President from among the sitting members. Governors are appointed to 14-year terms that, like those of Justices of the United States Supreme Court, span multiple Presidencies. However, unlike Supreme Court Justices, members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors are term limited, and not eligible for reappointment. Members can be removed from the board by the President of the United States [2].

McGrain at one point has Harrelson refer to the Federal Reserve “cartel” by saying “whoever these men are” and finishing with “but we don’t know who they are”.

This, too, is a lie. The last four Chairman of the Board of Governors have been Paul Volcker [A Democrat, appointed by 39^th President of the United States James Carter on August 6, 1979], Alan Greenspan [A Republican, appointed by 40^th President Ronald Reagan on August 11, 1987], Ben Bernanke [A Republican, appointed by 43^rd President George Walker Bush II on February 1, 2006], and Janet Yellen [A Democrat, appointed by 44^th President of the United States Barack Obama on October 9, 2013]. [15]

To “support” his claim that the Federal Reserve is some mysterious cartel, McGrain quote-mines the character of Sidonia, [based on British politician Lionel Rothschild] speaking to the character of Coningsby [based on German Jewish financier Nathan Mayer], from Book IV Chapter 15 of two-time British Conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli’s 1844 novel “Coningsby: The New Generation”:

“So you see, my dear Coningsby, that the world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.” [8]

The film then displays on-screen the following “interesting quote” from Michigan industrialist Henry Ford:

“The one aim of these financiers is a world controlled by the creation of inextinguishable debt.”

However, it should be noted that no record can be found anywhere of Ford ever having said or written any such thing at any time, leading to the suspicion that the “quote” in question may very well have been fabricated.

The film then claims that; at a “secret meeting” in 1910 at the “estate” of American financier and philanthropist John Morgan on Jekyll Island in Glynn County, Georgia; this supposedly mysterious “cartel” of bankers, the few of whom that are named include Morgan and Rockefeller, wrote the Federal Reserve Act [19]. 

There is very little about this claim that bears any resemblance to reality. The meeting was not secret; it did not take place at Morgan’s “estate”, and had little if anything to do with the writing of the Federal Reserve Act [11].

The first claim, that this meeting was held “in secret”, is patently absurd; as the event was widely covered on the front pages of local Glynn County, Georgia newspapers at the time.

Secondly, the meeting also did not, as McGrain claims in the film, take place at the “estate” of John Morgan on Jekyll Island. It took place at the Jekyll Island Club, of which Morgan was only one member [18]. In fact, neither Morgan nor Rockefeller was even in attendance at the meeting in question. Morgan was represented at the meeting by investment institution J.P. Morgan and Company’s Senior Partner, philanthropist Henry Davison. Rockefeller was represented by former Assistant United States Secretary of the Treasury Frank Vanderlip and Republican Rhode Island United States Senator Nelson Aldrich, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance and a Uniform National Currency [Later the Committee on Banking and Currency; Now the Senate Finance Committee]. [19]

Thirdly, the Federal Reserve Act was not introduced on the floor of United States House of Representatives until August 29, 1913; by Democratic Virginia Congressman Carter Glass, the Chairman of House Committee on Banking and Currency [Now the House Financial Services Committee]; [21] nearly three years after the November 1910 meeting at the Jekyll Island Club in Georgia. From this incongruence, it is difficult to imagine just how exactly McGrain came to the conclusion that those at the 1910 meeting on Jekyll Island in Georgia “wrote” the Federal Reserve Act that the Virginia Congressman would introduce more than three years later [3].

The film also claims that these bankers, again including Morgan and Rockefeller by name, singlehandedly elected 28^th President of the United States Woodrow Wilson solely on the condition that he would sign the Federal Reserve Act into law if elected. It is once more difficult to conceive of just how exactly one might come to this conclusion, as Congressman Glass would not introduce the Federal Reserve Act to the House of Representatives until more than five months after Wilson became President on March 4, 1913 [7]; and nearly a year after the Presidential election of November 5, 1912 [6] in which New Jersey Democrat Wilson defeated New York Progressive Party nominee Theodore Roosevelt and Ohio Republican William Taft [17].

The film claims that President Wilson felt great remorse and regret after signing the bill, and quotes the 28^th President as writing:

“I have unwittingly ruined my country. Our great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Therefore all of our activities are in the hands of a small group of men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, completely controlled and dominated governments in the world. No longer a government of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.” 

Here, “Ethos” takes the leap from mere intellectually-dishonest quote-mining into the realm of full-blown quote fabrication.

The first part, about having “unwittingly ruined my country” is actually a quote about American President Wilson from two-time Italian Liberal Party Prime Minister Sidney Sonnino [4]  at the January 18, 1919 Peace Conference in Paris, France, which resulted in the January 10, 1920 Treaty of Versailles [5].

One of the few parts of the quote that is actually from the writings of Wilson himself;

“all of our activities are in the hands of a small group of men”; is an out-of-context quote mine from page 185 of the 1912 Section VIII: “Monopoly, Or Opportunity?” of Wilson’s 1913 book “The New Freedom: A Call For The Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People”.  The full in-context quote reads as follows:

“A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is privately concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men who, even if their action be honest and intended for the public interest, are necessarily concentrated upon the great undertakings in which their own money is involved and who necessarily, by very reason of their own limitations, chill and check and destroy genuine economic freedom. This is the greatest question of all, and to this statesmen must address themselves with an earnest determination to serve the long future and the true liberties of men.” [12]

However, it should be noted that, in “Monopoly or Opportunity?” Wilson was criticizing the situation before the Federal Reserve was created. As University of Wisconsin—Madison College of Letters and Sciences Department of History Chairman and William Francis Allen Professor Emeritus of History John Cooper [M.A, Ph.D.; Columbia University]; the 2010 Pulitzer Prize finalist author of “Woodrow Wilson: A Biography”; told Salon staff writer Andrew Leonard for his Friday December 21, 2007 article “The Unhappiness of Woodrow Wilson: Did the President Lament the Day He “Unwittingly Ruined” His Country By Creating the Federal Reserve?”:

“I can tell you categorically that this is not a statement of regret for having created the Federal Reserve. Wilson never had any regrets for having done that. It was an accomplishment in which he took great pride.” [16]

The same is true for the quote: “We have come to be one of the worst ruled, completely controlled and dominated governments in the world.” It, too, is an out –of-context quote mine from Wilson’s “The New Freedom”, this time from page 201 of the 1912 Section IX: “Benevolence, Or Justice?” The full in-context quote reads as follows:

“We are at the parting of the ways. We have not one or two or three, but many, established and formidable monopolies in the United States. We have, not one or two, but many, fields of endeavor into which it is difficult, if not impossible, for the independent man to enter. We have restricted credit, we have restricted opportunity, we have controlled development, and we have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated, governments in the civilized world—No longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and the duress of small groups of dominant men.” [12]

Moving into what is, for Beck, Jones, and McGrain alike, more familiar territory, at the 55^th minute “Ethos” has Harrelson saying with a straight face to the camera: “

“The right to the freedom of speech, the right to the freedom of assembly and the right to a fair trial are no longer protected by law.”

The very fact that McGrain was able to write such a thing, and Harrelson to say such a thing, proves the statement to be fallacious at best. Nevertheless, McGrain continues, in a monologue seemingly plagiarized directly from one of Jones’s paranoid conspiratorial anti–government “Prison Planet” rants:

“Any action, speech or protest against the government can be construed legally as terrorism. In 2005, Congress passed the Real ID Act. Soon we will be required to carry ID cards by law. There are plans to equip these cards with RFID tracking chips that will be able to track your every move, already in all new passports. Many believe this will eventually lead to the implanted chip which is already being used in many places in our society. It is not difficult to see a future where we are all locked into a monitored control group where ort every move, all transactions will be tracked, monitored and recorded and if anyone gets out of line they can just turn off their chip.” [9]

            The Real ID Act of 2005 was introduced on the floor of the House of Representatives on January 26, 2005 by Republican Wisconsin Congressman Frank Sensenbrenner, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and the Committee on Science, Space and Technology [13]. The Act reads as follows:

“To establish and rapidly implement regulations for state drivers license and identification document security standards, to prevent terrorists from abusing the asylum laws of the United States, to unify terrorism-related grounds for inadmissibility and removal, and to ensure expeditious construction of the San Diego border fence.” [14]

            Title II of the Act establishes new federal standards and requirements pertaining to security, authentication, and issuance procedures for the state-issued driver licenses and non-driver identification cards to be accepted by the federal government for “official purposes”, as defined by the United States Secretary of Homeland Security; currently defined as presenting state drivers licenses and identification cards for boarding commercially operated airline flights and entering federal buildings and power plants [20]. Three of four planned phases apply to areas that affect relatively few United States citizens—The United States Department of Homeland Security headquarters on Nebraska Avenue in Washington D.C., nuclear power plants and restricted and semi-restricted federal facilities. Phase 4 applies to boarding federally regulated commercial aircraft. Implementation of Phase 1 would begin following a period of “deferred enforcement” “To ensure that the public has ample advanced notice” [10]. The Act was signed into law by Republican President George Walker Bush II on May 11, 2005 and was effective May 11, 2008. Implementation of Phase 1 began on January 20, 2014. Phase 4 will not be implemented before January 1, 2016 [13].

            Considering the fact that the Real ID Act was passed by Congress nearly a decade ago, what McGrain might have meant by his use of the term “soon” for something [everyone being required to carry government-issued identification cards with tracking chips in them] which still has not happened yet nor looks likely to happen at any time in the even remotely foreseeable future, is anyone’s best guess.

Over the part of his monologue wherein he mentions passports, the image that is projected onscreen is not that of an American passport, but rather of a German electronic passport [1], a fact evident by the German name “Bundesdruckerei” [“Federal Printer”] embossed in brightly shining letters on its cover.

At the film’s 57^th minute; immediately after warning his audience that, in the paranoid delusional dystopian future hellscape that he has just imagined aloud, the government would be capable of simply “turning off” someone’s chip [whatever that might mean] if the person got “out of line”; McGrain has Harrelson tell his audience, without the slightest hint of any sense of the inherent irony, that:

“Many of our fears are manufactured for us.”

2,560 Words

1.      Alcala, F.; Arendt, H.; Beel, J.; Brown, K.; Burchardt, U.; Czura, B.;  et. Al. “EPassport: The World’s New Electronic Passport—A New Report about the EPassport’s Benefits, Risks and its Security”. Otto-Von-Guericke University—Magdeburg. http://www.scribd.com/doc/20964615/ePassport-The-World-s-New-Electronic-Passport-A-Report-about-the-ePassport-s-Benefits-Risks-and-its-Security

2.      Allexon, A.; Allison, H.; Alvarez, S.; Anderson, T.; Bennett, A.; Boyer, L.; Braunstein, S.; Carpenter, S.; Cooper, Y.; et. Al. “The Federal Reserve System Purposes and Functions” Ninth Edition. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. June 2005. http://www.federalreserve.gov/pf/pdf/pf_1.pdf

3.      Bagwell, Tyler. “The Jekyll Island Duck Hunt That Created The Federal Reserve”. Jekyll Island History: Stories of the Famed Island and the Surrounding Area. 2008. http://www.jekyllislandhistory.com/federalreserve.shtml 

4.      Ball, Christopher. “Woodrow Wilson and the American Myth in Italy: Culture, Diplomacy and War Propaganda”. Harvard Historical Studies. June 29, 2008. http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=23404

5.      Blukacz-Louisfert, Balndine. “Chronology 1919”. Indiana University Center for the Study of Global Change. http://www.indiana.edu/~league/1919.htm

6.      Blum, John. “Win The Election of 1912”. Community Television of Southern California. 2001. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/wilson/sfeature/sf_election.html 

7.      Blum, J.; Brown. V.; et. Al. “Wilson’s Legacy”. “American Experience”. 2001. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/wilson/sfeature/sf_legacy.html

8.      Disraeli, Benjamin. “Coningsby or the New Generation” Book 4, Chapter 15. 1844. http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/d/disraeli/benjamin/coningsby/complete.html

9.      Boyd, J.; et. Al. “Privacy, Surveillance and the Real ID Act”. Purdue University Graduate School Center for Education Research in Information Assurance and Security. March 2, 2009. https://www.cerias.purdue.edu/assets/pdf/bibtex_archive/2009-19.pdf

10.  Garcia, M.; Lee, M.; et. Al. “Analysis of the Provisions of the Real ID Act of 2005”. Congressional Research Service. May 25, 2005. http://fas.org/sgp/crs/homesec/RL32754.pdf

11.  Griffin, Edward. “The Creature From Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve” Seventh Printing. American Media. May 1998. https://archive.org/stream/CreatureFromJekyllIslandByG.Edward-G.EdwardGriffin#page/n1/mode/2up

12.  Hale, William and Wilson, Woodrow. “The New Freedom: A Call for the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People”. June 1913. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14811/14811-8.txt 

13.  Husch, Ben, et. Al. “Countdown to Real ID”. National Conference of State Legislatures. February 7, 2014. http://www.ncsl.org/research/transportation/count-down-to-real-id.aspx 

14.  Kuntz, Michele; et. Al. “2005 Real ID Act”. University of Washington—Bothell. May 11, 2005. http://library.uwb.edu/guides/usimmigration/2005_real_id_act.html

15.  Lambert. M.; Liu, M.; et. Al. “The Composition of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors”. Conference of State Bank Supervisors. October 2013. http://www.csbs.org/news/csbswhitepapers/Documents/Final%20CSBS%20White%20Paper%20on%20Federal%20Reserve%20Board%20Composition%20(Oct%2023%202013).pdf 

16.  Leonard, Andrew. “The Unhappiness of Woodrow Wilson: Did the President Lament the Day He “Unwittingly ruined” his country by creating the Federal Reserve?” Salon. Friday December 21, 2007. http://www.salon.com/2007/12/21/woodrow_wilson_federal_reserve/

17.  Linky Donald and Weingart, John. “Woodrow Wilson and the Election of 1912”. Rutgers State University of New Jersey Eagleton institute of Politics. 2014. http://www.eagleton.rutgers.edu/research/americanhistory/ap_wilson.php  

18.  Mace, Lesley. “The Not-so Strange Case of Jekyll Island: The 1910 Plan to Create a Central Bank”. Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. November 6, 2013. http://www.frbatlanta.org/pubs/extracredit/13fall_jekyll_island.cfm

19.  Mullins, Eustace. “Secrets of the Federal Reserve”. The London Connection. 1991. http://www.whale.to/b/mullins1.html  

20.  Randolph, Susan. “Collaborative Versus Prescriptive Legislating and Rulemaking: A Case Study of the Driver’s License Provisions in the Real ID Act of 2005”. The George University Journal of Public Policy and Public Administration Volume 14. 2007. http://www.policy-perspectives.org/article/viewFile/4147/2907    

21.  Rothbard, Murray and Salerno, Joseph. “A History of Money and Banking in the United States: The Colonial Era to World War II”. Quarterly Journal of Australian Economics Volume 2 Number 3. Friday November 13, 2009. https://direct.mises.org/books/historyofmoney.pdf

22.  Watson, Paul. “Rockefeller Admitted Elite Goal Of Microchipped Population”. Prison Planet. Monday January 29, 2007. http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/january2007/290107rockefellergoal.htm