Bunning Vs. Bunning

This clip of Senator Jim Bunning has received a great deal of praise across the Internet. In my opinion, it’s cheap demagoguery.

Bunning congratulates himself for opposing Bernanke’s nomination four years ago. He also criticizes Bernanke for his loose monetary policy. Yet one of the reasons he opposed Bernanke’s nomination four years ago was for his tight money policy.

But Bunning has been a critic of the Fed course of “measured” hikes in short-term interest rates in order to fight inflation, saying that there is not sufficient inflationary pressures to justify the 11 quarter-percentage point hikes since June 2004.

Incidentally, Bunning closes by calling the Fed “the Creature from Jekyll Island.” This is a reference to a crackpot Bircher conspiracy screed of the same name by G. Edward Griffin.
Even for nutter stuff, this one is off the deep end. Here’s part of one review:

G. Edward Griffin lays out this conspiratorial version of history in his
book The Creature from Jekyll Island. His
amateurish take on history is highly suspect, however. Gerry
Rough, in a series of well- researched essays on U.S. banking history,
reveals many historical inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and even contradictions
in Griffin’s book and others of its genre.

As to the conspiracy:

Also in 1910, Senator Nelson Aldrich, Frank Vanderlip of National City (today know as Citibank), Henry Davison of Morgan Bank, and Paul Warburg of the Kuhn, Loeb Investment House met secretly at Jeckyll Island, a resort island off the coast of Georgia, to discuss and formulate banking reform, including plans for a form of central banking. The meeting was held in secret because the participants knew that any plan they generated would be rejected automatically in the House of Representatives if it were associated with Wall Street. Because it was secret and because it involved Wall Street, the Jekyll Island affair has always been a favorite source of conspiracy theories. However, the movement toward significant banking and monetary reform was well-known. It is hardly surprising that given the real possibility of substantial reform, the banking industry would want some sort of input into the nature of the reforms. The Aldrich Plan which the secret meeting produced was even defeated in the House, so even if the Jekyll Island affair was a genuine conspiracy, it clearly failed.
The Aldrich Plan called for a system of fifteen regional central banks, called National Reserve Associations, whose actions would be coordinated by a national board of commercial bankers. The Reserve Association would make emergency loans to member banks, create money to provide an elastic currency that could be exchanged equally for demand deposits, and would act as a fiscal agent for the federal government. Although it was defeated, the Aldrich Plan served as an outline for the bill that eventually was adopted.

So there, I’ve done Rachel Maddow’s work for her today “GOP senator references crackpot Bircher conspiracy!!”
As you might expect, Griffin believes in more conspiracies:

In 1974, Griffin wrote and published the book World Without Cancer,[15][16] and released it as a documentary video; its second edition appeared in 1997, and it was translated into Afrikaans, 1988, and German, 2005. It stated that cancer is a metabolic disease facilitated by the lack of Laetrile (called Vitamin B17 by its American developer), a view which has not been accepted by the majority of scientists. Because the position had been labeled “quackery” by the American Cancer Society, as well as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the American Medical Association, Griffin responded that such groups had a “hidden economic and power agenda”.[2][17]

Griffin said that a grouping of financial, political, and industrial interests at “the very top of the world’s economic and political power pyramid” have “created a popular climate of bias that makes scientific objectivity almost an impossibility” and have dominant influence over the medical profession, medical schools, and medical journals.[18] A critical review in the American Journal of Public Health considered this view a “conspiracy” theory and stated that as “an emotional plea for the unrestricted use of the Laetrile as an anti-tumor agent, the scientific evidence to justify such a policy does not appear within it.”[19]

Griffin’s websites refer visitors to doctors, clinics, and hospitals with alternative cancer treatments,[20] including sellers of laetrile,[15] a product of apricot seeds.[21] He does not sell laetrile himself.[15]

Griffin’s productions referenced the work of biochemist Dr. Dean Burk, head and chief chemist of the Cytochemistry Section of the National Cancer Institute, who served for over 30 years. Funded by the McNaughton Foundation, Burk described his experiments to Griffin as showing that Laetrile and glucosidase set “the cancer cells dying off like flies.”[22] A systematic review in Supportive Care in Cancer, of 36 reports containing laetrile intervention data, found no controlled clinical trials, little evidence for laetrile’s effectiveness, and doubts about its safety.[3]

Griffin became the founder and president of the Cancer Cure Foundation (now the Cure Research Foundation).[23] During the 1980s, he returned to producing films about terrorism, subversion, and Communism.

Posted by on December 9th, 2009 at 10:43 am


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