Without doubt there is an Establishment, an Establishment Elite, a Power Elite, a Ruling Elite; there are Global Power Brokers.
However one defines them, these terms in any case mean much the same.
Behind an often innocent face this Establishment operates out of reach of public perceptions. Glimpses only occur, for example, at certain official or society gatherings, or in the list of attendees at memorial services. Even then one has to sift out the "hangers-on" and "also-rans", often indistinguishable by appointment, rank or title. The British and European Monarchies, even redundant Royal Houses, are classic survivors with an impenetrable network of their own. Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands is an established member of the Bilderberg Group. An intriguing glimpse came in a report in The Daily Telegraph that the late Diana, Princess of Wales, had returned from a visit to Bosnia with her Butler, Paul Burrell and Lord Deedes in a "small jet borrowed from George Soros". Soros, a member of the Bilderberg Group, made a cool £1,000,000,000 out of the British taxpayer as a result of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism debacle of 1992. He was also involved in the sequestration of the huge mineral wealth of the Trepca Mines in Kosovo that followed the "staged" war against Yugoslavia, in 1999(2).
Former Chief of the Defence Staff, Lord Guthrie of Craigiebank, is now a director of N.M. Rothschild and a member of the Rockefeller-Brzezinski-Kissinger Trilateral Commission. American businesswoman Lynn Forester is a close friend of ex-President Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary. In The Daily Telegraph she wrote how she met her future husband, Sir Evelyn de Rothschild, in 1999, when she flew into Scotland with another friend, Dr Henry Kissinger, where all three were to attend a conference of "leading financiers and foreign policy strategists". What she appeared careful not to reveal was that this was the annual conference of the Bilderberg Group!
One further conundrum for the casual observer has its roots in the French Revolution of 1789, and concerns the rise and role of Marxism and Soviet Communism. During four decades of the so-called "Cold War" ordinary servicemen and civilians were consigned to gaol for security infringements and other forms of collaboration. Yet the Western Powers allowed Communists to occupy key government and other appointments, such as Professor Eric Hobsbawm at the University of London, with appointments in the United States, Canada, and in Europe on both sides of the "Iron Curtain"!
Certain Western leaders moved easily in Soviet circles.
At this stage we may cite another example of these apparent convolutions; collaboration which logically would have carried a lengthy prison sentence for the ordinary citizen. A succession of British Government Command Papers was signed by both Conservative and Labour Government Ministers between 1951 and the late 1970s. One typical Agreement concluded with the Soviet Union in 1963, Cmnd. 2059, covered "Relations in the Scientific, Technological, Educational and Cultural Fields". The reality of relations with the Communist system has plainly been quite different to the confrontational picture long painted for public consumption.
The "Insider’s" Story Of Conspiracy And Concealment We owe the central theme of this edition of On Target to a paper written by Boudewijn Wegerif. A financial expert brought up in South Africa, but normally domiciled in Sweden, Boudewijn Wegerif dealt with the critique by W. Cleon Skousen, in The Naked Capitalist(3), of Professor Carroll Quigley’s monumental 1,348 page Tragedy and Hope(4). Here we have, in the two authors, an entirely credible basis for confirming a long history of conspiracy that continues today. It is a conspiracy not only because of its Global magnitude, but because it has been deliberately withheld from the public domain. This is precisely what "conspiracy" is all about. We must therefore consider the authors and their books carefully. We shall make reference to them in the text as appropriate.
* W. Cleon Skousen received a L.L.B. (Law), from George Washington University, Washington, D.C., and practised law in the District of Columbia. He served with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I.), before accepting a position with Brigham Young University. From there he took leave of absence to become Chief of Police for Salt Lake City. Before resuming his university duties he had also been editor of the police magazine Law and Order.
* At the time of writing Tragedy and Hope Carroll Quigley was Professor of History at the Foreign Service School of Georgetown University. He had previously taught at Princeton and Harvard. In 1951 he had been a lecturer at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, at the Brookings Institution, the United States Naval Weapons Laboratory, at the Foreign Service Institute of the State Department and the Naval College, Norfolk, U.S.A. He was a consultant to the Congressional Select Committee which set up the National Space Agency (N.A.S.A.). We have further evidence of the level at which Professor Quigley’s work should be considered. The New York Times of 17th July, 1992, recorded that then presidential candidate Bill Clinton paid tribute to the influence of Quigley on his political outlook. Two further books, the first also by Professor Carroll Quigley, are also important in the context of Tragedy and Hope.
* Quigley’s The Anglo-American Establishment – From Rhodes To Cliveden(5), deals with the arrival in Oxford, in 1870, of Professor John Ruskin, whose followers included Cecil Rhodes and Lord Milner. From these beginnings we saw Rhodes’ early ideals for an Anglo-Saxon global imperium. From this evolved Rhodes scholarships, the Round Table organisation, the Royal Institute of International Affairs (R.I.I.A.), and the Council on Foreign Relations (C.F.R.), in the United States; all interlocking sources and centres of the Power Elite
* Fabian Freeway – High Road To Socialism In The U.S.A. 1884 – 1996(6), by Rose L. Martin, was published in 1966 and is extremely important. She describes in great detail, with names, dates and organisations, how Socialism leached across the Atlantic to America to function almost undercover. She reveals the links between the London School of Economics and Political Science (L.S.E.), and the Rockefellers. She reveals how leading capitalist figures like banker Thomas Lamont became integrated in Left-Wing circles, and that John F. Kennedy and his elder brother Joseph were students under Fabian Socialist Professor Harold Laski at the L.S.E.
In The Naked Capitalist Skousen takes selected subjects and extracts Quigley’s detailed and comprehensive coverage. He is far from sycophantic, inter alia, in his opinion of Quigley’s motives in making his revelations. We have taken the following extracts from Boudewijn Wegerif’s paper, based on the writing of Skousen and Quigley, with additional comments. They have been edited only for presentation:
In his commentary, Skousen asks why Quigley would want to expose the money masters? "Obviously," writes Skousen, "disclosing the existence of a mammoth power network which is trying to take over the world could not help but arouse the vigorous resistance of the millions of people who are its intended victims. So why did Dr. Quigley write this book?" The answer, according to Skousen, is that Quigley wants to show that "it is now too late for the little people to turn back the tide. In a spirit of kindness Quigley is therefore urging them not to fight the noose which is already around their necks. He feels certain that those who do will only choke themselves to death. On the other hand, those who go along with the immense pressure which is beginning to be felt by all humanity will eventually find themselves in a man made millennium of peace and prosperity.
All through his book. Dr. Quigley assures us that we can trust these benevolent, well meaning men who are secretly operating behind the scenes. They are the Hope of the world. All who resist them represent Tragedy. Hence, the title for his book."
Skousen goes on: "To assure us of his own unique qualification for the writing of this book, Dr Quigley states:
I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960s, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. I have objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies . . . but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known(Quigley, p.950, emphasis added).
"Anyone reading Dr. Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope will have little difficulty detecting the tremendous self esteem of the author. He considers himself not only an ‘insider’ but a member of the intellectual elite among the insiders. He feels that the forces of total global control are now sufficiently entrenched so that they can reveal their true identity without fear of being successfully overturned. He expresses the utmost contempt for members of the American middle class who think they can preserve what he calls their ‘petty bourgeois’ property rights and constitutional privileges."
Skousen is sharply critical of Carroll Quigley’s arrogant assumptions, but acknowledges that Quigley takes issue with the money masters’ desire to keep their conspiratorial subversion a secret. He thinks it is time people knew who was running things. "The real value of Tragedy and Hope," writes Skousen, "is not so much as a ‘history of the world in our time’ (as its subtitle suggests) but rather as a bold and boastful admission by Dr Quigley that there actually exists a relatively small but powerful group which has succeeded in acquiring a choke hold on the affairs of practically the entire human race." He adds, "Of course, we should be quick to recognize that no small group could wield such gigantic power unless millions of people in all walks of life were ‘in on the take’ and were willing to knuckle down to the iron clad regimentation of the ruthless bosses behind the scene." And: "perhaps we should have anticipated just such a development. [For] anyone familiar with the writings of John’s Apocalypse might have suspected that modern history would eventually contain the account of a gigantic complex of political and economic power which would cover the whole earth."
And again: "Dr. Quigley assures us that this type of global power structure is on the verge of becoming a total reality. He points out that during the past two centuries, when the peoples of the world were gradually winning their political freedom from the dynastic monarchies, the major banking families of Europe and America were actually reversing the trend by setting up new dynasties of political control through the formation of’ international financial combines. Dr Quigley points out that these banking dynasties had learned that all governments must have sources of revenue from which to borrow in times of’ emergency. They had also learned that by providing such funds from their own private resources, they could make both kings and democratic leaders tremendously subservient to their will. It had proven to be a most effective means of controlling political appointments and deciding political issues."
CONCEPT AND POSSIBILITY OF ECONOMIC MELTDOWN
First, Back To Basics, And The "Here And Now" With the scene set by Professor Carroll Quigley, we should now pause and go right back to square one and our favourite analogy of – you’ve guessed it – the hen! We buy organic food where possible. Far from the world painted by Quigley our local farm shop is located in one of the rambling buildings around the sprawling farmyard. We can see the hens whose eggs we purchase roaming freely. The message is clear. A natural source of food out of reach, if precariously so, of the factory or insane bureaucratic regulation. Eggs are produced naturally by our hens, like meat and milk from our cattle, regardless of fiscal or other artificial constraints on the availability of "money" with which to purchase these vital commodities. Yet a hugely complex "umbilical cord", a "dotted line", links those portrayed by Quigley and their Power to determine our ability to consume our own natural resources; or alternatively to face starvation.
The principle is little different to that in which certain nations possess natural resources upon which we have come to depend, but do not have; such as precious or strategic metals, or oil. Then we have the added complication of fair trade, or exchange, strategic monopoly, exploitation, or even war to maintain control, as in the case of that now being planned against Iraq.
Food is a perfect example. The great lie is shortage. We read of starvation in the Third World. Yet food production is being deliberately controlled and even run down in the West. Prices to the farmer are being systematically strangled by multi-national corporations and retailing chains with the complicity of subservient governments. Yet costs to the consumer are artificially inflated by a vast transport industry committed to moving – exchanging – like items quite unnecessarily between producer nations.
Cui bono – who profits, inter alia? The mighty oil industry. As East European countries of the former Soviet Union are lured into an European Union, their indigenous agriculture is similarly threatened as multinational corporations and manufacturing industries move in in search of cheap labour and other low cost overheads. The present British Government is determined on the destruction of traditional, small and medium-scale family agriculture. This example of the magnitude of the betrayal of domestic interests in the interests of the global economic model came to On Target from Farming and Livestock Concern U.K. It was written in Thailand, and was dated 19th October, 2002:
* Britain has signed a counter trade agreement under which it will promote sales of Thai agricultural produce in return for supplying weapons to the military. The deal was signed yesterday by the British ambassador Lloyd Smith and General Chavalit Yongchaiyudh, deputy Prime Minister overseeing security matters. Under the pact, the British Government would seek to increase imports of local farm produce, as well as find new markets for Thai goods. In return, the military would procure arms from B.A.E. Systems Co., formerly known as British Aerospace. Also in attendance at the signing ceremony were Defence Minister General Thammarak Isarangkura and defence deputy permanent secretary General Uthai Shinawatra.
Zambia is said to be threatened by starvation, yet the Zambian Government refuses to accept Western "aid" in the form of Genetically Modified grain from the United States. Far from any question of altruistic concern we read that the United States is over-producing such that this output must be foisted on overseas markets ("U.S. ‘Dumping unsold G.M. food on Africa", The Guardian, 7th October, 2002). United States conglomerates can patent – steal – Indian Basmati rice and traditional indigenous seed varieties, yet Union Carbide has still to be brought to justice for the Bhopal chemical pollution disaster. Such is the Power of the United States.
Multinational Corporations like Monsanto and Syngenta, far from showing concern for Third World privation, far from any euphemistic consideration of "aid", enslave Third World countries with the use of "terminator" seed, contractual obligations to imported commercial seed, herbicides, insecticides, fertilizers and so on. Commodities reports in the financial columns reflect not "aid", or concern for "starvation", but export markets, and the United States-driven imposition of G.M. grain, soya, rice and cotton.
The Rise And Fall Of The Economic Vortex We may apply these principles to the over-production of virtually any product or commodity. We may apply them to control and exploitation through the World Trade Organisation (W.T.O.), International Monetary Fund (I.M.F.), or the World Bank, or to unilateral action by Multinational Corporations and, principally, the United States. It is a one-way traffic of exploitation by the powerful of the weak. There is little evidence of fair exchange. The basis of this is the almost unlimited, deregulated creation of "money" to facilitate this global economic scenario. We visualise this as an inverted cone spinning on its tip in precarious equilibrium. For another view of this one may proceed to a very simplistic but highly descriptive example applied to investment in government expenditure, corporate finance or the military-industrial complex.
Bonds are issued, say British Government Gilt-Edged Securities. These are marketed to the purchaser as interest bearing investments. To be viable such investments have to be one jump ahead of the debtor, be it on the basis, say, of gov-ernment taxation or manufacturing costs. Thus government or corporate debt can never catch up if there is to be an income benefit to the bond holder. Our "cone" spins on ever upwards as more money is created. What we have in effect is a leap-frogging process in which "Growth" must be ever upwards as this debt chases its own tail. We therefore have the endless search for advantageous investment in Third World and Developing Nations, as in the case of China, and the eternal burden of debt recycling – in other words, economic slavery – in the case of resource-rich Latin American Nations like Brazil and the Argentine.
What goes up must inevitably come down again. National governments and private businesses routinely spend ahead into debt; the individual is likewise spending ahead; on credit; in other words, all with money they do not possess in real terms. Sooner or later this economic model must begin to unravel. This has happened in a big way following the attack on the World Trade Centre, in New York, on 11th September, 2002, although the reality is that it was already in train by then.
Beginning with the obvious fields of tourism and air transport, one sector after another has begun to crumble in a chain reaction. Direct or indirect personal investments for retirement, for example, contract with the contraction of the markets, the profits from which sustain the essential income benefit. This is because global scale investors such as banks and insurance corporations pass on this meltdown to the customer, as we have seen currently in the case of Equitable Life and Standard Life Insurance in the United Kingdom. We see ominous portents in the exponential rise of "money" chasing debt, ultimately on a global scale. A single family breadwinner is no longer able to sustain a mortgage; indeed, we are well into the era of working wives as an economic necessity. Predictably, electorates have deliberately been kept in the dark about the economic mechanisms and reasons by the governments they elect and the controlled Media. Instead, other subterfuges come into play, for example, as retirement pension values evaporate.
The Financial Services Sector attempts to seduce property owners to liquidate their assets, as in the Norwich Union leaflet:
"Need more money for your retirement? Cash in on the money locked in your home".
"Family Silver" And The Pawnbroker Syndrome The late Lord Stockton referred to Privatisation as selling the family silver. State controlled enterprises traditionally bear a political cachet; the old Labour Party Clause 4 of public ownership. One essential truth is that private sector ownership is infinitely more efficient than over-manning and other constraints under public ownership. The inefficient state enterprise hierarchy has tended to metamorphose to head privatised industries. Political and Civil Service incompetence and the profit motive have seriously destabilised the railway system in the United Kingdom. Unless surplus labour thrown up by private ownership is physically culled, it must find employment and remuneration elsewhere, thus drawing on and recirculating through the same economic model. These all tend to involve dangerous half-truths. Privatisation can only be a stopgap in accruing capital against an on-going commitment to debt. The same applies to the sell-off and lease back of public – Government – buildings.
The Private Sector Finance Initiative is yet another form of Privatisation, by inviting external investment, and therefore influence and control. Many State functions are beleaguered by bureaucratic incompetence and organic inefficiency, but private finance must inevitably result in greater exposure to market forces and the need for Government intervention, as in the case of the railways and air traffic control. The only publicity of which we are aware has come in the form of advertisements in the Morning Star by the General, Municipal, Boilermakers trade union. Although these each refer to a private company investing in the Health Service in the United Kingdom, the principle is equally applicable to the Global Economic Model as a whole. Here is the relevant text from one of the advertisements (emphasis added):
* Balfour Betty is a private company that provides a range of services for the public sector. So far it has 16 P.F.I. contracts with a total value of £1,558,700. The company is very happy with their work. Their latest report states that P.F.I. "will provide a stable long-term profit and cash stream". . . . Every pound going into Balfour Beatty’s profits is a pound less for extra nurses and extra treatments.
On the global scale we have long had debt-equity "swaps", an endless cycle of debt "rescheduling" as in Brazil and the Argentine, and privatisation of public services. This is no more than asset stripping by the Global Power Brokers to keep corporate profits one step ahead of the debt; in other words, to prevent our "spinning cone" from toppling over – the meltdown.
To give multinational corporations and the banks behind them greater leverage to avert this spiralling crisis, the Global Power Brokers have attempted, so far unsuccessfully, to force through the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (M.A.I.). This would simply have given Multi-national Corporations authority over the interests of elected national governments. Through the World Trade Organisation (W.T.O.), another subterfuge, the General Agreement on Trade in Services (G.A.T.S.), now opens vital National services, such as education, to foreign investors; in other words, to international Privatisation!
THE GLOBAL NEMESIS OF PROFIT, POWER AND GREED
The Growth Of Unregulated United States Power From the end of the Nineteenth Century the growth of United States economic and military Power evolved to become effectively un-challenged with the collapse of Soviet Communism during the 1980s. Virtually absolute double standards have prevailed in the Middle East in the case of Israeli oppression of the Palestinian people and the continuing theft of their land. The will of the United Nations is largely ignored. What the United States says, or vetoes, goes. The genocidal war between Iraq and Iran from 1980 to 1988 was sponsored by the United States-dominated Western Powers.
Iraq was set up, through its incursion into Kuwait, in 1990. Allies in the resultant Gulf War of 1991 were in truth "bought off" by the United States either on the basis of debt to the Global Economy, or because they stood to gain collectively from that Economy. The United States plans again to force the hand of the United Nations, eventually to launch a war against Iraq in order to control Iraqi oilfields. When the Financial Times writes that "Nations ponder whether they can afford to oppose U.S. stance", with bar charts showing statistically the economic dependence of individual members of the United Nations Security Council on the United States, there can no longer be any pretence.
General Carl von Clausewitz, in his treatise On War(7), famously stated that:
We see, therefore, that War is not merely a political act, but also a real political instrument, a continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same by other means. Senior military officers are expected to defend the "National Interests", and may be seen generally to accept this duty at face value. However, this may be seen also in the context of the integrity of those interests for those who care – or dare – to inquire.
During the so-called "Cold War", any deviation from these loyalties carried a serious connotation of betrayal as was detailed by Sir Clive Rose in The Soviet Propaganda Network – A Directory Of Organisations Serving Soviet Foreign Policy(8). Nevertheless the organisation "Generals for Peace and Disarmament" described by Rose consisted of fifteen retired West European and American generals. The original eight founders included Admiral J.M. Lee of the United States Navy and the late Brigadier Michael Harbottle from the United Kingdom.
In the light of the subsequent collapse of Soviet Communism the rise of unchallenged United States Power and the writing of Professor Carroll Quigley in Tragedy and Hope, one has to ask, however, precisely what are the National Interests? Highly complex and convoluted relations between the Global Power Brokers in the West and the Communist system may be seen in a very different light today.
Admiral Lee, Brigadier Harbottle and their confederates were not the first to have reservations. This speech by Major General Smedley Butler of the United States Marine Corps, often quoted of late, was delivered as long ago as 1933:
* War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses. I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we’ll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag. I wouldn’t go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket. There isn’t a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its "finger men" to point out enemies, its "muscle men" to destroy enemies, its "brain men" to plan war preparations, and a "Big Boss" Super Nationalistic Capitalism.
* It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.
I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909 1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil (now Exxon-Mobil), went its way unmolested. During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.
The Cabinet of President George W. Bush, comprised of multi-millionaires, is the richest on record in the United States. Vice-President Dick Cheney has his roots in the oil business. Secretary for Defense Donald Rumsfeld is estimated to be worth between $61,000,000 and $245,000,000. Outside the cabinet, National security Adviser Condoleezza Rice also has her roots in the oil business. Collectively the Bush team is the visible front behind which lies the Global Power Brokerage revealed by Professor Carroll Quigley in Tragedy and Hope.
This article, "The World according to Cheney, Rice and Rumsfeld", by Michael Byers, from the London Review of Books, 21st February, 2002, puts this Power in perspective:.
* The United States Government wields more power than any regime since the Roman Empire. . . . Decisions reached on Wall Street and in Washington reverberate around the world. Corporate America, the regulatory infrastructure that supports it and the pension funds that propel it, are the dominant influences on economic policy in Europe, Asia, South America and elsewhere, not to mention on the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (I.M.F.), and the World Trade Organisation (W.T.O.). The collapse of Enron may have demonstrated the fragility of corporate structures, but it also exposed the fevered mating that goes on between business and political elites. Enron was more influential than all but a handful of nation-states. Last Spring, I asked an Argentinian diplomat what he thought of his country becoming part of the Free Trade Area of the Americas, currently being initiated at the initiative of a number of United States-based corporations. He said, with evident regret: "We have no choice".
* If the Republicans win back control of the Senate [which they have since done – Ed.], the momentum generated by 11th September could continue largely unchecked for another two years, giving Cheney, Rice and Rumsfeld all the time they need to reshape our world. Should they succeed, the day the World Trade Center collapsed will without doubt be regarded as historically more significant than the day the Berlin Wall fell. . . . The importance of decisions made in Washington today eclipses that of decisions made in the United Nations – and not just for Americans. Citizens of other countries find themselves in a position which has its ironies; victims of a 21st Century form of "taxation without representation", subject to the governance of a foreign power but deprived of any voice,
Apocalypse – The Nemesis Of Unlimited Power To Create Money Aida Parker is a veteran journalist who publishes her regular APN Newsletter in Johannesburg, South Africa. Many years on the staff of The Citizen, she is an expert on finance and has numerous close contacts in financial circles in the United States. In the June, 2002, issue of APN, she wrote of the coming economic collapse under the heading "U.S. Economy At Dead Stop: Armageddon Approaches":
* We saw it coming: but United States financial and corporate blow-out is now right on top of the bloodiest smash-up in history, far more damaging than anyone could have foreseen. And it becomes critical: already in certain sectors worse than the Great Depression of fearsome memory. The facade of United States financial impregnability built up over the past decade is kaput. Its much-delayed recession is here. Of most immediate danger is the staggering stock market debacle. That alone guarantees catastrophe. Total investor losses on the Wall Street meltdown now exceed $6,000,000,000,000, all of it from investor’s pockets. This crash has destroyed up to half of people’s life savings and scrambled the retirement nest eggs of more than 45,700,000 "baby boomers" due to retire over the next five years. It has vaporised the property, financial security and retirement dreams of millions. . . . The Dow Jones Stock and Standard and Poor’s 500 Stock indices are still both grossly over-valued. Historically, investors invariably over-react to such a threat, driving stocks well below their historical valuations. Yet not in the United States today. As the market moves into its third full year of stock losses, despite everything more than 50 per cent of shareholders remain in it, ensnared by the despicable lies and manipulation of the United States Government, Wall Street, Federal Reserve, all aided by the general media.
The picture gets much worse. With zero savings, householders hold $7,600,000,000,000 in debt. Such debt is at its highest in United States history, with consumers holding $1,000,000,000,000 more in debt than they earn in disposable income. All told, householders hold $5,300,000,000,000 in mortgage debt, with $1,000,000,000,000 in new home mortgages acquired in the last year. Personal bankruptcies last year were more than double those in 1990-91. 2002 will be even worse.
* Morgan Stanley recently wrote that the trade deficit is now 4.3 per cent of United States trade. If the trade deficit of a developed nation reaches as high as 5 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (G.D.P.), there is usually a drop of 20 per cent in that nation’s currency within three years. Morgan Stanley projects that the United States trade deficit could reach 6 per cent next year, which means a deficit of $2,000,000,000 a day. Net real investment in the United States is now nil. Further, the United States has been importing far more than it exports. Much of corporate America is in deep trouble. There have been five consecutive quarters of declining corporate profit. United States companies now owe a record $4,700,000,000,000 to banks, venture capitalists, bondholders, money funds and other institutions. The Federal Reserve Board says this debt is growing almost three times faster then G.D.P.
In 2001, more than 40,000 businesses filed for bankruptcy. Estimates are that 652 big companies will have a tough job surviving another year. Xerox has $162,000,000,000 in debt, exponentially more than it has assets. Nextel has $16,700,000,000 of debt, only $4,200,000,000 in cash reserves. Both could fall into bankruptcy. Del Monte, General Mills, Trump Hotels & Casinos, Ford, Kellogg, Campbell Soup, 7-Eleven, all are in trouble. Boeing’s orders dropped 45 per cent last year. Hotel chains are plagued with very high vacancy rates; steel makers have 50 per cent in excess capacity, and the worst earnings in 40 years. The Ford Motor Company is closing five plants in North America, and has chalked up 35,000 job cuts over the past year. Aida Parker further wrote, in the same issue of her Newsletter, the following paragraphs under the title "Wall Street’s day of reckoning: U.S. Corporate Lies backfire":
* Just when the United States Government and Wall Street had more or less convinced millions of investors of a "great profit recovery", things have fallen apart again. A gathering storm of corporate scandals is increasingly thwarting America’s proclaimed "market comeback". The disasters that have overtaken Enron, Tyco, the auditing company, Arthur Anderson, and many others, have introduced a new element of danger that was never before this serious, even in the greatest crisis. That’s what happens when a major company’s financial returns are based on a pack of lies. The flow of news sullying the reputations of some of America’s most prestigious business leaders seems unending and has seriously rattled investors.
Fall-out? Right across the country Corporate America is under the closest scrutiny. It is a national scandal that has affected up to 2,770 companies listed on the United States stock exchanges, involving all sectors and all regions. It is likely to prove a potent election issue in the coming Congressional 2002 mid-term elections.
As we have seen with Merrill Lynch, the names of some of the most respected giant financial houses are being dragged down, with spreading consequences. . . . . Millions of Americans have lost savings, homes and retirement nest eggs in the collapse of the financial market. . . . Subpoenas have already been issued against a variety of Wall Street companies suspected of issuing false ratings. These include Credit Suisse, First Boston, Morgan Stanley, Dean Witter, Paine Webber, Bear Sterns and Salomon Smith Barney. All have been under rigorous audit, with their shares heavily clobbered. Hardly surprising, Goldman Sachs is in trouble. The Securities & Exchange Commission (S.E.C.), has been busy investigating allegations of inside trading in United States Treasury bonds. There is no doubt plenty more to look at.
Goldman’s Tokyo branch was recently suspended from trading for ten days, for violating short-selling rules and failing to disclose non-securities business.
. . . No. This recession is not over – not by a long shot. Indeed, it has barely begun. The average United States household now has more debt than income: $1.15 per dollar. The national deficit has grown non-stop. The financial pages have carried the warnings for some time. In The Times of 17th October, 2002, James Doran, in his "Wall Street Diary", wrote "Sage of the market sees mother of all crashes". Here are the key paragraphs:
* The proportion of sages, gurus and so called wise people inhabiting Wall Street has risen exponentially since the bear dug his claws so deeply into the stock market. Their daily soothsaying incantations become so doom-laden in tone that it would come as no surprise to see one morning a group of traders, their coloured jackets daubed with runes, rummaging through pails of chicken innards out on the corner of Broadway. But, perhaps, the most doom-laden of them all is Robert Prechter junior, the man whose fiendishly accurate predictions about the 1980s bull run won him the prestigious title of "guru of the decade". His new book, Conquer the Crash, describes a dismal remainder of the decade for anyone who fancies dabbling in the American stock market. Or the bond market, or any securities at all for that matter. Prechter believes that the United States economy is at the tip of a depression, far deeper than that of the 1930s. He is convinced that the depression will last about five years with unemployment reaching record levels before a twenty-year period of prosperity is ushered back.
Already $8,000,000,000,000 has been wiped off the value of shares this year with many more trillions to come, Prechter warns. The nadir will be even more terrible, he forecasts, with the Dow Jones index eventually finding a bottom below 1,000 points.
WHO ARE THE THEY, AND WHAT ARE THEIR GOALS?
We may now return to Professor Carroll Quigley’s monumental Tragedy and Hope(9) and W. Cleon Skousen’s critique of it in The Naked Capitalist(10). A number of points can be made. First, is that almost nothing moves without "money" as the medium of exchange and negotiation. Therefore, how "money" is created and valued as a currency, and how it is processed, gives overriding Powers to those who ultimately control it – Bankers.
Secondly, we note that Tragedy and Hope was written in 1966, and Skousen’s The Naked Capitalist in 1970. Organisations have evolved, and names behind them, the Global Power Brokers, have moved on; so too, has the Global Power structure. If the names have changed, similarly talented, qualified and influential successors have simply replaced them. We may see much the same as the rules of, say, Cricket, have changed over the years, just as the names, attitudes and styles of those who play at a national level have evolved. In the context of Quigley and Skousen this much becomes obvious from a study of attendees and organisations from the first meeting of the Bilderberg Group, in 1954.
We take our final extracts for the first part of this two-part edition of On Target from Skousen’s The Naked Capitalist.
* Having established how powerful the money managers of the world have now become, Dr. Quigley’s second purpose appears to have been his desire to let us know what the political philosophy of these world giants has turned out to be. This is undoubtedly the most shocking aspect of his book. It is all the more disturbing because the facts in this part of his book fit perfectly with the world of reality in which we find ourselves. Many things which have seemed inconsistent and incongruous suddenly loom up with startling clarity as Dr. Quigley provides an insider’s analysis of what has been happening.
* In the beginning of this presentation I pointed out, some of the disturbing questions which are likely to occur to anyone who has been trying to understand the significance of the amazing trends of current history. There is a growing volume of evidence that the highest centers of political and economic power have been forcing the entire human race toward a global, socialist, dictatorial oriented society. And what has been most baffling about it has been the fact that this drift toward dictatorship with its inevitable obliteration of a thousand years of struggle toward human freedom, is being plotted, promoted and implemented by the leaders of free nations and the super rich of those nations whose positions of affluence would seem to make them the foremost beneficiaries of the free enterprise, property oriented, open society in which so much progress has been made. Certainly they, above all men, should know that in order for this system to survive, freedom of action and the integrity of property rights must be preserved. Then why are the super capitalists trying to destroy them?
* Dr. Quigley provides an answer to this question but it is so startling that at first it seems virtually inconceivable. It becomes rational only as his scattered references to it are collected and digested point by point. In a nutshell, Dr. Quigley has undertaken to expose what every insider like himself has known all along that the world hierarchy of the dynastic super rich is out to take over the entire planet, doing it with Socialistic legislation where possible, but having no reluctance to use Communist revolution where necessary (Emphasis added).
* Dr. Quigley is sometimes reluctant to admit the full ramifications of his ugly thesis when the shocking and often revolting implications of it spill out on the blood stained pages of recent history. This is why we find him proving his thesis up to a point and then frantically endeavouring to cover up the consequences of it by denying the validity of what Congressional Committees have exposed through their investigations. This black thread of strange contradiction runs through several important sections of Dr. Quigley’s book, but should offer no difficulty to the reader once he understands what is happening.
* As we pointed out, Dr Quigley prides himself in being a member of this secret power group which is identified with the international jet-set of super-rich banking dynasties. He agrees with practically all of their goals and policies. However, he strongly objects to their policy of secrecy (Quigley p. 950). He wants them to receive credit for what they have been doing. He therefore undertakes to show who has been largely responsible for the massive movement toward the collectivizing power on the Socialist-Communist Left during the past fifty to seventy-five years (emphasis added).
* It began with the ideological conquest of some important people’s minds.
(To be continued in Part 2 below)
*************************
BOOK REVIEW By "Kitz"
To Kill A Nation – The Attack on Yugoslavia by Michael Parenti. Verso, 2000. 246pp. Michael Parenti’s book is the result of his visit to Yugoslavia in 1999. Using sources, friendly and hostile with intelligence and insight, he arrives at conclusions which makes one wonder why the West has been led to believe that [Slobodan] Milosevic was another Hitler, that Serbia was a demon state within a state and was the root cause of Yugoslavia’s dismemberment. Additionally, Serbia and its leaders were portrayed as being responsible for the debilitating Western sanctions and ultimately NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia and pilloried for its refusal to come to terms with the West thereby enabling it to share in its [the West’s] prosperity and democratic values. Step by step, Parenti demolishes the picture and has no doubt where the real and ultimate blame lies for the killing of a nation. In this context he cites United States policy which "has performed brilliantly and steadily in the service of those who own most of the world and who want to own it all". So after Chile, Angola and Nicaragua the United States is now poised to destabilise and ruin Iraq in its aim to own all. But why in the 1990s should the United States along with its allies, NATO, the United Nations, World Trade Organisation (W.T.O.), etc., alight upon Yugoslavia? Parenti provides several reasons.
With the fall of the Soviet Union as a global power, Yugoslavia was no longer a wedge between the West and its finance capitalism. Yugoslavia was also branded as a "Socialist state" and had to be pushed aside when it was emerging as a state tolerant of minorities and capable of building an infrastructure without Western assistance, that is, until it decided to seek financial assistance from the International Monetary Fund (I.M.F.), as a result of global economic slowdown. This provided the chink in the armour that financial capitalism had waited for and through which the likes of George Soros, the advocate of an "open society" descended upon the later rump of the Yugoslav state (Serbia, Macedonia, with Kosovo under NATO control). Parenti supplies a graphic picture of how the dismemberment of Yugoslavia took place. [Marshal] Tito died in 1980 and although not a leader to everyone’s liking, he held Yugoslavia together, preventing its racial mix from coming to the surface and threatening the security of the state. Parenti adds that there could have been every chance of Muslims living next to Serbs, Albanians and Romanies in complete harmony. However, Tito’s death and subsequent political uncertainty supplied the United States with the opportunity of destabilising the state as had been done before in several countries so that global overcapacity could be foisted on another country to disguise its own growing economic problems and its burgeoning debt.
The story then becomes almost farcical and certainly tragic as the United States with Western complicity fostered racial hatred using NATO as its instrument. First Slovenia was picked off, then Croatia and in effect Bosnia-Herzegovina until all that was left was Serbia and Macedonia, with mineral-rich Kosovo within Serbia’s borders. At this stage all that was needed after the imposition of the Dayton Accords was the skilful portrayal of Serbia as a demonised state intent upon rocking the boat of peace, Western style. The farce of the Rambouillet conference in which the Serbian leader Milosevic became synonymous as a brutal dictator in his quest for a Greater Serbia to be achieved by a process of ethnic cleansing took place in 1999, termed the Rambouillet ambush by Parenti. The massive bombing campaign which followed at the hands of NATO may yet turn out to be one of the obscenities of Western finance capitalism. Yugoslavia’s infrastructure was virtually destroyed as the almost mythical daily briefings of Jamie Shea continued to invent stories of Serbian atrocities including pillage and rape.
Sebrenica a massacre? Parenti asks where is the evidence and like so many other stories of Albanians and Kosovars being gunned down in cold blood by Serbs, such evidence does not and never has existed. Some excesses common to war there were but how do these equate with NATO’s deliberate bombing of hospitals, columns of refugees and the destruction of bridges, roads and railways? What about the use of depleted uranium (D.U.), in NATO weaponry which might even outlast Yugoslavia and possibly the world itself with the effects of its radioactive pollution? But NATO has done its job and now the finance capitalistic vultures are hovering over such succulent morsels as the Trepca Mines.
The future for Yugoslavia, Parenti concludes is grim. He points out that Yugoslavia might become as impoverished as Bulgaria and Romania (client states of the I.M.F.), are at present. Parenti bitterly criticises the all-consuming greed of multinational corporations, the unfeeling, calculating roles of bankers and the vanity and powerlessness of politicians in this obscene process. Will we ever learn and perhaps one day put President Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Tony Blair and Wesley Clark into the dustbins of history where, on the evidence Parenti provides, they rightly belong?
REFERENCES Note: Prices are shown where available from Bloomfield Books, and represent only a selection relevant to the theme of this edition of On Target. Material geared to the text is numbered. Publications of general interest are listed unnumbered. A wide range of reading may be found in the Stock Price List. Out of print, or older works, may be obtained through the Book Search Service, or the Second-Hand Book Service, both of which are operated by Mr. T.G. Turner, for which details are available as for the S.P.L.
(1) Parenti, Michael. To Kill A Nation – The Attack on Yugoslavia. Verso, 2000.
(2) On Target, Vol. 29, Nos. 21 & 22, 8th & 22nd April, 2000.
(3) Skousen, W. Cleon. The Naked Capitalist – A Review and Commentary on Dr Carroll Quigley’s Book: Tragedy And Hope – A History of the World in Our Time. W. Cleon Skousen, 1970. £12.00.
(4) Quigley, Carroll. Tragedy And Hope – A History of the World in Our Time. 1,348pp. Originally published by the Macmillan Company, New York, 1966. Reprinted by G.S.G. Associates, Rancho Palos, Verdes, California, United States, with permission. H/B. £47.95.
(5) Quigley, Carroll. The Anglo-American Establishment – From Rhodes To Cliveden. Books In Focus, Inc., 1981. £22.95.
(6) Martin, Rose L. Fabian Freeway – High Road To Socialism In The U.S.A. 1884-1966. Western Islands, 1966.
(7) Clausewitz, General Carl von. On War, translated by Colonel J.J. Graham. In three volumes. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd., 1908.
(8) Rose, Sir Clive. The Soviet Propaganda Network – A Directory Of Organis-ations Serving Soviet Foreign Policy. Pinter Publishers, 1988.
(9) Quigley, Carroll. Tragedy And Hope – A History of the World in Our Time. Op. cit.
(10) Skousen, W. Cleon. The Naked Capitalist. Op. cit. – Hyman, Sidney.
The Aspen Idea. University of Oklahoma Press, 1975. – Perloff, James.
The Shadows Of Power – The Council on Foreign Relations And The American Decline. Western Islands, 1988. £15.95. – Engdahl. F. William.
A Century of War – Anglo-American Oil Politics And The New World Order. Dr. Böttiger Verlags-GmbH, 1992. £12.95. – Chomsky, Noam.
Profit Over People – Neoliberalism and Global Order. Seven Stories Press, 1999. – Hertz, Noreena.
The Silent Takeover – Global Capitalism and the Death of Democracy. William Heinemann, 2001. – Korten, David C.
When Corporations Rule The World. Kumarian Press, Inc., and Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc, 2001. £16.75.
Further material may be found in the Bloomfield Books Stock Price List (S.P.L.). This is available from the address below. Prices for all material include postage in the United Kingdom. Overseas orders add 20% for surface mail (Europe add 20% for automatic air mail) or 55% for airmail. (U.S. readers should add 60% after adding postage to the U.K. prices, and send payment in U.S. dollars with a cheque drawn on a bank in the U.S.A. made payable to "Donald A. Martin"). All from Donald A. Martin, Bloomfield Books at: 26 Meadow Lane, Sudbury, Suffolk, England, CO10 2TD.
EXTRA COPIES: As a service to our readers, extra copies and back numbers of On Target are available at £2 for a single copy, £1.50 each for 2 – 10 copies, 75p each for 11 – 50 copies, and over 50 copies at 50p each. (quantity prices only apply per issue). ON TARGET INDEXES. These are available from Bloomfield Books, currently for Volumes 22-29. The price is 50 pence per copy, per volume (all 8 volumes – £3.50). See address below. On Target is printed and published by Intelligence Publications (U.K.) 26 Meadow Lane, SUDBURY, Suffolk, ENGLAND CO10 2TD. By private subscription only at the following rates: U.K. – £20 per annum U.S.A. – Surface Mail U.S.$45 per annum- Air Mail U.S.$50 per annum Elsewhere overseas – Surface Mail £25 per annum – Air Mail £30 per annum
Reproduction, without prior agreement, of the contents of this publication is subject to the acknowledgment of the source, together with the address and subscription rates, and provided a copy of any reproduction is sent immediately to the publisher. Editor and Publisher: Donald A. Martin Copyright © D.A. Martin Deputy Editor and Research Department: Barry S. Turner
Part II
FOOD FOR THOUGHT Through deregulation and the removal of national economic borders we have created a global economy more powerful than any national government – and it is flying on autopilot right into the face of a great mountain. Yet in 1992, when I flew from Manila, Philippines, to New York City and began writing When Corporations Rule the World, few seemed to notice.
The number of people in the United States actively concerned about the issues of corporate globalization could have met around a very small conference table. Gradually the excesses of C.E.O. [Chief Executive Officer] compensation, the unceremonious firing of tens of thousands of employees by companies reporting record profits, the wholesale movement of previously well-paid jobs to countries where workers are paid pennies an hour, and the wave of buyouts by corporate raiders began to attract public attention. More and more lives are being disrupted or ruined in the pursuit of quick profits.
David C.Korten, in When Corporations Rule the World(11)
WHY A MAJOR WAR IS NEEDED THE GLOBAL ECONOMY AND THOSE WHO CONTROL IT
Published in 2 Parts – Part 2
INTRODUCTION TO PART 2 Note: To avoid repetition it is important as we read on to take note of the key references given at the start of Part 1. References in the text continue in the numerical sequence of Part 1. In Part 1 we considered Global Power and the money system that constitutes the lifeblood – the "power grid" – of these forces(12). Our analysis was based largely on Tragedy and Hope, by Professor Carroll Quigley(13). This 1,348-page tome by a man who considered himself to be an "insider", one of "them", must be regarded as a definitive work of its kind. The second work that formed the basis of our analysis is The Naked Capitalist, by W. Cleon Skousen(14). This, in its turn, is a penetrating assessment of Quigley’s book. Quigley was published in 1966; Skousen in 1970. We therefore need to project our analysis further. But save for natural turnover, the same Ruling Class remains in Power. Little of the structure has changed other than in the fine-tuning of scale, balance and concentration.
In Part 1 we referred to the repeated rescheduling, the debt slavery, in Brazil and Argentina as characteristic of exploitation of the Third and Developing Worlds. This is going on today, and is well described by Michael Rowbotham in Goodbye America!(15).
More than a decade ago, in 1991, we could read numerous reports in the Financial Times: "Multinationals warn Brazil over free [trade] zone (21st May, 1991), "Creditor banks to discuss Brazilian debt proposal" (26th September, 1991), "Foreign cars flow into Brazil to meet surging demand"(2nd October, 1991) and "Brazil set for $2bn pact with I.M.F. soon" (13th November, 1991). As Argentina was forced to open its economy we read "Menem sweeps away economic regulations" (1st November, 1991).
Of Mexico we read "Lessons learned from privatisation – A record-breaking sell off programme" (25th October, 1991).
The Industrial Revolution brought to the Twentieth Century a mighty war machine, the scale and expenditure of which was demonstrated by the 1914-18 and 1939-45 wars alone. As part of an industrialising economy the entire balance of employment changed. The drive for efficiency, in other words, for competitive and economic survival, and an exponential rise in technology after 1945, have seen further fundamental changes. The so-called "International Community" is now compelled to secure strategic natural resources by force if necessary. "Money" remains the master that drives perpetual Growth as debt chases its own tail. Military Power and the supporting activities that depend on it; the Military-Industrial complex itself, air and sea transport and so on, have become a fast-track "burn-off", an economic safety valve in their own right.
Nato was formed as a force of the United States and subordinate European Powers specifically as a defence against the armies of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. Today, with a virtual absence of public debate or approval, it has become the enforcement arm of the United States-driven "International Community". That this principle is being extended to enable the Global Power Brokers to employ military force in the Middle East, or anywhere else in pursuance of their interests, is clear from official Nato publications(16)(17).
On the 12th November, 2002, we read already of plans to employ Nato forces in Afghanistan ( "Nato poised to take role in Kabul", Financial Times, 12th November, 2002).
SECRETIVE RULERS OF THE PLANET
A Scenario Of Global Power And Those Who Exercise It
We would probably look in vain for a cabal behind the cabal. It is almost impossible, perhaps surreal, with even a spiritual dimension, to imagine some secret, inner, unknown group, invisible even to a publicly recognisable Ruling Elite. Many names are in any case unknown to the public at large. Much business will be transacted in exclusive clubs and at private gatherings.
In 1931, Lady Queenborough wrote in great detail of secret sects and societies going back through the centuries(18). Many of these societies employed Masonic style rituals and organisations. Secrecy there undoubtedly is.
It can be no accident that we have found no references in any biography of the important Nineteenth Century Italian revolutionary Guiseppe Mazzini to link Mazzini with Albert Pike, the Grand Master of Grand Orient Freemasonry in the United States. Yet Lady Queenborough recorded their extensive correspondence. It is perfectly logical to expect the same deliberate control over information today, and indeed this has been demonstrated many times over.
In Tragedy and Hope, and The Anglo-American Establishment(19), Professor Carroll Quigley dealt extensively with the secret society founded by Cecil Rhodes and those groups that evolved from it. Here is what Quigley wrote in 1966(20):
* As Governor-General and High Commissioner of South Africa in the period 1897-1905, [Sir Alfred, later Lord] Milner recruited a group of young men, chiefly from Oxford and from Toynbee Hall, to assist him in organising his administration. Through his influence these men were able to win influential posts in government and international finance and became the dominant influence in British imperial and foreign affairs up to 1939. Under Milner in South Africa they were known as Milner’s Kindergarten until 1910. In 1909-1913 they organised semisecret groups, known as Round Table Groups, in the chief British dependencies and the United States. These still function in eight countries. . . . In 1919 they founded the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) for which the chief financial supporters were Sir Abe Bailey and the Astor family (owners of The Times).
Similar Institutes of International Affairs were established in the chief British dominions and in the United States (where it is known as the Council on Foreign Relations) in the period 1919-1927. After 1925 a somewhat similar structure of organisations, known as the Institute of Pacific Relations, was set up in twelve countries holding territory in the Pacific area, the units in each British dominion existing on an interlocking basis with the Round Table Group and Royal Institute of International Affairs in the same country.
Close to the network spawned by Milner were the Fellowship of All Souls College, Oxford, and the Rhodes Trust which grants scholarships to study at Oxford. Many Rhodes scholars have found their way into positions of influence. Apart from United States President Bill Clinton himself, fellow Rhodes scholars were appointed to his administration in 1993.
The World Economic Forum is based at Davos, in Switzerland. Each year the International financiers, leading politicians and other "movers and shakers" meet there for a World Business Summit(21). The same individuals, as one follows the pattern and permutation of names, can associate discreetly at the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies in Colorado, in the United States(22). The International Foundation Directory(23) describes the Ditchley Foundation as follows:
* Founded in 1955 by Sir David Wills to promote, carry out or advance charitable objects, and in particular any branches or aspects of education likely to be for the common benefit of British subjects and citizens of the U.S.A. . . . Organizes conferences on topics of international concern to the British and American people, with the participation of other nationalities, particularly from Member States of the European Union.
American and Canadian Ditchley Foundations exist with similar aims, and to assist in the work of the United Kingdom Ditchley Foundation. Robert Eringer, who has carried out extensive research into the Bilderberg Group and Trilateral Commission, describes Ditchley Park as a "centre of intrigue" and writes rather differently(24). We are inclined to the Eringer version, as we shall understand when we examine names and linkages:
* This [American Ditchley Foundation] sponsors select, Bilderberg-like gatherings at Ditchley Park, a remote estate of over a thousand acres in the Oxfordshire countryside. . . . The 250 year-old house is equipped with modern conference rooms, interpretation circuits and closed-circuit televisions. It is elegantly decorated with valuable antiques and priceless paintings. . . . Presidential advisors, senators, bankers and businessmen from the United States gather frequently at Ditchley to meet with their British counterparts, but their comings and goings through nearby Kidlington Airport are rarely reported by the press. The palatial manor is regularly used for high-level weekend conferences by officials from the Home Office, diplomats from the Foreign and Commonwealth office, and for private meetings of British, European and international political leaders. . . . The Board of Governors at Ditchley includes former Bilderberg chairman Lord Home, Bilderberg steering committee members Lord Roll [since at least 1974] and Henry Heinz II, and at least twelve other Bilderbergers. . . .
Another body that merits serious consideration is the Group of Thirty economists, businessmen and financiers, and one that has remained virtually unknown. We wrote of this under the heading "Smoky mirrors in the corridors of power"(25). The Group was chaired at the time of writing by Dr Jacob A. Frankel, Vice Chairman of Merrill Lynch International, former Chairman of the Bank of Israel and former Director of Research at the International Monetary Fund. He had also served as Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Inter-American Development Bank and as Vice Chairman of the European Bank for Reconstruction. The immediate predecessor to this versatile individual was Bilderberger Paul A. Volcker, who was Chairman of the American Federal Reserve Board until 1987 and is Chairman of the Trilateral Commission. Volcker is also, or has been, on the boards of, or associated with, J. Rothschild Wolfensohn, Lord Black’s Hollinger-Telegraph newspaper group, the food conglomerate Nestlé and Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan Bank. Without an in-depth analysis it is almost impossible to suggest the extent to which individual members of the Group of Thirty deliberate on their own initiative, or act only with delegated authority, but the membership is usefully repeated here:
* Leszck Balcerowicz: Architect of Poland’s economic transformation, and former Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance.
* Geoffrey Bell: President of Geoffrey Bell and Co., and Secretary for the Group of Thirty.
* Sir Roderick Carnegie: Chairman, Hudson Conway Limited & Adacel Technologies Limited, Australia.
* Domingo Cavallo: former Minister of the Economy of Argentina and a Member of Congress.
* E. Gerald Corrigan: Managing Director of Goldman Sachs & Company, and former President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
* Andrew Crockett: General Manager, Bank for International Settlements.
* Guillermo de la Dehesa Romero: Consejero Delegado of Spain’s Banco Pastor.
* Jacques de Larosierc: former Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund and former President of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
* Richard Dobs: Advisory Director of Morgan Stanley & Company.
* Gerhard Fels: Managing Director of the Insitut der Deutschen Wirt-schaft Koln, Germany.
* Stanley Fischler: Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, former Vice President, Development Economics and Chief Economist at the World Bank and Gillian Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.); Bilderberg Group.
* Victor K. Fung: Chairman of the Hong Kong Trade Development Council.
* Toyon Gyohten: President of the Institute for International Monetary Affairs and former Chairman of the Bank of Tokyo.
* Gerd Hausler: formerly Managing Director of Dresdner Bank and the Deutsche Bundesbank.
* John G. Heimann: Chairman of the Financial Stability Institute and formerly Chairman, Global Financial Institutions of Merrill Lynch and United States Comptroller of the Currency.
* Peter B. Kenen: Walker Professor of Economics and International Finance, Princeton University.
* Paul Krugrnan: New York Times columnist and Professor of Economics at the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University.
* William J. McDonough: President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and Chairman of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision.
* Mervyn King: Deputy Governor of the Bank of England.
* Arminio Fraga Neto: Governor of the Central Bank of Brazil and former Managing Director of Soros Fund Management.
* Shijuro Ogata: former Deputy Governor for International Relations, Bank of Japan.
* Sylvia Ostry: Distinguished Research Fellow at The Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto.
* Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa: Member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank.
* William Rhodes: Vice Chairman of Citigroup.
* Ernest Stern: Managing Director of J.P. Morgan and former Managing Director of the World Bank.
* Jean-Claude Trichet: Governor of the Banque de France; Bilderberg Gp.
* Sir David Walker: Chairman of Morgan Stanley International in London.
* Marina v N Whitman: Professor of Business Administration and Public Policy at the University of Michigan.
* Yutaka Yamaguchi: Deputy Governor of the Bank of Japan.
The Bilderberg Group We are tempted to pursue the quest for an ultimate source, some remote pinnacle of Power; an absolute, to no purpose. That a tiny, exclusive group could control the course of world events would be like trying to steer an ocean liner with a tea spoon. Dynasties unquestionably exist, of which the best known are the Rothschild and Rockefeller families, but over two centuries the extent of their vast wealth as a source of their Power will be too well concealed today.
Others wield enormous Power, but can only be considered as "mattoids"; functionaries, of whom Dr Henry Kissinger is a classic example. Kissinger is undoubtedly extremely wealthy in his own right but, as a former Intelligence sergeant in the United States Army, he was picked out and groomed for Power by Nelson Rockefeller.
The Bilderberg Group was founded in 1954 and takes its name from the hotel in Holland where the first meeting took place. The Bilderberg Group remained relatively unknown and had been kept strictly out of the public gaze despite brief press interest in 1977-80 ("An exclusive club, perhaps without power, but certainly with influence", The Times, 18th April, 1977; "Kingmakers – Shadows behind the men of power" and "Secret meetings to shape the world", Daily Mirror, 12th & 13th February, 1980).
However, in 1998, when the conference took place at the Turnberry Hotel, in Scotland, the Bilderberg Group received an unwelcome flurry of press attention, initially in The Scotsman, a newspaper noticeably less deferential than those South of the border. It was probably no accident that shortly afterwards a little-known journalist, Jon Ronson, produced a rather flaccid exposure of secret societies that we suspect was intended to take the heat out of any interest(26).
Predictably, a similarly lame television exposure followed. Equally predictably, as intended, public interest faded.
Regardless of this uncomfortably high, if transient profile, the Global Elite have not travelled the world each year for almost half a century for no reason. Nor have these annual conferences been held in conditions of the tightest security, with armed guards, even to the point of clearing hotels of other guests and importing replacement staff without good reason. Other, more clandestine groups exist, but there is also the continuity element. We have therefore extracted details of small, but representative selection of attendees, in two batches; the first that covering 1954 to the 1970s. This is roughly the time that Professor Carroll Quigley was writing Tragedy and Hope.
The second selection has been taken for the period late 1980s to date. Information has been taken from Robert Eringer(27), The Spotlight newspaper and its successor, the American Free Press, and three Liberty Lobby publications(28)(29)(30). Directorships and other appointments and associations are shown, past and present, where these are considered significant. Each name is annotated "a" for the earlier period, 1954 to the 1970s, and "b" for the later period. Some individuals will, of course, cover both periods.
Membership of the Trilateral Commission, "T.C." and Council on Foreign Relations, "C.F.R.", is also shown:
* Dr Giovanni Agnelli: T.C.; Hollinger-Telegraph Group; Fiat Sp.A.; Chase Manhattan Bank (a)(b).
* Robert O. Anderson: Atlantic Richfield; Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies (a).
* Dwayne O. Andreas: T.C.; Hollinger-Telegraph Group; Archer Daniels Mid-land grain trading conglomerate (b).
* George W. Ball: Lehman Brothers (a).
* Lord Black: T.C.; Chairman and Chief Executive, Hollinger-Telegraph Group (b)
* Tony Blair: Labour Party Shadow Home Secretary; currently British Prime Minister (b).
* John P. Brown: B.P.; later, Lord Brown, Chief Executive, B.P. Amoco (b).
* The Hon. Zbigniew Brzezinski: C.F.R; T.C.; Hollinger-Telegraph Group; United States National Security Affairs Adviser to President Carter (a)(b).
* The Rt Hon. Lord Carrington, K.G., C.H., G.C.M.G., M.C.:Hollinger-Telegraph Group; Kissinger Associates; Chase Manhattan Bank.(b)
* Kenneth Clarke: former British Government Minister; British and American Tobacco; Foreign and Colonial Investment Trust; Independent News & Media (b)
* Jon S. Corzine: Goldman Sachs (b).
* E. Gerald Corrigan: United States Federal Reserve Bank (b).
* Michel A. David-Weill: Lazard Frères (b).
* Stanley Fischler: T.C.; International Monetary Fund (b); Group of Thirty.
* Lawrence Freedman: Department of War Studies, King’s College, London (b)
* Stephen Friedman: T.C.; Goldman Sachs (b).
* Katharine Graham: Washington Post (b).
* Rupert N. Hambro: Hollinger-Telegraph Group; Hambros Bank (b).
* Lord (Denis) Healey: Fabian Socialist; former Cabinet Minister (a)(b).
* Henry J. Heinz II: Heinz Food Company (a)(b).
* Cor A.J. Herkstroter: Royal Dutch Shell (b).
* Thomas L. Hughes: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (a).
* Henry L. Keswick: Hollinger-Telegraph Group; Royal & Sun Alliance Insurance; Wife, Tessa Keswick, formerly a Conservative Government Adviser (b).
* The Hon. Henry A. Kissinger: T.C.; Hollinger-Telegraph Group; Kissinger Associates; Cargill food trading conglomerate (a)(b).
* Sir Cyril Kleinwort: Kleinwort Benson (a).
* Andrew Knight; Economist; News International (b).
* David McLaughlin: Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies (b).
* Robert MacNamara: International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (a).
* Thomas Lamont: J.P. Morgan (a).
* Peter Mandelson: former British Cabinet Minister; ex-officio plenipotentiary (b).
* Jessica T. Matthews: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (b).
* Tomasso Padoa-Schioppa: European Central Bank (b).
* The Hon. Richard N. Perle: Hollinger-Telegraph Group; C.F.R. United States Government security and defence appointments since 1969 (b).
* Lord Robertson: Secretary-General of Nato (b).
* David Rockefeller: Chase Manhattan Bank (a)(b).
* Lord Roll of Ipsden: T.C.; Economic Minister, British Embassy to the United States; Ditchley Foundation; S.G. Warburg; U.B.S.-Warburg (a)(b).
* Baron Edmund de Rothschild: N.M. Rothschild; Rothmans International (a).
* Lord Rothschild, G.B.E.: Hollinger-Telegraph Group; Five Arrows; St James Place Capital (b).
* Sir Evelyn de Rothschild: Hollinger-Telegraph Group; N.M. Rothschild (b).
* Donald A. Rumsfeld: currently United States Secretary of Defense (a).
* The Hon. Raymond Seitz: Hollinger-Telegraph Group; T.C.; United States Ambassador to the United Kingdom; Lehman Brothers Bank (b).
* Robert Shapiro: Chief Executive, Monsanto (b).
* Gerhard Schröder; currently Federal German Chancellor (a).
* Joseph E. Slater: Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies (a).
* George Soros: Soros Fund Management (b).
* Shepard Stone: Ford Foundation; Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies (a).
* Peter D. Sutherland: T.C.; European Commission; General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (G.A.T.T.), World Trade Organisation (W.T.O.), Allied Irish Banks; Goldman Sachs International; B.P. Amoco (b)
* Martin Taylor: Barclays Bank; W.H. Smith (b).
* Jean-Claude Trichet: Banque de France; Group of Thirty (b).
* John L. Thornton: Goldman Sachs (b).
* Victor H. Umbricht: Ciba-Geigy (a).
* Martin Wolf: Financial Times (b).
* James D. Wolfensohn: World Bank; J. Henry Schroder; Salomon Brothers; James D. Wolfensohn Inc.; Rockefeller University (b).
* Paul D. Wolfowitz: T.C.; C.F.R; Assistant United States Secretary of Defence (b).
* The Hon. Paul A. Volcker: T.C.; Hollinger-Telegraph Group; Chairman United States Federal Reserve Board; Nestlé; Chase Manhattan Bank; James D. Wolfensohn Inc.; Group of Thirty (b)
Names And Networks Certain patterns emerge from a study of Bilderberg Group attendees. Potential national leaders appear to be invited once only, to be looked over. These have included future United States President Clinton, future British Prime Minister Blair and his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, and Conservative Party Leader William Hague, to name but a few. Other politicians such as Kenneth Clarke and Peter Mandelson have attended regularly and are perhaps being groomed to replace the ageing Lords Healey and Roll. This analysis can be taken further.
It is significant that from 1954, Supreme Allied Commanders in Europe seem to have attended automatically. In 1998, as the United States-driven "Nato" attack on Yugoslavia loomed, Lord Robertson, Secretary-General of Nato, attended. In 1999 Robert Shapiro and Daniel Vasella, the Chief Executives of Monsanto and Novartis A.G. respectively, attended. This followed the year in which public rebellion erupted in the United Kingdom against Genetically Modified Organisms (G.M.O.s), in foodstuffs. In the case of G.M.O.s it was possible to trace connections between Government, regulatory and advisory bodies, and the multinational retailing, food processing, agri-chemical and pharmaceutical industries.
The principle we apply in following these leads is little different to that in the case of circumstantial evidence in, say, a murder inquiry. We may take the example of the Ditchley Foundation. The Chairman of the Council of Management, Sir Antony Acland, is a former Ambassador to Washington. He was also a non-executive Director of Shell Transport and Trading. If we take the Shell Board of Directors and consider with whom Sir Antony may have been rubbing shoulders over a reasonable time-scale, we find interesting links with the Rhodes Trust.
Another former Director and a Rhodes Trustee until 1997 was Lord Armstrong of Ilminster, one-time Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Civil Service. Lord Armstrong’s other directorships have included B.A.T., N.M. Rothschild and Rio Tinto Zinc (R.T.Z.). He is currently a director of Bristol and West (Building Society) plc and the Bank of Ireland. Three fellow directors of the Bank of Ireland are also on the Bristol and West Board. Other directors include Niall FitzGerald, Chairman of Unilever and a director of the Prudential Corporation, and Ray MacSharry, a former European Commissioner for Agriculture.
Current Rhodes Trustee Professor R.J. O’Neill is Chairman of Round Table Moot, a Fellow of All Souls and Chairman of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. He is also a non-executive Director of Shell Transport and Trading, and sits on the Board with Sir John Jennings, who is a Member of the Board of Counsellors of Bechtel, the giant construction corporation which has extensive interests in the Middle East. Bechtel is closely connected with former United States Secretary of State, George Shultz.
Another current Rhodes Trustee, Lord Waldegrave, is on the Board of Bristol and West, and Dresdener Kleinwort Wasserstein, as well as being a Fellow of All Souls. Rhodes Trustee Lord (John Francis Harcourt Baring) Ashburton, was previously on the Boards of British Petroleum and Barings plc along with Bilderberger Peter Sutherland, and a member of the Court of the Bank of England.
MONEY AS A CONTROLLING POWER
In The Beginning, Man Created "Money"! The death of Lord Hambro, a man of high intelligence and urbane charm, in November this year, was another milestone in the demise of the great family banking houses. The record goes back over three centuries to the Tonnage Act of 1694 which resulted in the establishment of the Bank of England. Then began the right of the City of London to create the equivalent sum in its own "money" to that which it lent to the Government in the name of the Monarch. This new aristocracy sent its sons to the finest public schools. In later years they often went on to serve in wealthy regiments of the British Army before going on to be "something in the City". Eton and the Coldstream Guards feature regularly in the records. In effect this aristocracy of the City had won for itself the privilege of creating, lending – and controlling – the financial requirements of the Nation, for which they charged interest. In other words the people paid through taxation, and the City of London lived off the proceeds.
Once they became socially and functionally integrated with governments; not least the Treasury, as part of the Ruling Elite the battle was lost. As we take the story on to the stage at which control once exercised by the private banking houses reached the global dimensions of today, we quote freely from Professor Carroll Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope.
* In time they [the banking families] brought into their financial network the provincial banking centers, organized as commercial banks and savings banks, as well as insurance companies, to form all of these into a single financial system on an international scale which manipulated the quantity and flow of money so that they were able to influence, if not control, governments on one side and industries on the other. The men who did this . . . aspired to establish dynasties of international bankers and were at least as successful at this as were many of the dynastic political rulers. The greatest of these dynasties, of course, were the descendants of Meyer Amschel Rothschild (1743 1812) of Frankfort, whose male descendants, for at least two generations, generally married first cousins or even nieces.
Rothschild’s five sons, established at branches in Vienna, London, Naples, and Paris, as well as Frankfurt, cooperated together in ways which other international banking dynasties copied but rarely excelled. The names of some of these other banking families are familiar to all of us and should be more so. They include Baring, Lazard, Erlanger, Warburg, Schroder, Seligman, the Speyers, Mirabaud, Mallet, Fould, and above all Rothschild and Morgan.
Even after these banking families became involved in domestic industry by the emergence of finance capitalism they remained different from ordinary bankers in distinctive ways:
(1) they were cosmopolitan and international;
(2) they were close to governments and were particularly concerned with questions of government debts . . .
(3) their interests were almost exclusively in bonds and very rarely in goods . . .
(4) they were, accordingly, fanatical devotees of deflation . . .
(5) they were almost equally devoted to secrecy and the secret use of financial influence in political life.
These bankers came to be called "inter-national bankers" and, more particularly, were known as "merchant bankers" in England, "private bankers" in France, and "investment bankers" in the United States. In all countries they carried on various kinds of banking and exchange activities, but everywhere they were sharply distinguishable from other more obvious, kinds of banks, such as savings banks or commercial banks.
* One of their less obvious characteristics was that they remained as private unincorporated firms, usually partnerships, until relatively recently, offering no shares, no reports, and usually no advertising to the public. This risky status, which deprived them of limited liability, was retained, in most cases, until modern inheritance taxes made it essential to surround such family wealth with the immortality of corporate status for tax avoidance purposes. This persistence as private firms continued because it ensured the maximum of anonymity and secrecy to persons of tremendous public power who dreaded public knowledge of their activities as an evil almost as great as inflation. As a consequence, ordinary people had no way of knowing the wealth or areas of operation of such firms, and often were somewhat hazy as to their membership. Thus, people of’ considerable political knowledge [in the United States] might not associate the names of’ Walter Burns, Clinton Dawkins, Edward Grenfell, Willard Straight, Thomas Lamont, Dwight Morrow, Nelson Perkins, Russell Leffingwell, Elihu Root, John W. Davis, John Foster Dulles, and S. Parker Gilbert with the name "Morgan", yet all these and many others were parts of the system of influence which centred on the J. P. Morgan office at 23 Wall Street.
This firm, like others of the international banking fraternity, constantly operated through corporations and governments, yet itself remained an obscure private partnership until international finance capitalism was passing from its deathbed to the grave. J.P. Morgan and Company, originally founded in London as George Peabody and Company, in 1838, was not incorporated until March 21 1940, and went out of existence as a separate entity on April 24 1959, when it merged with its most important commercial bank subsidiary, the Guaranty Trust Company.
The London affiliate, Morgan Grenfell, was incorporated in 1934 and still exists.
The Progressive Centralisation Of Financial Power The Bank of England was firmly in control in Great Britain. In the United States the aim of the leading bankers was to constrain and centralise the latitude of independent action of the network of private banks across the country. This is fully described by Eustace Mullins in The Federal Reserve Conspiracy(31). And conspiracy it was. At the heart of this was the Colonel Edward Mandel House, the man who became the Power behind President Woodrow Wilson after House and a small group of leading Wall Street bankers had manipulated the presidential election of 1912. As a result, the Federal Reserve System was passed into law through the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. This official sounding creation did not, of course, place control in the hands of the Government, but in the hands of the Wall Street Bankers.
In London, Montagu Norman became Governor of the Bank of England in 1920 for an incredible period of 24 years. Norman wielded amazing influence, and set about establishing central banks in leading nations across the world. We read again from Professor Carroll Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope:
* Norman had a devoted colleague in Benjamin Strong, the first governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Strong owed his career to the favor of the Morgan Bank, especially of Henry P. Davison, who made him secretary of the Bankers Trust Company of New York (in succession to Thomas W. Lamont) in 1904, used him as Morgan’s agent in the banking rearrangements following the crash of 1907, and made him vice president of the Bankers Trust (still in succession to Lamont) in 1904. He became governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York as the joint nominee of Morgan and of Kuhn, Loeb, and Company in 1914. Two years later, Strong met Norman for the first time, and they at once made an agreement to work in cooperation for the financial practices they both revered. These financial practices were explicitly stated many times in the voluminous correspondence between these two men and in many conversations they had, both in their work and at their leisure (they often spent their vacations together for weeks, usually in the south of France).
In the 1920’s, they were determined to use the financial power of Britain and of the United States to force all the major countries of the world to go on the gold standard and to operate it through central banks free from all political control, with all questions of international finance to be settled by agreements by such central banks without interference from governments. Thus we read that Sir Otto Ernst Niemeyer of the British Government Treasury, later of the Bank of England, and Professor Theodor Emanuel Gugenheim Gregory from the London School of Economics visited New Zealand in 1930, as a result of which Sir Otto Niemeyer submitted a report advising the New Zealand Government: . . . to establish a private corporation to control the volume of currency and credit in the country. He also proposed that this privately owned central reserve bank should be given a permanent monopoly of all the Government’s "money, remittance, exchange and banking transactions"(32).
We pick up the history of control over the world’s finances using selected extracts from Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope, when the system that had existed before the 1914-1918 War was becoming complicated by increasing currency speculation (emphasis added):
* These efforts were concentrated in a determination to restore the gold standard as it had existed in 1914. In addition to these pragmatic goals, the powers of financial capitalism had another far reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations.
Each central bank, in the hands of men like Montagu Norman of the Bank of England, Benjamin Strong of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, Charles Rist of the Bank of France, and Hjalmar Schacht of the Reichsbank, sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world.
* In each country the power of the central bank rested largely on its control of credit and money supply. In the world as a whole the power of the central bankers rested very largely on their control of loans and of gold flows. In the final days of the system, these central bankers were able to mobilize resources to assist each other through the B.I.S., where payments between central banks could be made by bookkeeping adjustments between the accounts which the central banks of the world kept there. The B.I.S. as a private institution was owned by the seven chief central banks and was operated by the heads of these, who together formed its governing board. Each of these kept a substantial deposit at the B.I.S., and periodically settled payments among themselves (and thus between the major countries of the world) by bookkeeping in order to avoid shipments of gold. They made agreements on all the major financial problems of the world, as well as on many of the economic and political problems, especially in reference to loans, payments, and the economic future of the chief areas of the globe.
* The B.I.S. is generally regarded as the apex of the structure of financial capitalism whose remote origins go back to the creation of the Bank of England in 1694 and the Bank of France in 1803. As a matter of fact its establishment in 1929 was rather an indication that the centralized world financial system of 1914 was in decline. It was set up rather to remedy the decline of London as the world’s financial center by providing a mechanism by which a world with three chief financial centers in London, New York, and Paris could still operate as one. The B.I.S. was a vain effort to cope with the problems arising from the growth of a number of centers. It was intended to be the world cartel of ever growing national financial powers by assembling the nominal heads of these national financial centers.
The commander in chief of the world system of banking control was Montagu Norman, Governor of the Bank England, who was built up by the private bankers to a position where he was regarded as an oracle in all matters of government and business.
In government the power of the Bank of England was a considerable restriction on political action as early as 1819 but an effort to break this power by a modification of the bank’s charter in 1844 failed. In 1852, Gladstone, then chancellor of the Exchequer and later prime minister, declared, "The hinge of the whole situation was this: the government itself was not to be a substantive power in matters of Finance, but was to leave the Money Power supreme and unquestioned."
* This power of the Bank of England and of its governor was admitted by most qualified observers. In January, 1924, Reginald McKenna, who had been Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1915 1916, as chairman of the board of the Midland Bank told its stockholders: "I am afraid the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that the banks can, and do, create money. . . . And they who control the credit of the nation direct the policy of Governments and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people."
In that same year, Sir Drummond Fraser, vice president of the Institute of Bankers, stated, "The Governor of the Bank of England must be the autocrat who dictates the terms upon which alone the Government can obtain borrowed money."
On September 26, 1921, the Financial Times wrote, "Half a dozen men at the top of the Big Five Banks could upset the whole fabric of government finance by refraining from renewing Treasury Bills."
Vincent Vickers, who had been a director of the bank for nine years, said, "Since 1919 the monetary policy of the Government has been the policy of the Bank of England and the policy of the Bank of England has been the policy of Mr. Montagu Norman. "On November 11, 1927, the Wall Street Journal called Mr. Norman "the currency dictator of Europe."
* It must not be felt that these heads of the world’s chief central banks were themselves substantive powers in world finance. They were not. Rather, they were the technicians and agents of the dominant investment bankers of their own countries, who had raised them up and were perfectly capable of throwing them down. The substantive financial powers of the world were in the hands of these investment bankers (also called "international" or "merchant" bankers) who remained largely behind the scenes in their own unincorporated private banks. These formed a system of international cooperation and national dominance which was more private, more powerful, and more secret than that of their agents in the central banks.
This dominance of investment bankers was based on their control over the flows of credit and investment funds in their own countries and throughout the world. They could dominate the financial and industrial systems of their own countries by their influence over the flow of current funds through bank loans, the discount rate, and the rediscounting of commercial debts; they could dominate governments by their control over current government loans and the play of the international exchanges.
Power Begins To Slip Even Further Away From Elected Governments We now return to the Bilderberg Group. By a rare chance we acquired a copy of the official Report on a meeting held at Mont Tremblant, in Canada, in April, 1968, two years after Professor Carroll Quigley wrote Tragedy and Hope. The second item on the agenda consisted of three papers, one by an American, and two by French participants. Broadly, the theme was that of the growing power of "world" companies, the corporations. We can see here a clear path to the formation of the World Trade Organisation (W.T.O.), in 1995, attempts to force through the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (M.A.I.), the General Agreement on Trade in Services (G.A.T.S.), and moves towards Private Finance Initiatives (P.F.I.). All these measures covertly extend the Power of multinational corporations and international banks over that of elected governments, that is, the people. Also evident is clear pressure for the establishment of an European Union, which would rationalise and simplify relationships for the world companies. We reproduce relevant extracts from the American Paper. We have run certain paragraphs together only for reasons of layout:
* For more than half a century, a handful of great companies had been active around the world. Since the Second World War their number had multiplied many times. How could we best preserve and advance the value of the world company within the world political structure without excessive loss to other values? It was important to recognize the lack of phasing between the development of the world company and the continued existence of an archaic political structure of nation states which was evolving only at glacier pace in response to new world requirements. This lack of phasing was responsible for most of the problems confronting the world company, which, in broad terms, could best be considered with respect to two sets of relationships. The first concerned relations between the government of the country in which a world company was organized and the governments of the various host states in which it operated. For a variety of reasons such as the desire to prevent evasion of their own laws or the wish to extend their own jurisdiction as far as possible domiciliary governments frequently sought to control activities of world companies even though those activities took place outside their geographic boundaries. . .
. Much more serious problems surrounded the second type of relationship that between a world corporation and the governments of the host states in which it did business. Traditional international good manners as well as treaty stipulations would require that the corporation be accorded "national treatment". Yet sometimes, because it did not fully respond to reality, this principle was more honoured in the breach than the observance. No words in a treaty could alter the fact that the absentee management of a world company did not view its problems within the same frame of reference as a host government, with its responsibility for the national economy, its reasons of national pride, its interests and other elements.
Since a world company was more likely to be a dominant element of economic power in a small nation than in a large one, the prosperity of many less developed countries was heavily dependent on decisions made by managements of world companies located five or six thousand miles away. . . . Even here, the fact that most world companies were domiciled in America was a significant political element that infected economic arrangements with national jealousies and resentment; but if the world company had a great potential for good as an instrument for efficiently utilizing resources, there was no need to apologize for the sensible and vigorous way American industry had organized itself to serve an expanding world economy.
* What American entrepreneurs were doing was exactly what European industrialists should be doing if the conditions existed in Europe that would make this possible. Those conditions seemed to be in the making. Next summer, for the first time in history, goods would move with full freedom throughout six nations of Western Europe to serve the needs of 200 million people and the writer was confident that the European Community would within a year include Great Britain and very likely several other important European trading nations. Yet, great as the achievement had been, it still fell far short of what was needed. An environment had to be created that would make Europe a seed bed for new world companies, regardless of the preoccupation with the so called "technological gap" and concern about the "American invasion".
Until Europe achieved greater political unity, however, European business was unlikely to make adequate progress toward a more satisfactory economic structure.
With the Treaty of Rome already ten years old, for instance, social, fiscal and legal complications still made mergers across national lines difficult, if not impossible. The United States would welcome a European counter invasion. If European companies were buying American corporations and establishing production sources in and outside the United States, it would be to everyone’s advantage. The development of a modern structure of enterprise in Europe which would probably not be possible without greater political unity was by far the best way to ease the problems of the world company in the advanced nations.
* To realize the full promise of the world company it was not enough to liberalize world trade, including the free movement of capital. Ways would also have to be found to assure peaceful coexistence between two overlapping circles of authority corporate managements and local host governments. A limited amount could be accomplished by improved corporate diplomacy. Over the past few years many world companies had sought to mitigate the prejudices and fears they might otherwise engender by taking local partners, employing local managers, etc. But, in many cases, the costs of seeking recognition as a local citizen could be excessive. The peculiar genius of the world company stemmed from its ability to view the world economy from a single vantage point and to deploy resources without regard to national origin in response to a common set of economic standards. The disadvantage of local partners was that they were, in a sense, enemies of such mobility, since their judgements were based on benefits to the local subsidiary rather than on the interests of the world enterprise as a whole. . . . Such a suggestion would be strengthened if the problem were considered on a philosophical level as a case study in the legitimacy of power.
Where was there a legitimate base for the power of corporate managements to make decisions that could profoundly affect the economic life of nations to whose governments they were only responsible to a limited extent? Did corporate managements have the right to make decisions affecting not only the mass of shareholders but the economic welfare of whole communities and the pocket books of consumers? There was no overriding political authority to supervise the totality of the world company’s operations nor was there any organic arrangement to prevent national governments from interfering with the fulfilment of its role in world commerce.
* The author said he was not proposing a federal governmental structure at the world level, or anything like it; but there was no reason why world companies might not be accorded some form of denationalized status by a multilateral treaty. Basically, his suggestion was that the world companies should become quite literally citizens of the world. This implied the establishment by treaty of something in the nature of an international companies law, administered by a body made up of representatives drawn from signatory countries, who would not only exercise normal domiciliary supervision but would also enforce the kinds of arrangements that are normally included in treaties of establishment. Such an international companies law could set limits, for example, on the restrictions that signatory states might be permitted to impose on companies established under its sanction. The operative standard defining those limits would be the freedom needed to preserve and protect the central principle of assuring the most efficient use of world resources.
The author of the paper strongly urged that any such treaty should be outside the machinery of the United Nations and that, in the first instance, no attempt should be made to gain signatories outside the small circle of industrialized nations. Like the G.A.T.T. [General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade], it would be regarded primarily as a mechanism for creating a code of rules among the major trading nations, reserving the possibility that, over the years, it might provide a world charter as more and more of the less developed countries adhered to its provisions.
Obviously such an international company would have a central base of operations since it was clearly necessary that there be a single profit centre. And its operations in its home country would, of course, be subject to local law to the extent that the organic treaty did not contain overruling regulations. But in all cases the enterprise must become international.
The Final Dissolution Of Financial Borders And The Nation State? Fractional Reserve Banking is based on a "liquidity" reserve which permits lending as a multiple of this reserve. Now compulsory reserves are gone the only restraint on the banks’ ability to create money is "prudence" combined with bank supervision and regulation. Money is treated wrongly as a commodity, now even more so, instead of only being an instrument to facilitate the distribution of goods and services. Thus money is leap frogging itself in search of ever greater returns so that one wonders if we are no longer seeing debt chasing its tail as a commitment to the banks, but instead profit chasing its tail; a form of global asset stripping.
The world remains rich in human potential and natural resources, but these are being destabilised by this optical illusion of "money", such that when our economic model of the precariously spinning vortex of an inverted cone destabilises, these natural values – jobs, property and personal security – are artificially destabilised with it. Real assets, like the water we drink, the air we breathe and the potential to feed ourselves are unaffected. So do the Global Elite, as their financial infrastructure disintegrates, sacrifice those who comprise it and profited from it while the going was good. We have to ask if the Global Elite are any longer able to control this situation themselves as we watch their man, Alan Greenspan, President of the Federal Reserve Board, acting like a man sticking his fingers in the holes in the economic "dyke"?
The situation was well understood and described by Michael Rowbotham in The Grip of Death(33). David C. Korten is a campaigner and writer against globalisation. In When Corporation Rule the World (34), he writes compellingly of the watershed of the 1939-1945 War, when the financial empire created by Montagu Norman and his ilk was superseded by that of a single World Power, the United States. Here are selected extracts under the heading "Delinking Money From Value", to which we have added the emphasis:
* To understand what has happened to the global financial system, we must begin with an understanding of the nature of money. Money is one of humanity’s most important inventions, created to meet an important need. The earliest market transactions were based on the direct exchange of things of equal value, which meant that a transaction could occur only when two individuals met who each possessed an item they were willing to trade for an item possessed by the other. The useful expansion of commerce was greatly constrained. This constraint was partially relieved when people began to use certain objects that had their own intrinsic value as a medium of exchange – decorative shells, blocks of salt, bits of precious metals, or precious stones. Eventually, metal coins provided standard units of exchange based on the amount of precious metal, generally silver or gold, they contained. Later the idea emerged that it was more convenient to keep the precious metal in a vault and issue paper money that could be exchanged for the metal on demand. In a sense, the paper bill was originally the equivalent of a receipt showing that the bearer owned an amount of precious metal, but the paper receipt was more convenient and transportable.
* Each of these innovations was, however, a step toward delinking money from things of real value. An additional step was taken at the historic 1944 Bretton Woods conference that created the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund [I.M.F.]. The countries represented at this meeting agreed to create a new global financial system in which each participating government guaranteed to exchange its own currency on demand for U.S. dollars at a fixed rate. The U.S. government, in turn, guaranteed to exchange dollars on demand for gold at a rate of $35 per ounce. This effectively placed all the world’s currencies on the gold standard, backed by the U.S. gold stored at Fort Knox. Many governments thus came to accept U.S. dollars as gold deposit certificates and chose to hold their international foreign exchange reserves in dollars rather than gold.
* This system worked reasonably well for more than twenty years, until it became widely evident that the United States was creating far more dollars to finance its massive military and commercial expansion around the world than it could back with its gold. If all the countries that were holding dollars decided to redeem them for gold, the available supply would be quickly exhausted, and those who had placed their faith in the integrity of the dollar would be left holding nothing but worthless pieces of paper.
To preclude this eventuality, on August 15,1971, President Richard Nixon declared that the United States would no longer redeem dollars on demand for gold. The dollar was no longer anything other than a piece of high grade paper with a number and some intricate artwork issued by the U.S. government [actually private Federal Reserve Notes – Ed]. The world’s currencies were no longer linked to anything of value except the shared expectation that others would accept them in exchange for real goods and services. Once computers came into widespread use, the next step was relatively obvious – eliminate the paper and simply store the numbers in computers.
Although coins and paper money continue to circulate, more and more of the world’s monetary transactions involve direct electronic transfers between computers. Money has become almost a pure abstraction delinked from anything of real value.
Four developments are basic to this transformation of the financial system:
(a) The United States financed its global expansion with dollars, many of which now show up on the balance sheets of foreign banks and foreign branches of U.S. banks. These dollars are not subject to the regulations and reserve requirements of the U.S. Federal Reserve system.
(b) Computerization and globalization melded the world’s financial markets into a single global system in which an individual at a computer terminal can maintain constant contact with price movements in all major markets and execute trades almost instantaneously in any or all of them. A computer can be programmed to do the same without human intervention, automatically executing transactions involving billions of dollars in fractions of a second.
(c) Investment decisions that were once made by many individuals are now concentrated in the hands of a relatively small number of professional investment managers.The pool of investment funds controlled by mutual funds doubled in three years to total $2,000,000,000,000 at the end of June 1994, as individual investors placed their savings in professionally managed investment pools rather than buying and holding individual stocks. Meanwhile, there has been a massive consolidation of the banking industry – more than 500 U.S. banks merged or closed between September 1992 and September 1993 alone concentrating control of huge pools of funds within the major international "money center" banks. Pension funds, now estimated to total $4,000,000,000,000 in assets, are managed mostly by trust departments of these giant banks, adding enormously to their financial power. The pension funds alone account for the holdings of about a third of all corporate equities and about 40 per cent of corporate bonds.
(d) Investment horizons have shortened dramatically. The managers of these investment pools compete for investors’ funds based on the returns they are able to generate. Mutual fund results are published daily in the world’s leading newspapers, and countless services compare fund performance monthly and yearly. Individual investors have the ability to switch money among mutual funds with the push of a button on a phone or their personal computer mouse, based on these results. For the mutual fund manager, the short term is a day or less and the long term is perhaps a month. Pension fund managers have a slightly longer evaluation cycle.
* Individual savings have become consolidated in vast investment pools managed by professionals under enormous competitive pressures to yield nearly instant financial gains. The time frames involved are far too short for a productive investment to mature, the amount of money to be "invested" far exceeds the number of productive investment opportunities available, and the returns the market has come to expect exceed what most productive investments are able to yield even over a period of years. Consequently, the financial markets have largely abandoned productive investment in favour of extractive investment and are operating on autopilot without regard to human consequences.
* The financial system increasingly functions as a world apart at a scale that dwarfs the productive sector of the global economy, which itself functions increasingly at the mercy of the massive waves of money that the money game players move around the world with split second abandon. Joel Kurtzman, formerly business editor of the New York Times and subsequently editor of the Harvard Business Review, estimated that for every $1 circulating in the productive world economy, $20 to $50 circulates in the economy of pure finance, although no one knows the ratios for sure. In the international currency markets alone, some $800,000,000,000 to $1,000,000,000,000 changes hands each day, far in excess of the $20-25,000,000,000 required to cover daily trade in goods and services.
According to Kurtzman: Most of the $800 billion in currency that is traded . . . goes for very short term speculative investments from a few hours to a few days to a maximum of a few weeks. . . . That money is mostly involved in nothing more than making money . . . It is money enough to purchase outright the nine biggest corporations in Japan overvalued though they are including Nippon Telegraph & Telephone, Japan’s seven largest banks, and Toyota Motors. . . . It goes for options trading, stock speculation, and trade in interest rates. It also goes for short term financial arbitrage transactions where an investor buys a product such as bonds or currencies on one exchange in the hopes of selling it at a profit on another exchange, sometimes simultaneously by using electronics.
* This money is not associated with any real value. Yet the money managers who carry out the millions of high speed, short term transactions stake their reputations and careers on making that money grow at a rate greater than the prevailing rate of interest. This growth depends on the system’s ability to endlessly increase the market value of the financial assets being traded, irrespective of what happens to the output of real goods and services. As this growth occurs, the financial or buying power of those who control the inflated assets expands, compared with the buying power of other members of society who are actually creating value but whose real and relative compensation is declining.
WORLD REVOLUTION IN THE SERVICE OF CAPITALISM
The Illusion Of Conventional, Contemporary Politics Since the Nineteenth Century Industrial Revolution and growth of Finance-Capitalism, British politics had evolved as principally the "Left-Right", "Them and Us" social divisions of the Conservative and Labour Parties. Growing affluence and the widespread effects of modern technology blurred these divisions which remain as largely instinctive today. The late Alan Clark had little doubt that the Conservative Party hierarchy, backed by land ownership, industry and the City of London, were dedicated only to their political self-preservation(35). The unacceptable Power and privileges of the select few had seen elements of the upper and middle classes defect to Marxism and Soviet Communism in the years before the 1939-45 War. What was seen as a free enterprise, property owning society suited the image of confrontation between the West, and the Communism of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.), and its satellites, during the stand-off of the post 1945 "Cold War". The collapse of Soviet Communism during the 1980s, epitomised by the fall of the Berlin Wall, exposed uncomfortable truths for those few who bothered to think.
For the "Right" came the realisation that free enterprise Capitalist ideals based on the Nation State and national culture and traditions were already vanishing and being subsumed by Global Economics and the increasingly remote Power of the Multinational Corporations.
Faced with this same Power and the consequent, progressive liquidation of state ownership, Labour Party traditionalists were similarly marooned. Outside a Global Elite, the Establishment and their world-wide mattoid infrastructure, ordinary people of any political persuasion are not in the equation, except as incidental beneficiaries of the Global Economic Model. However, International Socialism and International Finance-Capitalism are two sides of the same centralised, monolithic coin. We therefore see why International Fabian Socialists in the United Kingdom have integrated with the interests of the Global Power Brokers – as philosophically matching pieces of the same jig-saw.
Smoky Mirrors And Ideological Paradoxes Before adopting positions we must be clear about the realities, for which there are rarely absolutes. We must be clear about what is said and what actually happens, and why. We must avoid attributing political labels as a diversion from truth. We must distinguish the absolutes of right and wrong, especially when taking instinctive or defensive party-political positions. As we peel away successive layers of a conceptual onion we find different interpretations and different priorities depending on levels of perception, according to levels of interest. We must be aware of the position to which we have long been conditioned and educated as part of the planned Global Scenario.
Since the Gulf War of 1991 Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein has threatened no one, except perhaps his own people. Can we seriously sustain the policy for inhumane, draconian decade-long sanctions against Iraq that have cost the lives of 500,000 innocent Iraqi children alone? The only threat posed by Saddam Hussein to the so-called International Community is that based on supposition, fabrication and persistent speculative talk-up by selected journalists performing for the controlled Media.
Behind the new United States-driven war now being planned against Iraq lie the potential for massive profits for the military-industrial complex and the oil industry. Does this have a party-political position?
Can we defend the deliberate, official Anglo-American cover-up and suppression of information about the effects of Gulf Syndrome and the use of Depleted Uranium (D.U.), ammunition in the case of our own servicemen? Why are such matters so often seen and handled along party-political lines?
Can the Western Powers justify their conspicuous moral defection and lack of initiative, in failing strongly to oppose decades-long brutal Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, even given the dominant pro-Israeli position of the United States? Why do the Media fail positively to expose Israel and support the Palestinian cause, save perhaps for Independent newspapers and the Communist Morning Star; whose hand is on the brake? Can this be seen along party-political lines?
Why are journalists like John Pilger, who exposed these atrocities, these truths,(36) defined as "left wing extremists"? (The Sunday Times, 17th November, 2002). Professor Noam Chomsky understood exactly the process of the mass conditioning of public perceptions. Regarded himself as "Liberal-Left", one has to ask not what his political alignment might be, but are the perceptions to which people are being conditioned the right ones, justifiable, and in whose ultimate interest are they? He wrote, of the approach in the West (emphasis added)(37):
* It’s a privatized system of propaganda, including the media, the journals of opinion and in general including the broad participation of the articulate intelligentsia, the educated part of the population. The more articulate elements of those groups, the ones who have access to the media, including intellectual journals, and who essentially control the educational apparatus, they should properly be referred to as a class of "commissars". That’s their essential function; to design, propagate and create a system of doctrines and beliefs which will undermine independent thought and prevent understanding and analysis of institutional structures and their functions. . . . This is a typical case [framing the corporations as the national interest] of the way the framework of thought is consciously manipulated by an effective choice and reshaping of terminology so as to make it difficult to understand what’s happening in the world.
A very important function of the ideological institutions – the media, the schools and so on – is to prevent people from perceiving reality, because if they perceived it they might not like it and might act to change it. That would harm privileged people who control these things.
The Real Enemy Of Globalisation Is Nationalism, Left Or Right We must remember three key factors.
Firstly, Soviet Communism evolved from the concept of a World Revolution postulated by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.
Secondly, those whom it suited to collaborate with, or even promote Communist ideology, such as the Global Power Brokers, logically encompassed the same Internationalist philosophies and objectives.
Thirdly, the second "S" in U.S.S.R. stood for "Socialism"; ipso facto, International Socialism.
Loyalty, and support for the wars of conquest in the Balkans, the Middle East, Afghanistan, and selective exploitation and suppression elsewhere, defy conscience and betray traditional, especially Conservative, instincts that are based on loyalty to the perceived "national" interests. But these conventional political alignments and their political exponents can no longer be trusted. Whilst paying lip service to "national" interests, certain influences behind the scenes have long been making systematic attempts to discredit not only the Monarchy, but the principle of Monarchy. They have sought to undermine the concept of loyalty to Queen and country, and to the national culture and heritage. This should not be confused with a colonial legacy taken out of the context of the age of imperialism. Nor should the use of immigration as a mechanism of cultural dilution, as opposed to cultural enrichment, be confused with a colonial legacy in which, for example, large numbers of Indians were transplanted to work in Africa, or with migration from regions exploited and destabilised by Western economic policies. These waters run much deeper than simplistic party-political considerations and have a distinct internationalist connotation.
Throughout the "Cold War" European Nations were governed by various permutations of International Socialism. Within these ranks Communists, neo-Communists, crypto-Communists and others were allowed to function openly in government appointments. In the United Kingdom, Communist agent Reuben Falber channelled funds from the Soviet Union during the 1960s and 1970s to finance industrial disruption through the Communist Party of Great Britain. When this was revealed in 1991 it caused barely a ripple of interest; no arrest or investigation followed ("Kremlin bankrolled British strikes", The Sunday Times, 17th November, 1991).
Lord Victor Rothschild was known for his Communist sympathies.
During the 1939-1945 War the late Brian Grimston, a wartime R.A.F. officer working in M.I.5, discovered that Rothschild had cleared the traitor Klaus Fuchs for work on classified nuclear research despite the fact that Grimston and his superior, Wing Commander Henry Arnold, had warned Rothschild that Fuchs was a security risk.
Oil magnate and Communist supporter, Armand Hammer, whose father was a co-founder of the American Communist Party, was allowed to function openly as a Soviet agent and go-between. When Melita Norwood was exposed as a former Communist agent in 1999, she was not arrested. Instead, she roused no more interest than Reuben Falber and was accorded almost sympathetic treatment by the press ("The double life of a quiet old lady", The Independent on Sunday, 12th September, 1999; "My grandmother from Bexleyheath", The Daily Telegraph, 14th September, 1999).
When it comes to Nationalism and Nationalist ideals, the story is very different. Latin America is economic "territory", principally of the United States. The North American Free Trade Agreement (N.A.F.T.A.), encompassed the U.S.A., Canada and Mexico, and is already being expanded to incorporate Latin American countries. John Stockwell(38) and William Blum(39) have exposed United States terrorism and subversion to remove Nationalist governments in Latin America opposed to political and economic domination.
The School of the Americas, in Georgia, was established for the very purpose of training terrorists.
The Left Wing President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, an important oil exporting country, is one such independent-minded nationalist leader. For some months now, Chávez has been exposed to relentless, unsympathetic press coverage. There can be no doubt that the United States, working through "Right Wing" interests in Venezuela, is determined upon his removal from office.
For almost half a century, Soviet Communism was seen as the mortal enemy of Western democracies. But when "Right Wing" policies or positions are adopted by individuals or political factions – of whom Austrian politician Jörg Haider is the most prominent – member Nations of the European Union go into paroxysms of condemnation.
Major General Edwin Walker had a distinguished military career. In 1961 he was removed from his appointment as the highly regarded Commander of the United States 24th Infantry Division in West Germany. The reason, according to the so-called "conservative" newspaper, The Daily Telegraph in its obituary of 5th November, 1993, was that General Walker had been "regaling his troops with John Birch Society propaganda"; in other words, to warn against Communist infiltration and subversion. The same obituary also condemned the John Birch Society as "extreme Right Wing". The rest of the obituary was little more than a character assassination.
In The Usurpers(40) Medford Evans tells a very different story and we suspect, unlike the Telegraph obituary writer, had carefully studied the proceedings of the Steenis Committee of the United States Senate before which Walker had testified. Clear to Medford Evans was that it did not suit certain Powers within the United States Administration to expose Communist interests!
Cultural Communism As A Strategy For Destabilisation A major threat to the International Elite is a stable, homogeneous society based on sound religious, ethical, moral and social values, to which an educated, informed and active broad middle class is axiomatic. Any such organisation depends on authority vested in a proper hierarchical structure. Heredity must in part involve an advantage, but this is a privilege that must be devoted to the communal good, not to personal Power, aggrandisement or enrichment. A privileged Nomenklatura always existed in the Soviet Union, the same privileges have been subsumed by the International Fabian Socialist Government of Prime Minister Blair, and hierarchical values have been reintroduced in China. Karl Marx argued, with some reason, that stable religious and moral values of the Nineteenth Century Bourgeoisie served to oppress the Working Classes. He therefore postulated a World Revolution of the Proletariat to destroy the Existing Order. This meant the elimination of religion, the conventional family, morality, inheritance and private property.
In 1926 the Comintern agent in China, Mikhail Borodin, told Madame Chiang Kai-shek that Liberal beliefs were a major weapon in the World Revolution(41). It was no accident, either, that the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research – the "Frankfurt School" – was established in 1923 for the Marxist Max Horkheimer and others to work for the social destabilisation of society – the "long march through the institutions(42).
Students influenced by Horkheimer’s philosophy now occupy senior positions in society. We are witnessing not self-discipline, social freedom or justice, but unrestrained social licence, the calculated dumbing down of Education standards, of society through the media and entertainment industry, the promotion of pornography and promiscuity, the oppression of Political Correctness, and diversion by the "bread and circuses" of entertainment. Can this be accidental?.
BETRAYAL BY THE INTERNATIONAL ELITE
After the 1939-1945 War comprehensive reports from a series of Congressional hearings showed that Marxism and its derivative Soviet Communism were well understood as a serious threat to the West(43-47). In 1966 Rose L. Martin wrote in comparable detail of links between International Fabian Socialism and the Socialist network in the United States, and the integration of the Ruling Elite with both(48). Why was all this not made widely available, or relayed through the universities and training establishments?
We must now return to the writing of W. Cleon Skousen in The Naked Capitalist, and Professor Carroll Quigley in Tragedy and Hope.
Skousen recalled a conversation with the Communist Dr Bella Dodd. Dr Dodd had been puzzled when the United States Communist Party was referred by Moscow for directions from three men at the Waldorf Towers, each of whom proved to be wealthy capitalists. Skousen went on:
* This reviewer has also observed a number of strange developments which seemed to point to a conspiratorial control center higher and stronger than either Moscow or Peiping. For example, when Harry Dexter White (Under-Secretary of the U.S. Treasury during World War II) was discovered to be a Soviet agent, the White House was immediately informed. But instead of being fired or arrested, Harry Dexter White was appointed as the new Executive Director of the U.S. Mission to the International Monetary Fund of the United Nations. . . . Politics in Washington were equally puzzling. Why were so many top government officials always members of the Democratic Socialist cadre called Americans for Democratic Action (A.D.A.), or were members of the exclusive Council on Foreign Relations? . . .
Another puzzle was the fact that whenever the political blunders of these high-powered people aroused the anger of the public, they were not only allowed to quietly resign, but were given extremely lucrative outside jobs, usually in one of the tax-exempt foundations. It didn’t look like government "of the people" but government by certain people.
In 1943 Major George Racey Jordan discovered that classified atomic material was being flown out to the Soviet Union at the behest of presidential aide, Harry Hopkins. Quigley, the "insider", wrote:
* Finally, it is evident that a great deal of nuclear information (whether secret or not is unknown), as well as uranium metal, went to the Soviet Union as part of Lend Lease in 1943. Major George Racey Jordan, USAAF, tried in vain to disrupt these shipments at the time. While most of Jordan’s evidence is unreliable, the shipment of uranium to Russia is corroborated from other sources. The significance of such shipments is still unknown, since the export license permitting them was granted at the request of General Groves. Jordan’s other evidence, most of which was very discreditable to the New Deal (since he testified that he, Groves, and others were under direct pressure from Harry Hopkins and Vice President Henry Wallace to allow export of nuclear materials, radar, and other secrets to Russia) was subsequently shown to be false, yet all his statements were given nationwide publicity by news commentators . . . by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and are still widely believed. Skousen, on the other hand, wrote:
* Right after World War II, Major Racey Jordan, expeditor of Russian lend lease, disclosed that his one time boss, Harry Hopkins, had secretly secured the latest know how on the atomic bomb as of 1943 and shipped it to Russia in a lend lease plane which Jordan found to be loaded with black suitcases containing espionage files on the United States. When Jordan grounded this plane and flew to Washington to make an issue of this betrayal of U.S. interests he found himself threatened with severe disciplinary action. He was later ordered by Harry Hopkins to approve and ship to Russia (without making a record of it) several shipments of refined uranium compounds which experts later estimated to have been more than was necessary to produce an atomic explosion. The testimony of Major Jordan before a Congressional Committee is summarized in his book, From Major Jordan’s Diaries. [See References, 49 – Ed.].
The last example in our necessarily limited selection from the 1,348 pages of Tragedy and Hope deals with the enormously rich and influential tax-exempt Foundations, mainly in the United States. These sponsor radical organisations and sociological, education and other projects very much in line with the work of the Marxist Frankfurt School. As Skousen puts it, "weakening and subverting the constitutional and ideological fabric of the American culture", so to consolidate the Power of the International Elite. The story of the investigations that followed was published in Wormser’s Foundations: Their Power and Influence(50). Quigley wrote:
* It must be recognised that the power these energetic Left-wingers exercised was never their own power nor Communist power but was ultimately the power of the international financial coteries, and once the anger and suspicions of the American people were aroused, as they were in 1950, it was a fairly simple matter to get rid of [hide elsewhere – Skousen] the Red sympathisers. Before this could be done, however, a congressional committee, following backward to their sources the threads which led from admitted Communists like Whittaker Chambers, through Alger Hiss, and the Carnegie Endowment to Thomas Lamont and the Morgan Bank, fell into the whole complicated network of interlocking tax-exempt Foundations.
The Eighty-third Congress in July 1953 set up a Special Committee to investigate Tax-exempt Foundations with Representative Carroll B. Reece, of Tennessee, as Chairman. It soon became clear that people of immense wealth would be unhappy if the investigation went too far and that "most respected" newspapers in the country, closely allied with these men of wealth, would not get excited enough about any revelations to make publicity worth while, in terms of votes and campaign contributions.
GAMBLING WITH THE CRYSTAL BALL
We stated that War was needed; in other words, for some, a profitable mechanism for maintaining and consolidating control by fair means or foul. War is also organic to the economic cycle. We see only two polarised philosophical positions, party-political alignments being irrelevant and simplistic. At one extreme, generally taken as the more rational position in a democratic society, is that somebody, somewhere, has rightly to be delegated the authority to rule, which calls for a degree of autocracy and confidentiality. The measures required may be justified, if harsh and inevitable.
The opposite and more critical view, is that an exclusive International Elite has taken to itself the trappings of power; to be retained if need be by force. The aim is Profit and Power at any price, whatever the cost to the environment or in human lives. To ensure this the will of the people must be subordinated to the will and purposes of that Elite.
The reality is that if we are fortunate, we can survey the real wealth of our livelihood, the fields, bricks and mortar, but that security or poverty can now turn on a computerised decimal point for the profit of others.
REFERENCES Note: Prices are shown where available from Bloomfield Books, and represent only a selection relevant to the theme of this edition of On Target. A wide range of reading may be found in the Stock Price List (S.P.L.), which may be obtained post free on request from the address on the last page. Books temporarily out of stock are annotated*. Out of print, or older works, may be obtained through the Book Search Service, or the Second-Hand Book Service, both of which are operated by Mr. T.G. Turner, for which details are available as for the S.P.L.
(11) Korten, David C. When Corporations Rule the World. Kumarian Press and Berrett-Koehler Publisher, Inc., 1995, revised 2001. £16.75.
(12) On Target, Vol. 32, Nos. 7 & 8, 5th & 19th October, 2002.
(13) Quigley, Carroll. Tragedy And Hope – A History of the World in Our Time. 1,348pp. Originally published by the Macmillan Company, New York, 1966. Reprinted by G.S.G. Associates, Rancho Palos, Verdes, California, United States, with permission. H/B. £47.95.
(14) Skousen, W. Cleon. The Naked Capitalist – A Review and Commentary on Dr Carroll Quigley’s Book: Tragedy And Hope – A History of the World in Our Time. W. Cleon Skousen, 1970. £12.00.
(15) Rowbotham, Michael. Goodbye America! Globalisation, debt and the dollar empire. Jon Carpenter, 2000. £13.25.
(16) The Alliance’s Strategic Concept. Approved by the Heads of State and Government participating in the meeting of the North Atlantic Council in Washington D.C. on 23 and 24 April 1999. NATO office of Information and Press, 1110 Brussels, Belgium.
(17) The Reader’s Guide To The NATO Summit In Washington, 23-25 April 1999. NATO office of Information and Press, 1110 Brussels, Belgium.
(18) Queenborough, Lady (Elizabeth Starr Miller). Occult Theocracy. Published posthumously for private circulation only, under the auspices of The International League for Research. C 1933. Originally in two volumes. H/B reprint in one volume, £27.95.
(19) Quigley, Carroll. The Anglo-American Establishment – From Rhodes To Cliveden. Books In Focus, Inc., 1981. £22.95.
(20) Quigley, Carroll. Tragedy And Hope. Op. cit.
(21) The International Foundation Directory 1998. Europa Publications Limited, 1998.
(22) Hyman, Sidney. The Aspen Idea. University of Oklahoma Press, 1975.
(23) The International Foundation Directory 1998. Op. cit..
(24) Eringer, Robert. The Global Manipulators – The Bilderberg Group – The Trilateral Commission – Covert Power Groups of the West. Pentacle Books, 1980. £6.00.
(25) On Target, Vol. 30, No. 12, 2nd December, 2000.
(26) Ronson, Jon. Them – Adventures with Extremists. Picador, a Macmillan im-print, 1991.
(27) Eringer, Robert. Op. cit.
(28) Spotlight On The Bilderbergers: Irresponsible Power. Liberty Lobby Publica-tions, 1975. £5.95.
(29) Inside The Bilderberg Group. Liberty Lobby Publications, undated. £5.95.
(30) Spotlight Special Report – The Bilderberg Group and the World Shadow Government (September 1991). £1.00; 10 copies £6.00;. over 20 copies at 50p each.
(31) Mullins, Eustace. The Federal Reserve Conspiracy. Omni Publications, 1971.
(32) Field, A.N. All These Things. A.N. Field, P.O. Box 154, Nelson, New Zealand, 1936.
(33) Rowbotham, Michael. The Grip of Death – A study of modern money, debt slavery and destructive economics. Jon Carpenter, 1998. £17.95.
(34) Korten, David C. Op. cit.
(35) Clark, Alan. The Tories – Conservatives And The Nation State 1922 – 1997. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998.
(36) Channel 4 Television: Paying the Price: The Killing of the Children of Iraq, March 2000 and Palestine is Still the Issue, September, 2002.
(37) Chomsky, Noam. Chronicles of Dissent – Interviews with David Barsamian. A.K. Press, 1992. £12.25.*
(38) Stockwell, John. The Praetorian Guard: The U.S. Role in the New World Order. South End Press, 1991.
(39) Blum, William. Rogue State – A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower. Zed Books, 2000, revised 2002.
(40) Evans, Medford. The Usurpers. Western Islands, 1968.
(41) Chiang Kai-shek, Madame. Conversations With Mikhail Borodin. Privately published, c1978
(42) On Target, Vol. 29, Nos. 6 & 7, 11th & 25th September and Nos. 8 & 9, 9th & 23rd October, 1999.
(43) Hearings Before The Subcommittee On Legislation Of The Committee On Un-American Activities. House Of Representatives, Eightieth Congress. Hearings On Proposed Legislation To Curb Or Control The Communist Party Of The United States. United States Government Printing Office, Washington, 1948.
(44) The Communist Conspiracy Strategy And Tactics Of World Communism Part I; Communism Outside The United States Prepared and released by the Committee on Un American Activities, U.S. House of Representatives, Wash-ington, D.C. United States Government Printing Office, Washington, 1956.
(45) Soviet Total War – "Historic Mission" of Violence and Deceit. Prepared and released by the Committee on Un-American Activities, United States House of Representatives, Washington, D.C., 1956.
(46) Facts On Communism – Volume I – The Communist Ideology. Committee On Un-American Activities. House Of Representatives, Eighty-Sixth Congress, First Session. United States Government Printing Office, Washington, 1960.
(47) Facts On Communism – Volume II – The Soviet Union, From Lenin To Khrushchev. House Of Representatives, Eighty-Sixth Congress, Second Session. United States Government Printing Office, Washington, 1961.
(48) Martin, Rose L. Fabian Freeway – High Road To Socialism In The U.S.A. 1884-1966. Western Islands, 1966.
(49) Jordan, George Racey, with Richard L. Stokes. From Major Jordan’s Diaries. Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1952. P/B reprint, £4.00
(50) Wormser, Rene A. Foundations: Their Power And Influence. First published in 1958. Second printing by Covenant House Books, 1993. £19.95.
Further material may be found in the Bloomfield Books Stock Price List (S.P.L.). This is available from the address below. Prices for all material include postage in the United Kingdom. Overseas orders add 20% for surface mail (Europe add 20% for automatic air mail) or 55% for airmail. (U.S. readers should add 60% after adding postage to the U.K. prices, and send payment in U.S. dollars with a cheque drawn on a bank in the U.S.A. made payable to "Donald A. Martin"). All from Donald A. Martin, Bloomfield Books at: 26 Meadow Lane, Sudbury, Suffolk, England, CO10 2TD.
EXTRA COPIES: As a service to our readers, extra copies and back numbers of On Target are available at £2 for a single copy, £1.50 each for 2 – 10 copies, 75p each for 11 – 50 copies, and over 50 copies at 50p each. (quantity prices only apply per issue).
ON TARGET INDEXES. These are available from Bloomfield Books, currently for Volumes 22-29. The price is 50 pence per copy, per volume (all 8 volumes – £3.50). See address below. On Target is printed and published by Intelligence Publications (U.K.) 26 Meadow Lane, SUDBURY, Suffolk, ENGLAND CO10 2TD. By private subscription only at the following rates: U.K. – £20 per annum U.S.A. – Surface Mail U.S.$45 per annum- Air Mail U.S.$50 per annum Elsewhere overseas – Surface Mail £25 per annum – Air Mail £30 per annum
Reproduction, without prior agreement, of the contents of this publication is subject to the acknowledgment of the source, together with the address and subscription rates, and provided a copy of any reproduction is sent immediately to the publisher. Editor and Publisher: Donald A. Martin Copyright © D.A. Martin Deputy Editor and Research Department: Barry S. Turner