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MODERN SECRET SOCIETIES
Secrecy is the freedom zealots dream of: no watchman to check the door, no accountant to check the books, no judge to check the law. The secret government has no constitution. The rules it follows are the rules it makes up.--BILL MOYERS
Secret societies not only exist, they have played an important role in national and international events right up to this day.
In considering the reach of modern secret societies, it is instructive to first look at America’s immediate past presidents and the people and events surrounding them.
While many Americans popularly viewed President Bill Clinton as a youthful saxophone player with an eye for the ladies, most were unaware of his connection to three of the most notorious of modern secret societies: the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations (take particular notice of the initials CFR as they crop up incessantly in the study of U.S. policy decisions and world conflicts), and the Bilderbergers.
The Trilateral Commission publishes its membership as well as position papers, but its inner workings are secret. The CFR also publishes a membership roll, but members are pledged to secrecy regarding its goals and operations. The Bilderberg group keeps both its agenda and membership a secret.
Prominent members of the Clinton administration who belonged to the council included former CFR president Peter Tarnoff, Anthony Lake, Al Gore, Warren Christopher, Colin Powell, Les Aspin, James Woolsey, William Cohen, Samuel Lewis, Joan Edelman Spero, Timothy Wirth, Winston Lord, Lloyd Bentsen, Laura Tyson, and George Stephenopoulos. Former Trilateral members included Bruce Babbitt, Stephen W. Bosworth, William Cohen, Thomas Foley, Alan Greenspan, Donna Shalala, and Strobe Talbott.
Publisher John F. McManus noted that in the fall of 1998, as impeachment loomed over him, Clinton hurried to New York to seek support from his CFR friends.
"Bill Clinton knows well that he serves as president because the members of the ’secret society’ to which he belongs chose him and expect him to carry out its plans," wrote McManus.
Clinton was not the only recent president with connections to these groups.
President George Bush was a Trilateralist, a CFR member, and a brother in the mysterious Order of Skull and Bones. President Ronald Reagan, a former spokesman for General Electric, did not officially belong to these groups, but his administrations were packed with both current and former members as will be detailed later.
President Jimmy Carter’s administration was so filled with members of the Trilateral Commission that conspiracy researchers had a field day. Even the Establishment media began to talk.
By the early 1970s, thanks to burgeoning communications technology, many Americans were becoming more aware of secretive organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations. Former CFR chairman David Rockefeller, apparently in an effort to deflect public attention from CFR activities, instigated the creation of a more public offshoot organization: the Trilateral Commission.
Both the commission and its predecessor, the CFR, are held out by conspiracy researchers as the epitome of covert organizations which may be guiding public policy in directions opposite to those either in the best interest of or desired by the public.
The concept of the Trilateral Commission was originally brought to Rockefeller by Zbigniew Brzezinski, then head of the Russian Studies Department at Columbia University. While at the Brookings Institution, Brzezinski had been researching the need for closer cooperation between the trilateral nations of Europe, North America, and Asia.
In 1970, Brzezinski wrote in Foreign Affairs, a CFR publication,
"A new and broader approach is needed—creation of a community of the developed nations which can effectively address itself to the larger concerns confronting mankind. ... A council representing the United States, Western Europe, and Japan, with regular meetings of the heads of governments as well as some small standing machinery, would be a good start."
Later that year, he published a book entitled Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era. Within those pages, Brzezinski spelled out his vision for the future.
He prophetically foresaw a society "... that is shaped culturally, psychologically, socially, and economically by the impact of technology and electronics—particularly in the area of computers and communication."
Brzezinski’s visions would raise the suspicions of those opposed to the consolidation of world political and economic power. Declaring "National sovereignty is no longer a viable concept," he predicted "movement toward a larger community by the developing nations . . . through a variety of indirect ties and already developing limitations on national sovereignty." He foresaw this larger community being funded by "a global taxation system."
In explaining that a cooperative hub, such as the Trilateral Commission, might set the stage for future consolidation, he reasoned, "Though the objective of shaping a community of developed nations is less ambitious than the goal of world government, it is more attainable."
Brzezinski’s hope for a global society did not exclude nations then under the rule of Marxism, which he described as "a further vital and creative stage in the maturing of man’s universal vision" and "a victory of the external man over the inner, passive man, and a victory of reason over belief."
Brzezinski’s plan for a commission of trilateral nations was first presented during a meeting of the ultra secret Bilderberg group in April 1972, in the small Belgian town of Knokke-Heist. Reception to Brzezinski’s proposal reportedly was enthusiastic. At that time international financiers were concerned over Nixon’s devaluation of the dollar, surcharges on imports, and budding detente with China, all of which were causing relations with Japan to deteriorate. In addition, energy problems were growing in response to price increases by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).
With the blessing of the Bilderbergers and the CFR, the Trilateral Commission began organizing on July 23-24, 1972, at the 3,500-acre Rockefeller estate at Pocantico Hills, a subdivision of Tarrytown, New York. Participants in this private meeting included Rockefeller, Brzezinski, Brookings Institution director of foreign policy studies Henry Owen, McGeorge Bundy, Robert Bowie, C. Fred Bergsten, Bayless Manning, Karl Carstens, Guide Colonna di Paliano, Francois Duchene, Rene Foch, Max Kohnstamm, Kiichi Miyazawa, Saburo Ikita, and Tadashi Yamamoto. Apparently these founders were selected by Rockefeller and Brzezinski.
The Trilateral Commission officially was founded on July 1, 1973, with David Rockefeller as chairman. Brzezinski was named founding North American director. North American members included Georgia governor Jimmy Carter, congressman John B. Anderson (another presidential candidate), and Time, Inc. editor-in-chief Hedley Donovan. Foreign founding members included the late Reginald Maudling, Lord Eric Roll, Economist editor Alistair Burnet, FIAT president Giovanni Agnelli, and French vice president of the Commission of European Communities Raymond Barre. The total exclusive membership remains about three hundred persons.
According to the commission’s official yearly publication, Trialogue,
"The Trilateral Commission was formed in 1973 by private citizens of Western Europe, Japan, and North America to foster closer cooperation among these three regions on common problems."
Skeptical conspiracy authors saw "closer cooperation" as more like "collusion" of the multinational bankers and corporate elite with an eye toward one-world government.
The Trilateral Commission has headquarters in New York, Paris, and Tokyo. An executive committee of thirty-five members administers the commission, which meets roughly every nine months rotating between the three regions.
It is not surprising that the question of who funds this group has arisen. Commission spokesmen stress that the group does not receive any government funding. A report in 1978 showed that commission funding from mid-1976 to mid-1979 was $1,180,000, much of which came from tax-exempt foundations such as the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, which in 1977 alone put up $120,000. Donations also came from the Ford Foundation, the Lilly Endowment, the German Marshall Fund and corporations such as Time, Bechtel, Exxon, General Motors, Wells-Fargo, and Texas Instruments.
In addition to its newsletter, Trialogue, the commission has regularly issued a number of "Task Force Reports" or "Triangle Papers" which are publicly available. "For years, conspiracy-oriented newsletters of the Right and Left have been peddling Trilateral ’secrets’ which were obtained directly from the Commission!" snickered journalist and Trilateral Commission researcher Robert Eringer. It is obvious to most researchers that, as these papers are available to the public, they don’t contain any true inner "secrets."
One such paper, entitled The Crisis of Democracy, was published by the commission in 1975. One of its authors, Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, avowed that America needed "a greater degree of moderation in democracy." He argued that democratic institutions were incapable of responding to crises such as the Three Mile Island nuclear accident or the Cuban refugee boatlift operation. The paper suggested that leaders with "expertise, seniority, experience and special talents" were needed to "override the claims of democracy."
Just a few examples indicate that those espousing Trilateralist policies often end up implementing those same policies in the government. Three years after his paper was published, Huntington was named coordinator of security planning for Carter’s National Security Council. In this capacity, Huntington prepared Presidential Review Memorandum 32, which led to the 1979 presidential order creating the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), a civilian organization with the power to take totalitarian control of government functions in the event of a national "emergency."
Yale University economist Richard Cooper headed the commission’s task force on monetary policy, which recommended selling official gold reserves to private markets. Cooper became undersecretary of state for economic affairs, presiding as the International Monetary Fund sold a portion of its gold.
Trilateralist John Sawhill authored an early commission report, Energy: Managing the Transition, which made recommendations on how to manage a movement to higher-cost energy. Carter appointed Sawhill deputy secretary of the Department of Energy. C. Fred Bergsten aided in the preparation of a commission report called The Reform of International Institutions, then went on to become assistant secretary of the treasury for international affairs.
"Many of the original members of the Trilateral Commission are now in positions of power where they are able to implement policy recommendations of the Commission; recommendations that they, themselves, prepared on behalf of the Commission," noted journalist Eringer. "It is for this reason that the Commission has acquired a reputation for being the Shadow Government of the West."
"The Trilateral Commission’s tentacles have reached so far afield in the political and economic sphere that it has been described by some as a cabal of powerful men out to control the world by creating a superna-tional community dominated by the multinational corporations," wrote researcher Laurie K. Strand in a piece entitled "Who’s in charge—Six Possible Contenders" for the People’s Almanac #3.
Even U.S. News & World Report took note of the commission’s globalist agenda, reporting, "The Trilateralists make no bones about this: They recruit only people interested in promoting closer international cooperation. ..."
Researchers Anthony C. Sutton and Patrick M. Wood in their book Trilateral Over Washington voiced suspicions of the group and offered this view of its inception.
"The Trilateral Commission was founded by the persistent maneuvering of David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Rockefeller, [then] chairman of the ultrapowerful Chase Manhattan Bank, a director of many major multinational corporations and ’endowment funds’ has long been a central figure in the mysterious Council on Foreign Relations. Brzezinski, a brilliant prognosticator of one-world idealism, has been a professor at Columbia University and the author of several books that have served as ’policy guidelines’ for the CFR. Brzezinski served as the (Trilateral) commission’s executive director from its inception in 1973 until late 1976 when he was appointed by President Carter as assistant to the president for national security affairs."
It was Brzezinski who recruited Carter for the Trilateral Commission in 1973. In fact, during President Jimmy Carter’s administration, so much Trilateral material was made public that considerable debate ensued within the news media.
Even the Establishment-oriented Washington Post pondered in early 1977,
"But here is the unsettling thing about the Trilateral Commission. The President-elect (Carter) is a member. So is Vice-President-elect Walter F. Mondale. So are the new secretaries of State, Defense and Treasury, Cyrus R. Vance, Harold Brown and W. Michael Blumenthal. So is Zbigniew Brzezinski, who is a former Trilateral director and Carter’s national security advisor, also a bunch of others who will make foreign policy for America in the next four years."
Sutton and Wood commented,
"If you are trying to calculate the odds of three virtually unknown men (Carter, Mondale, and Brzezinski), out of over 60 (Trilateral) commissioners from the U.S., capturing the three most powerful positions in the land, don’t bother. Your calculations will be meaningless."
Carter administration Trilateral also included Ambassadors Andrew Young, Gerard Smith, Richard Gardner, and Elliot Richardson, White House economic aide Henry Owen, Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher, Director Paul Warnke of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Undersecretaries of State Richard Cooper for economic affairs and Lucy Benson for security assistance, Undersecretary of the Treasury Anthony Solomon, Robert Bowie of the CIA, and Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke.
Lest anyone think that the Trilateral Commission was simply some organ of the Democratic Party, U.S. News & World Report in 1978 listed prominent Republicans who were members. These included former Secretaries Henry Kissinger of State, William Coleman of Transportation, Carla Hills of Housing and Urban Development, Peter Peterson of Commerce, and Casper Weinberger of Health, Education, and Welfare.
Also listed were ex-Energy administrator John Sawhill, ex-CIA Director and future President George Bush, ex-Deputy Secretaries of State Robert Ingersoll and Charles Robinson, ex-Deputy Defense Secretary David Packard, former Environmental Protection Agency administrator Russell E. Train, Ambassadors William Scanton to the United Nations and Anne Armstrong to Britain, and members of Congress John Anderson, William Brock, William Cohen, Barber Conable, John Danforth, and Robert Taft, Jr., and Marina Whitman, former member of the Council of Economic Advisors.
Provoking additional concern among conspiracy researchers was President Carter’s selection of banker Paul Volcker to head America’s powerful central bank, the Federal Reserve. Reportedly appointed on instructions from David Rockefeller, Volcker had been the North American chairman of the Trilateral Commission as well as a member of those other secret groups, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Bilderbergers. He was replaced as chairman of the Federal Reserve during the Reagan administration by current chairman Alan Greenspan, also a member of the Trilateral Commission, the CFR, and the Bilderbergers.
It is easy to see why so many people believed that U.S. Government policy was being directed from these Rockefeller-dominated organizations.
Despite having been written nearly twenty years ago, the words of Sutton and Wood ring true today for many average Americans concerned over the state of the nation and suspicious of a superelite trying to gain world control. They wrote,
"By Biblical standards, the United States most certainly deserves judgment—perversion runs amok, child abuse is common, greed and avarice are the passwords to success and morals have rotted. If we are about to be thrown into the pits of the dark ages, the most logical catalyst, or motivator on the horizon is the Trilateral Commission."
Former senator and presidential candidate Barry Goldwater echoed the fears of many when he wrote,
"What the Trilaterals truly intend is the creation of a worldwide economic power superior to the political government of the nation-states involved. As managers and creators of the system they will rule the world."
Such criticism prompted David Rockefeller to defend the commission in a 1980 edition of the Wall Street Journal.
"Far from being a coterie of international conspirators with designs on covertly ruling the world, the Trilateral Commission is, in reality, a group of concerned citizens interested in fostering greater understanding and cooperation among international allies. ..."
But some criticism came from within the Carter administration itself. Secretary of State Edmund Muskie charged that Brzezinski was making foreign policy rather than coordinating it. William Sullivan, who had been U.S. ambassador to Iran, accused Brzezinski of sabotaging U.S. efforts to ease relations with Iran following the departure of the Shah. "By November 1978, Brzezinski began to make his own policy and establish his own embassy in Iran," complained Sullivan.
It was accusations such as these that prompted sudden concern in Washington over secret and semisecret organizations. Columnist Nicholas von Hoffman noted,
"Brzezinski has long spooked those who worry about the Trilateral Commission, that Rockefeller-inspired group of globally minded big shots from the major industrial powers. For countless Americans of both a rightward and a leftward persuasion, the commission, which tried to influence governments’ trade and diplomatic policies, is a worrisome conspiracy."
Concern spilled over into veterans organizations. In 1980, the American Legion national convention passed Resolution 773, which called for a congressional investigation of the Trilateral Commission and its predecessor, the Council on Foreign Relations. The following year a similar resolution was approved by the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW).
Congressman Larry McDonald introduced these resolutions in the House of Representatives but nothing came of it. McDonald, who as national chairman of the John Birch Society was a vocal critic of these secret societies, died in the still-controversial downing of Korean Airlines 007 on September 1, 1983.
During the 1980 presidential campaigns, Republican candidate Ronald Reagan went on the record blasting the nineteen Trilaterals in the Carter administration — including Carter himself, who wrote that his association with the commission was "a splendid learning opportunity"—and vowed to investigate the group if elected. While competing with George Bush for the nomination, Reagan lambasted Bush’s membership in both the Trilateral Commission and the CFR and pledged not to allow Bush a position in a Reagan government.
Yet during the Republican national convention a strange series of events took place.
While Reagan was a shoe-in as the presidential candidate, the vice presidency was the object of a contentious fight. In midweek, national media commentators suddenly began talking about a "dream ticket" to be composed of President Reagan and Vice President (and former president) Gerald Ford. Pressure began building for this concept, which would have created a shared presidency and, hence, divided power. It was even suggested that since Ford had been president he should choose half of the Reagan cabinet.
Faced with the prospect of presiding over half a government, Reagan rushed to the convention floor late at night and announced,
"I know that I am breaking with precedent to come here tonight, and I assure you at this late hour I’m not going to give you my acceptance address tonight. . . . But in watching the television at the hotel and seeing the rumors that were going around and the gossip that was taking place here ... let me as simply as I can straighten out and bring this to a conclusion. It is true that a number of Republican leaders . . . felt that a proper ticket would have included the former president of the United States, Gerald Ford, as second place on the ticket. ... I then believed that because of all the talk and how something might be growing through the night that it was time for me to advance the schedule a little bit. ... I have asked and I am recommending to this convention that tomorrow when the session reconvenes that George Bush be nominated for vice president."
Reagan never again uttered a word against the commission or the CFR. Following his election, Reagan’s fifty-nine-member transition team was composed of twenty-eight CFR members, ten members of the elite Bilderberg group, and at least ten Trilaterals. He even appointed prominent CFR members to three of the nation’s most sensitive offices: Secretary of State Alexander Haig, Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger, and Secretary of the Treasury Donald Regan. Additionally, he named Bush’s campaign manager, James A. Baker III, who then served as his chief of staff. Baker is a fourth-generation member of a family long connected to Rockefeller oil interests.
Then little more than two months after taking office, President Reagan was struck by an assassin’s bullet which, but for a quarter of an inch, would have propelled Bush into the Oval Office seven years before his time. Oddly enough, the brother of the would-be assassin, John W. Hinckley, had scheduled dinner with Bush’s son Neil the very night Reagan was shot. Hinckley’s Texas oilman father and George Bush were longtime friends. It should also be noted that Bush’s name—including his then little-publicized nickname "Poppy"—along with his address and phone number were found in the personal notebook of oil geologist George DeMohrenschildt, the last known close friend of Lee Harvey Oswald. The existence of a 1963 FBI report mentioning a "George Bush of the CIA" in connection with reactions of the U.S. Cuban community to the JFK assassination drew media attention during the 1992 election. Many researchers view these seemingly small, unconnected, and little-reported details as collectively pushing the notion of coincidence to the breaking point.
The undeniable ties connecting America’s leadership to the CFR and the Trilateral Commission—along with the fact that globalist banker David Rockefeller was a leading luminary in both groups—has prompted much anxiety among conspiracy writers on both the Left and Right.
"If the Council on Foreign Relations can be said to be a spawning ground for the concepts of one-world idealism, the Trilateral Commission is the ’task force’ assembled to assault the beachheads," wrote authors Sutton and Wood in 1979. "Already the commission has placed its members ... in the top posts the U.S. has to offer."
Texe Marrs (no known relation to this author), president of Living Truth Publishers in Austin, Texas, has warned,
"The Trilateral Commission is a group with the goal of hastening the era of World Government and promoting an international economy controlled behind the scenes by the Secret Brotherhood (the Illuminati)."
The late senator Barry Goldwater was just as cautionary. In his 1979 book, With No Apologies, Gold-water warned,
"David Rockefeller’s newest international cabal [the Trilateral Commission] ... is intended to be the vehicle for multinational consolidation of the commercial and banking interests by seizing control of the political government of the United States."
Such allegations resulted in a 1981 commentary by Washington Post writers normally disinterested in any conspiracy theory. They at last acknowledged the Trilateral presence by sarcastically writing,
"Remember those dreaded three-sided Trilateralists, the international conspirators headed by David Rockefeller who were going to take over the world? Jimmy Carter was one. George Bush used to be one too and it cost him dearly in his campaign last year against Ronald Reagan.
"Well, guess who’s coming to the White House. Guess who invited them. Guess who will lead the delegation. Right. The Trilateralists are coming. President Reagan has asked them to come. They will be led by David Rockefeller. The Trilateralists have landed and the conspiracy theorists no doubt will be close behind," they sneered.
Despite public denials, the Trilateral Commission certainly counts as a secret society as its meetings are not open to public scrutiny. And it most certainly represents an extension of the even more secretive Council on Foreign Relations, as all eight North American representatives to the founding meeting of the Trilateral Commission were CFR members.
Globalism did not begin with the Trilateral Commission. The concept of a one-world community stretches back far beyond the twentieth century, but became concentrated in the granddaddy of the modern American secret societies—the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).
The council began as an outgrowth of a series of meetings conducted during World War I. In 1917 New York, Colonel Edward Mandell House, President Woodrow Wilson’s confidential adviser, had gathered about one hundred prominent men to discuss the postwar world. Dubbing themselves "the Inquiry," they made plans for a peace settlement which eventually evolved into Wilson’s famous "fourteen points," which he first presented to Congress on January 8, 1918. They were globalist in nature, calling for the removal of "all economic barriers" between nations, "equality of trade conditions," and the formation of "a general association of nations."
Colonel House, who once described himself as a Marxist socialist but whose actions more reflected Fabian socialism, was the author of a 1912 book entitled Philip Dru - Administrator. In this work, House described a "conspiracy" within the United States with the goals of establishing a central bank, a graduated income tax, and the control of both political parries. Two years after the publication of his book, two, if not all three, of his Literary goals had been met in reality.
By late 1918, stalemate on the Western Front and the entry of America into the war forced Germany and the Central Powers to accept Wilson’s terms for peace. The subsequent Paris Peace Conference of 1919 resulted in the harsh Treaty of Versailles, which forced Germany to pay heavy reparations to the Allies. This ruined the German economy, leading to depression and the eventual rise of Adolf Hitler and his Nazis.
Attending the Paris peace conference were President Woodrow Wilson and his closest advisors, Colonel House, bankers Paul Warburg and Bernard Baruch, and almost two dozen members of "the Inquiry." The conference attendees embraced Wilson’s plan for peace, including the formation of a League of Nations. However, under American law, the covenant had to be ratified by the U.S. Senate, which failed to do so, apparently distrusting any supernational organization.
Undaunted, Colonel House, along with both British and American peace conference delegates, met in Paris’s Majestic Hotel on May 30, 1919, and resolved to form an "Institute of International Affairs," with one branch in the United States and one in England. The English branch became the Royal Institute of International Affairs. This institute was to guide public opinion toward acceptance of one-world government or globalism.
The U.S. branch was incorporated on July 21, 1921, as the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). It was built upon an existing, but lackluster, New York dinner club of the same name, which had been created in 1918 by prominent bankers and lawyers for discussions on trade and international finance. Article II of the new CFR’s bylaws stated that anyone revealing details of CFR meetings in contravention of the CFR’s rules could be dropped from membership, thus qualifying the CFR as a secret society.
This secrecy has been assiduously protected by America’s major media. "Analysts of the Soviet press say the Council crops up more regularly in Pravda and Izvestia than it does in the New York Times," noted journalist J. Anthony Lucas in 1971.
Since 1945, the CFR has been headquartered in the elegant Harold Pratt House in New York City. The building was donated by the Pratt family of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. The mansion, with its painted French doors, elegant tapestries, and fireplaces, presents a clublike atmosphere.
Characterization of the CFR as an "old boys’ club" is enhanced by the fact that many members belong to other upper-crust Social Register groups such as the Century Association, the Links Club, the University Club, and Washington’s Metropolitan Club.
In the CFR’s 1997 annual report, Board Chairman Peter G. Peterson acknowledged that there was a "kernel of truth" to the charge that the council was an organization of "New York liberal elite," but stated the CFR today is "reaching further into America" with an increasing number of members now living outside New York and Washington.
The CFR’s invitation-only membership, originally limited to 1,600 participants, today numbers more than 3,300, representing the most influential leaders in finance, commerce, communications, and academia. Admission is a very discriminating and painful process: candidates have to be proposed by a member, seconded by another member, approved by a membership committee, screened by the professional staff, and finally approved by the board of directors.
In an effort to adjust to the modern world, the Council extended its membership by the early 1970s to include a few blacks and more than a dozen women. To broaden its influence beyond the eastern seaboard, the CFR created Committees on Foreign Relations composed of local leaders in cities across the nation. More than thirty-seven such committees comprising about four thousand members existed by the early 1980s.
Original CFR members included Colonel House, former New York senator and Secretary of State Elihu Root, syndicated columnist Walter Lippmann, John Foster Dulles and Christian Herter, who both later served a secretaries of state, and Dulles’s brother Allen, who later served as director of the CIA.
Founding CFR president, millionaire John W. Davis, was financier J. P. Morgan’s personal attorney, while Vice President Paul Cravath also represented Morgan properties. The council’s first chairman was Russell Leffingwell, one of Morgan’s partners. Since most of the earliest CFR members had connections to Morgan in one way or another, it could be said that the council was heavily influenced by Morgan interests.
Funding for the CFR came from bankers and financiers such as Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Bernard Baruch, Jacob Schiff, Otto Kahn, and Paul Warburg. Today, funding for the CFR comes from major corporations such as Xerox, General Motors, Bristol-Meyers Squibb, Texaco, and others as well as the German Marshall Fund, McKnight Foundation, Billion Fund, Ford Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Starr Foundation, and the Pew Charitable Trusts.
According to the Capital Research Center’s Guide to Nonprofit Advocacy and Policy Groups, CFR board members are associated with such influential organizations as the Committee for Economic Development, Institute for International Economics, Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the Business Enterprise Trust, the Urban Institute, the Business Roundtable, Council on Competitiveness, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, National Alliance for Business, Brookings Institution, Business-Higher Education Forum, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Ethics and Public Policy Center, Hoover Institution, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Wilderness Society, and the American Council for Capital Formation.
The CFR played a key role in American policy during World War II, and journalist J. Anthony Lucas noted, "From 1945 well into the sixties, Council members were in the forefront of America’s globalist activism."
In a 1997 mission statement, CFR officials, whose "ranks include nearly all past and present senior U.S. government officials who deal with international matters," stated the council is merely "a unique membership organization and think tank that educates members and staff to serve the nation with ideas for a better and safer world."
Critics dispute this goal, noting that the CFR has had its hand in every major twentieth century conflict. Many writers view the CFR as a group of men set on world domination through multinational business, international treaties, and world government.
Even insiders seem to have a hard time convincing their fellows that there is no attempt at conspiratorial control. Admiral Chester Ward, retired judge advocate general of the U.S. Navy and a longtime CFR member was quoted as saying, "CFR, as such, does not write the platforms of both political parties or select their respective presidential candidates, or control U.S. defense and foreign policies. But CFR members, as individuals, acting in concert with other individual CFR members, do."
Journalist Lucas agreed, commenting that even if one rejects a "simple-minded" dictatorial view of the CFR,
"one must also recognize that influence flows as well through more intricate channels: the personal ties forged among men whose paths have crossed time and again in locker rooms, officers’ messes, faculty clubs, embassy conference rooms, garden parties, squash courts, and board rooms. If the Council has influence— and the evidence suggests that it does—then it is the influence its members bring to bear through such channels."
Admiral Ward went on to explain that the one common objective of CFR members is "to bring about the surrender of the sovereignty and the national independence of the United States... Primarily, they want the world banking monopoly from whatever power ends up in the control of global government," Ward added.
He detailed CFR methods in a 1975 book coauthored with Phyllis Schlafly titled Kissinger on the Couch.
"Once the ruling members of the CFR have decided that the U.S. Government should adopt a particular policy, the very substantial research facilities of CFR are put to work to develop arguments, intellectual and emotional, to support the new policy, and to confound and discredit, intellectually and politically, any opposition," he explained.
The public manifestation of the CFR is its publication Foreign Affairs, termed "informally, the voice of the U.S. foreign-policy establishment." Although council supporters claim "articles in Foreign Affairs do not reflect any consensus of beliefs. . . ," critics counter that the CFR signals members to its desired policies through such articles.
Even the stodgy Encyclopaedia Britannica admitted, "Ideas put forward tentatively in this journal often, if well received by the Foreign Affairs community, appear later as U.S. government policy or legislation; prospective policies that fail this test usually disappear."
Alvin Moscow, a sympathetic biographer of the Rockefeller family, wrote more to the point stating,
"So august has been the membership of the Council that it has been seen in some quarters as the heart of the eastern Establishment. When it comes to foreign affairs, it is the eastern Establishment. In fact, it is difficult to point to a single major policy in U.S. foreign affairs that has been established since [President] Wilson which was diametrically opposed to then current thinking in the Council on Foreign Relations." (emphasis in the original)
The Council has two methods of communicating the thoughts and desires of its inner circle of leadership: regular luncheon or dinner meetings where prominent thinkers and leaders from around the world address council members and council study groups that periodically present position papers on subjects of interest.
The Council also offers a Corporation Service, through which subscribing companies are provided twice-a-year dinner briefings by government officials such as the treasury secretary or CIA director. Noted author John Kenneth Galbraith, who resigned from the CFR in 1970 "out of boredom," called such off-the-record talks a "scandal." "Why should businessmen be briefed by Government officials on information not available to the public, especially since it can be financially advantageous?" he reasoned.
Author G. Edward Griffin agreed that initially the CFR, as a front for the British Round Table group, was dominated by the J. P. Morgan family.
"The Morgan group gradually has been replaced by the Rockefeller consortium, and the roll call of participating businesses now reads like the Fortune 500," he wrote in 1994.
One example of Rockefeller domination of the CFR came in the early 1970s when David Rockefeller went over the heads of a nominating committee and offered the editorship of Foreign Affairs to William Bundy, a former CIA official instrumental in prosecuting the Vietnam War.
Demonstrating how every U.S. government administration since the Council’s inception has been packed with CFR members, conservative journalist and CFR researcher James Perloff noted, "The historical record speaks even more loudly. . . . Through 1988, 14 secretaries of state, 14 treasury secretaries, 11 defense secretaries and scores of other federal department heads have been CFR members."
Nearly every CIA director since Allen Dulles has been a CFR member, including Richard Helms, William Colby, George Bush, William Webster, James Woolsey, John Deutsch, and William Casey.
"Many of the council’s members have a personal financial interest in foreign relations," noted researcher Laurie Strand, "because it is their property and investments that are guarded by the State Department and the military [and the CIA]."
Many researchers have alleged that the CIA, in fact, serves as a security force, not only for corporate America, but for friends, relatives, and fraternity brothers of the CFR. This may be a two-way street. According to a former executive assistant to the deputy director of the CIA Victor Marchetti along with former State Department analyst John D. Marks,
"The influential but private Council, composed of several hundred of the country’s top political, military, business, and academic leaders, has long been the CIA’s principal ’constituency’ in the American public. When the agency has needed prominent citizens to front for its proprietary companies or for other special assistance, it has often turned to Council members."
CFR members who take government positions tend to bring in fellow members. When CFR member Henry Stimson came to Washington as secretary of war in 1940, he brought with him fellow member John J. McCloy as assistant secretary for personnel. McCloy, in turn, did his part over the years to bring more CFR members to government. "Whenever we needed a new man [for a government position], we just thumbed through the roll of council members and put through a call to New York," once commented McCloy, a former CFR chairman, chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, mentor to David Rockefeller, and himself foreign policy adviser to six U.S. presidents.
Another example of the influence of the CFR can be seen in the meteoric rise of Henry Kissinger. In 1955, Kissinger was merely another unknown academic who attended a meeting at the Marine Corps School at Quantico, Virginia, hosted by then presidential foreign affairs assistant Nelson Rockefeller. This meeting was the start of a lengthy friendship between the two culminating in a $50,000 outright gift to Kissinger from Rockefeller. Kissinger soon was introduced to David Rockefeller and other prominent CFR members. Through the CFR, Kissinger obtained funding and entree to ranking officials of the Atomic Energy Commission, the three branches of the military, the CIA, and the State Department. He used this access to produce a best-selling book entitled Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, in which he argued that a nuclear war might be "winnable." By the time of Nixon’s administration, Kissinger was secretary of state, and he remains a formidable force in world affairs.
According to published reports, the Clinton administration was top-heavy with more than one hundred CFR members helping to begin the Clinton years. CFR members were named ambassadors to Spain, Great Britain, Australia, Chile, Syria, South Africa, Russia, Romania, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Italy, India, France, Czech Republic, Poland, Nigeria, and the Philippines. Currently, more than a dozen members of both the House and Senate are CFR members.
Author Robert Anton Wilson commented, "If the CFR had millions of members like, say, the Presbyterian Church, this list might not mean much. But the CFR only has 3,200 members."
Because of its Wall Street/banking origins and its inherent secrecy, the Council on Foreign Relations came under strident attack by conservative writers. This public attention led to the creation of the less secretive Trilateral Commission.
Public awareness of the pervasive CFR presence in government became so widespread that the late Gary Allen, whose book on globalist organizations, None Dare Call It Conspiracy, sold more than five million copies despite being ignored by the Establishment media, commented just before the 1972 national elections,
"There really was not a dime’s worth of difference [between presidential candidates]. Voters were given the choice between CFR world government advocate Nixon and CFR world government advocate Humphrey. Only the rhetoric was changed to fool the public."
In a call to action, Allen echoed the admonition of many researchers who are suspicious of the CFR’s motives when he wrote, "Democrats and Republicans must break the Insider control of their respective parties. The CFR-types and their flunkies and social climbing opportunist supporters must be invited to leave or else the Patriots must leave." Many conspiracy researchers today see a parallel situation in the 2000 election, shaping up to be a contest between Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush, both of whom have long-standing business and family ties to Wall Street and CFR members.
Author Perloff warned from a Christian perspective that a monumental battle is shaping up between the Kingdom of Christ and,
"an evil, one-world government: the kingdom of the Antichrist... Many notables of the American Establishment have given themselves over to one side in this conflict, and it is not the side the ancient scriptures recommend. . . . Whether or not they are conspirators, whether they are conscious or not of the ultimate consequences of their actions, their powerful influence has helped move the world toward apocalyptic events."
Clearly the CFR has exerted a powerful influence, if not outright control, over U.S. policies for nearly the past century. But for almost fifty years, this influence has been shared with another closely connected secretive group—the Bilderbergers.
The Bilderbergers are a group of powerful men and women—many of them European royalty—who meet in secret each year to discuss the issues of the day. Many suspicious researchers claim they conspire to manufacture and manage world events.
Despite the fact that many highly regarded American media members meet with the Bilderbergers, little or nothing gets reported on the group or its activities, leading writers to claim censorship and news management.
As with the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, Bilderbergers often carry cross-membership in two or more of these three groups.
British author David Icke presented a story from Dr. Kitty Little which gives fascinating insight into the long-range planning of one secret group. Dr. Little, who worked for Britain’s Ministry of Aircraft Production during World War II and later the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, recounted how she attended the meeting of a Labour Party "study group" at Oxford University in 1940.
The speaker that evening was a young man who claimed to be part of a "Marxist takeover" plot. The speaker said he was a member of a nameless group (it had no name to make it harder to prove its existence) that aimed to engineer Marxist control in Britain, Europe, and parts of Africa. He explained that since Britons distrusted extremists, group members would pose as moderates, which would allow them to dismiss critics as right-wingers. The speaker added that he had been selected to head the group’s political section and that he expected to be named prime minister of the United Kingdom some day.
The speaker was Harold Wilson, who indeed became prime minister during the 1960s and ’70s.
Wilson was referring to the group which has come to be known as the Bilderbergers. It still has no official name, but it has been identified with the Bilderberg Hotel in Oosterbeek, Holland, where it was first discovered by the public in 1954. Its meeting in February 1957 on Saint Simons Island near Jekyll Island, Georgia, was the first on U.S. soil.
Wilson has not been the only head of state to mingle with the Bilderbergers. In 1991, then Arkansas governor Bill Clinton was honored as a Bilderberg guest. The next year he ran for and won the presidency of the United States. After his election, Clinton made no mention of the Bilderberg meetings, but, according to The Spotlight (a Washington tabloid that has covered Bilderberg conferences for years), Hillary Clinton attended in 1997, becoming the first American first lady to do so. Thereafter, talk steadily grew concerning her future role in politics.
The official creation of this highly secret organization came about in the early 1950s following unofficial meetings between members of Europe’s elite in the 1940s. They included European foreign ministers, Holland’s Prince Bernhard, and Polish socialist Dr. Joseph Hieronim Retinger, a founder of the European Movement after World War II. Retinger became known as the "father of the Bilderbergers."
Retinger was brought to America by Averell Harriman (CFR), then U.S. ambassador to England, where he visited prominent citizens such as David and Nelson Rockefeller, John Foster Dulles, and then CIA Director Walter Bedell Smith. Previously, Retinger had formed the American Committee on a United Europe along with future CIA Director and CFR member Allen Dulles, then CFR Director George Franklin, CIA official Thomas Braden, and William Donovan, former chief of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), forerunner of the CIA. Donovan began his intelligence career as an operative of J. P. Morgan Jr., and was known as an "Anglophile," a supporter of close British-American relations. Retinger continued his participation in Bilderberg meetings until his death in 1960. Another CIA-connected person who helped create the Bilderbergers was Life magazine publisher C. D. Jackson, who served under President Eisenhower as "special consultant for psychological warfare."
From these associations came the idea of holding regular meetings of prominent businessmen, politicians, bankers, educators, media owners and managers, and military leaders from around the world. The Bilderbergers also are closely tied to Europe’s nobility, including the British royal family. According to several sources, meetings are often attended by royalty from Sweden, Holland, and Spain.
The primary impetus for the Bilderberger meetings came from Dutch Prince Bernhard, whose full name and title was Bernhard Julius Coert Karel Godfried Pieter, Prince of the Netherlands and Prince of Lippe-Biesterfeld.
Bernhard was a former member of the Nazi Scbutzstaffel (SS) and an employee of Germany’s I.G. Farben in Paris. In 1937 he married Princess Juliana of the Netherlands and became a major shareholder and officer in Dutch Shell Oil, along with Britain’s Lord Victor Rothschild.
After the Germans invaded Holland, the royal couple moved to London. It was here, after the war, that Rothschild and Retinger encouraged Prince Bernhard to create the Bilderberger group. The prince personally chaired the group until 1976, when he resigned following revelations that he had accepted large payoffs from Lockheed to promote the sale of its aircraft in Holland.
Since 1991 the Bilderberg chairmanship has been held by Britain’s Lord Peter Carrington, former cabinet minister, secretary-general of NATO, and president of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, a sister organization to the CFR. Carrington has been linked to the Rothschild banking empire by both business connections and marriage.
Americans with famous names who have attended Bilderberger meetings include CFR members George Ball, Dean Acheson, Dean Rusk, McGeorge Bundy, Christian Herter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Douglas Dillon, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Walter Reuther, Jacob Javits, Robert McNamara, Walter Bedell Smith, and General Lyman Lemi-nitzer. Other noteworthy attendees have included J. William Fulbright, Henry Ford II, Georges-Jean Pompidou, Giscard d’Estaing, Helmut Schmidt, and France’s Baron Edmond de Rothschild.
"In fact, the Bilderbergers are a sort of unofficial CFR, expanded to an international scale," stated author Neal Wilgus.
Author and former intelligence officer Dr. John Coleman claimed "The Bilderberger Conference is a creation of [Britain’s] MI6 under the direction of the Royal Institute of International Affairs." Considering the U.S. intelligence connections, it also can be legitimately argued that the Bilderberg conferences have been at least partially organized and sponsored by the CIA.
According to "Strictly Confidential" minutes of the first Bilderberg conference,
"Insufficient attention has so far been paid to long-term planning, and to evolving an international order which would look beyond the present-day crisis [the Cold War]. When the time is ripe our present concepts of world affairs should be extended to the whole world."
Investigative reporter James P. Tucker, who has doggedly tracked the Bilderbergers for years, wrote,
"The Bilderberg agenda is much the same as lliat of its brother group, The Trilateral Commission. . . . The two groups have an interlocking leadership and a common vision of the world. David Rockefeller founded the Trilateral but shares power in the older Bilderberg group with the Rothschilds of Britain and Europe."
The Bilderbergers usually meet once a year at plush resorts around the globe, and their activities are cloaked in total secrecy despite the attendance by top-level American media members. Although the group claims to merely hold informal discussions on world affairs, there is evidence that its recommendations often become official policy.
The concept of a unified Europe under centralized control—a goal of the medieval Knights Templar—appears well along the way to becoming a reality thanks to the Bilderbergers. George McGhee, a Bilderberger and former U.S. ambassador to West Germany, acknowledged that "the Treaty of Rome, which brought the [European] Common Market into being, was nurtured at Bilderberg meetings."
Jack Sheinkman, chairman of Amalgamated Bank and a Bilderberger member, stated in 1996,
"In some cases discussions do have an impact and become policy. The idea of a common European currency was discussed several years back before it became policy. We had a discussion about the U.S. establishing formal relations with China before Nixon actually did it."
Sheinkman may be one of those Bilderberger members who do not understand the true goals of the group’s elite leadership. According to Icke,
"The Bilderberg Elite, like Carrington and those on the steering committee, coordinate the regular attenders of Bilderberg meetings—who know the real game plan—and those invited on a rare or one-time basis— who may not know the true agenda of the organization, but can be fed the party line that world institutions are the way to peace and prosperity."
And what is this "true agenda" ? It may have been revealed when Prince Bernhard stated, "It is difficult to reeducate the people who have been brought up on nationalism to the idea of relinquishing part of their sovereignty to a supernational body. ..."
The 1998 meeting of the Bilderbergers was conducted on May 14-18 in the palatial Turnberry Hotel near Glasgow, Scotland. As usual, there was little or no reporting on this event by America’s mainstream media.
Unlike their American counterparts, some members of Scotland’s news media found their voice. Under the headline "Whole world in their hands," Jim McBeth of The Scolsmiin described (he light security surrounding the meeting, commenting, "Anyone approaching the hotel who did not have a stake in controlling the planet was turned back."
McBeth described the Bilderberg guest list as,
"an international who’s who of the wealthy, influential and powerful. . . Once a year, the 120 men and women credited with putting Bill Clinton into the Oval Office and ousting Lady [Margaret] Thatcher from No. 10 [Downing Street], meet to discuss world events and, some claim, manipulate them," he added.
At least one reporter, Campbell Thomas with the Scottish Daily Mail, was arrested by security officers, handcuffed, and held for eight hours for daring to approach the Bilderberg meeting.
It was reported that one of the decisions of the 1998 Bilderberg meeting was to encourage British prime minister Tony Blair to press harder for Britain’s entry into the growing European union, a step viewed with suspicion by his predecessor Margaret Thatcher. Blair may have gone further in this plan to reduce Britain’s independence, as his plan to dissolve the House of Lords was successful later in 1998. While the Lords were viewed by many as unenlightened idlers, others saw the wealthy, but patriotic, Lords as a bulwark against the erosion of English sovereignty by supporters of the "New World Order."
Unlike their American brethren, the Canadian media actually reported news of the 1996 Bilderberg meeting near Toronto with such headlines as " [Canadian prime minister Jean] Chretien to Speak at Secret World Meeting," "[Canadian publisher Conrad] Black Plays Host to World Leaders," and "World Domination or a Round of Golf?"
When asked to comment about the lack of reporting by journalist William F. Buckley who attended the Bilderberg meeting in Canada, a secretary commented, "I don’t think that is the nature of the meeting, is it?" Paul Gigot of the Wall Street Journal, another attendee, explained, "The rules of the conference, which we all adhere to, are that we don’t talk about what is said. It is all off the record. The fact that I attended is no secret."
Perhaps these reporters don’t talk about what they learn at these secret meetings, but it is clear that their association shapes their editorial positions. Media critics have long charged that the differences in editorial positions of America’s major news outlets are negligible.
"If the Bilderberg Group is not a conspiracy of some sort, it is con-iliu led in such a way as to give a remarkably good imitation of one," wrote journalist C. Gordon Tether of London’s Financial Times in 1975. About a year later, following ongoing arguments over censorship, Tether was fired by Financial Times editor Max Henry "Fredy" Fisher, a member of the Trilateral Commission.
An obvious connecting link between the CFR, Trilateral Commission, and the Bilderbergers is the Rockefeller family, particularly the youngest son, David.
Several wealthy and well-known businessmen constituted what amounted to an "American royalty" in the early part of the twentieth century: steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, banker Andrew Mellon, and transportation moguls Cornelius Vanderbilt and Edward Harriman.
But none approached the lasting power or international ties of the Rockefellers and Morgans.
John Davison Rockefeller continues to be the most recognized (and perhaps most despised) rich man in the world even though he’s been dead since 1937. During the past century, no one family in America has assembled such power and influence as the Rockefellers, thanks to their wealth and close ties to England.
Years ago the Rockefeller name continually cropped up in any discussion of secret societies, but today’s mass media rarely speak of the Rockefeller role in world events. But at one time the name of John D. Rockefeller was on everyone’s lips and his finances were known to all.
An 1897 edition of a rural Texas newspaper reported,
"John D. Rockefeller sleeps eight and one-half hours every night, retiring at 10:30 and rising at 7. Every morning when he gets up he is $17,705 richer than he was when he went to bed. He sits down to breakfast at 8 o’clock and leaves the table at 8:30, and in that short half hour his wealth has grown $1,041.50. On Sunday he goes to church, and in the two hours he is away from home his riches have grown $4,166. His nightly amusement is playing the violin. Every evening when he picks up the instrument he is $50,000 richer than he was when he laid it down the previous night. These little facts give some idea of the relentless growth of this man’s fortune."
One insight into the forging of John D.’s business philosophy might be gained by an anecdote told by Nelson Rockefeller. It seems when John D. was a small child his father, William "Big Kill" Rockefeller, who sold cancer "cures" from a medicine wagon, taught him to leap into his arms from a tall chair. One time his father held his arms out to catch him but pulled them away as little John jumped. The fallen son was told sternly, "Remember, never trust anyone completely, not even me."
At the start of the American Civil War, Rockefeller was a young agricultural commodities broker in Cleveland, Ohio. He quickly recognized the potential of the fledgling petroleum industry there, and in 1863 he and some associates built a refinery. In 1870 he incorporated Standard Oil Company of Ohio.
"The National City Bank of Cleveland, which was identified in congressional hearings as one of three Rothschild [the dominant European banking family] banks in the United States, provided John D. Rockefeller with the money to begin his monopolization of the oil refinery business, resulting in the formation of Standard Oil," noted a recent investigative video entitled, "The Money Masters."
Rockefeller, who was quoted as saying "Competition is a sin," ruthlessly eliminated competitors by either mergering or buying them out. Failing that, he cut prices until his competitors were forced to sell. He also managed lucrative railroad rebate agreements, which ensured him a near monopoly on the transportation of oil. Standard Oil—the direct ancestor of Exxon—prospered enormously, and by 1880 Rockefeller owned or controlled 95 percent of all oil produced in the United States.
Trouble for Rockefeller began in 1902 with the publication of a series of articles by Ida Tarbell, the daughter of a Pennsylvania oil producer run out of business by Rockefeller. Based on five years of research, Tarbell’s series was published in McClure’s Magazine and entitled "The History of Standard Oil Company." One reviewer proclaimed her work a "fearless unmasking of moral criminality masquerading under the robes of respectability and Christianity."
Tarbell’s expose resulted in government and court actions, which appeared to break up Standard’s oil monopoly. However, as early as 1882 Rockefeller had moved to mask his business dealings by creating the first great American corporation: Standard Oil Trust. "The trust embraced a maze of legal structures, making its workings virtually impervious to public investigation and understanding," explained The New Encyclopedia Britannica.
Such maneuvering continued in 1892 when the Ohio Supreme Court ordered the trust dissolved. Instead, Rockefeller simply moved Standard’s headquarters to New York City. In 1899 all assets and interests were transferred to a new creation, Standard Oil Company of New Jersey.
In 1906 the U.S. government charged Standard Oil with violating the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. Although apologists argued that Standard was simply caught in an emotional tidal wave of public discontent over the excesses of big business, the U.S. Supreme Court on May 15, 1911, couched its decision in these clear terms: "Seven men and a corporate machine have conspired against their fellow citizens. For the safety of the Republic we now decree that this dangerous conspiracy must be ended by November 15th."
Eight of the companies formed after the dissolution retained "Standard Oil" in their names, but even these were soon altered to present the image of diversity. Standard Oil Company of New York first merged with the trust company Vacuum Oil to form Socony-Vacuum, which in 1966 became Mobil Oil Corporation. Standard Oil of Indiana joined with Standard Oil of Nebraska and Standard Oil of Kansas and by 1985 had become Amoco Corporation. In 1984 the combination of Standard Oil of California and Standard Oil of Kentucky had become Chevron Corporation, while the old Standard Oil of New Jersey in 1972 became Exxon Corporation. Other former Standard companies include Atlantic Richfield, Buck-eye Pipe Line, Pennzoil, and Union Tank Car Company.
Ironically, the breakup of Standard only increased the wealth of Rockefeller, who now owned one fourth share of the thirty-three different oil companies created by the breakup of Standard. Shortly after the turn of the century, Rockefeller became America’s first billionaire.
Continued Rockefeller control was confirmed in the late 1930s by the only study of true ownership in America’s largest corporations ever made by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The study, The Distribution of Ownership in the 200 Largest Nonfinancial Corporations, was published in 1940. It concluded that Rockefeller holdings, while seemingly small—most were under 20 percent of outstanding stocks— nevertheless when compared to the remaining widely dispersed ownership were considered sufficient "to give the Rockefeller family control over the corporations."
Once again, interlocking directorships allowed the Rockefellers and others to maintain control over the oil industry.
"All of the eight largest oil companies were interlocked in 1972 through large commercial banks with at least one other member of the top group," wrote Dr. John M. Blair, former assistant chief economist for the Federal Trade Commission. "
"Exxon had four such interlocks—with Mobil, Standard of Ind., Texaco, and ARCO. Mobil had three—with Exxon, Shell, and Texaco—as did Standard of Indiana—with Exxon, Texaco, and ARCO—as well as Texaco—with Exxon, Mobil, and Standard of Ind.—and Shell with Mobil. Whenever all of the six [largest] commercial banks—exclusive of Bank of America and Western Bancorporation—hold their board meetings, directors of the top eight—excluding Gulf and SoCal—meet with directors of, on the average, 3.2 of their largest competitors."
Ironically, by the turn of the new century, the old Standard monopoly was being reformed by the anticipated merging of two of the world’s oil giants: Exxon and Mobil. This $75 billion "megadeal" was quickly called "Rockefeller’s revenge." At this writing the consolidation of oil companies has continued with announced plans for British Petroleum PLC to acquire Amoco.
By the time of his death in 1937, Rockefeller and his only son, John D. Rockefeller Jr., had not only built up an amazing oil empire but had established such institutions as the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (established 1901), the General Education Board (1903), the University of Chicago (1889), the Rockefeller Foundation (1913), the Lincoln School (1917), where the Rockefeller children began their educations, and Rockefeller University in New York City.
The Rockefellers also were greatly interested in the eugenics movement, a program of scientifically applied genetic selection to maintain and improve "ideal" human characteristics, including birth and population control. This idea grew from the writings of the Victorian scientist Sir Francis Galton, who after study reached the conclusion that prominent members of British society were such because they had "eminent" parents, thus combining Darwin’s concepts of "survival of the fittest" with the class-conscious question "who’s your daddy?"
If this sounds like a Nazi experiment run wild, consider that in the late nineteenth century, the United States joined fourteen other nations in passing some type of eugenics legislation. Thirty states had laws providing for the sterilization of mental patients and imbeciles. At least sixty thousand such "defectives" were legally sterilized.
Of course, to determine who was dirtying the gene pool requires extensive population statistics. So in 1910 the Eugenics Records Office was established as ë branch of the Galton National Laboratory in London, endowed by Mrs. E. H. Harriman, wife of railroad magnate Edward Harriman and mother of diplomat Averell Harriman. Mrs. Harriman in 1912 sold her substantial shares of New York’s Guaranty Trust bank to J. P. Morgan, thus assuring his control over that institution.
After 1900, the Harrimans—the family that gave the Prescott Bush family its start—along with the Rockefellers funded more than $11 million to create a eugenics research laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor, New York, as well as eugenics studies at Harvard, Columbia, and Cornell. The first International Congress of Eugenics was convened in London in 1912, with Winston Churchill as a director. Obviously, the concept of "bloodlines" was highly significant to these people.
In 1932 when the Congress met in New York, it was the Hamburg-Amerika Shipping Line, controlled by Harriman associates George Walker and Prescott Bush, that brought prominent Germans to the meeting. One was Dr. Ernst Rudin of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Genealogy and Demography in Berlin. Rudin was unanimously elected president of the International Federation of Eugenics Societies for his work in founding the German Society for Race Hygiene, a forerunner of Hitler’s racial institutes.
Eugenics work, under more politically correct names, continues right up to today. General William H. Draper Jr. was a "Supporting Member" of the International Eugenics Congress in 1932 and, despite or because of his ties to the Harriman and Bush families, was named head of the Economic Division of the U.S. Control Commission in Germany at the end of hostilities. According to authors Tarpley and Chaikin,
"General Draper (in later years) founded ’Population Crisis Committee’ and the ’Draper Fund,’ joining with the Rockefeller and Du Pont families to promote eugenics as ’population control.’ The administration of President Lyndon Johnson, advised by General Draper on the subject, began financing birth control in the tropical countries through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
"General Draper was George Bush’s guru on the population question. . . . Draper’s son and heir, William H. Draper III, was co-chairman for finance—chief of fundraising—of the Bush-for-President national campaign organization in 1980."
The younger Draper went on to work with population control activities of the United Nations.
Rudin’s eugenics work was to a large part funded by Rockefeller money. "These wealthy American families, like their counterpart’s in Britain, feel themselves to be racially superior and they wish to protect their racial superiority," commented author Icke.
Nepotism proved a connecting link in these family chains. According to biographer Alvin Moscow, "Starting in the year 1917 and continuing over the next five years, the elder Rockefeller handed over his fortune to his only son and heir with no strings attached."
John Jr., while dealing primarily with philanthropic activities, nevertheless followed his father’s mode of business practices, particularly in his opposition to unions. This stance softened, at least publicly, following the Ludlow Massacre of 1914 in which Colorado militia members fired on strikers at the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, killing forty persons.
Rockefeller Jr. helped create the United Service Organization (USO) for soldiers during World War II and supervised the building of Rockefeller Center in Manhattan. After the war, it was Rockefeller who donated land in Manhattan for the headquarters of the United Nations.
Rockefeller Jr. sired one daughter, Abby, who died of cancer in 1976 at age seventy-two, and five sons—John III, Nelson, Laurance, Winthrop, and David.
The eldest, John III, became chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation and guided millions of dollars to international agencies such as the India International Centre and the International House of Japan. His personal money went to his fabulous Oriental art collection and the creation of the Population Council, a center concerned with overpopulation and family planning. He died in 1978, but his son, John "Jay" Davison Rockefeller, carried on the family’s political interest by serving as governor of West Virginia.
Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller also carved out a career in politics. Prior to World War II he journeyed to Venezuela, where he discovered the culture of South America, as well as the lucrative oil business. Because of his knowledge of the area, President and fellow New Yorker Franklin D. Roosevelt set Rockefeller on his government vocation by appointing him coordinator for inter-American affairs. Rockefeller also served as a four-term governor of New York state following various posts in the family oil and banking businesses.
In 1953 the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) was established, and Rockefeller was named undersecretary upon the recommendation of Secretary Oveta Culp lobby. Rockefeller was able to push through many social programs as detailed by author Alvin Moscow, who wrote,
"Oveta Gulp Hobby was out front as the Secretary; Nelson worked behind the scenes, finding key personnel to head various programs, promulgating research and studies, putting together new programs and then trying to steer those new programs through the Eisenhower administration and through a sometimes skeptical Congress."
Eisenhower even appointed Rockefeller special assistant for foreign affairs, the same office his close friend Henry Kissinger held under President Nixon.
He continually sought the Republican presidential nomination, but his plans were thwarted by Nixon in both 1960 and 1968 and by Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964. Rockefeller eventually was appointed vice president of the United States in 1974 by President Gerald R. Ford, himself an appointee of President Richard Nixon, who was forced to resign over the Watergate scandal. Rockefeller died at age seventy in 1979 under controversial circumstances involving a young female staff assistant.
Laurance Spelman Rockefeller became the most business-oriented of the brothers and enjoyed a successful career as a venture capitalist. Developing an early interest in aviation, he invested in Eastern Airlines in 1938 along with famed aviator Captain Eddie Rickenbacker and turned the airline into one of the world’s largest. Rockefeller also invested heavily in the dreams of a young Scotsman named James McDonnell Jr., who went on to launch what became McDonnell-Douglas Aircraft Corp. He entered the realm of environmentalism and became chairman of the Citizens Advisory Committee on Environmental Quality, president of the American Conservation Association, and chairman of the New York Zoological Society.
Winthrop Rockefeller was considered the maverick of the Rockefeller clan. Dropping out of Yale in 1934, he made his way to Texas where he worked as an oil field roustabout. During World War II, he served as a combat infantryman in the Pacific theater earning a Purple Heart and Bronze Star with two Oak Leaf Clusters. Returning home, he developed a taste for drinking, women, and New York cafe society. But in 1953, tiring of this lifestyle, he suddenly moved to Arkansas where he was voted "Arkansas Man of the Year" in 1956. His famous name allowed him to gain the office of governor in 1967. It was then that a young Arkansas Democrat, Rhodes scholar, and DeMoley member named Hill Clinton may have gained the attention of Rockefeller. Winthrop, too, died of cancer in 1973, just two months before his sixty-first birthday.
David Rockefeller was the youngest of the five Rockefeller brothers and the one who became the most powerful, if not the most prominent. After earning a B.S. degree from Harvard, he entered the London School of Economics, a school largely funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust Fund, and the widow of J. P. Morgan partner Williard Straight. Here he came into contact with the teachings of Ruskin and other socialists, including Harold Laski. Educated at Oxford, Laski early on advocated political pluralism but later turned to Marxism and became a luminary in Britain’s Socialist Party. He once wrote that the state is "the fundamental instrument of society."
Returning to the States, David Rockefeller exhibited his deep feelings for England in a letter to the New York Times in April 1941 in which he stated, "We should stand by the British Empire to the limit and at any cost. ..." Just before the outbreak of war, he obtained a doctorate degree from the University of Chicago. His doctoral thesis was entitled "Unused Resources and Economic Waste." Perhaps articulating the driving ambition of the Rockefeller brothers, he wrote, "Of all forms of waste, however, that which is most abhorrent is idleness. There is a moral stigma attached to unnecessary and involuntary idleness which is deeply imbedded in our conscience."
During the war, he entered the U.S. Army as a private but was soon working in North Africa and France with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), forerunner to the CIA. This experience, along with his schooling in England, strengthened a lifelong concern with foreign affairs. It was most probably during this time that Rockefeller developed high-level intelligence contacts which later brought him insider knowledge of many top-secret operations.
By 1948 David Rockefeller was chairman of the board of trustees of the Rockefeller Institute. The president of the institute was Dr. Detlev Wulf Bronk, a biophysicist specializing in the human nervous system. According to the controversial MJ-12 documents, Bronk not only was a member of MJ-12—reportedly a supersecret group in charge of the UFO issue—but leader of the team that autopsied "extraterrestrial biological entities" recovered from a crashed disk near Roswell, New Mexico, in July 1947.
After the war, Rockefeller joined the staff of Chase National Bank of New York, where his uncle, Winthrop Aldrich, was chairman of the board and president. Chase traced its history back to central bank advocate Alexander Hamilton’s Bank of the Manhattan Company begun in 1799, and by 1921 it had become the second largest national bank in the United States. In 1955 Rockefeller played a major role in the merger of Chase with the Bank of Manhattan Company, which resulted in Chase Manhattan Bank. In 1969 the bank became part of Chase Manhattan Corp. in line with the trend of establishing holding companies to avoid banking laws prohibiting certain activities, such as the acquisition of finance companies. That same year David Rockefeller became the company’s board chairman and chief executive officer, thanks primarily to his preeminence in international banking.
His connections to the world of international politics as well as intelligence were improved when his uncle Aldrich retired as chairman of the bank in 1953 to become U.S. Ambassador to the Court of Saint James (England). Aldrich was succeeded by John J. McCloy, a former chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations. McCloy, who has been called the "architect of the postwar American intelligence establishment," served as assistant secretary of war from April 1941 to November 1945, president of the World Bank from 1947 to 1949, and U.S. Governor and High Commissioner for Germany from 1949 to 1952. McCloy also served on the Warren Commission, helping mediate disagreements with members who were troubled by the controversial "single bullet" theory of JFK’s assassination. According to author Alvin Moscow, David Rockefeller soon became "the undisputed protégé of McCloy."
David Rockefeller had already joined the Council on Foreign Relations in 1941 before war came, and by 1950 had been elected vice president.
His interest in foreign affairs could not have been entirely altruistic, since it has been estimated that the multinational banks, with Chase leading the way, loaned more than $50 billion to developing nations between 1957 and 1977. Even sympathetic biographer Moscow admitted,
"David’s fascination with international relations, necessitating intricate knowledge of the governmental, social and economic policies of nations throughout the world, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, dovetailed uniquely with his interest and concern in expanding Chase Manhattan’s business in the international banking market."
To say that David Rockefeller may be one of the most important men in America would be an understatement. According to Gary Allen, in the year 1973 alone, "David Rockefeller met with 27 heads of state, including the rulers of Russia and Red China." In 1976 when Australian president Malcolm Fraser visited the United States, he conferred with David Rockefeller before meeting President Gerald Ford. "This is truly incredible," wrote author Ralph Epperson, "because David Rockefeller has neither been elected or appointed to any governmental position where he could officially represent the United States government."
But the Rockefeller influence—if not control—extends far beyond their banking and oil interests. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, for example, in 1997 listed nearly $500 million in assets. It was incorporated in 1940 by the five brothers. Since that time, the Fund has dispersed more than $461 million in grants to a wide range of activities and institutions including various universities, numerous arts programs, the Smithsonian Institution, Buddhist Zen Center, Aspen Institute, Asian Cultural Council, Brookings Institution, National Audubon Society, National Park Foundation, Planned Parenthood of New York City, NAACP, German Marshall Fund of the U.S., Yale University, Center for Strategic and International Studies, National Academy of Sciences, and the Society for International Development.
In 1977 the Fund contributed $1 million to the Council on Foreign Relations. Perhaps due to the adverse publicity of conspiracy writers, this amount had dropped to a mere $45,000 in 1997, $25,000 of which went to study the "economic and political implications of Korean unification." The Trilateral Commission, which received $120,000 from the Fund in 1977, was not mentioned in their 1997 annual report.
In 1997 the Fund also spent more than $1.2 million in grants for various projects in New York City, an area of special and long-term interest by the Fund.
The Fund is especially involved in environmental issues, as evidenced by its donations to National Environmental Trust, Greenpeace Environmental Trust, National Wildlife Federation, American Conservation Association, Environmental Defense Fund, among others. Conspiracy authors have noted that if someone owned an interest in companies which might be adversely affecting the environment, what better way to gain some measure of control over activists than by heavy contributions?
M. O’Neill, niece of the five Rockefeller brothers, in 1998 ended her term as chairwoman of the Fund. The position was assumed by Nelson’s son, Steven C. Rockefeller. The one-world outlook of the Rockefellers was still evident in the Fund’s 1997 annual report. Mrs. O’Neill wrote that the Fund had "a refocused ’One World’ strategy, with an explicitly global perspective and an emphasis on the convergence of national and international frameworks."
Fund president and CFR member Colin G. Campbell wrote that Rockefeller money was being used to help create,
"a number of cross-sectoral partnerships . . . that involve such sometimes unlikely partners as nonprofit and for-profit entities, government agencies and non-government organizations, research universities and grassroots activist groups."
"In fact much of the U.S. government’s involvement in health, education and welfare in the latter half of the twentieth century seems to have been pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation in the first half of the century," commented author Moscow.
Rockefeller activities always seem to involve or produce world leaders. Henry Kissinger already has been mentioned. Prior to World War II, a Rockefeller Foundation division on economic research was headed by Canadian W. L. Mackenzie King. A mentor to John D. Jr., Mackenzie later became prime minister of Canada.
Contributing to the power of their name was the fact that Rockefeller projects were nearly always successful. According to biographer Alvin Moscow, the brothers,
"moved warily before lending the Rockefeller name or finances to any new endeavor or enterprise. But once committed, they stayed with their commitments for the long haul, giving generously of their money, their time and their efforts. It became known in various civic and social circles that if a Rockefeller was involved, the project most likely had merit and was expected to succeed."
Despite their close ties and commitments to Britain, the Rockefellers gave the appearance of being a purely American phenomenon. Another American banking empire actually began in Britain.
If John D. Rockefeller had an equal in the halcyon days of the robber barons it was John Pierpont Morgan, a man even more demonstrably connected with an "Anglophile network."
The Morgan banking empire continues to hold sway over both business and political decisions being made today, and many Morgan employees and agents can be counted among the membership of the secret societies.
Morgan’s mother was Juliet Pierpont Morgan, whose father, the Reverand John Pierpont, was vocally pro-British and the son of a Yale University founder. J. P. Morgan’s father, Junius Spencer Morgan, was an American financier who traveled to England in the 1850s where he was befriended by another expatriate American named George Peabody, a man already doing business with the British Rothschilds. Joining with Peabody under the name Peabody, Morgan & Company, Junius’s wealth grew as the result of obtaining loans for the North during the American Civil War. His son, John Pierpont Morgan, was born in 1837.
Junius and son took charge of the business upon the retirement of Peabody in 1864 and promptly changed the name to Morgan and Company.
The Morgans, too, became closely connected to the British Rothschilds, even staying in their home on occasion. Many authors have written that the Morgans eventually became a covert agent for the Rothschilds. "Morgan’s activities in 1895-1896 in selling U.S. gold bonds in Europe were based on his alliance with the House of Rothschild," noted author Gabriel Kolko.
The idea that the Morgans were the American front for Britain’s Baron Nathan Mayer Rothschild’s interests also was advanced by Eustace Mullins, the author who in 1952 first revealed the maneuvering which resulted in the creation of the Federal Reserve System. Regarding the Rothschilds, Mullins wrote, "Even though they had a registered agent in the United States ... it was extremely advantageous to them to have an American representative who was not known as a Rothschild agent." Mullins said the Rothschilds "preferred to operate anonymously in the United States behind the facade of J. P. Morgan and Company."
"Part of the reality of the day was an ugly resurgence of anti-Semitism," wrote George Wheeler, author of Pierpont Morgan and Friends: Anatomy of a Myth. "Someone was needed as a cover. Who better than J. Pierpont Morgan, a solid, Protestant exemplar of capitalism able to trace his family back to pre-Revolutionary times?"
"Tin- possibilities arc obvious that ÿ major portion of the wealth and power of the Morgan firm was, and always had been, merely the wealth and power of the Rothschilds who had raised it up in the beginning and who sustained it through its entire existence," agreed author Griffin.
Although J. P. Morgan was born in America and educated in Boston, in 1856 he traveled to Germany where he studied at the University of Gottingen, founded by England’s George II in 1737 who then was serving as Elector of Hanover. Notorious for its expulsion of dissident professors called the "Gottingen Seven,"—which included the brothers Grimm and other adherents of Georg Hegel including Karl Marx—the university continued to be a hotbed of antiestablishment and secret society activity.
Returning to the United States, Morgan joined the New York banking firm of Duncan, Sherman and Company, the American representatives of their London company. "Thereafter, Morgan appears to have served as a Rothschild financial agent and went to great length to appear totally American," Griffin wrote.
At the outbreak of the American Civil War, young Morgan demonstrated that legalities and honesty played little part in his business practices. In May 1861 twenty-four-year-old Morgan offered to sell five thousand military rifles to the commander of the federal army stationed at St. Louis for twenty-two dollars apiece. The commander, desperate for rifles, agreed, but when the rifles arrived he refused payment, claiming the weapons were obsolete and defective. Morgan sued the army and won a court judgment ordering that he be paid the $109,912.
A congressional investigating committee in 1862 concluded that Morgan had defrauded the government. The committee found that the rifles, considered "thoroughly unserviceable, obsolete and dangerous," had been bought for $3.50 each from a New York arsenal by a Simon Stevens, who was employed by Morgan. When the St. Louis commander agreed to buy the weapons sight unseen, Morgan had used the agreement as collateral to borrow money to pay for the weapons. So the U.S. Army had bought its own defective rifles from Morgan, who, at no financial risk to himself, realized about 500 percent profit on each gun.
In 1871 he became a partner in one of his father’s firms, Drexel, Morgan and Company, which later became simply J. P. Morgan and Company. This firm soon became the predominant source of U.S. government financing.
"Because of his links with the Peabody firm, Morgan had intimate and highly useful connections with the London financial world, and during the 1870s he was thereby able to provide the rapidly growing industrial corporations of the United States with much-needed capital from British bankers," noted The New Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Next to the European Rothschild family, the Morgan Company became one of the most powerful banking houses in the world. But that wasn’t enough for John P. Morgan, who inherited the family interests in 1890 following his father’s death in a carriage accident on the French Riviera. Five years earlier he began the reorganization of America’s largest railroads and by 1902 was the world’s most powerful railroad magnate, controlling about five thousand miles of track.
Morgan even helped bail out the U.S. government following a bank panic in 1893. Forming a syndicate, Morgan propped up the government’s depleted reserves with $62 million in Rothschild gold. In the 1890s he oversaw the merger of Edison General Electric and Thomson-Houston Electric Company to form General Electric, which quickly dominated electrical equipment manufacturing. Next, Morgan merged several steel firms to form United States Steel Corporation, and in 1902 he created International Harvester Company out of several competing agricultural equipment manufacturers.
This diversified Morgan empire has never been equaled and continues to dominate the American financial industry to this day.
"Through a system of interlocking memberships on the boards of companies he had reorganized or influenced, Morgan and his banking house achieved a top-heavy concentration of control over some of the nation’s leading corporations and financial institutions," explained The New Encyclopaedia Britannica.
This empire was extended to include tax-exempt foundations, trusts, pension funds, and even government positions. Such manipulation can explain how control over the commercial and economic life of the United States was achieved and maintained for those with the knowledge, willpower, and wealth.
Although J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller competed with each other in many areas, "in the end, they worked together to create a national banking cartel called the Federal Reserve System," wrote Griffin.
The initial plan for the Federal Reserve System was conceived at a secret meeting in 1910 at Morgan’s private resort on Jekyll Island off the coast of Georgia.
Morgan, connected to the Rockefellers through his investment associate Nelson Aldrich, remained the dominant American capitalist until his death in 1913, the same year the Fed was created.
Morgan’s son, John Pierpont Jr., known as Jack, continued to increase the family’s fortune following his father’s death. Groomed to his place as head of the Morgan empire, the younger Morgan spent eight years working in the firm’s London office developing close ties to Britain’s elite banking circles. During World War I, Morgan organized more than two thousand banks for the underwriting of more than $1 billion in Allied bonds. He became the only banker to purchase supplies, both military and otherwise, for both the British and French governments during the war. This indicates considerable leverage and clout within those governments, again suggesting the involvement of the Rothschilds.
Although largely unknown to modern Americans, the name of Rothschild is synonymous with international banking and can be found behind the scene of many major world events.
This secretive banking dynasty was begun by Mayer Amschel Bauer, a German Jew born on February 23, 1744, in Frankfurt, then a hotbed of anti-Semitism stemming from the widely publicized philosophies of Immanuel Kant and Johann Fichte. His father dealt in fine silk cloth despite ordinances prohibiting Jews from the practice.
Young Mayer studied to become a Rabbi. He was particularly schooled in Hashkalah, a blending of religion, Hebrew law, and reason, which had become popular during the Age of Enlightenment. The death of his parents forced Mayer to leave Rabbinical school and become an apprentice at a banking house.
Quickly learning the trade, he became court financial agent to William IX, royal administrator of the Hesse-Kassel region, and a prominent Freemason. He ingratiated himself to William, who was only one year older than himself, by joining his interest in Freemasonry and antiquities. Mayer would search out ancient coins and sell them to his benefactor at greatly reduced prices. Considering his Rabbinical training coupled with his serious searches for antiquities, he surely developed a deep understanding of the ancient mysteries, particularly those of the Jewish Cabala. It was during this same period that the metaphysics of the Cabala began to fuse with the traditions of Freemasonry as will be described later.
Young Mayer also added to his client list the royal German family of Thurn und Taxis, a descendant of which would be executed as a member of the secret society which created Adolf Hitler. The prominent Thurn and Taxis family administered a courier service throughout the Holy Roman Empire. "They prospered because they received before their rivals news of market trends, commodity prices and major political events," noted Rothschild biographer Derek Wilson. Mayer saw firsthand that information, especially obtained quickly, often meant great wealth. Today, the axiom has become "time equals money." To prevent prying eyes from reading their mail, the family wrote all correspondence in Judendeutsch, German written in Hebrew characters. This code has prevented most researchers from any clear understanding of their methods and intentions.
During this time, according to The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Mayer set the pattern that his family was to follow so successfully—to do business with reigning houses by preference and to father as many sons as possible who could take care of the family’s many business affairs abroad."
According to several authors, the family fortune was built upon money embezzled from William IX, who was paid an enormous sum by the British government to provide Hessian soldiers to fight American colonists during the Revolutionary War. William handed over this money to Mayer for investment, but instead it reportedly was used to establish his son Nathan as head of the London branch of the family banking house. Mayer eventually repaid the money but "Nathan manipulated the situation in such a way that this became the origin of the enormous Rothschild fortune," Icke wrote.
Biographer Derek Wilson acknowledged this by writing,
"It was the temporary diversion of the immense sums of money originating in Hesse-Kassel which enabled N. M. [as Nathan liked to be called] to launch his banking operation, providing him with both liquidity and prestige."
" From the earliest days, the Rothschilds appreciated the importance of proximity to politicians, the men who determined not only the extent of budget deficits but also the domestic and foreign policies. . . ." wrote biographer Niall Ferguson. "Rothschild influence extended to royalty as well. Nathan first came into contact with British royalty thanks to his father’s purchase of outstanding debts owed by George, Prince Regent—later King George IV—and his brothers."
Ferguson traced Rothschild influence on through the British royalty to Queen Victoria’s prince consort, Albert, and his son. The British Rothschilds also were quite close to most prominent Victorian politicians such as Lord John Russell, Lord William Gladstone, Benjamin Disraeli, Arthur Balfour, Joseph Chamberlain, and Lord Randolph Churchill, Winston’s father.
It was also about the time of Nathan’s arrival in London that Mayer Bauer changed his name to Rothschild (literally "red shield") taken from a red shield emblem on the ghetto home of his ancestors. This name change undoubtedly was an attempt to separate his family from the raging anti-Semitism prevalent in Germany at the time. To further insulate the family from such racism, the Rothschilds used a stable of registered agents and front men to operate their far-flung business dealings.
This may be a good point to dismiss claims that the modern secret societies, either wittingly or otherwise, are furthering the aims of an international Jewish conspiracy. While it is undoubtedly true that many of the world’s wealthy elite have a Jewish heritage, one should not be sidetracked by the issue of race or religion. There is no evidence of substance to prove that Jews or Hebrews—or any other racial or religious group—are any more greedy or ambitious than anyone else.
Furthermore, any discussion of anti-Semitism is frequently lost in a misunderstanding of the distinction between Hebrews, Jews, and Zionists.
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language describes a Hebrew as a member of the Semitic people, a race descended from Abraham of the Old Testament which, ironically enough, also includes most Arabs. A Jew, on the other hand, is a adherent of Judaism, a religion handed down by the Israelites. A Zionist is a member of a political movement concerned with preserving and furthering the aims of the state of Israel. These constitute three separate issues: race, religion, and politics.
To lump these singular issues into one single conspiracy is both wrong headed and contrary to the historical evidence. Most people in modern America realize that it is wrong to judge a person on race, an attribute over which that person has no control. Likewise, it is considered bad manners by most to publicly attack another person’s religion. Only one’s politics are considered fair game for dissension and argument.
It is here, in the realm of politics, that much confusion has been sown. Supporters of Zionism for years have skillfully attacked their opponents as "anti-Semites" to the extent that many Americans, Jews and gentiles alike and especially the media, are loath to even question the policies of Israel no matter how odious.
Furthermore, the broad brush of anti-Semitism frequently has been used to besmirch anyone offering a conspiratorial view of history.
While it may be true that secret organizations in the past were built along both racial and religious grounds, attempting to bring race or religion into a discussion of modern secret societies and conspiracies only serves to confuse the issue and repel conscientious researchers. Although many international financiers are of Jewish descent, it is no more fair to accuse the Hebrew race of an international conspiracy than it would be to blame all Caucasians for the acts of Hitler’s Nazis.
W. Cleon Skousen, a former FBI agent who served as police chief of Salt Lake City in the late 1950s, wrote about international conspiracies in several books, including The Naked Communist. He, too, came to understand that racial identification was "an oversimplified explanation for the rise of the global power structure which has snared mankind." He explained, "In studying the global conspiracy it is important to keep in mind that it was not any particular race or religion but the ’passion for money and power’ which has drawn the tycoons of world finance into a tightly knit, mutual-aid society."
But such considered and reasoned understanding of anti-Semitism was not in vogue during Mayer Rothschild’s time. So he built his financial empire while studiously attempting to avoid the racism of his day.
This is not to imply that the Rothschilds were not proud of their Jewish ancestry. By all accounts, family leaders have been most devout in their observance of Jewish traditions and customs. Over the years, the family has donated liberally to Jewish causes and may have even played a vital role in establishing the state of Israel, although some conspiracy writers claim that Rothschild interest in Israel more concerns I he control of oil than love of a homeland.
One method utilized to avoid racism was the enlistment of non-Jewish operatives us fronts for the Rothschild organization. At the time of the American Civil War, J. P. Morgan publicly made anti-Semitic remarks, yet he furthered the goals of the Rothschilds.
"How much of Morgan’s apparent anti-Semitism was real and how much may have been a pragmatic guise is, in the final analysis, of little importance. . . . Regardless of one’s interpretation of the nature of the relationship between the Houses of Morgan and Rothschild, the fact remains that it was close, it was ongoing, and it was profitable to both. If Morgan truly did harbor feelings of anti-Semitism, neither he nor the Rothschilds ever allowed them to get in the way of their business," noted author Griffin.
According to author Icke, Morgan and Rockefeller were wealthy "gofers" who used Rothschild financing to "build vast empires which controlled banking, business, oil, steel, etc., and ran the United States economy in the way the Oppenheimers do in South Africa."
Another expediency was the use of Mayer Rothschild’s sons, known as the "Frankfurt Five," who were carefully schooled and groomed to loyally further the family banking business.
While Mayer and his eldest son, Amschel Mayer, supervised from their Frankfurt bank, son Nathan Mayer established the London branch in 1804. Meanwhile, the youngest son, Jakob (who preferred to be called James), joined Paris banking circles in 1811 while Salomon Mayer began operating in Vienna and Karl Mayer in Naples.
Mayer also worked with neighbors.
"The Warburgs began lobbying for Rothschild business in Hamburg as early as 1814, though regular dealings were not established until the 1830s. . . ." wrote biographer Niall Ferguson.
In 1785 the Rothschilds shared quarters with a family named Schiff. A grandson, Jacob Henry Schiff, immigrated to America in 1865 after meeting Abraham Kuhn, who invited him to join his New York investment firm. In 1875 young Schiff married the daughter of Solomon Loeb, then head of the powerful investment banking firm of Kuhn, Loeb 8c Company of New York City. Schiff became head of the firm in 1885 with the death of Loeb. It was Schiff who financed the purchase of the Union Pacific for railroad magnate Edward H. Harriman, father of later world statesman W. Averell Harriman. Both Schiff and Averell Harriman were to play important roles in the rise of Communism in Russia.
The elder Harriman’s two sons attended Yale and were inducted into the Order of the Skull and Bones—William Averell (The Order, 1913) and Edward Roland Noel (The Order, 1917). During the 1930s W. Averell’s banking firm of W. A. Harriman & Company merged with the private international banking firm of Brown Brothers creating Brown Brothers, Harriman & Company, a longtime partner of which was Prescott Bush (The Order, 1917), father of George Bush (The Order, 1949).
Intermarriages between the prominent Jewish immigrant families were common around the turn of the century.
"As they set about protecting their vast estates, moreover, these Jewish dynasts often found it useful in the United States as in western Europe to marry among each other," wrote history professor Howard M. Sachar.
"Solomon Loeb and Abraham Kuhn, it is recalled, married each other’s sisters, and Jacob Schiff became an instant partner by marrying Loeb’s daughter. In turn, Felix Warburg, scion of a distinguished Hamburg banking family, assured himself a senior partnership in Kuhn, Loeb by marrying Schiff’s daughter Frieda. Felix’s brother Paul married Solomon Loeb’s daughter Nina—from Loeb’s second wife—and thus became his own brother’s uncle. Another partner, Otto Kahn, married Adelaide Wolff, daughter of one of the firm’s original investors. At Goldman, Sachs & Co., two Sachs boys married two Goldman daughters."
Another more recent example of these upper-level connections was the much publicized 1950s love affair between Elie de Rothschild and Winston Churchill’s former daughter-in-law, Pamela Churchill. After the affair broke up, she moved to New York where, after a short-lived marriage to a Broadway producer, she wed financier and CFR member Averell Harriman. In 1993 Pamela Harriman was named U.S. Ambassador to France by President Clinton.
Unrelenting attention to business, coupled with intermarriages and the use of front men, built a gigantic and secretive Rothschild banking empire. This empire exerted considerable influence on the economic and hence the political history of Europe as well as the United States, although here in a more covert and indirect manner.
In 1806 Nathan had become an English citizen and wed Hannah Cohen, the oldest daughter of Levi Barent Cohen, then London’s leading financier. The marriage cemented his acceptance by the British banking establishment.
"Nathan Rothschild was able to brag later that in the 17 years he had been in England had increased his original 20,000 pounds slake given to him by his father by 2,500 times, i.e. to 50,000,000—a truly vast sum at that time, comparable in purchasing power to billions of U.S. dollars today," stated one Rothschild investigator.
Derek Wilson, a sympathetic biographer of the Rothschilds, noted that in 1810 Nathan was merely one of several financiers operating in London. But by 1815 he had become the principal financier to the British government and its Bank of England. "This remarkable coup could only have been achieved by a complex series of dealings, many of which were encased in a secrecy which cannot now be penetrated," remarked Wilson.
Author Icke saw this connection as proof of conspiratorial control by the Rothschilds.
"They had the crown heads of Europe in debt to them and this included the Black Nobility dynasty, the Hapsburgs, who ruled the Holy Roman Empire for 600 years," he wrote.
"The Rothschilds also took control of the Bank of England. If there was a war, the Rothschilds were behind the scenes, creating the conflict and funding both sides."
"They may have held citizenship in the country of their residence, but patriotism was beyond their comprehension," wrote Griffin. "They were also very bright, if not cunning, and these combined traits made them the role model of the cool pragmatists who dominate the political and financial world of today."
The Rothschild financial empire arose from loans to Europe’s rulers and from the family’s successful use of fractional banking. To understand fractional banking requires a brief look at the nomenclature and history of money; to understand its application requires a look at one of the most powerful financial institutions on the planet.
SECRETS OF MONEY AND THE FEDERAL RESERVE SYSTEM
Money—whether a piece of paper or a figure on a computer screen—is intrinsically worthless, yet it fuels the modern world. The trappings of money and banking have been compared to those of a religion, yet only those who profit from it understand the inner workings of the money cult. And they work hard to keep it that way.
In America the ultimate control of money rests with the bankers of the Federal Reserve System (the Fed), "the crucial anomaly at the very core of representative democracy, an uncomfortable contradiction with the civic mythology of self-government," as described by author William Greider, a former assistant managing editor of the Washington Post. His 1987 book Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country disparages "nativist conspiracy theories" yet presents an eloquent argument demonstrating conspiratorial control by the Fed.
Early man had no need for money. He hunted when he was hungry and farmed to stockpile food for the winter. If he needed a commodity which belonged to his neighbor, bartering was the order of the day.
But as work became more specialized, the limits to barter became apparent. The sheepherder could not always take his entire herd to market. So humans turned to coins as a measure of wealth. Precious metal, particularly gold, was limited in supply, always desirable, and easily transported as small coins imprinted with words or pictures to assure authenticity and purity—plus there was some ancient, almost holy, reverence attached to it. But heavy, bulging sacks of gold coins were burdensome, not to mention a tempting target for thieves and robbers.
Thus was born paper money. A paper bill was simply a promissory note. As such, paper was considered as valuable as real goods or services. This procedure worked well for a time, but then certain individuals realized that paper money, if loaned for a fee, could be used to generate more money.
The early goldsmiths who warehoused gold coins used this stockpiled wealth as the basis for issuing paper money. Since it was highly unlikely that everyone would demand their gold back at the same time, the smiths became bankers. They would loan out a portion of their stockpile for interest or profit. This practice—loaning the greater portion of wealth while retaining only a small fraction for emergencies—became known as fractional-reserve, or fractional banking. This system worked well enough unless everyone suddenly wanted their deposits back and started a "run" on the bank.
Added to fractional banking was the concept of "fiat" money—intrinsically worthless paper money made acceptable by law or decree of government. An early example of this system was recorded by Marco Polo during his visit to China in 1275. Polo noted the emperor forced his people- to accept black pieces of paper with an official seal on them as legal money under pain of imprisonment or death. The emperor then used this money to pay all his own debts.
"One is tempted to marvel at the [emperor’s] audacious power and the subservience of his subjects who endured such an outrage," wrote author Griffin, "but our smugness rapidly vanishes when we consider the similarity of our own Federal Reserve Notes. They are adorned with signatures and seals; counterfeiters are severely punished; the government pays its expenses with them; the population is forced to accept them; they— and the ’invisible’ checkbook money into which they can be converted— are made in such vast quantity that it must be equal in amount to all the treasures of the world. And yet they cost nothing to make. In truth, our present monetary system is an almost exact replica of that which supported the warlords of seven centuries ago."
But today it is the bankers, not warlords, who profit from money and they have created an incredible mechanism for doing so: the Federal Reserve System.
Anyone seeking to prove the existence of conspiracies in America need look no further than the origin of our present central bank. Here is a well-documented conspiracy involving the very names tied to modern secret societies.
The early American colonists had printed small quantities of paper money and were prospering. Benjamin Franklin explained,
"In the colonies we issue our own money. It is called Colonial Script. We issue it in proper proportion to the demands of trade and industry to make the products pass easily from the producers to the consumers. ... In this manner, creating for ourselves our own paper money, we control its purchasing power, and we have no interest to pay to no one."
The English parliament, at the urging of the Bank of England, put a stop to this colonial prosperity with passage of the Currency Act of 1764, which prohibited the printing of currency. The colonists were forced to accept notes from the Bank of England. Franklin and others claimed it was this outlawing of debt-free money which caused economic depression and widespread unemployment precipitating the American Revolution,
The very idea of a central bank run by professional bankers has been a contentious issue since the founding of the United States. The arguments for and against a central bank can be seen in the debates of Founding Fathers Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton.
Hamilton believed in strong central government and a central bank overseen by a wealthy elite. "No society could succeed which did not unite the interest and credit of rich individuals with those of the state," he wrote. Supporters of Hamilton’s elitist ideals formed America’s first political party, the Federalists. Hamilton, once described as a "tool of the international bankers," argued that "a national debt, if it is not excessive, will be to us a national blessing."
The Bank of North America was created in 1781, even before the drafting of the Constitution, by Continental Congressman Robert Morris, who tried to craft it into a central bank copying the Bank of England. It lasted just three years before being discontinued due to rampant fraud and the inflation caused by the creation of baseless "fiat" currency.
Hamilton, a former aide to Morris, became secretary of the Treasury and in 1791 headed the next attempt at a central bank by establishing the First Bank of the United States, a move strongly opposed by Jefferson and his followers.
Jefferson knew from European history that a central bank could quickly become the master of a nation. He pointed to the British experience and noted that,
"The other nations of Europe have tried and trodden every path of force or folly in fruitless quest of the same object, yet we still expect to find in juggling tricks and banking dreams, that money can be made out of nothing. ..."
"I sincerely believe . . . that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on ÿ large scale," he wrote to John Taylor in 1816, adding, "Already they have raised up a money aristocracy. . . . The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs."
Jefferson further believed a central bank to be unconstitutional. "I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground: That ’all powers not delegated to the United States, by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States or to the people.’ To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition. The incorporation of a bank, and the powers assumed by this bill, have not, in my opinion, been delegated to the United States, by the Constitution."
Ironically, Jefferson’s supporters, considered liberal in their time, what was to become the Republican Parry.
Jefferson was not alone among the Founding Fathers to express distaste over the profit of banking. "Our whole banking system I ever abhorred, I continue to Abhor, and I shall die abhorring. ..." wrote John Adams in 1811. "Every bank of discount, every bank by which interest is to be paid or profit of any kind made by the [lender], is downright corruption. It is taxation for the public for the benefit and profit of individuals. ..."
The First Bank of the United States also was closely modeled after the Bank of England and created a partnership between the government and banking interests. Twenty percent of the bank’s capital was obtained through the federal government with the remaining 80 percent pledged by private investors, including foreigners such as the Rothschilds. "The law records show that they [the Rothschilds] were the power in the old Bank of the United States," wrote author Gustavus Myers. It is clear that conspiring European bankers and their New World associates were trying to gain control over America’s money supply.
This bank also caused inflation by the creation of fractional-reserve notes. Money merchants prospered but the average citizen suffered. In 1811, when the bank’s twenty-year charter came up for renewal, it was defeated by one vote in both the Senate and the House.
But the costs of the War of 1812, along with chaotic financial conditions, prompted Congress to issue a twenty-year charter to the Second Bank of the United States in 1816. This central bank ended in 1836, after President Andrew Jackson in 1832 vetoed a congressional bill to extend its charter, precipitating what became known as the Bank War. Jackson, the first president from west of the Appalachian Mountains and the hero of the Battle of New Orleans, denounced the central bank as unconstitutional as well as "a curse to a republic; inasmuch as it is calculated to raise around the administration a moneyed aristocracy dangerous to the liberties of the country."
It was probably no coincidence that America’s first assassination attempt was made on Jackson in 1835 by a man named Richard Lawrence, who claimed to be "in touch with the powers in Europe." Lawrence’s pistols misfired, and the unharmed but infuriated Jackson withdrew government funds from the "den of vipers" and Second Bank president Nicholas Biddle retaliated by curtailing credit nationally, causing widespread economic panic. According to author Eustace Mullins, Biddle was an agent of Jacob Rothschild in Paris.
Next, Jackson was censured by Biddle’s friends in the Senate by a vote of 26-20 for failure to obtain Congressional authorization to withdraw the funds. The political motivation behind this action was confirmed in 1837, when the Senate annulled Jackson’s censure by a 24-19 vote. Bid-die disappeared from the scene, and by the end of his two terms "Old Hickory" had managed to totally eliminate the national debt.
Jackson saw Biddle’s maneuverings as a bald-faced attempt to blackmail the government into renewing the bank’s charter. He warned,
"The bold effort the present bank had made to control the Government, the distress it had wantonly produced . . . are but premonitions of the fate that awaits the American people should they be deluded into a perpetuation of this institution, or the establishment of another like it."
There were other attempts to resurrect a central bank, but none succeeded until the creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1913.
The effort to resurrect a central bank actually began three years earlier.
"There was an occasion near the close of 1910, when I was as secretive, indeed, as furtive as any conspirator. ... I do not feel it is any exaggeration to speak of our secret expedition to Jekyll Island as the occasion of the actual conception of what eventually became the Federal Reserve System. ..." wrote Frank A. Vanderlip, one of the men who created the Fed.
He went on to become president of New York’s National City Bank.
Vanderlip was referring to a secretive trip on the night of November 22,1910, by seven men representing perhaps as much as one fourth of the wealth of the world, to Jekyll Island, J. P. Morgan’s island retreat off the coast of Georgia. This mission was so secret that only first names were used and the regular servants on the island had been relieved by new employees who did not know any of the participants.
The secretive seven were Vanderlip, who represented William Rockefeller and Jacob Schiff’s investment firm of Kuhn, Loeb &c Company; Assistant Secretary of the United States Treasury Abraham Piatt Andrew; senior partner of J. P. Morgan Company Henry P. Davison; First National Bank of New York (a Morgan dominated institution) president Charles I). Norton; Morgan lieutenant Benjamin Strong; Kuhn, Loeb & Company partner Paul Mortiz Warburg; and Rhode Island Republican Senate "Whip" Nelson W. Aldrich, chairman of the National Monetary Commission, the only nonbanker in the group. But Aldrich was an associate of hanker ). P. Morgan and father-in-law of John D. Rockefeller Jr. Warburg, a representative of the European Rothschilds, was brother to Max Warburg, chief of the M. M. Warburg Company banking consortium in Germany and the Netherlands.
The group secluded themselves for a week on Jekyll Island and prepared plans for banking reform which the government deemed necessary due to a series of financial panics. Today, many researchers believe these panics were artificially created with a view toward forcing public acceptance of these very "reforms."
Author Ralph Epperson noted that Morgan returned to the States after visiting Europe in early 1907 and began rumors that the Knickerbocker Bank of New York was insolvent. Frightened depositors started a run on the bank, which sparked runs on other banks and the Panic of 1907 began. "Astudy of the panics of 1873,1893 and 1907 indicates that these panics were the result of the international bankers’ operations in London," concluded author Eustace Mullins, the authorized biographer of poet Ezra Pound, who encouraged Mullins to research the Fed in 1948.
Princeton University president (soon to be U.S. president) Woodrow Wilson proclaimed his solution to the financial panic, "All this trouble could be averted if we appointed a committee of six or seven public-spirited men like J. P. Morgan to handle the affairs of our country." Cries for a stable national banking system rose.
"So the American people, who had suffered through the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the battles between Andrew Jackson and the Second Bank of the United States, the Civil War, the previous panics of 1873 and 1893, and now the Panic of 1907, were finally conditioned to the point of accepting the solution offered by those who had caused all of these events: the international bankers. That solution was a central bank," wrote Epperson.
Under pressure from constituents, Congress passed the Aldrich-Vreeland Act of 1908 which authorized national banks to issue emergency currency called "script" and created the National Monetary Commission—chaired by Senator Aldrich—to recommend ways of stabilizing the U.S. monetary system.
"From the start, it was obvious that the Commission was a sham," wrote author Griffin. "The so-called fact-finding body held no official meetings for almost two years while Aldrich toured Europe consulting with the top central bankers of England, France and Germany. Three-hundred thousand tax dollars were spent on these junkets, and the only tangible product of the Commission’s work was 3H massive volumes of the history of European banking."
These volumes focused on the German Reichsbank whose principal stockholders were the Rothschilds and Warburg’s family firm, M.M. Warburg Company.
The Commission’s final report was prepared by the seven prominent men who secretly journeyed to Morgan’s Jekyll Island Hunt Club ostensibly to hunt ducks. These men concluded not to have one central bank in the United States, but several and they agreed that no one was to utter the words "central" or "bank." Most important, they decided that this creation would be made to look like an official agency of the U.S. government.
Speaking before an appreciative audience of the American Bankers’ Association, Aldrich stated, "The organization proposed is not a bank, but a cooperative union of all the banks of the country for definite purposes." Warburg had conceived of the idea of constructing this cooperative union in a manner palatable to both the bankers and the public. Any restrictions on the bankers could be—and were—removed later.
But this proposal, which came to be known as the Aldrich Plan after its Senate sponsor, was ill-fated from the start. Too many people saw that it was a transparent attempt to create a system of the bankers, by the bankers, and for the bankers. "The Aldrich Plan is the Wall Street plan," warned congressman Charles A. Lindbergh, father of the famed aviator. When Aldrich proposed his plan as a bill, it never got out of committee.
Author Greider sneered that "conspiracy-minded critics exaggerated the importance of the Jeykll Island meeting" but conceded that "their suspicions were poetically accurate" as the bankers knew "any proposal identified as Wall Street’s bill would be doomed in the Democratic House of Representatives."
A new tactic was needed and it came in the form of House Banking and Currency Committee chairman, congressman Carter Glass of Virginia, who attacked the Aldrich Plan by openly stating it lacked government control and created a banking monopoly. Glass drafted an alternative, the Federal Reserve Act, and expressed anti-Wall Street sentiments.
Jekyll Island planners Vanderlip and Aldrich spoke out venomously against Glass’s bill, even though entire sections were identical to the Aldrich Plan. It was clearly an effort to garner public support for the Glass bill by the appearance of banker opposition.
These efforts were underscored by ë banking reform organization called the National Citizens’ League, "entirely financed and controlled by the banks under the guidance of Paul Warburg," according to Griffin.
"The function of the organization was to disseminate hundreds of thousands of ’educational’ pamphlets, to organize letter-writing campaigns to Congressmen, to supply quotable material to the news media, and in other ways to create the illusion of grass-roots support for the Jekyll Island plan," he added.
Heading the league was economics professor J. Laurence Laughlin of the University of Chicago, a school heavily endowed by John D. Rockefeller.
While popular support for a new banking system was garnered, another often-used tactic was played out in the political arena. President William Howard Taft was already on the record pledging to veto any legislation creating a central bank. A more compliant leader was needed by the bankers.
This leader was Woodrow Wilson, the academic who had been retained as president of Princeton University by his former classmates Cleveland H. Dodge and Cyrus McCormick, both directors of Rockefeller’s National City Bank of New York. "For nearly 20 years before his nomination Woodrow Wilson had moved in the shadow of Wall Street," wrote author Ferdinand Lundberg. Wilson, who had praised J. P. Morgan in 1907, had been made governor of New Jersey.
He now became the bankers’ choice for president. Wilson’s nomination was secured by the man who would from that point onward be his constant companion and adviser, Colonel Edward Mandell House, a close associate of Warburg and Morgan. "The Schiffs, the Warburgs, the Kahns, the Rockefellers and the Morgans [all] had faith in House," noted Professor Charles Seymour, who edited House’s papers.
But there was a problem. Early polling indicated that Democrat Wilson could not defeat Republican Taft. In a maneuver that has been used successfully several times since, former president Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt, also a Republican, was encouraged to run as a third-party candidate with large sums of money provided to his Progressive Party by two major contributors closely connected to Morgan. The scheme worked well. Roosevelt pulled votes from Taft so that Wilson, who already had pledged to sign the Federal Reserve Act, was elected by a narrow margin. The appearance of opposition by Wall Street was necessary.
William McAdoo, Wilson’s son-in-law who was appointed secretary of the Treasury, hirer, "Hankers (ought the. . . Reserve Att with the tireless energy of men fighting a forest fire. They said it was populistic, socialistic, half-baked, destructive, infantile, badly conceived and unworkable." However, McAdoo said in interviews with these bankers, "I perceived gradually, through all the haze and smoke of controversy, that the banking world was not really as much opposed to the bill as it pretended to be. ..."
Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act on December 23, 1913, just two days before Christmas with some Congressmen already home for the holidays and with the average citizen’s attention clearly elsewhere.
"Congress was outflanked, outfoxed and outclassed by a deceptive, but brilliant, psycho-political attack," commented Griffin.
The Federal Reserve System today is composed of twelve Federal Reserve banks, each serving a section of the country, but dominated by the New York Federal Reserve Bank. These banks are administered by a board of governors appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, usually a rubber-stamp procedure.
The Fed is such a pivotal force in the world economy that financial experts in every nation play close attention to any action it takes. "The attention is warranted," wrote Kim Clark of U.S. News & World Report, "since even the slightest interest-rate tick can roil markets and create or destroy millions of jobs."
But the real story of the Fed is who controls it and why. "Using a central bank to create alternate periods of inflation and deflation, and thus whipsawing the public for vast profits, had been worked out by the international bankers to an exact science," noted Allen.
Congressman Lindbergh in 1913 said that the Federal Reserve System "establishes the most gigantic trust on earth. . . . When the President signs this act, the invisible government by the money power . . . will be legitimized. The new law will create inflation whenever the trusts want inflation. From now on, depressions will be scientifically created," he warned.
The Fed was quickly filled with the very people who had masterminded its creation. Morgan banker Benjamin Strong became the first governor of the New York Federal Reserve Bank while the first governor of the Fed’s board of directors was none other than Paul Warburg, the man most credited with planning the details of the system, who later went on to become chairman of the Reserve System.
Despite the word “Federal” in its name, the Fed is not part of the U.S. government. It is a private organization owned by its member banks which, in turn, are owned by private stockholders. And who are these stockholders?
"An examination of the major stockholders of the New York City banks shows clearly that a few families, related by blood, marriage, or business interests, still control the New York City banks which, in turn, hold the controlling stock of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York," reported researcher Eustace Mullins in his 1983 book, The Secrets of the Federal Reserve.
Mullins presented charts connecting the Fed and its member banks to the families of the Rothschilds, Morgans, Rockefellers, Warburgs, and others.
This private bank control of the Fed continues today.
"The Federal Reserve Bank of New York—which completely dominates the other 11 branches through stock ownership, control and influence, having the only permanent voting seat on the Federal Open Market Committee and handling all open market bond transactions—has 19,752,655 shares outstanding and is majority-owned by two banks: Chase Manhattan Bank (now merged with Chemical Bank), with 6,389,445 shares or 32.35 percent; and Citibank, NA, with 4,051,851 shares or 20.51 percent. Together, those two banks own 10,441,295 shares or 52.86 percent— which is majority control," stated a 1997 report by researcher Eric Samuelson.
It would appear that the warnings of Jefferson and Lindbergh about private control over a central bank have proven correct.
Griffin pointed out that with the creation of the Federal Reserve, the major bankers finally obtained a long-standing goal—taxpayer liability for the losses of private banks. He quoted Paul Warburg, who admitted,
"While technically and legally the Federal Reserve note is an obligation of the United States Government, in reality it is an obligation, the sole actual responsibility for which rests on the reserve banks. . . . The government could only be called upon to take them up after the reserve banks had failed."
"The man who masterminded the Federal Reserve System is telling us that Federal Reserve notes constitute privately issued money with the taxpayers standing by to cover the potential losses of those banks which issue it," Griffin explained (emphasis in the original).
The money to cover government overspending comes from a mechanism instigated by these same men at this same time period—a national income tax and the means to collect it.
In fact, the banker globalists behind Wilson had a field day. Sounding eerily like today’s politicians, Wilson proclaimed his government was "more concerned about human rights than about property rights." Masked by this rhetoric, Wilson pushed through more "progressive" legislation than any previous American administration, adding to the Federal Reserve System enforcement of the graduated income tax (with the Internal Revenue Service of the Treasury Department to enforce it), the Federal Farm Loan Act (which created twelve banks for farmers), the Federal Trade Commission to regulate business, among other bills.
To many people at the time, all of this legislation appeared necessary. Some still would argue that perhaps it is better that knowledgeable bankers be in charge of our nation’s money supply. After all, a 1963 Federal Reserve publication states,
"The function of the Federal Reserve is to foster a flow of money and credit that will facilitate orderly economic growth, a stable dollar, and long-run balance in our international payments."
But has the Fed accomplished it’s stated goals? Everyone over the age of forty has experienced the alternating periods of inflation and recession. In 1972 President Nixon devalued the dollar after Europeans refused to accept it. "Since 1976 the United States has had a negative trade balance, and, in 1985, for the first time since 1914, U.S. debts owed to foreign creditors exceeded foreign debts owed to U.S. creditors," noted The New Encyclopaedia Britannica.
If the true functions of the Fed are as claimed, then it has failed miserably. "It would seem that such a system with such a dismal record . . . would be abolished without delay," mused author Epperson, who suggested that perhaps the "system was created to do exactly the opposite of what it tells the American people."
Another secret aspect of the money game is demand deposits, money placed in a bank which can be withdrawn any time on demand. We know this system as checking accounts. Today they are rapidly being replaced by plastic "debit" cards. Depositors today pay ever-increasing "service charges" for the privilege of allowing their money to be used lor profit by their bank.
Consider that when ë person deposits $50 in a bank, this is in effect a loan to the bank since it must be repaid on demand. Therefore, on the books the $50 is considered a liability. However, the bank then loans the $50 to someone else who must repay it with interest. Now the $50 is considered an asset. The same $50 is both an asset and a liability, thus counteracting each other, proving that money is essentially worthless.
But then there’s the matter of interest. When the $50 is put into a savings account, there is some small amount of interest accrued, often on the condition that the money can’t be withdrawn quickly. When the $50 is placed in a checking account, the depositor draws no interest at all. But when the bank loans $50, they charge healthy interest based on current rates and reap the profit. It is clear then that in banking debt equals profit.
This is a primary secret of money.
It is not too difficult to see that it is much more profitable to open a bank than a checking account. It may also explain why the once mighty United States has become a debtor nation.
Usury is a term that has all but disappeared from our language. Younger people today have no concept of the word. Once usury was defined as any interest charged for a loan, but modern dictionaries softened this to merely "excessive" interest. The Texas constitution once defined usury as any interest in excess of 6 percent. This ceiling was increased over the years until the whole concept was deleted. Banking critics have noted that even the Bible only required 10 percent for God.
"Charging interest on pretended loans is usury, and that has become institutionalized under the Federal Reserve System," argued author Griffin. This has been accomplished by masking the operations of the Fed in secrecy and arcane economic terms. "The . . . mechanism by which the Fed converts debt into money may seem complicated at first, but it is simple if one remembers that the process is not intended to be logical but to confuse and deceive," Griffin added.
Greider agreed, writing, "The details of [the Fed’s] actions were presumed to be too esoteric for ordinary citizens to understand." Some believe this ignorance may be a blessing. Henry Ford was quoted as saying,
"It is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system for, if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning."
"Most Americans have no real understanding of the operation of the international moneylenders," concurred the late senator Barry Goldwater.
"The bankers want it that way. We recognize in a hazy sort of way that the Rothschilds and the Warburgs of Europe and the houses of J. P. Morgan, Kuhn, Loeb and Company, Schiff, Lehman and Rockefeller possess and control vast wealth. How they acquire this vast financial power and employ it is a mystery to most of us.
"International bankers make money by extending credit to governments. The greater the debt of the political state, the larger the interest returned to the lenders. The national banks of Europe are actually owned and controlled by private interests."
These same private interests can be demonstrated to own and control the Federal Reserve System.
According to author Greider, today’s money managers have designed such intricate and esoteric details surrounding their financial transactions that the Fed has assumed the proportions of a cult.
"To modern minds, it seemed bizarre to think of the Federal Reserve as a religious institution," he wrote.
"Yet the conspiracy theorists, in their own demented way, were on to something real and significant. . . . [The Fed] did also function in the realm of religion. Its mysterious powers of money creation, inherited from priestly forebears, shielded a complex bundle of social and psychological meanings. With its own form of secret incantation, the Federal Reserve presided over awesome social ritual, transactions so powerful and frightening they seemed to lie beyond common understanding. . . .
"Above all, money was a function of faith. It required implicit and universal social consent that was indeed mysterious. To create money and use it, each one must believe and everyone must believe. Only then did worthless pieces of paper take on value."
Many researchers and writers see the profit of debt, couched in ancient and mystical jargon, and coupled with the documented connections of bankers dominating government decisions, as the cause for increasing debt, both public and private.
"Thanks to the Federal Reserve’s decision to tolerate an enormous increase in the money supply, and to the flood of foreign capital seeking safe haven in the United States, American consumers and businesses still have ÿ surfeit of credit available to them," wrote Phillip J. Langman and Jack Kgan in the-business-oriented U.S. News & World Report in January 1999.
They also noted, "The economy continues to create new jobs, but Americans are going into debt faster than their incomes are rising."
Prior to the 1930s paper bills could be redeemed for gold, since Section 10 of the Constitution specified gold and silver as the only lawful tender. Older Federal Reserve notes bore the inscription, "Redeemable in lawful money at the United States Treasury, or any Federal Reserve bank." But no more.
"A new dimension of trust had added to the illusion [of real worth]," explained Greider. "Finally, the last prop for the money illusion was kicked away in this century: the gold standard was abandoned."
The original purpose of money—to represent tangible goods and services—has been forgotten.
The simple secrets of money have been carefully hidden by the priesthood of the money cult.
"The American public, not unlike its political leaders, depended on familiar cliches for its limited understanding of money," commented Greider. "Average citizens simply could not understand the language, and most economists made no effort to translate for them."
Money today is increasingly mere electronic blips in a computer accessed by plastic cards at ATMs. There is nothing to back it up. Yet this illusory money is loaned at interest by great institutions. As the total amount of money grows, its worth decreases. This is called inflation, in effect a built-in tax on the use of money. And inflation can be manipulated upward or downward by those who control the flow of paper money or the electronic blips.
"The result of this whole system is massive debt at every level of society today," wrote author William Bramley. "The banks are in debt to the depositors, and the depositors’ money is loaned out and creates indebtedness to the banks. Making this system even more akin to something out of a maniac’s delirium is the fact that banks, like other lenders, often have the right to seize physical property if its paper money is not repaid."
In the Great Depression of the 1930s, money retained its value. It was simply hard to come by and prices were depressed to reflect its scarcity. Today, America is experiencing an inflationary depression— prices continue to rise because of an inflated money supply. The more money that’s in circulation, the less it is worth.
Bankers such as the Rothschilds quickly learned that they could manipulate the worth of money by controlling the amount in circulation. Fractional banking allowed them to issue or withhold money at their discretion.
They multiplied their profits and power many times over by making loans to entire nations rather than mere individuals. "As they matured and learned the magic of converting debt into money, they moved beyond the confines of Frankfurt," noted Griffin. As documented by several authors, the Rothschilds also added efficient intelligence networks and quasi-official smuggling to enhance their empire.
For example, when Napoleon refused to take loans from the Rothschilds, creating his own Bank of France instead, he made vengeful enemies. After his return from exile in 1815, Napoleon was forced by circumstances to borrow heavily to defend France from the British Duke of Wellington and his cobbled-together European army. London’s Nathan Rothschild accommodated Napoleon with a loan of five million pounds. At the same time, Nathan, with the aid of other Rothschild family members, smuggled a vast amount of gold through France to equip Wellington. Again, the Rothschilds played both ends against the middle.
When Wellington’s revitalized army defeated Napoleon at Waterloo in June 1815, news of the victory was rushed to England by Rothschild couriers bearing their well-known and untouchable red pouches. The Rothschild messenger arrived a full day ahead of Wellington’s own courier. Knowing of his capacity for early intelligence, all eyes on the London Stock Exchange turned to Nathan Rothschild, who, appearing despondent, ordered the sale of his stocks. Certain that Wellington had been defeated, a selling frenzy began, with the end result that Nathan Rothschild’s agents soon were able to buy up a hefty majority of Britain’s debts for only a small portion of their true value.
Much later, Nathan Rothschild commented on his act by saying, "It was the best business I have ever done."
By the early nineteenth century the Rothschilds had managed to acquire nobility titles. The French line affixed the "de" in front of their names in 1816 while the Austrian branch became barons in 1882. In 1885 a reluctant Queen Victoria finally baronized Nathaniel Rothschild, Nathan’s grandson.
"Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, the brothers conducted important transactions on behalf of the governments of England, France, Prussia, Austria, Belgium, Spain, Naples, Portugal, Brazil, various German states and smaller countries. They were the personal bankers of many of the crowned heads of Europe. They made large investments, through agents, in markets as distant as the United States, India, Cuba and Australia," noted Griffin.
Of course, to protect such high-level investments, the Rothschilds needed to control to some extent the activities of the nations in which they operated. They also financed various countries and then played them against each other as a means of coercing compliance to their will. This ploy became known as the "balance of power" game and it required great secrecy.
"By remaining behind the scenes, they were able to avoid the brunt of public anger which was directed, instead, at the political figures which they largely controlled," explained Griffin, adding, "This is a technique which has been practiced by financial manipulators ever since, and it is fully utilized by those who operate the Federal Reserve System today."
The Rothschilds have remained clannish through the twentieth century as evidenced by biographer Wilson’s description of how Lionel de Rothschild "once went through with me a list of every living family member—dozens of them. And he was able to provide a quick verbal sketch of each one."
By the late 1990s the patriarchs of the Rothschild empire were Barons Guy and Elie de Rothschild in France and Lord Jacob Rothschild and Sir Evelyn de Rothschild in Britain.
Despite today’s openness in the media, the Rothschilds still hold their secrets. In 1998 Oxford Fellow and history tutor Niall Ferguson was allowed to publish a detailed biography of the Rothschilds—but only covering the years up to 1848. He referred to "the lunatic fringe" of conspiracy writers who saw worldwide control in Rothschild activities and purported to present a "scholarly history" of the family.
However, Ferguson’s protestations of Rothschild innocence stumbled under his own admission that even as an official biographer his research was curtailed. "From the outset, it was formally agreed that I would be entitled to quote freely from any material in the Rothschild Archive in London predating March 1915 ... and . . . from any other archives and private collections of papers as fur as their curators gave me permission to do so," he explained.
Even then, Ferguson discovered significant gaps and omissions in the archives, particularly for the years preceding the American Civil War. As a self-styled "atheist from a Calvinist background," he paid no attention whatsoever to the metaphysical aspects of the Rothschild background, their knowledge of Cabalistic tradition, or their connection to Freemasonry and other secret societies.
The Rothschilds cannot escape all media scrutiny, however, and occasionally there is a brief view afforded by news events, such as the July 8 1996, "mysterious suicide" of forty-one-year-old Amshel Rothschild, chairman of the family financial empire.
Amshel, as an eldest son, had become chief executive officer of Rothschild Asset Management in 1990 and ascended to the chairmanship in 1993. He reportedly was "uncomfortable" with his role in the banking empire having been coerced into it by his father, Lord Victor Rothschild. Rumors circulated that family members were dissatisfied with his business policies. According to journalist Sally Bedell Smith, the Rothschild firm had suffered about $9 million in losses in the year preceding Amshel’s death. This came at a time when Evelyn Rothschild had just concluded a joint venture with the second largest bank in China. In an effort to absorb this loss, Amshel planned to consolidate the family’s far-flung operations into one $28 billion global concern.
Amshel Rothschild was found dead in the marble bathroom of his Paris hotel room. He was lying at the base of the towel rack which was only five feet off the floor, prompting one reporter to comment, "Hanging himself could not have been easy for a man six feet one." He was wearing only a terry cloth robe and one end of the robe’s belt was wrapped around his neck. The other end was attached to the towel hanger rail which reportedly was accidentally pulled from the wall by one of the investigators.
Cause of death was initially reported as a heart attack but was later changed to apparent suicide by strangulation. There was no suicide note nor evidence of foul play, though the police report was sent directly to the I Tench minister of the interior, bypassing normal channels. This maneuvering was apparently done at the request of the publicity-shy family, a good indication of its power over government.
With no apparent personal problems and no note, suicide was the least likely theory of Amshel’s death.
Despite the curious circumstances of his death and his position in world banking, there was hardly a word of Amshel mentioned in the news media and (he verdict that he had hanged himself was noted without question or comment. The 2997 Britannica Book of the Year mentioned his death in only one sentence. It was buried in a section entitled "Economic Affairs: Banking," and stated, "The British banking industry was shaken in July by the apparent suicide of Amshel Rothschild, chief executive of asset management and investment for the London branch of the Rothschild dynasty and heir apparent to the family’s global banking operations." The lack of coverage of the questionable death of so prominent a person argues well for those who see hidden control over the media.
Rothschild biographer Wilson was awed by the staying power of the family. "Genetics, mythology, deliberate training, the opportunities provided by wealth and connections—all have played their part in producing one of the most remarkable—perhaps the most remarkable— family of recent history," he concluded with admiration. "Few dynasties, with the exception of hereditary monarchies preserved from oblivion by the right of primogenitude, have maintained their influence in the world for seven generations."
Primogenitude refers to a primary condition of Mayer Amschel’s original will instructing that only the eldest son in each generation could control the family wealth. By this method, not only has the Rothschild family been held tightly together but, as in the secret societies, those family members not privy to the innermost control have little knowledge of its financial dealings. Former top executives of the Rothschild businesses complained they often were kept "out of the loop" on important decisions.
This family togetherness and secrecy coupled with the incredible power of their wealth may explain patriarch Mayer Rothschild’s oft-repeated quote, "Permit me to control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws."
Rothschild influence spread worldwide. Rothschild influence over Japan’s dominant banking house of Nomura came through the friendship of Edmund Rothschild with Tsunao Okumura, the man most responsible for creating that financial giant.
It was a Rothschild who helped create the state of Israel. In 1917, after serving as a member of the British Parliment, Zionist 2nd Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild—the eldest son who inherited Nathan’s money and title after his death in 1915—received a letter from British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour expressing approval for the establishment of a homeland for Jews in Palestine. This letter Inter became known as the Balfour Declaration. In 1922 the League of Nations approved the Balfour mandate in Palestine, thus paving the way for the later creation of Israel. Baron Edmond de Rothschild, who built the first pipeline from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean to bring Iranian oil to Israel and founded the Israel General Bank, was called "the father of modern Israel."
In the United States, journalist William T. Still said the family’s creation of American wealth was "profound." "Working through the Wall Street firms of Kuhn, Loeb & Co., and J. P. Morgan Co., the Rothschilds financed John D. Rockefeller so that he could create the Standard Oil empire," Still wrote. "They also financed the activities of Edward Harri-man [railroads] and Andrew Carnegie [steel].
Whether or not the Rothschilds truly dominate or influence the economy of the United States, the close connections between America’s wealthy families and secret societies with those of Britain provide a solid and demonstrable link to Europe.
One such link is a sister organization to the Trilateral Commission, CFR, and Bilderbergers: the Royal Institute of International Affairs.
THE ROYAL INSTITUTE OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS—ROUND TABLES
The agendas and methods of the modern American secret societies did not originate in America, but were imports from the secret societies that had dominated Europe for centuries.
Returning to the 1919 meeting in Paris which led to the creation of the Council on Foreign Relations, it must be noted that the council was merely the American branch of a proposed "Institute of International Affairs." The English branch retained the original name, being known as the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA).
Like the CFR, creation of the institute was initiated by Woodrow Wilson’s adviser Colonel House, bankers Warburg and Baruch, and other member’s of House’s "Inquiry" group of internationalists. The RIIA was built upon an existing secret society, the Round Table Group, established around 1910 by the trust of English diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes.
Author Donald Gibson explained these creations thusly,
"The Royal Institute had been created in 1919 to perpetuate British power in the world, and it helped to create the Council on Foreign Relations as part of an effort to link England’s upper class and its foreign policy interests to those of the United States."
This view is echoed by author Icke, who wrote, "The so-called ’special relationship’ between Britain and America is, in fact, the relationship between the RIIA and the Council on Foreign Relations."
The RIIA settled in Chatham House, located in London’s Saint James’s Square just across from the home of the wealthy Astor family. British foreign policy is frequently said to emanate from Chatham House.
Leading the creation of the RIIA was Lionel Curtis, a veteran of South Africa’s Boer War who became secretary to Sir Alfred Milner, Britain’s high commissioner in South Africa. Curtis had been one of the bright young protégées of Milner known as "Milner’s Kindergarten." He has been described as a "British public administrator and author, advocate of British imperial federalism and of a world state, who had considerable influence on the development of the Commonwealth of Nations. . . . He was chiefly responsible for replacing the term [British] ’empire’ with ’commonwealth.’"
Milner, an "ardent imperialist" educated at Oxford and New College, provoked the Boer War of 1899-1902 by his rigid attitudes and in victory gained British control over South Africa’s diamond mines and a good portion of its gold supply. It was no coincidence that Milner became a principal trustee of the estate of Cecil Rhodes, the diamond tycoon of South Africa.
Cecil Rhodes, more than any other one person, provided the impetus to form several secret societies including the RIIA and the CFR, beginning with his Round Table groups.
Professor Carroll Quigley, a prominent historian and professor of history at the Foreign Service School of Georgetown University and President Clinton’s academic mentor, explained,
"The Rhodes Scholarships [Clinton received one] . . . are known to everyone. What is not so widely known is that Rhodes in five previous wills left his fortune to form a secret society, which was to devote itself to the preservation and expansion of the British Empire. And what does not seem to be known to anyone is that this secret society . . . continues to exist to this day."
Since Quigley and many others identify the Round Table Groups as the ancestor of the modern secret societies, it would indicate a closer look be given to Cecil Rhodes, his trustee Lord Milner, and their viewpoints.
Cecil Rhodes, the progenitor of the modern secret societies, and his academic mentor, John Ruskin, carried on a philosophical tradition which can be traced to ancient Greece and beyond. Others who followed this tradition included Socialist pioneers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
Born in 1853, Rhodes, son of the vicar of Bishop’s Stortford, was steeped in religious concepts from an early age. In 1879 he joined a brother who was operating a South African cotton farm. Both brothers soon succumbed to the lure of diamond prospecting.
After some initial success finding diamonds, Rhodes formed de Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd., named after the Nicolaas de Beers family mining claims he acquired.
For eight years Rhodes divided his time between mining in Kimberley, South Africa, and studies at Oxford, where he fell under the spell of fine arts professor John Ruskin.
The son of a prosperous wine merchant, Ruskin had departed from mainstream thinking to the extent that one biographer described his as "an inwardly difficult, lonely life, often pursued and struck at by madness." Given to frequent masturbation and nympholepsy (a frenetic fondness for underage girls), Ruskin nevertheless failed to consummate his marriage to nineteen-year-old Effie Gray in 1848. Six years later, still a virgin, she had the marriage annulled, a shocking development in those times.
Ruskin was an ardent student of the King James Version of the Bible but eventually gave up his belief in God. "John Ruskin, the man who inspired Cecil Rhodes, Alfred Milner, and those who formed the Round Table secret society, was himself influenced by the esoteric writings of [Greek philosopher] Plato and by Madame Blavatsky [founder of the occult Theosophy Society], the books of Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the secret societies in the mold of the Order of the Golden Dawn," wrote author Icke.
Ruskin, who reportedly read Plato’s Republic every day, embraced Plato’s concept of the perfect society being one that had structure imposed from centralized leadership—a ruling class—downward. Marx and Engels, the founders of modern Communism, also were students of Plato and echoed Ruskin’s views. Advocating tight central control over the state, either by a dictator or a special ruling class, Ruskin proclaimed, "My continual aim has been to show the eternal superiority of some men to others, sometimes even of one man to all others."
According to Quigley, Rhodes was so stirred by Ruskin’s philosophies that he copied one of his Oxford lectures in long-hand and kept it with him for thirty years.
Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, authors of The Temple and the Lodge, showed that Rhodes was active in British Freemasonry, which involved him with other prominent nineteenth century persons such as the royals George IV and William, as well as Lord Randolph Churchill (Winston’s father), Marquis of Salisbury, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, and Oscar Wilde. This group’s preoccupation with the philosophies of Plato, Ruskin, and the Theosophist Madame Blavatsky coincided with the ideals of Freemasonry.
With the aid of a close friend, German diamond merchant Alfred Beit, Rhodes expanded his diamond company until, by 1891, de Beers owned 90 percent of the world’s diamond production. In the mid-1890s Rhodes founded the Diamond Syndicate, forerunner of today’s Central Selling Organization which controls almost 80 percent of the worldwide diamond trade.
He also gained large control over the rapidly developing Transvaal gold mines. With ever-expanding wealth, Rhodes’s dreams also grew to include plans for a railroad from South Africa to Cairo and expanding the British Empire to include that century-long dream of reclaiming the American colonies.
As with the Morgans and Rockefellers, behind Rhodes we find the vast power of the Rothschild family.
"They were financiers to Cecil Rhodes, making it possible for him to establish a monopoly over the diamond fields of South Africa," wrote author Griffin. "They are still connected with the de Beers."
In November 1997, when Baron Edmond Adolphe Maurice Jules Jacques de Rothschild died at age seventy-one from emphysema in Geneva, it was reported that he left substantial holdings in de lUrrs Consolidated Mines, Ltd. of South Africa.
Lending support for a relationship between Rhodes and the Roth schilds was author and former British Intelligence Officer Dr. John Coleman, who wrote,
"Rhodes was the principal agent for the Rothschilds . . . [who] dispossessed the South African Boers of their birth right, the gold and diamonds that lay beneath their soil."
According to Coleman, Rhodes’s first Round Table group was established in South Africa with funding from the British Rothschild family to train business leaders loyal to Britain in ways to maintain control over that country’s wealth. The idea of Rothschild funding behind Rhodes also was supported by author Frank Aydelotte, who wrote in American Rhodes Scholarships, "In 1888 Rhodes made his third will . . . leaving everything to Lord Rothschild "
The Round Tables started out as a collection of semisecret groups formed along the lines of the Illuminati and Freemasonry with "inner" and "outer" circles and a pyramid hierarchy. The inner circle was called the Circle of Initiates (or the Elect) while the outer circle was called the Association of Helpers. Two members of Rhodes’s inner Circle of Initiates were British financiers Lord Victor Rothschild and Lord Milner.
Rhodes called his secret society the Round Table after the legendary meeting place of King Arthur. It should be noted that the Arthurian legend concerning the Holy Grail is closely connected to the controversial notion of a continuing bloodline from Jesus—the Sangreal or royal blood which shall be discussed later.
Coleman wrote that, armed with immense wealth gained from control of gold, diamonds and drugs, "Round Tablers fanned out throughout the world to take control of fiscal and monetary policies and political leadership in all countries where they operated."
Setting an example for today’s interlocking corporate directorships and tax-exempt foundations,
"The Round Table itself consists of a maze of companies, institutions, banks and educational establishments, which in itself would take qualified insurance actuaries a year to sort out," according to Coleman.
While some might dismiss Coleman as a conspiracy theorist, they could not say the same of Dr. Quigley.
"There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act," confirmed Quigley. "I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for 20 years and was permitted for two years, in the yearly 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. ... 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’s words were echoed by authors Wallechinsky and Wallace who quoted from Rhodes’s will. It called for "the establishment, promotion and development of a Secret Society, the true aim and object whereof shall be the extension of British rule throughout the world . . . [to include] the ultimate recovery of the United States of America."
In 1890 Queen Victoria, impressed with his imperialistic views, named Rhodes prime minister of Africa’s Cape Colony. Upon his death from heart disease in 1902, Rhodes’s reputation as an inflexible businessman and politician was softened by the news of his generous scheme to provide scholarships to Oxford for promising young men. Though Rhodes was praised for prohibiting the disqualification of applicants on the basis of race, it is clear he remained a product of his time since he once affirmed his desire for "equal rights for every white man."
Rhodes himself was thought to have been a member of a covert group known as the "Olympians" after the Greek gods. According to author Coleman, this was merely another name for the globalists he termed the Committee of 300. Additionally, Rhodes was thought to have been connected to the secretive and mysterious Illuminati as well, most probably through his Masonic connections.
Quigley identified Rhodes’s secret society in the plural as the Round Table Groups, which had added branches in seven nations by 1915. Though created by Curtis and others, funding for the society came principally from Rhodes’s followers and Lord Milner.
"Since 1925 there have been substantial contributions from wealthy individuals and from foundations and firms associated with the international banking fraternity, especially the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, and other organizations associated with J. P. Morgan, the Rockefeller and Whitney families ..." Quigley added, not mentioning the Rothschilds by name.
With Rhodes’s death, Milner, Rothschild, and their international banker associates gained complete control over the Round Tables, which began expanding far beyond the British Empire. Professor Quigley explained, "At the end of the war of 1914, it hivamc clear that the organization of this [Round Table] system had to be greatly extended." Lionel Curtis was called upon to establish the Royal Institute of International Affairs as an umbrella organization for the Round Table Groups.
Quigley saw the goals of these groups—the chief aim of which apparently was to form the world’s nations into one English-speaking entity so as to maintain peace and bring both stability and prosperity to underdeveloped areas—as "largely commendable."
In a great irony, the Round Table organization—which professed world peace as a primary goal—may have directly led to the development of the atomic bomb. During its expansion period, the Round Tables established many splinter organizations, one of which was the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey. This was the "American copy of All Souls College at Oxford," according to Quigley. The IAS was funded liberally by the Rockefeller General Education Board. It was here that the scientists working on the atom bomb were assisted by IAS members Robert Oppenheimer, Niels Bohr, and Albert Einstein.
For all that, Quigley wrote admiringly, "They were gracious and cultured gentlemen of somewhat limited social experience who were much concerned with the freedom of expression of minorities and the rule of law for all "
Other writers have not been so complimentary. Journalist William T. Still in his book New World Order: The Ancient Plan of Secret Societies wrote of "the centuries-old plans of secret societies to wrench the Constitution from the citizens of the United States."
"Rhodes committed the same error made by so many humanitarians before him," wrote author William Bramley, "he thought that he could accomplish his goals through the channels of the corrupted Brotherhood network. Rhodes therefore ended up creating institutions which promptly fell into the hands of those who would effectively use those institutions to oppress the human race."
But it was not only Round Table organizations which allowed America’s wealthy and powerful to mingle and converse. In certain circles, there were fraternal connections through much more secret groups, such as the ominous Order of Skull and Bones.
Skull and Bones, a highly secret fraternal order apparently only found at Yale University, has been the source of an unprecedented number of government officials who have furthered the globalist aims of their brethren in other covert groups, according to researchers.
"Members of the CFR when accused of being involved in a conspiracy, have protested to the contrary. And by and large they are right," wrote conspiracy researcher and author Anthony C. Sutton.
"Most CFR members are not involved in a conspiracy and have no knowledge of any conspiracy... However, there is a group WITHIN the Council on Foreign Relations which belongs to a secret society, sworn to secrecy, and which more or less controls the CFR." (emphasis in original)
Members have included extremely powerful men such as Henry Stimson, Secretary of War under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and described as "a man at the heart of the heart of the American ruling class"; U.S. Ambassador to Russia Averell Harriman; publisher Henry Luce, and J. Richardson Dilworth, longtime manager of the Rockefeller fortune.
According to Sutton and others, this secret society is the American chapter of an earlier German secret organization. Known variously as Chapter 322, the "Brotherhood of Death," or "The Order," this group is most popularly known as "Skull and Bones" or simply "Bones."
The American chapter of The Order was founded at Yale University in 1832 by General William Huntington Russell and Alphonso Taft.
Taft, who would become Secretary of War in 1876 and U.S. Attorney General and an ambassador to Russia, was the father of William Howard Taft, the only person to serve as both president and chief justice of the United States.
Russell would go on to become a member of the Connecticut Legislature. His family was at the center of Russell and Company, a firm controlled by some of Boston’s finest "blue blood" families that were enriched first by the slave trade and then by opium smuggling in the early nineteenth century. Some researchers believed this unsavory background explained the pirate symbol of skull and crossed bones adopted as The Order’s insignia, an emblem originally used as the flag of the old Knights Templar.
According to Sutton, The Order was brought from Germany to Yale by Russell, whose cousin, Samuel Russell, was an integral part of the British-inspired Opium Wars in China. A pamphlet detailing an 1876 investigation by a rival secret society of Skull and Bones headquarters at Yale (known as the "Tomb") stated,
"Its founder [Russell] was in Germany before Senior Year and formed a warm friendship with a leading member of a German society. He brought back with him to college authority to found a chapter here. Thus was Bones founded."
The secret German society may have been none other than the mysterious and infamous Illuminati. Ron Rosenbaum—one of the few journalists to take a serious look at Skull and Bones—took note that the official skull and crossbones emblem of The Order was also the official crest of the Illuminati. In an investigative piece for Esquire magazine Rosenbaum wrote, "I do seem to have come across definite, if skeletal, links between the origins of Bones rituals and those of the notorious Bavarian Illuminists . . . [who] did have a real historical existence . . . from 1776 to 1785 they were an esoteric secret society with the more mystical freethinking lodges of German Freemasonry."
Author Icke agreed, writing that The Order was merely the "Illuminati in disguise. . . . The symbolism of [its] initiation ceremony would appear to indicate at least close links with Freemasonry," he added. Masonic emblems, symbols, a German slogan, even the layout of their initiation room—all are identical to those found in Masonic lodges in Germany associated with the Illuminati.
Considering the nefarious background of its founders and their families, authors Webster Griffin Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin warned, "The background to Skull and Bones is a story of opium and Empire, and a bitter struggle for political control over the new U.S. republic."
Whatever its inception, Skull and Bones was officially incorporated as the Russell Trust’in 1856. The Order conducts annual meetings at a club site on New York’s Saint Lawrence River named Deer Hand (sic). The misspelling was at the request of its donor, Bones member George D. Miller.
While undoubtedly the preeminent secret club, Skull and Bones is not the only one. According to Tarpley and Chaitkin, "Princeton has its ’eating clubs,’ especially Ivy Club and Cottage Club, whose oligarchical tradition runs from Jonathan Edwards and Aaron Burr through the Dulles brothers. At Harvard there is the ultra-blue-blooded Porcelian (known also as the Pore or Pig Club); Theodore Roosevelt bragged to I lie German Kaiser of his membership there; Franklin D. Roosevelt was a member or the slightly “lower’ Fly Club.”
Other secret clubs exist at Yale - Wolf’s Head and Scroll & Key to name two—and, as stated by Rosenbaum, anyone in the Eastern Establishment who does not belong to Skull and Bones almost assuredly belongs to one of these other groups. But no other group has the demonstrable blood and wealth connections of the Skull and Bones.
Each year, only fifteen Yale juniors are selected to participate in Skull and Bones during their senior year.
In addition to extraordinary secrecy—Bones members are required to leave the room if anyone should mention the group—The Order has its own membership designations. Neophyte members are called Knights, after the fashion of earlier secret societies such as the Knights Templar, Knights of Malta, or Knights of Saint John. Once a full member, he is known as a Patriarch, one honored as a founding father. Outsiders are derogatorily referred to as "Gentiles" or "vandals."
Author Sutton noted that active membership in Skull and Bones comes from a,
"core group of perhaps 20-30 families... First we find old line American families who arrived on the East coast in the seventeenth century, e.g. Whitney, Lord, Phelps, Wadsworth, Allen, Bundy, Adams and so on," he wrote. "Second, we find families who acquired wealth in the last 100 years, sent their sons to Yale and in time became almost old line families, e.g. Harriman, Rockefeller, Payne, Davison."
Icke wrote that these families exhibited an Old World concern over their heritage and bloodlines. He said they utilize arranged marriages,
"to protect or ’advance’ the genetic lines of the 'pseudo' blue bloods who owe the origins of their inherited wealth and influence to drug running, slavery and carefully chosen marriage partners. These intermingled families help and support each other in their quest for financial, political and genetic dominance."
"You ... get the feeling there’s a lot of intermarriage among these Bones families," Rosenbaum agreed. "Year after year there will be a Whitney Townsend Phelps in the same Bones class as a Phelps Townsend Whitney. ... In fact, one could make a half-serious case that functionally Bones serves as a kind of ongoing informal Establishment eugenics project bringing vigorous new genes into the bloodlines of the Stimsonian elite."
Nepotism runs deep in The Order as seen in the fact that modern finances of the Russell Trust were handled by John B. Madden Jr., a partner in Brown Brothers Harriman, formed by tine merger of Urown Urns. 6c Company and W. Ë. I Inrmnan ik Company in 1933. Madden started there in the 1940s working under Senior Partner Prescott Bush? Father of former president George Bush, all of them members of Skull and Bones.
A more recent example of members’ fierce loyalty was shown in the 1980s scandal of President Bush’s connection with the criminal activity in the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). As the bank’s illegal activities came to light—involving many prominent names— attempts were made by the Bush administration to block or blunt any meaningful investigation. Finally a formal investigation of the BCCI was launched by the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations headed by Massachusetts senator John Kerry.
Kerry was chairman of the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, which had received significant BCCI contributions, and he was also a member of Skull and Bones. The Kerry-led investigation foundered. Jack Blum, a special counsel to Kerry’s subcommittee, stated, "I proposed a serious investigation of BCCI and was brushed aside. ... A high-level cover-up of everything concerning BCCI was set into place after Customs stumbled across their money-laundering operation in Miami, and it’s still in place."
The interests of both the Morgans and Rockefellers were well represented in The Order. Member Percy Rockefeller tied The Order to Standard Oil properties, while a number of Morgan men show up on the rolls of Skull and Bones.
While J. P. Morgan was not a Bonesman, Harold Stanley (The Order, 1908) joined Morgan’s Guaranty Trust banking firm in 1915 and eventually became a Morgan partner and president of the combined Morgan, Stanley & Company. W. Averell Harriman (The Order, 1913) was a board member of Guaranty Trust. H. P. Whitney (The Order, 1894) and his father, W. C. Whitney (The Order, 1863) were both directors of Guaranty Trust.
The flow of financial power was not always channeled through direct membership in Skull and Bones.
"The Order controls the substantial wealth of Andrew Carnegie, but no Carnegie has ever been a member of The Order," wrote author Sutton.
"The Order used the Ford wealth so flagrantly against the wishes of the Ford family that two Fords resigned from the board of the Ford Foundation. No Ford has been a member of The Order. The name Morgan never appeared on the membership lists, although some of Morgan partners are with the inner core, for example, [partner Harold] Stanley [of Morgan, Stanley & Co.], [the son of Hairy P.] Davison and [John] Perkins."
McGeorgy Bundy (The Order, 1940) was president of the Ford Foundation from 1966 to 1979. During the early to mid-1960s, Bundy served as a national security adviser to both Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. At the same time, his brother William Bundy (The Order, 1939) who had been with the CIA, served as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs.
Many other illustrious names can be connected to Skull and Bones, such as Low, Forbes, Coolidge, Delano, Taft, Stimson, and others. Prominent recent Bonesmen include President George Bush (The Order, 1949); William Bissell (The Order, 1925) whose brother, Richard Bissell, became Deputy Director of Plans for the CIA; Amory Howe Bradford (The Order, 1943), who married Carol Warburg Rothschild in 1941 and soon became general manager of the New York Times; Henry Luce (The Order, 1919) who became head of the powerful and influential Luce publishing empire which included Time and Life magazines; and William F. Buckley (The Order, 1950) a nationally syndicated conservative columnist.
Authors Tarpley and Chaitkin did not see all this as a harmless college fraternity. "The present century owes much of its record of horrors to the influential Anglophile American families which came to dominate and employ the Skull and Bones Society as a political recruiting agency, particularly the Harrimans, Whitneys, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers and their lawyers, the Lords and Tafts and Bundys," they commented. Other researchers see Skull and Bones as the epicenter of New World Order control. The Order has been called a "stepping stone" to the Council on Foreign Relations, Bilderbergers, and the Trilateral Commission.
After examining The Order’s influence and control in the areas of foreign policy, finance, education, and religion, Christian author and publisher Texe Marrs urged,
"The Order of Skull and Bones must be unmasked for what it is—a great and present danger to our freedoms and to our constitutional rights."
Rosenbaum, in a possible explanation of The Order’s sinister trappings, wrote that it was simply due to an "impressionable young Russell [who] just stumbled on the same mother lode of pseudo-Masonic mummery as the Illuminists." Although, perhaps with some sarcasm, he also voiced the possibility that "the Eastern Establishment is the demonic creation of a clandestine elite manipulating history, and Skull and Bones is one of its recruiting centers,"
Rosenbaum also wrote he saw Skull and Bones in "headlong decline" and in recent years it has become "a more lackadaisical, hedonistic, comfortable, even, said some, decadent group."
Controversy concerning The Order surfaced during the 1980 presidential election. Former U.S. Labor Party National Chairman Lyndon H. LaRouche began an independent bid for the presidency. In the New Hampshire primary elections, LaRouche attacked Republican candidate George Bush for his affiliation with The Order, stating,
"Skull and Bones is no mere fraternity, no special alumni association and added mumbo-jumbo. It is a very serious, very dedicated cult-conspiracy against the U.S. Constitution. Like the Cambridge Apostles, the initiate to the Skull and Bones is a dedicated agent of British secret intelligence for life."
Many observers believed that the revelations of Bush’s connection to Skull and Bones, the CFR, and the Trilateral Commission cost him the New Hampshire primary and eventually the presidency in 1980.
"The Order has either set up or penetrated just about every significant research, policy, and opinion-making organization in the United States," declared Sutton.
There are indications Sutton may be correct. One of the most thorough investigations of institutional stockholders ever conducted was a 1980 study by the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs entitled Structure of Corporate Concentration. Its conclusion, as reported by author Donald Gibson, was to the point: "Financial institutions, part of or extensively interrelated with the Morgan-Rockefeller complex, are the dominant force in the economy."
After studying this report, Gibson wrote,
"The board of directors of Morgan included individuals serving on the boards of 31 of the top 100 firms. Citicorp was tied to 49 top companies, and Chase Manhattan, Chemical Bank, and Metropolitan Life each had 24 other top companies represented on their boards. These and a multitude of other overlaps among the top 100 firms provide a dense network of relationships reinforced by frequent ties through private clubs, educational background, marriages, and membership in organizations such as the (Council on Foreign Relations [Skull and Bones, The Trilateral Commission | and the Business Council."
Gibson also noted that at least two Morgan-Rockefeller institutions were among the top six stockholders in AT&T, General Motors, DuPont, Exxon, General Electric, ITT, United Technologies, and Union Pacific.
As with other secret societies, many telltale connections between Skull and Bones and the CIA are discernible. In addition to the aforementioned Bush, Bundy, and Bissell, other Bonesmen who became CIA officials included Director of Personnel F. Trubee Davison (The Order, 1918); Beirut CIA Station Chief James Buckley (The Order, 1944); Rhodes scholar and Deputy Director for Plans Hugh Cunningham (The Order, 1934); and poet Archibald MacLeish (The Order, 1915) who helped Office of Strategic Services (OSS) William Donovan form the CIA in the late 1940s.
"Yale has influenced the Central Intelligence Agency more than any other university, giving the CIA the atmosphere of a class reunion," stated Yale history professor Gaddis Smith.
Rosenbaum made a point of mentioning that Yale slang for a secret society member is "spook," the same term used in the CIA for an undercover operative.
Yet the CIA is only one of numerous U.S. government "alphabet" offices which many charge are used as agents of change and control along with dozens and dozens of front organizations, foundations, think tanks, and study groups created and/or financed by the secret societies. Many researchers claim such private organizations were actually created by leading secret society members.
TAX-EXEMPT FOUNDATIONS AND ALPHABET AGENCIES
Today, there are more than forty thousand tax-exempt foundations operating within the United States alone, most professing the most laudable of intentions. Yet many can be seen as furthering the secret societies’ agenda of globalization and centralized government.
Norman Dodd, director of research for the House Select Committee to Investigate Foundations and Comparable Organizations, in 1952 reported that the president of the Ford Foundation told him bluntly that "operating under directive from the White House" his foundation was to "use our grant-making power so as to alter our life in the United States that we can be comfortably merged with the Soviet Union." With the collapse of Communism, the advent of the United Nations and NATO along with various economic treaties now in place, it would appear that this goal is close to becoming realized.
Ë superficial glance ;U sonic of the paslanil current organizations and foundations linked to Skull and Bones, the CFR, the Trilateral Commission, the Illuminati, and other secret societies by several writers reveals some surprises. To name just a few, these include the Agency of International Development, American Civil Liberties Union, American Council of Race Relations, American Press Institute, Defamation League, Arab Bureau, Aspen Institute, Association of Humanistic Psychology, Battelle Memorial Institute, Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, Center for Constitutional Rights, Center for Cuban Studies, Center for Democratic Institutions, Christian Socialist League, Communist League, Environmental Fund, Fabian Society, Ford Foundation, Foundation for National Progress, German Marshall Fund, Hudson Institute, Institute for Pacific Relations, Institute on Drugs, Crime and Justice, ’ International Institute for Strategic Studies, Mellon Institute, Metaphysical Society, Milner Group, Mont Pelerin Society, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, National Council of Churches, New World Foundation, Rand Institute, Stanford Research Institute, Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, Union of Concerned Scientists, International Red Cross, and the YMCA.
The Aspen Institute, for example, is a "global concern with considerable diplomatic influence" with nearly $60 million in net assets that "regularly hosts presidents, prime ministers, philosophers, statesmen, advisers, educators, journalists, artists, activists and a roster of corporate representatives to rival the Fortune 500 list," noted Paul Anderson, writing in the Aspen Times Weekly. "Yet, despite its national—indeed, international—prominence, the Institute remains an enigma to the majority of local residents and visitors."
The Institute was founded in the 1940s as the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies—the appellation regarding humanism was dropped in the 1970s. Founders included Walter Paepcke, a Chicago industrialist; Robert Maynard Hutchins, president of the Rockefeller-dominated University of Chicago; Mortimer Adler, a philosopher; and CFR and Bones member Henry Luce, the powerful head of Time-Life publications. All of these men were closely connected to the University of Chicago-affiliated Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Despite a series of fierce disagreements with the town of Aspen over expansion and land use, the Institute continues to utilize the restful Rocky Mountain atmosphere to soothe attendees at its many influential seminars and conferences.
The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), an umbrella organization encompassing hundreds of diverse groups representing both the Left and the Right of the political spectrum, is still active in Washington. It is another example of an organization linked to the secret societies. Author Coleman wrote,
"IPS has shaped and reshaped United States policies, foreign and domestic, since it was founded by James P. Warburg and the Rothschild entities in the United States, bolstered by Bertrand Russell and the British socialists through its networks in America. . . . The objectives of IPS came from an agenda laid down for it by the British Round Table . . . one of the most notable being to create the ’New Left’ as a grassroots movement in the U.S. IPS was to engender strife and unrest and spread chaos like a wildfire out of control, proliferate the ’ideals’ of left-wing nihilistic socialism, support unrestricted use of drugs of all types, and be the ’big stick’ with which to beat the United States political establishment."
According to Coleman, IPS founders Richard Barnett and Marcus Raskin have controlled such diverse elements as the Black Panthers, Daniel Ellsberg, National Security Council staff member Morton Halperin, the Weathermen, the Venceramos and the campaign staff of candidate George McGovern.
Author S. Steven Powell noted that a stated IPS goal was "the dismantling of all economic, political, social, and cultural institutions in the United States." Following an extensive investigation just prior to the collapse of Communism, he concluded, "An ordered accounting of [IPS activities] reveals that much of what the institute does, for all intents and purposes, also serves the interests of the Soviet Union. . . . [The] IPS has been remarkably successful in promoting a sweeping radical agenda by maintaining the facade of a liberal scholarly research center."
According to researchers, much of IPS funding comes from CFR-connected organizations, including the Rubin Foundation, represented by the New York law firm of Lord, Day & Lord. The Lord family has counted members on the rolls of Skull and Bones since 1898. Winston Lord (The Order, 1959), a former aide to Henry Kissinger, in 1983 was chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations and later President Reagan’s ambassador to China.
A long-time president of the Ford Foundation was the ubiquitous McGeorge Bundy, CFR member, Bonesman, and the National Security Advisor who presided over the Gulf of Tonkin incident precipitating the Vietnam War.
In the mid-1980s a movement toward rewriting the U.S. Constitution gained momentum in part due to the work of the Center of the Study of Democratic Institutions, which was established with Ford Foundation money. It foundered in the face of widespread opposition.
The worldviews of the wealthy are impressed on their fellows by underwriting great centers of education such as the London School of Economics and Political Science. Funding for the creation of this school came from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust Fund, and others connected to J. P. Morgan & Company. This prestigious school was established by Sidney James Webb, an founding member of the Fabian Society.
Founded in London in 1883, the Fabian Society was a group of evolutionary socialists who took their name from the Roman general Fabius Cunctator, who managed to defeat Hannibal’s larger army through a series of hit-and-run attacks. By avoiding head-on pitched battles, Fabius managed to conquer in the long run. The Fabian socialists, whose aim was "the reorganization of society by the emancipation of land and Industrial Capital from individual and class ownership," took note of Fabius’s tactics.
In fact, the question of tactics was about the only difference between Fabian socialists and communists. Where communists desired to establish socialist governments through revolution, the Fabians were content to slowly move toward socialism through propaganda and legislation.
The Fabians once were chastised for their methods by one of their most prominent members, author H. G. Wells. In 1906 Wells said, "I find in our society ... a curious conceit of cunning, something like a belief that the world may be maneuvered into socialism without knowing it." Rather than accept this call for more openness, the Fabians ignored Wells and continued their tactics of stealth and subterfuge.
Other notable Fabians included George Bernard Shaw and English economist John Maynard Keynes, whose "new economics" of greater debt and tighter economic control by government was the mainstay of American economics until the arrival of "Reaganomics" and a "counterreformation" instigated by University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman and his monetarist theories.
After failing to achieve their socialist ideals within Britain’s Liberal and Conservative parties, the Fabians in 1906 formed the powerful British Labour Party.
Early in the twentieth century, Fabian Society founder Webb reorganized the University of London into a federation of teaching institutions, crafted Britain’s Education Acts of 1902 and 1903, and founded the London School of Economics.
Famous students from the London School of Economics include David Rockefeller, Joseph Kennedy Jr. and his younger brother, the future President John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy Jr., future senator Daniel Moynihan, author Zecharia Sitchin, and newscaster Eric Sevareid.
Government "alphabet" agencies susceptible to secret society control include not only the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) but the National Security Council (NSC), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), National Security Agency (NSA), Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF), Internal Revenue Service (IRS), Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and many others. These agencies are themselves secretive, citing reasons of national security, executive privilege, or the need to protect informants or criminal case files.
One prime example of tight inner government control by secret society members may be found in the National Security Council, which, since its creation by the National Security Act of 1947, has come to dominate U.S. policy decisions including those involving the use of armed force. Most Americans have no idea who exactly comprises the powerful NSC. They might be surprised to learn that council principals are the president, vice president, and secretaries of State and Defense, positions predominately held by members of the CFR or the Trilateral Commission throughout the twentieth century.
If the top leadership of government and business is controlled by the secret societies, as alleged by most writers on the subject, then the activities of subservient agencies and divisions must be of little consequence. Government bureaucrats—honest and well-intentioned workers for the most part—simply follow orders and policies set by superiors. Many government employees have lost their jobs or resigned in the face of directives that bewilder and perplex those not privy to the inner secrets.
Many people today believe that this same small group of men and women along with friends and associates not only manipulate many of the major world issues but also control the tax-exempt foundations. Those people connect with each other through a variety of means international business and politics, conferences, social gatherings, foundations, etc.—and therefore constitute a cohesive group. This group has been called by many names: the New World Order, the Committee of 300, the Illuminati, the Secret Brotherhood, or often simply "they." More than one author even suggest that these persons are themselves guided or controlled by non-human intelligences, described as "prison wardens" or "Custodians."
"Until the dawn of the twentieth century, this plan for a New World Order was centered in Masonry, then Illuminated Masonry, but with the advent of the Round Table Groups—which still exist today—and their American brethren, the Council on Foreign Relations, the torch has been passed from century to century," wrote journalist William T. Still.
By mid-1999 it appeared that the same old torch was still being passed as election year 2000 began to shape up. Advocating "compassionate conservatism," George W. Bush, the eldest son of the former President and CIA director who belonged to of all of the aforementioned secret societies, was the leading Republican candidate. Clinton’s Vice President and CFR member Al Gore led a contentious gang of Democrats. Early on, Gore sought guidance from the leading lights of Wall Street.
Once again, the American electorate was to choose between a globalist-supported Bush or a globalist-supported Gore. Obviously, the globalists will be the winner, regardless of the election outcome.
In late 1999 globalism suffered a slight setback when more than sixty thousand demonstrators, representing an odd mixture of unionists, environmentalists, and strict constitutionalists, protested the loss of United States sovereignty and jobs during a meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle. Predictably, the corporate-controlled news media styled the protest as unruly rioters although other accounts claimed that trouble began only after heavily armed police began clubbing and gassing participants.
Simply, the controversial General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) renamed in 1995, the WTO was widely seen as nothing more than a vehicle to further the Bilderberger goal of removing all trade barriers. Noting that free trade "breaks up old nationalities" and "hastens the social revolution," Karl Marx in 1848 proclaimed, "I am in favor of free trade."
As the goal of a New World Order moves closer to reality today, authors and researchers who are suspicious of the role of secret sodeties and their financial backers in government, business, and foundations feel they face a disheartening maze of obstructions in trying to bring the story to the public. Major publishers won’t publish and news agencies won’t accept or distribute the stories and-often ridicule such writers as "alarmists" and "conspiracy theorists." Occasionally, there is even the threat of violence against investigators who dig too deep.
The eyes of the average citizen—conditioned to consider only the issues presented in their daily media—glaze over at any discussion of secret societies or hidden history. After all, they ask, if any of this were real, wouldn’t it be covered on Sixty Minutes or the nightly news?
While the mass news media does not operate in secret, its internal structure and operation remain a mystery to most of the public. And its influence cannot be understated.
Throughout 1998, no one could long consider the Clinton Administration’s transfer of nuclear technology to China or the president’s signing of questionable Executive Orders such as an extension of the international zone along the southern U.S. border more than 150 miles. The mass media had everyone’s attention focused solely on Clinton’s sexcapades.
"The media may not always be able to tell us what to think, but they are strikingly successful in telling us what to think about," stated media critic Michael Parenti.
Many people complain that the major media are superficial, conformist, and subjective in their selection of news. A recent Pew Research Center poll showed respondents who thought news reporting unfair and inaccurate ranged into the 60 percentiles. A survey by the news industry publication Editor & Publisher showed that journalists themselves do not disagree. Nearly half of its members indicated their belief that news coverage is shallow and inadequate.
The purpose of the mass media is not to tell it like it is, according to media critics, but rather to tell it like the media owners want it to be. Parenti wrote that the major role of the press is "to continually recreate a view of reality supportive of existing social and economic class power." This skewed perspective can clearly be seen in the terms used in stories concerning "labor disputes" —it’s never "management disputes." He pointed out that management always makes "offers" while labor issues "demands."
"Much of what is reported as ’news’ is little more than the uncritical transmission of official opinions to an unsuspecting public," wrote Parenti. "What [reporters] pass off as objectivity, is just a mindless kind of neutrality," said journalist Britt Hume, who added reporters "shouldn’t try to be objective, they should try to be honest."
Yet the power of the combined media is overwhelming. A 1994 study by Veronis, Suhler & Associates revealed that the typical American spends more than four hours a day watching TV, three hours listening to radio, forty-eight minutes listening to recorded music, twenty-eight minutes reading newspapers, seventeen minutes reading books, and fourteen minutes reading magazines.
The consolidation of the corporate media power which produces these time-consuming products has accelerated tremendously in the 1990s, turning formerly prestigious news organs into little more than advertising distribution systems. And even those are dwindling in number. Ben Bagdikian, former dean of the School of Journalism at the University of California in Berkeley, reported that in 1982, fifty corporations controlled most of the mass media in the United States. By January 1990 that number had shrunk to a mere twenty-three. By the end of 1997 this number was down to ten.
According to Standard and Poor’s Industry Surveys—Publishing the top ten media corporations (moving from the largest on down) were Time-Warner (magazines, radio/TV, cable); Walt Disney Co. (newspapers, magazines, radio/TV, cable); Tele-Communications Inc. (cable); News Corp. (newspapers, magazines, radio/TV, cable, other); CBS Corp. (radio/TV, cable, other); General Electric (radio/TV, cable); Gannett Co. (newspapers, radio/TV, cable); Advance Publications (newspapers, magazines); Cox Enterprises (newspapers, radio/TV, cable); and New York Times Co. (newspapers, magazines, radio/TV).
These ten companies take in a yearly gross revenue greater than the next fifteen largest media companies combined.
During the 1990s "Telecommunication firms were engaged in the most visible and dramatic drive for corporate alliance and consolidation," wrote author Grader in One World, Ready or Not.
"AT&T, Time Warner, TCI, MCI, Ameritech and Nynex, CBS, ABC, Disney and many others — the overlapping deals were stunning as U.S. firms rushed to unite market power and technological assets in cable and telephone systems, broadcasting, filmmaking, publishing and other media, while simultaneously forging telecom partnerships abroad. U.S. consumers would provide the capital for these huge new conglomerates through the deregulated rates they paid to cable and telephone companies. The winners, it was clear, would be a handful of broad and powerful media combines, as dominant as the railroad and oil trusts were in the 1890s."
World War II veterans might wince to learn that with the July 1998 acquisition of Random House publishers, the German firm of Bertelsmann A.G. became the largest trade publisher in the English-speaking world. This one company now controls more than twenty top publishers, including Ballantine, Bantam, Crown, Del Ray, Delacorte Press, Broadway Books, Dell, Dial, Doubleday, Fawcett, Harmony, Laurel, Pantheon, Princeton Review, and Times Books. Adding to this publishing clout, in October 1998 Bertelsmann, headquartered in Mayer Rothschild’s hometown of Frankfurt, purchased a 50 percent interest in barnes-andnoble.com, the bookseller’s Internet site.
Over and above ownership consolidation, there is a decreasing number of distribution companies, which are critical to the widespread dissemination of information. Standard & Poor’s editors noted that in 1996, distribution problems caused by the consolidation of formerly independent distributors "disrupted deliveries and relationships with retail clients . . . canceled, missed and late deliveries were common occurrences." Authors have complained for years that books on controversial subjects always seem to encounter distribution or publicity problems. With an estimated eight hundred new magazines added each year to the existing eighteen thousand or so (most fail within the first year), it is easy to understand the importance of distribution.
Major banks own significant amounts of stock in the ever-decreasing number of media corporations, which in turn are controlled by secret society members. "Through elite policy-shaping groups like the Council on Foreign Relations and the Business Roundtable, they steer the ship of state in what they deem to be a financially advantageous direction," noted authors Martin A. Lee and Norman Solomon in 1990. "GE, CapCities, CBS, the New York Times and the Washington Post all have board members who sit on the Council on Foreign Relations." Little has changed today. A cursory glance at the 1998 edition of Standard & Poor’s Corporation Records showed several CFR and Trilateral members sit on the boards of the major media corporations.
Corporate ownership intermingled with secret society members, many of whom are employed in the media, may explain why Bilder-berg, Trilateral, and CFR meetings are not reported by America’s "watchdog" media. In fact, the membership lists of these societies read like a who’s who of the mass media.
These members include many past and present media corporate leaders such as Laurence A. Tisch and William Paley of CBS; John F. Welch Jr., of NBQThomas S. Murphy of ABC; Robert McNeil, Jim Lehrer, Hodding Carter III, and Daniel Schorr of Public Broadcast Service; Katherine Graham, Harold Anderson, and Stanley Swinton of Associated Press; Michael Posner of Reuters; Joan Ganz-Cooney of Children’s TV Workshop (Sesame Street}; W. Thomas Johnson of CNN; David Gergen of U.S. News <& World Report; Richard Gelb, William Scranton, Cyrus Vance, A. M. Rosenthal, and Harrison Salisbury of the New York Times; Ralph Davidson, Henry Grunwald, Sol Linowitz, and Strobe Talbott of Time; Robert Christopher and Phillip Geyelin of Newsweek; Katherine Graham, Leonard Downie Jr., and Stephen S. Rosenfeld of the Washington Post; Arnaud de Borchgrave of the Washington Times; Richard Wood, Robert Bartley, and Karen House of the Wall Street Journal; William F. Buckley Jr. of National Review; and George V. Grune and William G. Bowen of Reader’s Digest. Furthermore, sitting on the boards of directors of the corporations which own the media are secret society members.
Some of the well-known reporters, anchors, and columnists who are members of the CFR and/or the Trilateral Commission include Dan Rather, Bill Moyers, Ñ. Ñ. Collinwood, Diane Sawyer, David Brinkley, Ted Koppel, Barbara Walters, John Chancellor, Marvin Kalb, Daniel Schorr, Joseph Kraft, James Reston, Max Frankel, David Halberstram, Harrison Salisbury, A. Ochs Sulzberger, Sol Linowitz, Nicholas Katzen-bach, George Will, Tom Brokaw, Robert McNeil, David Gergen, Mortimer Zuckerman, Georgie Ann Geyer, Ben J. Wattenberg, and many others. Small wonder so many researchers see a conspiracy of silence among these media peers.
Then there are "media watchdog" organizations such as Accuracy in Media (AIM). Many persons assume such groups are watching out for I ho public’s interests.
Not according to writer Michael Collins Piper, who in 1990 made public that AIM founder Reed Irvine was paid $37,000 a year as an "advisor for the division of international finance" of the Federal Reserve System. Noting that many Fed members also belong to the secret societies, Piper wrote,
"To this day, Irvine and AIM never touch on any subject which is sensitive to the interests of the international Establishment: whether it be the Bilderberger group, the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations or the truth about the privately owned Federal Reserve."
There are also choke points within the flow of information, such as the international desk at Associated Press headquarters in New York, where one person decides what news from outside the United States makes it onto the wire service. It is important to understand that the real control over the mass media is not direct control over the thousands of hardworking editors, reporters, and news directors throughout the nation, but rather the control over the distribution of the information.
Then there is the tremendous pressure created by fear of job security and loss of sources. Many national columnists must rely on insider sources to provide juicy information. Much of this information comes from government sources which would dry up if they published the wrong story. Even the more hard-hitting national reporters still must pull their punches if they want to maintain their insider sources.
The ever-concentrated corporate ownership of the media has meant that objectivity in news, long viewed as a public service, flies out the window in favor of bottom-line profits based on ratings. At the time of the JFK assassination, the three major TV networks—ABC, CBS, and NBC—supported their news departments with public service funds. Today, these same news departments are funded as programming with a resultant concern over ratings. News today is "a kind of commodity in the marketplace, no longer a holy profession," commented former CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr. "Today, it doesn’t matter anymore. You just make your money and to hell with public service."
Veteran newsman Walter Cronkite agreed. Quoted in a professional journal, he said the current state of television journalism is "disastrous and dangerous" and decried "unreasonable profits ... to satisfy shareholders. In demanding a profit similar to that of the entertainment area, they’re dragging us all down."
"I challenge any viewer to make the distinction between [TV talk show host] Jerry Springer and the three evening newses and CNN," commented 60 Minutes correspondent Morley Safer.
The watchdog media in America, as they like to portray themselves, appear to be more like lapdogs to their corporate owners. This may explain why six of the top ten "censored stories" of 1995, as determined by Alternet news service, involved business stories such as the monopolization of telecommunications, the worsening child labor situation, increased government spending on nuclear arms, medical industry fraud, the chemical industry’s battle to subvert environmental laws and the broken promises of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
Such stories failed to reach a wide audience because, as Greider accurately pointed out, "any who question the reigning mantra of economic orthodoxy will be harshly disciplined by the press and multinational interests."
It is especially intriguing that none of America’s major "watchdog" media show much interest in determining who owns the corporations which control the media and the nation. One explanation for this lack of investigative zeal may be found in the story of an NBC-TV news researcher who in 1990 contacted Todd Putnam, editor of National Boycott News. The news staffer was interested in "the biggest boycott going on right now." Putnam replied, "The biggest boycott in the country is against General Electric." To which the NBC staffer immediately responded, "We can’t do that one. . . . Well, we could do that one, but we won’t." In 1986 NBC was bought by General Electric.
There can be no argument regarding the reality of secret societies today. The existence of groups like the Trilateral Commission, Council on Foreign Relations, and the Bilderbergers is well documented. The only question is the extent of their control and manipulation of major world events.
Likewise, there is no question that members of these societies exert inordinate control over many of the largest corporations and banks in tie world. These corporations, in turn, control essential minerals, energy, transportation, pharmaceuticals, agriculture, telecommunications, and eiitcrtainincni in oilier words, the basics of modern life.
They also provide an inner core of ranking government officials on a -revolving door basis. These officials often implement the very policies conceived and desired by the societies.
These societies hold considerable sway over national elections and policy, yet seem strangely immune to any investigation, whether by government or the mass media. Since its inception in 1913, there has never been an outside, objective audit of the Federal Reserve System despite periodic calls for such. The same can be said for the powerful private foundations which direct so much of modern science and culture.
Taken together the facts suggest that the overall goal of these modern societies is to bring about one world government with attendant centralized social control and loss of national sovereignty. This objective is coming ever closer to reality, largely through the increasing corporate and financial control over both governments and economies.
Samuel Berger, Clinton’s national security adviser and a regular attendee of the Bilderberger meetings, revealed that group’s outlook in a recent talk at the Brookings Institution when he stated,
"Globalization— the process of accelerating economic, technological, cultural and political integration—is not a choice. It is a growing fact. It is a fact that will proceed inexorably, with or without our approval. It is a fact that we ignore at our peril."
No one is suggesting that this issue be ignored. Quite the contrary. Conspiracy writers seek a more open dialogue on this matter. It’s the major media that shies away from the subject.
It may be that global government is desirable. It certainly appears inevitable. And it’s nothing new. World domination has been the focus of men since before Alexander the Great. Why then is there so much secrecy about this issue today?
The question of whether or not the plan for one world government is a sinister conspiracy to subjugate the population or simply an attempt to facilitate a natural evolutionary step is a matter still to be decided, apparently with little or no help from the mass media.
But one thing is absolutely clear. It is apparent that globalization or one world government or the New World Order is not simply the imaginings of conspiracy theorists or paranoids but the articulated goal of the secret brotherhoods, organizations, and groups, all of which carry the imprint of the old orders of Freemasonry, the Round Tables, and tin- Illuminati, which will be examined more closely later.
The recognition of a ruling elite by knowledgeable experts like Quigley and the others quoted, coupled with the suspicions of many more regarding secret control, has created a climate in which the average person feels less and less control over both the nation’s destiny and his or her own.
It is not necessary to believe in such widespread conspiracies. What is necessary is to know that others do believe and act accordingly. To comprehend the world around us, we must study the full range of evidence if we are to avoid either destructive paranoia or baseless and naive faith.
The evidence points clearly to a commonality of purpose on the part of secret society members and that these members, their relatives, associates, and hirelings are closely interrelated.
That luminaries of the modern secret societies—people connected by blood, marriage, social and business associations—are at the controls of the international corporations which dominate much of modern life through their power over business, advertising, government, and the mass media is beyond dispute. They have dominated the scene since the days of Mayer and Nathan Rothschild, Cecil Rhodes and Alfred Milner, J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller.
And their societies can be traced directly to earlier secret organizations, forming a conspiratorial chain throughout history. They appear to be following a plan formulated and articulated many years ago. This plan, an outgrowth of the objectives of the Illuminati and Freemasonry, found expression in the Round Tables of Mason Cecil Rhodes. It was carried forward by the "illuminized" members of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, and their numerous foundations and trusts. This incestuous brotherhood also made ample use of secret intelligence agencies in both Britain and America to further their plans.
All this prompts several questions.
If the CFR, the Trilateral Commission, and the Bilderbergers are simply innocent well-intentioned people working to bring about a peaceful and prosperous world, as they claim, then why all the secrecy?
Why all the front organizations, some of which are the antithesis of others?
Why do they obviously distrust public attention?
Which leads to the single most important question: If they do create a centralized one-world government, what’s to prevent some Hitler-like tyrant from taking control?
Secrecy is the key. Any activity that is justified and honorable should be able to withstand the light of public scrutiny. When the secrets of these societies are laid bare before the public, everyone will be able to judge for themselves the merit of their goals and purposes.
Until that time, the diligent researcher must sift through the historical record, piecing together the clues which will prove or disprove secret society involvement in world events, searching for the telltale fingerprints of conspiracy.
