Such forthright statements prompted vicious attacks from the corporate mass media.
Washington Post
columnist Sebastian Mallaby described Perkins as “a frothing conspiracy theorist, a vainglorious peddler of nonsense,” while a
New York Times
writer referred to Perkins’s work as “cloak-and-dagger atmospherics.”
Yet Perkins’s words echo those of Marine major general Smedley Butler, who in his 1935 book
War Is a Racket
explained, “Bankers lend money to foreign countries and when they cannot pay, the President sends Marines to get it.” Butler also explained that the racket of war is “something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small ‘inside’ group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.”
But the money changers overextended themselves. Their ballooning economy began to lose air in the meltdown of 2008. Many commentators have attributed the financial crisis and the Great Recession that followed to conscious planning by the elite money changers of today with help by government hacks. After all, many members of Congress held investments with the Wall Street companies behind the mortgage-backed securities fraud that broke in 2008.
Internet commentator Michael Rivero called the collapse “the biggest financial swindle since the Great South Seas Bubble of 1721.” Rivero groused, “In short the US Government took your jobs, so the banks could take your homes, to cover the losses from this gigantic swindle they were caught playing on the whole world. Tens of millions of Americans have had their homes confiscated to keep the Wall Street crooks out of jail. It is wealth confiscation to protect the banks, just like FDR did in 1933 with the gold, only this time done with houses and in such a way as to trick Americans into thinking it was their own fault they lost their homes.”
In the years before the crisis, Congress passed laws reducing government oversight and regulation, while banks were encouraged to make questionable loans and offer an $8,000 first-time home buyer credit in order to lure more buyers. Many bad mortgages were “bundled” with a few good ones to produce packages called derivatives. These were marked A-1 by rating agencies receiving bank money, then sold and resold to banks and other institutions. Then the whole scam came unraveled. Sold on the canard that some banks are “too big to fail,” Congress voted to bail them out. This was nothing more than using public money borrowed from the Federal Reserve to cover the bad loans and credit swaps. It was a classic example of “taxation without representation,” as the vast majority of the American public did not want to save the bankers from their own misdeeds. To add insult to injury, there have been no prosecutions of the Wall Street insiders or bank officials involved.
Why was no one prosecuted? In mid-October 2008, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Timothy Geithner, met with Andrew Cuomo, then the New York attorney general. Before he became the governor of New York, Cuomo was looking into banking and rating irregularities and also looking into questionable bonuses during the bailout of the now-defunct American International Group (AIG). According to persons with knowledge of the meeting, Geithner argued that he was concerned about the “fragility of the financial system” and requested that there be no prosecutions. Previously it had been Geithner, acting as undersecretary of the treasury, along with Henry Paulson, who had sent $5 billion of U.S. taxpayer money through AIG to the giant Swiss bank UBS. In defense of Cuomo’s inaction, William K. Black, a professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri, wrote, “This is not some evil conspiracy of two guys sitting in a room saying we should let people create crony capitalism and steal with impunity. But their policies have created an exceptional criminogenic environment. There were no criminal referrals from the regulators. No fraud working groups. No national task force. There has been no effective punishment of the elites here.” Black should know. In the 1980s, he served as the federal government’s director of litigation during the savings-and-loan crisis. This lack of punishment stands in stark contrast to that scandal, in which special government task forces referred one thousand cases to prosecutors, resulting in more than eight hundred bank officials going to jail.
President James A. Garfield, just two weeks before he was assassinated in 1881, stated, “Whoever controls the volume of money in our country is absolute master of all industry and commerce … and when you realize that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate.”
THE EXCHANGE STABILIZATION FUND
One of the hidden tools of financial control may come from the Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF) of the United States Treasury. This little-known agency is one of those government constructs that has morphed into a gigantic money-moving operation with absolutely no oversight by the U.S. government, the states, or the American people. Yet the ESF uses tax money and its profits to fund operations both inside and outside the country. Texas congressman Henry B. Gonzalez, a vocal opponent of the Fed, while chairman of the House Banking Committee, criticized the ESF for “back-door financing” and “a complete lack of public accountability.”
The ESF was created and originally financed by the Gold Reserve Act of 1934. Its purpose, according to an official description, was “to contribute to exchange rate stability and counter disorderly conditions in the foreign exchange market.” The act authorized the secretary of the treasury to exclusively deal in gold, foreign exchange, securities, and instruments of credit subject to the approval of the president. While ownership of gold was outlawed for Americans in 1933, the ESF transferred gold out of the country to foreigners in exchange for dollars, draining our gold reserves for years to come. Today, when people blame the Federal Reserve for stealing America’s gold reserves, they should know that it was actually the ESF, never scrutinized or questioned by Congress, that drained the Federal Reserve many years ago.
Under agreements with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), in 1978 Congress amended the Gold Reserve Act to provide short-term credit to foreign governments and monetary authorities. Such ESF “bridge loans” are financed through swaps, which means that dollars held by the ESF are made available to a country through its central bank in exchange for the same value in that country’s currency.
The ESF also administers special drawing rights (SDRs), assets created by the IMF and then loaned to countries requiring help in financing balance-of-payment deficits. SDRs are permanent resources of the ESF, whose operations are conducted through the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The New York Fed acts as an intermediary between the ESF and those foreign governments seeking short-term financing.
This all sounds fine until one learns that it allows the U.S. Treasury secretary to operate outside U.S. laws. According to minority members of the House Committee on Coinage, Weights, and Measures who reviewed this law in its preparation, “This [law] in fact, means that the Secretary of the Treasury shall be under no obligation to comply with general laws of the United States in the handling of this fund. … We believe that [this] places autocratic and dictatorial power in the hands of one man directly over the control of the value of money and credit and indirectly over prices. … We believe that this is too great a power to place in the hands of any one man. We believe that it is contrary to every true principle of American Government.”
After serving as the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Timothy Geithner was appointed treasury secretary when Barack Obama took office. After being appointed by the president, a Senate panel must confirm the treasury secretary. Much like a corporate president or CEO, the secretary is merely the top administrative executive, who makes certain that things run smoothly. The real power comes from above. Sunset provisions in the 1934 law provided that the ESF would expire after two years, but President Roosevelt extended its life by declaring that the economic emergency of the Great Depression was continuing. The ESF, like so many other government instrumentalities, is still with us.
During World War II, the ESF was headed by Harry Dexter White, who was not on the regular Treasury payroll but rather was paid from the ESF budget. He was given vast authority in and full responsibility for all Treasury matters related to foreign relations as well as all Treasury economic and financial matters related to U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, and civilian-affairs operations anywhere overseas. At the same time, White sat on the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) Advisory Committee. The OSS was the counterespionage and counterpropaganda agency of the government, a large organization of more than twelve thousand people who created wartime propaganda and planted false rumors, including the manufacture and propagation of scandals, as well as other activities designed to sow confusion and distrust. All this was financed by the ESF.
After the war, the ESF helped design the world’s new monetary system, including its best-known creations—the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. The ESF also has been charged with providing unaccountable funds to the CIA. According to Lawrence Houston, the first general counsel of the CIA, “The heart and soul of covert operations is … the provisions of un-vouchered funds, and the inviolability of such funds from outside inspection.”
Now the ESF has copycat agencies in many states and itself has become nothing more than a slush fund to bankroll CIA black operations. There are even accusations of laundering drug money. The slush funds operate without legislative oversight or public scrutiny and, while technically legal, outside of the intentions of the U. S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. To pinpoint the movement of tax money to questionable recipients would require a full audit of all the economic stabilization funds and the legislation that regulates transfers of public tax monies to innumerable clandestine and questionable, though technically “legalized,” funds.
Internet commentator Eric deCarbonnel has documented an immense amount of information on the ESF and has concluded that the agency “controls the New York Fed, runs the CIA’s black budget, and is the architect of the world’s monetary system (IMF, World Bank, etc). ESF financing (through the OSS and then the CIA) built up the worldwide propaganda network which has so badly distorted history today (including erasing awareness of its existence from popular consciousness). It has been directly involved in virtually every major US fraud/scandal since its creation in 1934: the London gold pool, the Kennedy assassinations, Iran-Contra, CIA drug trafficking, HIV, and worse. …”
It is inner connections like the ESF that lead to the creation of economic hit men like John Perkins, who strong-arm and even oust the leaders of foreign nations. Because these covert agencies operate largely in secret and because their corporate masters own the mass media, most Americans are unaware of the high crimes perpetrated in their name.
Though the ESF began during the age of the Great Depression, the history of conspiratorial banking control goes much further back. Mujahid Kamran, vice chancellor of the University of Punjab and an expert on corporate America, has concluded that the American banking system is ultimately pernicious. “The advent of the industrial revolution, the invention of a banking system based on usury, and scientific and technological advancements during the past three centuries have had three major consequences,” he wrote in
The Grand Deception: Corporate America and Perpetual War.
“These have made the incredible concentration of wealth in a few hands possible, have led to the construction of increasingly deadly weapons culminating in weapons of mass destruction, and have made it possible to mold the minds of vast populations by application of scientific techniques through the media and control of the educational system. The wealthiest families on planet earth call the shots in every major upheaval that they cause. Their sphere of activity extends over the entire globe, and even beyond, their ambition and greed for wealth and power knows no bounds, and for them, most of mankind is garbage—‘human garbage.’ It is also their target to depopulate the globe and maintain a much lower population compared to what we have now.” Dr. Kamran also noted that universities in developing countries operate in close partnership with the large private foundations and that the only way to truly understand the operation of the world is “to realize the U.S. Government is owned by those who own these foundations.”
I
F THE IDEA THAT A SMALL GROUP OF INTERNATIONAL YET
interconnected individuals control the worlds of finance and commerce seems like a paranoid conspiracy theory, consider a 2011 study by three scientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. Combining mathematics used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data, they traced the ownership of the transnational corporations. From a database of 37 million companies and investors, the Swiss team constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company’s operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.
The study shockingly confirmed the worst fears of conspiracy theorists and the Occupy protestors, as the analysis of the relationships among forty-three thousand transnational corporations identified a relatively small group of companies—primarily banks—with disproportionate power over the global economy.
One of the authors of the study, James B. Glattfelder of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, hesitated to draw conclusions or support anyone’s theories, but he said, “Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it’s conspiracy theories or free-market. Our analysis is reality-based.”
According to an article in
New Scientist
, the study
revealed a core of 1,318 companies with interlocking ownerships. Each of the 1,318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What’s more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1,318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world’s large blue chip and manufacturing firms—the “real” economy—representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.
When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a “super-entity” of 147 even more tightly knit companies—all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity—that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. … Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.
“In effect, less than one per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network,” explained Glattfelder.
Although study members and commentators disparaged talk of conspiratorial control, they did admit that such interconnectedness was worrisome, as it might bring on instability in world markets. “If one [company] suffers distress, this propagates,” said Glattfelder, who added that perhaps there should be global antitrust rules to limit such centralized control. One suggestion offered was a tax on corporations that display excessive interconnectivity.
The Swiss researchers limited their study to corporations and never sought to analyze the family, social, and business relationships among owners and stockholders. Yet personal relationships
do
matter, especially in matters of business and politics.
One classic example of individuals guiding corporate decisions may be found in the 1985 acquisition by Capital Cities Communications of the ABC television network, a company about two thirds larger than the acquiring company. In late 1984, William J. “Bill” Casey, then President Reagan’s CIA director, demanded that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) revoke ABC’s licenses because it had reported repeatedly on CIA scandals. The FCC was so unimpressed by the request that it never asked the network to respond. But Casey’s demand prompted ABC News president Roone Arledge to state, “The CIA’s complaint constitutes an unprecedented effort by a government agency to involve the power of government to suppress vigorous reporting about its activities. It raises serious and disturbing First Amendment concerns.” Rebuffed by the FCC, Casey turned to Capital Cities, of which he was a founder. He owned 34,755 shares of the company, and his wife owned a comparable number, giving the pair a controlling interest. Thus with the purchase of ABC, the head of the CIA took control of one of the major TV networks with little reporting of this fact outside the financial pages of a few newspapers. The Cap Cities–ABC deal, the biggest broadcasting merger in U.S. history, started an avalanche of media mergers and takeovers. It also ended any deep investigative reporting on the CIA by ABC.
As always, behind the flow of money necessary for such mergers and acquisitions were the banks. Once there were hundreds of banks in America, owned by individuals and local families. But due to government regulations put into place during the Reagan-Bush years, these banks either faded away or consolidated. In 1990, there were thirty-seven major banks in the U.S. By 2009, buy-outs, mergers, and bankruptcies had reduced this number to four. Those left standing were Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo, according to the General Accounting Office. Ominously, in June 2012, the giant global rating agency Moody’s downgraded the ratings of Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and JP Morgan, citing concerns for the stability of the world’s financial system.
Gerald Celente, founder of the Trends Research Institute and author of best-sellers
Trend Tracking
and
Trends 2000
, pointed out that even Jesus became an activist when he confronted the money powers. “When you think about the Prince of Peace, when’s the only time he became violent? It was when he picked up a whip and drove the moneychangers out of the temple. The moneychangers have taken over the temples—the temples of Athens, the temples of Rome, the temples of Berlin and the City of London. They’ve taken over Washington. They’ve taken over every capital of every major city in the world. So where’s it going? It’s very simple to see where it’s going. It’s called class warfare.”
Stephen Moore, senior economic writer for the
Wall Street Journal
editorial page, said Americans have become a nation of takers, not makers. “Today in America there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million in 2011) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million). This is an almost exact reversal of the situation in 1960, when there were 15 million workers in manufacturing and 8.7 million collecting a paycheck from the government. It gets worse. More Americans work for the government than work in construction, farming, fishing, forestry, manufacturing, mining, and utilities combined.”
Big banks, big government, mortgage firms, ratings agencies, derivatives, credit swaps … they all sound too complicated for the average person. But are they really? Greed is still greed. Corruption is still corruption, and criminality is still criminality, no matter the cover of law, regulations, corporate policy, or legal technicalities.
This was not all due to accident and coincidence. It was all the plan of a handful of insiders, many operating within the secret societies, who provide a disproportionate number of government leaders and officials. Who’s behind it all? According to a growing number of conspiracy researchers looking to answer that question, it can be traced back to thirteen families, all interconnected by blood.
Various individuals have publicly claimed to be a part of the Illuminati, the inner elite, or whatever name one would like. While most are of dubious character with few or no real credentials, their stories tend to support the accounts of various conspiracy researchers. Their stories are surprisingly consistent and offer fascinating insights into the workings of such an elite.
Bill Ryan, who worked on a famous social sciences project called Project Camelot, interviewed one of these self-proclaimed elite members. “In the summer of 2010, I was approached by a very unusual man,” Ryan explained. “I’ve called him ‘Charles.’ He’s spent many years working for the elite group that considers it their responsibility to run the planet. He’s not an academic, a historian, or a scientist. But he wanted to communicate some important information about the worldview and philosophy of this group. Ryan reported,
They are a controlling group of 33 individuals who meet frequently to make strategic decisions about humanity and the planet. They are not the “Illuminati,” which is a lower-level secret society—of which there are many, like the Knights of Malta, the Rosicrucians, Skull and Bones, the Priory of Sion, numerous Masonic groups, and more. The 33 can be compared to a Board of Directors of a very large global corporation. Like a real Board, there is a “Number One Man” who makes final policy decisions, having consulted his colleagues, all of whom have expertise and who have earned a right to participate. There are differences of opinion sometimes—and different personalities, as in any group of people—but basically they are very much aligned with the overall purpose, which is (using this analogy) to ensure that Corporation Plant Earth continues to expand and prosper. All in line with the Corporation’s “mission statement”—which is about optimizing the human genome.
Charles explained that each of these people, each representating one of thirty-three bloodlines, is so powerful and controls so much wealth and assets that each could be regarded almost as a nation-state in his (or occasionally her) own right. They all regard it as their responsibility to “manage” planet Earth. He said they are party to a great deal of hidden history through their private possession of ancient documents and artifacts, many located in the Vatican Library.
The history and lineage of the human race is not—at all—what the public has been told. It has been decided a long time ago that the human race could not handle these truths. This information is regarded as a kind of “sacred knowledge.” Safeguarding this knowledge is taken extremely seriously, and, as Charles explained, there is a great deal of tradition and historical culture—going back thousands of years—which is almost inextricably interwoven with the way the group functions. As Charles also tried to explain, they do not see time as you and I do. Delaying something by a year, or a decade, or a hundred years, means very little. They do not operate to a calendar. Only to unfolding events.
One woman, who goes by the pseudonym of Svali, claimed to have escaped the Illuminati after working for years as a high-level programmer and trainer. She said that while she was growing up, her mother and stepfather were Illuminati members. According to Svali, the Illuminati have six chairs on their “ascended masters council”—representing the sciences, government, leadership, scholarship, spiritual affairs, and military affairs—and she claimed that her mother sat on a Washington, D.C., area regional council and served as spiritual chair. A German philosopher named Adam Weishaupt is often credited with founding the Illuminati in 1776 in Germany, but Svali said that this was untrue. “They chose him as a figurehead and told him what to write about. The financiers, dating back to the bankers during the times of the Templar Knights who financed the early kings in Europe, created the Illuminati. Weishaupt was their ‘gofer,’ who did their bidding,” she said. Svali explained:
The Illuminati is a group that practices a form of faith known as “enlightenment.” It is Luciferian, and they teach their followers that their roots go back to the ancient mystery religions of Babylon, Egypt, and Celtic druidism. They have taken what they consider the “best” of each, the foundational practices, and joined them together into a strongly occult discipline. Many groups at the local level worship ancient deities such as “El,” “Baal,” and “Ashtarte,” as well as “Isis and Osiris” and “Set.” This said, the leadership councils at times scoff at the more “primitive” practices of the anarchical, or lower levels. I remember when I was on council in San Diego, they called the high priests and priestesses the “slicers and dicers,” who kept the “lower levels happy.” This is not to offend anyone, it only shows that at the leadership levels, they often believe they are more scientifically and cognitively driven. But they still practice the principles of enlightenment.
There are 12 steps to this, also known as “the 12 steps of discipline,” and they also teach traveling astral planes, time travel, and other metaphysical phenomena. Do people really do this, or is it a drug induced hallucination? I cannot judge. I saw things that I believe cannot be rationally explained when in this group, things that frightened me, but I can only say that it could be a combination of cult mind control, drug inductions, hypnosis, and some true demonic activity. How much of each, I cannot begin to guess. I do know that these people teach and practice evil.
At the higher levels, the group is no longer people in robes chanting in front of bonfires. Leadership councils have administrators who handle finances (and trust me, this group makes money. That alone would keep it going even if the rest were just religious hog wash). The leadership levels include businessmen, bankers, and local community leaders. They are intelligent, well educated, and active in their churches. Above local leadership councils are the regional councils, who give dictates to the groups below them, help form the policies and agendas for each region, and who interact with the local leadership councils.
At the national level, there are extremely wealthy people who finance these goals and interact with the leaders of other countries. The Illuminati are international. Secret? By all means. The first thing a child learns from “family, or the Order” as they are called, is “The first rule of the Order is secrecy.” This is why you don’t hear from more survivors who get out. The lengths that this group goes to, to terrify its members into not disclosing, is unbelievable. … Try being buried in a wooden box for a period of time (it may have been minutes, but to a four year old it is an eternity), and then when the lid is lifted, being told, “if you ever tell, we’ll put you back in forever.” The child will scream hysterically that they will NEVER EVER [emphasis in the original] tell. I was that child, and now I am breaking that vow made under psychological duress. Because I don’t want any other children to go through what I did, or have seen done to others.