Historical Analysis of the Global Elites: Ransacking the World Economy Until ‘You’ll Own Nothing’ (3)

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World War II

Just a few years later, World War II demonstrated that “war is a racket” yet again. By carefully penetrating the cloak of deception behind which it was hidden, Professor Antony C. Sutton considered original documentation and eyewitness accounts to reveal what remains one of the most remarkable and under-reported facts of World War II.

In his account of this orchestrated conflagration, Sutton carefully documents how prominent Wall Street banks and US businesses supported Hitler’s rise to power by financing and trading with Nazi Germany, reaching the unsavory conclusion that “the catastrophe of World War II was extremely profitable for a select group of financial insiders” including J.P. Morgan, T.W. Lamont, the Rockefeller interests, General Electric, Standard Oil, and the National City, Chase, and Manhattan banks, Kuhn, Loeb and Company, General Motors, Ford Motor Company, and scores of others in “the bloodiest, most destructive war in history”. (Wall Street and The Rise of Hitler).

To illustrate the complex and wide-ranging collaboration between US business interests and the Nazis throughout the war, consider just one example: On the eve of World War II the German chemical complex of I.G. Farben, which included the banker Max Warburg (brother of Paul of the US Federal Reserve) on its Board of Directors, was the largest chemical manufacturing enterprise in the world, with extraordinary political and economic power within Hitler’s Nazi state. The Farben cartel dated from 1925 and had been created with financial assistance from Wall Street by the organizing genius of Hermann Schmitz, a prominent early Nazi who, through I.G. Farben, helped fund Hitler’s seizure of control in March 1933. Schmitz created the super-giant chemical enterprise out of six already giant German chemical companies.

So critical was I.G. Farben to the Nazi war effort that it produced 100% of its lubricating oil and various other products, 95% of its poison gas – “enough gas to kill 200 million humans” – used in the extermination chambers, 84% of its explosives, 70% of its gunpowder, and very high proportions of many other critical products including aviation fuel. As Sutton concludes: “Without the capital supplied by Wall Street, there would have been no I.G. Farben in the first place and almost certainly no Adolf Hitler and World War II.” (Wall Street and The Rise of Hitler, pp.17-20)

The cost in human lives of World War II was 70-85 million. But there was no cost to those Wall Street corporations and their fellow war profiteers that collaborated with Nazi Germany. Just massive profits.

Following World War II

Documenting what had become the long-standing collusion between political, corporate and military elites, sociology Professor C. Wright Mills published his classic work The Power Elite in 1956. This scholarly effort was among the earliest of the post-World War II era to document the nature of the US elite and how it functioned, highlighting the interlocking power of corporate, political and military elites as they exercised control over US national society and went about the task of exploiting the general population.

But a weakness of the account by Mills was his failure to grapple with the already long-standing power of a global elite to manipulate key events in any one country, and certainly the United States, even if much of this was done through the relevant national elite(s).

This ‘global reach’ of the Elite is again clearly apparent in any study of ownership of the world’s oil resources. In his 1975 book The Seven Sisters, Anthony Sampson popularized this collective name for the shadowy oil cartel that, throughout its history, had vigorously worked to eliminate competitors and control the world’s oil. Several decades later, Dean Henderson simply observed that “After a tidal wave of mergers at the turn of the millennium, Sampson’s Seven Sisters were Four Horsemen: Exxon Mobil, Chevron Texaco, BP Amoco and Royal Dutch/Shell.” Beyond this, however, Henderson noted the following:

“The oil wealth generated in the Persian Gulf region is the main source of capital [for the international mega-banks]. They sell the Gulf Cooperation Council sheiks 30-year treasury bonds at 5% interest, then loan the sheiks’ oil money out to Third World governments and Western consumers alike at 15-20% interest. In the process these financial overlords – who produce nothing of economic import – use debt as their lever in consolidating control over the global economy.”

And, following a series of mergers and then the 2008 banking crisis, four giant banks emerged to dominate the US economy: JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America and Wells Fargo. Moreover, these banks, along with Deutsche Bank, Banque Paribas, Barclays “and other European old money behemoths”, own the four oil giants and are also “among the top 10 stock holders of virtually every Fortune 500 corporation” giving them vast control over the global economy.

So who owns these banks? By now it should come as no surprise that several scholars at different times during the past 100 years have investigated this issue and come to essentially the same conclusion: the major families, increasingly interrelated by blood, marriage and/or business interests, have simply consolidated their control over the banks. Apart from scholars already mentioned above, in the 1983 revision of his book, Eustace Mullins noted that a few families still controlled the New York City banks which, in turn, hold the controlling stock of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Mullins identified the families of the Rothschilds, Morgans, Rockefellers, Warburgs and others.

Several scholars have written on the subject of elite power since Mills with Professor Peter Phillips penning the 2018 book Giants: The Global Power Elite which reviews “the transition from the nation state power elites described by Mills to a transnational power elite centralized on the control of global capital around the world. The Global Power Elite function as a nongovernmental network of similarly educated wealthy people with common interests of managing, facilitating, and protecting concentrated global wealth and insuring the continued growth of capital.”

Aside from the obvious criticism that Phillips effectively repeats the mistake made by Mills in assuming that there was no pre-existing “transnational power elite” even if in different form, Phillips goes on to usefully identify the world’s top seventeen asset management firms, such as BlackRock and J.P Morgan Chase, that collectively manage (by now) more than $US50 trillion in a self-invested network of interlocking capital that spans the globe.

More precisely, Phillips identifies the 199 directors of the seventeen global financial Giants and the importance of those transnational institutions that serve a unifying function – including:

the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, G20, G7, World Trade Organization (WTO),
World Economic Forum (WEF), Trilateral Commission,
Bilderberg Group
Bank for International Settlements and the Council on Foreign Relations

and particularly two very important global elite policy-planning organizations:

the Group of Thirty (which has 32 members) and
the extended executive committee of the Trilateral Commission (which has 55 members).

And Phillips carefully explains why and how the Global Elite defends its power, profits and privilege against rebellion by the “unruly exploited masses”: “the Global Power Elite uses NATO and the US military empire for its worldwide security. The whole system continues wealth concentration for elites and expanded wretched inequality for the masses.” Advocating the importance of systemic change and the redistribution of wealth, Phillips goes on to argue that “This concentration of protected wealth leads to a crisis of humanity, whereby poverty, war, starvation, mass alienation, media propaganda, and environmental devastation are reaching a species-level threat.”

Hence, it is worth reiterating: War plays an ongoing and vital role in the exercise of Elite power to reshape world order to maximize wealth concentration by the Elite. If you want further evidence of this, you might find these recent reports instructive:

the US Congressional Research Service report Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-2022,
the Tufts University Fletcher Center for Strategic Studies report Military Intervention Project (MIP) Research
and an article and video that summarize and discuss these two reports in US launched 251 military interventions since 1991, and 469 since 1798.

But, as the discussion above and below illustrates, war is not the only mechanism the Elite uses.

For an account which focuses on identifying many of the world’s largest corporations, in many industries, and then illustrates the interlocking nature of corporate ownership while demonstrating that they are all owned by the same small group of giant asset management corporations – notably including Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street – this video is very instructive: Monopoly: Who Owns the World?.

And for a penetrating critique of BlackRock and its overall strategy to acquire vast worldwide control, including by using its Aladdin investment analysis technology (which employs massive data collection, artificial intelligence and machine learning to derive investment insight), see BlackRock: Bringing Together Man and Machine and this three-part series by James Corbett: How BlackRock Conquered the World.

In the Monopoly video, you will again see the names of some familiar persons and families who own significant shareholdings in these corporations and asset management firms. After showcasing families such as the Rothschilds, Rockefellers and Morgans, the narrator simply observes in relation to Vanguard that its “largest shareholders are the private funds and nonprofit organizations of these families”.

And if you think that national Elites in countries like China and Russia are somehow not involved in all this, you might find it interesting to read articles that discuss the wealth and political influence of the Chinese “immortals” and the Russian oligarchs:

Beyond this, however, Emanuel Pastreich points out that if anyone attributes responsibility for Chinese policies in relation to data collection and control based on QR codes and contact tracing, they inevitably identify the Chinese government.

“But the truth is that few, or none, of these policies were made up or implemented by the Chinese government itself, but rather that the Chinese government is occupied by IT corporations that report to the billionaires (often through Israel and the United States) and bypass the Chinese government altogether.”

Pastreich goes on to offer some insight into how key Elite intelligence and finance corporations are driving the technocratic social control policies being implemented under cover of the ‘virus’ in China.

In fact, as Patrick Wood points out, referencing a much earlier book of his own and Professor Antony Sutton – see Trilaterals Over Washington volumes I & II – “Thanks to early members of the [Elite’s] Trilateral Commission, China was brought out of its dark ages Communist dictatorship and onto the world stage. Furthermore, the Trilateral Commission orchestrated and then facilitated a massive transfer of technology to China in order to build up its non-existent infrastructure. As a failed Communist dictatorship, China was a blank slate with over 1.2 billion citizens under its control. However, Chinese leadership knew nothing about capitalism and free enterprise, and [key Trilateralist Zbigniew] Brzezinski made no effort to teach them about it. Instead, he planted seeds of Technocracy. In the 20-year period from 1980 to 2000, a transformation took place that was considered nothing short of an economic miracle; but it was not of China’s doing. Rather, it can be fully attributed to the masters of Technocracy within the ranks of the Trilateral Commission.” After listing several key features of China’s technocracy (5G, AI, social credit scores, etc.), Wood concludes that “China is a full-blown Technocracy and it is the first of its kind on planet earth.”

And in relation to Russia, Riley Waggaman simply observes that “As for covid-triggered economic restructuring: the Russian government has openly embraced the World Economic Forum’s Fourth Industrial Revolution. In October [2021], the Russian government and the WEF signed a memorandum on the establishment of a Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution in Russia.

Russia has already adopted a law allowing for experimental legal regimes to allow corporations and institutions to deploy AI and robots into the economy, without being encumbered by regulatory red tape. Returning to Gref and his digital Sbercoin: Russia’s central bank is already planning to test-run a digital ruble that, among other nifty features, could be used to restrict purchases.”

Moreover, according to Mikhail Delyagin, a deputy of the State Duma of the Russian Federation: “In the 90s, under Yeltsin, the external management of global banksters was carried out through the IMF and through [Russian oligarch Anatoly] Chubais. Now under Putin, external management will be done by Big Tech, social global platforms, and Big Pharma through the WHO. Exactly the same management.” Cited in Duma deputy: “Protect yourself and Russia from a coup d’état!” Russian lawmaker issues video appeal to the nation. Will anyone listen?

Separately from this, remember that the Elite, as well as its agents and organizations (including those in China and Russia), have vast wealth stashed in “secrecy jurisdictions” (better known as tax havens): locations around the world where wealthy persons, criminals and terrorists, as well as governments and government agencies (such as the CIA), banks, corporations, hedge funds, international organizations (such as the Vatican) and crime syndicates (such as the Mafia), can stash their money so that they can avoid regulation and oversight, and evade tax. Just how much wealth is stashed in tax havens? While this is impossible to know precisely, it can only be measured in tens of trillions of dollars as well as an unknown number of gold bricks, artworks, yachts and racehorses.

How is this possible? Well, it is protected by government legislation and legal systems, with an ‘army’ of Elite agents – accountants, auditors, bankers, businesspeople, lawyers and politicians – ensuring that they remain protected. The point here is simple: if you have enough money, the law simply does not exist. And you can evade taxes legally and in the full knowledge that your vast profits (even from immorally-acquired wealth such as sex trafficking, gun-running, endangered species trafficking, conflict diamonds and drug trafficking) are ‘lawful’ and will escape regulation and oversight of any kind.

But legal systems facilitate monstrous injustice in other ways too. For example, they ensure that owners of corporations are enabled to ruthlessly exploit both their workers and all taxpayers as well. For a thoughtful and straightforward account of how this works, see this article by Professor James Petras: How Billionaires Become Billionaires.

Read the fourth part of the article

Analysis by Robert J. Burrowes

yogaesoteric
February 8, 2023