Showing posts with label Colonel Edward House. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Colonel Edward House. Show all posts

Monday, April 1, 2013

Government by Contract

If Jesse Jones served as the “bridge” between the purposes of the Democratic Party in the 1930s and the source of funds to accomplish such purposes, those initially "egalitarian" purposes quickly disintegrated into a factional grab for government succor—much as a newly born puppies fight amongst themselves in competition for access to their mother’s teats. Being "connected" came to mean the ability to manipulate the system that chose which contractors would perform the services the government's policy planners ordained. Eventually that would lead to planning the policy around the desire for the income from the contracts. That is, naturally, how democracy works. 

An Unbridled Administrator

The New Deal was merely an updated continuation of the unfinished agenda begun by the previous Democratic President, Woodrow Wilson—interrupted by Republicans Coolidge, Harding and Hoover. An outline of that platform had conveniently been set forth for us in a pathetically-written novel, originally published anonymously shortly before the 1912 election, whose author was revealed in the spring of 1916 to be none other than the mysterious little man from Texas known as Colonel House.

In Philip Dru, Administrator House laid out his plans for an efficiently run new world order—a model for rule by a beneficent executive officer in whose hands power would be centralized. The legislative agenda necessary to accomplish that ideal government was systematically put in place during the Woodrow Wilson administration (1913-1921) through enactment of:

Click image to enlarge.
  • The Federal Reserve Banking System (Owen-Glass Act, signed December 23, 1913) and 
  • The progressive federal income tax (Sixteenth Amendment, U.S. Constitution, ratified February 3, 1913).
The motive behind the Wilson agenda, to control the masses without upsetting the applecart, was reflected on the title page of House’s novel:


"No war of classes, no hostility to existing wealth, no wanton or unjust violation of the rights of property, but a constant disposition to ameliorate the condition of the classes least favored by fortune." --Giuseppe Mazzini [1]
An organic metaphor
In this paper, we will observe the results of that effort to make the executive branch of government, delineated by the U.S. Constitution to be only one of three co-equal branches of government, into what it is today — a centralized clearinghouse capable of obtaining natural resources and redistributing them by means of an oligarchical administrative system in which a bureaucracy contracts with corporations set up by factions within the financial elite. That clearinghouse function is best illustrated by picturing a spider plant. Over time, an elected executive government, headed by the U.S. President, has spun off various unelected and unaccountable offshoots to evolve into a bureaucratic infrastructure through which, like the initial plant, distributes its gathered resources.

The Model

House was assisted in his effort to set up a central bank by other behind-the-scenes advisers (in a curtain-behind-the-curtain sleight-of-hand maneuver), the most important of which was the German Jewish banker Paul Warburg. In 1907 Warburg met Senator Nelson Aldrich, who “visited [Jacob Schiff’s office at] Kuhn, Loeb to ask how the Reichsbank issued treasury bills. Schiff didn’t know and summoned Paul. By the time Aldrich left, an enthusiastic Paul mused, ‘There marches national bank currency and there goes currency reform.’” [2] 

The distribution clearinghouse Warburg designed, which was modified by Congress before final passage, is comprised of an elite class of bankers who are shareholders of the private centralized banking system granted power in 1913 — a class whose ultimate goal is to break free of any legislative or judicial constraints and to govern the country much as Philip Dru was allowed to do in Col. House’s warped imagination. The bankers operate within twelve separate regions of the country, each of which is governed by a separate governing board. 

Jesse Jones, super man?
Col. House’s challenge after the Act was passed (but before the system was actually operating to its full extent) was to put in place the administrative infrastructure he had laid out in his book. As individuals in power tend to do, he sought expertise for his experiment only from his inner circle of acquaintances. Jesse Jones states in his autobiography that, though he had refused House’s repeated summonses to Washington throughout the Wilson Administration, he finally gave in to the entreaties because his country needed him to help alleviate the symptoms of the depression; Jones thus viewed himself as the ideal administrator. Once Roosevelt replaced him, Jones’ support for the New Deal waned. Nevertheless, once the legislation had been enacted and forced down the throat of the Supreme Court, the enhanced administrative power given the executive branch remained. 

Acting as the financial hub of the New Deal government of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jones distributed “Fifty Billion Dollars,” according to the title of his autobiography, though it has never been clear how that money was created. While Jones was head of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation he had the power to dole out and deny contracts to individuals and corporations in order to keep the masses employed so as not to be engaged in revolutionary activity against the existing power structure. Upon his return to Houston in 1946, he would not only continue his commercial real estate develop business, but would work through his Houston Endowment Foundation to set up a secret method to finance intelligence operations which will be discussed in a future essay. [3]

Secret Visionaries

One platform plank remained unfulfilled by the end of Wilson’s term of office.  Although it would take another world war to gain approval for that goal — which, incidentally, helped to further the international banking ideal desired by the Bank for International Settlements in Switzerland — Wilson was still hopeful he could achieve that goal.  In order to draft a constitution for the League of Nations, he appointed a four-main committee chaired by Col. House and named another man, like Warburg, from a German Jewish background, as adviser to the committee. George Louis Beer, whose father Julius Beer lived next door to Swiss-born Meyer Guggenheim and his son William on West 77th Street in New York, [4] used his knowledge of British imperial and colonial policy to develop a constitution for world government along similar lines. [5]  He was chief of the colonial division of the American delegation at the Paris Peace Conference and in charge of helping to draft the mandates for the administration of the former German colonies.

Just as a plant absorbs its required nutrients from the soil, the Guggenheim family had been instrumental in acquiring for the United States scarce minerals necessary for the nation’s strategic purposes — coinage, weapons manufacture, etc. Because of the scarcity and the expense in obtaining those minerals, the Guggenheims therefore occupied a powerful position in America at the turn of the century. Having been a member of the Jewish clique which included an assortment of Jewish bankers in Kuhn, Loeb and other Wall Street firms, George Louis Beer understood the importance of such strategic metals in banking and world trade. [6] His family maintained connections among the Jewish banking community which moved from one nation to the next, setting up centralized banking systems which could act within a global clearinghouse in an attempt to stabilize each nation to maintain control over its currency .[7]

The Texas Network

Like Col. House, Jesse Jones greased a political machine composed of Texans with whom he had been associated in business and banking.  It is the network to which they gave power which maintains power today. It is that network that explains who Halliburton is. Without understanding the past, we can never hope to understand the current power structure — how it thinks and how it works.

We can identify the network by its components — the businesses in which its constituents were engaged. The purpose of the “administrator” is to distribute the government’s money to those businesses, assuring the network that it will not need to compete with the same type of businesses not controlled by the network. Since money usually determines the outcomes of elections, the network sets up its own method of bypassing the law in order to funnel money to its candidates. Bush II's administration used Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay in that role.

Vice President Dick Cheney’s primary function was to distribute contracts to his old employer, Halliburton, as well as to lay the groundwork for the pretext necessary to get the United States involved in a war. Can it really be that simple? The best way to answer that question is to examine and analyze the governing boards of Halliburton throughout its history — a time-consuming process. In “TheHalliburton Riddle,” we stated: “Connally, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Armstrong — of those four, three would serve as directors of Halliburton. The fourth, Rumsfeld, as Secretary of Defense would help George W. Bush engineer the war in Iraq, to Halliburton’s benefit,” thus intimating that there is a definite connection between that corporate clique and the policy decisions being made in the White House, and that, to a great degree, those policy decisions are concerned primarily with trade deficits and currency stabilization — issues with which the United States has been dealing throughout its history.

Federal Reserve System regions
The State of Texas houses one of the twelve district banks that operate the Federal Reserve. Located in Dallas, it controls all banks in Texas, southern New Mexico and northern Louisiana. Texans have always resented their subservience to Eastern capital, always searching for a way to avoid having to go to New York or Boston to sell their bonds or issue new corporate stock. When Jesse Jones headed the RFC, he made sure that his friends back home were not neglected, and those friends liked having one of their own as the nation’s chief banker. 

Although Jones had, in 1917 been one of the initial incorporators of Houston-based Humble Oil Company (a majority of whose stock was secretly, and illegally, owned by Standard Oil of New Jersey), he sold his stock when began work for the Red Cross at the end of World War I. His co-founders, however, because of Texas’ importance as a resource for petroleum and natural gas, would eventually see themselves in the chairmanship of Standard Oil of New Jersey. They would also gain access to the board of Houston’s prestigious Rice University, patterned along the lines of Princeton, where Jersey Standard was originally headquartered.  The founders would also control a major segment of the beef producing industry — with its King Ranch in South Texas performing a dual function as cattle raiser and oil producer (having leased its land to Humble Oil, which found huge oil fields there).

It was, in fact, a scion of the King Ranch — Congressman Richard Mifflin Kleberg — who gave Jesse Jones’ replacement as head of the Texas network his first job in Washington, D.C. in 1932. While young Lyndon Baines Johnson was still learning the ropes as Cong. Kleberg’s aide, Col. House was in New York meeting periodically with FDR. But between 1938 (when Col. House died) and about 1941, control of the Texas network wavered between Jesse Jones and Vice-President John Nance Garner. Once Garner was replaced as Vice-President by Henry Wallace, Jones’ power diminished, and the Texas network came increasingly under the influence of Lyndon Johnson. It was at that point that George and Herman Brown, founders of Brown & Root, began to use Johnson’s inside information and connection to FDR to keep the federal dollars flowing into Texas.

Johnson’s most significant and most secret tap into inside information sources, however, involved a Texan who is even more mysterious than Col. House — a man named Robert Bernerd Anderson, who possibly did more than any other individual to ensure Texas’ access to mineral resources independent of the Federal Reserve’s New York and Boston districts.  Anderson will be the subject of more detailed study in the future.

The political machine for which LBJ worked (he only thought he controlled it; whereas, it was the other way round) continues to reside in Texas today, although it is now headed by Republicans rather than Democrats, and is still centered within the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas. Thus, it is no mere coincidence that three of the last seven Presidents allegedly “elected” by the people of the United States have claimed Texas as their residence. [8] The disproportionate influence asserted by Texans stems no more from a coincidence than does the fact that the election of 2004 pitted two members of the Yale secret society Skull and Bones against each other. Identification of the financial/political network (some have used the term “cabal”) which rose to power in 1963 — and which is so reluctant to relinquish that power — is of urgent importance in order to change the paradigm that has taken America ever closer into the grips of globalism.

Just as Brown & Root (Halliburton) understood that maintaining political power is a necessary step in order to assure its continued access to government contracts, the contracts themselves helped to determine what policies those politicians, whose power was contingent on continuing to feed contracts to the network which elected them, would pursue.  It is a vicious cycle that, in the hands of Texans, always becomes deadly and dangerous.


Notes:

[1] Philip Dru Administrator: A Story of Tomorrow, 1920-1935, originally published anonymously in 1912 by B.W. Huebsch. The badly written novel was in 1916 disclosed to have been authored by Col. Edward M. House, the man behind Woodrow Wilson’s rise to prominence. Indicating that his true purpose in creating such an administrative framework within the federal executive branch of government was to keep the peasants happy so as not to upset the existing order, House began his book with a quote from the Italian nationalist, Giuseppe Mazzini, whom present-day conspiracy theorists have called an illuminati leader.
[2] Ron Chernow, The Warburgs: The Twentieth-Century Odyssey of a Remarkable Jewish Family (New York:  Random House, 1993), 132. Chernow reveals that Paul Warburg, along with Aldrich, “sneaked off” to Jekyll Island, Georgia late in 1910 to discuss currency reform with other wealthy men from American banking circles. This meeting was discussed in “Membershipby Inheritance Only.”
[3] William R. Corson, The Armies of Ignorance: The Rise of the American Intelligence Empire (New York: Dial Press/James Wade Books, 1977).  According to Corson, Jones had been chosen by Colonel House to serve under Major General Ralph H. Van Deman—General Pershing's senior intelligence officer and Chief of Allied Counterintelligence—at the Paris Peace Commission after World War I. Van Deman’s 38-year career in intelligence had taken place long before the Office of Strategic Services, the Central Intelligence Agency, or National Security Agency had been created, before any funding mechanism for intelligence operations existed. Corson had lived, worked, and traveled in Japan, China, Indonesia, Thailand, Burma, Laos, and Cambodia throughout the cold war years and had fought in  World War II, Korea, and Vietnam—retiring as a retired lieutenant colonel from the Marine Corps.  He had “learned the intricate workings of the intelligence community in a wide variety of field and staff intelligence assignments,” including “Staff Secretary of the President's Special Group (CI) joint DOD-CIA Committee on Counterinsurgency R & D, Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense's Director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, and Officer in Charge of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Systems Analysis) Southeast Asia intelligence evaluation program.”  Yet, with all that experience, after talking with Van Deman, Corson admitted to being left “with a conundrum which after 27 years remains unresolved.  It involved my stated disbelief that the activities surrounding his card file project could have been carried out without the financial assistance of others.  His reply was equally disarming and bemusing.  In essence he said, “I have never personally accepted a penny to carry out this work; however, others have had need for funds to do what is necessary’ and he asked, ‘Do you have any quarrel with the idea that private citizens should not make funds available to those able and willing to carry out the work required to keep us free?’  We left it there with his gentle admonition, ‘Your father understood this and there is no reason you should not.’ My thoughts jumped to my father's relationship with Jesse Jones and the Houston Endowment, but Van Deman, in a sphinxlike pronouncement said, ‘Your future lies with those in the active forces, but never fear, there are those in reserve who will help in their own silent ways.’” (See footnote at pages 104-105.)
[4] The Guggenheims were discussed in “Who “Created” Condi Rice?” written in 2004 (see revised article and also Part 2).  As stated in that essay, the Guggenheims had amassed a fortune in lead, copper and silver smelting in Colorado, which “in 1887, led to the formation of the American Smelting & Refining Company (ASARCO) and the Guggenheim Exploration Company in 1899 and created the American Smelting and Refining Co. (ASARCO).”
[5] In addition to becoming wealthy from importing tobacco, Beer’s studies had been pursued first at Columbia in New York and later in London, where he learned how the British socialists had financed their own welfare scheme, first with Indian opium, and later with gold and diamonds from South Africa.
[6] The Federal Reserve Act’s “chief architect was Paul Warburg of the German and Swiss banking house who moved to America only nine years earlier. He brought with him all the experience of European central banking. His brother Max Warburg was financial adviser to the Kaiser and later Director of Germany's central bank, The Reichsbank.  Paul Warburg’s Wall Street banking operation was a partnership with the Rothschilds in Kuhn Loeb & Co.”  G. Edward Griffin, The Creature from Jekyll Island (American Media, Fourth Edition, 2002).
[7] Julius Beer’s name appeared often in The New York Times in conjunction with names such as Schiff, Guggenheim, Rothschild, Warburg, Lewisohn, Lehman and Loeb — within the context of “Jewish society” and charitable causes of that day.
[8] The first of the three, Lyndon B. Johnson, entered the White House as a result of John F. Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963 and was elected in 1964. The second was George H.W. Bush, virtual president for much of Reagan’s eight years in the Office, elected in 1988.  The third is George W. Bush, who has held the job since 2001. We don’t count Gerald Ford as being “elected”; he was appointed to the vice presidency after Spiro Agnew resigned and ascended to the Presidency following Richard Nixon’s disgrace. We also use the term “elected” loosely because of disputes surrounding the elections of 2000 and 2004. 

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

War Is Big Business

Deep Politics of Freeport Sulphur

In the Vol. 3, No. 3, March-April, 1996 edition of Probe, noted JFK assassination researcher Lisa Pease wrote in her article entitled "David Atlee Phillips, Clay Shaw and Freeport Sulphur":
Freeport Sulphur was born in Texas in 1912. The company later moved the headquarters office to New York. Originally, the principal business was mining sulphur. By 1962, Freeport Sulphur was the nation's oldest and largest producer of sulphur. In 1962, the fertilizer industry used 40% of the sulphur produced in the world. Other business segments that use sulphur in the production process are chemical, papermaking, pigment, pharmaceutical, mining, oil-refining and fiber manufacturing industries. For most of this period, Freeport was headed by John Hay Whitney.

Jock makes the Time cover
In 1927, Payne Whitney, one of America's richest multimillionaires, died, leaving his only son and future Freeport president an estate valued at over $179 million. At the young age of 22, John Hay Whitney became one of the country's richest men. Nonetheless, "Jock," as the press later called him, took a job at Lee Higginson and Co. on a salary of $65 a month. There, he made a fateful friendship with another onetime Lee Higginson employee named Langbourne Williams. Langbourne's father had originally founded Freeport Texas, then lost control of the business. Langbourne enlisted Jock's boss at Lee Higginson--J. T. Claiborne--to help in a proxy fight for control of Freeport. Claiborne urged the young Jock to join their efforts. Jock did--to the tune of a half a million dollars. By 1930, the Claiborne-Williams-Whitney team had won control of Freeport.



Freeport, Texas, was actually a town--not a business. It became a deep-water port when a Swedish Texan named Swenson, coincidentally the widowed brother-in-law of fertilizer magnates from Maryland named Tilghman, decided to use the expiring Herman Frasch patent to develop a sulphur resource. Located within a salt dome located on a part of the historic Austin's Colony granted to Stephen F. Austin, the land was owned by the heirs of Austin's sister, Mrs. James F. Perry, whose Peach Point Plantation in Brazoria County--variously called Bryanmound (Bryan Mound) or Bryan Heights Salt Dome -- was first suspected to contain sulphur by stock speculator Bernard Baruch a few years prior to its actual development in 1912.

When Baruch was unable to obtain financing from J.P. Morgan for sulphur production at the Bryan/Perry property, he instead moved to adjacent Wharton County's Boling salt dome, which he (along with the Morgan bank and W. Boyce Thompson) purchased in 1914 from  the Gulf Sulphur Company. In 1918 the name changed to Texas Gulf Sulphur. Austin's original land grant included land all the way to Bastrop, but it is not known whether the mineral estate of Boling Dome was still by that time owned by the Perrys and Bryans.

Freeport Sulphur, early days





Sulphur, however, was in great demand during World War I, and Bernard Baruch of the War Industries Board in Woodrow Wilson's administration was sniffing it out. It should not be overlooked that Woodrow Wilson was a wholly owned subsidiary throughout his administration by the little man from Texas named "Colonel" Edward M. House, originally from Houston. 

House's father, Thomas W. House, had run the blockade during the war years and had been in Matamoros and Monterey with Charles Stillman, William Marsh Rice and other merchants from Texas. They knew how to profit from trading in war materiel. 

The New Regime at National City Bank

By 1915 sulphur output would double:


By this time, Erice Swenson was 65 years old, no doubt ready to retire. But, as an officer in the National City Bank in new York, and as head of Freeport Sulphur in the middle of the great war, that was not about to happen. James Jewett Stillman, who died in 1918, was for four years replaced by his son, James Alexander Stillman. 

An 1896 Harvard graduate, young James in 1901 married Anne Urquhart, the daughter of actress Cora Urquhart and James Brown Potter. As founder of high society's Tuxedo Set, Potter was the son of banker Howard Potter, who married Mary Louisa Brown, whose father, James Brown, was the senior partner of  Brown Brothers & Co, an investment bank founded by sons of Alexander Brown of Baltimore.

When Mrs. Stillman followed her mother onto the stage as "Fifi" Stillman in 1921, a long battle played out in news headlines across the nation, and when James' embarrassing personal life hit the front pages of all the newspapers, it was the elderly Eric Swenson who rose to the chairmanship of the National City Bank.

Swenson must have known where lots of bodies were buried over the years, even having been one of the chief witnesses in the case prosecuted by the grandfather of James A. Baker III against the alleged murderer of William M. Rice, whose death opened up the huge endowment for Rice University.

By now most of the men who participated in setting up the sulphur facility at the new city of Freeport, Texas and the port that allowed for its distribution, were beginning to recede from the active management. These investors were named as the original underwriters of the stock at page 105 of a book by Gerald Kutney, Sulfur: History, Technology, Applications & Industry, as well as in a magazine article in The Chemical Engineer.

Original underwriters of $700,000 worth of stock in the company included the following:
  • Frank A. Vanderlip, James Stillman, Samuel McRoberts--all officers of National City Bank, along with Eric P. Swenson, whose family bank, S. M. Swenson & Sons, also subscribed, as did Maud Tilghman Swenson's brothers, Frederick B. & Sidell Tilghman. Maud died in 1892, only three years after her marriage to Eric Swenson.
  • John Langbourne Williams & Sons and Franklin Quimby Brown of Redmond bank (also involved in Knickerbocker Trust), who also subscribed as underwriters, were members of a fertilizer syndicate called Interstate Chemical Corporation with the Tilghmans. Their syndicate of investors in railroad securities often included C. Sidney Shepard (Yale, 1878) of New Haven, CT.
  • Smaller investors: Edwin Hawley (tycoon in Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad), Williams & Peters (coal merchants), E. K. Knapp, E. M. Carter, Benjamin Andrews (a mining engineer who held several patents in connection with Union Sulphur Co.), James M. Edwards, Orne Wilson, W. B. Chisolm (part of a fertilizer syndicate), W. O. Wetherbee (a bank clerk who testified with Swenson in the Rice murder trial), John N. Steel, John Hays Hammond (associate of William Boyce Thompson), A. Chester Beatty, A. C. Swenson, F. A. Fearing, George C. Reiter, and S. M. Betts.
Many of those named above were also directors of the Interstate Chemical Corporation.
It was because of the initial investment by the J.L. Williams & Sons banking enterprise that Langbourne Meade Williams, Jr. ascended to a management position in 1930. His father (L.M. Sr.), died in 1931, and the Freeport Sulphur stock the family held gave him an opportunity to make a financial play, but it was another connection which gave him the power to do it. That came from the Rockefellers.




To be continued in a future post.