The Halliburton Riddle

“We know what the meaning of i$, i$ to Halliburton. It is by far the largest beneficiary of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. With no-bid, no-ceiling contracts, the company has already amassed $2 billion in work. It is doing everything from restoring oil facilities to providing toilets for troops. A year ago Halliburton was staring at nearly a half-billion dollars in losses. In the second quarter of 2003 it posted a profit of $26 million.”

—Derrick Z. Jackson, “Cheney’s Conflict with the Truth,”  

The Boston Globe (September 19, 2003)

“I’ve severed all my ties with the company, gotten rid of all my financial interests. I have no financial interest in Halliburton of any kind and haven't had now for over three years.”   —Vice President Dick Cheney, on NBC’s Meet the Press, September 14, 2003

Manifest Destiny

In today’s fast-paced, constantly-changing world, members of the working class—especially those in America where vacation/holiday time is extremely limited, find it increasingly more difficult to maintain regular contact with old friends and extended family members. To be able to spend time with the same group of friends at least once or twice every year is almost unheard of. Vice President Dick Cheney, in spite of his rigorous schedule, however, has been able to maintain a relationship with the owners of the Armstrong Ranch in South Texas, for more than thirty years and “sometimes hunts there several times a year.”[1] 

Such a relationship cries out for more scrutiny than it has been given in the press so far.  Cheney’s “peppering” of Texas attorney Harry Whittington with gunshot is not notable in and of itself; it is the frequency with which such hunting trips have taken place that piques the imagination. The ranch where the shooting occurred is owned by the family of Anne L. Armstrong, a former director on the board of Halliburton for twenty-three years (1977-2000), serving not only as a high-level corporate committee member on the management oversight committee and the corporate governance committee, but, in particular, on the very nominating committee which in 1995 chose Dick Cheney as its president and eventually as Halliburton’s chairman. 

Cheney has denied any persisting ties with his former employer—the same corporation which has reaped massive profits from the Bush-Cheney debacle in Iraq—leaving us to speculate what it is that entices such an inept hunter back to that ranch year after year.  The failure of Cheney and his hosts to notify the proper authorities for more than twenty-four hours after the shooting further incites an inquisitive mind to inquire whether other persons with longstanding relationships to Halliburton and the Vice President were allowed to skulk away, undetected by law enforcement or members of the press.

The Armstrong Ranch has been called “kind of a rite of passage for Texas Republicans. You go pay homage.”[2] That statement contains overtones of an obeisance required, yet undefined. The suggestion that the Armstrong family has a long Republican tradition must be viewed in light of Texas’ short history of voting Republican—a tide which did not even begin to turn until Texas elected its first Republican U.S. Senator (John Tower) in 1961 and its first Republican governor (Bill Clements) in 1978. Nevertheless, the process by which Texans wormed their way into the Republican power structure deserves our attention. That power shift occurred at the same point in time that destiny brought together Donald Rumsfeld, Richard B. Cheney and Anne L. Armstrong.  Destiny embodied in the form of Richard M. Nixon…and made manifest in the person of John B. Connally, Jr.

Economic Opportunities

Donald Rumsfeld was the first of the trio to receive a bid into the Nixon White House—an invitation which resulted from Nixon’s approval of the way Rumsfeld handled a political confrontation with a program touted by Democrats in August of 1966. As a young Republican Congressman from Illinois, Rumsfeld had launched a vicious series of attacks upon a project called “Mohole,” viewed by him as a boondoggle for President Lyndon Johnson’s long-time supporter, Brown & Root. So successful was Rumsfeld’s attack that what Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson a “purely non-political project”—designed by the National Science Foundation to learn the cause of earthquakes and volcanoes—was terminated, notwithstanding the fact that Brown & Root continued to be awarded much more lucrative military contracts in Vietnam.  

Pearson and Anderson accused Rumsfeld of having attacked the wrong Brown & Root contract, of having missed the real story—“that Brown and Root have been financing Lyndon Johnson for years, put up around $100,000 for him when he was running as a young Congressman from Texas. And today the defense contracts they have been getting from the Government are far greater than the piddling $19.7 million which the House last week lopped off the Mohole project…”[3]

One week before Mohole was axed, Congress had authorized spending of almost half a billion dollars “for military construction money [for Vietnam], of which Brown and Root will get a substantial share.”[4] Almost as an afterthought the columnists added: “Brown and Root also prospered under President Eisenhower. They were given a large slice of the contract to build military bases in Spain at a cost of around $2 billion. The George Brown family at that time was contributing not to Mr. Eisenhower but to the Democrats.”[5] 

That’s nice work, if you can get it. 

Two years later Richard Nixon had replaced Lyndon Johnson in the White House, and he remembered Rumseld’s performance. He wanted that young man on his team and offered him a job in his administration—at the very bottom rung, the Office of Economic Opportunity. Rumsfeld quickly accepted. At his first opportunity Rumsfeld called in a young legislative aide with whom he had crossed paths—Dick Cheney. It boggles the mind even to attempt to visualize these two men working to expand economic opportunity for the impoverished; social workers they are not. Both were, however, extremely hard-working and ambitious and did not remain long in the cellar. Late in 1970 Rumsfeld also took on the added assignment of White House Counselor and would ultimately be replaced at OEO by another of today’s military-industrialists, Frank Carlucci of the Carlyle Group. 

One year later, Rumsfeld was named Director of the Cost of Living Council, a new position created under the Economic Stabilization Act of 1970, and he brought Cheney over as his deputy. The importance of the Cost of Living Council at that particular time cannot be over-emphasized.  Before we had a war on drugs or a war on terror, we were fighting a war against inflation.  As the end of the war in Vietnam was approaching, the looming fear was that America would not be able to sell enough products overseas to compensate for its increasingly insatiable demand from foreign sellers.  Bankruptcy thus haunted the Nixon Administration in 1970 and 1971, much as it had Grover Cleveland’s presidency in the 1890’s. 

When John Connally took control of the Treasury Department in February 1971 after the resignation of Secretary David M. Kennedy of Chicago, the picture was bleak.[6] In 1973 Connally told a group of Canadians in Toronto:

By the middle of 1971 the American trade balance was in rapid decline. Moreover, we could no longer maintain the fiction that the dollar was convertible into gold when in fact those dollars increased to a ratio of six to one over our gold reserves during the 1960s and the 1970s. We had simply expended our surplus and extended our credit until both were exhausted. The American image of invulnerability was clearly a delusion. It was again demonstrated that no nation is so large and so powerful that it is invulnerable to change.[7]

Closing the gold window

Connally’s selection by Nixon was a curious choice. He was still a Democrat at that time and had no obvious ties to anyone in the Nixon White House. Perhaps he had been hand-picked by Nixon’s former New York law firm—Mudge, Rose—which represented Paribas, a 19th-century offshoot of the Rothschild-controlled Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas. Connally, an attorney, was a partner in the Houston law firm of Vinson & Elkins, whose senior partner, James A. Elkins, Jr., had inherited a large block of stock in the First City National Bank of Houston—for which Connally served as a director. A 1976 Congressional investigation would subsequently reveal that the large Houston bank had partnered with numerous Rothschild-affiliated banks in joint ventures such as Rothschild Intercontinental Bank, Ltd. of London and New Court Securities Corp. of New York.[8] The Washington Post reported in 1969 that the Rothschilds were “rebuilding their international financial empire through the Five Arrows Group … composed of London’s N.M. Rothschild, Baron Guy’s Paris Rothschild bank, Cousin Edmond’s Geneva-based Banque Privee, the Banque Lambert of Brussels, in which the Rothschilds have a substantial minority stake, and Pierson, Heldring and Pierson, an independent Dutch bank long associated with the family.”[9]

Early in 1969 Connally had also been elected to Halliburton’s board, and he would be “re-elected” in November 1972 after having served seventeen months as Secretary of the Treasury.[10] Halliburton had also been a client of Vinson & Elkins, and it would remain so until 2002 when the corporation moved its business to Houston rival firm, Baker & Botts, the law firm headed by Bush friend James A. Baker III. Connally’s gigantic challenge during his short term of office was to “close the gold window,” thus ending the United States’ legal obligation to exchange dollars held by foreign banks for gold. 

Connally was neither a banker nor an economist, and he was never a wealthy man—compared to the Vanderbilts, Whitneys and the like. But he was a lawyer for wealthy and powerful men, among whom he circulated his entire life—whose names remain shrouded in secrecy behind corporate facades.  Connally’s underlings in the Nixon administration—Rumsfeld and Cheney—also rose from economic stations that would be termed, at most, middle class, neither of them ever having achieved any degree of education, accomplishment, or even competence that would justify the arrogance each has exhibited in the last decade. The Cost of Living Council in which Rumsfeld and Cheney were members was, of course, chaired by Treasury Secretary Connally until he resigned in 1972. 

During that same era, Anne Armstrong would also ascend from her lowly position as adviser on women’s issues to take a place at the Cost of Living Council, as Rumsfeld advanced to a brief tour at NATO (where he acted as a front man for Henry Kissinger), before serving as President Gerald Ford’s Secretary of Defense after Nixon’s resignation. 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.

What a small world! 

Who Really Owns Halliburton?

The answer to the Halliburton riddle lies in history. It is a complex tale that takes one through the Indian lands of Oklahoma to California high society; back to the ranches and oilfields of Texas and the skyscrapers of Dallas and Houston. For now, it is the question that is most important—a question the media has yet to ask, much less to answer.

ENDNOTES:

[1] Anne E. Kornblut, “Cheney Shoots Fellow Hunter in Mishap on a Texas Ranch,” The New York Times (February 13, 2006).

[2] Harvey Kronberg in The Quorum Report, quoted in Rick Lyman and Anne E. Korblutt, “The Ranch Where the Politicians Roam,” The New York Times (February 19, 2006).

[3] Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson, “The Washington Merry-Go-Round:  Contractors’ Gift Not Linked to Mohole,” The Washington Post, Times Herald (August 26, 1966), E15.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Kennedy’s resignation may have resulted from the Administration’s embarrassment suffered after the visit of the Rothschild-connected President of France, Georges Pompidou, a few months earlier, as discussed in “Sophistsand Other Scoundrels, Part 1.” 

[7] Joint Meeting of the Empire Club of Canada and The Canadian Club of Toronto (March 19, 1973). Connally, in response to a question raised following his speech (he was asked whether a decision by another nation such as Canada “to conserve its oil, gas, water, mineral and other resources and limit delivery of those to the United States, would … be accepted philosophically by your country … or might we expect political, economic or military pressure to reverse it”), exhibited an attitude of frustration with “nationalism” that has become more prevalent in the years since Connally passed from the scene. He answered as follows: “What you have is yours. You can do with it what you wish; that's your prerogative as a sovereign nation. I would assume that if you are going to deny all your oil, your gas, your water, your timber, your resources, your nickel, your gold or your coal, whatever you have in the way of natural resources, you're going to deny those to the United States in order to conserve them yourselves. I assume that you will equally deny them to other nations around the world.  Under those circumstances I don't know that the United States would have any cause to complain at all.  If, on the other hand, if you denied them only to us and continued to market them and ship them to other nations around the world, I don't know how we could do anything but assume that this was a punitive action taken directly against the United States and then you might hear a little flap about it…. So I think we all have to frankly use our best efforts to put down this increasing wave of nationalism that's sweeping the world.” [italics added]

[8] “International Banking: A Supplement to a Compendium of Papers Prepared for the Fine Study,” Staff Report of the House Committee on Banking, Currency and Housing. 94^th Cong., 2d Sess. (1976). The embedded link allows one to search the article. A search for the word Rothschild brings up nine hits.

[9] Lawrence Malkin, “Rothschild’s Draws on Past to Forge New Global Links, Washington Post, Times Herald (April 6, 1969), 105.

[10] New York Times (November 29, 1972), 64.

Conception of National Interest with Disastrous Implications

The Americans were marvelously ingenious in their exploitation of the commerce. They managed to circumvent both the East India Company's franchise and the Chinese Government's prohibition and carried on a very lucrative, if antisocial and ultimately ruinous trade. Finally, the fact of American participation in the [opium] traffic fundamentally altered the American posture in the Far East. It grew like the Southern view of slavery -- what began as an economic necessity ultimately developed into a conception of national interest with disastrous implications for the future.

Quoted from an article by Professor Jacques M. Downs, "American Merchants and the China Opium Trade, 1800-1840," published in The Business History Review, Vol. 42, No. 4 (Winter, 1968), pp. 418-442. Downs was professor of history at St. Francis College in Biddeford, Maine. (See his obituary in the September 17, 2006 Portland Press Herald / Maine Sunday Telegram.)

The entire 26-page research article (available for purchase at various websites or free from JSTOR in libraries which subscribe), from which the above quote is taken, appeared in print the same year that the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy ripped apart the United States. I remember that year with both horror and awe, as my own life suffered a violent philosophical wrenching so alien to what was occurring all around me. As a sophomore in high school when President Kennedy had died from assassins' bullets, I had almost completed my college courses as a major in history and government in my West Texas home by 1968. While friends and family carried on as though nothing had occurred, my life was changed forever.

Courtesy of Gnostic Center

The previous year my English lit class had studied Plato's Republic, and I felt as though I were living the scene where Socrates describes the cave-like prison where inhabitants face a wall where they view only the shadows of what is going on behind them, created by a light behind the events being played out in reality.

It was not unlike the mirror image of a world into which Alice had climbed--almost real, but not quite real. And the sound track was being provided for us daily to describe the events, that we couldn't quite trust as truth. My education was only just beginning, but it was interrupted for quite a few years of angry cynicism that kept me off-track. I did not know where to turn. I began to distrust everyone and everything. Finding my way back was a long, hard road. I watched as many of my contemporaries were sucked into Vietnam, either as war or anti-war participants. Little did we know at the time that the history about which Professor Downs had written was coming to pass.

Excerpts from "American Merchants and the China Opium Trade, 1800-1840," by Jacques M. Downs

An Existing Business Model

Most of our knowledge comes from the accounts of Europeans visiting or residing in Smyrna in the late century. More complete information apparently must await the systematic exploitation of Turkish records. [See - By far the best sources I have found to date are Salaheddin Bey, La Turquie a l'exposition universelle de 1867 (Paris, 1867) 48-56, and Carl von Scherzer, Smyrna (Vienna, 1873), 136-140. Scherzer was Austrian Consul at Smyrna for many years and should know his subject. See also O. Blau, "Etwas fiber das Opium" in the Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenliindischen Gesellschaft (1869), 280-281. The latter article, though very brief, cites several earlier sources in German and French. Unfortunately, neither Blau nor many of his references are readily available in this country.]

Opium was planted in late October and November and began to grow during the winter. Although the cold weather kept the plants small, the root-system developed considerably. Thus with the coming of spring, the plants would grow rapidly, each sending up from one to four stalks three or four feet high. At the end of April the poppies bloomed, and about two weeks after the petals fell, the poppy-head was fully developed and ready for harvesting....

Map of Ottoman Empire, circa 1792

The crop began arriving in Smyrna toward the end of July or the first of August and continued until the following spring. [See a letter from Thomas H. Perkins to John P. Cushing, January 15, 1825, Samuel Cabot Collection, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston.]  Merchants resident at Smyrna purchased the raw opium for shipment overseas, most importantly to the Orient, though one-quarter to one-half seems generally to have gone to Europe and elsewhere.

In the early days of this commerce most Americans employed the good offices of the British Levant Company, since it was customary to use "the flag and the protection" of a nation which had a trade agreement with the Sublime Porte. [fn. - The United States had no formal agreement with the Porte until the Rhind Treaty of 1830. For further information, see Samuel Eliot Morison, "Forcing the Dardanelles in 1810," New England Quarterly, I (April, 1928), 208-225.] For this service, they paid "a light consulage and dragomange duty, roughly about one per cent on the value of goods imported and exported." Although the British Consul-General in Constantinople reported as late as 1809 that Americans still preferred to consign their goods to the Levant Company, the trading pattern soon began to change.

As early as the late 1790's, American vessels were calling at Smyrna but it was not until 1804 that Philadelphia and Baltimore ships began the trade in earnest. [See Charles C. Stelle, "American Opium Trade to China prior to 1820," Pacific Historical Review, IX (Dec., 1940), 430-431. See also letter from R. Wilkinson to James Madison, January 15, 1806, U.S. Department of State, Despatches from Consuls in Smyrna, I, National Archives, Washington, D.C.] Probably the first figures of any consequence in the American drug trade from Smyrna to China were James and Benjamin C. Wilcocks. The former arrived in Smyrna in 1804 as supercargo of the brig Pennsylvania. They cleared for Batavia, but both were in China by the following October. Benjamin remained, but James appears to have gone home with the ship, to return via Smyrna on the Sylph the following year with more opium. [Note:  The Wilcockses sailed for their kinsmen, William Waln and R. H. Wilcocks of Philadelphia, who continued to send ships to Canton consigned to the brothers. See letter from Wilkinson to Madison, January 15, 1806; Despatches from Consuls in Smyrna. Benjamin Wilcocks remained in Canton until 1807 or 1808. He then returned home and established a business in Philadelphia but "was obliged to return . . . in 1811." See letter from John R. Latimer to Mary R. Latimer, March 30, 1830, John R. Latimer Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.]

Apparently the commerce paid, for several other American China merchants immediately showed an interest. Willings & Francis sent opium aboard the Bingham in the spring of 1805, [See letters from the supercargo, William Read, in the Willings & Francis Collection, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

The brig Eutaw, Captain Christopher Gantt, of Baltimore was in Smyrna from July to November, 1805, and then sailed for Canton with 26 chests and 53 boxes of opium aboard, and in January of the following year, Stephen Girard seems to have become excited by the possibilities of the trade. He wrote two of his supercargoes in the Mediterranean:

"I am very much in favor of investing heavily in opium. While the war lasts, opium will support a good price in China .... " [See letter from Girard to Mahlon Hutchinson, Jr., & Myles McLeveen, January 2, 1805, Stephen Girard Papers, Girard College Library, Philadelphia, Pa. on microfilm at the American Philosophical Society Library, Philadelphia.]

James & Thomas H. Perkins of Boston, who had relatives in Smyrna, had inquired of their nephew at Canton as to the market for Turkish opium in China. [Note: Extracts from two letters from J. & T. H. Perkins to John P. Cushing June 19, September 23, 1805, quoted in J[ames] E[lliott] C[abot], "Extracts from the Letterbooks of J. & T. H. Perkins..." (See typewritten Manuscript, Massachusetts Historical Society, n.d.] John Cushing [See Biographical Dictionary of American Business Leaders by John N. Ingham] had gone to Canton as clerk to Ephraim Bumstead, a former apprentice in the Perkins house. Bumstead fell ill and died, and Cushing, age 16, took over. When he came of age, he was made a partner in the firm, Perkins & Company, which he had organized and run since his arrival. He proved to be a merchant of rare ability and amassed a fortune of nearly one million dollars before he finally sailed for home in 1831. Others soon joined them, and the first of a series of "opium rushes" was reported at Smyrna by Girard's disappointed agents. [See letter from Mahlon Hutchinson, Jr., & Myles McLeveen to Girard, March 30, 1806, Girard Papers.] In 1807, another Philadelphian, George Blight, reported from China that while opium "at times paid very well," it had "disappointed many the past season" because the trade had been far overdone. [See letter from Blight to Girard, March 4, November 21, 1807, Girard Papers.]
 

Opium As a Specie Substitute

Here was a pattern which was typical in the American China trade. Precisely the same configuration had appeared in the commerce in ginseng, sealskins, sandalwood, and just about every other specie-substitute American merchants discovered. The first ships would make a killing, the scent of which would draw others into the trade until the market was saturated, and the trade ceased to pay. Thereafter, periodic gluts would occur until the supply became exhausted (as with sandalwood and fur) or until a few of the stronger firms established some sort of loose organization of the market. In the Turkish opium trade, the organizers were Perkins & Company and its allied concerns in Boston.

America's War on Drugs

What we had begun to see by 1968 was a phony war against drugs. We were being told that marijuana was a gateway drug, not only highly addictive, but which would lead to even worse opiate addictions--primarily heroin. A war was necessary. Not only should all these narcotics be "controlled," but anyone who used or possessed them should be prosecuted as criminals. I was rebellious only in mind and spirit but quite conservative where behavior was concerned. I avoided all drugs, including tobacco, and had never even tasted beer or wine until after graduating college in 1970.

I lived and operated within a strange world of half-life, where I did what a good girl would do, while at the same time held those who would try to control my beliefs or actions in total and utter contempt. I knew in my gut that Lee Harvey Oswald, for example, had not killed President Kennedy, that Sirhan Sirhan was also a mind-controlled patsy, and that there was something much bigger and uglier than James Earl Ray who was responsible for killing Martin Luther King. I could not explain how I knew, but I did.

I had completed law school by 1975, while maintaining a deprecatory  opinion of lawyers and a fear of being co-opted if hired by a firm of them. I shunned the adversary system which I saw as a sham that required sophistry of the highest register. I refused to argue on behalf of or support people or principles with which I disagreed. Thus I eventually found a niche within the land title and abstract industry, which seemed so close to my love of history. In time, I prospered, grew ever confident within myself, and began to meet others who shared my point of view--thanks, of course, to the internet.

It was only after meeting such folks as Kris Millegan and Catherine Austin Fitts, hearing their stories, reading and researching with them in the mid-1990's, that I was able to free the restraints that kept me from changing my position in the cave. Only with their helpful insight did I begin to look at reality head on. I can never thank them enough for allowing me to step into the world of truth where we now reside together.

We had started to realize by that time that the drug war was being fought to benefit a secret intelligence group who wanted to eliminate their competition and thus effectively create a price support floor under the commodity which paid for America's "national security" infrastructure.

So many of our research community referred to this phenomenon as "CIA Drugs," but I knew it began much earlier than the year 1947, when the CIA was born. Little did I know that Professor Downs had already discovered in 1968 that elements within our government had conceived of this use of opium as a substitute specie as being in the "national interest," or national security interest as it became to be called, and that conception would have ever more disastrous  implications for us and our world.

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 77^th 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.