Douglas Caddy

http://lewrockwell.com/miller/miller40.1.html

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp launches anti-corruption review Media group to review compliance with bribery laws in several of its publishing arms, including News International in London By Josh Halliday guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 15 August 2012 12.38 EDT [To view Murdoch memo to staff, click on link below] http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/aug/15/rupert-murdoch-memo-news-corp-staff?intcmp=239 Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation has launched a review of anti-corruption controls in several of its publishing arms, including News International in London. Murdoch told News Corp staff in a memo on Wednesday that the company recently launched the probe as a "forward-looking review" to improve compliance with bribery laws. The media tycoon told staff that the anti-corruption review was "not based on any suspicion of wrongdoing by any particular business unit or its personnel". The memo described the review as focused on selected locations around the globe. One of these locations is London, where News International publishes the Sun, the Times and the Sunday Times. It also published the now-closed News of the World. It is understood that News International's broad internal anti-corruption review began officially in July last year, when Tom Mockridge replaced Rebekah Brooks as chief executive. The probe accelerated when Imogen Haddon took over as chief compliance officer at News International in March. News Corp also appointed two New York-based compliance officers to oversee company-wide procedures. Gerson Zweifach, ex-senior executive vice-president and general counsel, is News Corp chief compliance officer and Lisa Fleischman, former associate general counsel, is deputy compliance officer. The Metropolitan police has arrested 14 current or former Sun journalists as part of its ongoing investigation into inappropriate payments to police and public officials. Murdoch said in his memo to staff: "As you are all aware, our company has been under intense scrutiny in the United Kingdom. I assured parliament and the Leveson inquiry that we would move quickly and aggressively to redress wrongdoing, co-operate with law enforcement officials and strengthen our compliance and ethics programme company-wide. With the support of our board of directors, I am pleased to tell you that we have made progress on each of these important steps." He added: "We have already strengthened and expanded our anti-bribery training programmes. To ensure the effectiveness of our entire compliance and ethics programme, we have recently initiated a review of anti-corruption controls in selected locations around the globe. The purpose of this review is to test our current internal controls and identify ways in which we can enhance them. "Let me emphasise that the review is not based on any suspicion of wrongdoing by any particular business unit or its personnel. Rather, it is a forward-looking review based on our commitment to improve anti-corruption controls throughout the company." Murdoch said the strengthening of News Corp's compliance procedures will take time and resources, but added that the cost of non-compliance are far more serious.

The British Lawmaker Nipping at Tabloids’ Heels By AMY CHOZICK The New York Times August 10, 2012 LONDON SIX years ago, Rupert Murdoch’s British tabloid The Sun described Tom Watson, then a little-known 39-year-old member of Parliament, as part of a “plotting gang of weasels” who played “grubby politics at a time when soldiers are dying in Afghanistan.” Recently, Mr. Watson got some payback. For years he led the push to investigate the freewheeling tactics at British tabloids, most notably those belonging to Mr. Murdoch, as the scandal involving phone hacking unfolded. Last month prosecutors brought criminal charges against eight senior editors and reporters at News International, the British publishing arm of Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation. Since the accusations were first made public, Mr. Watson, a Labour politician who had himself been the subject of tabloid fodder, has emerged as a kind of Inspector Javert of the Murdochs. He served on the parliamentary committee on media ethics that repeatedly questioned Mr. Murdoch and his son James; traveled to Los Angeles to attend the company’s shareholder meeting where he leveled new charges, and he even recently published a book about the phone-hacking scandal, “Dial M For Murdoch.” It is hard to imagine even the most publicity-craving American official writing a similar book in the middle of Congressional hearings. And Mr. Watson has faced criticism for his ubiquity in the British news media and for telling James Murdoch, who formerly oversaw News Corporation’s British operations, during the hearing that he is “the first mafia boss in history who didn’t know he was running a criminal enterprise.” The criticisms have not deterred Mr. Watson. On a sunny afternoon in his office at Portcullis House in Westminster, the shades pulled tight, he said he expected that the phone hacking would prove to be the tip of the iceberg. “I’m certain we’ll see more evidence emerge of computer hacking,” Mr. Watson said in a far-ranging interview in May. Last month a Scotland Yard investigation did reveal that wrongdoing at Murdoch-owned British papers extended to computer hacking and payments to public officials. Mr. Watson, 45, is not the typical corporate gadfly. He indulges in the role-playing video game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim in his free time and quotes Bob Dylan in describing News International’s mistakes. (“The ladder of the law has no top and no bottom,” he said in a May news conference.) Last year, Mr. Watson was named deputy chairman of the Labour Party, a position that coordinates the party’s campaigns. On his office wall at Parliament hangs an illustrated rendering of Mr. Watson dressed as Super Mario, royal blue overalls and all, and a framed copy of the final edition of the 168-year-old News of the World, the Murdoch tabloid closed in July 2011 after reports of widespread phone hacking emerged. “Thank You & Goodbye,” the headline read. Born in Sheffield and raised in Kidderminster in Britain’s West Midlands area, he grew up reading the left-wing tabloid Morning Star (founded in 1930 as the mouthpiece of Britain’s Communist Party) and middle-market Daily Express. He was first elected to Parliament in 2001, representing West Bromwich East, a central district that includes most of the town of West Bromwich and has one of the highest unemployment rates in Britain. IN 2006, Mr. Watson signed a letter calling for the resignation of Prime Minister Tony Blair, whom Mr. Murdoch still backed. The move, Mr. Watson said, prompted the ire of Rebekah Brooks (then Rebekah Wade), the onetime editor of both The Sun and News of the World who has now been charged with phone hacking and obstruction. He said the political editor at the Blair-friendly Sun warned him: “My editor will pursue you for the rest of your life. She will never forgive you for what you did to her Tony.” Ms. Brooks could not be reached for comment, and a News Corporation spokeswoman could not comment on the criminal investigation. In 2009 The Telegraph reported that Mr. Watson claimed the maximum government allowance on a set of dining room chairs for his London home. The purchase, which he had to defend with the parliamentary fees office, earned Mr. Watson a free pizza cutter from the department store Marks & Spencer, a detail not lost on the British media. He said he did not think much about phone hacking until 2009 when The Guardian published an article about how News of the World reporters regularly intercepted voice mail messages. Colin Myler, then the editor of The News of the World (and now of The New York Daily News), answered lawmakers’ questions about the accusations. “His body language was such that I thought there had to be more to it,” Mr. Watson said. “That’s when we really started to drill down deeper.” Around that time, News International put Mr. Watson and his family under surveillance. “We were put under unbearable pressure,” Mr. Watson said. He said the scrutiny put on his family by News International contributed to his divorce. “My wife and I are separated mainly because she’s not patient about News International in any way,” Mr. Watson said. In November, James Murdoch said he was subsequently made aware that the company had spied on Mr. Watson. “I apologize unreservedly for that,” he said in a parliamentary select committee hearing. “It is not something that I would condone. It is not something I had knowledge of, and it is not something that has a place in the way we operate.” In May, Mr. Watson, as part of Parliament’s Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, was one of six Labour and Liberal Democrat legislators who declared that the elder Murdoch was “not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company.” News Corporation called the report’s declaration “unjustified and highly partisan,” but Mr. Watson stands by the report’s language. With unexpected respect he called Mr. Murdoch “one of the great media innovators of the last half century,” but said that the scandal had exposed a “corporate culture that is shot to pieces.” (A News Corporation spokeswoman declined to comment for this article.) Mr. Watson’s new book, written with the journalist Martin Hickman, recounts the episodes that led to the closing of The News of the World. In the book he tells a story steeped in the language of class warfare and refers to himself in the third person, in both mundane and heroic terms. (“Watson crept out of bed and bought the papers.” “As Watson walked along the beach, he was in tears.”) HE said he did not see a conflict in writing a book about a corporate scandal while sitting on a committee investigating that scandal. Instead, he said he considered the book a public service. “It’s a complex story that was not told in the pages of British newspapers until very recently,” Mr. Watson said. He added: “And our select committees aren’t as powerful as Senate committees” in the United States. Mr. Watson said he expected the investigation into News Corporation would stretch on for at least two more years. The scandal, meanwhile, has helped raise Mr. Watson’s profile, a detail not lost on his opponents, who feel the crusade against Mr. Murdoch was motivated in part for political gain. Mr. Watson said it was not. But he did say that a murky area goes with the territory. “The good guys and the bad guys are all slightly flawed in this tragedy,” Mr. Watson said. The bells of Big Ben just outside his office struck five o’clock in the background. He added: “In some ways it’s so positively Shakespearean.”

News Corporation posts $1.6bn loss as phone-hacking legal fees stack up Losses include charges related to plan to split off publishing assets from more lucrative film and By Dominic Rushe in New York guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 8 August 2012 17.39 EDT News Corp said legal costs relating to the phone-hacking investigation had mounted to $224m. News Corporation made a loss of $1.6bn (£1.2bn) in the last quarter as it absorbed $2.8bn in charges related to a plan to spin off its ailing publishing businesses. The loss compared with a profit of $683m in the same period a year ago and came as revenues dipped 6.7% to $8.4bn, hit by a slide in audiences for TV shows including American Idol and disappointment at the box office for its Hollywood studio. The results were below analysts' expectations and the company's shares fell in after-hours trading. The fourth-quarter loss was linked "most significantly" to poor performances at News Corp's Australian publishing assets, the company said. News Corp announced plans last month to split off its publishing assets including the Wall Street Journal, the Times and the Sun in the UK, and its Australian newspapers from the more lucrative film and television assets including Fox Broadcasting, the Twentieth Century Fox studios and its stake in BSkyB. The move comes in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal that has led to a sprawling criminal investigation in Britain and has triggered an investigation in the US under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. News Corp said legal costs relating to the investigation had risen to $224m for the 2012 fiscal year. On a conference call with analysts, News Corp president Chase Carey said the split of the company was going as planned and "all about bringing focus and alignment to our business". The results painted a grim picture for the publishing business, which reported annual operating income of $597m, down from $864m a year ago. The drop would be even worse, were it not for the exclusion of a $125m litigation settlement charge the company took last year related to its marketing services business. News Corp's publishing business was hit particularly hard by declines at its Australian and UK newspapers, as well as the absence of contributions from the closure of the News of the World. Carey said 2013 would be a flat year for publishing and that a recovery in UK business was likely to be offset by more losses in Australia. Rupert Murdoch, chairman and chief executive, was not on the call, but said in a press release: "News Corporation is in a strong operational, strategic and financial position, which should only be enhanced by the proposed separation of the media and entertainment and publishing businesses." Murdoch's son, James, who stepped down from senior executive positions at BSkyB and News Corp in the UK earlier this year, was present on the conference call but was not asked any questions and did not speak. The media was allowed to listen in to the call but reporters were not permitted to ask questions.

I am a little biased in favor of Gerald Ford because the day that he became President, he told the media in answer to a question that he was reading my first book that had just been published, The Hundred Million Dollar Payoff. He declared that he reading my book for 15 minutes every night before going to bed. The Washington Star gave his statement a big play. Ford also sent me a letter when he was Vice President indicating how much he enjoyed the book. As a result of all this I was later a featured luncheon speaker at the 1976 GOP Presidential Convention in Kansas City where Ford was nominated to carry the GOP banner. He lost to Jim Carter that November. I previously had communication with Ford when he was a key leader in the House of Representatives after I published a book about Abe Fortas and why he should be forced to resign from the U.S.Supreme Court. Fortas later did so as the scandal surrounding him intensified. This all occurred while Watergate was still raging. With Agnew's departure, the office of Vice President had to be filled. I had told my closest political friends in Washington from the first day of Watergate that it was likely Nixon would be forced out of the presidency. It was always considered a possibility by many others and that is why the office had to be filled and why Agnew, who was too controversial, had to be forced to resign so that someone else could assume the mantle if Nixon, too, had to resign. Wow that is cool you had a POTUS read your book and acknowledge you like that. You must have made some serious dough back then I just checked your profile on this forum Mr. Caddy and you've had an incredible life! Excuse me for the next type but HOLY S@#T! You knew William F. Buckley, all these CIA guys like Hunt, and the WAtergate people, and even worked for Nixon! That's amazing. I don't think people like you exist much anymore, at least in my generation. Don't take this the wrong way, but if you died today, I would say you have lived a full life Ok, I got to ask, just tell me straight out, I know it's not the right forum, but Mr.Caddy, who killed John F. Kennedy? I have always believed that the ultimate decision to kill JFK was made by LBJ who was cunning and smart enough to insulate himself from the actual operation. Howard Hunt, who in his deathbed video revealed that he was a "benchwarmer" in the assassination operation, declared that at the top of the pyramid was LBJ who had an almost maniacal intent to become President.

Rebekah Brooks charged over phone hacking allegations Former News International chief executive formally charged over alleged phone hacking and will appear in court next month By Press Association guardian.co.uk, Thursday 2 August 2012 20.34 EDT Former News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks was formally charged with phone hacking and will appear in court next month, Scotland Yard have said. Brooks, 44, answered bail at Lewisham police station and will appear at Westminster magistrates court on 3 September. Six other journalists from the News of the World, including David Cameron's former spin doctor Andy Coulson, have been officially charged and will appear at the same court on 16 August. The seven stand accused of one general charge of alleged phone hacking between October 2000 and August 2006 that could affect as many as 600 victims. Brooks, of Churchill, Oxford, and Coulson face specific charges of illegally accessing the voicemail of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler. The other former NoW staff who face court action are ex-managing editor Stuart Kuttner, former news editor Greg Miskiw, former head of news Ian Edmondson, ex-chief reporter Neville Thurlbeck and former reporter James Weatherup. In a statement issued last month, Brooks insisted she was innocent, adding: "The charge concerning Milly Dowler is particularly upsetting, not only as it is untrue but also because I have spent my journalistic career campaigning for victims of crime. I will vigorously defend these allegations." Brooks is already facing three counts of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, linked to the investigation into phone hacking. She and five others, including her racehorse trainer husband Charlie, who faces one count of the same offence, are due to appear at Southwark crown court in London on 26 September.

I consider Joseph P. Farrell's report in the above video to be a balanced and sophisticated analysis of this important geopolitical event. Should the Obama Administration be forced publicly to acknowledge the placing of the missiles in Cuba by Putin, it could have a dramatic impact on the Presidential election. The issue would then become for the American voter: who would be best to handle this crisis that may last for a long time -- Obama or Romney? Romney's recent trip abroad has left the impression that he is a dunderhead on foreign affairs.

http://gizadeathstar.com/2012/08/news-and-views-from-the-nefarium-august-2-2012/

I am a little biased in favor of Gerald Ford because the day that he became President, he told the media in answer to a question that he was reading my first book that had just been published, The Hundred Million Dollar Payoff. He declared that he reading my book for 15 minutes every night before going to bed. The Washington Star gave his statement a big play. Ford also sent me a letter when he was Vice President indicating how much he enjoyed the book. As a result of all this I was later a featured luncheon speaker at the 1976 GOP Presidential Convention in Kansas City where Ford was nominated to carry the GOP banner. He lost to Jim Carter that November. I previously had communication with Ford when he was a key leader in the House of Representatives after I published a book about Abe Fortas and why he should be forced to resign from the U.S.Supreme Court. Fortas later did so in 1969 as the scandal surrounding him intensified. With Agnew's departure, the office of Vice President had to be filled. I had told my closest political friends in Washington from the first day of Watergate that it was likely Nixon would be forced out of the presidency. It was always considered a possibility by many others and that is why the office had to be filled and why Agnew, who was too controversial, had to be forced to resign so that someone else could assume the mantle if Nixon, too, had to resign.

Thanks for posting this information. I was unaware Agnew had written a book and had always wondered what he thought about the hammer that came down on him before Nixon's fall. I remember Senator Goldwater openly being critical of how Agnew had been treated or I should say mistreated.

Author Phil Stanford is nearing completion of his lengthy research into the unique role played by Heidi Rikan in Watergate. Heidi was the madam who headed the prostitution ring that operated out of the Columbia Plaza Apartments near Watergate. There has always been an open question as to whether James McCord and the burglars were targeting through their wiretap operation the Democratic National Committee inside Watergate or the prostitution ring or both. Phil has a major scoop on his hands because he has obtained Heidi’s Black Book that contains the names of the clients of the prostitution ring, which include persons prominent in politics, business and the Watergate scandal. Involved are some key Nixon White House personnel and campaign officials. Because of the explosive nature of Heidi’s Black Book, Phil had provided copies to close and trusted friends in different parts of the country so that if some untoward event involving him were to occur before his work is published, the contents of the Black Book will then be made public. Phil’s work represents a major step towards understanding key dynamics behind the scandal that have never before been disclosed.

News Corporation directors could face charges for neglect of duties Lawyers for Rupert Murdoch's company have protested against criminal charges amid fears over broadcasting contracts By Nick Davies and David Leigh guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 31 July 2012 15.27 EDT Directors within Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation could face corporate charges and prosecution for neglect of their duties, in plans that are being examined by the Crown Prosecution Service. Company lawyers, fearing a dramatic escalation of the hacking scandal by criminalising the boards on which Murdoch family members sit, are understood to have protested to the authorities. A criminal prosecution could have a strong adverse impact on the deliberations by Ofcom as to whether News Corp representatives are "fit and proper" to hold UK broadcasting licences. Asked about representations that have been made to the police or the CPS about the unfairness of possible corporate charges, a News International spokesman said yesterday that Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers, who is leading the police inquiries into phone hacking, conceded the company culture had now changed: "She agreed that the current senior management and corporate approach at News International has been to assist and come clean." The company's protestations that it had turned over a new leaf appeared to receive some support from Lord Justice Leveson at his inquiry last week, when he brought up its past alleged obstruction of the police. Leveson said at the inquiry: "I received evidence of the response which the police received when they visited News International in 2006. "Would it be right for me to conclude at this stage that whatever might have happened in the past at News International titles, the senior management and corporate approach now has been to assist and come clean, from which I might be able to draw the inference that there is a change in culture, practice and approach?" Akers responded: "Yes, sir. I don't disagree with any of that." One problem for News International, however, is the wording of section 79 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, the hacking legislation under which eight senior News of the World journalists and executives have already been charged. It provides for the corporate prosecution of a company which commits such an offence, and also of any director whose neglect or connivance led to the crime. The most senior executive so far charged with offences, and the only News International board member, is Rebekah Brooks, the former chief executive, who denies separate allegations of an attempted cover-up of the hacking scandal, as well as denying the charges of involvement in hacking. She only joined the board in 2009 and resigned last year. Rupert Murdoch's son James joined the News International board in April 2008, and resigned last year. His father also recently resigned all his UK newspaper board positions. The only other senior Murdoch executive on the NI board throughout the period of the original hacking scandal was its previous chief executive, Les Hinton, who left the UK boards in 2007. He said later: "I was ignorant of what apparently happened." Hinton rejected heavy criticisms of him by a Commons committee investigating the phone hacking, which accused him of "selective amnesia" in his dealings with them. The report, published earlier this year, claimed he misled parliament and was "complicit" in a cover-up of the true extent of the hacking. The culture, media and sport committee also accused James Murdoch of willful blindness in failing to investigate the extent of phone hacking. Opposition MPs on the committee branded Rupert Murdoch as unfit to be in charge of a large media firm, although Tory members refused to support this. The CPS is not making any public statements. But the disclosure that it was advising the police on possible corporate criminal charges was made by Akers during her Leveson testimony, when she said that advice was being obtained "in respect of both individual and corporate offences". Despite subsequent speculation that this was a reference to possible action against the company by the US justice department, it is understood that the CPS is only looking at potential UK offences. News International said: "We are aware of the reference made by DAC Sue Akers in her evidence to the Leveson inquiry." ------------------------------------------- http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/07/31/uk-police-arrest-sun-journalist-in-stolen-cellphone-plot/

July 23, 2012 Hasty and Ruinous 1972 Pick Colors Today’s Hunt for a No. 2 By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN The New York Times WASHINGTON — Scott Lilly was a young member of Senator George McGovern’s presidential campaign staff in the summer of 1972, and he remembers the satisfaction he felt when Mr. McGovern chose Mr. Lilly’s home-state senator to be the Democratic Party’s vice-presidential candidate. But a few days after the convention that nominated Mr. McGovern and his running mate, Senator Thomas F. Eagleton of Missouri, Mr. Lilly said, he came to a realization. “It suddenly struck me out of the blue that they didn’t know,” he said, that the decision to pick Mr. Eagleton had been made without some crucial facts. And he was right. The information he had felt obligated to share with a top campaign aide several weeks before — that Mr. Eagleton had been hospitalized for mental health issues — had never been passed on. Mr. Lilly’s tip “did not register,” the aide, Frank Mankiewicz, said in an interview this year. “It was a very hectic time. I must have had not two things on my mind, but maybe 80.” Today, one of the lasting legacies of Mr. McGovern’s choice of Mr. Eagleton — and the tumult it caused in his campaign — is the microscopic examination of the lives and records of potential vice-presidential candidates, a ritual involving teams of lawyers and consultants and reams of medical and financial records that the candidates are obligated to produce. Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee, is now engaged in that vetting process. And while he is renowned for his love of data, as well as his caution, every presidential candidate since Mr. McGovern has had the same goal in the vice-presidential search: no surprises. In the case of Mr. Eagleton, a number of other people besides Mr. Lilly had some inkling of his history, even if they did not have definitive proof. They included a prominent member of Mr. Eagleton’s staff, many political figures and reporters in Missouri, reporters for Time magazine and probably officials in the Nixon White House. But Mr. McGovern, who had pledged to “avoid the messy way vice presidents had been picked in the past,” chose Mr. Eagleton after considering him for less than an hour. The conversation in which Mr. McGovern offered Mr. Eagleton the nomination lasted precisely 67 seconds, and there was no mention of Mr. Eagleton’s three hospitalizations for depression or the electroshock therapy during two of the stays. Eighteen days later, Mr. Eagleton was forced to resign from the ticket in a debacle that culminated with Mr. McGovern’s enduring one of the worst defeats in presidential history. Joel K. Goldstein, a St. Louis University law professor and an expert on the vice presidency, said that in 2012 “a candidate would never be asked to run without extensive prior scrutiny and private exchanges.” Yet in 2008, Senator John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin, a relatively unknown Alaska governor, as his running mate reinforced the inherent dangers of a selection process that mainly involves a presidential nominee and a small group of aides. Steve Schmidt, who was involved in Ms. Palin’s selection and later publicly admitted that he regretted it, said that while McCain campaign aides were certainly aware of the consequences of the way Mr. Eagleton was selected, there was still “a tremendous tension that exists in the vetting process between the desire for secrecy and the ability to gather the type of information that would give you a sense about how the person functions under pressure or stress, for example.” Over the years, Mr. McGovern, who turned 90 last week and has recently been ailing, has expressed regret that Mr. Eagleton, who died in 2007, when he was 77, was not more forthcoming about his health. “I wish, of course, that Senator Eagleton had discussed his health problem with me before I selected him,” Mr. McGovern said in an interview in 2005. “I think that would happen nowadays.” But Mr. McGovern also pointed out that it was a different time, when politicians felt it was unseemly to ask delicate questions about one another. “Almost no candidate for the vice presidency had ever been checked out before, with the exception of Lyndon Johnson, who checked out his colleague Hubert Humphrey very carefully,” Mr. McGovern said. Forty years later, in an era of continuous news delivered on Twitter and the Internet and amplified by cable television, the slow and painful unfolding of Mr. Eagleton’s history and the reluctant response to it by Mr. McGovern and his aides seem unimaginable. But the story of the “18-day running mate” — as Mr. Eagleton is called in a new history of the episode by Joshua M. Glasser — remains a cautionary tale for candidates and their staffs. For Mr. Eagleton, depression was an issue from the time he entered state politics. He was hospitalized for the first time in December 1960, less than a month after he was elected attorney general of Missouri. He was admitted to Barnes Hospital in St. Louis for what his father, Mark, a prominent lawyer, said was “a virus”; in reality, Mr. Eagleton received electroshock therapy. During his 1960 campaign, he also experienced an opposite extreme that involved a euphoric state of increased energy and activity known as hypomania. He said he lost 22 pounds and “became terrifically keyed up and terrifically exhausted.” After being elected lieutenant governor in 1964, Mr. Eagleton was again hospitalized for depression. Two years later, he was admitted a third time, and he again received electroshock therapy. In the late 1970s, Mr. Eagleton received a diagnosis of bipolar II disorder from Dr. Frederick K. Goodwin, a psychiatrist who later directed the National Institute of Mental Health. Dr. Goodwin surmised that the same problem had plagued Mr. Eagleton in the previous decade. As Mr. Eagleton worked his way up in Missouri politics and ultimately reached the Senate, he was careful not to disclose his medical history. From the first of his hospitalizations, news releases and euphemisms (like “undergoing tests”) were used to disguise the real reason for his stays. Over the years, rumors about Mr. Eagleton’s health surfaced quietly and subsided without much consequence. The information stayed within Missouri journalistic circles and among the Eagletons’ friends. “You would expect that if there was anything out there, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch would have it,” Gary Hart, Mr. McGovern’s campaign manager, who was later a senator and an unsuccessful candidate for president, said in an interview — an assumption that proved to be disastrous. Some of Mr. Eagleton’s friends noted his drinking in the 1960s, according to James N. Giglio’s biography of the senator, “Call Me Tom.” “He drank quite a bit,” said Mr. Lilly, who often socialized with Mr. Eagleton and who is now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington. “Sometimes he was funny, sometimes he was frightening, sometimes he created some stirs about that. How much of what was going on was alcohol and how much bipolar? My guess is the fundamental problem was bipolar.” While a small number of journalists, politicians and health workers heard rumors or knew that Mr. Eagleton suffered from depression and had a drinking problem, no one pursued the story because of a general reluctance to investigate the personal affairs of public figures. But at least one national news organization looked into the rumors. An editor at Time magazine heard about Mr. Eagleton’s mental health issues in 1966, but the magazine did not pursue the story until 1968, when one of its reporters, Jonathan Z. Larsen, visited Missouri to report on its Senate race. Mr. Larsen was unable to confirm the rumors about Mr. Eagleton’s drinking and electroshock treatment, but he said that “we put it on record only for future reference, when and if Tom Eagleton assumes a position of higher authority.” In July 1972, with Democrats gathered in Miami Beach for their convention and Mr. Eagleton being talked about as a possible choice for the ticket, Greg Wierzynski, then Time’s Chicago bureau chief, surprised an Eagleton campaign aide by asking about the electroshock rumors. The aide later delivered a denial. So did the senator’s brother, Mark, a doctor in St. Louis. Exhausted after a long underdog campaign battling the Democratic Party establishment, Mr. McGovern and his aides spent the early days of the convention fighting off a last-minute challenge to the winner-take-all rule that had given him all the California delegates. On July 13, 1972, with the nomination finally his, Mr. McGovern turned his attention to selecting his running mate. Until then, Mr. McGovern had focused on only one person, Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts. After a long courtship, Mr. Kennedy rejected the offer a final time, and Mr. McGovern then tried and failed to interest two of his closest friends in the Senate, Walter F. Mondale of Minnesota and Gaylord A. Nelson of Wisconsin, in the position. His aides focused on the mayor of Boston, Kevin H. White, and Mr. Eagleton. They immediately realized that they had little information about either one. Gordon Weil, Mr. McGovern’s Senate executive assistant, volunteered to check out both men. Mr. Weil had only an hour or so to inquire about a strong rumor that a journalist had passed on to a McGovern aide concerning Mr. Eagleton’s alcoholism or mental illness. Mr. Weil’s quick check turned up rumors that Mr. Eagleton drank, but not seriously, and no evidence of mental health problems. Mr. McGovern dismissed the reports on Mr. Eagleton, and he instead put more stock in his Senate colleagues’ recommendations. With a party-imposed deadline of that afternoon to pick his running mate, Mr. McGovern had to act quickly — and he did. He offered the nomination to a man with whom his longest meaningful conversation had lasted for 20 minutes, in the Senate steam room. “I’m flattered, and I will do whatever I can,” Mr. Eagleton told Mr. McGovern in their decisive 67-second conversation, “and I hope I don’t let you down.” Mr. McGovern then handed the phone to Mr. Mankiewicz, who asked Mr. Eagleton some questions but never explicitly raised the issue of his health. Mr. Eagleton, convinced that his mental health issues were behind him, later said he “took a calculated risk” in concealing his health information. During a celebration that went on well into the next morning, Mr. Weil ran into Douglas J. Bennet, Mr. Eagleton’s chief of staff, and asked him about the drinking and mental health rumors. Mr. Bennet denied the drinking problem but did describe his boss’s hospitalizations and his electroshock therapy. Mr. Weil said he “went straight upstairs after my conversation with Bennet, walked into a very crowded, noisy party and interrupted whatever discussion Gary Hart and Frank Mankiewicz were having” to tell them. They, in turn, went to Mr. McGovern, who said he assumed that the reports were the usual “kind of rumors that floated around.” Roberta Weil, Mr. Weil’s wife, said her husband returned to their hotel room and told her that Mr. Eagleton had been treated for depression. “I said, ‘That is not that bad,’ ” Mrs. Weil said. “And he said: ‘Yeah, but he has had shock treatment. It is all over.’ ” By that time, Clark Hoyt, a reporter for The Miami Herald who would later become the public editor of The New York Times, was in St. Louis doing research for an article about Mr. Eagleton and was puzzled by the gaps when Mr. Eagleton dropped out of the news. Mr. Hoyt’s interest shot up when his editors passed on a tip from a man who, identifying himself only as a McGovern supporter, called The Detroit Free-Press, part of the same chain as The Herald, on July 17, four days after Mr. Eagleton’s nomination. The caller had given the newspaper the name of a doctor knowledgeable about Mr. Eagleton’s case. When Mr. Hoyt went to the doctor’s home, she slammed the door in his face, and he knew the tip was correct. On July 23, Mr. Hoyt and a colleague, Robert Boyd, flew to South Dakota to confront Mr. Mankiewicz. He told them their evidence was circumstantial and urged them to wait on the story, never letting on that he, too, had learned about Mr. Eagleton’s depression. But he promised them an interview with Mr. Eagleton. Two days later, Mr. Eagleton and his wife, Barbara, also arrived in South Dakota. At breakfast with Mr. McGovern and his wife, Eleanor, Mr. Eagleton gave Mr. McGovern a full account of his illness for the first time, and they then held an impromptu news conference, depriving the journalists of their scoop. Mr. McGovern and his principal aides still did not realize that Mr. Eagleton’s health would be a major issue. But on July 27, with criticism mounting over his selection, Mr. McGovern began consulting psychiatric experts. One was Dr. Karl A. Menninger, who was blunt. Mr. McGovern asked what the psychiatrist would do if he were in the politician’s shoes. Dr. Menninger’s reply: “You have to ask him to step down.” While top aides and an increasing number of Democrats were urging Mr. McGovern to drop Mr. Eagleton, Mr. McGovern ordered his press secretary, Richard Dougherty, to issue a statement that he was “1,000 percent” behind Mr. Eagleton’s staying on the ticket — a phrase that would forever be associated with both men. As the pressure mounted, Mr. McGovern vacillated, initially using others to send signals to Mr. Eagleton to carry out the pledge he had made when he said he would resign if his presence on the ticket embarrassed Mr. McGovern. On July 30, they met again, this time in Washington. Mr. Eagleton resigned the next day, July 31, after Mr. McGovern agreed that he would say the reason was not Mr. Eagleton’s mental health, but the public debate over Mr. Eagleton’s past mental health, which was diverting attention from important issues. In his unpublished autobiography, Mr. Eagleton wrote that “electroshock was the political killer.” But, for a presidential campaign, the real killer might be something else: the unknown. Michael D. Shear contributed reporting. This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: Correction: July 26, 2012 An article on Tuesday about Senator George McGovern’s selection of Senator Thomas F. Eagleton as his running mate in 1972, and the lasting effect that decision has had on vice presidential selections, referred imprecisely to Mr. McGovern’s loss. While his defeat was the largest in a contested presidential race in terms of the margin of the popular vote, it was not the “worst defeat” ever in presidential history when judged by electoral votes — the standard most historians use. In 1936, Alf Landon carried Maine and Vermont and won eight electoral votes. In 1984, Walter Mondale won his home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia for 13 electoral votes. And Mr. McGovern won the 17 electoral votes of Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. Also, because of an editing error, an article on Tuesday about Senator George McGovern’s selection of Senator Thomas F. Eagleton as his running mate in 1972, and the lasting effect that has had on the selection of vice presidential candidates, misstated the date that Mr. Eagleton was forced to end his candidacy because of mental health issues. It was July 31, 1972 — not Aug. 1.

http://blog.seattlepi.com/movielady/2012/07/29/jfk-ii-secrets-never-keep-the-new-oliver-stone-sequel/

Excerpted from the review by Russell Baker titled “The Master of Hate” of the book, Enemies: A History of the FBI, by Tim Weiner published in the August 16, 2012 issue of The New York Review of Books: Is everyone aware, for example, that Mark Felt – Hoover’s chief lieutenant and the mysterious ‘Deep Throat” whose leaks Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein about the Watergate burglary helped bring down President Nixon – was working with a group of top FBI agents to engineer Nixon’s fall? And that, though the public did not learn “Deep Throat’s” identity for thirty-three years, it was known to Nixon within ten days after Felt’s first leak appeared in The Washington Post? While Felt was leaking to the press about the president’s Watergate involvement, someone else, perhaps another FBI agent, was leaking to the White House about Felt’s leaking to the press. Such was life in the world of top secrecy. According to their oral histories, a group of senior FBI agents decided to get involved partly because, when Hoover died, Nixon chose L. Patrick Gray instead of Mark Felt to succeed him. They saw Gray as a clueless political stooge whose appointment meaned the bureau. “It hurt all of us deeply,” one of the mutinous agents recalled in an oral history. “Felt was the one that would have been the Director’s first pick. But the Director died. And Mark Felt should have moved up right there and then. And that’s what got him into the act. He was going to find out what was going on in there. And, boy, he really did.”

Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks to be charged over phone hacking PM's former aide and ex-News International chief will face charges in connection with hacking of Milly Dowler's phone By Vikram Dodd guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 24 July 2012 09.40 EDT British prosecutors say they have the evidence to prove there was a criminal conspiracy at Rupert Murdoch's News of the World newspaper involving former senior executives, including Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks, to hack the phones of more than 600 people including the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler. Announcing the charging of eight people over the phone-hacking scandal on Tuesday, prosecutors alleged the tabloid's targets ranged from a victim of the 7 July 2005 terrorist attacks to celebrities and senior Labour politicians. Coulson left the editorship of the News of the World in 2007 after a journalist and private investigator were convicted of phone hacking, and would go on to be appointed as director of communications for the Conservative party. After the 2010 election Coulson worked in Downing Street for David Cameron, who said he deserved a "second chance", as one of the prime minister's most senior advisers, before Coulson resigned as renewed controversy over phone hacking grew. Prosecutors say other victims of hacking include former senior Labour cabinet ministers such as the former deputy prime minister John Prescott, two former home secretaries, David Blunkett and Charles Clarke, and the former culture secretary Tessa Jowell. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said it would charge Coulson and the former News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks in relation to the hacking of Milly Dowler's phone. The allegations about the hacking of the murdered schoolgirl's phone led Murdoch to decide to shut down the News of the World in 2011. Also charged over phone hacking are Stuart Kuttner, former managing editor of the News of the World, Ian Edmondson, former news editor, Greg Miskiw, another former news editor, Neville Thurlbeck, former chief reporter, James Weatherup, former assistant news editor, and the private investigator Glenn Mulcaire. Alison Levitt QC, principal legal adviser to the director of public prosecutions, announced the decision on Tuesday. She said the charges related to allegations of phone hacking from 3 October 2000 to August 2006. The CPS alleges that more than 600 people were victims. Levitt said: "All, with the exception of Glenn Mulcaire, will be charged with conspiring to intercept communications without lawful authority, from 3 October 2000 to 9 August 2006. The communications in question are the voicemail messages of well-known people and/or those associated with them. There is a schedule containing the names of over 600 people who the prosecution will say are the victims of this offence." The CPS said victims included Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, the celebrity chef Delia Smith, the actors Jude Law, Sadie Frost, Sienna Miller, Wayne Rooney, Sir Paul McCartney and his former wife Heather Mills, Sven-Goran Eriksson, the former England manager, and the former trade union leader Andrew Gilchrist. Another alleged victim is Prof John Tulloch, who was left bloody and burnt after the worst ever terrorist attacks on the UK mainland in July 2005, targeting London's transport system. Levitt said police would contact those who the CPS says were victims, and then publish their names. Brooks faces two additional charges over conspiracy to hack Gilchrist's voicemails. She is also accused over the Dowler voicemails, along with Coulson, Kuttner, Miskiw, Thurlbeck and Mulcaire. Coulson also faces additional charges relating to Blunkett and Clarke's voicemails, as well as those of Calum Best. Miskiw faces nine further charges, the CPS said. Edmondson faces a further 11 charges, Thurlbeck seven, and Weatherup seven. Mulcaire is charged over the voicemails of four people: Milly Dowler, Gilchrist, Smith and Clarke. To bring charges, the CPS must be satisfied that prosecution is in the public interest, and that there is a realistic prospect of a jury being convinced of the evidence beyond all reasonable doubt. Levitt said she had also considered CPS interim guidelines on the prosecution of journalists, which says that if stories being pursued are in the public interest, that is a factor against charging. Brooks, a friend of the prime minister to such an extent that they texted each other, issued a statement denying all the charges against her. She is a former editor of the News of the World, and of the Sun, after which she was selected to run Murdoch's UK publishing interests. She said: "I am not guilty of these charges. I did not authorise, nor was I aware of, phone hacking under my editorship. I am distressed and angry that the CPS have reached this decision when they knew all the facts and were in a position to stop the case at this stage. The charge concerning Milly Dowler is particularly upsetting, not only as it is untrue but also because I have spent my journalistic career campaigning for victims of crime. I will vigorously defend these allegations." Coulson said he never had done anything to harm the Milly Dowler investigation and would "fight these allegations". "The idea I would sit in my office dreaming up schemes that would undermine investigations is simply untrue," he said. Thurlbeck also denied the charges. "I will vigorously fight to clear my reputation," he said. The Labour leader, Ed Miliband, said: "Everybody was very shocked at the revelations of the hacking of Milly Dowler's phone. We said at the time we needed to get to the bottom of what had happened. It is now right that justice takes its course. This is now a matter for the courts." In the years following the 2007 conviction of one of its journalists for phone hacking the royal household, News International insisted the practice was limited to one rogue reporter. The charging decisions follow a Scotland Yard investigation that began last year, after police had repeatedly said for over a year that there was no need to reopen the investigation. In July 2009, the Guardian began running a series of articles that claimed phone hacking was more widespread than previously admitted. On Monday, police said they believed there were 4,775 potential victims of phone hacking, of whom 2,615 had been notified. The Metropolitan police deputy assistant commissioner Sue Akers told the Leveson inquiry her force had notified more than 702 people who were "likely" to have been victims. The CPS has received files from the Met's Operation Weeting team covering 13 individuals, including 11 journalists from the News of the World and Mulcaire. The CPS said three of the 13 would not face charges, and added they had not made a decision on two people at the request of the police, who want to make further inquiries. The previous phone-hacking investigation has been criticised as being insufficiently thorough. The Met says it launched Operation Weeting after receiving "significant new information" from News International on 26 January last year. A total of 24 people including 15 current and former journalists have been arrested as part of the operation. Police have also detained 41 people under Operation Elveden, an investigation into alleged corrupt payments made to police officers and other public officials. Seven people have been arrested as part of Operation Tuleta, investigating the scale of computer hacking and other breaches of privacy. The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) is a complex piece of legislation and there has been doubt in legal circles about when exactly an offence of phone hacking may be said to have been committed. Prosecutors looking at the evidence gathered by the new police phone-hacking investigation have been working on the basis of a "broad interpretation" of Ripa, the director of public prosecutions, Keir Starmer, told the Guardian earlier this month. This would mean it was not absolutely necessary – for the purposes of bringing a criminal prosecution – for a voicemail message to have been unheard by its intended recipient before it was allegedly hacked into. Coulson has already been charged in Scotland over alleged perjury, while Brooks has already been charged in England with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. ------------------------- http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/jul/24/phone-hacking-charges

Murdoch Inquiry Extends to Cellphone Theft By RAVI SOMAIYA The New York Tims July 23, 2012 LONDON — The phone hacking investigation in Britain, which began with Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid newspapers, has broadened to include allegations that information was obtained from stolen cellphones, significant payoffs were made to public officials, and “medical, banking and other personal records” were illegally accessed, the senior police officer in charge of the operations told a judicial inquiry Monday. The officer, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers of Scotland Yard, gave the most detailed assessment yet of the three investigations prompted by allegations in 2009 that The News of the World tabloid had illegally intercepted voice mail messages on an industrial scale. The newspaper was closed last summer under the weight of public outrage. But detectives have fresh details on a swath of related illegal activities, Ms. Akers told the panel headed by Lord Justice Sir Brian Leveson. The police are aware of information that Mr. Murdoch’s papers obtained from two stolen cellphones, she said. One was in Manchester, in northern England, and the other in southwest London. She said that it seemed that one of thee phones had “been examined with a view to breaking its security code,” in order to gain access to its contents. The authorities are trying to establish whether the thefts were isolated incidents, or "the tip of the iceberg," she said. Officers are examining 101 allegations of data interception, she said. That investigation, called Tuleta, has yielded seven arrests. Another inquiry, into bribes paid to public officials, has led to 41 arrests -- including 23 current and former journalists, four police officers, nine current and former public officials and others who were conduits for the bribes. One prison official is accused of having received nearly $55,000 from Mr. Murdoch’s newspapers and from the rival Trinity Mirror and Express newspaper groups from April 2010 to June 2011. The initial investigation into phone hacking, Operation Weeting, led to the arrest of 15 current and former journalists, 11 of whom will return to police stations on Tuesday as part of their bail conditions. The police have notified 2,615 people that they may have been targets of the voice mail interceptions. Of these, 702 "are likely to have been victims," she said. Six people, including Rebekah Brooks, the former chief executive of Mr. Murdoch’s British newspaper group, News International, and her husband, Charlie Brooks, a horse trainer, have been charged in that investigation and will appear in court in September. The Brookses were friends of Prime Minister David Cameron.

Rupert Murdoch steps down from NI boards Rupert Murdoch's grip on UK newspapers is loosening "finger by finger", as he resigns string of directorships. By Katherine Rushton, Media, telecoms and technology editor 7:00PM BST 21 Jul 2012 The Telegraph Rupert Murdoch has resigned as a director of a string of companies behind The Sun, The Times and The Sunday Times, fuelling expectations that he is preparing to sell the newspaper group. Companies House filings show that Mr Murdoch stepped down from the boards of the NI Group, Times Newspaper Holdings and News Corp Investments in the UK last week. He also quit a number of News Corp’s US boards, the details of which have yet to be disclosed by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. News Corporation played down the significance of the resignations as “nothing more than a corporate housecleaning exercise prior to the company split”. The media giant took a similar line when James Murdoch resigned a string of directorships at News International last November, pouring cold water on suggestions that he was walking away from the UK newspaper arm. He quit as chairman three months later. News Corporation has already said it will split into two separately listed companies, distancing its embattled newspaper and book publishing interests from its rapidly growing film and television operations, which account for nearly 90pc of News Corp’s $4.2bn (£2.7bn) annual revenues. Mr Murdoch has repeatedly insisted that he remains committed to the UK newspaper business. He vowed at the time of the announcement to remain a “very active chairman” of the publishing business. But his surprise resignation of directorships on both sides of the Atlantic has raised expectations that he is gearing up to sever all ties with the company. Splitting News Corp would also put some much-needed distance between its film and television assets and the newspaper business, whose reputation is threatening the whole News Corp empire. Claire Enders at Enders Analysis said Mr Murdoch’s resignations were part of the “slow fade of Rupert and James from the UK” that began last year and will be “complete and permanent”. “The grip of the Murdochs, finger by finger, has been loosened and it’s not in order to return triumphantly. It’s a permanent shift. “James and Rupert have decided that they are not welcome in the UK, and they’re right. there is an enforced emotional withdrawal from these assets because they are no longer useful [in terms of influence]," she said. Sources close to News Corp say that its executives have discussed the possibility that, after the split, the Murdochs could sell down their stake in the publishing division altogether and use the equity to help fund a leveraged buyout of the film and entertainment division. It is unclear whether the business still plans to pursue this course of action, but doing so would allow Mr Murdoch to shake off shareholder pressures and revive a long-held plan eventually to appoint his son James Murdoch as his successor. However, some analysts claim that News Corp investors want the Murdochs to buy the publishing assets outright.

http://www.garynorth.com Inner Rings: Benefits and Costs By Gary North Remnant Review (July 21, 2012) Of all the passions, the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things. -- C. S. Lewis I regard C. S. Lewis's essay, "The Inner Ring," as one of the most important short essays ever written. He delivered the speech at King's College, University of London, in 1944. He delivered this speech to undergraduates. He understood that these young men were likely to be in positions of leadership when they reached middle-age. He understood also that they would be placed under a specific form of temptation at some point in their careers, and perhaps even before he delivered his speech. This form of temptation is the desire to be in the know. He believed that it is a universal desire, and that it begins in an unobtrusive manner. It does not seem to be a threat to an individual's ethics, but he made it clear in his presentation that it is extremely dangerous ethically. He went so far as to say that the desire to be a member of the inner ring is the most effective way that evildoers can persuade normal people to do very evil things. We know about the desire to be part of an inner ring from a very early age. Children start clubs for the purpose of starting clubs. They want to distinguish themselves from all those others who are outside the club. The desire to be inside rather than outside is an almost universal desire. Lewis pointed out that certain kinds of organizations must have an inner core of high-performance people. There are people who do certain kinds of work, or have certain kinds of skills, which are not shared by large numbers of people. When a person is involved in an activity which, by the very nature of the activity, excludes the broad mass of humanity, the person who possesses the skill to participate should not hesitate to participate. The distinction between those inside the group and those outside the group is not based on the structure of the organization, but rather on the varying skills that people possess in life. The essence of the inner ring, he said, is the desire to create exclusivity. As he put it, "your genuine Inner Ring exists for exclusion." He was arguing that any organization that exists strictly for the desire to exclude others is inherently immoral, and it leads to immoral behavior. An individual would be wise, beginning at an early age, to avoid becoming a member of any organization whose fundamental goal in life is to exclude others. This is the oath-bound brotherhood. This is also the unofficial group of insiders who believe that they are truly in the know. When an individual is approached by someone he believes to be a member of an inner ring, and this individual seems to be inviting him into the inner ring, the person being approached should be extremely wary. The reason he should be wary, Lewis argued, is this: at some point, the person making the offer, or someone in the inner ring, will ask the newcomer to do something that is not quite right. Whatever it is that he is being asked to do is preliminary to other similar requests. As the requests get more and more deviant from the standards of society outside the inner ring, the individual is left increasingly defenseless. He finds it very difficult to say no. Lewis warned that the ultimate result of this is the transformation of an otherwise honest person into a scoundrel. The scoundrel may be highly successful, or he may go to prison, but he is in either case a scoundrel. A scoundrel is someone who does something that he knows to be immoral, irrespective of the negative effects on both his life and others. The scoundrel is not to be trusted by members of the general community. Why not? Because he does not share their values. He wants only to be trusted by others who participate in the inner ring. But the reality is this: because he is not to be trusted, he will be tempted to do things that he would have known or immoral prior to his membership in the inner ring. TWO HIERARCHIES He began his speech by discussing what he called two different systems or hierarchies. One hierarchy is official. It may be printed somewhere. He gave a good example: generals outrank colonels. This is a hierarchy that everybody recognizes as being a hierarchy. It has certain tasks, and there are rules and regulations regarding the implementation of programs and the imposition of sanctions. What is not always clear at the beginning is the fact that there is a second hierarchy. This hierarchy is unofficial. There is probably no rulebook. People are brought into it, and they may be excluded from it, for reasons that are not clear to the people who are brought in or excluded. They recognize that there is the secondary hierarchy, and this hierarchy seems to have authority that is greater than that possessed by high individuals in the official hierarchy. In other words, the secondary hierarchy, which is unofficial, is in fact more powerful or more influential than the visible hierarchy, which is governed by handbooks or customs that are available to people outside the hierarchy. Anyone who is interested in the history of conspiracies is alert to the existence of the double hierarchy. But, as Lewis warned, gaining entrance into the invisible hierarchy is always problematic. Some people think they are in, when in fact they have been excluded. He describes it as an onion. You keep peeling off external layers, and eventually nothing is left. At every stage, the individual may believe that he has reached the inner ring. But the system is such so that no one can be sure where the inner ring ends. There is an element of mystery about the secondary hierarchy. It is mysterious, primarily because people are never quite sure where they are in the hierarchy. People are always off-balance. They think they are in, but they are not sure that they are really in. They think that they have advanced up the chain of command, or what is the same thing, toward the central inner ring. But they are never quite sure. This creates an element of mystery, but it also creates an element of confusion. A person never knows exactly where he stands. It is in an environment like this that conventional people can be lured into doing exceedingly evil acts. It is this disruption of one's sense of place that is important to the control exercised by members of the inner ring. In Lewis's book, That Hideous Strength (1946), which is the third novel in the Perlandra trilogy, he has an important scene in which he conveys this sense of disorientation. As part of an initiatory procedure, an individual is placed inside a small room that has been deliberately built in order to confuse the person who is inside. Its angles are slightly off. He is disoriented. This disorientation is basic to breaking down his will to resist. In that book, the targeted person is being lured by means of a false promise to enter the inner ring. The inner ring is a true conspiracy. The conspiracy is not interested in him; it is interested in his wife. They are using him to get at her. His wife is also part of an inner circle. This circle is ethically based. It does not exist for the sake of exclusion. But there is an element of secrecy in it, because at least some of the members are aware of the fact that an evil conspiracy wants to destroy the group. Members of this rival conspiracy -- which means "breathing together" -- see themselves as being under assault. They need secrecy in order to continue to operate, but this secrecy is a byproduct of their task. They are seeking to overturn the plans of the conspiracy, but they are organizationally much weaker than the conspiracy. This is Lewis's point about Christianity in general. He sees the Satanic conspiracy as much more self-conscious in its conspiratorial plans than the church ever is. In his great book, The Screwtape Letters, he has a senior demon teach his nephew about ways to delude, confuse, and entrap a particular person who is on the fringes of the church, but who for most of his life has remained out of it. That was pretty much a description of Lewis himself. The senior demon has all kinds of tricks to use that will keep the targeted victim from ever becoming self-conscious about what he is doing, ethically speaking and ecclesiastically speaking. The very nature of the inner ring weakens an individual's resistance to doing acts of evil. Yet it can also be said, and is said in That Hideous Strength, that members of a closed group of righteous people are also able to do things that they otherwise would not have done. The magnitude of the task calls forth extraordinary efforts that we would otherwise say are beyond the call of duty. Evil men are encouraged to do evil things, and righteous man are encouraged to do righteous things. Participation in a closed group strengthens the willingness to do extraordinary things, whether righteous or unrighteous. He does not make this equally clear in this essay. It is much clearer in That Hideous Strength. MY EXPERIENCE One of the advantages that I have had for a long time is that I have had no particular desire to be in anybody else's inner ring. I have operated as a loner long enough, so that I am not dependent psychologically on being a member of a special insiders' group. I can't think of any special insiders' group that I would want to join. I do not remember any time in my life when I wanted to join in inner ring, although this may just be a weakening of my memory. If there were various inner rings in the junior high school I attended, I must have been unaware of them. Also, I have never been convinced that participation in an inner ring would advance my career in a way that I could not advance it myself, on my own authority, by means of whatever skills I have as an individual. In other words, when I looked at various inner rings, I asked myself the classic question: "What's in it for me?" I never could find anything in the various inner rings that was of any particular advantage to me. I was involved in campus politics from my senior year in high school through the first semester of my junior year in college. During that four-year period, I wanted to get elected. I was not trying to join an inner ring. I was testing myself. It was a contest to win, not a way to be invited into any inner ring. There were rules for getting into office, and if you met these rules, which meant getting more votes than your opponent, you got in. There was not much there. The victory was more important than the fruits of victory, which were few. Toward the end of my first semester of my junior year in college, I came to the conclusion that getting elected to something was not going to get me anything of value. I decided it was not worth my time. I have not changed my mind over the last 50 years. I am not a political person. It is possible that I might have become one, but not after my change of mind in the first semester of my junior year in college. THE INKLINGS Lewis was a member of an organization called the Inklings. These were skilled writers, mostly of fiction, but also of nonfiction, who got together on a regular basis and read stories to each other. I would have been bored out of my mind by that organization. Yet it included J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of Lord of the Rings. It was obviously a high-powered crew from the point of view of literary skills. Lewis describes this kind of organization in his essay. The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it. But if you break it, a surprising result will follow. If in your working hours you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself all unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters. You will be one of the sound craftsmen, and other sound craftsmen will know it. This group of craftsmen will by no means coincide with the Inner Ring or the Important People or the People in the Know. It will not shape that professional policy or work up that professional influence which fights for the profession as a whole against the public: nor will it lead to those periodic scandals and crises which the Inner Ring produces. But it will do those things which that profession exists to do and will in the long run be responsible for all the respect which that profession in fact enjoys and which the speeches and advertisements cannot maintain. And if in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like, you will again find that you have come unawares to a real inside: that you are indeed snug and safe at the centre of something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring. But the difference is that the secrecy is accidental, and its exclusiveness a by-product, and no one was led thither by the lure of the esoteric: for it is only four or five people who like one another meeting to do things that they like. This is friendship. Aristotle placed it among the virtues. It causes perhaps half of all the happiness in the world, and no Inner Ring can ever have it. One of the members of the inklings was Lewis's older brother, Warnie. He took notes of the meetings. He did not write stories. What he did write, which is rarely mentioned in accounts of the Inklings, were some of the greatest books on Louis XIV that have ever been written. They are readable, and they are very good academically. His most famous book, The Splended Century, was assigned in upper division classes in early modern history at the university I attended. In other words, this was a high-powered book. Yet all he did in the meetings was to take notes, as far as books on the group indicate. He was a man of intellectual capacity at least as great as the other members of the group, at least in the specialized field of late-17th-century French history. He wrote seven books on this. He enjoyed being in the group, but it is not clear that members of the group had a full appreciation of the talent he possessed for writing history. They were literary figures; he was a first-rate historian. It is clear that he was not a member of the group as somebody who expected something special out of the group in relation to his career. The group was not able to provide it. Lewis warned the listeners against this desire to become part of an inner ring. My main purpose in this address is simply to convince you that this desire is one of the great permanent mainsprings of human action. It is one of the factors which go to make up the world as we know it--this whole pell-mell of struggle, competition, confusion, graft, disappointment and advertisement, and if it is one of the permanent mainsprings then you may be quite sure of this. Unless you take measures to prevent it, this desire is going to be one of the chief motives of your life, from the first day on which you enter your profession until the day when you are too old to care. That will be the natural thing--the life that will come to you of its own accord. Any other kind of life, if you lead it, will be the result of conscious and continuous effort. If you do nothing about it, if you drift with the stream, you will in fact be an "inner ringer." I don't say you'll be a successful one; that's as may be. But whether by pining and moping outside Rings that you can never enter, or by passing triumphantly further and further in--one way or the other you will be that kind of man. I have already made it fairly clear that I think it better for you not to be that kind of man. FROM MERITOCRACY TO INNER RING Christopher Hayes, a very bright man in his early 30s, has written a piece on the new elite of test-passers. These people get into the best universities. They are very smart, They operate as an inner ring in many cases. But their judgment is flawed. His article is here: http://www.thenation.com/article/168265/why-elites-fail?page=full He sees what Lewis saw: these inner rings are dangerous, for they are inherently immoral. The people in them have substituted money or power for ethics. They have been corrupted. And just as one would suspect, given the fractal nature of inequality at the top, hovering above those who work at big Wall Street firms is an entire world of hedge-fund hotshots, who see themselves as far smarter than the grunts on Wall Street. "There's 100 percent no question that most people on Wall Street, even if they have nice credentials, are generally developmentally disabled," a hedge-fund analyst I'll call Eli told me, only somewhat jokingly, one night over dinner. Hedge funds, according to Eli and his colleagues, are the real deal; the innermost of inner rings. "I was surrounded my whole life by people who took intelligence very seriously," Eli told me. "I went to good schools, I worked at places surrounded by smart people. And until now I've never been at a place that prides itself on having the smartest people and where it's actually true." That confidence, of course, projects outward, and from it emanates the authority that the financial sector as a whole enjoyed (and in certain circles still enjoys). "At the end of the day," Eli says with a laugh, "America does what Wall Street tells it to do. And whether that's because Wall Street knows best, whether Wall Street is intelligently self-dealing, or whether it has no idea and talks out of its ass, that is the culture in America." This is the Cult of Smartness at its most pernicious: listen to Wall Street--they've got the smartest minds on the planet. The British have a phrase for this: "Too smart by half." In the years leading up to World War I, the Roundtable group had lots of these people. They had lots of influence. Within half a century, they had run the British Empire into the ground. The hot shots on Wall Street did not read Mises's Theory of Money and Credit (1912). In 1963, I did. In late 2006, I knew the economy was headed into a recession in 2007. I said so in print. I am not smarter than all those people. I was merely better read. I had read Mises, who did not trust the state or the central banks. He described how government and fiat money misinform very smart entrepreneurs. CONCLUSION The hierarchy we have today will be replaced. It relies on the state too much. The state is going bankrupt. Trusting in it will lead to a disastrous crash. The elites are self-replicating, as always. They are therefore vulnerable to the effects of their own inbred social systems. They listen only to each other. That is a path to destruction. Elites are always replaced. They grow overconfident. They believe in their invincibility. Then they overplay their hand.

http://lewrockwell.com/orig10/marshall16.1.html

Who Really Runs the World? Conspiracies, Hidden Agendas and the Plan for World Government by Andrew Gavin Marshall www.lewrockwell.com July 21, 2012 http://lewrockwell.com/orig10/marshall16.1.htmmlml So, who runs the world? It’s a question that people have struggled with since people began to struggle. It’s certainly a question with many interpretations, and incites answers of many varied perspectives. Often, it is relegated to the realm of “conspiracy theory,” in that, those who discuss this question or propose answers to it, are purveyors of a conspiratorial view of the world. However, it is my intention to discard the labels, which seek to disprove a position without actually proving anything to the contrary. One of these labels – “conspiracy theorist” – does just that: it’s very application to a particular perspective or viewpoint has the intention of “disproving without proof;” all that is needed is to simply apply the label. What I intend to do is analyse the social structure of the transnational ruling class, the international elite, who together run the world. This is not a conspiratorial opinion piece, but is an examination of the socially constructed elite class of people; what is the nature of power, how does it get used, and who holds it? A Historical Understanding of Power In answering the question “Who Runs the World?” we must understand what positions within society hold the most power, and thus, the answer becomes clear. If we simply understand this as heads of state, the answer will be flawed and inaccurate. We must examine the globe as a whole, and the power structures of the global political economy. The greatest position of power within the global capitalist system lies in the authority of money-creation: the central banking system. The central banking system, originating in 1694 in England, consists of an international network of central banks that are privately owned by wealthy shareholders and are granted governmental authority to print and issue a nation’s currency, and set interest rates, collecting revenue and making profit through the interest charged. Central banks give loans to both governments and industries, controlling both simultaneously. The ultimate centre of power in the central banking system is at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), in Basle, Switzerland; which is the central bank to the world’s central banks, and is also a private bank owned by the world’s central banks. As Georgetown University history professor Carroll Quigley wrote: [T]he powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations.1 The central banks, and thus the central banking system as a whole, is a privately owned system in which the major shareholders are powerful international banking houses. These international banking houses emerged in tandem with the evolution of the central banking system. The central banking system first emerged in London, and expanded across Europe with time. With that expansion, the European banking houses also rose and expanded across the continent. The French Revolution resulted with Napoleon coming to power, who granted the French bankers a central bank of France, which they privately controlled.2 It was also out of the French Revolution that one of the major banking houses of the world emerged, the Rothschilds. Emerging out of a European Jewish ghetto, the Rothschilds quickly rose to the forefront in banking, and established banking houses in London, Paris, Frankfurt, Vienna and Naples, allowing them to profit off of all sides in the Napoleonic wars.3 As Carroll Quigley wrote in his monumental Tragedy and Hope, “The merchant bankers of London had already at hand in 1810-1850 the Stock Exchange, the Bank of England, and the London money market,” and that: In time they brought into their financial network the provincial banking centres, organised as commercial banks and savings banks, as well as insurance companies, to form all of these into a single financial system on an international scale which manipulated the quantity and flow of money so that they were able to influence, if not control, governments on one side and industries on the other.4 At the same time, in the United States, we saw the emergence of a powerful group of bankers and industrialists, such as the Morgans, Astors, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, and Carnegies, and they created massive industrial monopolies and oligopolies throughout the 19th century.5 These banking interests were very close to and allied with the powerful European banking houses. The European, and particularly the British elites of the time, were beginning to organise their power in an effort to properly exert their influence internationally. At this time, European empires were engaging in the Scramble for Africa, in which nearly the entire continent of Africa, save Ethiopia, was colonised and carved up by European nations. One notable imperialist was Cecil Rhodes who made his fortune from diamond and gold mining in Africa with financial support from the Rothschilds,6 and “at that time [had] the biggest concentration of financial capital in the world.”7 Cecil Rhodes was also known for his radical views regarding America, particularly in that he would “talk with total seriousness of ‘the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire’.”8 Rhodes saw himself not simply as a moneymaker, but primarily as an “empire builder.” As Carroll Quigley explained, in 1891 three British elites met with the intent to create a secret society. The three men were Cecil Rhodes, William T. Stead, a prominent journalist of the day, and Reginald Baliol Brett, a “friend and confidant of Queen Victoria, and later to be the most influential adviser of King Edward VII and King George V.” Within this secret society, “real power was to be exercised by the leader, and a ‘Junta of Three.’ The leader was to be Rhodes, and the Junta was to be Stead, Brett, and Alfred Milner.”9 The purpose of this secret society, which was later headed by Alfred Milner, was: “The extension of British rule throughout the world, the perfecting of a system of emigration from the United Kingdom and of colonisation by British subjects of all lands wherein the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labour, and enterprise… [with] the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of a British Empire.” [Emphasis added]10 Essentially, it outlined a British-led cosmopolitical world order, one global system of governance under British hegemony. Among key players within this group were the Rothschilds and other banking interests.11 After the 1907 banking panic in the US, instigated by JP Morgan, pressure was placed upon the American political establishment to create a “stable” banking system. In 1910, a secret meeting of financiers was held on Jekyll Island, where they planned for the “creation of a National Reserve Association with fifteen major regions, controlled by a board of commercial bankers but empowered by the federal government to act like a central bank – creating money and lending reserves to private banks.”12 It was largely Paul M. Warburg, a Wall Street investment banker, who “had come up with a design for a single central bank [in 1910]. He called it the United Reserve Bank. From this and his later service on the first Federal Reserve Board, Warburg has, with some justice, been called the father of the System.”13 President Woodrow Wilson followed the plan almost exactly as outlined by the Wall Street financiers, and added to it the creation of a Federal Reserve Board in Washington, which the President would appoint.14 Thus, true power in the world order was held by international banking houses, which privately owned the global central banking system, allowing them to control the credit of nations, and finance and control governments and industry. However, though the economic system was firmly in their control, allowing them to establish influence over finance, they needed to shape elite ideology accordingly. In effect, what was required was to socially construct a ruling class, internationally, which would serve their interests. To do this, these bankers set out to undertake a project of establishing think tanks to organise elites from politics, economics, academia, media, and the military into a generally cohesive and controllable ideology. Constructing a Ruling Class: Rise of the Think Tanks During World War I, a group of American scholars were tasked with briefing “Woodrow Wilson about options for the postwar world once the Kaiser and imperial Germany fell to defeat.” This group was called, “The Inquiry.” The group advised Wilson mostly through his trusted aide, Col. Edward M. House, who was Wilson’s “unofficial envoy to Europe during the period between the outbreak of World War I in 1914 and the intervention by the United States in 1917,” and was the prime driving force in the Wilson administration behind the establishment of the Federal Reserve System.15 “The Inquiry” laid the foundations for the creation of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the most powerful think tank in the US and, “The scholars of the Inquiry helped draw the borders of post World War I central Europe.” On May 30, 1919, a group of scholars and diplomats from Britain and the US met at the Hotel Majestic, where they “proposed a permanent Anglo-American Institute of International Affairs, with one branch in London, the other in New York.” When the scholars returned from Paris, they were met with open arms by New York lawyers and financiers, and together they formed the Council on Foreign Relations in 1921. The “British diplomats returning from Paris had made great headway in founding their Royal Institute of International Affairs.” The Anglo-American Institute envisioned in Paris, with two branches and combined membership was not feasible, so both the British and American branches retained national membership, however, they would cooperate closely with one another.16 They were referred to, and still are, as “Sister Institutes.”17 The Milner Group, the secret society formed by Cecil Rhodes, “dominated the British delegation to the Peace Conference of 1919; it had a great deal to do with the formation and management of the League of Nations and of the system of mandates; it founded the Royal Institute of International Affairs in 1919 and still controls it.”18 There were other groups founded in many countries representing the same interests of the secret Milner Group, and they came to be known as the Round Table Groups, preeminent among them were the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), the Council on Foreign Relations in the United States, and parallel groups were set up in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and India.19 These were, in effect, the first international think tanks, which remain today, and are in their respective nations, among the top, if not the most prominent think tanks. In 2008, a major study was done by the University of Philadelphia’s International Relations Program – the Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program – which sought to analyse and examine the most powerful and influential think tanks in the world. While it is a useful resource to understanding the influence of think tanks, there is a flaw in its analysis. It failed to take into account the international origins of the Round Table Group think tanks, particularly the Council on Foreign Relations in the United States; Chatham House or the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London; the Canadian Institute of International Affairs, now renamed the Canadian International Council; and their respective sister organisations in India, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia. Further nations have since added to this group of related think tanks, including Germany, and a recently established European Council on Foreign Relations. The report, while putting focus on the international nature of think tanks, analysed these ones as separate institutions without being related or affiliated. This has, in effect, skewed the results of the study. However, it is still useful to examine. The top think tanks in the United States include the Council on Foreign Relations, (which was put at number 2, however, should be placed at the number 1 spot), the Brookings Institution, (which was inaccurately given the position of number one), the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, RAND Corporation, Heritage Foundation, Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the American Enterprise Institute, among others. The top think tanks in the world, outside of the United States, are Chatham House (sitting at number one), the International Institute for Strategic Studies in the UK, the German Council on Foreign Relations, the French Institute of International Relations, the Adam Smith Institute in the UK, the Fraser Institute in Canada, the European Council on Foreign Relations, the International Crisis Group in Belgium, and the Canadian Institute of International Affairs.20 In 1954, the Bilderberg Group was founded in the Netherlands. Every year since then the group holds a secretive meeting, drawing roughly 130 of the political-financial-military-academic-media elites from North America and Western Europe as “an informal network of influential people who could consult each other privately and confidentially.”21 Regular participants include the CEOs or Chairmen of some of the largest corporations in the world, oil companies such as Royal Dutch Shell, British Petroleum, and Total SA, as well as various European monarchs, international bankers such as David Rockefeller, major politicians, presidents, prime ministers, and central bankers of the world.22 The Bilderberg Group acts as a “secretive global think-tank,” with an original intent “to link governments and economies in Europe and North America amid the Cold War.”23 In 1970, David Rockefeller became Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, while also being Chairman and CEO of Chase Manhattan. In 1970, an academic who joined the Council on Foreign Relations in 1965 wrote a book called Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era. The author, Zbigniew Brzezinski, called for the formation of “A Community of the Developed Nations,” consisting of Western Europe, the United States and Japan. Brzezinski wrote about how “the traditional sovereignty of nation states is becoming increasingly unglued as transnational forces such as multinational corporations, banks, and international organisations play a larger and larger role in shaping global politics.” So, in 1972, David Rockefeller and Brzezinski “presented the idea of a trilateral grouping at the annual Bilderberg meeting.” In July of 1972, seventeen powerful people met at David Rockefeller’s estate in New York to plan for the creation of another grouping. Also at the meeting was Brzezinski, McGeorge Bundy, the President of the Ford Foundation, (brother of William Bundy, editor of Foreign Affairs) and Bayless Manning, President of the Council on Foreign Relations.24 In 1973, these people formed the Trilateral Commission, which acted as a sister organisation to Bilderberg, linking the elites of Western Europe, North America, and Japan into a transnational ruling class. These think tanks have effectively socially constructed an ideologically cohesive ruling class in each nation and fostered the expansion of international ideological alignment among national elites, allowing for the development of a transnational ruling class sharing a dominant ideology. These same interests, controlled by the international banking houses, had to socially construct society itself. To do this, they created a massive network of tax-exempt foundations and non-profit organisations, which shaped civil society according to their designs. Among the most prominent of these are the Carnegie Corporation, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. The “Foundations” of Civil Society These foundations shaped civil society by financing research projects and initiatives into major social projects, creating both a dominant world-view for the elite classes, as well as managing the other classes. These foundations, since their establishment, played a large part in the funding and organising of the eugenics movement, which helped facilitate this racist, elitist ideology to having enormous growth and influence, ultimately culminating in the Nazi Holocaust. From then, the word “eugenics” had to be dropped from the ideology and philanthropy of elites, and was replaced with new forms of eugenics policies and concepts. Among them, genetics, population control and environmentalism. These foundations also funded seemingly progressive and alternative media sources in an effort to control the opposition, and manage the resistance to their world order, essentially making it ineffective and misguided. The Rockefeller Foundation was established in 1912, and immediately began giving money to eugenics research organisations.25 Eugenics was a pseudo-scientific and social science movement that emerged in the late 19th century, and gained significant traction in the first half of the 20th century. One of the founding ideologues of eugenics, Sir Francis Galton, an anthropologist and cousin to Charles Darwin, wrote that eugenics “is the study of all agencies under social control which can improve or impair the racial quality of future generations.”26 Ultimately, it was about the “sound” breeding of people and maintaining “purity” and “superiority” of the blood. It was an inherently racist ideology, which saw all non-white racial categories of people as inherently and naturally inferior, and sought to ground these racist theories in “science.” The vast wealth and fortunes of the major industrialists and bankers in the United States flowed heavily into the eugenics organisations, promoting and expanding this racist and elitist ideology. Money from the Harriman railroad fortune, with millions given by the Rockefeller and Carnegie family fortunes were subsequently “devoted to sterilisation of several hundred thousands of American ‘defectives’ annually, as a matter of eugenics.”27 In the United States, 27 states passed eugenics based sterilisation laws of the “unfit,” which ultimately led to the sterilisation of over 60,000 people. Throughout the 1920s and 30s, the Carnegie and especially the Rockefeller Foundation, funded eugenics research in Germany, directly financing the Nazi scientists who perpetrated some of the greatest crimes of the Holocaust.28 Following the Holocaust, the word “eugenics” was highly discredited. Thus, these elites who wanted to continue with the implementation of their racist and elitist ideology desperately needed a new name for it. In 1939, the Eugenics Records Office became known as the Genetics Record Office.29 However, tens of thousands of Americans continued to be sterilised throughout the 40s, 50s and 60s, the majority of which were women.30 Edwin Black analysed how the pseudoscience of eugenics transformed into what we know as the science of genetics. In a 1943 edition of Eugenical News, an article titled “Eugenics After the War,” cited Charles Davenport, a major founder of eugenics, in his vision of “a new mankind of biological castes with master races in control and slave races serving them.”31 A 1946 article in Eugenical News stated that, “Population, genetics, [and] psychology, are the three sciences to which the eugenicist must look for the factual material on which to build an acceptable philosophy of eugenics and to develop and defend practical eugenics proposals.” As Black explained, “the incremental effort to transform eugenics into human genetics forged an entire worldwide infrastructure,” with the founding of the Institute for Human Genetics in Copenhagen in 1938, led by Tage Kemp, a Rockefeller Foundation eugenicist, and was financed with money from the Rockefeller Foundation.32 Today, much of civil society and major social projects are a product of these foundations, and align with various new forms of eugenics. The areas of population control and environmentalism are closely aligned and span a broad range of intellectual avenues. The major population control organisations emerged with funding from these various foundations, particularly the Rockefeller foundations and philanthropies. These organisations, such as the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, funded major civil society movements, such as the Civil Rights movement, in an effort to “create a wedge between social movement activists and their unpaid grassroots constituents, thereby facilitating professionalisation and institutionalisation within the movement,” ultimately facilitating a “narrowing and taming of the potential for broad dissent,” with an aim of limiting goals to “ameliorative rather than radical change.”33 Two major organisations in the development of the environmental movement were the Conservation Foundation and Resources for the Future, which were founded and funded with money from the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, and helped “launch an explicitly pro-corporate approach to resource conservation.”34 Even the World Wildlife Fund was founded in the early 1960s by the former president of the British Eugenics Society, and its first President was Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, a founding member of the Bilderberg Group. While the environmental movement positions people as the major problem for the earth, relating humanity to a cancer, population control becomes a significant factor in proposing environmental solutions. In May of 2009, a secret meeting of billionaire philanthropists took place in which they sought to coordinate how to “address” the world’s environmental, social, and industrial threats. Each billionaire at the meeting was given 15 minutes to discuss their “preferred” cause, and then they deliberated to create an “umbrella” cause to harness all their interests. The end result was that the umbrella cause for which the billionaires would aim to “give to” was population control, which “would be tackled as a potentially disastrous environmental, social and industrial threat.” Among those present at the meeting were David Rockefeller, Jr., George Soros, Warren Buffet, Michael Bloomberg, Ted Turner, Bill Gates, and even Oprah Winfrey.35 Conclusion At the top of the list of those who run the world, we have the major international banking houses, which control the global central banking system. From there, these dynastic banking families created an international network of think tanks, which socialised the ruling elites of each nation and the international community as a whole, into a cohesive transnational elite class. The foundations they established helped shape civil society both nationally and internationally, playing a major part in the funding – and thus coordinating and co-opting – of major social-political movements. An excellent example of one member of the top of the hierarchy of the global elite is David Rockefeller, patriarch of the Rockefeller family. Long serving as Chairman and CEO of Chase Manhattan bank, he revolutionised the notion of building a truly global bank. He was also Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, a founding member of Bilderberg and the Trilateral Commission, heavily involved in the family philanthropies, and sits atop a vast number of boards and foundations. Even Alan Greenspan, in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, said that David Rockefeller and the CFR have, “in many respects, formulated the foreign policy of this country.”36 In another speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, then World Bank President James Wolfesohn, said in 2005, in honour of David Rockefeller’s 90th birthday, that, “the person who had perhaps the greatest influence on my life professionally in this country, and I’m very happy to say personally there afterwards, is David Rockefeller.” He then said, “In fact, it’s fair to say that there has been no other single family influence greater than the Rockefeller’s in the whole issue of globalisation and in the whole issue of addressing the questions which, in some ways, are still before us today. And for that David, we’re deeply grateful to you and for your own contribution in carrying these forward in the way that you did.”37 David Rockefeller, himself, wrote, “For more than a century ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicised incidents such as my encounter with Castro to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterising my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure – one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”38 Footnotes 1. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time, New York: Macmillan Company, 1966, 324 2. Carroll Quigley, op.cit., 515; Robert Elgie and Helen Thompson, ed., The Politics of Central Banks, New York: Routledge, 1998, 97-98 3. Sylvia Nasar, ‘Masters of the Universe’, The New York Times: January 23, 2000; ‘The Family That Bankrolled Europe’, BBC News: July 9, 1999. 4. Carroll Quigley, op.cit., 51 5. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, Harper Perennial: New York, 2003, 323 6. Carroll Quigley, op.cit., 130 7. Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, New York: Basic Books, 2004, 186 8. Ibid, 190 9. Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, GSG & Associates, 1981, 3 10. Ibid, 33 11. Ibid, 34 12. William Greider, Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987, 276 13. John Kenneth Galbraith, Money: Whence it Came, Where it Went, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1975, 121-122 14. William Greider, op.cit., 277 15. H.W. Brands, ‘He Is My Independent Self’, The Washington Post: June 11, 2006. 16. CFR, ‘Continuing the Inquiry. History of CFR’. 17. Chatham House, ‘CHATHAM HOUSE (The Royal Institute of International Affairs): Background’, Chatham House History. 18. Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, op.cit., 5 19. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, op.cit., 132-133 20. James G. McGann, Ph.D., The Global “Go-To Think Tanks”: The Leading Public Policy Research Organizations In The World, The Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program: University of Pennsylvania, International Relations Program, 2008, 26-28 21. CBC, ‘Informal forum or global conspiracy?’, CBC News Online: June 13, 2006. 22. Holly Sklar, ed., Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management, South End Press: 1980, 161-171 23. Glen McGregor, ‘Secretive power brokers meeting coming to Ottawa?’, Ottawa Citizen: May 24, 2006 24. Holly Sklar, ed., op.cit., 76-78 25. Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, New York: Thunders’s Mouth Press, 2004, 93 26. Ibid, 18 27. Ibid, 101-102 28. Edwin Black, ‘Eugenics and the Nazis – the California connection’, The San Francisco Chronicle: November 9, 2003 29. Edwin Black, War Against the Weak, op.cit., 396 30. Ibid, 398 31. Ibid, 416 32. Ibid, 418 33. Michael Barker, The Liberal Foundations of Environmentalism: Revisiting the Rockefeller-Ford Connection, Capitalism Nature Socialism: 19, (2), June 2008, 18 34. Ibid, 19-20 35. John Harlow, ‘Billionaire club in bid to curb overpopulation’, Times Online: May 24, 2009 36. CFR, Remarks at the Council on Foreign Relations Annual Corporate Conference, Transcripts: March 10, 2005. 37. CFR, Council on Foreign Relations Special Symposium in honor of David Rockefeller’s 90th Birthday, Transcript: May 23, 2005. 38. David Rockefeller, Memoirs, New York: Random House: 2002, 405 Reprinted with permission from New Dawn Magazine. July 21, 2012 Andrew Gavin Marshall is an independent researcher and writer based in Montreal, Canada, writing on a number of social, political, economic, and historical issues. He is also Project Manager of The People’s Book Project. Visit his website.

Rodney: Many thanks for posting this video/recording of the interview with Waldron. For the past three weeks I have unable to listen to coasttocoast on the local major radio station because for some reason there is tremendous static. So I missed listening to Waldron being interviewed live Tuesday night. I found the information that he imparted in the interview to be fascinating.He has advanced the knowledge of what happened in Watergate and the JFK assassination immeasurably but, in my opinion, there are still major issues and questions that need to resolved, and I really do mean major.

http://www.coasttocoastam.com/show/2012/07/17

http://www.coasttocoastam.com/show/2012/07/17

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