Rival Empires,
New Deal,
War and Peace Studies,
War,
End of Pax Britannica,
A-Bomb

excerpted from the book

Gods of Money

Wall Street and the Death of the American Century

by F. William Engdahl

edition.engdahl, 2009, paperback

p82
The [J.P.] Morgan faction owed much of its enormous power within the United States since the 1870s to its intimate links with leading London financial groups, above all, the House of Rothschild. Morgan therefore favored a strategy of alliance, a form of 'special relationship' between a weakened City of London and the emerging power of Wall Street, as the preferred path to an ultimate American Century. J.P. Morgan's ties with the City of London and the British Treasury were so strong, in fact, that his bank remained the British Government's official financial agents in the United States from the 1870s until September 1931, when England left the Gold Standard.

... All major Wall Street factions agreed that their future lay in extending highly profitable credits to Europe, Latin America, Japan and the rest of the world, areas that had been the province of City of London bankers for the better part of a century. Those loans, and especially Wall Street underwriting of bonds to the world, earned the New York bankers the very attractive foreign interest rates of 5% and even as high as 8%. The bonds or credits were to be secured by national governments, which had agreed to 'stabilize' their postwar currencies by linking them to a new, US-led Gold Standard. The system of stabilization was a crude, ad hoc version of what the New York banks would later institutionalize in the International Monetary Fund and World Bank as the heart of the post-World War II dollar-based system. -

p84
After 1914 ... US monetary policy and capital flows in the critical years up to 1929-1931 were, in effect, guided by the needs of Wall Street in its drive to displace London as the world's banker

... From 1920-1929, the banks centered in New York channeled the wealth created by American industry and agriculture, via Wall Street, into foreign credit markets.

... One consequence of the destructive European War of 1914-1918 had been the unprecedented transfer of Europe's gold reserves out of Europe's central banks and into the vaults of the Federal Reserve, as debt-strapped European belligerents, from England to France to Italy and beyond, were forced to pay for American manufactured war supplies in gold.

By the time the Treaty of Versailles was signed, the United States had become the possessor of the vast bulk of the world's monetary gold, a 400% increase in US gold reserves since the prewar period. Until the 1914 outbreak of war, gold had been the basis of the international monetary system, a system that had been centered in the City of London since the Napoleonic Wars.

By 1920, however, the United States Federal Reserve had accumulated 40% of the world's monetary gold reserves. It had garnered the gold by being able to pay the world's highest price for monetary gold at a time Britain and Continental Europe were burdened with America's severe war reparations and war debt repayment obligations pursuant to Versailles.

p86
Montagu Norman, the arch conservative governor of the Bank of England throughout the 1920s ... supported the aims of finance capitalism "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.

p86
Carroll Quigley in his book 'Tragedy and Hope'

[The global economic] 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 ... In each country the power of the central bank rested largely on its control of credit and money supply. In the world as a whole the power of the central bankers rested very largely on their control of loans and of gold flows.

p90
In 1919 the strongest economic power was clearly no longer the British Empire, but rather, the United States which had emerged from the war in a most powerful position - as the creditor to all major European countries. America's gold stocks had multiplied fourfold during the war, giving it the world's largest monetary gold reserves. The process continued up until the great stock market crash of 1929.16 Britain, by contrast, had massive foreign debts, mostly to the United States. Its currency had sharply depreciated, and its reserves of gold had fallen dangerously low.

The role of gold was a decisive factor in determining which power served as financial center of the world. In 1919 the United States had resumed pegging the dollar to gold, having suspended it for two years when America entered the war in 1917. Unlike Britain, America had no problem to return to the gold standard because of its enormous, accumulated reserves. The United States had the decisive position in creation of a new postwar gold standard, both because of its reserves and its new role in the world's gold market.

p114
The entire edifice of the Roaring '20's consumer credit binge, the new practice of "buying on the installment plan," came crashing down... Instead of injecting liquidity into the domestic economy to stave off the growing economic contraction, the New York Fed ... withdrew liquidity from the economy in a vain attempt to hold onto the Gold Exchange Standard, raising Federal Reserve discount rates in the process from 1% to 3% in October, 1931, a staggering differential.

That desperate attempt by Wall Street and the New York Federal Reserve to salvage their gold standard and with it, their dreams of an American financial empire, resulted in the destruction of both... The higher rates of the Federal Reserve pushed the US economy deep into depression and deflation.

It was not because of economic orthodoxy that it held on to the fixed gold standard so long. It was because the powerful forces directing Wall Street, the Money Trust, were determined not to sacrifice their goal of a US-controlled global money power through the Gold Exchange Standard that J. P. Morgan & Co., Benjamin Strong, Dillon, Read, Edwin Kemmerer and the leading financial elites of the United States had built on the ashes of World War One. They had few qualms about plunging the economy of the United States into the most severe depression in American history in their ultimately vain bid to grasp global financial power from England.

In contrast to developments in the United States, after 1931 British Sterling floated free of ties to gold, and a devaluation of some 40% boosted British exports and mitigated the effects of world collapse. In rapid succession, other European countries left the gold standard, except for France. The United States, meanwhile, clung to the deflationary gold parity until April 1933.

The conjuncture of these crises led to an increased role of the Federal government in American economic life. It took the form of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, when the first Democratic President since World War I was inaugurated on March 4, 1933. Most of FDR's recovery programs were in reality the continuation or implementation of many of the infrastructure projects that had been initiated under the hapless Hoover.

From the full onset of the Great Depression in 1931 through the peak of war) spending in 1944, US government debt rose from 29% of GDP to over 130% of GDP. Simultaneously, the share of public spending in the overall national economy rose from 12% in 1931 to over 45% by 1944.

Benjamin Strong's grand project for making New York and Wall Street the bankers to Europe and to the world had fundamentally distorted the structures of the global financial system and of global trade and economic development, leading to their eventual, inevitable collapse.

It would take six years of domestic economic depression, corporate restructuring and preparation for a new great war in Europe to reverse the setback to Wall Street's bid to displace the British Empire as the world's dominant power. It required knocking out the revitalized German Reich as a future rival to American hegemony once and for all.

The process would be called World War II. In reality it was a continuation of the unresolved geopolitical issues of World War I, a titanic and tragic battle between two powers-Germany and the United States-to become successor to ( the falling British Empire as world hegemonic power. At least that was how leading elites in the US establishment saw it.

... There could be no doubt, however, that the United States Money Trust did have the idea and intention of creating a global imperium, an informal empire of finance secured by the world's most powerful military. To realize that goal they needed a new World War.

The Federal Reserve was to play a decisive role here as well. The first bid by the powerful New York Banks, backed by their private Federal Reserve of New York, had proved a catastrophic failure that plunged the United States into the worst financial crisis in its history, with chain-reaction bank failures and years of depression. Within less than a decade, Wall Street and the powerful families behind it were ready to make their second and victorious bid for global power.

p119
Between the October 1929 stock market crash and the end of 1932, just three months prior to the inauguration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in March 1933, America's national wealth had evaporated on a scale never before imagined. National income or GDP fell from some $88 billion to less than half that, or $42 billion, by the end of 1932. Amid the turmoil of the 1929-1933 New York stock market meltdown, and Federal Government debt. Banks became, in effect, government bond traders rather than commercial business lenders... The stock market was not to recover its highs of 1929 for almost four decades.

p119
The longer-term consequence of the Roosevelt era policies was a dramatic shift away from the power of international private banking, especially investment banking as done by J.P. Morgan, Kuhn Loeb, Dillon Read and other

p121
In June 1933 the US Congress passed the Glass-Steagall Act, officially named the Banking Act of 1933. As a measure intended to curtail future stock and financial speculation bubbles, the new act prohibited a bank holding company from owning other financial companies, including insurance and investment banks. In addition, it established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation for insuring bank deposits.

... The Glass-Steagall Act, passed amid the national bank panic in the first days of Roosevelt's administration, dealt a devastating blow to the once almighty House of Morgan, a blow from which it never fully recovered. The Rockefeller faction emerged on the ashes of the House of Morgan to dominate US establishment policy as no other.

p122
Two days after his inauguration as President on March 6, 1933, Roosevelt decreed a four-day national banking holiday. The main aim was to prevent anyone from hoarding or exporting gold or silver. Every bank in the United States was shut down. Neither deposits nor withdrawals were possible.

... Within three days Congress had passed the Emergency Banking Act that validated the President's actions and gave him near carte blanche powers to go further.

... On April 5, 1933 Roosevelt signed an Executive Order declaring it illegal for American citizens to hold or own gold coins, bullion or gold certificates. Violation was punishable by a $10,000 fine or ten years in prison, making owning of gold a felony.

The Federal Government thus had confiscated its own citizens' gold. As gold was universally regarded as the ultimate store of value for a currency or for repayment of debts, it was a massive, forced confiscation by the State of the private wealth of its citizens in return for mere paper promises to pay... By confiscating civilian gold holdings the US Government not only restocked its gold vaults at the expense of its citizens, it also cut off any chance citizens could resort to gold for a personal long-term store of value in the middle of the nation's worst economic depression.

p124
Bernard Baruch [was] one of the most politically influential of the Wall Street Money Trust. Baruch was a financier, a political "contributor" of Wall Street money to influence Congress, and an adviser to Presidents from Wilson to Hoover to Roosevelt and even a British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill.

... Throughout the Republican presidencies of the 1920's, [Bernard] Baruch had built up his influence, mainly by making large financial contributions to influential Congressional Democrats. He was a power broker without rival in that day, widely known to control the votes of at least 60 Senators and Representatives in Congress, through his money and influence.

...[Bernard] Baruch ... had gained a fortune in the stock market by selling all his stocks at peak prices some weeks before the October 1929 crash... He didn't say that his close friend, Winston Churchill, had done the same on Baruch's advice. Both Baruch and Churchill, curiously managed to get out at the stock market peak, just before the Bank of England triggered the events leading to the London market crash in September 1929. Suspicions in certain quarters held that Churchill and Baruch both benefited from their respective insider positions.

... Baruch held an unequalled position of power and influence over Washington economic policy during those critical first few years of the depression.

... Baruch's unique influence blocked any genuine Democratic alternative to the disastrous Hoover laissez faire policy in those critical months. That lack of initiatives or solutions from the Democrats in the 1930s was not unlike the deafening silence of Congressional Democrats more than eight decades later during the 2008 Congressional debate over an unprecedented $700 billion Republican bailout bill for Wall Street.

p130
Shortly after his reelection to a second term in 1937, [Franklin] Roosevelt, notorious for lack of understanding of economics, accepted the opinion of his Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau that the depression was ending, and that the greatest danger was potential inflation from too much government spending.

As a consequence, FDR slashed Federal spending and dramatically reduced the budgets of New Deal agencies such as the Works Progress Administration.

The Federal Reserve duly tightened the money supply, slamming the brakes on consumer spending. The stock market underwent its most severe drop in US history as two million Americans were thrown out of work. The press called it "Roosevelt's Depression."

131
Rockefeller's Wall Street interests, Bernard Baruch, and a powerful circle of big business leaders [in the 1930s] were determined to reorganize the US economy along the centralized corporatist model of Mussolini's fascist Italy.

p132
Contrary to carefully planted propaganda in the media portraying FDR as the "hero of the little man" who was ready to "chase the moneylenders from the temple," Roosevelt was the scion of a wealthy East Coast family, a distant relative of Teddy Roosevelt, and every bit The Man of Wall Street-especially of Baruch, Rockefeller and their group.

p132
In May 1933, during his first weeks in office, FDR proposed to Congress the creation of a National Recovery Administration (NRA). It passed with a minimum of debate amid the depression crisis. Its first head was Hugh S Johnson associate of and advisor to Bernard Baruch.

The concept of the NRA was largely drawn from the national military emergency mobilization of industry that Baruch and Johnson had administered during the First World War. Ever since then, Big Business and Wall Street had been salivating over the possibility of getting such power over the economy into their hands once again. The Great Depression would be their cancer. Johnson would be their man. Within Roosevelt's Administration, Johnson was open about the fact that he saw Mussolini's Italian Fascist corporatism - the merger of government and corporate power to the one-sided gain of business - as a model for America.

p133
In 1930 as most banks were struggling to survive, Rockefeller's Chase National Bank was thriving... Chase Bank's most significant acquisition during the first months of the financial crisis in 1930 was the Equitable Trust Company of New York, the largest stockholder of which was John D. Rockefeller Jr. This made the Chase Bank the largest bank in America and indeed the world .

As a result of their dominant position following the decline of the House of Morgan during the depression, the Rockefeller group, in addition to controlling Chase Bank and First City Bank of New York, controlled the largest US oil companies.

... The Rockefeller group also consolidated a commanding control over the major chemical and defense-related industries.

p136
[John D.] Rockefeller's principal business adviser, Frederick T. Gates, suggested that he organize his wealth into a tax-exempt foundation after 1913, using tax-free funds, to extend the power and influence of the family.

... The Rockefeller Foundation was incorporated in New York State in 1913, under the direction of Gates, whom Rockefeller called the greatest businessman he ever encountered. Gates would focus the new foundation's activities on programs that would dramatically leverage Rockefeller wealth, but above all, the family's political and social power.

Under this mantle of philanthropy, the Rockefeller Foundation would reshape the map of the entire world, beginning in the late 1930s. The programs and mechanisms through which it operated were phenomenally important and little understood, as they were extremely well disguised.

In 1939, with a major funding grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, the New York Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) began what would be a series of long-term studies in collaboration with the US State Department.

The top secret project [was] called the War & Peace Studies.

... Between November 1939 and late 1942, the Rockefeller Foundation had contributed no less than $350,000 to finance a plan for post-war American economic hegemony via the War & Peace Studies Group was an investment that, like most 'philanthropic' investments made by the Rockefellers, would be ( repaid thousands of times over in later years) It defined the post-war American f business empire globally. Their American Century was very much a Rockefeller empire though most Americans were blissfully ignorant of the fact.

p139
Unlike the British Empire, which was based on military conquest and direct possession of colonies, their American vision of global domination was based on financial conquest and economic possession. It was a brilliant refinement, one which allowed US corporate giants to veil their interests behind the flag of 'democracy and political rights' for 'oppressed colonial peoples,' support of 'free enterprise' and 'open markets.

p139
a confidential memo from the Council on Foreign Relations War & Peace Studies group to the US State Department in 1941

If war [WWII] aims are stated which seem to be solely concerned with Anglo-American imperialism, they will offer little to people in the rest of the world. The interests of other peoples should be stressed. This would have a better propaganda effect.

p139
The interests represented in the Council on Foreign Relations [War & Peace Studies] ... reflected the interests of the elite handful of American banks and industrial corporations that had developed global interests. The businessmen and their law firms represented in the Council on Foreign Relations were a breed apart from the rest of Americans, an oligarchy to themselves, an aristocracy of power and money.

p139
Council on Foreign Relations - War & Peace Studies Security Sub-Committee minutes

[Realizing it was doubtful that] the British Empire as it existed in the past will ever reappear and .... the United States may have to take its place...," the US "must cultivate a mental view toward world settlement after this war which will enable us to impose our own terms, amounting .... to Pax Americana.

p143
Council on Foreign Relations War & Peace Studies Group memorandum E-B19 (1941)

The foremost requirement of the United States in a world in which it proposes to hold unquestionable power is the rapid fulfillment of a program of complete re-armament... to secure the limitation of any exercise of sovereignty by foreign nations that constitutes a threat to the minimum world area essential for the security and economic prosperity of the United States.

p143
Council on Foreign Relations War & Peace Studies Group would present themselves as the selfless advocates of freedom for colonial peoples and as the enemy of imperialism. They would champion world peace, but through multinational control.

... The American domination of the world after 1945 would be accomplished via a new organization, the United Nations Organization... It would include the new Bretton Woods institutions of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, and later, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).

p143
Under the banner of 'free trade' and the opening of closed markets around the world, US big business would advance their agenda, forcing open new untapped markets for cheap raw materials as well as new outlets for selling American manufactured goods after the war [WWII].

p144
The Rockefeller group within the American power establishment, along with numerous related corporate heads from Henry Ford to the DuPonts, had long been attracted to the European models of Mussolini's corporatist Fascism and even German Nazism.

... There was a larger geopolitical motive to their fascist sympathies before the war. They, like their cousins in the British Round Table circles, desired a larger war, a war between their two formidable potential Eurasian rivals for hegemony: Russia and Germany. They wanted a war in which both great powers, Stalin's Soviet Union and Hitler's Third Reich would, as one British insider put it, "bleed each other to death.

... Their motivation had everything to do with the building of their American Century on the ashes of Europe, which would require decimating both Germany and the Soviet Union.

p144
In 1941, at the onset of the US entry into the war, Standard Oil of New Jersey, later renamed Exxon, was the largest oil company in the world. It controlled 84% of the US petroleum market. Its bank was Chase Bank, and its controlling ownership was held by the Rockefeller family and their tax-free foundations.

p144
In 1941, at the onset of the US entry into the war, Standard Oil of New Jersey, later renamed Exxon, was the largest oil company in the world. It controlled 84% of the US petroleum market. Its bank was Chase Bank, and its controlling ownership was held by the Rockefeller family and their tax-free foundations. After the Rockefellers, the next largest stockholder in Standard Oil was LG. Farben, the enormous petrochemicals trust of Germany, which at the time was a vital part of the German war industry.

p145
While Nelson Rockefeller was ostensibly combating Nazi economic interests in Latin America as head of the US Government's CIAA (Coordinator of InterAmerican Affairs), the Rockefeller family's Standard Oil, through its Chairman Walter C. Teagle, and President William S. Farish, was arranging to ship vital tetraethyl lead gasoline to the German Luftwaffe. Standard Oil's Teagle, Henry Ford and Royal Dutch Shell's Sir Henry Deterding were all openly pro-Third Reich before the war [WWII].

... The Rockefeller clan was not alone in secret financial and industrial dealings with the Third Reich. They worked with other leaders of the US power through most notably the DuPont chemicals family and the Bush family through Prescott Bush, father of President George Herbert Walker Bush and grandfather of President George W. Bush.

p148
Rockefeller's Standard Oil had handed over to the Third Reich the secret of synthetic rubber manufacture, its superior acetylene process and its method for producing synthetic gasoline. The gasoline processes kept the Luftwaffe in the air for two and a half years and enabled Hitler to keep his gigantic motorized army in motion.

p148
The Round Table group of Lord Milner had been the catalyst for the propaganda drive to go to a war against Germany before 1914.

By the late 1930s, the Round Table that propagandized for a war against the German Reich, also beat the drums for accepting a German remilitarization of the Rhineland. Using their house organ, the London Times, and their own magazine, The Round Table, the same group called for non-intervention into the Spanish Civil War when Germany backed Franco's forces with arms and logistical support.

p149
If the British Round table elites, as well as Hitler, had miscalculated their relative power equations, the emerging power circles around the Rockefeller brothers and their War & Peace Studies group at the Council on Foreign Relations did not. They clearly saw that if England were to emerge in any way intact and the "victory" in the war, then the emerging US hegemony would be blocked perhaps for decades or longer. That was clearly something they wanted to avoid. They also knew that Germany, too, must be eliminated as a postwar contender for hegemony.

One way to do so was to insure that Germany was able to prosecute the war with enough fuel, at least at the beginning. It was not a matter of corporate profit for the Standard Oil group or for Rockefeller banking interests. It was about balance of power calculations and the American establishment's own understanding of the lessons of geopolitics.

... For Germany and Russia to be "played" against each other in a destructive war of attrition, the Germany Luftwaffe and tank corps would at least have to be assured of adequate fuel.

p151
[A] major player in the Rockefeller and Wall Street backing for the Third Reich sand a future war against the Soviet Unioivas Prescott Bush, father of President George Herbert Walker Bush, and father of George Walker Bush. All three were members of Yale University's secret society, Skull & Bones.

The Bush family had collaborated intimately with the powerful Rockefeller group for decades before World War II. Both families made their money in oil and in war industries.

George H. Walker and Samuel Prescott, Bush, the grandfathers of George Herbert Walker Bush, were the dynasty's founders during and after World War I.

Walker, a St. Louis financier, made a fortune in war contracts. In 1919, he was hired by railroad heir W. Averell Harriman to be president of the Wall Street-based W.A. Harriman Co. which invested in oil, shipping, aviation and manganese, partly in Russia and Germany, during the 1920s.

Samuel Bush ran an Ohio weapons manufacturing company, Buckeye Steel Castings. In 1917, Samuel Bush was appointed head of the ammunition, small arms and ordnance section of the federal War Industries Board of Bernard Baruch. Both George Walker and Sam Bush were deeply invested in the creation of what became the US military-industrial complex.

Prescott Bush made his fortune as director of companies involved in US war production throughout World War II. One Bush company, Dresser Industries of Texas, produced the incendiary bombs dropped on Tokyo and made gaseous diffusion pumps for the atomic bomb project. At the same time, his companies were strategically engaged in secretly arming and financing the Third Reich through German steel magnate, Fritz Thyssen.

The Bush family, in addition to long-standing ties with the influential Harriman banking and railroad fortune, enjoyed intimate links to the Rockefellers and their control of the US oil industry.

Bush family ties to John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil went back 100 years, when Rockefeller had made Sam Bush's Buckeye Steel Castings fabulously successful by convincing railroads that carried their oil to buy heavy equipment from Buckeye Steel. George H. Walker helped rebuild the Soviet oil industry in the 1920s, and Prescott Bush acquired experience in the international oil business as a director of Dresser Industries in Texas, a part of the Harriman family banking holdings and a company with intimate ties to the Rockefeller oil interests. Dresser later became part of Halliburton Corporation, the firm made infamous through Dick Cheney.

In 1931, as a consequence of the reorganization of power on Wall Street after the 1929 stock crash, the investment bank, W.A. Harriman & Co. merged with the British-American investment house, Brown Brothers, to create the investment bank, Brown Bros. Harriman. The senior partners were Averell Harriman and his brother, and Prescott Bush and Thatcher H. Brown. The London branch operated as Brown, Shipley, the bank where Montagu Norman had been a senior partner before heading the Bank of England. 36

During the 1920s Harriman had become banker in New York for German steel magnate Fritz Thyssen. In 1934, a year into the Third Reich, Prescott Bush, senior partner at Brown Bros., Harriman, was also a director of the German Steel Trust's Union Banking Corporation. In 1926, Wall Street investment banker Clarence Dillon, a close friend of Prescott Bush, had created the German Steel Trust on behalf of Thyssen, and held two seats on the board of the new steel trust.

The Union Banking Corporation, located at W.A. Harriman & Co and interlocked with Thyssen-owned Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart (BHS) in the Netherlands, was set up as a unit of W.A. Harriman & Co. BHS was used as the vehicle to move money back and forth across the Atlantic between the United States and Thyssen enterprises in Germany. Meanwhile, Prescott Bush and Avereil Harriman, at Brown Bros. Harriman, were the managers for Thyssen's financial operations outside Germany.

In 1942, the US Government's Alien Property Custodian Leo T. Crowley signed Vesting Order Number 248, seizing the property of Prescott Bush under the Trading with the Enemy Act. The order was published in obscure government record books and kept out of the news. It explained only that the Union Banking Corporation was run for the "Thyssen family of Germany and/or Hungary ...nationals ... of a designated enemy country. "38

After the war, US Congressional investigators probed the Thyssen companies, Union Banking Corp. and related Nazi enterprises. They reported that Thyssen's huge German steelworks, Vereinigte Stahiwerke, had produced the following shares of total German national output during the Third Reich: 50.8% of pig iron; 41.4% of universal plate; 36.0% of heavy plate; 38.5% of Nazi Germany's galvanized sheet; 45.5% of pipes and tubes; 22.1% of wire; 35.0% of explosives. 11 Their role in producing Hitler's war armaments was enormous.

The deep involvement of the Rockefeller, Harriman and Bush families in providing vital strategic and financial support to Hitler's war buildup was(in the final analysis)an integral part of an even more ambitious agenda. Their aim was not to back a victorious Germany, but to create the global war out of which an American Century, more accurately, a Rockefeller Century, would emerge after 1945.

Bush, Rockefeller, Harriman, DuPont and Dillon were all instrumental in providing critical support to the Third Reich in its early years as part of their grand geopolitical game plan -- to bring the great European powers, especially Germany and Russia, to ruin by 'bleeding each other to death,' thereby opening the door to the hegemony of the American Century. That was the real agenda of Rockefeller's War & Peace Studies.

p154
[Franklin Roosevelt] and his Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, had deliberately incited the Japanese into war. They did so by embargoing Japanese oil supplies and preparing a US military ,action against Japanese expansion in the Pacific... Roosevelt was fully informed days before the bombing of Pearl Harbor of the exact details of the Japanese naval advance.

p155
Five months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the highest levels of the United States Government knew a war was imminent with Japan, based on US intelligence's top secret Magic intercepts which had broken the Japanese Naval and diplomatic encryption codes.

p156
On November 28, 1941, Admiral Husband Kimmel in Hawaii received an updated dispatch from Admiral Stark in Washington

Negotiations with Japan appear to be terminated to all practical purposes ... Japanese future action unpredictable but hostile action possible at any moment. If hostilities cannot repeat not be avoided the United States desires that Japan commit the first overt act.

After receiving this warning, Admiral Kimmel was ordered by Washington not to institute long-range reconnaissance from Pearl Harbor against possible air attacks. Following instructions from Stimson's War Department, between November 28th and December 5th, Kimmel ordered the two US aircraft carriers, U SS Enterprise and USS Lexington, together with six heavy cruisers and fourteen destroyers, to leave Pearl Harbor for Midway and Wake Island -- placing the most modern strategic ships of the Pacific Fleet conveniently far from the site of the Japanese attack on December 7th Washington deliberately withheld vital intelligence from Kimmel that would have indicated days in advance that the Japanese goal was Pearl Harbor.

p157
On November 26, two weeks before the attack, Roosevelt had been urgently and personally alerted to an imminent attack on Pearl Harbor by none other than Winston Churchill. Roosevelt responded by stripping the fleet at Pearl Harbor of air defenses, a measure bound to insure Japanese success.

... Churchill's November 26, 1941 message to Roosevelt is the only document in their correspondence that has to this day never been made public, on grounds of 'national security.' Churchill reportedly explicitly warned FDR of an imminent attack on Pearl Harbor to come on "December 8," the actual date Tokyo time, of the December 7 Japanese attack, according to the memoirs of Churchill's Washington Ambassador, Lord Halifax.

p158
[President Franklin] Roosevelt and his advisers incited the Japanese attack on the US Naval base at Hawaii in order to mobilize unwitting American citizens into a war to establish the American Century.

p166
Sir Halford Mackinder, in 1919

Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World Island; who rules the World Island commands the entire World.

p166
The policy makers from the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the internationalists around the Rockefeller group engaged in seemingly paradoxical and contradictory policies. They were simultaneously financing and staffing the CFR War & Peace Studies - intended to be a detailed blueprint for a postwar US global domination, an American Century - while at the same time they were going to extraordinary lengths supporting the Third Reich's war buildup, accruing huge profits from the sales to their 'enemy'.

p166
For the influential US elites grouped around the CFR [Council on Foreign Relations], war (WWII) was merely an instrument through which to extend their financial power in the postwar world and create an American imperium, one displacing not only the British Empire, but also the German Reich and any other potential European competitor. They understood quite well that wars enabled the conquering and subjugating of new markets, and that what the world called 'peace' was but a 'temporary armistice' or ceasefire in the continual war process, until prospects for looting a given area had reached relative limits and a new war of conquest became necessary.

p166
For the influential US elites grouped around the CFR [Council on Foreign Relations], war (WWII) was merely an instrument through which to extend their financial power in the postwar world and create an American imperium, one displacing not only the British Empire, but also the German Reich and any other potential European competitor.

p167
Yale University geopolitical strategist Nicholas Spykman, 1938

Unless the dreams of European Confederation should materialize, it may well be that fifty years from now the quadrumvirate of world powers will be China, India, the United States and the USSR.

p167
minutes of the CFR [Council on Foreign Relations] War & Peace Studies' Security Sub-Committee of the Advisory Committee of the Post-War Foreign Policy, 1938

The British Empire as it existed in the past will ever reappear and... the United States may have to take its place... The US must cultivate a mental view toward world settlement after this war [WWII] which will enable us to impose our own terms, amounting... to Pax Americana.

p168
American leading circles around the Rockefellers and Wall Street had resolved among themselves that all potential European rivals for power would have to grind themselves down in a mutual slaughter. The goal of these American elites was to eliminate, above all, the prospect of a German Reich that would fill the power vacuum in Central Europe left by the collapse of France and its allies.

p168
The United States developed its future war strategy within the internationalist circles around FDR, Rockefeller, Prescott Bush and the Council on Foreign Relations. Their geopolitical agenda ... was to 'support' and use Hitler in order to destroy Germany once and for all.

... The goal of these circles in the United States was to realize a global American supremacy built on the war-ravaged ashes of Germany, of Britain and of Stalin's Russia. The Rockefellers and their crowd were no more 'pro-German' than they were 'pro-British.'

They were pro-American Century, and above all, pro-Rockefeller.

... They formed tactical alliances with Nazi Germany one moment, and with Russia and Britain the next. These were simply matters of expediency-tactics in pursuit of their strategic end goal: global American hegemony, their American Manifest Destiny, their Lebensraum or Grand Area.

p184
[Franklin] Roosevelt and the circles around Rockefeller's War & Peace Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations were certain that they would emerge the victors in the most costly war in history [WWII]. They began a careful propaganda campaign to prepare public opinion to come into a war against Hitler's Germany. The reason for the US entering the European war, at least from the perspective of Rockefellers and their allies on Wall Street and in big industry, had nothing to do with Hitler's policies of "final solution" against Jews or other atrocities of the Third Reich.

Rather, the growing propaganda campaign to win American hearts to another war in Europe had to do with the need to destroy the most serious rival to a postwar American Century - the German Reich.

The US plan was to delay launching the Anglo-American Second Front against Hitler long enough to let Russia and Germany bleed each other to death.

p185
The war [WWII] involved the mobilization over 100 million military personnel, making it the most widespread war in history. In a state of 'total war,' the major belligerents had placed their entire economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities at the service of the war effort, blurring the distinction between civilian and military resources. Over 70 million people, the majority of them civilians, had been killed, making it the deadliest conflict in human history.

p197
President [Harry] Truman on his order to use the Atomic bomb on Japan in August 1945

It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made the most useful... This is the greatest thing in history.

p197
In the summer of 1945 President Harry Truman signed the order to drop a terrifying new bomb on Japanese cities.

No other act of the war underscored the brutal new message of postwar American power more than Washington's use of two atomic bombs, one on August 6 on Hiroshima and on August 9 on Nagasaki, Japan. Although the United States had previously dropped leaflets warning civilians of air raids on twelve other Japanese cities where conventional bombing raids were to take place, residents of Hiroshima were given no notice of the atomic bomb.

... The two bombs had killed as many as 140,000 people in Hiroshima and 880,000 in Nagasaki by the end of 1945, with roughly half of those deaths occurring on the days of the bombings. Among those, perhaps 20% died from injuries or the combined effects of flash burns, trauma, and radiation burns, compounded by illness, malnutrition and radiation sickness.

p198
Hitler's Germany had surrendered to the Allied Forces in May 1945, a month after Truman became President. Japan was by then isolated, economically on its knees and de facto a defeated power. Its exhausted troops were deserting in droves. According to military experts, an effective naval blockade of Japan by US and Allied warships would have been sufficient to force the Japanese Emperor to surrender, even on the harsh terms demanded by Washington and with no further loss of lives.

... The purpose of dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been not for terrorizing Japan into surrender - they were already on their knees - but for overwhelming the Soviet Union with a convincing demonstration of American military power.

p203
The driving force behind the entire War & Peace Studies of the Rockefellers' Council on Foreign Relations, the motive for Roosevelt to bring the United States into war, the entire war mobilization and public indebtedness that the war effort required in the United States, all were aimed at one postwar objective: the creation of a vast captive global market or economic space for the United States.

... America was to be an empire in much the same way that Great Britain had been an Empire after 1815, with one significant difference. America's economic imperialism would disguise itself under the rhetorical cover of 'spreading free enterprise,' and supporting 'national self-determination' and 'democracy.' The term 'empire' was to be scrupulously avoided.

... It was every bit an empire, albeit a less visible one, based on the role of the United States in international finance, with the dollar as the pillar of the postwar system, backed up by overwhelming military superiority.

... The US establishment realized the value of giving abundant local spoils to the wealthy and often corrupt national elites in foreign markets they wished to conquer. The system that evolved after 1945 was one of a single, overwhelming global power, the United States, and a growing number of de facto vassal states whose wealthy elites were in one way or another dependent for their existence on the 'good graces' of Washington and the Pentagon. The 'good graces' usually included US-trained secret police forces, death squads, and timely coups.

The American Century was to be an informal empire of dependent "client states" rather than occupied colonies, deemed by them to be an outmoded and inefficient model of domination.

p204
American history over the previous century [19th century] had been driven an increasingly powerful carte of financial elites and the large industrial trusts they controlled [The Money Trust]. Their interests, rather than the interests of the nation and the population as a whole, defined the strategic priorities of that powerful cartel. Their overwhelming control of the national media allowed their propaganda experts to portray their interests as 'America's interests.' Most Americans, wanting to think the best of their country, bought the propaganda.

... Their economic model was that of the British East India Company or, more accurately, of the Barbary pirates, looting and plundering to exhaustion one region after the next to prop up their empire, leaving behind as little of value as possible. For the Rockefellers ... the entire world was considered their 'frontier.' By portraying their mission after 1948 as a Cold War fought by 'American democracy' against 'Godless Communism' they gave the cause of advancing American interests a messianic religious cover that was astonishingly effective for decades.

p204
For the Rockefellers ... the entire world was considered their 'frontier.' By portraying their mission after 1948 as a Cold War fought by 'American democracy' against 'Godless Communism' they gave the cause of advancing American interests a messianic religious cover that was astonishingly effective for decades.

p205
Sir Halford Mackinder, the father of British geopolitics, in his essay, 'The Round World and the Winning of the Peace', July 1943. Mackinder outlined his vision for a US-dominated postwar order. He defined 'the Heartland' as essentially the area covered by the USSR. Mackinder planted the geopolitical seed for what became the Cold War.

The conclusion is unavoidable that if the Soviet Union emerges from ' this war [WWII] as conqueror of Germany, she must rank as the greatest land Power on the globe. Moreover she will be the power in the strategically strongest defensive position. The Heartland is the greatest natural fortress on earth.

p206
On April 15, 1945, a few days after the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and only days before the German surrender, a group of senior foreign policy advisors met behind closed doors at the State Department in Washington.

... The men discussed how to turn America's military focus from Germany to the Soviet Union in the face of the overwhelming sentiment among ordinary Americans that the war had been won with the help of the Soviet Union and that a return to peacetime would reflect this. They discussed how to achieve a radical shift in US opinion, turning it against America's wartime ally, Russia.

p209
The decision by Washington to use the devastating power of the atomic bomb on Japan was a signal event that was intended among other things to declare to the world the dawn of the American Century and to open the way for a postwar dollar imperium, a Pax Americana on American rules. No debate was to be tolerated. The Cold War was born to underpin that economic imperium, the American Century. Bretton Woods and the unique role of the US dollar as 'key currency' would become the basis of a new American global empire, the American Century.

So long as the weakened nations of Western Europe had to depend on a US military security umbrella in a prolonged Cold War with the Soviet Union and later the Peoples' Republic of China, Washington could virtually dictate vital economic conditions of that alliance. It did, and the Bretton Woods System was the cornerstone of that economic domination.

Gods of Money

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