Many
Americans subscribe to the annoying belief that our nation’s military-industrial
complex is the surest way to remain the wealthiest and leading superpower in
the world. After all, it’s worked for the last century, pro-military supporters
love to point out.
However,
America’s dependence on warmongering may soon become a liability that is
impossible to maintain. Transhumanism, globalization, and outright replacement
of human soldiers with robots are redefining the county’s military
requirements, and they may eventually render defense budgets far smaller than
those now. To compensate and keep America spending approximately 20 percent of the federal budget on defense (as we have for
most of the last few years), we’ll either have to manufacture wars to use all
our newly-made bombs, or find another way to keep the American economy afloat.
It just so
happens that there is another way—a method that would satisfy liberals and
conservatives alike. Instead of always spending more on our military, we could
transition our nation and its economy into a scientific-industrial complex.
There’s
compelling reason to do this beyond what meets the eye. Transhumanist
technology is starting to radically change human life. Many experts expect to
be able to stop aging and conquer death for human beings in the next
25 years. Others, like myself, see humans merging with machines and replacing our every organ with
bionic ones.
Such a new
transhuman society will require many trillions of dollars to satisfy humans
ever-growing desire for physical perfection (machine or biological) in the
transhumanist age. We could keep our economy humming along for decades because
of it.
Whatever
happens, something is going to have to give in the future regarding military
profiteering. Part of this is because in the past, the military-industrial
complex operated off always keeping a few million US military members ready on a moment's notice
to travel around the world and fight. But there’s almost no scenario where we
would need that kind of human-power (and infrastructure to support it) anymore.
Increasingly,
small teams of special operation soldiers and uber-high tech are the way
America fights its wars. We just don't need massive military bases anymore, nor
the thousands of companies to support the constant maintenance of ground
troops. Such a reality changes the economics of the military dramatically, and
will eventually leave it a fraction of its size in terms of personnel and real
estate.
The
coming military age of automated drones, robot tanks, cyberwarfare, and
artificial intelligence just doesn’t require that many people
We’ll still
have the need for technology to fight the wars and conflicts we entangle
ourselves in, but it’ll be mostly engineers, programmers, and technicians who
wear the uniform. The coming military age of automated drones, robot tanks,
cyberwarfare, and artificial intelligence just doesn’t require that many
people. In fact, expect the military not just to shrink, but to mostly
disappear into ones and zeroes.
Many people
think that the beast of a military-industrial complex—made famous by President
Dwight Eisenhower’s warning against it in his farewell address—appeared only in
the last 50 years. However, others persuasively argue that America has been at
war 93 percent of the time since the US Declaration of
Independence was signed in 1776—so it’s been with us from the beginning.
In liberal
California where I live, such facts annoy just about everyone I know—except, of
course, those who are shareholders and beneficiaries of the defense industry.
Thankfully, despite Congress being led by mostly older white religious men, the
younger generation clamors for an improved America—one that can keep its
economies running smoothly in a more peaceful way.
This is
where the scientific-industrial complex comes in and could satisfy most
everyone. And best of all, a society of science requires actual people. Lots of
them: nurses, scientists, start-up CEOs, designers, technologists, and even
lawyers. The advent of modern medicine to treat virtually every ailment—and the
whole anti-aging movement, in general—affects all 318 million Americans. Over half of us suffer from health issues that can be improved
but often aren’t, for a variety of reasons. For example, the US Census Bureau reports that 40 percent of people over the
age of 65 suffer from a disability—and for two thirds of them, it’s
mobility-related issues. And millions are already racking up the symptoms of heart disease that will kill them. And a younger generation
is just waiting to explore bionics, chip implants, and how to upgrade their
genes to avoid health problems in the future. All this means we have the fodder
to reshape the American economy from a militaristic-based one to a type that
thrives off scientific and medical innovation.
Instead of
spending American money on sending our soldiers to risk their lives for the
whims of war, we could be giving civilians the medicine and healthcare they
need to live far better and longer. And living longer has unseen benefits, too.
In the future, bonafide transhumans won’t have to retire if they don’t want to.
Their bodies will be ageless and made so strong through technology that work
and careers may continue indefinitely—and therefore, so will paying taxes.
Transhuman existence is a self-fulfilling economic-boom prophesy for both individual and country.
To help
create this new mindset in society, I recently delivered a Transhumanist Bill of Rights to the US Capitol as part of
my presidential campaign tour. Article 1 of the bill, among other things, aims
to establish that a nation would provide a universal right via science and
technology for citizens to live indefinitely if they wanted. This, of course,
takes socialized medicine one step further, and doesn’t just mandate that the
government is interested in your well being, but that it’s ultimately
interested in your permanent survival.
If a nation
was to embrace such a universal right to live indefinitely, it would forever
change how a nation looks at the individual lives of its citizens. What would
follow is a nation’s intense build-out of how to improve the health, longevity,
and well being of its people. Additionally, the institutions that are
constantly drawing on America, like social security and welfare due to
disability, would be less taxing.
Currently,
the US Constitution (which I personally think needs a significant rewrite for
the 21st century) is overly concerned with protection of national
sovereignty—which is one major reason why the military-industrial complex is
allowed to grow undeterred. If the US Constitution was endowed with precise
wording to also protect an individual’s health, well-being, and longevity, then
a scientific-industrial complex could rise. This new monster institution would
legally be mandated to provide the most modern medicine, technology, and
science possible to its people.
Shamefully,
the Iraq War will cost the US $6 trillion dollars by the time we’re actually done paying
all our bills—despite the fact that it’s highly questionable whether Iraq was
ever even a serious national security issue. However, our country undeniably
faces a serious national security issue today—in fact, I’d call it a full blown
crisis. Nearly 7,000 Americans will die in the next 24 hours from cancer,
heart disease, diabetes, aging, and other issues. And the same amount of people
will die tomorrow and the day after.
Overcoming
disease and aging in the transhuman age will inevitably occur. The question is
not if, but when?
The answer lies in how much our nation is willing to spend on scientific and
medical research—and how soon. But so long as it continues to spend money on
the military instead of citizen’s health, human beings will die—which is ironic
since it’s the military that is supposed to protect us (and not inadvertently
sabotage us by swallowing funding for bombs instead of medicine). All we need
do as a country is change the direction of our spending, from defense to
science. If we can transform America into a scientific-industrial complex,
we’ll still be able to keep our economy chugging along. Let America’s new wars
be fought against cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and aging itself. It’s a
win-win, except for body bag and casket makers.
Zoltan
Istvan is the 2016 presidential candidate of the Transhumanist Party. He writes
an occasional column for Motherboard in which he ruminates
on the future beyond natural ability.
In this rare video,
two high-ranking Bush Administration officials reveal the terrible truth about
9/11, Iraq, and all the other countries the West has invaded since then...
This video
could help destroy any lingering illusions that the chaos currently engulfing the MiddleEast is just a tragic twist of fate.
According to retired US Army General Wesley Clark and Former Bush
Secretary-Treasurer Paul O’Neil, this endless ‘War on Terror’ was planned at least one year before 9/11– and possibly as far back as 1991.
In
a buried 2004 60
minutes interview, O’ Neil reveals:
At George W Bush‘s first
ever security council (which took place just ten days after
his inauguration), getting rid of Saddam Hussein was top of the agenda.
This means the Neo-cons were plotting to overthrow the Iraqi
President eight months before 9/11.
No questions were asked about whySaddam was targeted. Instead, Bush told the council: “Just find me a way to do it.”
A possible occupation of Iraq was discussed in January and February of 2001.
Divvying up Iraq’s oil wealth was also discussed at this stage.
In the same
video, Wesley Clark, speaking at the Commonwealth Club of California in 2007,
details how just ten days after 9/11, a Pentagon officer confided that the Bush
Administration intended to attack Iraq. When Clark asked why, his colleague
responded: “We don’t know.”
Clark asked
whether Saddam had been tied to the events of 9/11.
“No”, came the answer, “But we’re going to attack and
destroy the governments of seven countries in five years.” Clark
names them: Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, and Iran. (the USA and their allies are or have been
active in all of
these countries except Lebanon and Iran, which Clark claims is
the end goal).
The alleged
plan is admittedly a few years behind schedule, and we’re not sure why Afghanistan
is missing from the list, but the fact Clark accurately
names the rest gives weight to his testimony. Clark says this is
all part of the neo-con PNAC (Project for a New American Century), which aims
to “Destabilize the Middle East, turn it upside down, make it under our
control.” He claims this plan goes back as far as 1991.
Please
watch, share, educate yourself about Islam, and don’t forget who
humanity’s real enemies are.
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Who is George Bush? How did he become the 41st U.S. President? He is said to be a man of the “old establishment,” who “chose to seek
his fortune as an independent oilman….” 1
In fact, Bush was never “independent.” Every career step in his upward
climb relied on his family’s powerful associations. The Bush family joined the
Eastern Establishment comparatively recently, and only as servitors. Their
wealth and influence resulted from their loyalty to another, more powerful
family, and their willingness to do anything to get ahead.
For what they did, Bush’s forebears should have become very famous, or
infamous. They remained obscure figures, managers from behind the scenes. But
their actions–including his father’s role as banker for Adolf Hitler–had tragic
effects for the whole planet.
It was these services to his family’s benefactors, which propelled
George Bush to the top.
Prescott Goes to War
President George Herbert Walker Bush was born in 1924, the son of Prescott S. Bush and Dorothy Walker Bush. We will begin the
George Bush story about a decade before his birth, on the eve of World War I.
We will follow the career of his father, Prescott Bush, through his marriage
with Dorothy Walker, on the path to fortune, elegance and power.
Prescott Bush entered Yale University in 1913. A native of Columbus,
Ohio, Prescott had spent the last five years before college in St. George’s
Episcopal preparatory school in Newport, Rhode Island.
Prescott Bush’s first college year, 1913, was also the freshman year at
Yale for E. Roland ( “Bunny” ) Harriman, whose older brother (Wm.) Averell
Harriman had just graduated from Yale. This is the Averell Harriman who went on
to fame as the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union during World War II, as a
governor of New York State, and as a presidential advisor who was greatly
responsible for starting the Vietnam War.
The Harrimans would become the sponsors of the Bushes, to lift them onto
the stage of world history.
In the spring of 1916, Prescott Bush and “Bunny” Harriman were chosen
for membership in an elite Yale senior-year secret society known as Skull and
Bones. This unusually morbid, death-celebrating group helped Wall Street
financiers find active young men of “good birth” to form a kind of imitation
British aristocracy in America.
World War I was then raging in Europe. With the prospect that the U.S.A.
would soon join the war, two Skull and Bones “Patriarchs” , Averell Harriman
(class of 1913) and Percy A. Rockefeller (class of 1900), paid special
attention to Prescott’s class of 1917. They wanted reliable cadres to help them
play the Great Game, in the lucrative new imperial era that the war was opening
up for London and New York moneycrats. Prescott Bush, by then a close friend of
“Bunny” Harriman, and several other Bonesmen from their class of 1917 would
later comprise the core partners in Brown Brothers Harriman, the world’s
largest private investment bank.
World War I did make an immense amount of money for the clan of stock
speculators and British bankers who had just taken over U.S. industry. The
Harrimans were stars of this new Anglo-American elite.
Averell’s father, stock broker E.H. Harriman, had gained control of the
Union Pacific Railroad in 1898 with credit arranged by William Rockefeller,
Percy’s father, and by Kuhn Loeb & Co.’s British-affiliated private
bankers, Otto Kahn, Jacob Schiff and Felix Warburg.
William Rockefeller, treasurer of Standard Oil and brother of Standard
founder John D. Rockefeller, owned National City Bank (later “Citibank” )
together with Texas-based James Stillman. In return for their backing, E.H.
Harriman deposited in City Bank the vast receipts from his railroad lines. When
he issued tens of millions of dollars of “watered” (fraudulent) railroad stock,
Harriman sold most of the shares through the Kuhn Loeb company.
The First World War elevated Prescott Bush and his father, Samuel P.
Bush, into the lower ranks of the Eastern Establishment.
As war loomed in 1914, National City Bank began reorganizing the U.S.
arms industry. Percy A. Rockefeller took direct control of the Remington Arms
company, appointing his own man, Samuel F. Pryor, as the new chief executive of
Remington.
The U.S entered World War I in 1917. In the spring of 1918, Prescott’s
father, Samuel P. Bush, became chief of the Ordnance, Small Arms and Ammunition
Section of the War Industries Board. 2 The senior Bush took national
responsibility for government assistance to and relations with Remington and
other weapons companies.
This was an unusual appointment, as Prescott’s father seemed to have no
background in munitions. Samuel Bush had been president of the Buckeye Steel
Castings Co. in Columbus, Ohio, makers of railcar parts. His entire career had
been in the railroad business– supplying equipment to the Wall Street-owned
railroad systems.
The War Industries Board was run by Bernard Baruch, a Wall Street
speculator with close personal and business ties to old E.H. Harriman. Baruch’s
brokerage firm had handled Harriman speculations of all kinds. 3
In 1918, Samuel Bush became director of the Facilities Division of the
War Industries Board. Prescott’s father reported to the Board’s Chairman,
Bernard Baruch, and to Baruch’s assistant, Wall Street private banker Clarence
Dillon.
Robert S. Lovett, President of Union Pacific Railroad, chief counsel to
E.H. Harriman and executor of his will, was in charge of national production
and purchase “priorities” for Baruch’s board.
With the war mobilization conducted under the supervision of the War
Industries Board, U.S. consumers and taxpayers showered unprecedented fortunes
on war producers and certain holders of raw materials and patents. Hearings in
1934 by the committee of U.S. Senator Gerald Nye attacked the “Merchants of Death”
— war profiteers such as Remington Arms and the British Vickers company –whose
salesmen had manipulated many nations into wars, and then supplied all sides
with the weapons to fight them.
Percy Rockefeller and Samuel Pryor’s Remington Arms supplied machine
guns and Colt automatic pistols; millions of rifles to Czarist Russia; over
half of the small-arms ammunition used by the Anglo-American allies in World
War I; and 69 percent of the rifles used by the United States in that conflict.
4
Samuel Bush’s wartime relationship to these businessmen would continue
after the war, and would especially aid his son Prescott’s career of service to
the Harrimans.
Most of the records and correspondence of Samuel Bush’s arms- related
section of the government have been burned, “to save space” in the National
Archives. This matter of destroyed or misplaced records should be of concern to
citizens of a constitutional republic. Unfortunately, it is a rather constant
impediment with regard to researching George Bush’s background: He is certainly
the most “covert” American chief executive.
Now, arms production in wartime is by necessity carried on with great
security precautions. The public need not know details of the private lives of
the government or industry executives involved, and a broad interrelationship
between government and private-sector personnel is normal and useful.
But during the period preceding World War I, and in the war years
1914-1917 when the U.S. was still neutral, interlocking Wall Street financiers
subservient to British strategy lobbied heavily, and twisted U.S. government
and domestic police functions. Led by the J.P. Morgan concern, Britain’s
overall purchasing agent in America, these financiers wanted a world war and
they wanted the United States in it as Britain’s ally. The U.S. and British
arms companies, owned by these international financiers, poured out weapons
abroad in deals not subject to the scrutiny of any electorate back home. The
same gentlemen, as we shall see, later supplied weapons and money to Hitler’s
Nazis.
That this problem persists today, is in some respect due to the
“control” over the documentation and the history of the arms traffickers.
World War I was a disaster for civilized humanity. It had terrible, unprecedented
casualties, and shattering effects on the moral philosophy of Europeans and
Americans.
But for a brief period, the war treated Prescott Bush rather well.
In June, 1918, just as his father took over responsibility for relations
of the government with the private arms producers, Prescott went to Europe with
the U.S. Army. His unit did not come near any fire until September. But on
August 8, 1918, the following item appeared on the front page of Bush’s
home-town newspaper:
High Military Honors Conferred on Capt. Bush
For Notable Gallantry, When Leading Allied Commanders Were Endangered,
Local Man is Awarded French, English and U.S. Crosses.
International Honors, perhaps unprecedented in the life of an American
soldier, have been conferred upon Captain Prescott Sheldon Bush, son of Mr. and
Mrs. S.P. Bush of Columbus.
Upon young Bush … were conferred: Cross of the Legion of Honor, …
Victoria Cross, … Distinguished Service Cross….
Conferring of the three decorations upon one man at one time implies recognition
of a deed of rare valor and probably of great military importance as well.
From word which has reached Columbus during the last few days, it
appears as if the achievement of Captain Bush well measures up to these
requirements.
The incident occurred on the western front about the time the Germans
were launching their great offensive of July 15…. The history of the remarkable
victory scored later by the allies might have been written in another vein, but
for the heroic and quick action of Captain Bush.
The … three allied leaders, Gen. [Ferdinand] Foch, Sir Douglas Haig and
Gen. [John J.] Pershing … were making an inspection of American positions. Gen.
Pershing had sent for Captain Bush to guide them about one sector…. Suddenly
Captain Bush noticed a shell coming directly for them. He shouted a warning,
suddenly drew his bolo knife, stuck it up as he would a ball bat, and parried
the blow, causing the shell to glance off to the right….
Within 24 hours young Bush was notified … [that] the three allied commanders
had recommended him for practically the highest honors within their gift….
Captain Bush is 23 years old, a graduate of Yale in the class of 1917. He was
one of Yale’s best- known athletes … was leader of the glee club … and in his
senior year was elected to the famous Skull and Bones Society…. 5
The day after this astonishing story appeared, there was a large cartoon
on the editorial page. It depicted Prescott Bush as a small boy, reading a
story-book about military heroism, and saying: “Gee! I wonder if anything like
that could ever truly happen to a boy.” The caption below was a rehash of the
batting- away- the-deadly-shell exploit, written in storybook style.@s6
Local excitement about the military “Babe Ruth” lasted just four weeks.
Then this somber little box appeared on the front page:
Editor State Journal:
A cable received from my son, Prescott S. Bush, brings word that he has
not been decorated, as published in the papers a month ago. He feels dreadfully
troubled that a letter, written in a spirit of fun, should have been
misinterpreted. He says he is no hero and asks me to make explanations. I will
appreciate your kindness in publishing this letter….
-Flora Sheldon Bush.
Columbus, Sept. 5th. (7)
Prescott Bush later claimed that he spent “about 10 or 11 weeks” in the
area of combat in France. “We were under fire there…. It was quite exciting,
and of course a wonderful experience.”8
Prescott Bush was discharged in mid-1919, and returned for a short time
to Columbus, Ohio. But his humiliation in his home town was so intense that he
could no longer live there. The “war hero” story was henceforth not spoken of
in his presence. Decades later, when he was an important, rich U.S. Senator,
the story was whispered and puzzled over among the Congressmen.
Looking to be rescued from this ugly situation, Captain Bush went to the
1919 reunion of his Yale class in New Haven, Connecticut. Skull and Bones
Patriarch Wallace Simmons, closely tied to the arms manufacturers, offered
Prescott Bush a job in his St. Louis railroad equipment company. Bush took the
offer and moved to St. Louis–and his destiny.
Adolf Hitler and Prescott Bush
A Thoroughbred Marriage
Prescott Bush went to St. Louis to repair his troubled life. Sometime that same year, Averell Harriman made a trip there on a
project which would have great consequences for Prescott. The 28- year-old
Harriman, until then something of a playboy, wanted to bring his inherited
money and contacts into action in the arena of world affairs.
President Theodore Roosevelt had denounced Harriman’s father for
“cynicism and deep-seated corruption” and called him an “undesirable
citizen.”9 For the still- smarting
Averell to take his place among the makers and breakers of nations, he needed a
financial and intelligence-gathering organization of his own. The man Harriman
sought to create such an institution for him was Bert Walker, a Missouri stock
broker and corporate wheeler- dealer.
George Herbert ( “Bert” ) Walker, for whom President George H.W. Bush
was named, did not immediately accept Harriman’s proposal. Would Walker leave
his little St. Louis empire, to try his influence in New York and Europe?
Bert was the son of a dry goods wholesaler who had thrived on imports
from England. 10 The British connection had paid for Walker summer houses in
Santa Barbara, California, and in Maine– “Walker’s Point” at Kennebunkport.
Bert Walker had been sent to England for his prep school and college education.
By 1919 Bert Walker had strong ties to the Guaranty Trust Company in New
York and to the British-American banking house J.P. Morgan and Co. These Wall
Street concerns represented all the important owners of American railroads: the
Morgan partners and their associates or cousins in the intermarried
Rockefeller, Whitney, Harriman and Vanderbilt families.
Bert Walker was known as the midwest’s premier deal-arranger, awarding
the investment capital of his international-banker contacts to the many
railroads, utilities and other midwestern industries of which he and his St.
Louis friends were executives or board members.
Walker’s operations were always quiet, or mysterious, whether in local
or global affairs. He had long been the “power behind the throne” in the St.
Louis Democratic Party, along with his crony, former Missouri Governor David R.
Francis. Walker and Francis together had sufficient influence to select the
party’s candidates. 11
Back in 1904, Bert Walker, David Francis, Washington University
President Robert Brookings and their banker/broker circle had organized a
world’s fair in St. Louis, the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. In line with the
old Southern Confederacy family backgrounds of many of these sponsors, the fair
featured a “Human Zoo” : live natives from backward jungle regions were
exhibited in special cages under the supervision of anthropologist William J.
McGee.
So Averell Harriman was a natural patron for Bert Walker. Bert shared
Averell’s passion for horse breeding and horse racing, and easily accommodated
the Harriman family’s related social philosophy. They believed that the horses
and racing stables they owned showed the way toward a sharp upgrading of the
human stock–just select and mate thoroughbreds, and spurn or eliminate inferior
animals.
The First World War had brought the little St. Louis oligarchy into the
Confederate-slaveowner-oriented administration of President Woodrow Wilson and
his advisors, Col. Edward House and Bernard Baruch.
Walker’s friend Robert Brookings got into Bernard Baruch’s War
Industries Board as director of national Price Fixing (sic). David R. Francis
became U.S. ambassador to Russia in 1916. As the Bolshevik Revolution broke
out, we find Bert Walker busy appointing people to Francis’s staff in
Petrograd. 12
Walker’s earliest activities in relation to the Soviet state are of
significant interest to historians, given the activist role he was to play
there together with Harriman. But Walker’s life is as covert as the rest of the
Bush clan’s, and the surviving public record is extremely thin.
The 1919 Versailles peace conference brought together British imperial
strategists and their American friends to make postwar global arrangements. For
his own intended international adventures, Harriman needed Bert Walker the
seasoned intriguer, who quietly represented many of the British-designated
rulers of American politics and finance.
After two persuasion trips west by Harriman, 13 Walker at length agreed
to move to New York. But he kept his father’s summer house in Kennebunkport,
Maine.
Bert Walker formally organized the W.A. Harriman & Co. private bank
in November 1919. Walker became the bank’s president and chief executive;
Averell Harriman was chairman and controlling co-owner with his brother Roland
( “Bunny” ), Prescott Bush’s close friend from Yale; and Percy Rockefeller was
a director and a founding financial sponsor.
In the autumn of 1919, Prescott Bush made the acquaintance of Bert
Walker’s daughter Dorothy. They were engaged the following year, and were
married in August, 1921. 14 Among the ushers and grooms at the elaborate
wedding were Ellery S. James, Knight Woolley and four other fellow Skull and
Bonesmen from the Yale Class of 1917. 15 The Bush-Walker extended family has
gathered each summer at the “Walker country home” in Kennebunkport, from this
marriage of President Bush’s parents down to the present day.
When Prescott married Dorothy, he was only a minor executive of the
Simmons Co., railroad equipment suppliers, while his wife’s father was building
one of the most gigantic businesses in the world. The following year the couple
tried to move back to Columbus, Ohio; there Prescott worked for a short time in
a rubber products company owned by his father. But they soon moved again to
Milton, Mass., after outsiders bought the little family business and moved it near
there.
Thus Prescott Bush was going nowhere fast, when his son George Herbert
Walker Bush–the future U.S. President–was born in Milton, Mass., on June 12,
1924.
Perhaps it was as a birthday gift for George, that “Bunny” Harriman
stepped in to rescue his father Prescott from oblivion, bringing him into the
Harriman-controlled U.S. Rubber Co. in New York City. In 1925 the young family
moved to the town where George was to grow up: Greenwich, Connecticut, a suburb
both of New York and of New Haven/Yale.
Then on May 1, 1926, Prescott Bush joined W.A. Harriman & Co. as its
vice president, under the bank’s president, Bert Walker, his father-in-law and
George’s maternal grandfather–the head of the family. 16
The Great Game
Prescott Bush would demonstrate strong loyalty to the firm he joined in
1926. And the bank, with the scope and power of many
ordinary nations, could amply reward its agents. George Bush’s Grandfather
Walker had put the enterprise together, quietly, secretly, using all the
international connections at his disposal. Let us briefly look back at the
beginning of the Harriman firm–the Bush family enterprise–and follow its course
into one of history’s darkest projects.
The firm’s first global lever was its successful arrangement to get into
Germany by dominating that country’s shipping. Averell Harriman announced in
1920 that he would re-start Germany’s Hamburg- Amerika Line, after many months
of scheming and arm-twisting. Hamburg-Amerika’s commercial steamships had been
confiscated by the United States at the end of the First World War. These ships
had then become the property of the Harriman enterprise, by some arrangements
with the U.S. authorities that were never made public.
The deal was breathtaking; it would create the world’s largest private
shipping line. Hamburg-Amerika Line regained its confiscated vessels, for a
heavy price. The Harriman enterprise took “the right to participate in 50
percent of all business originated in Hamburg” ; and for the next twenty years
(1920-1940), the Harriman enterprise had “complete control of all activities of
the Hamburg line in the United States.”17
Harriman became co-owner of Hamburg-Amerika. The Harriman-Walker firm
gained a tight hold on its management, with the not-so-subtle backing of the
post-World War I occupation of Germany by the armies of England and America.
Just after Harriman’s public statement, the St. Louis press celebrated
Bert Walker’s role in assembling the money to consummate the deal:
“Ex-St. Louisan Forms Giant Ship Merger”
“G. H. Walker is Moving Power Behind Harriman-Morton Shipping Combine….”
The story celebrated a “merger of two big financial houses in New York,
which will place practically unlimited capital at the disposal of the new
American-German shipping combine….” 18
Bert Walker had arranged a “marriage” of J.P. Morgan credit and Harriman
family inherited wealth.
W.A. Harriman & Co., of which Walker was president and founder, was
merging with the Morton & Co. private bank–and Walker was “[p]rominent in
the affairs of Morton & Co.,” which was interlocked with the
Morgan-controlled Guaranty Trust Co.
The Hamburg-Amerika takeover created an effective instrument for the
manipulation and fatal subversion of Germany. One of the great “merchants of
death,” Samuel Pryor, was in it from the beginning. Pryor, then chairman of the
executive committee of Remington Arms, helped arrange the deal and served with
Walker on the board of Harriman’s shipping front organization, the American
Ship and Commerce Co.
Walker and Harriman took the next giant step in 1922, setting up their
European headquarters office in Berlin. With the aid of the Hamburg-based
Warburg bank, W.A. Harriman & Co. began spreading an investment net over
German industry and raw materials.
From the Berlin base, Walker and Harriman then plunged into deals with
the new dictatorship of the Soviet Union. They led a select group of Wall
Street and British Empire speculators who re-started the Russian oil industry,
which had been devastated by the Bolshevik Revolution. They contracted to mine
Soviet manganese, an element essential to modern steelmaking. These concessions
were arranged directly with Leon Trotsky, then with Feliks Dzerzhinsky, founder
of the Soviet dictatorship’s secret intelligence service (K.G.B), whose huge statue
was finally pulled down by pro-democracy demonstrators in 1991.
These speculations created both channels of communication, and the style
of accomodation, with the communist dictatorship, that have continued in the
family down to President Bush.
With the bank launched, Bert Walker found New York the ideal place to
satisfy his passion for sports, games and gambling. Walker was elected
president of the U.S. Golf Association in 1920. He negotiated new international
rules for the game with the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews,
Scotland. After these talks he contributed the three-foot-high silver Walker
Cup, for which British and American teams have since competed every two years.
Bert’s son-in-law Prescott Bush was later secretary of the U.S. Golf Association,
during the grave political and economic crises of the early 1930s. Prescott
became USGA President in 1935, while he was otherwise embroiled in the family
firm’s work with Nazi Germany.
When George was one year old, in 1925, Bert Walker and Averell Harriman
headed a syndicate which rebuilt Madison Square Garden as the modern Palace of
Sport. Walker was at the center of New York’s gambling scene in its heyday, in
that Prohibition era of colorful and bloody gangsters. The Garden bloomed with
million-dollar prize fights; bookies and their clients pooled more millions,
trying to match the pace of the speculation-crazed stock and bond men. This was
the era of “organized” crime–the national gambling and bootleg syndicate
structured on the New York corporate model.
By 1930, when George was a boy of six, Grandpa Walker was New York State
Racing Commissioner. The vivid colors and sounds of the racing scene must have
impressed little George as much as his grandfather. Bert Walker bred race
horses at his own stable, the Log Cabin Stud. He was president of the Belmont
Park race track. Bert also personally managed most aspects of Averell’s racing
interests– down to picking the colors and fabrics for the Harriman racing gear.
19
From 1926, George’s father Prescott Bush showed a fierce loyalty to the
Harrimans and a dogged determination to advance himself; he gradually came to
run the day-to-day operations of W.A. Harriman & Co. After the firm’s 1931
merger with the British-American banking house Brown Brothers, Prescott Bush
became managing partner of the resulting company: Brown Brothers Harriman. This
was ultimately the largest and politically the most important private banking
house in America.
Financial collapse, world depression and social upheaval followed the
fevered speculation of the 1920s. The 1929-31 crash of securities values wiped
out the small fortune Prescott Bush had gained since 1926. But because of his
devotion to the Harrimans, they “did a very generous thing,” as Bush later put
it. They staked him to what he had lost and put him back on his feet.
Prescott Bush described his own role, from 1931 through the 1940s, in a
confidential interview:
I emphasize … that
the Harrimans showed great courage and loyalty and confidence in us, because
three or four of us were really running the business, the day to day business.
Averell was all over the place in those days … and Roland was involved in a lot
of directorships, and he didn’t get down into the “lift- up-and-bear-down”
activity of the bank, you see– the day- to-day decisions … we were really
running the business, the day to day business, all the administrative decisions
and the executive decisions. We were the ones that did it. We were the managing
partners, let’s say. 20
But of the “three or four” partners in charge, Prescott was effectively
at the head of the firm, because he had taken over management of the gigantic personal
investment funds of Averell and E. Roland “Bunny” Harriman.
In those interwar years, Prescott Bush made the family fortune which
George Bush inherited. He piled up the money from an international project
which continued until a new world war, and the action of the U.S. government,
intervened to stop him.
Bush Family Dynasty - The Nazi Connection
(45:14)
Notes for Chapter I
1. Washington Post, Aug. 16, 1991, p. A1.
2. Gen. Hugh S. Johnson to Major J.H.K. Davis, June 6, 1918, file no.
334.8/168 or 334.8/451 in U.S. National Archives, Suitland, Maryland.
3. Bernard M. Baruch, My Own Story (New York: Henry Holt and Co.,
1957), pp. 138-39. Baruch related that “our firm did a large business for Mr.
Harriman…. In 1906 Harriman had [us] place heavy bets on Charles Evans Hughes
in his race for Governor of New York against William Randolph Hearst. After
several hundred thousand dollars had been wagered, [our firm] stopped. Hearing
of this, Harriman called … up. `Didn’t I tell you to bet?’ he demanded. `Now go
on.’|”
4. Alden Hatch, Remington Arms: An American History, 1956,
copyright by the Remington Arms Co., pp. 224-25.
5. The Ohio State Journal, Columbus, Ohio, Thursday, Aug. 8,
1918.
6. The Ohio State Journal, Friday, Aug. 9, 1918.
7. The Ohio State Journal, Friday, Sept. 6, 1918.
8. Interview with Prescott Bush in the Oral History Research Project
conducted by Columbia University in 1966, Eisenhower Administration Part II;
pp. 5-6. The interview was supposed to be kept confidential and was never
published, but Columbia later sold microfilms of the transcript to certain
libraries, including Arizona State University.
9. Theodore Roosevelt to James S. Sherman, Oct. 6, 1906, made public by
Roosevelt at a press conference April 2, 1907. Quoted in Henry F. Pringle, Theodore
Roosevelt (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1931), p. 452. Roosevelt
later confided to Harriman lawyer Robert S. Lovett that his views on Harriman
were based on what J.P. Morgan had told him.
10. See The Industries of St. Louis, published 1885 by J.M.
Elstner & Co., pp. 61-62 for Crow, Hagardine & Co., David Walker’s
first business; and p. 86 for Ely & Walker.
11. See Letter of G.H. Walker to D.R. Francis, March 20, 1905, in the
Francis collection of the Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, Missouri, on
the organization of the Republicans and Democrats to run the election of the
mayor, a Democrat acceptable to the socially prominent. The next day Walker
became the treasurer and Francis the president of this “Committee of 1000.” See
also George H. Walker obituary, St. Louis Globe-Democrat, June 25, 1953.
12. Letter of Perry Francis to his father, Ambassador David R. Francis,
Oct. 15, 1917, Francis collection of the Missouri Historical Society. “… Joe
Miller left for San Francisco last Tuesday night, where he will receive orders
to continue to Petrograd. I was told by Mildred Kotany [Walker’s sister-in-law]
that Bert Walker got him his appointment through Breck Long. I didn’t know Joe
was after it, or could have helped him myself. He will be good company for you
when he gets there….”
13. Private interview with a Walker family member, cousin of President
Bush.
14. Prescott Bush, Columbia University, op. cit., p. 7.
15. St. Louis Globe Democrat, Aug. 7, 1921. 16. This is the
sequence of events, from Simmons to U.S. Rubber, which Prescott Bush gave in
his Columbia University interview, op. cit.,) pp. 7-8.
17. Public statement of Averell Harriman, New York Times, Oct. 6,
1920, p. 1.
18. St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Oct. 12, 1920, p. 1.
19. Sports-as-business has continued in the family up through George Bush’s
adult life. Bert’s son George Walker, Jr.–President Bush’s uncle and financial
angel in Texas–co-founded the New York Mets and was the baseball club’s vice
president and treasurer for 17 years until his death in 1977. The President’s
son, George Walker Bush, was co-owner of the Texas Rangers baseball club during
his father’s presidency.
20. Prescott Bush, Columbia University, op. cit., pp. 16-22.
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