Engelhard’s
wife was the daughter of a Brazilian diplomat. Her daughter, whom he
adopted, married Samuel Pryor Reed, grandson of armaments tycoon Samuel
F. Pryor. As Percy Rockefeller’s agent at Remington Arms in 1914, Pryor
had a key position in mobilizing American industry, supervised by the
War Industries Board, to manufacture and sell weapons to the Allies in
World War I. (See “Who
‘Created’ Condi Rice?”—which
explores how Eugene Meyer, Jr. and Bernard Baruch used the War Finance
Corporation and the War Industries Board “to administer minerals and
materiel into a massive war machine.”) It was this war profiteering
which first brought Samuel Bush (George H.W. Bush’s grandfather) into
government operations—as explored in “Money
and Gunpowder, Part Two—A Place for Cannons”.[6]
Liquefying
the Metals Trade
The
metals Marc Rich brokered prior to 1973 were strategic ones, from the
aspect of national defense. Originally, such trading had to be done in
the field, as it necessarily involved physical delivery of the metal at
a specific location and time. Eventually, however, futures contracts
were devised for most metals, allowing financial trading to take place
at the commodities exchange. Before 1973, oil had never been traded on
the futures markets. Things began to change in March of that year when
President Nixon imposed price controls on oil. As reported in Time
Magazine on March 19:
“Inflation
seems once again to be getting out of hand, despite repeated assurances
from the President and Treasury Secretary George Shultz that Washington
retains ample authority to crack down on price boosters. There was even
more concern last week after the Government reported that in February
the unadjusted wholesale price index jumped 1.9%, the biggest monthly
rise in 22 years. With that, in an obvious attempt to regain its
credibility, the Administration reached for its vaunted ‘stick in the
closet’ and re-imposed direct controls on the nation's 23 biggest oil
companies.”
Little
mention was made of the price controls on oil, however, as food prices
continued to soar through the summer. Marc Rich, however, knew that
Middle Eastern oil producers were fuming because the dollar devaluation
in 1971, combined with the price controls, had resulted in a net loss
of income to them. At that point, through trading contacts with the
royal Pahlavi family of Iran, Rich began to ship Iranian oil to Spanish
refineries. He bought $150 million worth of crude oil at $5 above spot,
only to be forced to sell by his bosses in New York, who panicked
before the embargo set in.[7]
Virtually
all the trading done at Phibro (as Philipp Brothers was called after
the Minorco merger) was extremely secretive. Minorco, S.A. (Luxembourg)
was then the international trading and investment arm of the
Oppenheimer mining interests—trading in diamonds, gold and other
precious materials. Engelhard and Harry Oppenheimer were bosom buddies,
who first met in South Africa. Just as Engelhard played a vitally
strategic role in maintaining a predictable level of necessary metals
for the United States’ needs for coinage and national defense purposes,
the Oppenheimer family had long performed the same functions for the
British Empire.
Diamonds
are Forever
Prior
to the diamond discoveries in South Africa in the 1860’s, the supply of
that precious gem was feared to be in danger of depletion. Author
Edward Jay Epstein relates:
“According
to the records of the British East India Company, Jewish traders
controlled virtually the entire world diamond traffic by the end of the
eighteenth century. The Brazilian fields, however, were becoming
rapidly depleted of diamonds, and no more diamonds were coming out of
India. Just as it appeared that the world might run out of diamonds,
the South African mines were discovered in the eighteen-sixties. The
ten leading Jewish merchants in London, fearing that the market would
be flooded with South African diamonds, quickly formed a syndicate to
buy up all of the production from these new mines. A number of the
merchants in this syndicate had also acquired large stock holdings in
the De Beers monopoly itself. One of the merchants who took the lead in
arranging the deal with Cecil Rhodes was Dunkelsbuhler. Dunkelsbuhler
brought into his London company a sixteen year old apprentice from
Friedberg, Germany.”[8]
Ernest Oppenheimer, son of a cigar
merchant, was that young boy sent to South Africa as a buyer for Anton Dunkelsbuhler in 1901.
“German
by birth, British by naturalization, Jewish by religion, and South
African by residence," he became the “prototype of the multinational
businessman.”[9]
Oppenheimer
created Consolidated
Diamond Mines (CDM) of South West Africa in 1917 by first setting up
Anglo-American Corporation of South Africa in London with some
assistance from his brothers and the House of Morgan. He offered
to give each major German investor shares in Anglo-American in exchange
for their holdings in the “forbidden zone” in Namibia, which he held in
a South African corporation. With this leverage he
convinced De Beers to trade him a share of stock and a seat on the
board in exchange for an interest in his properties. By 1929, he
and his cousins had become a powerful force in the diamond monopoly.
With support from Lord Rothschild, whose bank still owned a large block
of stock in De Beers, he was named chairman and added De Beers to his Anglo-American Company.
In
order to maintain the monopoly, even though demand for diamonds during
the depression was nil, Oppenheimer closed his mines but continued to
buy from whatever source was presented to the company. By 1937 De Beers
had stockpiled some 40 million carats, about a 20-years supply.
Threatened with bankruptcy, he decided to create a market himself. He
first found industrial applications for poor-quality diamonds in
manufacturing--diamond grinding
wheel—which became an indispensable tool for mass production. Oppenheimer
sent his son Harry to New York City to work with Madison Avenue
strategists on a campaign touting the four “C’s” of diamond
perfection—cut, color, clarity, carat—helping sales to increase more
than 50 percent in two years. A new custom was declared—diamond
engagement rings—with the slogan “a diamond is forever.”
The
Gold Fix
London
first became the world gold center in 1671 when Moses Mocatta arrived
from Amsterdam. His bank, called Mocatta & Goldsmid, would begin
operation in 1684, a mere ten years before the Bank of England was
established. Mocatta would act as broker for buying and selling foreign
gold that arrived at the Bank of England. Great Britain first adopted a
formal gold standard in 1816. Nathan Mayer Rothschild had his first
bullion dealings with the Bank of England in 1824; then Pixley &
Abel began operating in 1852, followed the next year by Samuel Montagu
& Company. Germany and the U.S. adopted the gold standard early in
the 1870’s. Most countries, however, suspended gold payments once World
War I commenced, and the gold standard collapsed. At war’s end in 1919
London became the center for “fixing” the price of gold twice a day in
a formal meeting at the Rothschild offices in New Court, St. Swithins
Lane in London.
Britain,
devastated by economic depression, abandoned the gold standard in 1931,
though the United States kept the price of gold fixed at $20.67 per
ounce until 1933, when America prohibited gold exports, ended
convertibility of dollars into gold, and mandated that all gold held by
citizens be exchanged for dollars. In January 1934 the price of gold
was devalued to $35 per ounce, and the gold standard resumed. London
continued its fixings until the outbreak of World War II in September
1939, when they were suspended for almost fifteen years. The task of
keeping the sterling price of gold at $35 per ounce became increasingly
more difficult as the market grew. As early as 1961 the Bank of England
had to occasionally sell from its reserves on the fix to hold the $35
per ounce. This led to the creation of the gold pool—an alliance
between central banks—to maintain the $35 level. The pool worked well
until 1965, when private buying of gold began to exceed mine supply,
forcing central banks to sell reserves into the market to hold the
price steady.
A
run on gold in March 1968 resulted in suspension of gold selling in
London for two weeks—reopening with prices thereafter fixed in dollars
rather than sterling. The gold price, free to float, was set twice a
day, morning and afternoon. London’s action was followed two years
later by President Nixon, who in August 1971 repudiated the United
States’ obligation to redeem its dollars in gold. By the end of 1974,
gold had soared from $35 to $195 per ounce.
Gold
is a stabilizing influence in global trade, useful in maintaining a
level of confidence in the government’s ability to ensure the value of
investments both at home and abroad. The author previously mentioned
the importance of gold in an article called “Snatching
the Gold.” The strategic value of other metals was
discussed in “Who
“Created” Condi Rice?” These
two articles are part of an ongoing project by this author to describe
the historical trail that has been taking America and the rest of the
world into a new world order—a centralized order where local control no
longer exists. Implicit in this new world order is the recognition of
one absolute truism:
Power
comes from controlling vital and strategic commodities. The countries
which are the sources of those commodities must, therefore, be
dominated and not allowed to exercise any form of independence or
nationalism.
A Citizen of the
World
Marc
Rich fits snugly into this new world order. Jack Quinn, Rich’s lead
attorney in charge of obtaining a pardon from President Clinton,
explained the crime for which Rich was convicted on CNN’s Larry King
program:
“This
case arose out of a complicated series of oil transactions that
occurred during the time when we had price controls on oil. And, in
essence, what happened was that Marc Rich and major United States oil
companies, including Arco, had linked domestic transactions to foreign
transactions in an effort, admittedly, to circumvent those price
controls. I think they were trying to do so lawfully. But what they
tried to do was to find a way to get the real value out of a price of
oil.”[10]
For
years Howard Safir, working for Rudy Giuliani as his New York City
police commissioner and later as chief of operations for the U.S.
Marshals Service, had been tracking Rich down from one country to
another. Safir told Larry King: “He was hard to get because he had a
great deal of influence in a lot of countries, and we were pretty much
restricted to just a few countries where we could apprehend him. He had
a Bolivian passport, he had a Spanish passport. The Israelis were very
clear they weren't going to help us apprehend him. So it was very
difficult to get him, plus he had a lot of money….You know, Marc Rich
is one of those people who considers himself a citizen of the world,
inconvenienced by the petty laws of nations. And the message that this
sends is outrageous.”[11]
Such
“world citizenship” makes perfect sense, of course, to those persons
who make their livelihood from global trade—what can best be termed the
merchant adventurer class which brought us slavery, tobacco, rum,
spices, and last but not least, opium. Part of the author’s research is
to explore the genealogies of various members of this class of merchant
traders from one generation to another to see how their accumulated
knowledge and interrelationships have been used to take control of
governments throughout the world and to indoctrinate others through
advertising techniques and propaganda.
Keeping
that purpose in mind, we can look back in our analysis of Condi Rice
and notice how every aspect of her life has been managed by persons who
sought to control the same type of strategic minerals traded by Marc
Rich—copper, silver, gold and oil. As we indicated at that time, it was
no accident that Condi was chosen for the position she holds. She fits
a politically correct profile, has impressive looking educational
credentials and is extremely malleable. She does what she is told and
no more.
Scooter
Libby fits that same mold, and he is working for the same people.
Further research may reveal who hides behind that curtain.
Please
send comments or requests to republish to
http://www.sandersresearch.com/Sanders/NewsManager/contactsra.aspx.
[1]A.
Craig Copetas, Metal Men: How Marc Rich Defrauded the Country,
Evaded the Law, and Became the World’s Most Sought-After Corporate
Criminal (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2001).
[2]Steven
A. Holmes, Ron Brown: An Uncommon Life
(New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2000). According to Holmes, the
school was a favorite preparatory academy for sons of middle-class
black families.
[3]The
Wall Street Journal, May 24, 1984.
[4]Copetas,
Metal Men, 80.
[5]Judith
Ramsey Ehrlich and Barry J. Rehfeld, The New Crowd: The Changing of
the Jewish Guard on Wall Street (New York: Little, Brown and
Company, 1989), 197.
[7]Mark
Honigsbaum, The Observer, May 13, 2001.
[8]Edward Jay Epstein in
The Rise and Fall of Diamonds: The Shattering of a Brilliant Illusion
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982). (This book appears online
at Epstein’s website.) Epstein
adds:
“Until the early part of the eighteenth century, the entire world's
supply of diamonds came from India. The caravans that brought them
across Arabia traded these rare stones to Jewish traders in Aden and
Cairo for gold and silver. The traders then resold them to Jewish
merchants in Venice, Lithuania, and Frankfurt. It was a natural
enterprise for the Jews scattered throughout central Europe: Since they
were moneylenders, they had to concern themselves with assessing,
repairing, and selling gems that had been offered to them as collateral
for loans. They also had close connections with the Jewish trading
centers in the Ottoman Empire through which all the Indian diamonds
passed…. When the Jewish diamond merchants and workers were forced by
the Inquisition to flee from Lisbon and Antwerp, they resettled in
Amsterdam. Since cutting factories required no equipment except for
hand tools, which were portable, the Jews instantly transformed
Amsterdam into the diamond center of Europe. By the middle of the
seventeenth century, Jewish diamond merchants helped finance the Dutch
East India Company, which organized its own trade route to India. So
Amsterdam then replaced Lisbon as the port of entry in Europe for
India's diamonds. Just as the fields in India began to cease yielding
diamonds, more were discovered in 1725 in Brazil. The Dutch maneuvered
to gain control of this traffic, but now they had to contend with the
rise of British sea power. By the mid eighteenth century, the British
had almost completely taken over the trade in diamonds, both from India
and Brazil. As the trading center for uncut diamonds shifted from
Amsterdam to London, so did the Jewish diamond merchants…. The Jewish
traders sent the diamonds to cutting factories that had been
re-established in Antwerp, and from there, the jewels were sold to all
the royal courts of Europe. To select and evaluate these diamonds, the
courts chose Jewish gem experts, who became known as ‘Court Jews.’
[11]Safir
indicated as well that in 1986 Rich “had a lawyer from East Germany
offer $225 million for him and Pinky Green if the prosecutions were
wiped out.”
