Former officials are often more honest than current ones, since they aren't under pressure to spread happy talk.
Former European Central Bank chief economist Otmar Issing recently said what current officials aren't addressing:
Nobody can be sure that we have a self-sustaining recovery. The challenges facing the ECB are tremendous. "Money multipliers have collapsed everywhere. What M3 is telling us is that confidence is missing. I don't see any way to stabilise M3 in such circumstances.
As Ambrose Evans-Pritchard notes:
Data from the European Central Bank shows that the M3 broad money supply has contracted over the last six months, confounding expectations that ultra-low interest rates would soon boost monetary growth. Loans to the private sector fell 0.3pc from a year earlier, the first such decline since the data started in 1983.
The M3 figures include a wide range of bank accounts...
The picture is even starker in America where M3 has shrunk at an annual rate of 6.5pc over the last three months, a pace of contraction not seen since the 1930s. US bank loans have plummeted since May.
(While the Fed stopped reporting M3 in 2006, people are still tracking it).
How can M3 have collapsed when governments world-wide are printing money faster than IHOP can cook pancakes?
Well, professor Tim Congdon from International Monetary Research says:
A key reason for credit contraction is pressure on banks to raise their capital ratios... "The current drive to make banks less leveraged and safer is having the perverse consequence of destroying money balances," he said. "It strengthens the deflationary forces in the world economy. That increases the risks of a double-dip recession in 2010."
But isn't it good that governments are requiring banks to raise their capital rations?
Sure, but unless they force the banks to write off their bad debts, they will remain giant black holes, and will never be adequately capitalized. If they are never adequately capitalized, they will never release money out into the economy through loans and other economic activity which increases M3.
http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2009/10/money-multipliers-have-collapsed.html
At this point, I must give kudos to one of my readers, Ginny, who pointed me to G. Edward Griffin who wrote, “The Creature From Jekyll Island; A Second Look At The Federal Reserve”. I have run across other books about this subject, but I am starting with Mr. Griffin because he explains it in the simplest terms. This may help overcome some of the mental trauma we experience when we think of trying to understand the banking system in this country, and believe me, you need to settle in and understand just how much danger we are in at this moment in time with the $700 Billion Bailout, the $2 Trillion the Fed gave out before the $700 Billion, and the $1 Trillion (estimated) that the PEBO is going to print for stimulus. The Federal Reserve is printing money out of thin air and then charging us interest on that money, and there is no end in sight. This is the reason that the “powers-that-be” will force the collapse of the dollar to start anew and every single American will be financially devastated, and then asked to accept the Amero at cents on the dollar. The time to educate yourselves is NOW, and here is just one link to what is happening behind the scenes; readiness for mass rioting. This also may explain why a completely unknown black senator was installed in the White House. The “rich, white, money men” kill two birds with one stone, and the black community loses all credibility of ever having another black person put in such a place of power because the first black president presided over the biggest collapse of an American Economy EVER. Think that is far-fetched? Applying that theory really does explain how someone like Barack Obama with such a jaded past, hidden documents, no experience, and total self-absorption could become the fall-guy for the Wall Street money men. ALWAYS FOLLOW THE MONEY!
http://logisticsmonster.com/the-fed/
For more....
http://logisticsmonster.com/the-fed/
At the moment of this writing the membership list compiled by PEHI contains 1496 names, the vast majority of them from the United States (rough estimate: about 82% or 1227). Analyzing the biographies of these members doesn’t just show that the Pilgrims are part of the WASP elite - they are the WASP elite. The following banks, law firms, and insurance companies have been headed by Pilgrims Society members - usually for generations:
Banks
American Securities Corp. Federal Reserve Kidder, Peabody and Co. Morgan Joseph & Co. Inc.
Banker’s Trust Fidelity International Trust Kleinwort Benson New York Savings Bank
Bank of England Fifth Avenue Bank Kuhn, Loeb & Co. N.M. Rothschild & Sons
Barclays Bank First Boston Corporation Lazard Oppenheimer & Co.
Barings Bank First National Bank Lehman Brothers Paine, Webber
Blackstone Group US/UK Fourth Nat. Bank of N.Y. Loeb, Rhoades & Co. Rockefeller Center, Inc.
Bowery Savings Bank Goldman Sachs Manufacturers Hanover Rockefeller Family & Ass.
Brown Brothers Harriman Gotham National Bank Marine Midland Salomon Brothers
Bullock Fund Hambro Mellon Bank S.G. Warburg
Chase National Bank Harriman National Bank J. P. Morgan & Co. Shearson Loeb Rhoades
Chase Manhattan US/UK International Banking Corp. J. P. Morgan Chase U.S. Trust Corp. of N.Y.
Chemical Bank Irving Trust Morgan Grenfell (UK) *
Citibank J. G. White & Co. Morgan Guaranty Trust *
Drexel & Co. J. Henry Schroder & Co. Morgan Stanley *
Law firms and insurance companies
Breed, Abbott & Morgan
Carter, Ledyard & Milburn
Coudert Brothers
Cravath, Swaine & Moore
Davis, Polk & Wardwell
Debevoise & Plimpton
Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy
Herbert Oppenheimer Nathan & Vandyk
Shearman & Sterling
Sullivan & Cromwell
Winthrop, Stimson, Putnam & Roberts
AIG
Equitable Life Assurance Society
Metropolitan Life Insurance Co.
Mutual Life Insurance Life Insurance Co.
Lloyds of London
Royal Globe Insurance Group
Other businesses
Chrysler Forbes * ICI R.J. Reynolds
Corning Glass Works General Electric Int. Nickel Co. of Canada Rio Tinto
De Beers (Anglo-Am Corp) General Motors Jardine Matheson U.S. Steel
Dodge IBM Phelps-Dodge W.R. Grace & Co.
* other media companies not mentioned here
Looking at these tables, it is clear that the major banks of New York and London have been very prominent in the Pilgrims Society, closely followed by a group of influential law firms and insurance companies. A number of corporations have also had a considerable presence in the Pilgrims, comparable to some of the law firms and smaller banks. The most prominent of these might well be IBM, of the Watson family - but the founders and owners of Chrysler, Dodge, Jardine Matheson, W.R. Grace & Co., Reynolds, Corning Glass, and Forbes have all been Pilgrims. A vast range of other corporations have been represented by Pilgrims, but do not appear to have been part of the core of the Anglo-American establishment.
Media (and Operation Mockingbird)
Except for Forbes, we deliberately left out large media companies in this last section, as their presence in the Pilgrims Society and influence on society deserves to be discussed separately.
The New York Times and Time Magazine have been the news publications the most intimately tied to to the Pilgrims of the United States over the years. Since 1896 the New York Times has been owned by the Ochs-Sulzberger family, members of which have been generational members of the Pilgrims since the very beginning. Orvil E. Dryfoos, who married a daughter of Arthur Sulzberger and rose to president of the New York Times in 1957 and publisher in 1961, was another member of the Pilgrims. A number of outside Pilgrims held senior positions in the New York Times too over the years. Among them were John William Harding, George McAneny, Philip Du Val, Cyrus Vance and Charles H. Price II.
Time Magazine was set up by Henry Luce in 1923. Although he himself appears not to have been a Pilgrim, most of his associates were, including some of those who financed the founding of his magazine: J. P. Morgan partners Thomas W. Lamont and Dwight Morrow,together with the Harriman and Harkness families. Among the Pilgrims that have held senior positions in Time Magazine are Paul Gray Hoffman (OSS-CIA), Philip G. Howlett, William J. Cross, Hedley Donovan, Donald M. Elliman, Jr., George A. Heard, Roy E. Larsen, Samuel W. Meek and Frank Pace, Jr. Henry Luce III became president of the U.S. Pilgrims in 1997.
Another important Pilgrims-affiliated publication used to be the New York Herald Tribune, owned by the Reid family and dissolved in 1966. Whitelaw Reid, Whitelaw Reid II, Ogden Mills Reid, Ogden Rogers Reid and several other family members have all been members of the Pilgrims Society. In 1958, John Hay Whitney, a vice president of the U.S. Pilgrims, took over the newspaper from the Reids.
Although not very prominent within the Pilgrims Society, some of Reader’s Digest most senior and long term managers have been Pilgrims, spanning the period from the 1940s to the 1980s. Among them were William John Cross, C. Robert Devine, Walter Wood Hitesman and Kent Rhodes.
News stations are considerably less prominent in the Pilgrims Society. One of the exceptions has been the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), located in Rockefeller Center and one of he most dominant broadcasting companies from the 1930s to the early 1970s. Morgan banker Owen D. Young founded the RCA in 1919. Young was chairman of General Electric, which took a controlling interest in the RCA. For the next fifty years, until 1970, the company was headed by James G. Harbord, Frank M. Folsom, and David Sarnoff. All these men, including Young, were members of the Pilgrims Society. In 1970, Sarnoff’s son, Robert, took over the chairmanship of the RCA, but couldn’t prevent the company from going into a permanent decline. Robert was ousted in 1975 and in the years after the RCA was taken over by other media conglomerates not particularly tied to the Pilgrims.
The RCA, in cooperation with General Electric and Westinghouse, had formed the NBC in 1926, which became its main broadcasting corporation. By the late 1930s, NBC had become so dominant on the airwaves that the FCC forced it into two companies, one becoming the significantly less influential ABC. At this moment it appears that the succeeding heads of both NBC and ABC weren’t invited to the Pilgrims. Of course, the Pilgrims of the RCA did continue to exert their influence over NBC for many years. One person not mentioned before is John Brademas, one of the directors of the RCA/NBC. Brademas is a perfect example of a WASP elitist. A member of both the American and British Pilgrims, he was a Rhodes Scholar, a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation, on the advisory board of the David Rockefeller Fellowships, a director of the Aspen Institute, a governor of the American Ditchley Foundation, a member of the CFR and a member of the Trilateral Commission. Brademas also served on a number of Carnegie commissions.
The other exception of a broadcasting company that has been represented in the Pilgrims Society is CBS. Over the years several Pilgrims have been directors of this New York-based company, among them Henry Kissinger and Marietta Peabody Tree (vice chair Pilgrims; great-granddaughter of George E. Peabody, the famous Morgan partner). William S. Paley, the founder and continuous owner of CBS until his death in 1990, was a member of the Pilgrims Society. So was “the most trusted man in America”, Walter Cronkite, the well known anchorman for the CBS Evening News from 1962 to 1982.
In the 1970s, after a number of scandals in which the CIA was implicated, several reports emerged about a working relationship between the CIA and a number of major media outlets. One of them was the 1979 book ‘Katherine the Great’ by investigative author Deborah Davis, who had been interviewing people in Washington for three years. She described the Washington Post’s relationship with the CIA and how Watergate might not have been an accidental discovery. It even gave a name to the CIA’s effort to establish contacts with the major media: Operation Mockingbird. Unfortunately virtually no one was able to read the book at the time, as it was immediately forced off the market, only to be republished in 1991. About Paley and Cronkite at CBS, Davis wrote:
“Paley’s own friendship with Allen Dulles is now known to have been one of the most influential and significant in the communications industry. He provided cover for CIA agents, supplied out-takes of news film, permitted the debriefing of reporters, and in many ways set the standard for cooperation between the CIA and the major broadcast companies which lasted until the mid-1970s… The [Washington] post men continued to see Paley and Cronkite every Christmas at a dinner given by Allen Dulles at a private club called the Alibi… membership is limited to men in or close to intelligence and is by invitation only.” [4]
Like Paley and Cronkite, Allen Dulles, head of the CIA from 1953 to 1961, could be found at Pilgrims gatherings in New York. The Alibi Club, on the other hand, was part of the “Georgetown Set” in Washington, D.C., an elite, liberal social group with strong anti-communist feelings and close connections to the New York WASP establishment. Members of the Georgetown Set included many senior CIA officers: Frank Wisner, Allen Dulles, James Angleton, Cord Meyer, Richard Bissell, and others. A few newspaper men like Washington Post owner Philip Graham and journalist Joseph Alsop — and apparently Walter Cronkite — were also part of this group. [5]
Davis and investigative reporters like Carl Bernstein have mentioned the names of important newspaper men who cooperated with the CIA. The CIA rated newspaper men among the best spies; they could go almost anywhere and ask questions without raising suspicions. At the same time newspaper men could be used to disseminate anti-communist propaganda, something which the major media outlets were only too happy to support the CIA with. As Newsweek’s foreign editor stated: “The informal relationship was there. Why have anybody sign anything? What we knew we told them [the CIA] and the State Department…. When I went to Washington, I would talk to Foster or Allen Dulles about what was going on. … We thought it was admirable at the time. We were all on the same side.” [6] All this makes a lot of sense, of course. The only problem here is that if all these media people are so cozy with their CIA and State Department friends, who is going to keep these people in line? Apparently no one, hence the long list of conspiracies in American and world history which the major media outlets prefer not to investigate. Bernstein wrote:
“Among the executives who lent their cooperation to the Agency were William Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System, Henry Luce of Time Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times, Barry Bingham Sr. of the Louisville Courier‑Journal, and James Copley of the Copley News Service. Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA include the American Broadcasting Company [ABC], the National Broadcasting Company [NBC], the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps‑Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald‑Tribune… By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc… When Newsweek was purchased by the Washington Post Company, publisher Philip L. Graham was informed by Agency officials that the CIA occasionally used the magazine for cover purposes, according to CIA sources.” [7]
It’s interesting to note that many of these media owners have appeared in the membership lists of the Pilgrims Society. In addition to the earlier-mentioned owners of the New York Times, Time Magazine, the New York Herald Tribune, RCA/NBC, and CBS who were involved with this prestigious Anglo-American society, Barry Bingham, Sr. of the Louisville CourierJournal, Jack R. Howard of Scripps-Howard, and the Muir family of Newsweek were also Pilgrims.
This last publication, Newsweek, from 1937 to 1961 was dominated by Pilgrims Society members. Besides the Muir influence, Newsweek was owned by the Astor Foundation, named after a family with whole generations of members in both the British as the American Pilgrims. Among the directors of the Astor Foundation also was Gates W. McGarrah [8], a first rate example of Pilgrims influence. McGarrah had been chairman of the Rockefellers’ Chase National Bank, a U.S. member of the General Council of the German Reichsbank, chairman of the New York Federal Reserve, and the first president of the Bank for International Settlements. He also was a grandfather of CIA director Richard Helms.
In 1961, Newsweek was taken over by the Washington Post, the establishment newspaper from Washington, D.C. It seems the only reason no Washington Post men can be found among the U.S. Pilgrims is because the society is focused primarily on New York high society. There had been plans in the early years to open other Pilgrims clubs in cities as Washington and Paris, but these ideas never manifested [9]. Interestingly, once considered one of the most “reliable” Mockingbird newspapers, in 1992 the Washington Post revealed to its readers the contents of an internal CIA memorandum, written the year before. In part it read:
“A. Media. 1) Current program: a) PAO [CIA's Public Affairs Office] now has relationships with reporters from every major wire service, newspaper, news weekly, and television network in the nation. This has helped us turn some intelligence failure stories into intelligence success stories, and it has contributed to the accuracy of countless others. In many instances, we have persuaded reporters to postpone, change, hold, or even scrap stories that could have adversely affected national security interests or jeopardized sources and methods.” [10]
In his 1977 Rolling Stone article, Bernstein mentioned one British-based news agency (with an important New York department) that has been significantly influenced by Pilgrims: Reuters. Among the Pilgrims who have held senior positions in Reuters are Sir Christopher Chancellor, general manager from 1944 to 1959; Lord William Barnetson, chairman from 1968 to 1979; Sir Denis Hamilton, chairman from 1979 to 1985; and directors Lord Thomson of Fleet and Sir David Walker. Information on British Pilgrims is still quite scarce compared to its American counterpart, so this list of senior executives will undoubtedly grow as more historical members become known.
Additionally, in 1995 a person named Gerald James published his rather controversial book ‘In the Public Interest’. James had been a banker at Barings Brothers (a Pilgrims bank) and a member of the aristocratic Monday Club. He knew many people in intelligence, including the former deputy head of MI6, George Kennedy Young (who became a banker at Kleinwort). James was also chairman of the arms company Astra Holdings. In his biography/expose James wrote how a cabal of City bankers and intelligence men were running the major illegal arms deals, had infiltrated and corrupted smaller companies, and collapsed a number of them after fearing exposure in the wake of the Iraqgate scandal. James’s Astra Holdings had been among these “front companies” which had been collapsed, prompting James to write a book in an effort to clear his name. This turned out to be not entirely without risk: journalists he talked to were intimidated and several important witnesses died under suspicious circumstances. Relevant here is page 138 of his book, in which James describes his experiences with the British media:
“I have been involved with a number of journalists in researching this story [arms-to-Iraq affair]. At any one time there might be as many as half a dozen following up this or that line of inquiry and we keep constantly in touch by telephone. It is to our mutual benefit, except that the relationship, which has now been going on for for nearly five years, has frequently been marked by sudden changes of policy by newspaper editors or the unexplained removal of a journalist from the case or even from the paper (sometimes to a more exalted position on another where the arms-to-Iraq inquiry is not part of the brief.)… It never really surprised me until I was amazed to receive, from one of my other sources, a list of journalists with affiliations to MI5, on which were posted some of my own contacts in the press, indeed some who had at the beginning made something of a name for themselves on the back of the arms-to-Iraq affair.” [12]
British Pilgrims can hardly be tied to this British “Mockingbird” program, probably because there’s too little information available on the collusion between British intelligence and the press. The exception might be some of the more reactionary aristocrats in the British Pilgrims, like Sir Frederick Bennett, Lord Chalfont, Lord William Rees-Mogg and their ally in the United States, John Train, though a discussion of these people will have to wait a few paragraphs.
http://logisticsmonster.com/the-pilgrim-society/
More information -
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/esp_sociopol_fed.htm
