Part 2 (1/2)

Chapter XVI, Part II of a two-volume set.

The best way for the Rockefeller-Morgan Insiders to eliminate growing compet.i.tion was to impose a progressive income tax on their compet.i.tors while making sure the law contained built-in escape hatches for themselves. Actually, very few of the proponents of the graduated income tax realized they were playing into the hands of those they were seeking to control. As Ferdinand Lundberg notes in The Rich And The Super rich: What it [the income tax] became, finally, was a siphon gradually inserted into the pocketbooks of the general public. Imposed to popular huzzahs as a cla.s.s tax, the income tax was gradually turned into a ma.s.s tax in a jujitsu turnaround ....

The Insiders' princ.i.p.al mouthpiece in the Senate during this period was Nelson Aldrich of Rhode Island, the maternal grandfather of Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller. Lundberg says that ”when Aldrich spoke, newsmen understood that although the words were his, the dramatic line was surely approved by 'Big John' [D. Rockefeller] . . . .- In earlier years Aldrich had denounced the income tax as -communist and socialistic,- but in 1909 he pulled a dramatic and stunning reversal. The American Biographical- Dictionary comments: just when the opposition had become formidable he (Aldrich) took the wind out of its sails by bringing forward, with the support of the President (Taft) a proposed amendment to the Const.i.tution empowering Congress to lay income taxes.

The escape hatch was ready. By the time the Amendment had been approved by the states, the Rockefeller Foundation was in full operation. The careful orchestration of both parts of the campaign represents one of the most successful financial coups in history. The money the Rockefellers have made by it is incalculable.

By exempting themselves from the burden they forced on their compet.i.tors, the Rockefellers were able to operate in a world of near laissez-faire capitalism while foisting the weight of more and more socialism on their compet.i.tors. It is the equivalent of a sprinter forcing every other runner in a race to carry a sixteen-pound shot.

Backing the graduated income tax had another timely advantage for old John. It was about the same time that Judge Kenesaw Landis was ordering the breakup of the Standard Oil monopoly. Wily John D. was able to kill several flying feathered creatures with a single hard object. He not only avoided taxes by creating four great tax exempt foundations; he used them as repositories for his -divested- interests in the various Standard Oil ent.i.ties. In the switch, Rockefeller had made his a.s.sets non-taxable so that they might be pa.s.sed down through generations without being ravaged by the estate and gift taxes which everyone else had to pay. As Lundberg observed, old John D. planned ahead.

Each year the Rockefellers can dump up to half their incomes into their pet foundations and deduct the ”donations” from their income tax. Nelson admitted at the confirmation hearings:” . . the foundation pays no capital gains tax and no income tax so those funds can continue to multiply. They not only can, they do.

Having the foundations as a tax-free piggy bank is only one of the advantages they provide the family.

As Business Week has observed: -”The real motive behind most private foundations is keeping control of wealth. ”In the foundation world, where - not for profit- really means not-for- taxation,- one exchanges owners.h.i.+p for control.

The Rockefellers have further advantages with their foundations. They can buy, sell or hold real estate, stocks and other securities. Congressman Wright Patman, chairman of the House Banking Committee, has charged that the Rockefellers and other foundations act in concert, using their enormous portfolios to perform maneuvers which used to be known indelicately as -rigging the market.- So powerful have the major foundations become that the Patman Committee concluded: ”Unquestionably, the economic life of our Nation has become so intertwined with foundations that unless something is done about it they will hold a dominant position in every phase of American life.”

Since this report was issued by the Patman Committee in the early 1950s, absolutely nothing has been done about the power of the Rockefeller-controlled foundations - except to a.s.sist them to become even more powerful. And as this knowledgeable study warned over twenty years ago, these foundations now do hold ” adominant position in every phase of American life”, as we shall see.

It is the Rockefeller family which sits comfortably astride this foundation colossus. Collectively, the Rockefeller foundations have in excess of $1.5 billion in a.s.sets but they also have interlocking control over the other most powerful foundations, the Carnegie Group and the giant Ford Foundation.

When you hear of ”Carnegie Foundation” think Rockefeller. For many years the five Carnegie foundations have been mere appendages of the Rockefeller octopus. The chief operators of the Carnegie foundations have for decades been members of the Rockefeller coordinating committee, the Council on Foreign Relations, the glue which holds the Rockefeller Establishment together. (The Council on Foreign Relations, or CFR, is the subject of the next chapter.) In addition, two of the six men on the Carnegie Corporation's finance committee are also directors of Rockefeller financial inst.i.tutions.

The baby giant of the foundation world is the $3 billion-in-a.s.sets Ford Foundation. From 1953 to 1965, John J. Mc Cloy was chairman of the Ford Foundation, during most of which time he was also chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank. Mc Cloy was succeeded by another Rockefeller minion, Eugene Black, a director of Chase Manhattan and former head of the World Bank. Currently running the show at the Ford Foundation is Mc George Bundy, formerly on the payroll of the Rockefellers' Council on Foreign Relations. As with the Carnegie foundations, most of the trustees of the Ford Foundation are members of the Rockefellers' Council on Foreign Relations.

It is not too hard to see how, as the Patman Committee has charged, these foundations can collude to act as a single ent.i.ty. The terrible part of this business is that the economic fraud permitted the Rockefellers through their foundations- though maddening to the middle-cla.s.s taxpayers who are aware of it-is the least malignant part of the foundation picture. It is the political and social impact of these foundations which is devastating. So serious is the matter, in fact, that even the irascible Congressman. Patman has not dared venture into such affairs, knowing that the trail is littered with the bleached bones of, imprudent Congressional investigators who sought to reveal how the Rockefellers are using the foundations in their grab for complete domination of the United States, The first of the Congressional Committees to attempt such an investigation was the c.o.x Committee, created in 1952 under the leaders.h.i.+p of Congressman Eugene E.c.o.x, a Democrat from Georgia. Warren Weaver notes in U. S, Philanthropic Foundations that the official purpose of this Committee was to determine which -foundations and organizations are using their resources for purposes other than the purposes for which they were established, and especially to determine which such foundations and organizations are using their resources for un-American and subversive activities or for purposes not in the interest or tradition of the United States.”

”Liberal” Democrats in control of Congress first delayed the appropriation of funds for the c.o.x Committee, then gave it only six months to conclude an investigation that would properly require several years.

c.o.x hoped to expose foundation fraud and the subversives, behind it; but, as Dwight Mac Donald has pointed out, ” the strategy misfired, because the Democratic leaders, who were still in control of the House, boxed the impeccably Americanistic chairman with less dedicated colleagues.” It was all-out war-with billions involved.

The first battle ended with a serious casualty Congressman c.o.x fell gravely ill during the investigation and died.

Without his leaders.h.i.+p, the Committee Report became a whitewash.

One member of that Committee refused to be a party to the Cover up. He was Congressman Carroll Reece of Tennessee, a former Chairman of the Republican National Committee and one of Robert Taft's campaign managers. Reece promptly demanded a new investigation.

The Rockefeller Establishment was frantic that its sacred cows might be butchered. ”The Was.h.i.+ngton Post, closely tied to the Rockefellers, never before known for its sense of public frugality, screamed that the Reece probe was ”wholly unnecessary and was stupidly wasteful of public funds.-”

The heat was on. So much so that when in a speech on the floor of Congress Mr. Reece referred to a ”conspiracy,” his use of the term brought down on his head an avalanche of anger and ridicule from virtually the entire Establishment Press. At the same time, the foundations unleashed an enormous barrage of vilification against the probe.

While the Press was shouting ”- Mc Carthyism, Rockefeller elements in the Republican Party were working behind the scenes to kill the investigation. As Rene Wormser, counsel for the Reece Committee, noted in Human Events for July 5, 1969: A Republican President [Eisenhower, who had the full support of the Rockefellers in his fight against Robert Taft] sat in the White House. The House of Representatives and all its committees were Republican controlled. Mr. Reece was a distinguished and important Republican .... Yet, when a committee of five members was appointed to conduct the foundation investigation, Mr. Reece found that, of the four others appointed with him, three had been selected from among members of the House who had voted against the investigation.

The key agent in Rockefeller efforts to break up the investigation was Congressman Wayne Hays of Ohio, a member of the Committee. During the inquiry, two tennis-shoe types decided to play Agatha Christie and began trailing Hays. They discovered that he went to the same Was.h.i.+ngton hotel for a closed luncheon on a specific day each week. Dressing as cleaning women, the ladie, investigated and established that Hays was reporting to representatives of several major foundations. Rent Wormser comments in Human Events on the Hays' tactics, Mr. Hays showed himself exceptionally adept at disruption. For example, in one session of 185 minutes, he resorted to constant interruption 246 times. He refused to obey rules of the committee. He insulted and vilified witnesses, counsel to the committee and committee members themselves. His intransigence finally caused' a termination of the hearings.

The brazen Congressman Hays even explained the purpose of his conduct to Counsel Wormser. Mr.

Wormser noted in his book, Foundations: Their Power and Influence: -. . . Mr. Hays told us one day that ”the White House” had been in touch with him and asked him if be would cooperate to kill the committee.”

Because of limited time, staff, and money, the Reece Committee was forced to concentrate its investigation or various Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations, and on the huge Ford Foundation.

The Committee found that one of the first areas into which John D. invested his money was education.

Daddy Oilbucks put his a.s.sistant, Fred Gates, in charge of his General Education Board. Gates tipped the Rockefeller philosophy on education in the Board's Occasional Paper No.1; In our dreams we have limitless resources and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk.

Later, the General Education Board expanded horizons to take into its ”molding hands” the city folk at well. To this end the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations, which often had interlocking directorates and many times acted in unison, began in the early Thirties to back John Dewey and his Marxist educationalists with enormous amounts of money.

As Rene Wormser observes: Research and experimental stations were established at selected universities, notably Columbia, Stanford, and Chicago. Here some of the worst mischief in recent education-was born. In these Rockefeller-and-Carnegie established vineyards worked many of the princ.i.p.al characters in the story of the suborning of American education. Here foundations nurtured some of the most ardent academic advocates of upsetting the American system and supplanting it with a Socialist state....

The Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations had jumped into the financing of education and the social sciences with both Left feet. For example, the foundations (princ.i.p.ally Carnegie and Rockefeller) stimulated two-thirds of the total endowment funding of all inst.i.tutions of higher learning in America during the first third of this century. During this period the Carnegie-Rockefeller complex supplied 20 % of the total income of colleges and universities and became in fact, if not in name, a sort of U.S. Ministry of Education. The result was a sharp Socialist-Fascist turn. As Rene Wormser, Counsel for the Reece Committee, reports: A very powerful complex of foundations and allied organizations has developed over the years to exercise a high degree of control over education. Part of this complex, and ultimately responsible for it, are the Rockefeller and Carnegie groups of foundations.

These foundations were, by way of grants amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars, responsible for the nationwide acceptance of avowed socialist John Dewey's theories of progressive education and permissiveness -the products of which have been marching on our college campuses for the past two decades.

Traditionalist teachers, who had been strongly resisting Deweyism, were swamped by education propagandists backed with a flood of Rockefeller-Carnegie dollars. At the same time the National Education a.s.sociation, the country's chief education lobby, was also financed largely by the Rockfellers and Carnegie foundations.

It, too, threw its considerable weight behind the Dewey philosophies. As an NEA report maintained in 1934:.

A dying laissez-faire must be completely destroyed and all of us, including the ”owners,” must be subjected to a large degree of social control.

Since America's public school system was decentralized, the foundations had concentrated on influencing schools of education (particularly Columbia, the sp.a.w.ning ground for Deweyism), and on financing the writing of textbooks which were subsequently adopted nationwide. These foundation- produced textbooks were so heavily slanted in favor of socialism that Wormser concluded:”- It is difficult to believe that the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Education a.s.sociation could have supported these textbooks. But the fact is that Rockefeller financed them and the N.E.A. promoted them very widely.- Little wonder that Reece Committee Counsel Wormser says evidence compiled during and after the Reece investigation of foundations: leads one to the conclusion that there was, indeed something in the nature of an actual conspiracy among certain leading educators in the United States to bring about socialism through the use of our school systems...

Congressman c.o.x had denounced these foundations for precisely these reasons. He named in particular the Rockefeller Foundation, -whose funds have been used to finance individuals and organizations whose business it has been to get communism into the private and public schools of the country, to talk down America and play up Russia....

It goes without saying that, by controlling the textbooks, the progressivists gained an open sesame to the minds of millions of students in the government schools. As John T. Flynn observed, it wasn't necessary to poison every gla.s.s of water coming out of every tap in a given community. It was necessary only to drop one cup of poison into the reservoir.

So successful was this conspiracy that by June of 1955, the Progressive Education a.s.sociation which had been founded by John Dewey officially disbanded. Dr. H. Gordon Hullfish, the a.s.sociation's president, explained: Founded in 1919 the PEA was a protest movement against traditional education, based in large part up on the philosophy of John Dewey. One reason for PEA's end is that many of the practices. It has advocated have been adopted by the nation's schools.

This progressive education is Rockefeller education. After all, they planned for it, they promoted it, and they paid for it!

Those who control education will over a period of several generations control a nation. The Rockefellers have for five or six decades been a controlling influence in the direction of American education.

While education is a powerful tool for controlling the thinking and outlook of people, it is not the only means.

Religion is also an important molder of public opinion.

For many years the Rockefeller Dynasty has bankrolled the Union Theological Seminary of New York, which has done so much to turn the clergy towards state socialism fascism, and to destroy the tenets of traditional Christianity. The highly influential seminary is known for turning out ” Christian- Communists.

The family's chief religious philanthropy for a number of years was the notorious Federal Council of Churches, which was p.r.o.nounced by US Naval Intelligence in 1936 as one of the most dangerous, subversive organizations in the country. According to Naval Intelligence: It is a large radical -pacifist- organization, and probably represents 20,000,000 Protestants in the United States. However, its leaders.h.i.+p consists of a small group which dictates its policies. It is always extremely active in any matters against national defense.

In its many official p.r.o.nouncements, the Federal Council attacked free enterprise, capitalism and the American way of life, and boldly advocated Socialism. In an official report in 1932,the Federal Council stated: ” The Christian ideal calls for hearty support of a planned economic system.... It demands that cooperation shall replace compet.i.tion as a fundamental method.”

At a full meeting in Indianapolis in December,1932, the Federal Council adopted unanimously this Socialist creed: ”-The churches should stand for social planning and control of the credit and monetary system and the economic processes.