TOPICS:Claire BernishConspiracyElite
May 23, 2016
As you begin to understand world governments don’t have your best interests in mind — that enemies of the State could more aptly be called enemies of the globe’s corporate and banking elite — power comes sharply into focus. Those who actually hold the power control the world’s economies, and it’s clear the fates of over 7.4 billion souls now inhabiting the planet are, at best, the least of their concern.
Of those at the top of food chain, so to speak, a small collection of families dictates both domestic and foreign policy — mainly through fueling war and conflict for the good of the military and pharmaceutical industries, and to a greater extent, corporate and central banks.
Five families, in particular, have made a killing off killing — from the enormously lucrative business of debt it creates to the industries feeding off the plundering of world resources — and therefore control the world.
5. Rothschild
Perhaps the most well-known among those five are the Rothschilds, whose dominance of central banks, nefarious insider trading, and nearly invisible hand in world governance — without consideration for the greater good — frequently earns the blanket description, evil.
Mayer Amschel Rothschild’s dealing in rare coins and antiques in Frankfurt, Germany, in the 1760s earned a rich patronage, allowing him to broaden his focus to include banking by the 1790s. In its 2005 list of 20 of “The Most Influential Businessmen” of all time, Forbes describes Rothschild as “a founding father of international finance,” who “helped invent modern banking by introducing concepts such as diversification, rapid communication, confidentiality and high volume.”
Carrying on the various aspects of the family businesses, Rothschild’s five sons “effectively formed a multinational bank.” During the Napoleonic Wars, they facilitated “loans to warring regimes and traded in cotton, arms, and wheat in defiance of Napoleon’s ban on British exports” — cementing the family’s prominence in political circles as well as influence over governmental affairs. Nathan Mayer Rothschild formed the eponymous bank in London and financed the Duke of Wellington’s interests during those wars.
Estimates of the Rothschild family’s net worth vary greatly, in part because Mayer Amschel dictated a male-only inheritance structure in his will, forcing female descendants into family marriages to maintain their grasp on wealth. Additionally, the sheer number of family members and locations of Rothschild financial and business dealings make assessing the totality of family wealth virtually impossible — though it’s rumored to be in the hundreds of billions.
Cloaked in secrecy for centuries, rumors concerning the Rothschild family run the gamut — including the widely held suspicion it maintains a degree of control over the U.S. federal reserve. One defining fact about the Rothschilds — noted by both establishment historians and so-called conspiracy theorists, alike — has been its astonishing abilities to not only maintain such a high degree of wealth and influence, but to keep numerous businesses under family control over such a long period of time.
Mergers and partnerships aid have absolutely assisted the Rothschilds’ rise to power, such as the 2012 purchase by the Rothschild Investment Trust of a 37 percent stake in Rockefeller Financial Services — which cemented the family’s financial ties to the second dynasty in this list.
4. Rockefeller
Son of a conman, John Davidson Rockefeller effectively began to solidify his American empire after buying out several partners who owned Cleveland’s largest oil refinery in 1865 — which became the foundation for the formation of the Standard Oil Company of Ohio in 1870. By then purchasing rival refineries and distributing its oil around the world, Standard — and Rockefeller — established a staggering monopoly on the industry, cornering some 90 percent of America’s refineries and pipelines.
Rockefeller’s pursuit of the market extended to every facet of Standard’s business, and “In order to exploit economies of scale, Standard Oil did everything from build its own oil barrels to employ its own scientists to figure out new uses for petroleum by-products,” according to History.com. Simply labeling Standard Oil a monopoly not only undercuts the company’s breadth, but downplays the savage and covert tactics Rockefeller employed to maintain its control over American oil.
Thanks in part to a series of 19 articles by Ida Tarbell, published in 1902 by McClure’s Magazine, the U.S. attorney under Pres. Theodore Roosevelt sued Standard Oil of New Jersey under the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. Over the course of the 1908 trial, Standard Oil’s dubious practices came to light — including secret deals with railroads, corporate spies, and bribes of elected officials, among other things.
Rockefeller “was accused of crushing out competition, getting rich on rebates from railroads, bribing men to spy on competing companies, of making secret agreements, of coercing rivals to join the Standard Oil Company under threat of being forced out of business, building up enormous fortunes on the ruins of other men, and so on,” the New York Times summarized in 1937.
Though the trial resulted in the fractioning of Standard Oil into 34 companies, the government permitted the original stockholders, including Rockefeller, to keep their ownership stakes while putatively acting as competitors. Thus, the monopoly effectively continued for at least another decade afterward, though it arguably lives on in the exertion of power by companies like ExxonMobil, Chevron, and BP — just a few of those resulting from the official destruction of the Standard Oil empire.
Called “history’s richest man” by Forbes in 2014, at the time of John D. Rockefeller’s death in 1937, “his assets equaled 1.5% of America’s total economic output. To control an equivalent share today would require a net worth of about $340 billion, more than four times that of Bill Gates,” whom the publication listed as the world’s richest man at the time of the article.
Other estimates imagine Rockefeller’s worth closer to $400 billion, and considering his habit of shady business practices, it wouldn’t be difficult to believe some of his fortune remained secreted away from the public spotlight.
All notoriety aside, Rockefeller stands as a testament to self-education, with his only formal training being a ten-week course in accounting — though it remains a matter of conjecture what good could have been accomplished had he focused his craftiness on other pursuits.
In 2015, the approximately 200 descendants comprising the Rockefeller family were conservatively estimated to have a combined net worth of $11 billion — placing the dynasty well below the top of the list of America’s richest, at #22.
Grandson David Rockefeller was, in 1954, among the founding members of the Bilderberg Group — whose highly secretive annual meetings have long been fodder for theories that ultra-elite families seek to gain or maintain control of world governments.