From: "Linda Minor" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> As you may know, LaRouche's group, EIR, attempted to trace modern financial institutions as far back as possible. They concluded that they originated with the Venetian banking system, which was controlled by the fondi (in italics--the plural of fondo), which translated loosely I think means "fund". Quoting now, from pp. 96-100: [I]nvestment banking in the U.S. is now almost wholly controlled by the ancient European fondi, that is, family trust funds whose pedigree goes back to the financing of the Crusades by Genoa and Venice. >From 1971 to 1981, in the decade after then-Treasury Under-secretary Paul Volcker removed its gold backing, the U.S. dollar fell to a mere 60% of its pre-devaluation level, while the combined effects of inflation and lower stock prices devalued American equity to about 30% of its 1971 level in terms of gold. From the standpoint of the old oligarchical fondi, secured through gold, American equity could be had for a fifth of its pre-1971 price during the late 1970s. This is the period of the grand reflow of capital to the U.S., measured by the International Monetary Fund as the "statistical discrepancy in the world current account balance." ... Among modern financial institutions, the Assicurazioni Generali of Venice, the heir to the old Venetian fortunes, provides the most clues to the operations of the fondi. The "Generali," as an insurance organization, is a clearing house for the operations of numerous fondi, each one represented by its frontman, one of the principal European investment banks. Its board of directors consists of the principal banking fortunes of Western Europe, each of whom is to be found in the succeeding chapters drawn from the 1978 edition of Dope, Inc. These directors included: *Baron August Von Finck, reputedly the richest man in Germany until his recent death (with the possible exception of Johannes von Thurn und Taxis), owner of the Merck und Finck investment bank. ...The bank's importance is a function of the fondo of the old Bavarian royal family of Wittelsbach. *Elie de Rothschild, of the French Rothschild family; *Baron Pierre Lambert, the Belgian cousin of the Rothschild family and proprietor of the Banque Bruxelles-Lambert (and a force on Wall Street through Drexel Burnham Lambert); *Jocelyn Hambro of Hambro's Bank, which owned a quarter of Michele Sindona's Banca Privata when it went under in 1974; *Pierpaolo Luzzatto Fequiz, of the ancient Venetian Luzzatto family, whom we shall encounter later in this chapter in the company of the notorious Banco Ambrosiano; *Franco Orsini Bonacossi of the ancient Orsini family, whose origin includes members of the ancient Roman senate. Europe's two most powerful investment banks, Lazard Freres (of the thousand-year-old David-Weill family) and the Banque Paribas (founded by Venetian Jews based in the Ottoman Empire trade) are the largest stockholders in the Assicurazioni through a variety of shells. The sister Venetian insurance company of the "Generali," the Riunione Adriatica di Sicurta, includes among its directors members of the Giustiniani family of Genoa and Venice, descendants of the vile Roman Emperor Justinian; the Doria family, the chief Genoese financiers of the Spanish Hapsburgs; as well as the current Duke of Alba, descendant of the brutal Spanish marcher-lord whom the Genoese bankers sent to the Netherlands four centuries ago to crush their independence. Assicurazioni Generali and the Bank for International Settlements of Basel (the "central bank for central banks"), are the world's only financial institutions to keep their books in the old pre-war Swiss gold franc, the "hard currency" which the fondi employed to buy American equities at a dime on the dollar during the first fumbling years of the Roosevelt administration. They waited long to avenge themselves against the upstart United States. Their chance came with the break of the dollar from its gold backing in 1971. Given the collapse of Wall Street stock prices during the long agony of the dollar between the 1967 collapse of the pound sterling and the aftermath of the 1971 debacle, it is not surprising that every major brokerage firm ran into trouble no later than the mid-1970s. Lehman Brothers, once the most powerful firm on the Street, was the first to raise the white flag. It secured, through offices of George Ball, a 7% investment from Banca de la Svizzera Italiana, a Swiss bank which functioned as a virtual Swiss subsidiary of the Banca Commerciale d'Italia--the bank at whose headquarters the infamous Propaganda-2 lodge of Italian freemasonry had been founded years earlier. The Banca de la Svizzera Italiana (BSI), based in Lugano, Switz., specialized in covert movement of Italian flight capital into the U.S. One by one the other major Wall Street houses fell under the control of the old European fondi. The dominant mergers and acquisitions operation on Wall Street, Lazard Freres, had never been an American house in any event; it was always dominated by the French-Jewish David-Weill family, and only managed for the interim by its then chairman, Andre Meyer, when no siutable family member was available. Drexel Burnham Lambert, the sixth-largest house, sold out its entire capital to the Lambert family of Brussels, the Belgian cousins of the Rothschild family. A.G. Becker, an old-line Chicago brokerage firm, merged into a menage-a-trois with S.G. Warburg, the supposedly independent branch of the Warburg banking family, and the ancient French-Ottoman Empire firm, the B anque de Paris det des Pays-Bas (Paribas), to create Warburg-Becker-Paribas (subsequently merged into Merrill Lynch during 1984). With virtually no exceptions, Wall Street's major houses sold out to the fondi. Finally, in 1981, Wall Street's most powerful investment bank (with the possible exception of Henry Kissinger's employer Goldman Sachs), Salomon Brothers, merged with Phibro, the trading arm of the Oppenheimer interests. As we shall see below, the absorption of Salomon Brothers, investment bankers to New York's Citibank, had the most devastating implications of all. ==== One of the biggest enemies of the Venetian system is Webster Tarpley, co-author of the most thorough George Bush biography written so far. At the website where the Bush book is posted in full http://www.tarpley.net/, Tarpley has a series of essays about Venice: http://www.tarpley.net/venconsp.htm Most important, Venice is today through its Cini Foundation and Societe' Europeenne de Culture the think tank and staging area for the Club of Rome and related deployments. Venice is the supranational homeland of the New Dark Ages gang, the unifying symbol for the most extreme Utopian lunatic fringe in the international intelligence community today. Get to know Venice. Then look back to the monetarist imbecility of Paul Volcker, at the ideological fanaticism that radiates forth from the Bank of America, Chase Manhattan, the Bank for International Settlements and the rest. You will recognize the unmistakable putrid stench of a Venetian canal, where the rotting marble palaces of generations of parasites are corroded by the greatest cynicism and cruelty the world has ever known. ...Indistinguishable from slave-gathering operations were piracy and buccaneering, the other staples of the Venetian economy. Wars with Genoa or with other powers were eagerly sought-after opportunities to loot the enemy's shipping with clouds of corsairs, and victory or defeat usually depended more on the success of the privateering than on the direct combat of the galleys, cogs, and soldiers of the battle fleets. Piracy shades over imperceptibly into routine commerce. Through decades of treachery and mayhem, the Venetians were able to establish themselves as the leading entrepot port of the Mediterranean world, where, as in London up to 1914, the vast bulk of the world's strategic commodities were brought for sale, warehousing, and transshipment. The most significant commodities were spices and silks from India and China, destined for markets in Central and Western Europe. Europe in turn produced textiles and metals, especially precious metals, for export to the East. Venetian production from the earliest period until the end was essentially nil, apart from salt and the glass manufactures of Murano. The role of the Venetian merchant is that of the profiteering middleman who rooks both buyer and seller, backing up his monopolization of the distribution and transportation systems with the war galleys of the battle fleet. The Venetian approach to trade was ironically dirigistic. Venice asserted a monopoly of all trade and shippiing in the northern Adriatic. The Serenissima's own functionaries organized merchant galley fleets that were sent out one or two times a year to key ports. The galleys were built by the regime in its shipyards, known as the Arsenal, for many centuries the largest factory in the world. They were leased to oligarchs and consortia of oligarchs at a type of auction. Every detail of the operation of these galley fleets, including the obligation to travel in convoy, was stipulated by peremptory state regulation. ... Venice lasted as long as it did because of the effective subordination of the oligarchs and families to the needs of the oligarchy as a whole, by the ironclad delimitation of noble status to those already noble in 1297 and their male descendants, and by continuous terror against the masses and against the nobility itself. ... The Venice-Genoa partnership is in evidence first of all in the banking side of the Spanish looting of the New World. Venice got control of the silver coming from the Americas, shifting to a silver standard from the previous gold standard in the middle of the sixteenth century. This silver was used to pay for the spices and other products from the East. Venice was extremely liquid at this time, with about 14 million ducats in coins in reserve around 1600. At about the same time, incredibly, the Venetian regime had completed the process of paying off its entire public debt, leaving the state with no outstanding obligations of any type. This ov erall highly liquid situation is a sure sign that flights of capital are underway, in the direction of the countries singled out by the GIOVANI as future partners or victims: France, England, and the Netherlands. The Genoese around the St. George's Bank received virtually the entire world's circulating gold stocks. The two cities teamed up starting around 1579 at the Piacenza Fair, a prototype of a clearing house for European banks, which soon had a turnover of 20 million ducats a year. This fair was a precursor of the post-Versailles Bank for International Settlements. In 1603, Venice and Genoa assumed direction of the finances of Stuart England, and imparted their characteristic method to the British East India Company. It is also this tandem that was present at the creation of the great Amsterdam Bank, the financial hinge of the seventeenth century, and of the Dutch East India Company. Venice and Genoa were also the midwives for the great financial power growing up in Geneva, which specialized in controlling the French public debt and in fostering the delphic spirits of the Enlightenment. The Venetians, in cooperation with the restored--that is, degenerated--Medici interests, began a major move into maritime and other types of insurance. These ventures live on today in the biggest business enterprise associated with Venice, the Assicurazioni Generali Venezia, one of the biggest if not THE biggest insurance and real-estate holdings in the world. On May 12, 1797, the Gran Consiglio obeyed Napoleon's ultimatum and voted itself out of existence. Four thousand French infantrymen paraded on St. Mark's Square, where foreign troops had never before in history been seen. The golden Bucentoro was burned and the gold carted off. The Venetian "Republic" was finished, but it continued most emphatically to exist in less visible but highly effective forms. One particular of the last years of Venice is of special interest to us: during the American Revolution about 3,000 Venetian naval personnel, corresponding to about one third of the total available strength, were serving with the British Royal Navy. .... Today, the Club of Rome is the institution that represents the most concentrated essence of Venetian influence and the Venetian method. The Club of Rome wants to convince the great powers and peoples of the world to commit collective suicide by accepting the genocidal doctrine of zero growth. It also hopes to abolish the sovereign nation as a vehicle for economic growth and scientific progress. Club of Rome founder Aurelio Peccei has just written a new book titled ONE HUNDRED PAGES FOR THE FUTURE, a global review of the impact of the Club of Rome, and particularly since its 1972 release of the zero-growth model LIMITS TO GROWTH was published, a series of social movements has sprung up under the sponsorship of the ideas in the book. These--the women's movement, the peace movement, Third World national liberation movements, gay rights, civil liberties, ecologists, consumer and minority rights, etc.--must now be welded together into one movement for a single strategic goal: the implementation of a zero-growth international order. The Venetian problem remains with us today. Truly, the most urgent task of this generation of mankind is to definitively liquidate the horror that is Venice. -----Original Message----- From: Catherine Austi Fitts <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Tuesday, November 23, 1999 4:25 PM Subject: RE: [CIA-DRUGS] Ranier E. Gut, Chairman, Credit-Suisse >From: "Catherine Austi Fitts" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > >I have been trying to find Dope Inc and some others in that series but do >not have it yet. I would love it if you could post it up. Thanks. > >-----Original Message----- >From: Linda Minor [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] >Sent: Monday, November 22, 1999 11:14 PM >To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >Subject: Re: [CIA-DRUGS] Ranier E. Gut, Chairman, Credit-Suisse > >From: "Linda Minor" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > >Catherine, >Have you ever read the LaRouche-published classic Dope, Inc.? There are >lots of names of investments bankers, etc. that you might recognize to help >you. > >> --------------------------- ONElist Sponsor ---------------------------- GRAB THE GATOR! FREE SOFTWARE DOES ALL THE TYPING FOR YOU! Tired of filling out forms and remembering passwords? Gator fills in forms and passwords with just one click! Comes with $50 in free coupons! <a href=" http://clickme.onelist.com/ad/gator4 ">Click Here</a> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
