There’s a lot of discussion about how Rockefellers and Rothschilds run the Illuminati, but in truth the trail into the oligarchies ruling the planet runs wider and deeper than two families from two countries. There are many others jousting for a slice of the skim. Here in the USA, the Duponts, certainly qualify, but also the Mellons.
Banker Andrew Mellon was appointed Secretary of the Treasury by President Warren Harding, known today as one of the most corrupt executives to occupy the Oval Office. His administration was brief, however, as Harding died unexpectedly under mysterious circumstances while visiting San Francisco. Some say it was flu, others blame a heart attack, but we’ll never know for sure because his widow refused an autopsy, while rushing back to Washington to quickly burn all his papers.
Mellon kept his job through two more administrations, which shows how immense his influence was. He invented trickle-down economics and cut the tax rate on the richest Americans from 75% to 25%, while reducing corporate and inheritance taxes. Although he was a great friend to the super rich, eventually Congress launched an impeachment hearing against him and began marshaling evidence of corruption, which prompted Mellon to swiftly resign to become Ambassador to England, always a plum posting for oligarchy insiders. He remained only a year, however, before retiring from public life, indicating the move may have been a diversion from a sticky situation.
Among Mellon’s most notable accomplishments was the vast reduction of WWI debt owed by Germany and France, as well as the creation of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. He unleashed his nephew-in-law Harry J. Anslinger to foment a war on marijuana and jazz culture after the Bureau of Prohibition became obsolete. Creating a war on plants was Mellon’s solution for keeping his alcohol vice squad intact.
President Franklin Roosevelt detested Mellon and launched an IRS investigation which determined he owed two million in back taxes, even though Mellon was the third largest tax payer behind Rockefeller and Ford. Rather than pay up, however, Mellon justified his reduced payment by explaining that as Secretary of the Treasury, he could set his own tax rate on himself according to what he felt he owed. The IRS dropped the case after Mellon’s death.
In 1958, Richard Mellon Scaife inherited a large chunk of the Mellon fortune after the death of this father Alan, who’d served as a major in the Office of Strategic Services, precursor of the CIA. In fact, a number of Mellons can be found in crucial positions in the OSS. While a freshman, Scaife was kicked out of Yale. He’d rolled a keg of beer down a flight of stairs, where it collided with another student, breaking his leg. When his mother died in 1972, Scaife became a billionaire and took control of the vast Mellon empire. According to his sister Cordelia, Richard, his mother and her were “gutter drunks.”
Scaife became a supporter of Barry Goldwater and was crushed by his resounding defeat at the polls. In order to take control of the country from the Democrats, it became necessary to muster a grassroots campaign to derail the exploding counterculture revolution. Scaife would soon either create or take control of countless propaganda fronts and think tanks, and by working divisive issues like abortion and gun control, the operation began constructing what became known as “the moral majority.”
Robert LeFevre was one of the first libertarians and founded a school in Colorado designed to indoctrinate leaders for a right-wing revolution. LeFevre became the model for a character in a Robert Heinlein novel, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Among those who attended the school was Kerry Thornley, who served at the secret Atsuki base in Japan and became a close associate of Lee Harvey Oswald, as well as members of the now-famous Koch family, who helped create the notoriously conspiratorial John Birch Society and also backed Goldwater’s failed presidential bid.
On the other side of the dialectic, however, Scaife’s cousin Billy Mellon Hitchcock became Tim Leary’s sugar daddy, and began bankrolling an LSD distribution network that was soon raking in illegal profits. One of Billy’s operatives was Ronald H. Stark, who apparently carried a copy of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress wherever he appeared. And Stark appeared in some of the strangest places, like a Zelig planted inside the counterculture.
In 1983, Scaife held a meeting with FBI informant John Rees and Chip Berlet, formally of the National Student Association, a CIA-front. The purpose of the meeting was to establish a hit squad on the emerging Lyndon LaRouche organization that was recruiting undergraduates (many of whom were of Jewish descent) into a political action hit-team aimed at discrediting both the counterculture and the new right-wing movement being fomented by key families around the country, most notably: Scaife in Pittsburgh, Bradley in Milwaukee, Olin in New York, Smith Richardson in Pittsboro, Coors in Denver, and Koch in Wichita.
Chip Berlet briefly became Washington DC editor of High Times magazine, and hosted A.J. Weberman when he came to investigate the JFK assassination. Thornley and Weberman would play key roles in sheep-dipping E. Howard Hunt as key instigator of the JFK hit, a rabbit hole I believe was cleverly devised by James Angleton to shield the real operatives, Ted Shackley and Johnny Roselli. They’d been charged with the mission to kill Castro, but after JFK called off the hit and began working for world peace, the CIA-sponsored hit team went off-the-shelf and hit JFK instead of Castro.
When you peer deeply into these events, it seems many of these famous altercations are staged dialectics for propaganda effect. By simultaneously funding Communists and anti-Communists, they sought control over debate parameters as engineered feuds have a way of building true believers on both sides of the divide.