Tag Archives: Hamilton

The CIA, Carl Oglesby, and Business International Corp.

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Update:

[I should clarify that the article on the site, which is devoted to LaRouche is not from the EIR itself, but from a critic, who has added some more interesting details to the story, in the comment section0.

Update:

Just to be clear, my link to the Lyndon LaRouche site (at the bottom) isn’t meant to support the man’s theories.  LaRouche is a Hamiltonian. I am not. He was also involved, allegedly, in cult-like behavior toward followers.

However, LaRouche, as even his strongest critics (like Chip Berlet here) admit, has good research. [ To clarify, the piece is not by LaRouche but by a critic who keeps tabs on his work and thus stores an archive of it.]

Linking to people like LaRouche, Stewart Rhodes of Oath-keepers (whom someone now informs me is considered a neo-Nazi)  is a no-no, apparently, in the PC world.

One is supposed to link only to certified organic, FDA-approved, brand-name thinkers.

On top of that, I just read today that the phrase “Talmudic Jew” is considered “Nazi” language.  Now, I don’t think I’ve ever used it, but I’ve surely written somewhere about Talmudic Judaism.

And to add to my sins, I’ve defended Ayn Rand (not that I am a Randian by any means). But when the media piles on someone,  some instinct in me compels me to rush to their defense.

Dear lord.  We say “Biblical Christian” all the time. And “Shia Muslim.” What about “Vedic Hindu?” Those are fine, aren’t they? Why the difference?

I know I can denounce the “bourgeoisie” as vermin all day long and still be OK. I can even talk about  femi-nazis without a  problem. ….just so long as I approve of Chip Berlet’s employers bombing the right sort of victims.

I give two figs for such puerile nonsense.

Because someone might read the  theories behind Hitler or Mao and try to understand them, it doesn’t follow that they are Nazis or Maoists themselves.

Vegetarianism doesn’t become Nazi become Hitler adopted it.

Hitler, Mao, PolPot…as monstrous as the crimes they enabled might be, they are not qualitatively different from the crimes of the average man.

No untouchables please, whether physically – through legal deprivations of their rights…or intellectually….through ghettoization and demonization.

ORIGINAL POST:

Carl Oglesby: “Revolutions do not take place in velvet boxes. . . . Nuns will be raped and bureaucrats will be disemboweled.”

Read more at http://politicaloutcast.com/2013/04/violence-and-mayhem-have-long-been-a-tool-of-the-left/#GbpcTScjJoQ0Mycu.99

One of the most respected student leaders of the antiwar movement in the 1960s was Carl Oglesby, who worked with Murray Rothbard, says Charles Burris at Lew Rockwell.

Not being more than a cursory student of this period, I did a little digging.

Here’s what I came up with:

Oglesby was initially a technical writer/editor with a defense contractor called Bendix, before entering politics. He soon rose to the head of  Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the best-known antiwar group.

The SDS was a splinter group from the Student League for Industrial Democracy, which was affiliated with the  National Student Association, formed in 1947.

The NSA was outed in 1966 as a CIA front.

(also here).

This was in an expose in Ramparts Magazine, a Catholic left-wing magazine.

The writers were Robert Scheer and Stanley Scheinbaum, who is described here as a communist activist.

This Catholic writer says Ramparts was a communist front posing as Catholic outlet to better attack the church.

In 2006, I wrote a piece called “Portrait of the CIA as an artist,” about cultural outlets that were set up or operated by the CIA, as the Cold War developed. Among the CIA-funded outfits was the Congress for Cultural Freedom .

All this is well known.

Besides that, several leaders in the antiwar movement, including feminist leader Gloria Steinem, received funding from the CIA.

Again, this is well-known.

New to me was that there was a  meeting set up between the business establishment and the leadership of the SDS. The  outfit involved was something called Business International, which seems to be the same Business International Corporation for which Barack Obama worked.

It’s long been considered an intelligence front.

So, you have a high-security employee of a defense contractor that was working for NASA and was later affiliated with Raytheon, entering an anti-government student movement, quickly becoming its spokesman, and letting the CIA spy on the movement without a qualm,…..but, yo,  it’s all good…

The ex- Bendix employee  suspects the company is an intelligence front trying to co-opt the movement, but that’s a good thing, because there’s an even worse bunch of business interests called “cowboys” that needs to be bested.

So, no problem.

The student movement thereafter develops a violent faction that blows up – literally as well as figuratively –   while from 1968 onward, the whole antiwar “scene” turns into a drug-addled, bead-wearing, orgiastic escape into self-help.

Oglesby worked closely with Murray Rothbard, about whose interactions with suspected CIA-affiliated figures – James Dale Davidson (of Agora Inc.), Robert Kephart, and Noam Chomsky –   I’ve blogged at length.

The Business International connection adds to the list.

Of course, I make no hard and fast claims. I just raise the issue.

Some links:

“Clinton, Quigley, and Conspiracy,” Daniel Brandt (NameBase.org):

“Almost everything that happened to the student movement (Lila: the antiwar protests against US involvement in Vietnam) is best explained without conspiracy theories. There are, however, some bits of curious evidence that should be briefly mentioned. Each of these alone doesn’t amount to much, but taken together they suggest that something more was happening — the possibility that by 1969 a significant sector of the ruling class had decided to buy into the counterculture for purposes of manipulation and control:

  • Student leaders James Kunen[19] and Carl Oglesby[20] both report that in the summer of 1968, the organization Business International, which had links to the CIA, sent high-level representatives to meet with SDS. These people wanted to help organize demonstrations for the upcoming conventions in Chicago and Miami. SDS refused the offer, but the experience convinced Oglesby that the ruling class was at war with itself, and he began developing his Yankee-Cowboy theory.
  • Tom Hayden, who by 1986 was defending his state assembly seat against those trying to oust him because of his anti-war record, was quoted as saying that while he was protesting against the Vietnam War, he was also cooperating with U.S. intelligence agents.[21]
  • The CIA was of course involved with LSD testing, but there is also evidence that it was later involved in the distribution of LSD within the counterculture.[22]
  • Feminist leader Gloria Steinem[23] and congressman Allard Lowenstein both had major CIA connections. Lowenstein was president of the National Student Association, which was funded by the CIA until exposed by Ramparts magazine in 1967. He and another NSA officer, Sam Brown, were key organizers behind the 1969 Vietnam Moratorium.[24] (In 1977 Brown became the director of ACTION under Jimmy Carter; his activism, which was more intense and more sincere than Clinton’s, didn’t hurt his career either.)
  • Symbionese Liberation Army leader Donald DeFreeze appears to have been conditioned in a behavior modification program sponsored by elements of U.S. intelligence.[25]
  • The CIA has a long history of infiltrating international organizations, from labor to students to religion. I submit that if an anti-war activist was involved in this type of international jet-setting, the burden is on them to show that they were not compromised. Clinton comes close to assuming this burden.

For more on Carl Oglesby’s meeting with Business International (the CIA front):

“Omnisicient Gentlemen of the Atlantic,” Maureen Tcacik at The Baffler, 2012 (Tcacik is an exceptionally talented writer and astute analyst of politics):

“In one of the many surreal chapters of Journey in Faith, Gene [ Lila: Gene Bradley] later attempted to influence—thought-lead?—what he saw as the perilously bereft civic “education” of the student left. The year was 1968, and the official story is that he was researching a Harvard Business Review feature—which he produced, although the research seems to have been rather more intensive than required. Gene describes consulting with the FBI, a connection made via “mutual good friends,” and a deputy of J. Edgar Hoover’s gladly inviting him to take a look at the Bureau’s secret files on the student left; then traveling through Switzerland, Germany, and France “observing” demonstrations (though none are shared in the book or the story); and, finally, most bizarrely, leading a delegation of fellow businessmen in a “debate” with Students for a Democratic Society leader Carl Oglesby—hosted (“with the best of intentions but with a full measure of naiveté,” he writes) by a concern called the Business International Corporation.

It seems likely that the 1968 summit at which Bradley “debated” one-time SDS president Carl Oglesby was the same SDS-BI meeting referenced in James Simon Kunen’s SDS memoir The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary. In the SDS version, the purpose of the meeting is straightforward. Certain unnamed businessmen who portray themselves as “the left wing of the ruling class” are seeking to “buy off some radicals”—purportedly because they’re rooting for Gene McCarthy to win the presidency. The businessmen “see fascism as the threat, see it coming from [segregationist George] Wallace,” Kunen reports. The idea is that heavy protests, which the businessmen offer to finance, will “make Gene [McCarthy] look more reasonable.”

This stated fear and motive seems dubious. Gene, after all, reported in the first chapter of his memoir how effectively he repressed his own fear of fascists. And the only people spooked by Wallace were those powerless enough to intimidate. Whatever the executives wanted from a bunch of college hippies, though, they were willing to both lie about and pay for. It’s all too easy to see in retrospect that lopsided “debates” of this sort had accumulated into a political reality that, for the lifetime of a college kid in 1968 anyway, was inextricable from the concoctions of Cold War propagandists.

Just the year before, the National Student Association, the dominant campus activism network that had spawned SDS, had been outed (along with the CCF enterprises) as a CIA front. It would not be until the late seventies that the bland-sounding sponsor of the Oglesby Bradley forum, Business International, would concede its own dual role as a CIA operation.”

“Ravens or Pigeons: SDS Meets Business International” (From Lyndon Larouche’s archives):

In his monumental history of SDS, Kirkpatrick Sale arguably makes a monumental goof. In his detailed discussion of 1968, he fails to mention one critical incident: the attempt by former SDS president Carl Oglesby to broker an alliance between SDS and the “Eastern Establishment” via Business International (BI), a firm that published sophisticated economic reports and advised top corporations. Sale’s mistake seems especially odd since the debate over Business International inside SDS was hardly a well-kept secret; there was even a long article about BI in New Left Notes.

The SDS-BI talks inspired the discovery of a supposed war between the “Yankee” and “Cowboy” factions of U.S. capitalism. In April 1968, Oglesby wrote a long article in the National Guardian promoting the idea of a deep split in the ruling class between two capitalist factions that he labeled “Yankees and Cowboys.”12 He argued that SDS should align with the Eastern Establishment Yankees, who, he argued, were anti-war, pro-Bobby Kennedy and opposed to newer and meaner factions of U.S. capital centered in the South and Southwest.13 In an August 1974 Ramparts article, Steve Weissman reports that in 1968 there was even a “vague proposal” by the Business International network to do “whatever was possible” to help SDS stage “a massive demonstration against Humphrey” in Chicago and one against Nixon in Miami.14 Weissman then recalled that SDS “refused the offer.”

In his memoir Ravens in the Storm, Oglesby discusses his negotiations with BI president Eldridge Haynes.15 Oglesby recalls that he first met Haynes at the Gotham Hotel in New York in the spring of 1968. As for Haynes:

He was a Harvard man. He had spent much of his career in the Foreign Service but had left government during the Kennedy years to become a consultant to businesses operating in the “frequently turbulent” countries of the Third World. This work had grown into Business International, Inc. CIA, right?16

The next day Oglesby took part in a roundtable presentation about SDS to a select group that included executives from GM, GE, AT&T, IBM, Ford, the AP, and even “a man from the State Department.” Two weeks later, Oglesby helped organize another dialog between BI clients and half a dozen SDSers from Columbia and CCNY. . . . SDS groups without me continued these meetings, sitting down with BI people four times that spring. . . . Haynes and I kept meeting. A little later that same spring, Haynes popped the big question. “Suppose Robert Kennedy were to become a presidential candidate. Do you imagine, Carl, that SDS might be inclined to support him?”17

Oglesby then explains:

I must confess, too, that I’d been scared of heavy-metal politics from the beginning . . . My fears of SDS’s leftward inclinations were strengthened by my sense, as of the BI meetings, that an alternative to a politics of rage was within our reach, and that it was essential that we choose it. . . . There was no way for us to achieve our objectives, I thought, without at some point establishing a sotto voce relationship with mainstream grown-ups.18

Clearly Haynes had done his homework and chose his first big SDS contact well.

Oglesby relates a conversation he had with Bernardine Dohrn who, like the vast majority of SDS members, opposed any alliance with BI, “sotto voce” or not. Oglesby says that he told Dohrn that even if “Haynes or the CIA has a secret agenda, I believe it’s not to screw us up but to use us in some way to help make RFK president.”

[Lila: as I believe the CIA – and Ron Paul’s campaign – used the Ron Paul libertarians to make Barack Obama president again.]

Dohrn replied:

Well, it could be both, couldn’t it? . . . You say this BI’s thing is to gather intelligence on Third World countries and sell it to the guys you once denounced as corporate imperialists. I don’t understand you, Carl. It seems like you talk one way and act another.“19

Oglesby remarked that Dohrn “was probably right in assuming that BI and Haynes were tied to Kennedy and very possibly to the CIA. . . . But who cared? As far as I was concerned, the more the CIA knew about SDS, the better. We had nothing to hide!”

Gene Bradley was one of the participants in a BI-sponsored meeting with Oglesby. A Christian Science devotee, Bradley headed up the International Management Association. In a 2012 article for The Baffler, Maureen Tkacik notes that Bradley’s life reads like the history of a “big-time spook.”20 In September 1968 Bradley, a vice-president of the National Strategic Information Center as well as a businessman, wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review entitled “What Businessmen Need to Know about the Student Left.” In his memoir The Story of One Man’s Journey in Faith, Bradley reports that as part of his research, “mutual friends” invited him to meet Hoover’s top FBI aide William Sullivan, who let Bradley read FBI files on the New Left. Bradley also recalls debating SDS’s “Carl Ogilsvie.”

Lila:

And, finally, here is Russell Kirk on the progression of Carl Oglesby from high-security employee of  defense contractor Bendix, which made telecom equipment for NASA, to president of  SDS, whose parent organization was a CIA front.

Oglesby was a friend of both Bernadine Dorn and of Hillary Clinton…until he finally left politics to write history and make music.

“Humane Letters and the Clutch of Ideology”

(Russell Kirk, The Imaginative Conservative, March 2012, originally published in The Political Science Reviewer, Fall, 1973)

“Indeed, the eagerness of certain contributors to withdraw from political activism into literary scholarship is almost embarrassing. Take Mr. Carl Oglesby, who once led the riots at the University of Wisconsin.

Mr. Oglesby here gives us an essay entitled “Melville, or Water Consciousness 8c Its madness.” Herman Melville, he says, found a madness he could live with. Ahab was evil, exploiting his crew, and Moby Dick was the victim of Ahab’s imperialism.”

QUOTE FROM OGLEBY

“So with a subdued Melville, I ask: Given some broad estimate of the scale, tempo and rhythm at which protoimperial systems condense out and acquire historical outline and social architecture, then swell and grow fevered, finally either to hang suspended a moment before a sometimes luminously sweeping descent, or else to burst all at once and splash blood everywhere, leaving little behind besides shards, cripples and memories that everyone who survives them pants to forget: given ‘these choices, what is the political utility of the concept anti-imperialism?”
END QUOTE

Russell Kirk:

“Is this rich, beautiful prose, transcending the sorry time? Mr. Oglesby clearly hopes so. But Mr. Oglesby’s prose will make no revolution; it may not even make sense. He sedulously avoids any direct reference to Viet Nam, as if he were writing in the Circum- locution Office – as if he would be prosecuted for so heroic a dissent. One thinks of a remark by Georges Sorel, meant to be approbatory: “Our experience of the Marxian theory of value convinces me of the importance which obscurity of style may lend to a doctrine.

They talk of liberty, but hunger for power; they idolize the People, but serve the ego. If one is bound for Zion, it is not well to plod round a prickly pear planted long ago by Mr. Marx of the British Museum; nor is that a good exercise for rousing the literary imagination. Nevertheless, the cactus land of ideology is perfectly safe for an American writer nowadays.

Blessed are the academic revolutionaries, for they shall know tenure.”

The Bankers And The American Revolution [Correction]

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Update: I didn’t make it clear that I do not subscribe to the theory given in this account of Lincoln as heroic defender of the the republic against the banking cartels. Gary North has written a piece refuting this theory.

I am however interested in the figure of Judah P. Benjamin and in his curious erasure from the history books, when, from many accounts, he was one of the most prominent men of his time. I know the name from a friend who is a Civil War aficionado. But this is the first I’ve read that he was connected in some way to the banking cartel.

ORIGINAL POST

An article at Global Research (“The Federal Reserve Cartel: Freemasons and the House of Rothschild,” Dean Henderson, July 30 2012) discusses the pervasive influence of the banking cartels on the major figures of the American Revolution, as well as on subsequent Presidents. It even suggests (at the end of this excerpt) that there was a  Rothschild connection to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

The article points the finger at Judah P. Benjamin, Confederate Secretary of State.

Others rebut the theory as an anti-Semitic canard (“Banking and the Confederacy,” K. R. Bolton, Alternative Right, July 26, 2011). They point out that Benjamin, a Sephardic Jew married to a Catholic and originally from Haiti, had little to do with the European aristocratic circles in which the Rothschilds and their associates moved.

Here is an excerpt from the four-part Henderson piece:

“All US Masonic lodges are to this day warranted by the British Crown, whom they serve as a global intelligence and counterrevolutionary subversion network. Their most recent initiative is the Masonic Child Identification Program (CHIP). According to Wikipedia, the CHIP programs allow parents the opportunity to create a kit of identifying materials for their child, free of charge. The kit contains a fingerprint card, a physical description, a video, computer disk, or DVD of the child, a dental imprint, and a DNA sample.

The First Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia in 1774 under the Presidency of Peyton Randolph, who succeeded Washington as Grand Master of the Virginia Lodge.  The Second Continental Congress convened in 1775 under the Presidency of Freemason John Hancock.  Peyton’s brother William succeeded him as Virginia Lodge Grand Master and became the leading proponent of centralization and federalism at the First Constitutional Convention in 1787.  The federalism at the heart of the US Constitution is identical to the federalism laid out in the Freemason’s Anderson’s Constitutions of 1723. William Randolph became the nation’s first Attorney General and Secretary of State under George Washington. His family returned to England loyal to the Crown.  John Marshall, the nation’s first Supreme Court Justice, was also a Mason. [3]

When Benjamin Franklin journeyed to France to seek financial help for American revolutionaries, his meetings took place at Rothschild banks.  He brokered arms sales via German Mason Baron von Steuben.  His Committees of Correspondence operated through Freemason channels and paralleled a British spy network.  In 1776 Franklin became de facto Ambassador to France.  In 1779 he became Grand Master of the French Neuf Soeurs (Nine Sisters) Lodge, to which John Paul Jones and Voltaire belonged.  Franklin was also a member of the more secretive Royal Lodge of Commanders of the Temple West of Carcasonne, whose members included Frederick Prince of Whales. While Franklin preached temperance in the US, he cavorted wildly with his Lodge brothers in Europe.  Franklin served as Postmaster General from the 1750’s to 1775 – a role traditionally relegated to British spies. [4]

With Rothschild financing Alexander Hamilton founded two New York banks, including Bank of New York. [5]  He died in a gun battle with Aaron Burr, who founded Bank of Manhattan with Kuhn Loeb financing.  Hamilton exemplified the contempt which the Eight Families hold towards common people, once stating, “All communities divide themselves into the few and the many.  The first are the rich and the well born, the others the mass of the people…The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge and determine right.  Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share of government.  They will check the unsteadiness of the second.”[6]

Hamilton was only the first in a series of Eight Families cronies to hold the key position of Treasury Secretary.  In recent times Kennedy Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon came from Dillon Read (now part of UBS Warburg). Nixon Treasury Secretaries David Kennedy and William Simon came from Continental Illinois Bank (now part of Bank of America) and Salomon Brothers (now part of Citigroup), respectively. Carter Treasury Secretary Michael Blumenthal came from Goldman Sachs, Reagan Treasury Secretary Donald Regan came from Merrill Lynch (now part of Bank of America), Bush Sr. Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady came from Dillon Read (UBS Warburg) and both Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and Bush Jr. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson came from Goldman Sachs. Obama Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner worked at Kissinger Associates and the New York Fed.

Thomas Jefferson argued that the United States needed a publicly-owned central bank so that European monarchs and aristocrats could not use the printing of money to control the affairs of the new nation.  Jefferson extolled, “A country which expects to remain ignorant and free…expects that which has never been and that which will never be.  There is scarcely a King in a hundred who would not, if he could, follow the example of Pharaoh – get first all the people’s money, then all their lands and then make them and their children servants forever…banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies.  Already they have raised up a money aristocracy.” Jefferson watched as the Euro-banking conspiracy to control the United States unfolded, weighing in, “Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of the day, but a series of oppressions begun at a distinguished period, unalterable through every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate, systematic plan of reducing us to slavery”. [7[

But the Rothschild-sponsored Hamilton’s arguments for a private US central bank carried the day.  In 1791 the Bank of the United States (BUS) was founded, with the Rothschilds as main owners.  The bank’s charter was to run out in 1811.  Public opinion ran in favor of revoking the charter and replacing it with a Jeffersonian public central bank.  The debate was postponed as the nation was plunged by the Euro-bankers into the War of 1812.  Amidst a climate of fear and economic hardship, Hamilton’s bank got its charter renewed in 1816.

Old Hickory, Honest Abe & Camelot

In 1828 Andrew Jackson took a run at the US Presidency.  Throughout his campaign he railed against the international bankers who controlled the BUS.  Jackson ranted, “You are a den of vipers.  I intend to expose you and by Eternal God I will rout you out.  If the people understood the rank injustices of our money and banking system there would be a revolution before morning.”

Jackson won the election and revoked the bank’s charter stating, “The Act seems to be predicated on an erroneous idea that the present shareholders have a prescriptive right to not only the favor, but the bounty of the government…for their benefit does this Act exclude the whole American people from competition in the purchase of this monopoly.  Present stockholders and those inheriting their rights as successors be established a privileged order, clothed both with great political power and enjoying immense pecuniary advantages from their connection with government.  Should its influence be concentrated under the operation of such an Act as this, in the hands of a self-elected directory whose interests are identified with those of the foreign stockholders, will there not be cause to tremble for the independence of our country in war…controlling our currency, receiving our public monies and holding thousands of our citizens independence, it would be more formidable and dangerous than the naval and military power of the enemy.  It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government for selfish purposes…to make the rich richer and more powerful.  Many of our rich men have not been content with equal protection and equal benefits, but have besought us to make them richer by acts of Congress.  I have done my duty to this country.”[8]

Populism prevailed and Jackson was re-elected. In 1835 he was the target of an assassination attempt.  The gunman was Richard Lawrence, who confessed that he was, “in touch with the powers in Europe”. [9]

Still, in 1836 Jackson refused to renew the BUS charter.  Under his watch the US national debt went to zero for the first and last time in our nation’s history.  This angered the international bankers, whose primary income is derived from interest payments on debt.  BUS President Nicholas Biddle cut off funding to the US government in 1842, plunging the US into a depression.  Biddle was an agent for the Paris-based Jacob Rothschild. [10]

The Mexican War was simultaneously sprung on Jackson. A few years later the Civil War was unleashed, with London bankers backing the Union and French bankers backing the South. The Lehman family made a fortune smuggling arms to the south and cotton to the north.  By 1861 the US was $100 million in debt.  New President Abraham Lincoln snubbed the Euro-bankers again, issuing Lincoln Greenbacks to pay Union Army bills.

The Rothschild-controlled Times of London wrote, “If that mischievous policy, which had its origins in the North American Republic, should become indurated down to a fixture, then that Government will furnish its own money without cost. It will pay off its debts and be without debt. It will have all the money necessary to carry on its commerce. It will become prosperous beyond precedent in the history of the civilized governments of the world. The brains and the wealth of all countries will go to North America. That government must be destroyed, or it will destroy every monarchy on the globe.” [11]

The Euro-banker-written Hazard Circular was exposed and circulated throughout the country by angry populists.  It stated, “The great debt that capitalists will see is made out of the war and must be used to control the valve of money.  To accomplish this government bonds must be used as a banking basis.  We are now awaiting Secretary of Treasury Salmon Chase to make that recommendation.  It will not allow Greenbacks to circulate as money as we cannot control that.  We control bonds and through them banking issues”.

The 1863 National Banking Act reinstated a private US central bank and Chase’s war bonds were issued.  Lincoln was re-elected the next year, vowing to repeal the act after he took his January 1865 oaths of office.  Before he could act, he was assassinated at the Ford Theatre by John Wilkes Booth.  Booth had major connections to the international bankers.  His granddaughter wrote This One Mad Act, which details Booth’s contact with “mysterious Europeans” just before the Lincoln assassination.

Following the Lincoln hit, Booth was whisked away by members of a secret society known as Knights of the Golden Circle (KGC).  KGC had close ties to the French Society of Seasons, which produced Karl Marx.  KGC had fomented much of the tension that caused the Civil War and President Lincoln had specifically targeted the group.  Booth was a KGC member and was connected through Confederate Secretary of State Judah Benjamin to the House of Rothschild.  Benjamin fled to England after the Civil War. [12]”