Quite. 'ONE BEEEEELION DOLLARS' in the 1930s - or whenever it was that he hit that mark, maybe even a couple decades later - would have been a sizeable sum.Victoria Steele wrote: Sheeze. Not a lightweight if even half of that is true of him. Victoria
Memory bells are ringing, somewhere (was it in the book?) we've mentioned Atlas buying up everything in the Depression. But I'd forgotten. It's great to see this mentioned again.
Trying to parse through some of the gold-bug conspiracy rhetoric, I can see definite correlations with the stated goals of the Pilgrim Society - 'Anglo-American friendship' - and the centre of gravity of William Stephenson and the UKUSA intelligence axis. Possibly not so much a conspiracy in itself as a vehicle for association of people who share a common agenda. And yes, it's high time Skull & Bones got slapped down as the young punks they are. Dashed uppity colonials. To run a proper Empire you need more than a couple centuries and some coffee. It's breeding, dahling.
(Stan Deyo's choice of title for 'The Cosmic Conspiracy' keeps running through my mind. COSMIC in security jargon meaning 'NATO-level clearance', not US-only. Trans-Atlantic connections. A nice little pun, if that was his intent. Maybe I'm reading too much into riddles.)
What little I've read about the banking industry and the City of London makes me want to run a mile. A world inhabited almost entirely by predators, mostly busy eating each other. Some smart and some not. A fun recent book about that is 'Traders, Guns & Money' by Satyajit Das - http://www.amazon.com/Traders-Guns-Mone ... 740&sr=8-1
Frankly I'm rather scared that when the wheels come off our current economic regime, there will be some VERY nasty witch-hunting, and lynch mobs will come back in vogue. And when that happens, it's usually the wrong people who get hurt.
If Odlum really personally put Eisenhower in power, that's pretty impressive. One gets the sense on just how deeply and quietly the true (by this world's standards) sources of money and power run. But also how fragile they are, compared to the rest of the universe. It takes a lot of effort to be the self-appointed 'benefactors of the human race'. Like pushing water uphill. I'd rather let it flow.
(I've just started reading a somewhat mainstream history book, 'The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth' by Gar Alperovitz - http://www.amazon.com/Decision-Use-Atom ... 422&sr=8-1 - and he makes many of the same points Paul, Langley and others here make about just *how* difficult it is, even now, to get straight answers from the official US historical record about who did what in the White House in 1945, when it came to atomic secrets. Documents missing, a clear history of official lies, a public mythology miles away from the reality of the decisions made. By comparison, the kind of weirdness we talk about on this forum seems about par for the course.)
Edit:
Oh, and another thing: I keep thinking about pivot points. You can accomplish a lot by finding the still centre between two forces and just gently rotating, rather than trying to do all the pushing yourself.
1945 and especially the Manhattan Project seems to be the axis between two world empires: the end of the British empire and the rise of the American empire. I've never been quite clear entirely why. Great Britain emerged from the war bruised and bloody, but victorious. But she lost much of her imperial trappings. Why? Was it America having the Bomb that was the bargaining chip? Was it just money, did paying for WW2 bankrupt the state? Who was the bill owed *to*, if all the world's bankers are in London? Was it guys like Gandhi getting rowdy? But the monarchy survived, nothing much changed, just a quiet handover of power. And the triumph of Coca-Cola.
But of course, it's mostly the same people involved, whether on the UK side or the US. One global white English-speaking imperial hegemon falls, one rises. (A whole bunch of runners-up flame out and collapse, but they get integrated into the global system; Russia and China provide pushback; the Third World emerges and bits of it get actively destabilised. But none of them get to bump UK/US from the top position.)
Who was standing there at that calm centre, during those pivotal years? Who were smart enough to hedge their bets, cover both bases, stand in the mid-Atlantic?
We *could* easily, at some point in the 20th century, have walked into a world where the US and British Empire came to a shooting war. Unthinkable now, but didn't Europe falling apart seemed too, at the time? And the European Union coming together, didn't that also seem unthinkable? We could much more easily have had a 20th century where America went isolationist and sat the wars out.
Neither happened. The UK fell, the US rose, the accents and swaggers of English speakers changed a bit, but the centre of gravity of white Western politics stayed much the same for sixty years. It's like Jefferson Airplane becoming Jefferson Starship: different name, a few new faces, but pretty much the same core band and the same music.
Good? Bad? I dunno. But that didn't just happen, it was engineered by people like the Pilgrims and maybe Carolines.
And were there any quiet little side-effects engineered as well, when that pivot spun in 1945?