John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie pioneered the tax exempt Foundations. Many consider these 2 men as great philanthropists, but these foundations were front organizations to fund their globalist New World Order agenda. Today, the George Soros Open Society Foundation, The Clinton Foundation, and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have all joined in on the global funding of the New World Order agenda.
“Philanthropy is the essential element in the making of Rockefeller power. It gives the Rockefellers a priceless reputation as public benefactors which the public values so highly that power over public affairs is placed in the Rockefellers’ hands. Philanthropy generates more power than wealth alone can provide.” – Myer Kutz Rockefeller Power (1974)
The hidden influence of tax-exempt foundations and think tanks in the halls of power has dramatically impacted our society, and in turn the world. The Rockefeller dynasty paved the way for eugenics in 20th Century America, heavily influenced the education system, created the medical cartel, and much more. Now Bill Gates’ various philanthropic institutions are impacting the globe, with a new initiative promising to make the next several years the “Decade of vaccines“. These institutions are impacting the globe to such an extent that some have suggested that the large foundations are monopolizing development. The United States has seen a shift of power to individuals who have been called “action intellectuals”. Who’s agenda are they serving? We didn’t elect these individuals, but large foundations are functioning like national governments.
The United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defense has picked up on this trend in its Strategic Trends program. The MoD’s Global Strategic Trends – Out to 2040 document foresees “…the emergence of a global elite, a powerful network of individuals and institutions that sits above the level of individual states and influences the global agenda…”
Our health, society and future are all impacted by these elites. Who are they? What agenda are they pursuing?
A look back…
The U.S. Congress first investigated the activities of the large foundations in 1915 under the Commission on Industrial Relations. The Commission found that,
“The domination by the men in whose hands the final control of a large part of American industry rests is not limited to their employees, but is being rapidly extended to control the education and social survival of the nation. This control is being extended largely through the creation of enormous privately managed funds for indefinite purposes, hereafter designated “foundations”, by the endowment of colleges and universities, by the creation of funds for the pensioning of teachers, by contributions to private charities, as well as through controlling or influencing the public press…”
Again in 1953 the Reece Committee found that tax-exempt foundations were wielding an unprecedented amount of influence over American society, including the education system. Norman Dodd served as the chief director of research for the Committee. In the monumental interview Dodd outlines what he found (See video above).
Foundations serve another, much less discussed purpose. The wealth of the individuals who own the large foundations is protected from taxation. The Rockefeller Foundation was conveniently founded in 1913, the same year that the income tax was ratified. John D. Rockefeller Sr. pioneered this art of so called “scientific giving”, and modern day philanthropists have followed in his footsteps. When John D’s public image became tarnished by his notoriously ruthless nature in his business dealings, he hired the PR man named “Poison” Ivy Lee. Lee suggested that Rockefeller begin giving away his wealth, and give it away he did; with strings attached.
Gary Allen explains in The Rockefeller File,
“He [Rockefeller] would “give” money away to foundations under his control and then have those foundations spend the money in ways which brought even more power and profits to the Rockefeller empire. The money “given” away would be bread cast upon the waters. But bread that always had a hook in it. John D. Jr. was to refer to this as the “principle of scientific giving.”
The influence of large foundations on American society is documented by Dr. Lily E. Kay in her book The Molecular Vision of Life: Caltech, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Rise of the New Biology. Kay writes, “Their numerous projects and the unprecedented scope of their financial and institutional resources shaped the development of culture and the production of knowledge in the United States. Through education, public opinion, stimulation of specific research agenda, and the promotion of selective categories of knowledge and research, the Foundation played a key role in the creation of a hegemonic bloc…”
At the turn of the 20th century, capitalism’s proclivity for crisis was fomenting rebellion within the U.S. through massive labor strikes, struggles for universal suffrage and relief from poverty as a major depression gripped the nation due to overproduction. In response, the nation’s political and economic elite significantly expanded U.S. pursuits of overseas markets for American goods and investment capital… [rationalizing] U.S. military intervention. These events required the intensification of the social control apparatus of U.S. nationalism – well oiled by its highly effective and profitable role in the conquest of North America – as a means [in part] to deflect attention towards an external “threat.”
To achieve these aims on a more structural level, Prussian inspired common schools established in the 19th century served as the model for the establishment of compulsory secondary education in early 20th century America. According to these altruistic “stewards” of the public good, mass public education needed to be standardized, vocational and efficient as a means to serve their larger “social mission” of preparing students for their future roles in the 20th century industrial workforce. This philanthropic agenda was made explicit in 1914 when the National Education Association passed a resolution that read, in part:
We view with alarm the activity of the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations—agencies not in any way responsible to the people—in their efforts to control the policies of our State educational institutions, to fashion after their conception and to standardize our courses of study, and to surround the institutions with conditions which menace true academic freedom and defeat the primary purpose of democracy as heretofore preserved inviolate in our common schools, normal schools, and universities.
Fast forward to the 1990’s when “venture philanthropy” emerged, shifting the social mission of philanthropy to focus on neoliberal structural adjustment programs, which dictate austerity measures in the service of elite financial investors. Since philanthropic foundations are established and controlled by billionaires whose wealth and power is derived from human exploitation and environmental degradation, this modern pursuit should not come as a surprise. The personal interests of this opulent minority are directly tied to today’s financialized economy as investors and as members of politically influential networks that oversee global financial markets. As such, in the 21st century venture philanthropists have focused their efforts on constructing new financial markets through what is referred to as “mission investing,” “social impact investing,” or just “impact investing.” Impact investing is a continuation of the sixty-year colonizing mission of the IMF, World Bank, World Trade Organization, “Troika” and the United States government; yet with a “friendlier,” but more duplicitous methodology.
Foundations Today
In May of 2009 several top philanthropists met at the home of Sir Paul Nurse, president of Rockefeller University. David Rockefeller Jr, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, Ted Turner and Oprah Winfrey were all in attendance. According to the London Times, the meeting was so secret that, “…some of the billionaires’ aides were told they were at ‘security briefings’”. The Times reports, “Over dinner they discussed how they might settle on an “umbrella cause” that could harness their interests.” The Times interviewed a guest at the meeting, who said that the group wanted to meet in secret because they didn’t want their statements ending up in the media, “painting them as an alternative world government.”
A brief overview of the activities of these groups will show that they have been acting as an alternative world government, and that they have been for decades. Through their grant-making power and immense wealth, they can effectively choose which scientific research projects are funded, what education reforms are initiated, and in turn the entire direction of society at large.
In an interview with the Seattle Times, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon was asked, “Some say the emergence of super rich philanthropies like the Gates Foundation has undermined the effectiveness of the U.N. and its member organizations, like the WHO.” Moon responded,
“On the contrary that is what we really want — contributions from the business community as well as philanthropies. We need to have political support, but it doesn’t give us all that we need. NGOs and philanthropies and many foundations such as Bill Gates Foundation — they’re taking a very important role…”
In October of 2007, the Global Impact Investing Network was established by the Rockefeller Foundation. The GIIN will “help solve social and environmental problems” by encouraging investment that will bring both profit and produce real world change. The GIIN is taking John D’s “principle of scientific giving” to another level. This conglomerate of various banks and foundations will attempt to mold industry and society by investing in selected social programs and “screening” out investments for Co2 emitters and others deemed to be unworthy.
According to GIIN:
Impact investing challenges the long-held views that social and environmental issues should be addressed only by philanthropic donations, and that market investments should focus exclusively on achieving financial returns.” With that purpose in mind, GIIN’s primary mission is to build “critical market infrastructure and supports activities, education, and research that help accelerate the development of the impact investing field.
GIIN is well positioned to do just that since its membership is comprised of the luminaries of global finance and philanthropic foundations, including (but not limited to): The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Goldman Sachs, J.P.Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Prudential Financial, Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association – College Retirement Equities Fund (TIAA-CREF), Zurich Insurance Group, Ford Foundation, Deutsche Bank, International Finance Corporation, Root Capital, UBS Financial Services and the Inter-American Development Bank Group (long-term IMF/World Bank partner responsible for structural adjustment and austerity throughout Latin America).
As briefly documented earlier, GIIN’s founding member, the Rockefeller Foundation, along with the Rockefeller family, have a dark history of leveraging their wealth and power in the service of U.S hegemony, both domestically and internationally. In line with the legacy of John D. Rockefeller Senior, the Rockefeller Foundation went on to become an influential founding member of the “Washington Consensus” and has since been an aggressive supporter of the IMF and World Bank’s draconian policies and practices. The Rockefeller family and its foundation were also early activists and funders of eugenics based population control efforts in the U.S. and abroad via forced sterilization of “inferior” populations (Black, Brown and disabled people). As Edwin Black documented in his 2003 San Francisco Chronicle article “Eugenics and the Nazis — The California Connection,” “Eugenics would have been so much bizarre parlor talk had it not been for extensive financing by corporate philanthropies, specifically the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune.” According to Black, “the Rockefeller Foundation helped found the German eugenics program and even funded the program that Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz.”
Two of GIIN’s other founding members include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
According to Andy Beckett of The Guardian, the Gates Foundation is known for being “top-down, technocratic, applying the language of engineering to social problems.” Beckett goes on to claim how critics of the Gates Foundation and its form of “philanthrocapitalism” loathe how it plays god with its “creations.” Following this model, the Gates foundation is notorious for many nefarious activities across the planet. Accordingly, Andy Beckett of The Guardian went on to report:
In 2007 an extensive investigation by the Los Angeles Times found that the [Gates Foundation] charity, via its trust, invests in ‘companies that contribute to the human suffering in health, housing and social welfare that the foundation is trying to alleviate.’ The [Gates] foundation did not challenge the thrust of the articles, which included allegations that it invested in an oil company responsible for causing health problems by burning off its unwanted gas, in an African country in which the foundation was active in trying to improve the population’s health. But the charity decided after a brief review not to change its investment policy.
A Gates Foundation spokesperson replied to the Los Angeles Times investigation by glibly stating:
The stories you told of people who are suffering touched us all. But it is naive to suggest that an individual stockholder can stop that suffering. Changes in our investment practices would have little or no impact on these issues.
The Gates Foundation is the largest funder of research in genetic engineering on the planet and is one of the world’s major donors to agricultural research and development. In line with GIIN’s objectives, most of the Gates Foundation’s focus in these areas target the continent of Africa. A 2014 report by the biodiversity and small farmer advocacy organization GRAIN found that the Gates Foundation was indeed living up to its colonizing character, with the claim: “The Gates Foundation fights hunger in the South by giving money to the North.” GRAIN went on to report:
… the Gates Foundation is promoting an imported model of industrial agriculture based on the high-tech seeds and chemicals sold by US corporations… the foundation is fixated on the work of scientists in centralised labs and that it chooses to ignore the knowledge and biodiversity that Africa’s small farmers have developed and maintained over generations. Some also charge that the Gates Foundation is using its money to impose a policy agenda on Africa, accusing the foundation of direct intervention on highly controversial issues like seed laws and GMOs.
As reported in The Guardian, GRAIN co-founder Henk Hobbelink revealed, “The bulk of [Gates Foundation] grants for agriculture are given to organisations in the US and Europe” while the “overwhelming majority of its funding goes to hi-tech scientific outfits, not to supporting the solutions that the farmers themselves are developing on the ground. Africa’s farmers are cast as recipients, mere consumers of knowledge and technology from others.” GRAIN went on to report how Gates “also funds initiatives and agribusiness companies operating in Africa to develop private markets for seeds and fertilisers through support to ‘agro-dealers.’”
GIIN’s other co-founder USAID, has a stated mission that “…carries out U.S. foreign policy by promoting broad-scale human progress at the same time it expands stable, free societies, creates markets and trade partners for the United States, and fosters good will abroad.” As documented by Teresa Meade in her book, A History of Modern Latin America: 1800 to The Present, USAID’s practices in promoting “human progress” and “free societies” infamously include undermining popular liberation movements throughout the globe by engaging in torture, murder, spying and paramilitary terrorism campaigns in order to advance U.S. imperial interests. According to Meade USAID public safety officer Dan Mitrione, who trained police throughout Latin America in the art of surveillance and torture in the 1970’s, is known to have stated during his regular lesson plan, “The precise pain, in the precise place, in the precise amount, for the desired effect.”
As documented in a 2010 joint report put out by banking giant JP Morgan and the Rockefeller Foundation titled “Impact Investments: An emerging asset class,” “Increasingly, entrants to the impact investment market believe they need not sacrifice financial return in exchange for social impact.” Under the premise of “doing good while doing well,” this report points out that impact investment attracts a wide variety of investors who invest “across the capital structure, across regions and business sectors, and with a range of impact objectives.” These include diversified financial institutions, pension funds, philanthropic foundations, insurance companies, development finance institutions, specialized financial institutions, fund managers, high net worth individual investors and large-scale family offices (private firms that manage just about everything for the wealthiest families). Impact investments often fall within traditional asset classes – private equity/venture capital, debt, and fixed income securities (mortgage-backed securities, municipal bonds, and business loans).
Generally, most individual and institutional investors are hesitant to take on risks associated with untested “seed” and early-stage ventures, often preferring later-stage ventures; especially in what the Unitas Seed Fund refers to as the “challenging segments of society.” For this reason, according to a 2013 article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review titled “Closing the Pioneer Gap,” venture philanthropy plays a crucial role in closing the so called “pioneer gap” through financing “pioneer firms to develop, validate and establish new business models, and even build entirely new markets.” When summarizing a 2012 Monitor Deloitte report titled “From Blueprint to Scale: The Case for Philanthropy in Impact Investing,” Vinay Nair of the The Guardian wrote, “without philanthropy… many developing-world businesses serving the poor would never have been able to move towards a point of sustainability or scalability… philanthropy-backed capital can step in and help progress enterprises from earlier stages to where they are capable of attracting growth capital and better delivering social outcomes to the poor.” In this report, the authors note how venture philanthropic funding “does not have to be deployed in isolation from investment capital.” Instead they can “‘layer’ grants with capital to create hybrid models that target high-risk situations” or use “grants to deliver much-needed capacity building (or technical assistance) to overcome the inherent disadvantages of the bottom of the wealth pyramid (details to follow) business environment, alongside a return-capital investment model. As the report “From Blueprint to Scale: The Case for Philanthropy in Impact Investing” points out, “even where funding ultimately flows through as a grant to the pioneer firm or a nonprofit, funders could deploy complementary mission investing strategies.”
Mission investing associated with impact investments encompasses program related investments (PRIs) and mission-related investments (MRIs), both of which according to David A. Levitt, a non-profit and former KIPP charter school network attorney, are “characterized by an intention to create positive social impact as well as some level of financial return.” Impact investing allows “non-profit” philanthropic foundations to function as investment banks that utilize a full menu of debt and equity financial instruments. These instruments allow foundations to leverage influence over their investee companies/projects as creditors and/or as investor owners. Both PRI’s and MRI’s are tax-free investments.
According to Mission Investors Exchange, PRIs “are powerful, versatile tools that foundations use to achieve their philanthropic goals alongside traditional grantmaking.” Similar to grants, PRIs make capital available to nonprofit or for-profit companies that are aligned with a foundation’s philanthropic mission. PRIs are loans and equity investments that are designed to have a social impact while generating below market-rate financial returns.
An MRI is not part of a foundation’s formal “charitable” activity and is instead an investment a foundation makes – as a business – within financial markets. It is therefore a financial instrument that foundations can use to further their stated mission, while also bringing a market-rate financial return on a risk-adjusted basis. Since MRIs derive from investment assets (cash, fixed income, public equity, private equity, venture capital, and real estate) and are commercial investments, by law they must maximize investor returns. Private foundations invest billions in private and publicly traded companies and financial markets, but the idea of MRI’s is that “charity” foundations will invest in markets and corporations that are aligned with their legal mission statements.
When contrasting venture philanthropy’s larger mission with their official propagandized mission, these financial investments further reveal their duplicitous character. Accordingly, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation claims to exist “to dramatically improve the quality of life for billions of people.” With that in mind, according to their 2014 tax return, they invested over 40 billion dollars in equities and securities in hundreds of financial markets and companies. Some of these include investments in nations from Canada to Saudi Arabia and Egypt as well as mortgage and student loan financing firms. Others include major corporations such as Comcast, Verizon, Walmart and Dow Chemical as well as major investment banks, including JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, Barclays, Bank of America, CitiGroup, Lehman Brothers, Wells Fargo, Bear Stearns and Deutsche Bank.
According to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, their mission “focuses on improving people’s health” and ensuring “that all women and children have the nutrition they need to live healthy and productive lives.” Under this banner, the foundation invests in Coca-Cola, Pepsi, the multitude of highly processed Kraft products; and until very recently, McDonald’s, Burger King, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and KFC. In a 2014 article in Mother Jones titled, “How Bill Gates Is Helping KFC Take Over Africa,” Alex Park reported that USAID and the Gates Foundation fund:
… companies to build what development experts call ‘value chains’—business relationships that link small farmers to sellers of agricultural inputs like fertilizer on one side, and big buyers of corn and soy on the other. Those buyers turn these commodities into feed, and then sell it to large chicken wholesalers who are staking their future growth on supplying KFC’s African expansion.
Continued on next page…
