George Pratt Shultz:
Profile of a Hit Man
by Scott Thompson and Nancy Spannaus
If there is any one figure who stands out as a consistent, evil representative of the philosophy of the Economic Hit Man over the last 35 years, it is George Pratt Shultz. Shultz is a second-generation operative for the international synarchist banking network; he operates largely behind the scenes, but decisively toward carrying out the global fascist agenda of those international bankers.
Exemplary is the crucial role which Shultz played in August 1971, when he was Director of the Office of Management and the Budget for President Nixon. According to the first-hand testimony of then-Secretary of the Treasury John Connally (see box), members of a working committee on the economic crisis urged Connally to take the crucial step of removing the dollar from its link to gold. This was the first move toward establishing the floating exchange rate which has been used by the synarchists to destroy the world economy in the three decades since. The most forceful advocate of the move was Shultz, a devotee of the fascist free-market economist Milton Friedman.
The second crucial, but little-known example of Shultz's importance is his role in putting together the team behind the Presidency of George W. Bush. According to author James Mann, who wrote the Rise of the Vulcans book about Bush's inner Cabinet, Shultz initiated a discussion with George W. in the Spring of 1998, whereby the future President sat down in Shultz's living room on the Stanford University campus, in order to be vetted (in effect) to run for President. At that meeting were Martin Anderson, the former advisor to both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan; Abraham Sofaer, a former Shultz aide; John Cogan and John Taylor, two economics professors; and Stanford's provost, and Shultz protégé, Condoleezza Rice. After the "scholars" associated with the Hoover Institution indicated that they thought Bush would make a good Presidential choice, Bush invited Shultz, Rice, and Anderson down to Austin, Texas for a follow-up meeting in the Summer. Out of that meeting, which was joined by Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, came the public decision for Bush to run for President.
By early 1999, Rice pulled together a broader group of foreign policy advisors, who agreed to be called the "Vulcans," at her suggestion. Also present, and effectively supervising them, were none other than Cheney and Shultz.
But George Shultz, the 84-year-old grey eminence, has not retired, after setting up the Bush W. Administration. By the Fall of 2003, he had a new project, this time serving as the co-chairman of the economic taskforce for California gubernatorial candidate (and now would-be President of the United States) Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Clearly, anyone who understands the danger which Nixon's 1971 decision, the Presidency of George W. Bush, and Arnold Schwarzenegger all represent to the United States republic, needs to know just who is George P. Shultz.
The Pedigree
George Shultz is the second person in his family to play a crucial role in the policy establishment of the United States. The first to do so was his father, Birl Earl Shultz, whose history is most relevant to the later activities of his son.
Birl Shultz, born in Indiana in 1883, went East to college, getting his masters and Ph.D. from Columbia University in New York. During his time at Columbia, Birl became a friend and collaborator of Charles A. Beard, the revisionist historian who argued that the Founding Fathers of the United States were just a gang of plutocrats, seeking personal enrichment. Beard was part of the New Republic crowd, which the Morgan bankers were using to promote the likes of Benito Mussolini. The elder Shultz co-authored a book with Beard.
In 1918, Birl Shultz obtained a job which brought him into the circle of leading synarchist bankers, and obviously shaped his thinking for life. He became personnel director with the American International Corporation (AIC), where he remained until 1923. In 1922, he founded the New York Stock Exchange Institute, an institution dedicated to training future stock market employees.
EIR published extensively about the AIC back in 1986, in the course of tracking down the treasonous circles who were controlling Henry Kissinger, and other operatives who were attempting to destroy Lyndon LaRouche's, and President Reagan's, policy of strategic defense, which Reagan called the Strategic Defense Initiative. EIR identified the AIC, which was located at 120 Broadway in New York City, as an integral part of the supranational, bankers-controlled entity called "The Trust."
As personnel director of AIC, Birl Earl Shultz became an integral part of the "Trust" arrangements that existed under the New Economic Plan of Vladimir Lenin and Cheka secret police founder Felix Dzerzhinsky, whereby leading oligarchical families in the West and the Soviets in the East, sought to make deals in their mutual interest.
Founded in 1915 by Frank A. Vanderlip of the Stillman-Rockefeller-controlled National City Bank, the AIC had a $50 million capital investment fund drawn from such other top Establishment names as Morgan, Schiff, Winthrop, Grace, and Armour. Also, at 120 Broadway was a complex of firms that were trading and investing in Russian raw materials. This was also the address of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, whose founding board overlapped that of the AIC, and which, early on, offered $1 million credits to the Bolshevik Revolution. And, 120 Broadway was home to such "Trust" espionage agents as Lt. Sidney George Reilly of British Intelligence.
Ironically, records from the archives of that very State Department where George Shultz would one day serve as Secretary, show his father to have been involved through AIC with: 1) planning all the engineering projects of the Soviet Five-Year Plan, over eight years before they were implemented; 2) negotiating secret treaties between the Bolsheviks and the U.S. State Department, when the Bolsheviks barely controlled St. Petersburg and Moscow; 3) lobbying to stop Western military intervention of any consequence against the Bolshevik Revolution, while calling for "economic assistance" and ending the State Department blockade upon trade and credits for the Bolsheviks; and, 4) creating the first "back channel" to the Bolsheviks through the "controlled" Communist John Reed, and possibly through Armand Hammer, who later served George Shultz in this capacity until Hammer's death.
The AIC did not limit itself to extensive business with the Soviet Union. More than a third of its investment activity was in Ibero-America, where AIC was affiliated with the United Fruit Company and W.R. Grace, both of which companies were notorious for their political involvement.
The existing record of AIC's treachery is based largely upon documents written by Dr. Birl Shultz's contemporary, William Franklin Sands, who was assistant to AIC's president Charles A. Stone from 1917 to 1922. Because Sands was a former career diplomat, he was charged by AIC with the job of liaison to the U.S. government. Fortuitously for him and AIC (and perhaps not so accidentally), Sands found himself in Russia at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, where he had been working on a U.S. State Department relief program for German and Austrian POWs. Sands describes his accomplishments in Russia during this period as unique; he said his was "probably the only organization to bring a profit out of the Revolution."
There is evidence that Sands may have pursued far more than "business" with the Bolsheviks. U.S. State Department files contain an exchange which seems to indicate that Sands had negotiated secret treaties with the Bolsheviks at a time when they barely controlled St. Petersburg and Moscow!
These documents are indicative of the fact that AIC, and a good number of the firms that cohabited with it at 120 Broadway, were operating not as business enterprises per se, but as extensions of oligarchical families, who see their role as ensuring that the global financial oligarchy, centered in London and New York City, maintains decisive power over world resources and developments. It is noteworthy that a number of the firms involved were not financial, but specialized in construction and production, such as Stone & Webster, DuPont, and General Electric. This is a modus operandi parallel to that described in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins, who worked for an engineering firm, and then for Stone & Webster itself, while serving as an Economic Hit Man for the oligarchy.
Enter George Shultz
George Shultz was trained for his role as a Economic Hit Man in Eastern Establishment schools, including the Loomis School in Connecticut, Princeton University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Between his stints at Princeton and MIT, he spent three years in the U.S. Marine Corps during World War II. Later, he ended up at the University of Chicago, where he worked closely with that Nobel-certified monetarist idiot, Milton Friedman.
Shultz's first known nefarious mentor was Kurt Lewin, an operative of London's Tavistock Institute who had set up a Research Center for Group Dynamics on the MIT campus. Included among Lewin's objectives for mind control was to lower the cost of labor. In the mid to late 1940s, Shultz collaborated at the center with John T. Dunlop, with whom he did a study which found that speed-up of labor and wage-gouging could be accomplished, not only through the "human side," but also by the threat of economic depression and unemployment. Shultz was appointed chairman of the Industrial Relations Division of MIT in 1954.
Three years later, Shultz moved on to the University of Chicago, where his close friend and mentor, in addition to Friedman, was W. Allen Wallis. Wallis's career went from promoting racial eugenics, to the counterculture, to, ultimately, the monetarist Mont Pelerin Society, which he served as the founding treasurer. It is at secret Mont Pelerin Society meetings that many of the economic policies of the international financial oligarchy get disseminated to the bankers and government bureaucrats who will carry them out.
Shultz became a professor of Industrial Relations and ultimately the dean of the University of Chicago Business School. By the late 1960s, he had moved to the Stanford University Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, thus establishing a base at that university in which he continues to the present day.
Shultz's economic ideas reflect those of the so-called Chicago School, the extreme "free-market economics" ideas that lead to draconian looting of the working population, in favor of the financial oligarchy. In an interview with Public Broadcasting in 2000, Shultz forthrightly explained that the Chicago School had taken over the economy of Pinochet's Chile, creating what he called "the only decent economy in South America in the mid-'80s." He gave only a nod to the fact that there were "no doubt ... some unnecessarily brutal things in the process."
Positions in Government
Shultz's long career in government began in the 1950s, as a senior staff economist with President Eisenhower's Council of Economic Advisors. In the 1960s, he was involved with the Nixon campaign, and was appointed Secretary of Labor upon Nixon's election in 1968. Two years later, he became the first Director of the Office of Management and Budget, a position he held until he was appointed Secretary of the Treasury in June 1972. It was from that position that he took his most decisive action, in consolidating the arrangements for the post-industrial floating-exchange-rate monetary system.
Upon leaving the Nixon Administration in 1974, Shultz went to the Bechtel Corporation, where he became president and director, until he entered government once more with the Reagan Administration, in 1982. (According to James Mann's Rise of the Vulcans, Shultz was actually involved in vetting Reagan before his run for President.) He remains on the Board of that powerful corporation.
In 1981, Shultz was made chairman of the incoming President Reagan's Economic Policy Advisory Board. In that position, he did nothing to reverse the ravages upon the physical economy—industry, agriculture, infrastructure—wrought during the previous Carter Administration by Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker's usurious interest rates. Rather, Shultz embraced the New York Council on Foreign Relations' "1980s Project" work of 1976, which had called for "controlled disintegration" of the world economy.
It is noteworthy that Perkins considers Shultz's entrance into the Reagan Administration as leading to the crucial tilt against Gen. Omar Torrijos, the Panamanian leader who had negotiated the transfer of control over the Panama Canal to his nation, and who was then in negotiations with the Japanese for the construction of a second sea-level canal. This tilt ultimately led to his assassination in 1981. Perkins argues that Shultz's company, Bechtel, strongly objected to the construction of a new canal, for which it would not get the contract, and that Shultz used his influence with government accordingly.
In 1982, Shultz was promoted to become the 60th Secretary of State, and served until Jan. 20, 1989. As Reagan's Secretary of State for six years, Shultz pursued economic and geopolitical policies consistent with the synarchist bankers' intent to destroy the nation-state, and prospects for economic development, particularly in the developing sector. Exemplary of his outlook is a speech he gave in 1984, which is a clear precursor of the Cheney-Wolfowitz doctrine of pre-emptive war and American empire, first officially put forward in 1991.
According to EIR's sources in the U.S. intelligence community, Shultz used his position to try to nip the investigation of the Jonathan Pollard spy scandal in the bud. Under investigation was the existence of, and members of, what was called the "Mr. X Committee," which was thought to be collaborating with Israeli national Pollard in his espionage activities. For this purpose, Shultz deployed the Legal Advisor of the U.S. State Department, Abraham Sofaer, who was a former Federal judge nominated by President Carter, and alleged to be an agent of Israel's Mossad. Judge Sofaer had presided over the lawsuit brought by then-Gen. Ariel Sharon against Time for its straightforward coverage of the slaughter of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon by Falange militia, under General Sharon's oversight, during Israel's war on Lebanon.
No sooner did Shultz tip Sofaer to try to bury the Pollard case, than Sofaer led a delegation in late 1985 to Israel to interrogate Rafael Eitan. Eitan had been the head of Lekem—the "off-the-reservation" technological intelligence unit that was believed to have been the Israeli counterpart of the "X Committee." Not only did nothing come out of this interview with Eitan, but, while in Israel, Sofaer—according to columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak—gave an interview to the Israeli daily Ha'aretz, where he praised Sharon's invasion of Lebanon, Israel's bombing of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in Tunisia, and its interception of an Egyptian airliner.
So, Shultz used an avowed advocate of Israel's fascist "Terror Against Terror"-style tactics, to cover up the extent of the Pollard espionage network. And, he rewarded Judge Sofaer by seeing that he became a Fellow at the Hoover Institution, along with Shultz.
Toward the end of the Reagan Administration, following then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's advice that Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachov was a "man with whom you can do business," Shultz proposed what was then known as a "global condominium" or "New Yalta" arrangement with Gorbachov. Ironically, by 1989, Soviet hardliners, fearing an impending economic collapse, were preparing for a potential "global showdown," and Gorbachov was President in name only.
Exemplary of the "New Yalta," is the case of the Middle East, where Shultz rudely rejected Israeli and other suggestions that an economic development program for the region ought to be the key component of negotiating political solutions. Taking a page from Zbigniew Brzezinski's "Arc of Crisis," Shultz carried out secret diplomacy, offering Israel the West Bank (which had been part of Jordan), plus a part of southern Lebanon, if Israel would grant Syria, which was then a Soviet satrap, the remainder of northern Lebanon. Thus, the map of the Mideast would be redrawn into a "Greater Syria" and a "Greater Israel"—an arrangement which left the Palestinians, with whom Shultz refused to deal, nothing.
The Post-Reagan Era
Since leaving office, Shultz has not changed his disregard for the general welfare. He teamed up with "British Golem" and mega-speculator George Soros to promote a series of referenda to legalize narcotics, making him truly the "Godfather" of the Vulcans. Thus, in an Oct. 7, 1989, speech to the Stanford Business School, Shultz said that the time had come "to make it possible for addicts to buy drugs at some regulated place at a price that approximates cost.... We need at least to consider and examine forms of controlled legalization of drugs." Shultz's program, in historical effect, has resulted in skyrocketting addiction wherever it has been implemented.
In semi-retirement in the Hoover Institution's ivory towers, Shultz has done very well indeed, giving economic advice to many companies gullible enough to accept it from the man who helped bring about their impending demise. He is a member of the board of directors of Bechtel Group, Fremont Group, Gilead Sciences, Unext.com, and Charles Schwab & Co. He is also chairman of the International Council of J.P. Morgan Chase, which EIR analysts believe may have been taken under protection of the Federal Reserve after it nearly went under in 2003.
Shultz is being well rewarded for his years of servitude to the Anglo-American Establishment.