Macquarie Bank Takes the Low Road
by John Hoefle
The essence of the craft in magic, is to distract the audience with flashy movements and sounds, scantily clad females, and the like, to keep the audience occupied while the magician performs what are in reality rather mundane tricks. The magician is selling a fantasy, counting on the audience to believe the illusion rather than seeing through it to the trick behind.
The scam called privatization is one of these magician's tricks, in which something bought and paid for by the public is transferred to private hands, for the purpose of making the public pay through the nose to use it. One of the best examples of this is the conversion of roads that have been built for public use, with public tax dollars, into privately held toll roads, which then charge the public for using their own roads.
The argument is made that private companies can run and maintain the roads more cheaply than governments, and can put badly needed cash in public coffers, to the benefit of all involved. It is essentially the same argument Enron made about electricity—let the "free market" handle it. To refute this, one need go no farther than the local gas station, to see the benefits of "free market" pricing in the oil markets.
If you think they are unrelated, think again. The people who brought you the oil spot markets and futures markets, are the same people who brought you Enron and California-style electricity trading. Now they are after your roads and your water supplies. Behind the illusion, they are stealing you blind.
The leader in the growing market for road theft is Macquarie Bank of Australia, which owns parts of, or entire roads, airports, and other infrastructure in Europe, Africa, Asia, and North America. The projects in the United States include the showcase Dulles Greenway toll road, the Indiana Toll Road, and the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel.
With assets of $80 billion, it is a relatively small bank, compared to the trillion-dollar behemoths now prevalent in the banking sector, but it is just the tip of a tentacle of the oligarchic banking octopus, set up to specialize in a specific kind of stealing.
Macquarie's Dirty History
Macquarie Bank may be domiciled in Australia, but it is British to the core, founded in 1969, as Hill Samuel Australia, Ltd., an arm of the City of London's Hill Samuel & Co., which itself is part of the British Empire's colonial looting apparatus. Hill Samuel & Co. is a relatively new combination, as oligarchic banks go, formed in 1965, through the merger of M. Samuel & Co. and Philip Hill, Higginson, Erlanger. M. Samuel was the bank of the family of Marcus Samuel, better known as the founder of Shell Transport and Trading, the Brutish side of Royal Dutch Shell. Philip Hill, Higginson, Erlanger, was itself the product of two mergers in the 1950s.
Royal Dutch Shell was created in 1907, when the Royal Dutch Petroleum Company and the Shell Transport and Trading Company merged their operations. The queen of the oil cartel, it is a major player in world geopolitics, having supported Nazi Germany under Henri Deterding, having worked with its bankers, Rothschild and Lazard, to restructure the oil markets in the 1970s through two devastating oil hoaxes, and having funded the creation of the environmental movement and other kookery as a battering ram against scientific progress. In Shell, the "S" is silent.
Philip Hill, Higginson, Erlanger is just as dirty. The driving force behind the firm was Kenneth Keith, (later, Sir Keith and then Lord Castleacre), who joined Philip Hill in 1946. Keith also joined the board of Eagle Star Insurance, which controlled Philip Hill. Among his fellow board members was Sir Kenneth Strong; Strong and Keith were, respectively, the number one and number two men in British intelligence immediately after World War II. Philip Hill acquired Higginson & Co. in 1951, and Erlanger circa 1959.
Eagle Star
With Eagle Star, we see another aspect of British imperialism at work: organized crime and dope. EIR's blockbuster Dope, Inc.—required reading for any serious citizen—laid out the "dope" on the company: "Eagle Star is a sterling example of Canada's role in drugs, because it contains every element of the drug machine: the Bronfman family, which has spokes tying into the Zionist dirty money and terrorist apparat; the top levels of British intelligence; and, the core of the opium trade, the HongShang itself." The HongShang is the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, know known as HSBC. About Keith, Dope, Inc. says, "Sir Kenneth Keith moves between the secret world of British intelligence and the opium politics of the Far East."
Erlanger was no prize, either, being the bank of one Baron Emil Erlanger, of a family which got its start in oligarchic banking by working for Rothschild in Frankfurt, Germany. Baron Emil funded that British assault on the United States, known as the Confederacy, through the famous Erlanger Loan, backed by slave-grown Confederate cotton.
The Slime Mold
Lyndon LaRouche identified the "Eagle Star Syndrome," in a piece published in EIR in July 1998, identifying what he called the British-American-Canadian (BAC) establishment, whose operations are typified by the activities of Eagle Star. "Since no later than 1971," he wrote, "the U.S. economy, like that of the world in general, has been looted with a rapacity whose cumulative effect rivals the reputation of Genghis Khan." Among the offshoots of this BAC apparatus is the press empire of Rupert Murdoch, the man who inflicted Fox News upon the world.
The BAC, the Synarchists of Lazard and Rothschild, Felix "the Fascist" Rohatyn, and the privateers of American banks like Goldman Sachs, are part of the international financial apparatus LaRouche has characterized as a "slime mold." The names and faces may change, but one can always recognize them by their nature as parasites. The only road they should have is a one-way street right out of town.
