British Hedge-Fund Project:
The 'Americans Elect' Hoax
by Gretchen Small
March 5—What would you say, if you were told that a top hedge-fund speculator, who, for more than three decades, has doubled as a British intelligence agent organizing the overthrow of governments deemed unacceptable, and has set out to orchestrate the 2012 U.S. Presidential election by marshalling the power of the Internet to create a third "option," with the objective of ensuring that whoever wins, the result would be to rip up the Constitution and to install a technocratic fascist dictator as "President"?
Preposterous? No more so than the continuing toleration of Barack Obama and the current four Republican candidates as an actual "democratic" exercise. Or accepting the idea that computers can think, and that communicating electronically with people is the essence of human relations.
This new hand grenade the British are lobbing into the U.S. election is ready to be detonated. In the name of creating a "third pathway" for choosing a candidate, an outfit calling itself "Americans Elect" has already secured a line on the Presidential ballot in 17 states for its as yet to be decided "non-partisan ticket." It claims to be poised to do the same in another 18 states soon, and intends to be on the ballot in all 50 states by the election in November.
Americans Elect is the brainchild of the British-trained and -run hedge-fund speculator Peter Ackerman, who created, heads, and finances the International Centre for Non-Violent Conflict (ICNC), whose strategies Ackerman says he is deploying to shape the U.S. elections. Although headquartered in Washington, D.C., his ICNC serves as one of London's premier " 'democratic' regime-change" training centers globally.
These networks that are now promising that Americans Elect will deliver "shock therapy" to the U.S. political system in 2012, play a central role in the British apparatus deployed with the stated purpose of overthrowing and/or assassinating Russia's incoming President Vladimir Putin in the immediate period ahead, despite his landslide election victory.
EIR published the authorative dossier on that London apparatus in our Feb. 3, 2012 issue, titled, "Destabilizing Russia: The 'Democracy' Agenda of McFaul and His Oxford Masters." The dossier became one of the hottest items in the Russian blogsphere in the lead-up to the March 4 Presidential elections, and drove President Obama's Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, into public fits of enraged twittering.
Such projects only succeed, when citizens refuse to think on as big a scale as our enemy.
Nonpartisan Financier Fascism
"Using the Internet you have the power to help break gridlock and change politics as usual. No special interest. No agendas. Country before party. A greater voice for all Americans, no matter their party. You have the power to be heard. Every registered voter can be a delegate. Any constitutionally-eligible citizen can be a candidate. The power to choose new direction and new leadership in 2012. Real issues. Real candidates. Real votes. New direction, new leadership."
Step right up. Get your snake oil here, the circus barker cries. That is the tenor of everything posted on AE's disgusting, "it's all about you" website.
Americans Elect was set up in 2010 by "private equity financier" Ackerman, who continues as its chairman. His son Elliot, a former Marine Corps Special Ops and intelligence officer, is its chief operating executive. So far, Peter Ackerman has put in a reported $5 million of his own capital, and fellow hedge-fund speculator John Burbank is said to have put in $2.5 million from his multi-billion-dollar Passport Capital, LLC.
The total kitty at AE's disposal is now said to be $22 million, but all its other contributors are undisclosed, because this outfit, whose sole declared purpose is to nominate a Presidential ticket, is registered as a 501c "social welfare organization," which, unlike organizations involved in elections, does not have to make public its donors nor the amounts contributed.
Its Leadership Advisory Board, however, is listed, and as of February 2012, that included at least 15 other hedge-fund honchos; JPMorgan Chase managing director W. David Lawson; Lynn Forester de Rothschild, the CEO of her husband's E.L. Rothschild; and Charles Dallara, the managing director of the bankers' cartel (a.k.a. the Institute of International Finance), who has been on hand to personally dictate conditions for bailouts and genocide at pretty much every European summit of the past year. Among others with equally invalid claims to "serving no special interest."
With their $22 million, Americans Elect's financiers are reported to have hired 3,000 petition gatherers, and marshalled about as many volunteers. A June "online convention" of AE "delegates" (currently numbering around 350,000) is to select a candidate, who must pick a running-mate from another party.
Names being bandied about as candidates cover the spectrum, but AE's propaganda echoes that of the aborted 2008 "independent" campaign of Wall Street billionaire Michael Bloomberg: bipartisan fascist fiscal austerity.
On Feb. 19, AE champion and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman proposed that if former U.S. Comptroller David Walker[1] were to run as an independent, his participation in the Presidential debates would force the Democratic and Republican canidates to address the necessity (sic) of ripping up Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
As Comptroller, Walker championed the financiers' lie that entitlements must be eliminated; upon leaving government, he was picked up by Blackstone Equity's Peter Peterson as the poster boy for his drive to take down all of Franklin Roosevelt's social programs, and to impose British-style rationing of health care.
Lo and behold, Walker is a member of the Americans Elect Advisory Board. AE put out a press release the day after Friedman suggested a Walker nomination, hailing Walker.
"Dave Walker knows the facts, the truth and the tough choice we face in connection with our nation's poor finances and other key challenges.... Walker understands that Americans Elect's online nominating process for president combined with its independence from the two major political parties has the ability to shock the current political system in a positive manner."
The Devil in Your Elections
Ackerman embodies everything rotten about the world that emerged triumphant from the British-ordered assassinations of the two Kennedys—from parasitical monetarism, to systems analysis, artifical intelligence, and the "democracy" of extreme group-think.
In his opening to LaRouchePAC's explosive pamphlet, "The Noosphere vs. The Blogosphere: Is the Devil in Your Laptop?" (November 2007), Lyndon LaRouche addressed the underlying coherence of three cases of mass insanity typifying the New Dark Age into which the world was then sinking: Henry Paulson's bank bailout, a grisly MySpace, Facebook-organized murder in Italy, and yet another school mass killing by a video-game-addicted youth. LaRouche's title to his chapter, "From Milken & Enron to Perugia: 'Extreme Events'!", captures the life and work of Peter Ackerman.
Born in 1946 in New York, by the time Ackerman graduated with a PhD from Tuft University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in 1976, he was already under British intelligence control. His doctoral thesis, "Strategic Aspects of Nonviolent Resistance Movements," was written under the direction of the Oxford-trained Bertrand Russellite ideologue Gene Sharp, whose trajectory is featured in EIR's "McFaul" dossier.
Perhaps because of the fascination with "assymetric conflict" he says he developed at that time, Ackerman went into finance when he left school, hired in 1978 by the infamous organized crime-permeated financial house Drexel Burnham Lambert. Not in some minor role, either; his first position was as Assistant to the President. According to his testimony before IRS examiners questioning several years' tax filings in 2006, Ackerman ran Drexel's "Special Projects Group" from 1978-89, overseeing such pivotal restructurings as the Penn Central Railroad and Meyer Lansky's Resorts International. In George Anders' book, Merchants of Debt, Ackerman is identified as the chief strategist for the company, who increasingly ran the shop as Milken became tied up in legal battles from 1987 on.
When Milken finally went to jail in the Fall of 1990, Ackerman was not in town, having left for London early that year. There, he and his wife, Joanne Leedom-Ackerman, set up Rockport Capital, Inc., and he dove back into the project of using democracy as an imperial strategic weapon. Ackerman was a visiting scholar at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), where he re-worked his dissertation into a book, co-authored with the then-president of Sharp's Albert Einstein Institute (AEI), Christopher Kruegler, who bases his work on the theory of "civilian-based defense," which was concocted by the leading military light of Bertrand Russell's Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Sir Stephen King-Hall. Published in 1994, the introduction to Strategic Non-Violent Conflict: The Dynamics of People Power in the 20th Century was written by Sharp, and the foreward by the RAND Corporation's nuclear war gamer, Thomas Schelling of "rational irrationality" fame.
By that time, Ackerman and his wife were both on the board of Sharp's AEI.
Since moving back to the United States at the end of 1995, Ackerman has continued his two loves: making millions speculating, and overthrowing governments. His book morphed into a movie, adapted as a PBS series and packaged as an educational program for high school students, and then remade as a computer game.
In 2002, Ackerman went beyond financing Sharp's AEI, to set up the ICNC as a complementary institution, with expanded capabilities for financing and training agents. Projects range from training Iranian and Venezuelan dissidents (in 2005, he co-authored with universal fascist Michael Ledeen a call for Arab revolutions), to financing "journalists" for the Mexican-based NarcoNews (whose name is self-explanatory).
Quitting Britain's Game
At an Oct. 22, 2010 gala fundraiser in New York City, Ackerman discussed his work at the ICNC, as the methodology applied to Americans Elect.
"What you see is the need, particularly in authoritarian systems, to have some kind of external power to change a system that's dysfunctional.... Now, recently, I've been involved with another system that I think most here would agree is dysfunctional: our own political system.... What I am undertaking as the chairman of the Americans Elect initiative is an effort to create an online virtual primary and convention.... What I think will happen again, just like in civil resistance, we'll have a new force that will come to play in a system that is struggling. "
Put that together with Ackerman's 2004 report that he was working with Lawrence Livermore Labs to develop "new communicating techniques" to be used in youth insurgencies, and his statements elsewhere that he is most enthused about his video game, issued in an upgraded edition as "People Power. The Game of Civil Resistance." In this game, "the player takes on the role of strategist in a nonviolent movement against a variety of adversaries in pre-packaged scenarios," the adversaries being run by artificial intelligence.
Ackerman, dubbed "The Sniff" at Drexel Burnham Lambert for his butt-kissing of the boss, decided early on whose game he would play in, never questioning the "pre-packaged scenarios" served up by his British bosses.
Wouldn't you prefer to think for yourself?
[1] See Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., "Ducking the Issue! David Walker's Sleight of Hand," EIR, March 16, 2007.
