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Name someone stupid (8)

Posted by Gary Gevisser | Comments Off on Name someone stupid (8)

Name someone stupid – Part 7 CLICK HERE

Thursday, September 2, 2021 – 12:11 PM

https://www.2facetruth.com/name-someone-stupid-7/

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“He can think 3 moves ahead of them. Trust me. He’s a genius!”

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King Golden Jr. Esq., came away after the meeting with Oded thinking, “Is Gary Gevisser and his mother Zena the only 2 Jewish people who can think?”

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He never expressed those words to me, but I knew what he was thinking.

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How can a total bullshitter impress so many?

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Hitler managed to do it.

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But Hitler was not Jewish.

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GemACH sic,

You must have the answer; and if not ask your boss and the Schneerson’s replacement team who continue to do the bidding of the SA Oppenheimers.

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Insecure people surround themselves with insecure people.

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It takes one just a little smarter like Oded to make them feel like geniuses.

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He tells them what the Israelis from Kibbutz Hagoshrim are thinking and not to do anything until they make their move.

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They make their move and catch Arlene, Shandler, Ross and company flatfooted because they have been waiting for the wrong move, and now they can’t defend against it, and this Oded is that much more of a genius.

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Who here has ever worked with such geniuses?

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You are told that you are going to get fucked, you get fucked and the messenger is a genius.

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Why even bother thinking when you can go to Jack in the Box and get poison delivered directly into your bloodstream?

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How is possible that religious people, starting with fake Jewish people worshipping ink on paper, are disproportionately unhealthy?

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GoDNature would logically have them the healthiest, not only because they are smart but because God does not desire to be the laughing stock.

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Who but the SA Oppenheimers would profit from the loudest, foulest mouthed Jews being the exact opposite of you would logically expect?

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GemACH sic,

It is 3:25 PM and you are not expected to begin the Jewish Sabbath for a good 24 hours.

Are you working through your afternoon 10 minute break or are you now management and also no longer having to punch a time card?

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BTW, have you marked yourself safe on Facebook following the flash floods?

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Ben Gurion knew the GDP was wrong.

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There were at least 2 assassination attempts on Ben Gurion.

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In other words the chances of him being assassinated would have increased considerably had he exposed the diabolical GDP.

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GemACH sic, you didn’t get the food right.

The entire ChaBAD sic Nazi Jewish collaboration network didnt get either the food or the GDP right.

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The GDP is a colossal disaster.

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Nothing in history including all the vulcanoes, earthquakes, Hurricans, Tornadoes and the such, come close.

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It is unimaginably insane.

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It does more than border on the supernatural.

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All your silences explain it perfectly.

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It is highlighted by this monster GemACH sic playing with your diks.

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That is just an expression and women should take no offense because you have the imagination to think what it could be like just seated next to GemACH sic, let alone have his ugly naked body pressing down on you.

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GemACH sic,

you are a clown.

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All your nonsense because your big, fat, ugly ego prevented you from questioning the GDP?

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GemACH sic,

Let’s now go through chapter for chapter of The D I book, looking, for all the times the GDP [Gross Domestic Product] economic index is mentioned.

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Prologue:

THE DIAMOND INVENTION

In Japan, the matrimonial custom had survived feudal revolutions, world wars, industrialization and even the American occupation. Up until the mid-196os, Japanese parents arranged proper marriages for their children through trusted ‘intermediaries. The ceremony was then consummated, according to Shinto law, by the bride and groom both drinking rice wine from the same wooden bowl. This simple arrangement had persisted for more than a millennium. There was no tradition for romance, courtship, seduction and prenuptial love in Japan; and no tradition that required the gift of a diamond engagement ring.

Then, in 1967, halfway around the world, a South African diamond company decided to change the Japanese courtship ritual. It retained J. Walter Thompson, the largest advertising agency in the world, to embark on a campaign to popularize diamond engagement rings in Japan. It was not an easy task. Even the quartering of millions of American soldiers in Japan for a decade had not resulted in any substantial Japanese interest in giving diamonds as a token of love.

The advertising agency began its campaign by subtly suggesting that diamonds were a visible sign of modern Western values. It created a series of color advertisements in Japanese magazines showing very beautiful women displaying their diamond rings. The women all had Western facial features and wore European clothes. Moreover, in most of the advertisements, the women were involved in some activity that defied Japanese traditions, such as bicycling, camping, yachting, ocean-swimming and mountain-climbing. In the background, there usually stood a Japanese man, also attired in fashionable European clothes. In addition, almost all of the automobiles, sporting equipment and other artifacts in the picture, were conspicuous foreign imports. The message in these ads was clear: diamonds represent a sharp break with the Oriental past and an entry point into modern life.

The campaign was remarkably successful. Until 1959 the importation of diamonds had not even been permitted by the postwar Japanese government. When the campaign began in 1968, less than 5 percent of Japanese women getting married received a diamond engagement ring. By 1972 the proportion had risen to 27 percent. By 1978, half of all Japanese women who were married wore a diamond on their ring finger. And, by 1981, some 6o percent of Japanese brides wore diamonds. In a mere thirteen years, the fifteen-hundred-year Japanese tradition was radically revised. Diamonds became a staple of the Japanese marriage. And Japan became, after the United States, the second largest market for the sale of diamond engagement rings. It was all part of the diamond invention.

The diamond invention was an ingenious scheme for sustaining the value of diamonds in an uncertain world. To begin with, it involved gaining control over the production of all the important diamond mines in the world. Next, a system was devised for allocating this controlled supply of gems to a select number of diamond cutters who all agreed to abide by certain rules intended to assure that the quantity of finished diamonds available at any given time never exceeded the public’s demand for them. Finally, a set of subtle, but effective, incentives were devised for regulating the behavior of all the people who served and ultimately profited from the system.

The invention had a wide array of diverse parts: these included a huge stockpile of uncut diamonds in a vault in London; a billion-dollar cash hoard deposited in banks in Europe; and private intelligence network operating out of Antwerp, Tel Aviv, Johannesburg and London; a global network of advertising agencies, brokers and distributors; corporate fronts in Africa for concealing massive diamond purchases; and private treaties with nations establishing quotas for annual production.

The invention is far more than merely a monopoly for fixing diamond prices; it is a mechanism for converting tiny crystals of carbon into universally recognized tokens of power and romance. For it to ultimately succeed, it must endow these stones with the sort of sentiment that would inhibit the public from ever reselling them onto the market. The illusion thus had to be inculcated into the mass mind that diamonds were forever– “forever” in the sense that they could never be resold.

The invention itself was a relatively recent development in the history of the diamond trade. Up until the late nineteenth century, diamonds were a genuinely rare stone. They were found only in a few river beds in India and the jungles Brazil. The entire world production of gem diamonds amounted to only a few pounds a year.

In 1870, however, there was a radical change in this situation. Huge diamond “pipes” were discovered near the Orange River in South Africa.

These were the first diamond mines ever discovered. Now, rather than finding by chance an occasional diamond in a river, diamonds could now be scooped out of these mines by huge steam shovels. Suddenly, the market was deluged a growing flood of diamonds. The British financiers who had organized the South African mines quickly came to realize that their investment was endangered: diamonds had little intrinsic value, and their price depended almost entirely on their scarcity. They feared that when new mines developed in South Africa, diamonds would become at best only a semi-precious gem.

As it turned out, financial acumen proved the mother of invention. The major investors in the diamond mines realized that they had no alternative but to merge their interests into a single entity that would be powerful enough to control the mines’ production and, in every other way that was necessary, perpetuate the scarcity and illusion of diamonds. The instrument that they created for this purpose was called De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd., a company incorporated in South Africa.

As De Beers penetrated and took control of all aspects of the world diamond trade, it also assumed many protean forms. In London, it operated under the innocuous name of the Diamond Trading Company. In Israel, it was known under the all-embracing mantle of “the syndicate.” In Antwerp, it was just called the CSO– initials referring to the Central Selling Organization (which was an arm of the Diamond Trading Company). And in Black Africa, it disguised its South African origins under subsidiaries with such names as the Diamond Development Corporation or Mining Services, Inc. At its height, it not only either directly owned or controlled all the diamond mines in southern Africa, it also owned diamond trading companies in England, Portugal, Israel, Belgium, Holland and Switzerland. It was De Beers of course that organized the Japanese campaign as part of its worldwide promotion of diamonds.

By 1981, De Beers had proved to be the most successful cartel arrangement in the annals of modern commerce. For more than a half century, while other commodities, such as gold, silver, copper, rubber and grains, fluctuated wildly in response to economic conditions, diamonds continued to advance upward in price each year. Indeed, the mechanism of the diamond invention seemed so superbly in control of prices-and unassailable-that even speculators began buying diamonds as a guard against the vagaries of inflation and recession. Like the romantic subjects of the advertising campaigns, they also assumed diamonds would increase in value forever.

My interest in the diamond invention was sparked originally by a chance meeting that I had with an English diamond broker in St. Tropez in the summer of 1977. The .broker was Benjamin Bonas, and he represented De Beers’ Diamond Trading Company. He was visiting some friends of mine for the weekend, and during the course of a leisurely lunch the subject of diamonds was broached. Bonas explained that despite revolutions, hostile governments and general turmoil in Africa, De Beers still firmly controlled the production of diamonds. He pointed out that this arrangement had proved so successful that even the Soviet Union sold the diamonds from its Siberian mines to De Beers. He did not elaborate at this point on the actual mechanisms used De Beers to lock up the flow of diamonds from diverse quarters of the world. Nevertheless, I was intrigued by the idea that a South African company, aided and abetted Black African and Communist nations who were pledged a total embargo of South African business, had succeeded putting together a truly global alliance to protect the value and illusion of diamonds. As the former Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique got their full independence, the pressures throughout Africa, and most of the world, to isolate South Africa would drastically escalate. How would the diamond cartel survive?

In Washington, later that year, I filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act for all the investigations of the Justice Department concerning the diamond Cartel. The resulting archive of documents provided a fragmentary picture of De Beers’ conflicts and near collision with antitrust laws of the United States, the clues all pointed to mining companies in South Africa and the distribution arm in London. I therefore began my inquiry into the nature and future of the diamond invention in Johannesburg.

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No mention of the GDP.

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But there is mention:

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By 1981, the game was over, Israel was defeated, and now it was up to real estate developers to carve up the world unobstructed and hope no one caught on to the fraud of the GDP and the ensuing havoc.

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Pay particular attention to:

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Note the Nigerian like period, full-stop right before the word “broker” in the second sentence.

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Just like when I was invited for dinner with Bob Dylan, and he was given a rundown on me, and why he greeted me with a very warm smile and handshake and couldnt wait to get my take on the politics-economics of mineral rich South Africa, anyone high ranking in SA Oppenheimer cartel and meeting with scholarly, investigative reporter, Professor Edward Jay Epstein, now an author of 15 odd books, would know everything there is to not only know about Epstein but how to get him interested in the biggest story of his career.

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Who remembers my mother Zena’s diamond broach?

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Member @Emma Gevisser have you been enlisted to fence those diamonds or what about my mother’s antiques?

Does your father and mother know how bad you are?

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Who thinks SA Oppenheimers-De Beers can’t afford an online editor for Professor Edward Jay Epstein?

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CHAPTER ONE

A RELUCTANT TYCOON

SOUTH AFRICA

DECEMBER 4, 1978

If one man can be said to control the world’s diamonds it is Harry Frederick Oppenheimer.

Sitting across the desk from Oppenheimer, however, it is hard to imagine that this small, shy man dominated a multi-billion-dollar empire. He spoke quietly, but with great precision. He had a distinct Oxford accent, and as he explained an issue he tended to punctuate his answers with a self-effacing, smile. He was far more candid in discussing his business than I would have expected someone in this position to be, and I assumed that this disarming openness proceeded from his confidence in his control over his immediate universe. His interlocking businesses did after all account for over half of the industrial exports of southern Africa. The heart of this complex is located at 44 Main Street in the heart of Johannesburg’. The block-long building, with its imposing neocolonial facade and marble entranceway, looked much more like a government institution than the headquarters of the mining company. As it turned out, it housed in its offices far more power than most government buildings. Indeed, Oppenheimer even had a private treaty with the Soviet Union, although the terms have never been publicly revealed.

Oppenheimer explained that it was no secret that De Beers acquired through subsidiaries all the uncut diamonds that the Soviet Union wanted to sell on the open market. “We have of course no reason for concealing this arrangement other than the Russians prefer not to receive any public attention for obvious reasons,” he said almost apologetically. The “obvious reasons” for obscuring the arrangement with De Beers were that the Soviet Union had for some fifteen years called for a total boycott of South Africa and South African businesses, and its dealings with De Beers, if made public, might prove embarrassing.

But how long could such an unholy alliance last? The Soviet Union apparently had ambitions of its own in southern Africa, and at some point geopolitical considerations might take precedence over business considerations. I asked how he could be sure that the Soviets would renew the deal.

“We paid the Soviet Union more than half a billion dollars last year,” he answered. “This is not a sum it can easily replace, and I can see no conceivable reason why it would want to abandon such a profitable arrangement.” His logic was brutally direct: De Beers provided the Soviet Union with its single largest source of hard currency (only petroleum was a more important export for Soviet trade in 1977)If the Soviet Union withdrew its diamonds from De Beers, it would have to find other outlets to sell its uncut diamonds. And if it precariously dumped these diamonds on the market, the price would collapse, and the Soviet Union would lose an important source of foreign exchange. “What could the Russians possibly gain by competing with us?” he asked rhetorically.

He further pointed out that De Beers provided the Soviets with certain types of industrial diamonds that were important for drilling and producing electronic wiring. Its Siberian mines apparently did not produce these strategically important diamonds. By selling gem stones to De Beers, the Soviet Union received the credits for importing the industrial diamonds it needed.

The Soviet Union also had considerable influence in other diamond producing areas in Black Africa, such as Angola. I wondered if the logic of the arrangement between De Beers and the Soviets required the Soviets to use their power in those countries to help De Beers retain its control over diamond mines there. “You will have to address that question to the Africans concerned,” he replied abruptly. The tone in his voice made ii clear that there were aspects to the Soviet arrangement that he decidedly did not want to discuss.

African revolutionary movements had also been perceived as a threat to the stability of the diamond cartel. T here had been particular concern expressed about the safety of De Beers mines in Namibia, which were the world’s single largest source of gem diamonds. Technically, Namibia was then a United Nations trusteeship. In fact, however, South Africa administered this diamond-producing territory as if it were a province of that country. This had led to a potentially explosive situation. The United Nations had demanded that South Africa recognize SWAPO, the guerrillas group battling for independence, and hold elections under the auspices of the UN. If South Africa failed to comply with this ultimatum, the United Nations threatened to impose economic sanctions, including possibly an oil embargo. To buy time, South Africa decided to stage its own election in Namibia excluding SWAPO. Since this election would not lead to a change in the status of Namibia, or elect anyone to public office, it was being staged for the benefit of the world press. Condemned by SWAPO as a “charade,” it was scheduled to begin later this week

“What the South African government hopes to accomplish by this exercise is beyond me,” he commented. He suggested that even if the South African government turned out massive vote, it would only delay the movement toward independence in Namibia.

If independence was inevitable, De Beers might eventually find that its diamond mines there would be controlled not by a friendly government in South Africa but by a SWAPO revolutionary government. Would this pose a threat to De Beers’ diamond monopoly?

“We are prepared to deal with any legitimate government that comes to power there,” he replied unernotionally. The fact that SWAPO had announced that it planned to nationalize De Beers’ diamond concessions in Namibia did not faze him. “We now pay about 8o million dollars a year in taxes on those diamonds, and that provides the territory with most of its revenues,” he explained, and then added, “whatever government eventually comes to power they will need this revenue to survive.” His point was clear: Namibia needed De Beers’ money as much as De Beers needed Namibia’s diamonds. He was confident that SWAPO, or any other group in Namibia, would accept this bargain.

Oppenheimer was concerned with the possibility of the United Nations imposing economic sanctions against South Africa, since his empire exported billions of dollars worth of South African commodities. He did not believe, however, that they could affect the diamond trade. “I can think of no commodity less susceptible to dangers from UN sanctions than diamonds,” he said. He was stating the obvious: diamonds were after all one of the most convenient commodities to transport across borders. For example, an entire month of production of diamonds from the Namibian mines, worth $40 million, could be smuggled out of Namibia in an attache case.

Oppenheimer also gave little credence to the fear that De Beers might be running out of quality diamonds. He pointed out that De Beers was developing vast new mines in the Botswana desert, which he planned to visit the next day. These Botswana mines would provide the world with an ample supply of diamonds well into the I 99os.

I asked Oppenheimer whether this move into the independent country of Botswana was meant to make De Beers less dependent on South Africa for its diamonds.

According to the development plan that he had outlined, Botswana would soon be producing more diamonds than South Africa. He scoffed at the idea that the mining of diamonds in Botswana would have “any significant effect in divorcing De Beers policies from political and social problems in South Africa.” He emphasized, “We are, and will remain, a a South African company.

It was clear, however, that in the 198os De Beers would come increasingly dependent for its diamonds on African countries. In light of the continuing and intensifying confrontation between South Africa and Black Africa, it seemed questionable how effectively De Beers could operate mines in these independent countries with hostile regimes. Oppenheimer insisted that the black-white confrontation in Africa would not present a problem for De Beers. He termed the arrangement between De Beers and Black African nations “Mutually advantageous.” He further suggested that it might be useful for me to inspect at first hand some of De Beers’ mining operations in independent nations to more fully understand how the “arrangement” works. He offered to provide me air transportation and access to the mines in Botswana, Lesotho and other independent nations.

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No GDP.

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Economics comes up twice.

Note the space at the beginning of the second sentence, “T here”.

After the paragraph ends “… week” there is no punctuation, such as a full-stop:

“We are prepared to deal with any legitimate government that comes to power there,” he replied unernotionally.

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If English is your first language you might have difficulty with “unernotionally”, but don’t try checking Google, because Ive done that.

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@Tommy Simpson, do you feel that you are emotionally strong enough to handle the truth-logic?

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When you hear at your first meeting with the richest and most powerful person on the planet who has just with the help of the Schneerson hijacked the Israeli government, “We are prepared to deal with any legitimate government that comes to power there” is it your stunted growth that has you thinking, “Boring Shit!!”?

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GemACH sic,

Do you think Simpson has got bored and is no longer paying attention 24/7?

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Do you recall the attention to detail Simpson exhibited when arguing that my designation of you being “very fat” was incorrect because Simpson felt you were simply “fat” but he purposefully left us guessing, and you thought you had conned at least one person.

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GemACH sic, you haven’t managed to con anyone here, other than yourself as you inflict great pain and suffering on your own brain trying to dig yourself out of the largest, most ferocious Black Hole your mind can imagine.

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Remember we have yet to get through the importance of the GDP to The D I book and what a legitimate government means to a rapacious, merciless, raider.

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GemACH sic,

Anyone who is capable of worshipping ink on paper is able to read.

When did your trauma first begin?

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Im not talking about seeing day in, day out, the ugliest looking men that you couldn’t escape from because you were born into this ugly cult, but once beginning to read The D I book for the first time?

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It had to have been chapter 1, if not the Prologue.

Epstein continues:

The fact that SWAPO had announced that it planned to nationalize De Beers’ diamond concessions in Namibia did not faze him. “We now pay about 8o million dollars a year in taxes on those diamonds, and that provides the territory with most of its revenues,” he explained, and then added, “whatever government eventually comes to power they will need this revenue to survive.” His point was clear: Namibia needed De Beers’ money as much as De Beers needed Namibia’s diamonds. He was confident that SWAPO, or any other group in Namibia, would accept this bargain.

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Oppenheimer’s point was clear; the people are stupid and I expect you to make it all spectacularly interesting and to come away, “If you can’t beat them, join them”.

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When you buy the people who control the distribution of the money, you talk a lot about money when speaking to ignoramuses.

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You all thought Epstein was a brilliant writer.

He simply had you brilliantly fooled.

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GemACH sic,

Why don’t you as soon as you “clock out” write to Epstein asking, “Do you need an editor? I not only speak Yiddish, but I can juggle toilet paper in a supermarket isle. I can also help you put on Tefilin, grow a beard and get you fat so that you will fit in with the rest of us.”

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We are still on Chapter 1 – A RELUCTANT TYCOON

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GemACH sic,

How many terrorists, you think, could have been turned into peace real estate developers like The Coupon Clipper is Jack The Ripper, member @Jeffrey Essakow?

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Do you think it would take one attache case or several, to win over Hamas, ISIS, Hezbollah and Al Quaida?

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Of course it all depends not on the amount of attache cases or the number of diamonds in each attache case, but rather the ability of the SA Oppenheimers to create their own demand through advertising using media companies they either own directly or control through their influence.

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GemACH sic,

Do you consider yourself sophisticated in anything other than trash talk and helping spread anti-Semtism and anti-Israel sentiment?

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Didn’t your father and grandfathers teach you about how the Zagiew expanded their network without the Gestapo having to increase their payroll?

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GemACH sic,

Do you question the integrity of anyone within ChaBAD sic, or do you think because you all say you are Jewish that God loves all Jewish people.

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Does God not love Christian and Muslim people as equally as Jewish people?

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GemACH sic,

What is it about us Jewish people that make us so special?

You are the rat.

Clearly, I am not the rat because Im exposing the SA Oppenheimers and all their rats.

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CHAPTER TWO

THE DESERT VENTURE

BOTSWANA

DECEMBER 5, 1978

The small Cessna Air King took off from Jan Smuts in Johannesburg promptly at 7 A.m. for the two-hour flight to the Orapa mine in Botswana. On board the plane with me were four De Beers engineers who called themselves “the flying circus.” Their job was to periodically inspect and evaluate the operations at all of De Beers’ diamond mines, and then report back to Oppenheimer’s headquarters in Johannesburg.

We flew directly over the eastern edge of the Kalahari Desert, which cut through Botswana in a swath of brown barren earth. There were few signs of life anywhere below except for scattered clumps of twisted thorn trees and an occasional herd of oryx. By 9 A.M., the sun, was baking down on the parched earth which was partially concealed by a nimbus of dust. Suddenly, appearing like some desert mirage out of this haze, was a modern city. “Orapa,” the pilot announced, as he began circling for a landing.

Except for the fact that Orapa is in the middle of nowhere, it might have been any suburban city. I could see ranch houses with green lawns and rectangular swimming pools laid out along a cross-grid of paved streets. There were also a shopping center, football fields, parks and high rise apartment houses.

The De Beers engineer sitting next to me explained that most of the city of Orapa had in fact been prefabricated in Johannesburg in 1971, and then, piece by piece, reassembled on this stretch of desert. It had been an enormous undertaking. A road had to be bulldozed through the trackless wasteland so that trucks could move the mining equipment in, an artificial lake and a pipeline had to be constructed to bring water into Orapa, power lines had to be strung some 16o miles to the South African border, and an airstrip had to be built so that diamonds could be flown out. “This was the first mine I)c Beers ever developed outside of South Africa,” he continued.

At the Orapa airstrip, it took only a moment to go through Botswana customs. Oppenheimer’s headquarters had telexed ahead that I was arriving, and I was immediately issued a red badge. Without such a badge, not even a citizen of’ Botswana is allowed into Orapa. I remarked to the engineer about how quickly we were admitted into Botswana, considering that we did not have visas and that he was a South African citizen.

“No problem,” he laughed, “Harry Oppenheimer owns Botswana lock, stock and barrel.” I later found out that he wasn’t far wrong. Botswana, a republic with some 6 million citizens, most nomadic tribesmen, derives more than 50 percent of it s national income from diamond, manganese and copper mines controlled by Harry Oppenheimer. The Botswana government is dependent on these mines for almost all its revenues and foreign exchange.

Jim Gibson, a lanky Scotsman in his early forties, met me at the airport. He was De Beers’ chief geologist at Orapa, and he had been asked to show me around the mine. He explained as we drove back to Orapa that he had been at the mine since it went into production in 1971.

When we arrived at the mine, he handed me a steel helmet. As a safety regulation, De Beers requires that everyone wear one at all its mines.. “You’re looking at the second largest diamond mine in the world,” Gibson said, pointing to a long, oval-shaped depression in front of us. (The largest was the De Beers mine in Tanzania.)

I had imagined a mine deep underground honeycombed with labyrinthine tunnels. Instead I saw an open pit that looked like an excavation site for a skyscraper. A number of dirt roads wound their way down to the bottom of the pit, which was no more than 69o feet below the surface of the earth at its deepest point. On the floor of the mine I could see about fifty Botswana workers. They were dressed in khaki jumpsuits and yellow helmets, and most of them were operating steam shovels and other mechanized equipment.

Every few minutes, a large yellow truck driven by a Botswana would drive down the winding road to the bottom of the mine. A power shovel would then load it with a pile of bluish earth. When the truck returned to the surface, it would dump the bluish earth on a moving conveyor belt. The entire process was highly mechanized and required relatively few workers.

“It is simply an earth-moving operation,” Gibson explained, “every afternoon at 4 P.M., a number of dynamite charges are detonated to loosen up the ground, then the power shovels simply scoop up the kimberlite.”

Kimberlite is the blue ore in the mine. “What you are looking down into is a kimberlite pipe. If all the kimberlite was scooped out of that pit, it would look something like this.” He drew a sketch in the ground of something that looked like a funnel with an extremely long stem. “Millions of years ago there were underground explosions that sent lava shooting up to the surface. When the lava cooled, it hardened into these pipelike formations.” The kimberlite, containing the diamonds, had come gushing up with the lava.

I picked up a handful of the kimberlite ore and crumbled it into a loose mixture of stones and bluish dust. “Where are the diamonds?” I asked.

“Finding a diamond in kimberlite is like finding a very small needle In a haystack,” he responded. It is necessary to slit through more than two tons of kimberlite to find just one carat of diamonds.

A carat is a very minute measure. It is based on the remarkably uniform weight of the ancient carob seed, and weighs only 1/2000th of a pound. Separating the diamonds from this mass of bluish ore seemed a herculean task. I asked Gibson who separated out the diamonds.

“The diamonds are never touched by a human hand,” he explained, as we walked along a path parallel to the conveyor belt toward a glimmering structure about one-quarter of a mile away. “That’s the separation plant,” he said, pointing, to the building ahead. It towered about twenty stories above the desert and looked like some medieval fortress. As we approached it, I could see that it was constructed of giant slabs of metal and surrounded by a barbwire fence.

I had heard a number of stories about natives stealing diamonds from mines by concealing them on their bodies. I wondered whether this fortress like building was part of some draconian security system. I inquired whether they conducted body searches.

Gibson smiled and replied that there was no need for anything like that. He explained that the fully automated sorting machines kept the diamonds from tempting anyone.

The conveyor belt carries about one thousand tons of ore an hour into a plant. Inside the separation plant, the conveyor belt dumps the ore between two giant wheels-the ‘ ‘crushers “-which are large enough to pulverize automobiles. The kimberlite must be broken into small fragments in order to be automatically processed. The tiny particles, mainly sand, are screened out by a series of sieves. The kimberlite then moves on a conveyor belt into huge vats of swirling liquid that resemble enormous whirlpool baths. These “cyclone baths” were designed by Dc Beers to take advantage of the heavy density of diamonds in separating them out from lighter-density materials. Gibson explained, “They work on the same centrifugal principle as dairy creamers: at high speeds, lighter materials rise and are skimmed off.” More than 99 percent of the ore is removed in the vats; what remains is a concentrate of diamonds and other heavy minerals.

Back on the conveyor belt, the concentrate is channeled into a battery of large, five-foot-high black boxes called C~ sortexes.” These machines take advantage of one of the natural characteristics of diamonds: the fact that they, unlike most minerals, phosphoresce under X-rays. As the concentrate passed, the machines bombarded it with X-rays. Whenever a diamond passes through, it glimmers, activating a photoelectric cell inside the sortex. The photoelectric triggers a Jet of air that blows the diamond and the stones on either side of it off the conveyor belt and down a chute that leads to the sorting room.

We went next to the sorting room, which is the most heavily guarded inner sanctum in the entire diamond mining complex. Three different guards were required to put their keys into separate locks before the door could be opened. The windowless room had in its center a row of large glass boxes, which were all connected by pipes to the ceiling. “Not even the sorters have the opportunity to lay a hand on the diamonds in this system,” Gibson explained.

On closer inspection, I could see that each box had a pair of rubber gloves, called “evening gloves,” fastened to the glass wall of the box. Inside the box was a set of tweezers.

Suddenly, a stream of small stones came clattering through the pipe in the ceiling and spilled into the glass sorting box I was watching. A Botswana sorter immediately went to work. He thrust his hands inside the evening gloves, which protruded into the sealed glass container, and through these gloves, he picked up the tweezers. He quickly separated the stones into two piles-diamonds and non-diamonds. The chief sorter then came over to double-check the sorting. The sorter then pushed the non-diamonds down a hole in one side of the box, where they clanked through a pipe. “Those stones will be fed back onto the conveyor belt just in case the sorter missed any diamonds,” Gibson explained.

The diamonds left in the glass box were then released through a trap door in the bottom into a steel container. This container is continually guarded by two Botswana soldiers with shotguns.

The chief sorter allowed me to examine the day’s catch of diamonds through a window in the steel container. The vast preponderance of the diamonds were black chips resembling tiny fragments of coal. “What are black diamonds used for?” I asked.

“They’re industrial diamonds,” Gibson answered. “Most of them are ground down into abrasive grit and used to grind tools and precision parts.” “They will probably bring about $2 a carat, which is only a hundredth of what good gem diamonds will fetch in today’s market,” he added. It still is financially rewarding since the mine produces about 1.7 million carats of industrial grade diamonds in a year. The mix is roughly 8o percent industrial diamonds and 20 percent gems. The income from the industrial diamonds-even at a mere $2 a carat-is sufficient to pay the day-to-day operating costs of the mine.

I peered again into the box and saw that the whitish diamonds, which looked like tiny pieces of broken glass, had a wide variety of shapes. Some were flat chips, others were twisted triangles, and many were no larger than a grain of sand. It seemed difficult to see how this batch of uncut diamonds could ever be converted into fine jewels.

According to the chief sorter, there were between i,ooo and i,5oo carats of gems in the day’s take. He explained that the exact determination of the number of gem stones, and their value, was made by an official appraiser in the Botswana capital of Gaborone. The diamonds were then flown to London.

“How many of those diamonds are large enough to cut into a one-carat engagement stone?” I asked, recalling the concern about dwindling supplies of the large diamonds.

“You might find only two or three of that size here,” he said. In light of this low ratio in Botswana, it seemed that the concern was well founded.

When we left the separation plant, I looked at the huge mountain of kimberlite waste behind it. Each day the plant processed and spewed out some 20,000 tons of ore. It seemed to be an incredible undertaking for a mere handful of gem diamonds.

“Gem diamonds can be worth anywhere between $ioo and $5,000 a carat depending on their quality,” said Gibson, adding, “and quality is, for all practical purposes, what the official appraisers say it is.” He explained that appraisers had to take into account such nebulous factors as the shade of color, shape, and the cutability of the uncut diamond in making their evaluation. This evaluation was of considerable importance to the Botswana government, for it derived most of its revenue from the 50 percent share of the profits it received on the diamonds.

Diamond mines, unlike most other kinds of mining operations, could not measure, or even reasonably estimate the value of their own product. Gold mines can calculate how many ounces they produce each day, and copper mines can estimate their tonnage, but the Orapa mine could not immediately determine whether its production of gem diamonds that day was worth $ioo,ooo or a million dollars. Both the diamond mine and the Botswana government had to await the outcome of the official evaluation by the De Beers-trained appraisers.

We had lunch that afternoon at the Orapa Club. During the meal, Gibson told the story of how he and another De Beers geologist named Gavin Lamont discovered the Botswana diamonds.

It began in 1962 when Harry Oppenheimer decided to acquire the prospecting rights in Botswana (which was then the British protectorate of Bechuana land). Prospectors had already discovered three diamonds on the banks of the Moutlouse River, but unable to find the source of the diamonds they had abandoned the search. For nearly four years, Gibson and Lamont scoured the headwaters of the Moutlouse without finding a trace of diamonds-or any of the minerals associated with them. At this point, Lamont came up with a highly speculative geological theory. Since there had been enormous upheavals of the earth’s crust in southern Africa in prehistoric times, he suggested that the Moutlouse river may have been truncated by the rising earth; its previous source might have been on the other side of the mountains. Even though there was no corroborative evidence for this theory, Lamont and Gibson believed it was worth the gamble to explore it. They moved their prospecting team north to the edge of the Kalahari desert.

Sand proved to be an immediate problem for the prospectors. If there was a rich kimberlite pipe in the desert, it would be buried under hundreds of feet of sand and gravel. How could they sample the minerals under the desert?

White ants, which had built towering mounds on the desert, provided the solution. Gibson and Lamont realized that these ants had tunneled hundreds of feet below the surface of the desert in searching for humid earth for their nest, and with the mud they retrieved they also brought up traces of minerals from below the surface. By analyzing samples from these ant colonies, Gibson and Lamont found traces of two other minerals-garnets and ilmenites. Since both these minerals frequently occurred in kimberlite, they had reason to hope they were on the right track.

Finally, in March 1967, Gibson narrowed the search to a spot located a few miles away from a cattle trading camp called “Orapa” by the natives. Here he began drilling for core samples with equipment that De Beers had flown up from its Kimberley headquarters. “Those diamonds literally poured out of the small rotary pan,” Gibson recalled. “We realized that we were on to something very big indeed.” Gibson next ordered a series of aerial photographs taken of the area. Examining them, he delineated a depression more than a half mile in diameter. It was, in fact, the mouth of the Orapa pipe. “It was quite unbelievable that the whole area could in fact be kimberlite,” he remembered thinking then.

From that moment on, De Beers moved quickly to bring the mine into production. It cost some $ 3 3 million. Four years later, it went into production, and it was officially opened on May 26, 1971, by President Seretse Khania. Oppenheimer, indeed, had the entire Botswana government flown in for the ceremony. “It was, after all, the first diamond mine that De Beers had ever found,” Gibson added.

According to Gibson, De Beers had completely missed the 44-acre Finsch pipe in South Africa, and the 36o-acre Mwadui pipe in Tanzania, the largest pipe mine ever found, even though both sites had been explored by its geologists several years before the respective discoveries. In every instance, up to discoveries of Botswana, De Beers simply bought out the others. De Beers presumably had been purposely avoiding unnecessarily expanding the supply of diamonds by uncovering new mines.

The scarcity of diamonds one carat or larger in Botswana raised the question of how De Beers intended to meet the demand for these stones. The answer suggested to me was a mine on a mountaintop in the kingdom of Lesotho, which was my next step.

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Chapter 2, the day following the meeting with Harry Oppenheimer, containing no GDP or the word “economic”.

Thursday, 1:42 PM

CHAPTER THREE

SHANGRI-LA

LESOTHO

DECEMBER 6, 1978

Diamonds can be profitably mined in some of the most inaccessible locations in the world precisely because the operation does not require the construction of a vast transportation infrastructure to remove the final product. Almost all other mining enterprises, such as iron, copper, lead, zinc and potash, need to build railroad, pipelines or ports to bulk ship thousands of tons of ore a day. Most precious metals, such as gold, silver and platinum, must be chemically separated from the surrounding matrix of ore in a smelter that in turn usually requires massive daily shipments of coal and other materials. A diamond, however, requires only a primitive landing strip and a light plane to transport its final product which, though it may be worth tens of millions of dollars, seldom amounts to more than a few pounds of stones a day. Perhaps the best example of this phenomenon is the Letseng-La-Teral mine in the Kingdom of Lesotho.

The twin engine Otter, which De Beers had bought from the U.S. Air Force in Vietnam-and which still carried bullet scars from that war-flew low over the 10,0000-foot-high mountains. The kingdom, a landlocked enclave roughly the size of Belgium, was, up until 1966, the British protectorate of Basutoland. Below, I could see the ruins of fortresses used centuries before by the Basutos to defend themselves against the invasions of Zulus and other tribes. The land in the valleys looked green and rich, and trails through the mountain passes led to clusters of huts with conically shaped roofs.

Suddenly, the plane headed directly into a mountain wall shrouded by dense clouds. Everyone aboard, even the South African engineers who made this trip each week, gripped the edge of the seats. There was dead silence in the cabin. The wings of the plane looked as if they were about to touch the rocks they were flying through. Only then did I see the landing strip. It had literally been carved out of the mountainside. The wheels touched with a dull but reassuring thump. The Otter then slowly taxied up a rocky hill, screeched to a stop on the edge of a cliff and in a moment a dozen Basuto workers had tied it down with ropes firmly lashed around its wings and tail.

Through the morning mist, I could discern the rectangular shape of a corrugated iron tower built against the side of the mountain, which, oddly enough, resembled some of the ancient citadels that the plane had passed over. It was, I realized, the separation plant for the diamonds. “Welcome to Letseng-La-Tcrai,” the pilot said over the intercom. “It’s the highest mine in the world.” We were io,ooo feet above sea level on what is called “the roof of Africa.” The pilot explained to me, as I sat for a moment recuperating from the landing, that this Otter was the only means of getting in or out of the mine in winter weather.

When I finally disembarked, I found standing on this mountaintop a tall, slender man impeccably dressed in a three-piece pin-striped suit and wearing a school tie. He seemed completely unruffled and impervious to the icy wind that blew across the mountain. He looked, in fact, as if he had just got out of a cab in the center of London.

“Rogan MacLean,” he said, introducing himself. He explained that he worked at the Diamond Trading Company in London, and he had been sent to Lesotho to evaluate the diamonds coming out of its mine. He said that he was in charge of evaluating “large stones,” which De Beers defined as any uncut gem diamond weighing over 14.8 carats.

“How many large stones are found every year,” I asked.

“Very few. I’d say well under 200.. This mine is one of the two places in the world we regularly get them from. The ,I her place is Sierra Leone, but the fields there are just about exhausted.” MacLean explained, as we waited for a Land Rover to pick us up, that this mine had only been opened for some thirteen months, and it had already produced nearly too large stones. Most of these Lesothan diamonds had a brownish tint to them but aside from that, according to MacLean, they were of first-rate quality.

“How much are these diamonds worth?” I inquired.

McLean explained that the value of diamonds increases practically geometrically with their size. He estimated that whereas a one-carat diamond in good condition would be sold by the Diamond Trading Company for $3oo, a two-carat diamond of comparative quality might bring $2,000 (or 1,000 a carat), and a similar three-carat diamond would fetch $5,400 (or $1,800 a carat). “When you come to my little specialties, a forty-carat diamond might bring a half million dollars.”

Just then a bell began furiously ringing. Something extraordinary had apparently happened at the mine. A moment later, the Land-Rover arrived, and the driver talked with great excitement to MacLean. As we drove off in the Land-Rover, MacLean explained to mc that they were ringing a bell because a large diamond had just been found- the first in nearly two weeks.

When we pulled up in front of the sorting house, we were by a youthful man with a craggy face and blue eyes. He introduced himself as Keith Whitelock, the manager of the mine. He seemed visibly elated about this diamond. “Thought we might never find another big stone,” here,~ he said, as he led us past armed guards into the sorting house.

“Now you don’t have to worry about closing the mine,” MacLean said, with a broad smile.

Whitelock winced at this joke. It contained a grain of truth.. He told me that he had lived and prospected in Lesotho for over ten years. It was his personal Shangri-la.

“It’s a pity it has this crack in it,” he said, “otherwise it could have been cut into a marquise shape.” He explained that because of this almost invisible crack, the diamond would have to be cut into two separate jewels. “The most you could get out of this is two twelve-carat round diamonds.”

MacLean concluded that more than half the weight would be lost in cutting and polishing; depending on the shape of the diamond, somewhere between one-third and one-half of the weight is lost in cutting.

“What about the color? ” Whitelock asked.

“The color is superb,” MacLean answered, pronouncing “superb” as if it were two distinct words. He pointed out that it was extremely fortunate that the diamond was pure white. If it had a brownish tinge to it, as had the last large diamond he had examined from Lesotho, it would be worth only a tenth as much.”This mine depends on big stones-we need to produce two or three a month just to stay in business,” he explained.

When we got to the sorting room, Whitelock instructed the chief sorter to show MacLean the big stone that had just been found. A Basuto guard with a shotgun looked on as the sorter handed the diamond to MacLean.

The diamond itself looked like a large piece of broken glass, except that its edges were smooth. MacLean placed it on the scale. It weighed exactly fifty-eight carats. He nodded approvingly and pulled out his jeweler’s loupe from his pocket. Looking through it, he examined the diamond for about a minute.

Whitelock perked up and asked MacLean how much money this diamond would fetch in London. This in turn would determine how much money De Beers would credit to the mine’s account.

I’d say it should bring between six and seven thousand dollars a carat,” MacLean responded, without hesitating. At minimum, then, this single diamond would be sold to a dealer for $342,000.

“Well, that’s enough to keep the mine going for another two weeks,” Whitelock said smiling.

It seemed extraordinary that a single stone, weighing a fraction of an ounce, could support for a half month a mining enterprise that employed 800 workers. It turned out, however, that Whitelock was not exaggerating. The Basuto workers earned on the average $25 a week-the highest wages for labor paid in Lesotho. From this amount, De Beers deducts the cost of each worker’s food and lodgings. The South African engineers and supervisors, most of whom commute to South Africa weekly in the Otter, earn about $25 a week. With other operating expenses, such as fuel for the trucks and electricity for the machinery, the mountaintop mine cost about $150,000 a week to operate.

Whitelock drove us from the sorting house to the mine itself. Like the desert mine at Orapa, it was a kimberlite pipe. It was, however, only one-thirtieth the size of the pit I had seen the day before in Botswana. “This is the smallest diamond mine that De Beers operates,” Whitelock said, as we stood on the edge of the shallow pit. Below, about a dozen Basuto workers were loading a truck with a power shovel. “We also have the dubious distinction of mining the lowest-grade ore of any De Beers mine.” He explained that they had to sift through three to four tons of kimberlite at the separation to find a single carat of diamonds. And most of the diamonds found are not of gem quality. In all, this mine had produced only 17,000 carats of gem diamonds in its first year of production.

Oppenheimer had told me that De Beers had invested more money in this mountain venture than in any other diamond mine outside of South Africa. It had cost some $45 million to develop. Why had such a huge investment been made in a mine that could yield, compared to other mines, only a trickle of diamonds?

“There is only one reason for this mine to exist: large stones,” Whitelock answered. “Nearly io percent of the total caratage taken out of this mine is in the form of large stones. The world is running out of large diamonds.”

MacLean wholeheartedly agreed. “They are the romance of the diamond business. Movie stars won’t want diamonds if you need a magnifying glass to see them.” MacLean explained that an important part of his mission to Africa was to determine why the supply of large stones was so rapidly diminishing. He said that part of the problem was that most of the older mines fed the ore directly into the giant crushers which, though they speeded the automated separation of the diamonds, also tended to smash larger diamonds into smaller ones. He had just visited Premier mine in South Africa, which had, seventy-three years ago, yielded the world’s largest diamond-the 3000-carat Cullinan diamond. “Today, the crushers at the Premier would break a diamond that size into a thousand fragments.” He argued that mines capable of yielding such large stones should install a bypass system in . which the ore, before it goes through the crushers, is screened by X-ray machines to detect any larger diamonds.

“We have the bypass system,” Whitelock interrupted, “but it has never turned up any colossal diamonds for us.”

“It will,” MacLean answered confidently. “You’ll save the cost of it with a single diamond some day.” He recounted how at the Premier mine he had reconstructed a million dollar diamond from fragments he found at its sorting house. “A bypass system would have saved that diamond, and that alone would have paid the entire cost of the system twice over.

“We could certainly use a million-dollar diamond here,” Whitelock said, as we continued walking around the site. “Have you ever been to any place this beautiful?” he asked me.

I looked down the mountain to where he was pointing. A stream cut through the emerald green hill below, and then cascaded down over white rocks. Surrounding the hill were snow-covered mountain peaks. The roof of Africa was indeed extraordinary. I asked the mine manager how he had found this Shangri-la of his.

“I came here with Colonel Jack Scott twenty years ago and I never left.” He explained that Scott was a South African adventurer looking for diamonds, and he had heard of a Kimberlite pipe in Lesotho. Even before diamonds had been discovered in South Africa, he continued, Basuto tribesmen mined these kimberlites. They had been looking not for diamonds but for ilmenite, a mineral used as a bright cosmetic by the Basuto women. Scott managed to persuade the paramount chieftainess of Lesotho to give him a concession to sift through the kimberlite pipe for diamonds. “We came up on horseback then, and had to hack a jeep trail up the mountain,” Whitelock recalled.. “We were stranded for a week in a blizzard, but Scott got about 1,800 carats of diamonds out. Shortly thereafter Scott gave up the concession.”

Whitelock continued to prospect on his own in Lesotho, enjoying the trout-filled streams and endless game. Then, in 1967, a Basuto woman found a mountain diamond weighing 601 carats. It was the eleventh largest diamond ever found in the world. Rio Tinto Zinc, a London mining conglomerate, rushed in to buy the mining concession from the newly independent government of Lesotho. At this point, Whitelock joined Rio Tinto Zinc as a field geologist.

“They built the airstrip that you landed on this morning and they began digging out the mine,” he continued. Even though Rio Tinto Zinc excavated large amounts of kimberlite, it found that the ore yielded too low a percentage of diamonds to be economically profitable. In 1972, it abruptly abandoned the concession.

Chief Jonathan, the prime minister of Lesotho, then went to the “logical candidate,” as Whitelock put it, Harry Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer’s gold mines in South Africa were already the chief employer of Basuto labor, and Oppenheimer’s companies had invested in timber and land in Lesotho as part of a diversification strategy. Chief Jonathan proposed that Oppenheimer go into partnership in Mining diamonds with his kingdom.

Oppenheimer, according to Whitelock, found the idea of discovering magnificent diamonds in this mountain wilderness , to be an “especially romantic” undertaking. He likened it to salvaging great works of art and took the gamble of finding large stones in Lesotho, even though the economics remained at least problematical. “And he hired me to manage the mine,” Whitelock concluded his story.

I looked around at the too-foot-high separation plant erected on the side of the mountain, the Swiss-chalet style dormitories for the workers, and all the mechanized equipment in the mine. It seemed that an enormous amount of capital had been invested in this Shangri-la. Could this all be merely a romantic conceit of Oppenheimer?

Oppenheimer had opened the Orapa mine less than a year before he negotiated the venture in Lesotho. He had also during this period acquired prospecting rights to other countries adjacent to South Africa-Swaziland and Rhodesia. This sudden expansion by De Beers into four neighboring countries-Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland and Rhodesia-seemed to me to have been more than a coincidence. It was a time, after all, of increasing racial unrest in South Africa, and these neighboring countries could provide safe havens for De Beers.

We dined with the supervisory staff in a wood-paneled room that overlooked the spectacular mining site. They had a visitor from the Soviet Union, a geologist named George Smernoff. Smernoff, it turned out, had been stationed in Lesotho for nearly a year to observe De Beers’ mining techniques. This arrangement with Smernoff was part of an “exchange” between De Beers and the Soviets..

This remote kingdom seemed an odd place for an “exchange.” On the other hand, since the Soviet Union was supposedly boycotting South Africa because of its racial policies, Lesotho provided a convenient official residence for a Soviet mining expert whose unofficial business was in South Africa. “Does Smernoff have access to other De Beers mines?” I asked.. No one at the table answered.

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Chapter 3, 2 days after the first meeting, no GDP mentioned but the word “economic” appears twice:

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GemACH sic,

Do you understand that Harry Oppenheimer is not admitting to any fault in the genocide of 6 million Jewish people?

Are you still able to go out and have a romantic dinner with your wife, without either of you thinking the other is a disgusting slob and intellectual midget?

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CHAPTER FOUR

HOLDING BACK THE OCEAN

NAMIBIA

DECEMBER 7, 1978

The geopolitics of diamonds forges unlikely alliances in Africa. Only some seventy years earlier, German troops had nearly wiped out the Hereros as a race in Namibia. Now I watched the descendants of the original German settlers urging the Herero tribesmen to vote for their Democratic Trunsthale Alliance. It was a gay, festive atmosphere, with a crowd of Hereto women, wearing red turbans and long Victorian dresses, lined up to vote at a polling booth in Namibia’s capital city of Windhoek.

Namibia was still under the firm control of South Africa, which had administered it since 1915, and the election was clearly sponsored by South Africa. Nevertheless, it was the first election in Namibia’s history, and considerable efforts had been made to win the support of chiefs of the Herero and Ovambo tribes, who constituted the vast majority of the population. There had been massive rallies, torchlight parades and tribal festivals staged by the South Africans to encourage the black population to vote. The South African army even provided trucks to take the Ovambos from their rural kraals to the polling booths. During the week-long election there had also been scattered assassinations and acts of sabotage attributed to the SWAPO guerrillas. SWAPO had demanded that blacks in Namibia boycott the election.

South Africa, in turn, had invited journalists from all over the world to witness this extravaganza. The purpose was to demonstrate to the United Nations, and the media, that SWAPO could not effectively speak for or control the black population of Namibia. It was, in short, a contest of terror, and the measure of success was the percentage of eligible voters who participated in the election. Those who abstained voted in effect for SWAPO.

I was told, according to the latest tally, that nearly 8o percent of the eligible voters in all of Namibia had cast their vote, which was a resounding victory for South Africa. Returns coming in from the rural Ovambo villages close to the Angola border, where SWAPO guerrillas had their bases, showed that go percent or more of the Ovambos were voting, despite SWAPO threats of assassination.

After making the rounds of polling places in Windhoek, I flew across the Namib desert to Oranjemund, which is located, as its name implies, at the mouth of the Orange River. Even though the election was in its final day, this immaculately clean city was strangely silent. Unlike Windhoek, there were no boisterous rallies or blaring sound trucks in the palm-tree-lined streets. The polling booths were nearly deserted. Although this was the second largest city in Namibia, with more than 7,000 eligible Ovambo tribesmen, all the blacks seemed to be abstaining from the plebiscite. As it turned out, Oranjernund was the only city in all of Namibia that had, through its massive abstention, “voted” in effect for SWAPO.

The difference between Oranjemund and the rest of Namibia was that it was not under the control of the South African army. It was, and had been since its inception in 1936, the private preserve of De Beers and its wholly owned subsidiary, Consolidated Diamond Mines. Oppenheimer’s father had built the entire city from scratch after he had obtained exclusive rights to the adjacent 200 miles of Namibian desert called the Sperrgebeit, or forbidden zone. Cordoned off from the rest of Namibia by two barbwire fences, it has continued to live up to its ominous name. No one, not even army or government officials, is allowed into the forbidden zone without the express permission of Oppenheimer’s diamond company.

I was not surprised to find that De Beers had not cajoled or even encouraged its black workers in Namibia to vote. Since Namibian diamonds constituted the single largest source of profits for De Beers, Oppenheimer had to carefully weigh any intervention into Namibian politics. Not only the United Nations but five western powers-the United States, Britain, England, France and Germany-were demanding that South Africa relinquish its control over Namibia. The alternatives that were threatened were United Nations sanctions, which could include the severing of all telephone, mail, and air services to South Africa, and conceivably an oil embargo. Under these circumstances, there was the distinct possibility that South Africa would yield and SWAPO would come to power in Namibia. Oppenheimer would have then to renegotiate his subsidiary~ s concession to mine the diamonds of the forbidden zone with SWAPO.

I recalled Oppenheimer’s confidence about Namibia. Whether or not he had already established contacts with alterative governments there, it was understandable why he would not want to offend gratuitously the leaders of SWAPO by pressing the diamond workers to vote in this election. He might have to deal with them in the foreseeable future for Namibia’s diamonds.

The forbidden zone was a world unto itself. The only means of entering it was the Ernest Oppenheimer Bridge, which spanned the Orange River frontier between South Africa and Namibia. Armed guards manned barricades at both the South African and Namibian ends of the bridge. Before I was permitted to pass into the forbidden zone, I had to be met by an escort from the diamond company and issued a plastic security badge.

Inside the forbidden zone is the city of Oranjemund, with its own food-producing farms and reservoirs. The vast mining area runs alongside the Atlantic Ocean. To enter into the mining area, one has to insert his plastic security badge into a slot in the wall and wait for a door to slide open automatically. The central computer, which opens and closes these passageways, tracks the comings and goings of everyone in the mining area. De Beers’ helicopters constantly patrol overhead, and closely monitor the activities of the fishing craft that pass by in the ocean (even though the enormous waves would make landing a boat on the beach all but impossible). Behind the beach, a pack of Alsatian guard dogs patrol the no-man’s-land between the two barbwire fences. And behind the barbwire fences is the Namib Desert, one of the most inhospitable areas on earth. It is made impenetrable by 1,000-foot-high sand dunes and 120 degree temperatures.

The extraordinary security procedures are considered necessary in Namibia because what is recovered from the 200 mile-long beach is not kimberlite ore but pure gem diamonds, which can be easily pocketed by anyone. In one small crevice in a rock outcropping, some 15,000 carats of sparkling diamonds were found on this beach some years ago.

The mine, if it can be called a mine, is actually the continental shelf of the Atlantic Ocean. To get at the richest lodes of diamonds, the ocean must be literally pushed back and held back long enough to dig out the diamonds. The mechanism for holding back the pounding surf is a ten-story high mound, which, 600 feet out in the ocean, runs parallel to the beach.

Standing on this sandy mound, I looked down into the “mine,” which was actually the exposed floor of the ocean. It was an incredible sight; a full-scale battle between man and nature.

“You are looking at the largest construction project in the Southern Hemisphere,” observed Clive Cowley. Cowley had been the editor of Namibia’s leading newspaper, the Windhoek Advertiser; now he was the chief public affairs officer of De Beers in Namibia. He pointed to the thousands of workers and machines below. Giant bulldozers were belching smoke and scraping the ground with their blades like some kind of prehistoric animal. Powerful pumps were sucking the water out of the mining area through hoses as fast as it sprayed in over the barrier. Ovambo tribesmen, knee-deep in pools of water, were frantically sweeping the gravel off outcrops of rock on the ocean’s floor as if they feared that at any moment the barrier might give way, like a sand castle on a beach, and the ocean would come flooding in.

In the center of all this activity was an enormous piece of machinery, more than a football field in length and two stories high, mounted on caterpillar tracks. A continuous belt of steel buckets traveled around it, like cars on a ferris wheel, scooping up sand at one end and depositing it at the other end. It was the largest machine I had ever seen.

“That’s the bucket wheel excavator,” Cowley explained. “It cost $3.5 million to build, and it can move 1,800 tons of sand an hour.” The sand must be stripped away before the workers, called lashers, can get at the diamond-rich gravel.

The Ovambo tribesmen worked with their primitive tools in the shadow of this colossal machine. The contrast between tribal and modern technology was striking. Ironically,, as Cowley pointed out, it was the tribesmen, not the multimillion-dollar machine, who recovered most of the diamonds. These Ovambos had been recruited to work in the ocean mine in the jungles of Ovamba land, a thousand miles to the north. According to Cowley, they usually received eight month contracts from the diamond company. They would board a Hercules cargo plane, leaving their families behind on the kraal, and fly to Oranjemund.

“They have to be literally fought off the plane,” Cowley said. For just sweeping the gravel from the rocks, they received $200 a month. For driving trucks and other more skilled jobs, they earned up to $450 a month. This salary is completely exempt from taxes. Their own expense for their eight-month stay at the mines is $22 a month for their dormitory room and food. “By the time they return to Ovamba land, they have enough money to buy cattle, land or even a wife,” Cowley concluded.

Suddenly, a tractor the size of a locomotive came racing toward us. As it passed, an Ovambo waved from the cab. He then maneuvered the vehicle precariously on the edge of the mound, which was only about sixty feet wide, and dumped a load of dirt on top of it. Cowley explained that these tractors wage an around-the-clock battle with the Atlantic Ocean. Waves constantly rip away the sand, and these tractors, each of which carries a thirty-five-ton load of sand, constantly fill the breeches in the barrier. If an opening were not immediately filled, the ocean would break through and submerge the entire mine under fifty feet of sea water.

Every day, more than 100 million pounds of sand and gravel are dug out of the ocean mine. From the massive moving of the earth and holding back of the ocean, about two and a half to three pounds of diamonds are recovered each day. “All this effort, and more, purely for the vanity of women,” Cowley added, with an edge of irony in his voice. That irony was only compounded by the fact that De Beers had millions of dollars invested in advertising to take advantage of this vanity.

When I viewed the day’s catch in the sorting house, which was that day about 6,ooo carats, I saw that unlike in Botswana and Lesotho there were no black or discolored diamonds in the tray. These were clearly not industrial-grade diamonds, but white, well-formed gem diamonds.

“These aren’t the same sort of diamonds that come out of a pipe mine,” Cowley said. “They have been pounded by ocean waves for millions of years. The inferior diamonds have been smashed to bits eons ago. Only the fittest survive, and these are pure gems.”

Pointing to the container of diamonds that had been recovered from the ocean floor that day, he continued, “There are probably more pure gems in that dish than have been recovered today in all the pipe mines in South Africa combined.” Cowley estimated that this single day’s production would bring in over $1-5 million when they were sold by De Beers in London.

The profits on these Namibian diamonds were enormous. It cost no more to mine and separate these gem diamonds than it did for the industrial-grade diamonds that constituted the bulk of the production of most other mines. Yet these gems sold for one hundred times the price of industrial diamonds. From the four-hundred million dollars in revenues it took in the preceding year for these Namibian diamonds, De Beers realized a net profit of more than two hundred million dollars, making Namibia De Beers’ money spinner.

After we left the sorting house, Cowley took me over to see an extraordinary scrap yard. It was enclosed by barbwire ; and filled with enough antique machines to stock a museum. “Once a vehicle or piece of equipment ever enters the mining area, it is never allowed to leave,” Cowley said. He explained that this prohibition was necessary in order to prevent anyone from smuggling diamonds out concealed in a piece of equipment. Since it was not practical to attempt to search for an object as small as a diamond, De Beers simply assigned all the vehicles and machines, when they became outmoded, to this graveyard.

This tangle of relics encapsulated the history of the Namibian diamonds. There was, for example, a train of turn-of-the-century railroad cars with German markings. “Namibia was a German colony when diamonds were first found here at the turn of the century,” Cowley said. He explained that the diamond fields were then about 100 miles north of Oranjemund. To mine the diamonds, the Germans had built Teutonic towns at Pomona and Kolinanskop, complete with beerhalls and skittle alleys. “The Germans had the blacks sweep the streets every day to keep the sand out of their houses. When they could no longer find ;my diamonds on the beaches they abandoned these towns to the desert. It has become a ghost town; the beerhall is now filled with sand, sand comes halfway tip the walls inside the houses…”

There was also an ominous looking World War 11 battle tank with a British insignia on it. A huge steel blade had been welded in front of the gun turret. “De Beers converted these tanks to bulldozers after the war,” Cowley continued, “because there was no bridge across the Orange River then and it was next to impossible to float heavy equipment across on barges.” It took until the mid nineteen-fifties before the bridge was built.

Since De Beers’ geologist found that most of the diamond lodes were on the ocean floor, a method had to be devised of holding the ocean back, Cowley explained. Assisted by oceanographers at the University of Capetown, engineers initially experimented with the idea of altering the ocean’s current so that it would rip up the beach and redeposit the sand farther from the shoreline. This would create a natural barrier behind which the workers could sweep the diamonds out from the bedrock. To shift the direction of the ocean current, they dug a channel across the beach. Unfortunately, the ocean refused to follow the predicted course, and the engineers gave up on the attempt to harness the sea.

Next, the engineers attempted to erect an earthen dam in the ocean at low tide and cover it with a gigantic canvas tarpaulin before the tide returned. They postulated that the tarpaulin would prevent the ocean from dissolving the dam. Working in a rising tide, it took nearly two hours to lash down this cover. Less than an hour later, the waves ripped the tarpaulin to shreds.

The De Beers engineers had to return to their drawing boards. Finally, in the early 1960s, they came up with a system for building a series of dams that would be replenished with sand from the mine as fast as the ocean could strip it away. “After a good deal of trial and error it worked Cowley concluded.

Leaving the mining area, we had to pass through a long narrow building. Along one wall were large mirrors, which, Cowley explained, were two-way glasses through which security guards observed everyone passing through. At the end of one maze-like corridor, there was a turnstile that led to two closed doors, side by side. We went through the turnstile, waited; then a buzzer sounded, and the door on the right opened. “If the other door had opened, you would have had to undergo both an X-ray and body search,” Cowley said. He explained that the selection of who gets searched is completely at random. It would be medically dangerous to subject workers to constant dosages of X-rays, therefore only a small percentage of those who passed out of the mining area each day were actually searched. “Everyone from Harry Oppenheimer to Ovambo workers have to pass through that turnstile, and they never know which door is going to open,” Cowley added, as he again inserted our security badges into the slot at the end of the passageway.

The last door buzzed opened, and a moment later we were walking down a suburban street in Oranjemund. The transition from the moonscape-like mine to the familiarity of the modern city was somewhat unsettling.

We dined that evening with a group of De Beers executives at the Hexen Kcssel. The decor and cuisine were meant to evoke an “Old World” European spirit, but, like everything else in Oranjemund, the restaurant had been designed and built by De Beers. As far as the De Beers executives were concerned, the Namibian diamond mining operation was a reality that had been created by De Beers. If a revolutionary government ever forced De Beers to relinquish the concession, one executive suggested that mines would be flooded by the ocean in a matter of months, and no more diamonds ever would be recovered. So the forces of nationalism in Namibia would have to come to terms with the diamond cartel.

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Chapter 4 – HOLDING BACK THE OCEAN – 3 days after the first meeting on December 4, 1978.

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CHAPTER FIVE

THE BIG HOLE

KIMBERLEY

DECEMBER 14, 1978

In Kimberley I visited a mine that was completely different from all the others that I had seen in Africa. Instead of an open pit, the mine was entirely below the surface. In the entire world, there were then only six such underground mines. All of them were in South Africa: five hemmed in the mining city of Kimberley, and the sixth located 400 miles northeast in the Transvaal. The Wesselton, located only about a mile from downtown Kimberley, was the deepest of these diamond mines. The mine shaft extended 3,300 feet below the surface, which is deep enough to accommodate both towers of the World Trade Center in New York, stacked one on top of the other.

Before I was allowed to descend into the Wesselton, I was taken to a spotlessly clean changing room and provided with the necessary mining gear. This included steel boots, a white jumpsuit, a steel helmet with a built-in lantern, and a portable battery, which I strapped around my waist. I then proceeded to the mine shaft where I was met by Edward Robinson, a soft-spoken South African, who had been born and raised in the mining area around Kimberley.

At the top of the mine shaft, we stepped into a steel cage, the size of a large freight elevator. The door clanged shut. Robinson pressed a button, and with a sudden jerk, we began hurtling down the mine shaft. We were falling at a rate of twenty feet per second, or twelve miles an hour. Even at that speed, it took slightly more than two minutes to reach the mining level, 2,500 feet below the surface.

From all the films I had seen about coal mining, I expected to step out into a dark tunnel where men were hacking away at the rock with picks and shovels. Instead, I found myself standing in an enormous well-lighted and air-conditioned chamber. The ceiling was at least fifteen feet high, and there was a road in it wide enough for a two-ton truck.

“We call this the block cavina method,” Robinson said. “It works on the same principle as punching a hole in the bottom of a bottle to drain the liquid out.” He explained that rather than scooping out the kimberlite ore from above, as is done in open-pit mining, a shaft is drilled in the bedrock that encases the volcanic pipe. Once underneath the main body of ore in the pipe, or “the bottom of the bottle,” as Robinson put it, a series of tunnels that run parallel to the surface are dug under the pipe. This is the “mining level.” The kimberlite above, loosened by dynamite, then simply pours into the tunnels.

Robinson’s attention focused on something happening at the end of the tunnel we were entering. He held up his hand. Suddenly, everyone around us froze.

A voice counted in Afrikaner “… schwi … di … ein.” Then there was a loud explosion, followed in rapid succession by four other blasts. I could feel the reverberations of the concussion and smell burnt sulphur in the air.

“They’re dynamiting ahead,” Robinson calmly said. The dynamite came, he explained, from De Beers’ own explosive factory, which was the largest in Africa.

Robinson motioned to follow him into the tunnel. At one end, kimberlite ore was flooding in. A black worker operated a powerful winch. It manipulated a bulldozer blade about thirty yards away. The blade scraped kimberlite ore through a hole in the floor of the tunnel.

The ore poured into a train of hopper cars on the level below. It was fully automated. The train arrives under the opening just before the scraper forces the ore through it. When full, it then shuttles over to the mine shaft where it dumps its ore. A belt of continuous buckets then bring the ore to the surface and deposit it on the conveyor belt. In all, this highly mechanized form of mining required about 165 men, including supervisors, below ground. Most of the workers were black, and the supervisors were white.

Robinson said that it was the white labor unions that insisted that the whites be given supervisory positions, rather than the blacks. He explained that some 40 percent of the black workers were tribesmen from Lesotho on seasonal contracts (while in South Africa, they lived in De Beers– owned dormitories, called “hostels,” and received about $40 a week in salary).

Before Robinson became manager of the Wesselton mine he had worked at one of the Anglo-owned gold mines. The mining level there was more than one mile below the surface of the earth, and the temperature of the walls in the cramped tunnels reached 12o degrees Fahrenheit. Unlike kimberlite, which when loosened flows by gravity into the mining tunnels, gold ore must be chiseled out of bedrock with picks and drills. “The seam at times was no wider than a pencil line, and there were literally thousands of men chipping away at it,” he said. “There are more workers in a single gold mine than in all the De Beers diamond mines in South Africa.”

When we returned to the surface, I was momentarily blinded by the glare of the sun. It was also at least thirty degrees warmer above ground than below. We then took another elevator to the top of the tower of the mine shaft, which was about ten stories high. From this vantage point, the entire history of the mine could be clearly seen.

Robinson pointed to a yawning pit, almost 500 feet deep, across the parched earth. It was the original mine. Like all pipe mines, the Wesselton had begun as an open-pit mine. At some point it became too deep to haul out the kimberlite ore profitably. “The only way it could be mined,” Robinson said, was “to get the ore out from below.”

The half-mile-deep mine I had just visited was below that pit. The continuous belt of buckets dumped the ore from the shaft onto the conveyor belt. At Wesselton, according to Robinson, more than 6,ooo tons of kimberlite ore is brought up the mine shaft every day by this automated equipment. Yet there are only some 1,400 carats of diamonds recovered from this mass of ore. Of these, only about 150 carats are of gem quality. “More diamonds are recovered per ton from the waste dumps than from the mines”, he said, pointing to the mountains of kimberlite ore that had been spewed out of the separation plants over the years.

Some of this waste was more than a hundred years old. Diamonds smaller than a tenth of a carat were difficult to sell then , and De Beers had not invested until recently in sophisticated technology for recovering a high proportion of the minute diamonds. Now, however, with factories in India polishing diamonds as small as 1/25th of a carat, there was a ready market for these “small goods.”

Even with the “mining” of the old dumps, Robinson admitted that the Wesselton and the other mines around Kimberley were rapidly reaching the point of diminishing returns. He estimated that the De Beers mines in Kimberley could begin to run out of gem diamonds as early as the 1980s. Kimberley might then become a ghost town.

It was here that the diamond invention was devised, and the inseparable connection between Kimberley and De Beers, which is,, still evident when one walks through the town. The zig-zagging streets follow the pattern of the original mining claims. They then end abruptly in an enormous crater that the city literally hangs over. It is about one-quarter of a mile deep and partly filled with rain water, which reflects the buildings on the edge of the city. This abyss is called the Big Hole, and it is what remains of the Kimberley Central mine. This was the deepest open-pit mine ever dug. The ore was lifted out by a system of ropes and pulleys that looked like a giant spider web. Before it was finally abandoned in 1914, it produced over three and a half tons of diamonds. This flood of diamonds not only transformed Kimberley into a city, but it necessitated the creation of a global system for distributing and controlling the sale of diamonds.

The Harry Oppenheimer House is a darkly tinted glass skyscraper that stands in a private park in the center of Kimberley. Built in 1974, the entire building was designed and dedicated to a single purpose: the evaluation of uncut diamonds. The entire total of all the diamond mines and diggings in South Africa and Namibia are shipped here to be sorted, classified and valued. The diamond consignments generally arrive early in the morning in armored trucks, which drive into a concrete bunker in the sub basement of the building. The sealed containers of diamonds are then sent in a special elevator, which makes no intermediary stops, to the top floor. The seal is broken in front of witnesses, and the diamonds immersed in an acid bath to clean off any particles of dirt. After the diamonds are dried by hot-air jets, they are weighed on a highly precise electronic scale. This weight is then entered into a central computer, which will track the shipment as it moves through each stage in the sorting process.

If at any point the weight of the categories it has been divided into adds up to less than the original weight of the consignment, the computer sets off an alarm. This automatically locks the doors of the Harry Oppenheimer House. Only when the missing weight of diamonds is found will the computer permit anyone to leave the building.

Unlike gold or other precious metals, diamonds cannot be assigned a value merely by weighing them. An ounce of diamonds can be worth $100 or $100,000 depending on the quality of the diamonds. Before either a mine-or the South African tax authorities-can determine the value of the diamonds, they have to be sorted into their proper size, shape, color and clarity categories. “By the time we finish, a shipment is broken down into some two thousand different categories. The preliminary sorting is done by a series of ingenious machines that De Beers engineers invented specifically for this purpose. First, the diamonds are passed through a series of sieves. Diamonds that are too small to be cut into jewels are screened out as industrial diamonds. The remaining diamonds are then divided into sixteen different groups according to sizes that range from under to-tenths of carat to over one carat.

Next, within each group, the diamonds are sorted for shape by a series of machines, which by vibrating and twisting are able to separate flat and triangular shapes from the more valuable tetrahedral-shaped diamonds. At each stage in the separation process, the resulting groups are weighed and registered into the computer.

Finally, in this rough sorting, the diamonds are fed into a series of X-ray machines, which by employing different filters are able to automatically sort the diamonds into different colors. The opaque and black diamonds, called bort, as well as the smaller brown and golden diamonds, are separated out to be crushed into industrial abrasives. The diamonds are then again reweighed and sent to the floor below for hand sorting.

Here the gem-grade diamonds are laid out by colors on separate tables, which have been perfectly positioned in respect to the light. A team of sorters,. women in uniformly colored dresses and men in suits, then examine each diamond with a six-power jewelers’ loupe to make sure that it is correctly classified. If any of the five sorters disagrees in their opinion, the chief sorter, John Gie, is called in to arbitrate and make a final decision on that particular diamond.

“These are all highly skilled and trained quality controllers,” Gie explained to me. All are given periodic eye examinations by De Beers and are tested on their ability to match unsorted diamonds to the De Beers sample set. This set contains some 240 different shades of colors and shapes which serve as a De Beers standard for sorting operations in both Kimberley and London. After every gem diamond is checked for microscopic imperfections representatives of the Diamond Producers Association, which represents individual producers as well as the De Beers-owned mines, are allowed to question any classification they disagree with. In fact this generally is nothing more than a formality.

“A single diamond can be examined as many as ten times,” observed Gie. When everyone has agreed on the proper classification of each diamond, the data is fed into the computer. As each diamond is finally weighed, the computer assigns a dollar value to it according to a complex formula. The computer then instantly tallies up the total value of the shipment and credits that amount to the account of the individual mine.

A small percentage of these sorted diamonds are retained at Harry Oppenheimer House and distributed to a select number of local South African dealers. All the rest of the diamonds of South Africa and Namibia are shipped in sealed containers by air to the Diamond Trading Company’s headquarters in London. These consignments from Kimberley amounted to some 5,400,000 carats and accounted for about half of all the gem diamonds shipped to London.

I next followed the trail of diamonds from the sorting house in Kimberley to the Diamond Trading Company in London. The trip to the African mines had explained how diamonds were extracted from the earth, but this was only a rudimentary part of the diamond invention. The crucial element in the invention was controlling the supply available to the major diamond cutters and manufacturers, and this allocation took place in London.

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Chapter 5 – THE BIG HOLE – 10 days after the first meeting.

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CHAPTER SIX

THE RULES OF THE GAME

On the special calendar that De Beers sends to some 250 chosen clients, there are ten circled days on which diamonds are distributed. On these designated dates, the clients, who include diamond-cutting factories in New York, Tel Aviv, Bombay, Antwerp and Hong Kong, come to Number Two Charterhouse Street in London to attend what is called a “sight.” These occasions, which occur every five weeks involve the transfer of a pre-selected number of diamonds from the De Beers stockpile to the diamond-cutting industry around the world. At the sights in 1980, for example, De Beers distributed more than $2 billion worth of uncut diamonds that would eventually be resold in the retail market for more than $8 billion.

The block-long building at Number Two Charterhouse Street is the headquarters of the Diamond Trading Company.. Its four-story-deep vault holds most, if not all, the world~s supply of uncut diamonds. As clients arrive at the fortress-like entrance, they are met by uniformed guards and are escorted to a reception room on the second floor. One by one, the clients are then taken to private viewing rooms, which all face the northern light. Each room is equipped with an electronic scale for weighing diamonds, a magnifying glass for evaluating their quality and a telephone for consulting their associates.

After a brief wait, a guard delivers a small cardboard box to each room, weighs the contents on the scale and then leaves. Inside the box are a number of paper envelopes containing uncut diamonds that look like bits of broken glass. The type, quality, and exact weight of each diamond is marked on the outside of the envelope. On a sheet of paper accompanying the box is the price of the diamonds. The price of a diamond is heavily dependent on its quality. A discolored flat diamond weighing one carat may be worth no more than $50; but a flawless, colorless and octahedron diamond of the same weight may be worth $10,000. The price tag for the entire box may vary between $1 million and $25 million.

In these 200-odd shoe boxes are most of the diamonds that will eventually be sold in engagement rings and other jewelry throughout the world. The determination of who gets which diamonds in their shoe boxes completely shapes and orders the multibillion-dollar diamond business. The man who makes this decision at Number Two Charterhouse Street is E. M. Charles, a tall, gray-haired man whom everyone in the trade calls Monty.

Monty Charles has been close to the Oppenheimer family since he was a child. In the 1930s, his father owned an inn at Brae that was a favorite weekend retreat of Otto Oppenheimer, an uncle of Harry, who was then the director of the Diamond Trading Company in London. Oppenheimer took a liking to young Monty Charles and persuaded him to come to London to work for him as a sorter of diamonds. When the Second World War began, Monty Charles enlisted in the British Army. Soon afterward he was captured by the Japanese and forced to take part in the infamous death march. He was one of the few British officers who survived the ordeal.

In 1945, he was released from a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. When he returned to England, he was again employed by the Oppenheimers at the Diamond Trading Company. A hard, determined man, he rose within years to the position of managing director. Nominally, he worked under Sir Philip Oppenheimer-Otto’s cousin, but as far as most of the clients were concerned, Monty Charles was the court of last appeal for them.

Before each sight takes place, Monty Charles has to decide how many diamonds of each quality will be distributed m all, and then how this supply will be divided up among different clients. To begin with, before each sight is held, Monty Charles has to himself have a dependable picture of world demand for diamonds. A full-time staff of economists and researchers are employed by the Diamond Trading Company to track such crucial indicators as the rate of family formation in the United States and Japan, the economic conditions in each country, and the amount of income after taxes that might be available to buy diamonds. From this, the demand for diamonds is estimated. Next, market analysts calculate the number of diamonds that jewelry stores, wholesalers and diamond cutters already in their inventories and how many diamonds are in the “pipeline,” as the route all diamonds between De Beers and retailers take is called. N. W. Ayer, the cartel’s advertising agency, assists here by surveying retail stores and asking in telephone interviews about the quantitles of the diamonds that they have on hand. Diamond Trading Company executives are responsible for also making regional assessments based on reports from De Beers’ partially owned subsidiaries in Israel, Belgium, India and Portugal. Through this private intelligence system, the Diamond Trading Company is able to ascertain the categories of diamonds that are either in short supply or are a glut on the market. For example, if small yellow diamonds appear to be in excess supply, they are omitted from the boxes in the next sight.

About ten days before each scheduled sight, the staff makes a final determination of the total number of diamonds to be distributed in each category. The sorters then take this quantity of diamonds out of the vault and lay them on tables, according to size, shape and color in the sorting room on the third floor of the Diamond Trading Company. The massive display of glittering diamonds is truly extraordinary: When, for example, I was shown around the sorting room, in January of 1979, there were more than a quarter-billion dollars worth of gem diamonds heaped onto the tables.

Moving among these tables strewn with diamonds, Monty Charles and his staff decide which clients are to receive which diamonds. About a month before a sight takes place, clients submit requests for the number and types of diamonds they want. Most clients receive, however, not what they asked for but what Monty Charles decides to give them. There are, after all, only a limited number of really lucrative diamonds distributed at each sight, and those clients who receive a large share of them will prosper-and be able to expand their businesses. For the major diamond dealers, the objective is to increase the allocation of valuable diamonds that they receive in their shoe box at each sight. It is, as one dealer put it, “the name of the game.” But it is Monty Charles who spells out the rules of the game.

The first rule: No one may question the authority of the Diamond Trading Company to decide who gets- which diamonds. Monty Charles, as director of the operation, must be accepted as the sole arbiter of both the number and quality of the diamonds placed in each box. Since the number of uncut diamonds a manufacturer receives roughly determines his volume of business, and the quality of diamonds determines his profitability, the allocation of diamonds is a crucial factor in surviving in the diamond business. Yet no client may request a larger-or smaller-consignment of diamonds than he receives. Nor may he seek redress from the Oppenheimers or any higher executive of De Beers. Monty Charles’s decision is final.

The second rule: There shall be no haggling over price. The price for each of the 2,000 classifications of diamonds is fixed by De Beers, and determines how much money the mines in Africa and Siberia will be credited for the diamonds that they shipped to the Diamond Trading Company. De Beers can change the price at will, without any advance notice, or add a “surcharge.” Since the price that De Beers charges its clients at sights is usually at least 25 percent below the wholesale price for uncut diamonds, the privilege of being invited to a sight is worth about one-quarter of the value of the box. Even when wholesale diamond prices are depressed, clients are still expected to pay the fixed price, which may be above prevailing market prices. This is the price for admittance to future sights. If a client refuses to pay this price, he may not receive an invitation to future sights. For example, when wholesale prices fell in the 1974 recession, one large distributors of diamonds in the United States, refused to pay more than the fair market price for its box. As a penalty, it was not invited to another sight for three years, causing it to lay off workers, close factories and forgo profits, and when it allowed to attend another sight, it found that Monty Charles had filled its box with low-quality diamonds that were only marginally profitable to cut, which it now accepted.

The third rule: Take the entire box or none at all. Diamond mines produce diamonds of all sizes, shapes, colors and clarities. Some diamonds, such as the octahedron-shaped clear stones, are relatively easy and profitable to cut and polish into jewels. Other diamonds, such as the twisted crystals called macles, require enormously skilled labor and yield low profits. If manufacturers were allowed to choose only the more profitable diamonds in their box, De Beers would be left with all the unprofitable diamonds. Monty Charles therefore arranges a “series” of diamonds for each client in which the less profitable diamonds are mixed in with the more profitable gems. Under no circumstances may clients pick from this series the diamonds they want. They must accept all-or none.

The fourth rule: No client may resell the diamonds in his box in their uncut form without a special dispensation from Monty Charles. To maintain its international monopoly over the supply of diamonds, De Beers must control the world stockpile of uncut diamonds. If it permitted its clients to resell their boxes, some outside party could amass its own stockpile by bidding for the boxes. This actually occurred in 1977, when Israeli dealers paid a premium of up to 100 percent to De Beers clients for their unopened boxes. Many clients, seeing the opportunity to double their money overnight, took advantage of this windfall. The result was that by 1978, the stockpile in Israel was rapidly approaching in size De Beers’ own stockpile in London. If the Israelis suddenly panicked and threw their uncut diamonds on the market, the price would collapse. If the Israelis continued to amass diamonds, they would be in a position to offer their own sights and undercut the mechanism De Beers had invented for controlling the market. De Beers succeeded by gradually forcing the diamonds out of Israeli hands in 1979. To prevent a recurrence, Monty Charles insisted that clients must immediately cut and polish all the diamonds supplied to them in their boxes and then return the cardboard containers to assure that no one was selling their sealed boxes. He dramatically demonstrated that violators of this edict would be severely punished by purging some forty clients from the sights for reselling some of their uncut diamonds. His retribution was not lost on the other clients.

In some cases, a select number of clients are permitted to act as sub-distributors for De Beers and resell their diamonds to small cutting factories. Clients with such a dispensation are given what is called a “dealer’s sight” (as opposed to a “manufacturer’s sight”). They are expected to sell uncut diamonds only to trustworthy manufacturers, and are held accountable for any leakage of their diamonds into private stockpiles.

The fifth rule: Clients will supply De Beers with whatever information, it needs to assess the diamond market. Before attending a sight, a client must fill out a detailed questionnaire, specifying the number of uncut diamonds he has in inventory, the number of diamonds in the process of being cut, the number of diamonds previously sold, and all other relevant details of his business. He further estimates his future sales in each category. This data is processed through the computer at Charterhouse Street and helps provide a picture of the number of diamonds in the pipeline. The entire System requires that no more diamonds be released I from the stockpile than the public can absorb.

Indeed, to make sure that its clients are not secretly disposing of or privately stockpiling diamonds, the Diamond Trading Company requires that they submit to a “diamond audit.” In this procedure, a De Beers representative pays a surprise visit to a client’s cutting factories to see the financial records, the actual inventory of diamonds, machinery, and number of employees at work. He then makes his own estimate of how many diamonds the client is cutting per month. If this tally does not square with the number of diamonds the client had received at the London sights, the discrepancy is reported to Monty Charles.

The sixth rule: Diamonds must never be sold into “weak hands” In order to maintain the illusion that diamonds never crease in value, price wars and cutthroat competition must be avoided at all costs. De Beers’ clients are prohibited from selling their diamonds to any wholesalers or retail Jewelers who undercut prices at the retail level. If De Beers finds any wholesalers or retailers engaging in what it considers to be destructive competition, the manufacturers who get their diamonds at the sights are expected to immediately cut off the transgressor’s supply. In this respect, De Beers’ clients are, forced to be silent partners with De Beers in maintaining an orderly retail market.

The penalty for the violation of this rule is subtle but effective. A client who sells diamonds to “weak hands,” or anyone of whom De Beers disapproves, finds that the mix of diamonds in his box becomes progressively less profitable for him. For example, one manufacturer, who had been a client of De Beers for two decades, had sold some diamonds in 1977 to an Israeli diamond dealer who was considered by De Beers to be a dangerous speculator. He then found that his box, with a price tag on it of over $1 million, contained mainly “rubbish,” as he called it. He realized that in deciding whether or not to accept it he had a Hobson’s choice. If he took these diamonds, he would lose several hundred thousand dollars processing them. On the other hand if he turned down the box, he would lose his source for future diamonds and be forced to close his cutting factory. It was a painful decision. Finally, he nodded to his broker that he would accept the diamonds. On the way out, he passed Monty Charles, who shook his hand amicably and asked how he liked the merchandise he had received. When the client expressed some disappointment, Monty Charles reportedly answered, “Perhaps you’ve been slightly naughty, but let’s see what we can do next time.”

Aside from the penalties that it can impose at will, De Beers also provides positive incentives to clients who support the system-the “carat and schtick” approach, as one Israeli client Joked. Not only can the assortment of diamonds be arbitrarily upgraded for a favored client but Monty Charles can also add very lucrative “large stones” to a box. These larger diamonds can usually be resold for a windfall profit.

The sights in London thus are not merely occasions for major gem manufacturers to select the uncut diamonds that they wish to purchase but an integral part of the mechanism through which De Beers establishes and maintains the value of diamonds. Through these ten events a year De Beers extends its control from the diamond mines of Africa to the cutting factories of Belgium, Israel, India, and the United States. And through its clients-whose fortunes depend heavily on the contents of the shoe boxes they receive-De Beers is able to monitor and regulate the flow of diamonds that pass through the world pipeline into the retail market. The stakes are undisputably high in this game.

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Chapter 6 – THE RULES OF THE GAME

GemACH sic,

Now it gets interesting.

A full-time staff of economists and researchers are employed by the Diamond Trading Company to track such crucial indicators as the rate of family formation in the United States and Japan, the economic conditions in each country, and the amount of income after taxes that might be available to buy diamonds.

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GemACH sic,

It costs them nothing to create their own demand or to hire a staff made up of all the world’s economists who can only talk nonsense.

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Imagine being able to fill out a whole book with total nonsense?

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@Tommy Simpson, do you see the difference between what I am saying your contention that The D I book is “Boring Shit!!”?

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@Stephanie Marine, are you making progress in helping achieve a bigger audience?

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Stephanie, you never mentioned whether you thought I would be successful in teaching your prick son or his money bags, Bernard Arnault; why is that?

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Stephanie, can you describe to me the feeling of being nice to pricks just so long as they bring you a money making proposition?

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Stephanie, do you feel that you were blessed being brought into this world?

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GemACH sic, what besides your and your wife’s poor health do you feel blessed by?

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GemACH sic, if you and your wife cannot run fast would that mean you are slow?

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GemACH sic, if you think ever before you speak?

How long ago was that?

Could it be that your best memories were a previous lifetime such as a turkey?

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Did you like yourself so much that you had to eat you?

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CHAPTER SEVEN

THE EMPIRE BUILDERS

In July of 1980, a black crowd armed with whips and mallets toppled the bronze statue of Cecil John Rhodes from its pedestal in Salisbury, Zimbabwe. The caption of the Associated Press photograph of the event read, “Symbol of Colonialism Toppled in Zimbabwe.” Rhodes, after all, was the only man in history to have two nations and a federation named after him-Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) and the Rhodesian Federation (which had included Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe). In less than ten years, under the royal charter granted to him by the British government, he had colonized millions of square miles of the richest part of southern and eastern Africa. This territorial empire proved ephemeral- not even his bronze statue lasted out the century. He created another empire, however, De Beers, which endured.

Rhodes arrived in the port of Durban in South Africa in September of 1870. He was then a gangly boy of seventeen with a long face that made him appear taller than he was. He spoke with a squeaky voice that disconcerted other passengers on the boat. He had left England and traveled to South Africa because of his failing health. He had a collapsed lung and a weak heart, and his doctor predicted he would not live to the age of twenty-one. His father, a poor vicar in Hertfordshire, sent him on this voyage so that if he did not miraculously recover. he would at least die peacefully in a warm climate. His total stake in the world, a gift from his aunt, was two thousand pounds.

Even with meager resources, Rhodes was possessed by a dream. He wanted to extend the British Empire throughout the world. In a will he drew up several years later, he directed that whatever money he ha acquired in his life be used to form a secret society that would attempt, among other things, to bring the United States back under British rule. He also envisioned building a railroad from Capetown, at the southern tip of Africa, to Cairo, at the other end of the continent. The dream railroad, like all his other schemes, was only a means to an end, as he had no real interest in wealth. The end was colonizing Africa, from Capetown to Cairo, for the British empire.

As he believed that his life was not destined to be a long healthy one, he set out immediately to acquire the capital to realize his grandiose ambitions. A year earlier, diamonds had been discovered near the Orange River on the edge of the great Karoo desert in South Africa. Never before had diamonds been found in Africa, and fortune hunters from all over the world were converging on this spot. His older brother Herbert, who was a prosperous cotton grower in Natal province, had already staked out a number of small claims.. Rhodes decided to join his brother in the diamond rush.

He hired an oxcart for the rugged trip to the diamond fields, which took a month of traveling across open veldt. He bought a pick, shovel, and other prospecting gear. And, as he was preparing himself for the entrance examination for Oxford, he took along with him a set of the Greek classics.

His brother’s claims were on a farm owned by two brothers, D.A. and J. N. De Beer. The De Beer brothers were Boer settlers, interested in farming, not diamonds. They sold off their land to the swarm of prospectors and moved on, leaving behind only their name: De Beers.

When Rhodes arrived at the De Beers farm, he found the diamond rush in full frenzy. After setting up his canvas tent, he wrote to his mother, “I would like you to have a peep … from my tent door at the present moment. . . . Imagine a small round hill, at its highest point only 30 feet above the level of the surrounding country, about 180 yards broad and 120 feet long; all round it a mass of white tents.” He added, “It is like an immense number of ant heaps covered with black ants as thick as can be; the latter represented by human beings.”

This encampment, which was occupied by some 50,000 fortune hunters, was the second most populous “city” in the whole subcontinent of southern Africa. Within the next couple of years, the tents were replaced by corrugated iron shacks brought by ox cart from Capetown, and the city was named Kimberley in honor of Lord Kimberley, the British secretary of state for the colonies.

For Rhodes, however, Kimberley remained a human anthill. When his brother’s claim yielded only meager results, he decided that immediate profits were not in mining but in servicing the needs of the multitude of “ants” who were pouring into Kimberley by the thousand each week. He began his enterprise by importing ice cream, and then jugs of water, which he sold to the thirsty diggers. In doing so, he realized that water was a two-fold problem for the claim owners. On the one hand, they needed an ever-increasing amount of fresh water for their black laborers as they dug deeper into the ground for diamonds. On the other hand, the seepage of ground water into the mines, as the diggers approached the water table, was threatening to collapse the dirt walls of the mines. There were thousands of adjacent mines surrounding Kimberley, and the owners needed a means of pumping the water out. Rhodes now saw an opportunity for making his fortune.

He reckoned that soon a steam-powered pump would be needed to suck the water out of the mine. No such machine existed in Kimberley. In fact, there was only one steam pump in all of South Africa. Seizing the opportunity, Rhodes invested all the money he had in buying it.

No sooner had Rhodes’ steam pump arrived in Kimberley than a torrent of water flooded the Kimberley Big Hole mine. As the walls began to collapse, the thousands of black workers in the mine had to be pulled out of the mine with ropes. The individual claim owners, who each owned various sections of the floor of the mine, desperately needed Rhodes’ pump and they had no choice but to pay whatever he demanded.

Rhodes reinvested the money he made in ordering bigger steam pumps from England. He then ruthlessly drove whatever competition existed out of his the pumping business~ his competitors charged him with sabotaging their pumps~ and established a water-pumping monopoly in all mines around Kimberley.

As he progressively raised the charges for his pumps, the mine owners, and even mine syndicates, could not afford to pay him in cash. Instead, he got from them a share of the mines. By the age of twenty-seven, he was the largest mine owner in Kimberley. Although now exceedingly wealthy, he had little interest in personal amenities. He shared a tiny one-room shack with a business associate. He wrote that the “chief good in life” was not for him a happy marriage, great wealth or interesting travel, but “the absorption of the greatest portion of the world under [British] rule.” In between his sharp dealings in Kimberley, Rhodes managed to find time to take a degree at Oriel College at Oxford. Here John Ruskin’s lectures on the virtues of imperialism renewed his ambition to colonize Africa.

Returning to Kimberley, he merged his interests with two huge miming syndicates to form the De Beers Mining Company. He held the controlling block of stock in this new entity and applied to the Colonial Office in London for a charter. It was granted in 1880, and was unlike any other charter ever given to a mining company. Under its terms, Rhodes’ company was not confined to mining. It could build railroads, lay telegraph wires, annex territories, raise armies and install governments. Since the East India Company had been established in the seventeenth century, no company had ever been granted such unrestricted powers. It was all part of Rhodes’ dream of empire.

As the Kimberley mines kept spewing out tons of diamonds, the price of diamonds fluctuated wildly, and then, as diamond merchants were unable to absorb these diamonds, the price dropped to a few cents a carat. Mines closed, and claims were abandoned. Rhodes wrote in a letter that diamonds were on the verge of becoming a “frightful drug” on the market unless production was brought under control. To accomplish this, he proposed a new grand design for Kimberley: the amalgamation of all the other mining companies into his De Beers Company. Most of the other mine owners were willing to be bought out by Rhodes. One was not. His name was Barney Barnato.

Barnato, like Rhodes, was an English subject. He had been born on July 5, 1852, in the East End of London. By coincidence, it was the same day, but one year later, that Rhodes was born; but here the similarity between the two men ended. Barnato came from a Jewish slum, and instead of attending school, he had to eke out a living on the street selling rags and performing magic tricks for children. His real name was Barney Isaacs, but he changed it to Barnato so that he could join his brother in a music hall act. The name stuck.

Barnato arrived in Kimberley in 187 3 – He was twenty-one years old, and had in his possession thirty pounds in English currency and forty boxes of defective cigars. He proceeded to sell the cigars to the diggers in the diamond fields. He also gave boxing exhibitions, performed in a cabaret and traded everything from feathers to garden vegetables. The most profitable trading commodity proved, however, to be diamonds.

Barnato bought diamonds for cash from the diggers and quickly resold them. With his profits, he bought up a number of unproductive claims on the floor of the Big Hole. Then, to everyone’s amazement, these claims began yielding extraordinary quantities of diamonds, even when rain storms made working the adjacent claims impossible. Barnato was accused by other mine owners of having salted his claim with diamonds that he had illegally bought from smugglers and thieves. But the charges were impossible to prove.

Whatever the provenance of his diamonds, Barnato continued to expand his production. With the money he sold them for, he began buying up, piece by piece, the patchwork of claims on the floor of the Big Hole. When cave-ins made it impossible to dig any deeper in the Big Hole, mine owners rushed in panic to sell their claims. Barnato continued to buy these pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. Then, in 1883, he gambled on sinking an underground shaft- the first ever attempted for diamond mining. It worked, and the claims he had bought for a pittance became worth a fortune. just as Rhodes had gained control of the De Beers mine, Barnato got control cr most of the Kimberley Central mine.

Rhodes and Barnato- both in their mid-thirties, by 1887, controlled the world’s two giant diamond mines. A confrontation between these enormously ambitious men became inevitable. Rhodes, if he was ever to have his empire, had to buy out Barnato. He made the first move, attempting, with financial backing from the Rothschild bank in London, to buy one of the few pieces in the Kimberley mine that Barnato did not own. He offered the then staggering sum of 1,400,000 pounds to the French financiers who owned it, not because the diamonds in it were worth that sum but because it would paralyze Barnato’s effort to consolidate the Big Hole into a single mine.

When Barnato received word of Rhodes’ bold offer, he himself offered 1,750,000 pounds to the French financiers for this crucial section. He had no choice but to outbid his rival.

Rhodes, at this point, decided to offer Barnato a deal that would seem too lucrative for him to refuse. Instead of bidding up the price, which would only benefit the French investors, Rhodes suggested that Barnato withdraw his bid. In return, Rhodes agreed to buy this section of the mine at the lower price and then immediately resell it to Barnato for 300,000 pounds and a one-fifth interest in Barnato’s Kimberley Central mine.

Barnato immediately accepted the offer. It permitted him to acquire the section for 1,450,000 pounds less than he had offered, and with it, he could operate the mine as a single entity. He realized that giving Rhodes a one-fifth interest in his mine would provide him with a bothersome wedge into his company, but he assumed that he and his close associates still owned a sufficient number of shares to make it impossible for Rhodes to attempt to gain control. Barnato made the fatal mistake of underestimating Rhodes’ ambitions.

To Rhodes, the deal was only the opening gambit in his war for control. ~You could never deal with obstinate people until you got the whip hand,” he explained to an associate at the time. The one-fifth interest was to be his whip.

Rhodes set about asking the most powerful bankers in Europe, including Rothschild, Jules Porges, and Rodolphe Khan, to help him buy enough stock in Barnato’s company to allow him to merge it into his company. He argued that as long as there were competing diamond mines, the market would continually be flooded. Then prices would fall to a pont that the public would realize that diamonds had no intrinsic value.

The bankers were quickly persuaded that Rhodes was right: Diamond mining would only remain profitable if it were done by a monopoly that could systematically restrict the supply. They not only agreed to use the stock that they and their clients held in Barnato’s mine to bring about the merger but they also advanced Rhodes money to buy up shares of Barnato’s stock on the open market.

The rest simply required an exercise in stock manipulation. Rhodes first drove the price of diamonds down by dumping De Beers~ inventory of diamonds onto the market. The price plummeted, and as Barnato’s associates unloaded their stock, Rhodes bought it. When no more stock was available, Rhodes and his backers began again bidding up the price, which tripled in three months. By the time Barnato realized that Rhodes was attempting to buy up his company, it was too late. By March of 1888, Rhodes and his associates had acquired the additional 30 percent they needed for control of the Kimberley Central mine.

Barnato had no choice but to acquiesce in the proposed merger. He met Rhodes at the Kimberley Club, and over an amicable lunch they worked out the terms of the consolidation. Barnato would exchange his stock in the Kimberley Central mine for stock in De Beers Consolidated Mines, as the new company would be called. This would make Barnato the largest single shareholder, though Rhodes, with his bankers and allies, would be firmly in control of the new company. Barnato would also be appointed one of four life governors of the monopoly-a position he would hold as long as he lived. The two men then shook hands on the deal. Barnato told him, Rhodes later noted, “You evidently have a fancy for building an empire in the north and I suppose we Must give you the means to do so.”

There were still, however, some dissident shareholders in I lie Kimberley Central Company who opposed the merger. They sued Barnato and Rhodes, claiming in court that the new company would no longer be a mining company but an adventure in imperialism. They argued that under the De Beers charter the company might “undertake warlike operations” in central Africa.

To prevent further litigation, Rhodes and Barnato, who between them controlled four-fifths of the stock in the Kimberley Central mine, simply liquidated the company and sold its assets to De Beers. The 5,338,650 pound check that De Beers paid for the assets was framed and hung on the wall of the De Beers boardroom, in which it is still conspicuously displayed.

Rhodes then proceeded to buy up two other small pipe mines in the Kimberley area-the Dutoitspan and Bulfontain. By 1890, he controlled more than 95 percent of the world’s diamond production. The next order of business was restoring the balance between world supply and demand. Rhodes believed that the demand for diamonds was determined by the number of “licit relationships,” as he termed engagements, between the sexes each year. By estimating the intended marriages each year in the United States, which was then the main market for diamonds, Rhodes believed it was possible to project the market for diamonds each year. In accordance with this “licit relationship” calculus, he began to reduce production in Kimberley from three to two million carats a year.

Rhodes further held that there should be a single channel of distribution of diamonds. He therefore contracted to sell De Beers’ entire production to a London syndicate of diamond merchants, who would then resell the diamonds to cutters in Antwerp.

Once the diamond business was rationally ordered into a monopoly, Rhodes moved on to the matter of restoring the British Empire. He was elected prime minister of the Cape Colony and organized a military putsch, aimed at taking over the Transvaal from the Boer settlers, that failed. Rhodes did, however, succeed in colonizing a large portion of central Africa.

Barnato, who by now was one of the richest men in the world, returned to the music hall and acted in a number of amateur productions in Kimberley. Then, in 1897, on an ocean liner headed back to England, he either jumped or fell overboard and disappeared beneath a wave.

Rhodes died five years later at the age of forty-eight. His body was buried on a remote mountaintop in Rhodesia. He had never married and he had no heirs. He left almost his entire fortune to Oxford to finance future Rhodes scholars. At De Beers there was no immediate successor to Rhodes, but the vacuum would not remain unfilled for long. Within a year of Rhodes’ death another young entrepreneur arrived in South Africa. His name was Ernest Oppenheimer.

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Chapter 7 – THE EMPIRE BUILDERS.

No GDP, no use of the word economic-economy-economist.

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Chapter 8 – THE JEWISH CONNECTION

No GDP, no economics-economy-economist.

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CHAPTER NINE

DIAMONDS FOR HITLER

The strategic importance of diamonds became acutely clear to both the Allies and Axis powers with the approach of the Second World War in 1939. Only diamonds were hard enough to stamp out the millions of precision parts that were necessary for mass-producing airplane engines, torpedoes, tanks, artillery and the other weapons of war. Only diamonds could be used to draw the fine wire needed for radar and the electronics of war. Only diamonds could provide the jeweled bearings necessary for the stabilizers, gyroscopes and guidance systems for submarines and planes. Only diamonds could provide the abrasives necessary for rapidly converting civilian industries into a war machine. Without a continuing supply of diamonds, the war machine would rapidly slow to a halt. Yet, nearly all the diamond mines remained closed, and De Beers controlled the world supply of diamonds. Obtaining these industrial diamonds thus became a paramount objective for both the United States and Hitler’s Germany.

In Washington, D.C., the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt began to hold emergency meetings about diamonds in 1940 when Hitler’s armies swept across Europe in a blitzkrieg and threatened to invade England. The possibility had to be at least considered that England, like France, might be overrun or surrender. In that event, the world diamond stockpile would fall into Hitler’s hands. Since the United States had less than one year’s supply of industrial diamonds, the loss of De Beers’ stockpile would make it difficult, if not impossible, to continue the war. The economic planners for the war estimated that the United ,States needed at least 6.5 million carats of industrial diamonds to convert its factories to war production.

When apprized of this critical shortage in diamonds, President Roosevelt ordered the War Production Board, which had the responsibility for mobilizing the American economy for war, to buy the necessary 6.5 million carats from De Beers. De Beers, however, had other interests to consider. Its entire system for monopolizing diamonds depended on its controlling the available stockpile. Transferring a large portion of the stockpile from London to New York City, where it would be out of its control, ran counter to the De Beers logic.

Even though the Americans persisted in the negotiations for the diamonds, they found that Sir Ernest Oppenheimer personally opposed any transfer of diamonds to the United States. He argued that if the United States had its own stockpile, and the war suddenly ended, it might release the diamonds and undercut the entire world order that he had so laboriously constructed. Moreover, he held that the United States had sufficient diamonds for present needs, and that De Beers would continue its delivery of diamonds to American manufacturers on a monthly basis. In one letter, he characterized the American demand for a stockpile as “farcical.”

The Americans were dismayed by this intransigence. In an official Justice Department memorandum, the War Production Board expressed incredulity at the fact that “the leaders of the syndicate are intentionally risking the war production of the allies.” President Roosevelt, disturbed by this development, ordered the State Department to intervene directly with Winston Churchill’s war cabinet in London.

The State Department found, however, that the British government was reluctant to press De Beers to part with the diamonds. An investigation by U.S. intelligence indicated that the division of the British government responsible for acting on the request was entirely staffed by former executives of the De Beers “syndicate.” In a secret memorandum, the War Production Board noted, “The diamond section of the government and the syndicate seem to be the same.”* After the Roosevelt administration had made continuing efforts to persuade the British government that the diamonds were of critical importance to the United States war effort, it ordered the State Department to play its trump card and threaten that the United States would interrupt the supply f airplanes that was vitally needed by the British to defend themselves against the Luftwaffe bombing raids. According to a confidential report in this Justice Department archive, dated April 16, 1942, “It was said unofficially that we would not give planes to England if the syndicate would not sell us the diamonds with which to make them.” This dramatic threat had the desired effect. The British government pressed De Beers to accommodate President Roosevelt, and De Beers yielded.

Oppenheimer agreed to supply the United States immediately with one million carats–14 percent of the American request—and deposit an additional stockpile in Canada for the duration of the war. This Canadian stockpile, which would remain under De Beers control, was meant to mitigate the American concern over the possible capture of the London stockpile.

The Roosevelt administration was not entirely satisfied with this compromise. It continued to apply pressure to the British government, demanding that De Beers supply the additional 5.5 million carats. By this time, the air of crisis had passed, and De Beers was able to procrastinate successfully. At first, it claimed that it did not have enough diamonds in its vaults to supply this amount. Then, after U.S. intelligence debunked this claim, De Beers advised that its vaults were bombed shut” in an air raid on London. A year passed. Then De Beers asserted that it needed additional time to prepare an inventory of the diamonds it had available.

By this time, American officials feared that De Beers, despite the pressure exerted on it, had no intention of allowing a diamond stockpile of any magnitude to be established, even in Canada. Moreover, manufacturers of. diamond tools in the United States had begun complaining to the Office of Price Control that De Beers had effectively raised its prices as much as 60 percent through the device of reducing the quality of the diamonds it delivered. So, though the official price per carat remained the same, manufacturers had to buy more of the lower quality diamonds to build the tools and dies for industry. Since it was exceedingly difficult for the price control officials to measure the relative quality of industrial diamonds, De Beers was able to persist in its claim that it had not raised prices. In any case, the Justice Department concluded that the De Beers monopoly, by manipulating supplies from the stockpile, could impede the war effort.

The Justice Department decided then to launch its own investigation into the diamond monopoly. It had the full cooperation of the War Production Board, which still wanted control of the diamond stockpile, and the OSS, the newly created U.S. wartime intelligence service. The Investigators were not held back by any inhibitions about intercepting mail, borrowing bank records or other such extralegal measures. They all shared a common objective: helping the war effort. In their roughshod manner, they soon began turning up bits of evidence indicating that De Beers had systematically stifled diamond mining in areas of the world over which it could not exert control. For example, intercepted letters from Oppenheimer’s associates suggested that litigation had been initiated in Venezuela to prevent Nelson Rockefeller and other Americans from developing diamond mines in that country. One such letter detailed the possibility of competition in Venezuela, and asked an intermediary to suggest to Oppenheimer that he be “ruthless in stamping it out.” Another intercepted letter from a Belgian diamond executive suggested that De Beers was intentionally exhausting the diamond mines in the Belgian Congo, while preserving its mines in South Africa, so that after the war was over De Beers “will have complete control over the market..” Justice Department investigators also looked into charges that De Beers had conspired to buy out and shut down potential diamond mining areas in the country of Guyana and the state of Arkansas.

In Arkansas, it was charged that after diamonds were found there, Oppenheimer bought control of the company that was to mine the diamonds. Then, when the separation plant built on the site failed to produce a sufficient quantity of diamonds per ton of ore to make the mine profitable, it was closed. Subsequently, it was charged that the separation plant had been designed by the engineer in such a manner that it could not possibly retrieve diamonds. It emerged that the engineer was in the employ of De Beers. The mine, which was bought out by associates of Ernest Oppenheimer, was ordered closed in 1921 after Oppenheimer met the mine officials in New York, and the mine’s records were ordered destroyed. “An inference could be drawn . . . “the Justice Department memorandum noted, “that the property was sabotaged and then closed at the insistence of Sir Ernest Oppenheimer.” The evidence was admittedly highly circumstantial.

Whatever were the specific tactics of De Beers, the justice Department investigators reached the conclusion that the singular effect of these efforts was to artificially restrain the production of diamonds. This, in turn, produced higher prices. A 1944 memorandum to the attorney general concluded, “The United States is paying monopoly prices for an essential material needed in wartime production.” If De Beers were an American company, the memorandum continued, “There would be no question as to [its] having violated the anti-trust laws.” Since De Beers was a South African corporation, the Justice Department had to demonstrate that it had some jurisdiction over its activities before it could consider prosecuting it.

The FBI was called in to interview the leading diamond dealers in New York to determine whether De Beers, which sold them diamonds, could be construed as transacting business in the United States. The FBI reported, “The domestic trade operates in relative secrecy…. The syndicate will sell only to a small group of hand-picked dealers.” It further noted that De Beers officials avoided coming to the United States, and all transactions took place in London. Further inquiry showed that De Beers had closed all its bank accounts in the United States at the outset of the investigation.

The assistant attorney generals at the Justice Department who had superintended the investigation realized that the antitrust division had little chance of ever bringing De Beers to court in the United States. Despite all the prodigious investigative efforts, the case was abandoned in late 1945.

None of these documents cast any light on the question of how Hitler continued to obtain diamonds for the duration of the war. There was, however, an investigation of this problem by the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA.

According to a summary of OSS documents, the OSS learned through its agents in Germany that in November of 1943 Hitler had only an eight-month supply of industrial diamonds. When these diamonds ran out, Hitler’s war machine would be crippled. It would no longer be possible to build V-2 rockets or other exotic weaponry. It was thus a crucial wartime goal to prevent Hitler from replenishing his supply of diamonds.

As all mines in South Africa were closed, the OSS reckoned that there was only one place on earth from which the Germans could get industrial diamonds in sufficient quantity to maintain their .military-industrial complex: the Belgian Congo. The Belgian Congo was, however, administered by the Belgian government in exile, which was in London and completely under British control. The mines themselves were supervised, and policed, by the De Beers syndicate. In fact, when the justice Department began to move against De Beers, the War Department objected on the grounds that it might undercut the security system that De Beers had developed in the Belgian Congo. In an exchange of secret correspondence between the War and Justice Departments (which was declassified under my Freedom of Information request), it was argued by an official responsible for maintaining the diamond blockade that “almost the entire [diamond] production of Africa is policed through the operation of elaborate controls extending through every mining area of the continent.” Further, De Beers, which administered this program, sent “this controlled production … in a closely guarded stream to London.”

The OSS had determined, however, that tons of diamonds were somehow reaching Nazi Germany. If the De Beers system of “elaborate controls” was as effective as the War Department held, how could such enormous quantities of diamonds be regularly reaching Germany? To answer this question, the OSS had proposed sending its own undercover agents from its field office in Accra to the Belgian Congo. Since the British Ministry of Economic Warfare was responsible for allied activities in the Congo, this OSS action had to be cleared in London. At first the ministry blocked the request, and then it had proposed a joint “diamond investigation.” OSS agents met with their British counterparts, but little was done to pinpoint the source of the smuggling. Finally the OSS chief in Accra reported to Washington, D.C.:

“We have now come to the conclusion (a) that our assistance was requested in this program so that the Diamond Trading Corporation might discover how much we actually knew of the ramifications of the De Beers world monopoly, and (b) that the OSS/Accra recommendations for a Security Committee were sabotaged, not by the British Government, but by the representatives of the Diamond Trading Corporation, Ltd., London, through their domination of the Diamond Committee of the Ministry of Economic Warfare.”

As the OSS pursued the investigation, it found that the diamonds were reaching the Axis powers through Tangier and Cairo. Its agents, posing as illegal buyers in these entrepots, found that industrial diamonds were being sold for $26 a carat, which was thirty times the official price. It became increasingly clear that enormous profits were being made on the millions of carats that were being smuggled into Germany. Tracing their way back through the chain of illegal sellers, an OSS agent code-named Teton reported back from Leopoldville that “the major source of leakage was the Forminiere Mines,” which had been under the control of the syndicate ever since they were developed. According to the OSS report, Teton, pretending to be an American official who had come to the Congo to register “all American males of draft age,” made highly productive “contact” in Leopoldville and eventually turned up evidence “that a full year’s supply of diamonds had reached Germany from Forminiere through Red Cross parcels.” The shipment of several million carats of diamonds through the parcels that were regularly sent from the Congo to Nazi-occupied Belgium required considerable organization and support in the intervening areas.

Even though the investigation was causing great concern in the diamond section of the Ministry of Economic Warfare, Teton was ordered by the OSS to continue following the leads he had developed. Teton suspected that the Belgian police chief in Leopoldville was involved in the massive smuggling operation, and to test his suspicions he gave money to a Belgian citizen to make illegal diamond purchases in Leopoldville. As Teton suspected, the diamonds ‘traced directly to the police chief.

Before Teton could follow the trail any farther, however, e Belgian citizen was arrested by the police. The Belgian identified Teton as his source for the funds, and Teton was declared persona non grata by the governor general of the Congo, and expelled.

It again seemed to the OSS that British interests had stifled the investigation.

In February of 1944, British and American intelligence officials met in Accra to attempt to resolve the jurisdiction problem. Rejecting the OSS idea of an “advisory commission” on diamond smuggling, the British decided instead have a diamond security expert and a mining engineer, bo of whom were to be hand-picked by Sir Ernest Oppenheimer, conduct a security study of the mine. Even though this self-serving plan was never actually implemented, the OSS concluded, “Thus the responsibility for security would have been turned over entirely to the industry.”

Nevertheless, it was decided that British Intelligence would have the responsibility for interdicting the flow of diamonds to the Nazis. The OSS report noted that although this British intelligence operation was initially “well-planned,” it was unable to cope with the Syndicate’s control of the industry and its dealing with the enemy.”

The suggestion that the De Beers-controlled syndicate was “dealing with the enemy” was not accepted; or at least not acted upon by the U.S. War Department. In a secret memorandum, dated November 21, 1944, Patrick A. Gibson wrote Assistant Attorney General Edward S. Stimson, “I suppose that we could not make any allegation that the defendants (De Beers) themselves have prevented effective control of leakage of industrial diamonds to Germany. . . Any theory of this nature would seem to depend upon supporting action by some units of the British Government. Clearly, the British government was not about to investigate such a sensitive matter. It was therefore concluded that it would be imprudent to “be involved in a controversy of this nature.” With the end of the war in 1945, the OSS was dissolved, and the question of “dealing with the enemy” was never resolved.

American servicemen returned from overseas and purchased diamond rings for engagements that they had deferred. To meet the new demand, De Beers re-opened its mines in South Africa. The diamond invention had survived the war intact.

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https://edwardjayepstein.com/diamond/chap9.htm

Chapter 9 – DIAMONDS FOR HITLER

No GDP.

4 times the word economic.

1. The economic planners for the war estimated that the United ,States needed at least 6.5 million carats of industrial diamonds to convert its factories to war production.

2 & 3. Since the British Ministry of Economic Warfare was responsible for allied activities in the Congo, this OSS action had to be cleared in London. At first the ministry blocked the request, and then it had proposed a joint “diamond investigation.” OSS agents met with their British counterparts, but little was done to pinpoint the source of the smuggling. Finally the OSS chief in Accra reported to Washington, D.C.:

4. Even though the investigation was causing great concern in the diamond section of the Ministry of Economic Warfare, Teton was ordered by the OSS to continue following the leads he had developed. Teton suspected that the Belgian police chief in Leopoldville was involved in the massive smuggling operation, and to test his suspicions he gave money to a Belgian citizen to make illegal diamond purchases in Leopoldville. As Teton suspected, the diamonds ‘traced directly to the police chief.

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Edit: … would always make excuses …

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Edit: … exact opposite of what you would logically expect?

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Yesterday at 3:13 PM

Thu 3:13 PM

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Edit: … that I am saying and your contention that The D I book is “Boring Shit!!”?

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GemACH sic, “traced directly to the police chief”.

Today it would be the same if not a whole lot worse.

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Did Epstein have to spell out for you who chose the police chief?

Did Epstein have to spell out who runs London?

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What would we do if there were not good Americans in the CIA?

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What intelligence network would you trust today if you wanted to defend against ChaBAD sic-SA Oppenheimers?

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GemACH sic, do you think Professor E J Epstein got the chills and started trembling to come up with “unernotionally” [sic]?

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Wouldn’t you, even with all your retardation, picked up that your spellcheck hadn’t got the correct spelling for “unemotionally”?

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GemACH sic,

You would expect the Oppenheimers to be very careful in who they hired.

You would expect them to have their own editors watching for every word used in the greatest expose of all time and all geared to getting weak people like you automatically thinking, “If you can’t beat them, join them!”.

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Read again, “We [OSS] have now come to the conclusion (a) that our assistance was requested in this program so that the Diamond Trading Corporation might discover how much we actually knew of the ramifications of the De Beers world monopoly, and (b) that the OSS/Accra recommendations for a Security Committee were sabotaged, not by the British Government, but by the representatives of the Diamond Trading Corporation, Ltd., London, through their domination of the Diamond Committee of the Ministry of Economic Warfare.”

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GemACH sic,

Imagine someone coming to you for assistance only to find out what you know?

Is that what you have been doing with me all along?

You would expect that my 3 elder siblings and their fellow co-conspirators, but what’s in it for you?

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GemACH sic,

You are a very mischievous human being.

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Your goal has been to destroy me from the very beginning, no matter what.

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You could see that I am a far bigger threat to the SA Oppenheimers than @Solly Krok or anyone else on this planet.

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You could care less about trashing Krok because you have had your mind on bigger pieces on the chess board.

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But your insights are plagued by your weak mind and your poor diet that you wife feeds you cannot possibly help.

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Attacking Solly Krok is intended to make him be a person of poor judgment and chose poorly me as his advisor.

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GemACH sic, you are a manipulator of the highest order.

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The D I book explains that the SA Oppenheimers had infiltrated the highest levels of Allied Intelligence during WW2, and feared no one.

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GemACH sic, why would they loosen their grip when there was still half of European Jewry remaining and to be destroyed from within?

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It didn’t come as a surprise to you that my mother Zena and me have few supporters.

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You haven’t forgotten that the Nazis won World War II which was all about getting rid of the questioning Jewish people to allow for the ongoing theft of real estate and the minerals until they were all in the hands of the SA Oppenheimers and their friends.

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In other words, GemACH sic, if my mother Zena and I had many supporters then it would mean that SA Oppenheimers failed to capitalize on this World War II success.

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GemACH sic, do you think your wife and children have sufficient common sense to follow that logic?

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GemACH sic, another day has gone by and you have continued to play stupid.

It is logical that your mental health has suffered greatly because the brain damage is exponential, but a fool wouldn’t necessarily realize that.

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@Norm Zwail, would you agree with that logic?

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@Harry Rady, what about you?

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@Nelson Guedes, what about you?

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@Neal H. Hurwitz what about you, or have you already passed on and one of your wives is now manning your fb account?

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How many of you are thinking more about your interactions on social media that survive after you die?

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@Peter Chait, would you agree with the logic?

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@Peter Thiel would you agree that it is logical that GemACH’s mental health has suffered greatly because the brain damage is exponential, but a fool wouldn’t necessarily realize that?

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@Jeffrey Essakow, would you agree with that logic or do you first need to discuss it with your brother @Roy Essakow?

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@Ayi Kwei Armah, how are you doing?

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@Olga Zabludoff, how’s you CIA economist husband doing these days, and is he ready to discuss publicly with me President Nixon’s speech of August 15, 1971 when he was working alongside Nixon in the White House?

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GemACH sic, when you decided to undermine the competency and integrity of Solly Krok to get at me, you knew that you were committing an unforgiveable sin.

There are many geniuses about Judaism and one of them is that only the man you have harmed can forgive you.

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That means when you have done harm to someone who has either died or you have contributed to them losing their mind so that they can no longer speak out like my mother Zena, it is not possible to call upon God’s help for anything.

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It means you are totally fucked.

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Christianity is your only option.

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The creator of Christianity must be a genius. It is the only salvation offered to bad to Jewish people who cannot get forgiveness from those they have harmed.

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There is no crime worse in Judaism than to murder a good person’s good name.

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I refuse to forgive anyone who has done me or my mother Zena harm, so don’t even try.

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It has been crystal clear from the start the wrongs that have been done to my mother Zena, and each of you have acted like it was no big deal.

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Would Mark Zuckerberg be the same as the rest of you, if he were in your shoes?

But he isn’t.

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All Zuckerberg provides is a platform.

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And so far he has not interfered with my exposing the deep rot.

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He also has more intelligence than most all of you.

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He can see that this ugliness of the human spirit is the greatest pandemic, the rest simply not worth mentioning.

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He can also see that all the ugliness can end in the next instant were sufficient numbers of humans to want it.

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Why should he “jump the gun” when you demonstrate that all you desire is to see me dead?

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Of course, you will have your one spokesperson @Stephanie Marine saying how much she admired me and my mother, my wife and our doggy Mango, that she never once said a bad word about me or any other human for that matter, and you would would all lap it up like it was candy in your mouth.

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Could you think of anything uglier, other than this?

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GemACH sic, would you know if Hilary Clinton suffers more than most from yeast infections?

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GemACH sic, do you have personal experience with yeast infections that keep you up at night and bother your incessantly during the day?

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When you chose to be around sick people all day which is what you do when filling out prescriptions, did you think what it might do to your personality?

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Did the Schneerson guide you to be a pharmacist?

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Would you like to be a real estate investor like The Coupon Clipper is Jack The Ripper member @Jeffrey Essakow, and if so why don’t you ask him for advice on where to get the lowest cost financing and never to fear losing your shirt?

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GemACH sic, do you think the Schneerson and all his advisors never thought about the political clout that comes with being Harry Oppenheimer?

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It is now 7:32 PM your time.

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How well is your dinner passing through you?

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Do you feel weaker and now want to go to sleep but you feel you need to keep reading just in case you miss something should you possibly fall into a deep sleep?

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It was very bad to give Marc Rich the pardon.

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How do the Clintons manage to walk upright?

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The Clintons can’t laugh off The D I book like the rest of you.

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GemACH sic, should I explain why or would you prefer to talk tanning salons?

4:41 PM

What if Bill Clinton and Hilary Clinton and Chelsea Clinton have never even heard of The D I book or me, wouldn’t that make you feel even worse?

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How did these failed lawyers manage to get so powerful and rich and not know as much as you?

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Yes, not everyone here is in the same boat.

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You judge yourself and others by your financial wealth to get what you want and have others do for you what you either don’t like to do or are incapable of doing.

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The Schneerson just had to hand out $1 bills.

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The more you do a task, the better you get at it.

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Who thinks the Schneerson was clueless as to what was going on?

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That is a very good question.

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GemACH sic, who would be the best person within ChaBAD sic to ask?

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GemACH sic, you don’t want to acknowledge the great importance of the Lipskar in the ChaBAD sic organization.

Let me explain why.

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God would have to be bad to reward such bad people.

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The game is not over until the fat lady sings.

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GemACH sic, would you be surprised if you wife told you right now that she wants a get, a divorce?

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What sort of woman would want to be married to shithead such as you?

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God knows, just like you know, just like the rest of ChaBAD sic, that the Lipskars were The Schneerson’s right hand.

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GemACH sic, do you think it is just a coincidence that to the right of the Schneerson stands Mendel Lipskar?

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GemACH sic, does it make you feel worse when I tell you that I don’t believe in coincidences, that everything has a purpose?

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GemACH sic, you point out that I was smiling.

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Do you think the Schneerson gave a fuck what everyone did with their $1?

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How could the Schneerson not know that the SA Oppenheimers ran the entire show?

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Didn’t the Schneerson see that throughout the globe the rich were getting richer and the poor that much worse off?

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If you are a problem solver and that must be the work of the rabbis, don’t you first take an accredited university course in economics to figure out how monopolists go about skirting the anti-Monopolies, anti-price fixing laws and then confront the SA Oppenheimers without any fear because being a Man of God, you only fear God?

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So was the Schneerson totally stupid or corrupt?

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You don’t want to think he was corrupt.

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Then how could he have risen to such power and be so stupid?

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@Stephanie Marine, are you still with us?

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You added Alan Woolf to the group.

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@Alan Woolf, are you still there?

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@Alan Woolf, at 8:49 AM Calif. time today, right after you accepted my fb friend invitation I wrote to you on fb messaging:

I write on the military economy

Have you seen my writings?

What do you do?

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What were you waiting for before replying?

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You have 297 odd fb friends and the following are our mutual fb friends:

Alex Carlebach

183 mutual friends

Colin Boruchowitz

127 mutual friends

Harold Joffe

98 mutual friends

Jeff Levenstein

115 mutual friends

Rowan Hirsch

47 mutual friends

Shirley Prissman Katz

93 mutual friends

Solly Krok

226 mutual friends

Stephen Katz

126 mutual friends

Tamar Balkind

54 mutual friends

Telfed Israel

95 mutual friends

Yudi Cohen

116 mutual friends

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We are fighting a war against the Nazis who are murdering millions of Jewish people.

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Cutting and pasting Chapter 9, DIAMONDS FOR HITLER, subtitle, THE SECRET WAR REPORT OF THE OSS/CIA:

It again seemed to the OSS that British interests had stifled the investigation.

In February of 1944, British and American intelligence officials met in Accra to attempt to resolve the jurisdiction problem. Rejecting the OSS idea of an “advisory commission” on diamond smuggling, the British decided instead have a diamond security expert and a mining engineer, bo[th] of whom were to be hand-picked by Sir Ernest Oppenheimer, conduct a security study of the mine. Even though this self-serving plan was never actually implemented, the OSS concluded, “Thus the responsibility for security would have been turned over entirely to the industry.”

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Note that I filled in the missing letters of the word “both”.

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We have the person most responsible for arming Nazi Germany hand-picking the people to help in the investigation of Sir Ernest Oppenheimer aiding and abetting the enemy, and all you can do is trash me and my mother Zena?

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How incredibly sick can a species possibly be?

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Imagine if we were all bad, then we wouldn’t know good.

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Imagine if we were all good then we wouldn’t know what bad meant.

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So the importance of your large numbers must now be perfectly understood.

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Moving on to chapter 10, and should anyone at any time wish for me to go back to February 24, 1945 when Allied Fighter Bomber Pilot Ian Gow had to bale out south of Reggio, please let me know.

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CHAPTER TEN

THE ARRANGEMENT

To perpetuate the diamond invention, it was not sufficient for De Beers merely to own the large mines that produced most of the world’s diamonds. It had to control the production from all other significant sources, including the scattered diggings in Africa and the jungle streams of South America. It had to be able to assure the major diamond cutters and dealers that they had no alternative source for their diamonds other than De Beers’ operation at Charterhouse Street in London. If its clients believed that it would be possible to buy diamonds from diggers, tribesmen, smugglers and small mine owners, De Beers could no longer compel them to adhere to its rules for avoiding price competition.

Oppenheimer therefore negotiated a series of secret arrangements to block the availability of diamonds from the sources his company did not directly own or control. In South Africa and the Belgian Congo, he pressed the governments into passing laws that forced independent prospectors and diggers to sell their diamonds only to government-licensed diamond buyers, who in turn contracted to sell their diamonds to De Beers’ subsidiary, the Diamond Trading Company. In British colonies, such as Sierra Leone, he contracted to buy whatever diamonds were unearthed from British mining companies, such as the Selection Trust, which held the mining concessions there. In South America, where the alluvial diamond fields were scattered over vast areas, he arranged deals with local buying agents to buy up loose diamonds. In all cases, Oppenheimer required that the total production of diamonds be turned over to De Beers or its subsidiaries at an agreed-upon price.

When diamonds were found in the British colony of Guiana in 1925, De Beers, acting through its diamond syndicate in London, made an arrangement to buy the entire production, which amounted to about 12,000 carats a year. The agreement, drawn up by Otto Oppenheimer, specified that the price paid by the syndicate for these diamonds would be established through a sorting procedure. Moreover, it was stipulated that Oppenheimer would be the “technical advisor” to the diamond miners, and, as such, he would be solely responsible for defining the assortment. According to the contract, Oppenheimer’s decision on the sorting could not in any way be questioned or redressed. This meant, in effect, that Oppenheimer could determine what price would be paid to the Guianans, and if they found the price too low, they were restricted by the contract from selling the diamonds to anyone else.

As De Beers found that its own mines were producing more diamonds than it could market, its interest in this arrangement was not to stimulate further production in South America but to prevent these diamonds from finding their way into the market at an unfortunate time. Once the contract was signed, Oppenheimer began adjusting the sorting procedures by creating grades of “finer” diamonds. This maneuver effectively reduced the average price paid by the syndicate for Guianan diamonds by over 50 percent. At these low prices, the Guianan mining company, United Diamond Fields of British Guiana, Ltd., could no longer afford to buy diamonds from the native diggers. Consequently, the company’s production, which was based entirely on what these diggers found and turned in, fell from 12,000 carats to 3,000 carats a year. Bound by its contract to accept the syndicate’s price, the company went bankrupt in 1927, and Guiana diamonds ceased to be a threat to De Beers. The details of this arrangement emerged only in 1932 when a director of United Diamond Fields sued Otto Oppenheimer for fraud. After demonstrating that Oppenheimer had falsified an important certificate of evaluation, the director’s lawyer, Sir Patrick Hastings, forced the syndicate to pay his client a large cash settlement. There was, however, one maverick geologist who refused to accept this crucial arrangement, Doctor John Thornburn Williamson. Williamson was a rugged Canadian geologist who, after he left the employ of De Beers in 1932, began prospecting on his own for diamonds in what is now Tanzania.

In 1943, Dr. Williamson intrepidly traced a mineral often found in association with diamonds back to its source at Mwadui, where Williamson uncovered the largest diamond mine that had ever been found. The oval-shaped volcanic pipe, which was filled with diamondiferous ore, covered some 361 acres on the surface; and it was four times larger than any of the diamond pipes found in South Africa.

A De Beers team of prospectors had explored the territory around Mwadui a decade earlier without reporting any trace of diamonds; now De Beers had to prevent Williamson from flooding the market with these diamonds. When the extent of the diamond strike became clear in 1945, Ernest Oppenheimer offered Williamson 2 million pounds sterling for the mine. Even though this was an enormous sum of money then, and Williamson himself was penniless, he turned down the offer. After spending ten years in the jungles of Africa in solitary pursuit of diamonds, he was not about to sell out. He wanted to build his own empire. With the backing of a number of Indian merchants and a task force of Italian prisoners of war, he began excavating the diamonds from the pipe. By 1946, he had some 6,000 workers living with their families at Mwadui, and over 200 armed guards protecting his budding empire. The entire encampment was surrounded by two barbwire fences and protected by primitive gun fortifications.

As the diamonds began to pour out of Mwadui, De Beers became increasingly concerned about its ability to control world prices. The corporate minutes of De Beers on June 20, 1946, reflect this growing apprehension. “The chairman (Sir Ernest Oppenheimer) said that he was sure that a satisfactory outcome would result from negotiations with the British Colonial Office over a prospecting license for De Beers, but he said that the position would not be secure until they were able to come to terms with Williamson. He mentioned that the Tanganyika production was now one and one-half million pounds per annum. . . . He very much doubted whether, at the moment, he had 65 percent effective control of world production.” Oppenheimer pointed out that this uncontrolled production could prove “embarrassing” if there was an economic recession, and he recommended, according to the notes of the meeting, “that their efforts should be energetically directed towards obtaining effective control of all African production.”

The diamond sights in London proved to be one effective means of reasserting control of the Mwadui diamonds. Dr. Williamson had to sell the low as well as high quality diamonds he mined to diamond cutters in order for his mine to be profitable. Most of the major cutting factories, especially for the more difficult-shaped diamonds, were clients of De Beers. When these clients came to the London sights, they were told, according to reports reaching the U.S. Department of justice, that they should not buy any of Williamson’s diamonds. The threat was implicitly made that they might find their consignment drastically reduced or even abruptly ended if they bought any diamonds from Williamson. Since few of the cutting factories in Antwerp were willing to risk their sight in London by violating this rule of the game, Williamson found that he could only sell the clear, octahedron crystals that were in demand by small, independent cutters. He had to store most of the clear diamonds. This severely squeezed his cash reserves.

De Beers also applied pressure on Williamson through the British Colonial Office. When its representatives privately advised the British Exchequer of its he stockpile of diamonds, De Beers quickly brought pressure on the Colonial Office to remedy the situation. Diamonds, after all, earned at that time more foreign exchange for Great ,Britain than almost any other export, and the British government.. At about this time, Colonial Secretary Arthur Creech Jones advanced the idea to nationalize the Williamson diamond mine. In an official white paper, Creech Jones suggested that the colonial government, through nationalization, might better be able to control the exploitation of a mineral resource than a private company.

For Williamson, the message was clear: Either he make his deal with De Beers or his mine might be nationalized. Finally, in August of 1947, Williamson acquiesced to these pressures, and Creech Jones announced in the House of Commons that Williamson had agreed to sell his entire output through the Diamond Trading Company in London. Williamson was now part of the arrangement.

Oppenheimer went on to make similar arrangements with any other person, corporation or nation that discovered diamonds. He was in a position to either buy them out directly or to contract to buy all the diamonds their mines produced. It was a mutually profitable arrangement.

During Sir Ernest’s lifetime, De Beers never discovered a diamond mine itself. Oppenheimer saw little point to investing profits in exploring for diamonds, since De Beers made its profits from a scarcity, not an abundance, of diamonds. As he established it, one of the cardinal principles behind the diamond invention was that demand for diamonds was fixed each year and varied only with the number of engagements.

Any sudden increases in the production of diamonds would therefore have to be added to De Beers’ stockpile rather than its profit, and it made little sense for Oppenheimer to create new mines until the old ones were depleted. Instead, Oppenheimer reinvested the stream of profits into gold mines in the Orange Free State province of South Africa. The gold production would provide a reserve of capital for De Beers that would allow it to buy back diamonds if the retail market ever slackened.

By the time Sir Ernest died in 1957, he had turned the diamond invention into a powerful instrument for preserving the price of diamonds. By merging the mines in South Africa with the syndicate in London, he created a double-edged sword, production and distribution, for maintaining his control over the diamond industry. Through secret arrangements that he patiently and meticulously made with independent mine owners, he managed to channel almost all of the world’s uncut diamonds through this system.

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Chapter 10 – THE ARRANGEMENT

No GDP.

1 mention of the word, “economic”:

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@Alan Woolf, do you know how to cause a Professor of Economics a stroke?

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Yes, now, 5:45 PM Calif. time you know.

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Borders have never meant anything to the SA Oppenheimers once they got their politicians to embrace the ludicrous GDP economic index.

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So what do we fight?

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GemACH sic, do you have an answer for that or do you need to research Torah?

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GemACH sic, lets say that you want to fuck your neighbors wife because you no longer want to fuck your fat wife even if she decides to always cover up those fat ankles which may not be the only thing responsible for that scary look on her face.

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But the neighbor is much better looking than you, which is very easy to imagine.

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Could you see yourself organizing a war to have him sent off to the front lines like King David did to the husband of the wife that he wanted to fuck?

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Of course you could.

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Unless you think you are better than King David.

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Why would I expect for you to have a better moral compass than King David when you and your wife are so fat and ugly?

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GemACH sic, can you be so kind as to let us know when you are next going to provide a political commentary?

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We are now up to chapter 11. Look how quickly it is going.

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CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE DIAMOND CUT

In its rough form, a diamond is a lusterless, translucent crystal that resembles a chip of broken glass. For it to be transformed into a jewel, it must be cut into a particular gem shape and then polished, facet by facet. When Sir Ernest Oppenheimer organized the diamond cartel, there were no machines that could cut and polish diamonds. The crucial transformation from rough stones to jewels had to be done by hand, and only a relatively few craftsmen, mainly in Antwerp and Amsterdam, possessed the necessary skills. Oppenheimer therefore set out to extend the control of the cartel to diamond cutting as well as to diamond mining. He realized that although outsiders might conceivably discover new sources of diamonds, they could not compete with De Beers unless they also had the means to cut diamonds. The art of diamond cutting was thus ingeniously incorporated into the diamond invention.

Until the late fifteenth century, diamond cutting had been a primitive business. Diamonds were first “cleaved” by placing a chisel at the stone’s weakest point of molecular cohesion and striking it with a mallet. If the precise point was located on the diamond’s structure, the adhesion would be so weak that the diamond could be separated with a fingernail. If pressure was applied to the wrong point, or in the wrong direction, the diamond would shatter. After the medieval cutter succeeded in cleaving the diamond into the basic shape of the desired jewel, he placed it in an egg shaped tin cup, called a dop, and attempted to remove any imperfections in it by striking it with another diamond, since only diamonds were hard enough to cut diamonds. This process, which was extremely slow and painstaking, was called bruting. Even though the medieval cutter could eventually give the stone a jewel like appearance through these methods, he was extremely limited by the natural shape of the diamond.

The situation suddenly changed at the end of the fifteenth century when a Jewish diamond cutter in Antwerp named Lodewyk van Berken invented the scaif. The scaif was simply a polishing wheel that was impregnated with a mixture of olive oil and diamond dust, but it completely revolutionized the art of diamond cutting. The rough diamond was clamped in a dop and held against this whirling disc, while the diamond dust on it ground away the diamond to the desired angle. With the scaif, it became possible to polish symmetrically all the facets of the diamond at angles that reflected the maximum amount of light. As disciples of Van Berken applied the laws of optics to these angles, they created sparkling gems that fascinated the princes and aristocrats of Europe. Charles the Bold, Duke of Normandy, became the patron of Van Berken and commissioned him to cut a 137-carat diamond, which became known as the Florentine.

Diamond cutters from all over Europe came to Antwerp to study Van Berken’s methods, and orders for these light reflecting gems flowed in from all the royal courts, making Antwerp the pre-eminent diamond-cutting center in the world. At the head of the Pelikenstrasse, the street that winds through Antwerp’s diamond district, is a bronze statue of Van Berken dressed in a jerkin and skull cap, with a holster full of diamond tools strapped across his waist. He holds in his right hand a diamond.

The next major innovation came in the twentieth century with the invention of the diamond saw. Cleaving diamonds, although an economic and efficient process, had limited cutters to shaping the stone according to its natural lines of cleavage. The diamond saw, a circular steel blade lubricated continually with oil and diamond powder, allowed the cutters to go against the grain of the diamond without shattering it. The diamond saw, moreover, allowed cutters to salvage jewels from badly misshapen and deformed diamonds. To be sure, sawing was a more expensive process than cleaving. It required about one-tenth carat of diamond dust for every carat of diamond sawed through. And it was also a much slower process than cleaving a diamond with a single stroke. Indeed, it took days to saw through a two-carat diamond. Despite such disadvantages, the diamond saw became t he common method of shaping diamonds in the postwar years. Since it was far easier to train workers to saw than to cleave diamonds, it quickly transformed diamond-cutting in Antwerp from an esoteric craft to a semi-mechanized machines to polish diamonds.

The final refinement of the process for cutting diamonds came in 1919 when a twenty-one-year-old mathematician named Marcel Tolkowsky calculated the formula for the ideal proportions of a cut diamond. Master cutters had achieved an inner light in diamonds by choosing angles that sacrificed some reflected light in order to get refracted light. They did this by relying mainly on intuition, trial and error, and experience. Tolkowsky’s formula gave the optimum ratio between the angles of facets opposing one another in a diamond. Following this formula, a cutter would achieve the maximum refracted (or “inner”) light with the least sacrifice of reflected (or outer) light. This formula led to the popularization of the so-called “brilliant cut” diamond, which had fifty-eight facets polished exactly to the tolerances of the ideal proportions.

With the reduction of diamonds to a mathematic formula, it became possible to devise semi-automatic machines to polish diamonds. In the early 1960s, a De Beers subsidiary introduced the Pieromatic diamond-cutting machines in Antwerp. Although these machines still required trained workers to guide diamonds through the polishing operation, they greatly reduced the need for master craftsmen or even long apprenticeships. According to the literature accompanying the Pieromatic machines, men could be trained to operate them in a matter of months.

As the diamond business expanded in the postwar years, Sir Ernest Oppenheimer made every effort to keep the cutting industry anchored in Antwerp. Not only was Antwerp just across the channel from England, and highly convenient to De Beers, but Sir Ernest considered it essential to maintain a special relationship with the Belgian government, which controlled the huge diamond deposits in the Congo. Under his express orders, Monty Charles provided the Antwerp diamond cutters with ample supplies of diamonds at the London sights while cutting back on supplies to their competitors.

Amsterdam, which had been a major diamond cutting center in the nineteenth century, gradually lost almost all its gem cutters to Antwerp. (Strict working conditions imposed on the Dutch diamond-cutting factories by the labor unions greatly accelerated the exodus in the prewar years.) But, despite all of De Beers’ efforts, Antwerp did not achieve a monopoly on diamond cutting. The larger and more expensive diamonds were sent to be cut directly to New York, in order to avoid paying the tax on finished jewels, while the smaller diamond chips were sent to India to be polished by cheap labor. The “melees,” or medium-sized diamonds, generally under a half carat in weight, tended to flow to Israeli factories. Nevertheless, Antwerp’s cutters continued to receive most of the valuable diamonds and virtually all the difficult-shaped diamonds that required special skills.

To see how these diamonds were cut, I visited the Trau Freres factory in Antwerp. Founded in the nineteenth century, Trau Freres specializes almost exclusively in cutting a triangular-shaped twisted crystal known in the trade as a “macle.” As Trau Freres is invited to De Beers’ sights in London on a regular basis, it receives all its macles from De Beers. The factory employs about 100 workers, who receive on the average a salary and benefits of $400 a week, which makes them among the highest paid workers in Europe. Each worker was seated in front of a table cutting and polishing an individual macle.

The diamond I watched being shaped at Trau Freres started out looking like two triangles folded into one another. It took about ten hours for the craftsmen to saw it into its basic shape, which resembled a valentine heart. The heart shaped stone was then placed in a cup-like dop and rubbed against a second diamond in order to wear away the sharp and irregular edges. Finally, the craftsman began polishing the individual facets of the diamond on his whirling scaif. By the time this arduous process was completed, the diamond would have lost at least 40 percent of its original weight. This particular diamond had weighed io carats when Trau Freres received it in their box at the London sight, It cost them $4,000, or $400 per carat. The labor and interest costs on this individual diamond amounted to about $1,000. The final heart-shaped diamond that was cut weighed only 6 carats.

To break even, Trau Freres would have to sell it to a wholesaler for at least $ 5,000, or $ 837 per carat.

The thin margin of profit for specialty diamond cutters like Trau Freres depends almost entirely on the price they pay the Diamond Trading Company for the uncut diamonds in their box at the sights. If De Beers elects to raise the price even slightly or to provide them with an inferior selection of diamonds, these specialty cutters would be forced out of business. And according to at least one Antwerp specialty cutter, De Beers still uses its leverage over these cutters to prevent them from cutting diamonds from independent mines. By controlling the activities of these few cutters, De Beers makes it extremely difficult for any independent mine to sell the full range of its diamonds. Rather than forgo the profits from these poorly shaped diamonds, most potential competitors have been forced to sell their entire production to De Beers or one of its many subsidiaries. De Beers thus turned diamond cutting into an important element in its diamond invention.

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Chapter 11 – THE DIAMOND CUT

No GDP.

1 mention of the word “economic”:

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Chapter 12 – THE CORPORATE UNDERWORLD

https://edwardjayepstein.com/diamond/chap12.htm

No GDP.

“Economics-economist” are prominent:

Oppenheimer was born on October 28, 1908, in Kimberley, a city literally built on diamond mines. When he was four years old, his father became the first mayor of Kimberley, and was rapidly amassing a major financial interest in the diamond mines. During his childhood, Harry dreamed of other careers. He explained to me, “I first wanted to be an engine driver, then an admiral-nothing less!-in the Royal Navy and then an ambassador.” He added wistfully, “However, all these ambitions had to be abandoned before the age of twelve in favor of a business career.” He went to Charterhouse School in England, and then was admitted to Christ Church college at Oxford. At Oxford, he took his degree in politics, philosophy and economics. He was at that time most interested in economics and least interested in politics. His tutor for economics was Sir Roy Harrod, the Keynesian economist; his tutor for politics was Sir John Masterman, who later organized Britain’s celebrated “double-cross” espionage system against the Germans. Even with such impressive tutors, Oppenheimer enjoyed a carefree time in Oxford. It was perhaps the only truly carefree period in his life. He went on champagne picnics in the Oxfordshire countryside and spent weekends at the Spreadeagle Inn on the Thames (which the novelist Evelyn Waugh once termed “Oxford’s only civilizing influence”).

Whereas Sir Ernest had only to worry about economic changes, Harry Oppenheimer realized even as early as 1958, he has written, that he would have to prepare himself for violent political changes. A decade of apartheid under the Nationalist government had served to alienate South Africa from the rest of the Commonwealth. By 1961, South Africa was formally expelled from the Commonwealth and became a republic. As British colonies, such as Sierra Leone, Ghana and Tanzania, achieved their independence, they severed diplomatic relations with South Africa. Belgium also relinquished control of the Congo (which became Zaire), with its vast reserves of diamonds. As these newly independent nations grew increasingly hostile to South Africa, De Beers, which was, after all, a South African corporation, could not openly control their diamond fields. Then in 196 3, the Soviet Union called for a world boycott of trade with South Africa, and almost every nation in Africa Joined it (in theory, if not in fact). The United States even cut off military aid to South Africa. By the mid-1960s, South Africa became a pariah nation.

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Who feels that they are now getting to know Sir Ernest Oppenheimer and his only son Harry very well?

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@Steven Bailey, when you have previously read The D I book have you done so with your eyes closed?

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Chapter 13 – THE DIAMOND MIND

No GDP

Economy-economics:

Control of the world’s diamond mines was a necessary but not sufficient condition for perpetuating the price of diamonds. If the public’s appetite for diamonds decreased precipitously, as it had in the Depression, or women’s fashions suddenly changed, as it had with coral and pearls, De Beers would not be able for long to keep prices from collapsing, no matter how ruthlessly it cut back on production from the mines. To complete the diamond invention, De Beers had to control demand as well as supply, and this required some manipulation of the psyche of the diamond buyer. What was necessary was the creation of a mass mentality in which women would perceive diamonds, not as precious stones that could be bought or sold according to economic conditions or fashions, but as an inseparable part of courtship and married life.

In their subsequent investigation into the American diamond market, N. W. Ayer’s staff found that ever since the end of World War I in 1919, there had been a consistent decline in both the number and the quality of the diamonds sold in America. During this nineteen-year period, the total number of diamonds, measured in carats, had declined by 50 percent; while the price of the diamonds, measured in dollar value, had declined by nearly 100 percent. This suggested that well before the Depression, Americans had begun buying poorer quality and cheaper diamonds. They concluded, according to an Ayer memo, that the present depressed state of the market for diamonds was “the result of the economy, changes in social attitudes and the promotion of competitive luxuries.”

Although it could do little about the state of the economy, N. W. Ayer suggested that through a well-orchestrated advertising and public relations campaign, it could significantly alter the “social attitudes” of the public at large and thereby channel American spending toward larger and more expensive diamonds instead of “competitive luxuries.” Specifically, the Ayer study stressed the need to vitalize the association in the public’s mind between diamonds and romance. Since “young men buy over 90% of all engagement rings,” it would be crucial to inculcate in them the idea that diamonds were a gift of love: the larger and finer the diamond, the greater the expression of love. Similarly, young women had to be encouraged to view diamonds as an integral part of any romantic courtship. The study found that there was already an increasing number of marriages among middle-income wage-earners who were “the backbone of the diamond market,” and that, if properly cultivated, this trend could provide fertile grounds for diamond sales in the future.

When sociologists such as Thorstein Veblen popularized in his book The Theory of the Leisure Class the idea that Americans were motivated in their purchases, not by utility, but by “conspicuous consumption,” N. W. Ayer proposed applying this sociological insight to the diamond market. “The substantial diamond gift can be made a more widely sought symbol of personal and family success an expression of socio-economic achievement.”

To further develop the diamond mind in America, N. W. Ayer asked both psychologists and sociologists to analyze “basic human wants,” such as “comfort,” “freedom from fear,” “longer life,” “the ability to attract the opposite sex,” and “social approval.” It justified this psychological investigation to De Beers in the following terms: “An advertiser who can make a close and believable association between one or more of the “basic human wants” and his product, can rouse a more vigorous and more universal demand for his product and in the process tend to separate this demand from control by consumers’ current economic situation.”

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@Tommy Simpson, why has it taken you all these years to get up to chapter 13?

Do you prefer talking shit over reading?

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The point of this manipulation was to create in consumers a desire for diamonds that had been subliminally linked through advertising with other “basic human wants.” Dr. James Bossard, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, observed in a report that he prepared for N. W. Ayer: ~ The engagement ring . . . is a symbol of the ability to get your man in the competitive race. . . . It has the further features that it is not easily given (too expensive), it is visible (it sparkles), it is permanent (other things wear out), and it advertises the economic status of the giver. . . . Large scale society makes for impersonal relations. One result of this is to place marked emphasis upon outward manifestations and visible evidence.” He concluded “Conspicuous consumption becomes more impressive than quiet confidence. . . . Symbols are indicators of status…. A formal and visible symbol of approaching marriage becomes a vital necessity in a large office, a big university, a large plant.”

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Toward the end of the 1950s, N. W. Ayer reviewed its achievements in fostering, if not wholly inventing, the diamond engagement tradition. It reported to its client in South Africa that twenty years of subtle but well orchestrated advertisements and publicity had had a pronounced effect on the American psyche. “Since 1939 an entirely new generation of young people has grown to marriageable age,” it noted with unmistakable pride of accomplishment. “To this new generation a diamond ring is considered a necessity to engagement to virtually everyone.” The message had been so successfully impressed on the minds of this generation that those who could not afford to buy a diamond at the time of their marriage “deferred the purchase” rather than for going it. Not only had the twenty-year advertising campaign helped De Beers “sell current production” from its diamond mines, but, more importantly, it had elevated diamonds in the American mind to “cherished possessions” which, according to N. W. Ayer, helped “keep previous production in the hands of the consumer . . . and off the retail market.” Even in a severe economic pinch, diamonds would not be resold by consumers who had subsumed the advertising pitch “A Diamond Is Forever.”

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In America, which still remained the ultimate market for most of De Beers’ diamonds, N. W. Ayer developed a plan for insulating diamond sales from the cyclical swings in the economy that affected most luxury goods. In 1960, it suggested a series of advertising messages which would gradually induce consumers into perceiving diamonds in terms of sentiments, such as love, instead of valuable gems which could be disposed of in hard times. Specifically, the “engagement advertising strategy” for the 1960s involved three steps:

1. To attach to the diamond the meaning of the engagement period;

2. Conversely, to identify with the engagement period the romance, beauty, uniqueness, value and permanence of the diamond;

3. To express these ideas frequently to a clear majority of the U.S. families capable of responding.

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Chapter 14 – THE SMUGGLERS

No GDP.

No economic-economy.

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Chapter 15 – INFRINGEMENTS

No GDP.

Economic-economy:

De Beers reacted to the synthesis of gem diamonds in the same calm tone in which it had reacted fifteen years earlier to the synthesis of industrial diamonds. It claimed that it had known for “several years” that gem-sized diamonds could be created under laboratory conditions, but that since the cost of production would be “many times greater than finding and obtaining the natural product,” it was convinced that such a synthesis would prove to be “economically impractical.” Publicly, De Beers insisted that it would not alter its “plans for the future.”

General Electric also attempted to reassure American diamond dealers that General Electric was not about to flood the market with synthetic gem diamonds. Its spokesman told dealers: “Keep your diamonds. . . . We are not competing. We have no reason to harm the diamond industry.”

Despite these disclaimers, General Electric had evaluated the feasibility of manufacturing gem diamonds. It eventually decided against it for two reasons. First, there was a problem of what economists call “opportunity costs.” Manufacturing gem diamonds required tying up the press for nearly a week. In that same period, the presses could produce batches of powdered diamonds for industrial purposes every three minutes. Even though diamond powder could be sold for roughly only one percent what gem diamonds could be sold for, it would still be far more profitable to use the press for powder rather than gems.

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@Todd Haselton, how can there be “opportunity costs” to a monopolist that has every politician and business person in their backpocket?

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Chapter 16 – WARRING WITH ISRAEL

No mention of economic-economy.

1 mention of GDP aka Gross National Product:

By 1978, the banks had extended $850 million in credit to diamond dealers, an amount equal to some 15 percent of the entire gross national product of Israel. The only collateral the banks had for these loans were uncut diamonds.

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GemACH sic, do you think Prime Minister Begin, had, any, sense, of the diamond trade in Israel and the influence of the SA Oppenheimers?

Wouldn’t you expect Begin with Mossad-Israeli Military Intelligence [MIMI] advising him, that he would suspect that the SA Oppenheimers’ reach extended beyond the borders of Israel?

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GemACH sic, could you see Begin, if he suspected that Schneerson was an Oppenheimer agent to ask Schneerson, “Do you work for Harry Oppenheimer?”?

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GemACH sic,

After you read The D I book, would you want to know who works for the SA Oppenheimers?

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GemACH sic, how come you have yet to ask me a good question about The D I book?

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GemACH sic, how can you expect a positive outcome once you take your last breath, or any breath beforehand?

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GemACH sic,

Does it make you feel worse knowing there are a great many as evil as you?

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Chapter 17 – THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING

No GDP.

3 mentions, economic-economy.

1. The most ominous threat to the stability of the diamond invention, however, came from the Russians. For the Soviet Union, diamonds in the postwar years were a strategic objective of the highest priority. When the Cold War began in 1947, the Soviet Union had no secure source of industrial diamonds. It was entirely dependent on the De Beers cartel for the diamond drilling stones it needed in order to explore for oil and gas, the diamond die stones it needed to produce precision parts and draw out fine wire, and the diamond abrasives it needed to grind machine tools and armaments. Without a continuous supply of these industrial diamonds, it would be impossible for it to rebuild its war-wrecked economy-or to effectively rearm its military machine. Stalin, fully realizing that his crucial supply of diamonds could be cut off at any moment by an embargo, demanded that Russian geologists and scientists develop a more dependable source of diamonds. Since no diamond mines had ever been found in the Soviet Union, there were only two possible ways of satisfying Stalin’s order: either pipe mines had to be uncovered in the unexplored regions of the Soviet Union through a vast program of systematic prospecting, or industrial diamonds had to be manufactured through a laboratory procedure.

2. Dr. Meyer, who specialized in analyzing the mineral inclusions in diamonds, closely examined the stones. They were not like any gem diamonds he had ever seen. The Russian scientist then explained that all these gems had been synthesized from carbon in a hydraulic press. He boasted that manufacturing gems was no longer a scientific problem in the Soviet Union but an economic one. Both English visitors were astounded at this casual disclosure. No laboratory in the West had come even close to synthesizing a gem diamond. (The General Electric breakthrough occurred later.)

3. The professor pondered the question for a moment and replied that the Russians still found it economically unfeasible to synthesize gem-quality diamonds. It was, however, not clear from his answer what the conditions were under which the Russians would use this technology to manufacture diamonds.

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GemACH sic, how many wasted resources including human lives have been lost in the Cold War, Middle East Wars, genocides of Africa, the impoverishment of all the poor of the world, that only benefitted the SA Oppenheimers and their shills?

What does the Torah say about how us humans should behave?

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Chapter 18 – THE AMERICAN CONSPIRACY

No GDP.

1 mention, “economic-economy”:

Unlike diamond grit, drill stones cannot be economically synthesized, and therefore the drilling industry is heavily dependent for its diamond drilling bits on the natural stones excavated from the De Beers-controlled mines in Africa.

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GemACH sic, it is 9:06 PM your time.

It is very possible that you have had a stroke and are battling to make it to the toilet to relieve yourself.

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On the other hand, you could be just sitting there comatose.

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Can you wiggle your left toe?

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Do you feel that you are now capable of reading The D I book on your own?

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Can you add up the number of useless prayers you have said all your life and do you thank God for all of them otherwise you would be eating non-stop crap?

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GemACH sic, do you think it is fair that Bill Gates Jr. is so brazen about buying up all the remaining farmland that is not in the SA Oppenheimers hands?

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GemACH sic, could you see the SA Oppenheimers introducing a Gestapo globally and being more effective than Hitler’s?

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GemACH sic,

Are you aware of how impossible it was for good Jewish people to escape the dragnet of the Gestapo, and the only place to run were the forests that no longer exist and then to depend on sympathetic farmers nearby to feed you if you couldn’t live off the land?

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GemACH sic, how in good conscience could you allow yourself and your wife to get as fat as pigs knowing that starving us Jewish people was all part of the process to have us turning on each other?

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GemACH sic,

When President elect John F. Kennedy met with Harry Oppenheimer at the Carlyle Hotel, upper Manhattan, do you think the CIA had briefed Kennedy ahead of the meeting about who he was meeting with?

6:15PM

GemACH sic,

I know you have the urge to write me now, “Kennedy was a shit. His father was a shit. Roosevelt was a shit. Hitler was a shit, but Rebbe Schneerson was a genius, the greatest human being who has ever lived!”

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GemACH sic,

What are your thoughts about Einstein and Ben Gurion praising Spinoza who gave you charlatons the biggest middle finger possible, “Worshippers of ink on paper”?

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GemACH sic,

Did you see at the bottom of chapter 18 the link to the only advertiser on The D I book internet edition; namely , Kaplan University-Purdue University-Washington Post-Bezos?

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GemACH sic,

What do you think competition means to the SA Oppenheimers and their shills?

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Chapter 19 – THE WAR AGAINST COMPETITORS

No GDP.

No economy-economics.

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Chapter 20 – Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?

No GDP.

1 mention “economic-economy”:

Initially, bank officials assumed that most of stolen money prudently invested in diamonds would be easily converted back to money. Only a few weeks earlier Newsweek had reported in a cover story, “The Diamond Boom,” that diamonds were “the ideal asset” and that quality diamonds were soaring in price. While the diamonds that Rifkin had bought were commercial-grade stones used in jewelry. the London-based Economist Intelligence Unit had such diamonds, which had increased by at least 50 percent that year, were still increasing in price. Independent appraisers estimated that the diamonds, which Rifkin had bought at a low price, were worth at least $13 million at the retail level, and so the I bank foresaw that it might make a profit of some $5 million with the reported appreciation in value of the diamonds. In anticipation of this windfall, they agreed to pay the ten percent custom tax on the diamonds which Rifkin had evaded, as well as part of the cost of the FBI investigation. Before this expected profit could be realized, the bank had to await the outcome of the trial, since the diamonds were important evidence.

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GemACH sic,

Do you know how easy it is for the SA Oppenheimers to replace businesses driven into the ground and their replacements keep driving the economy or simply no replacing them and turning them into ghost towns which has the people thinking “This is capitalism and we should be thankful because the best rise to the top in all the professions including banking, finance, Wall Street blah blah” at same time making them that much more fearful?

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GemACH sic,

Is it your personal experience that people who are afraid are more likely to turn informer?

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CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CAVEAT EMPTOR

In 1977, in Los Angeles, a film producer, who had just closed his account with his stockbroker, received an unexpected call from a stranger with a distinct English accent. The caller, identifying himself as a representative of “De Beers Diamond Investments, Ltd.,” began by commending the producer on his acumen in withdrawing from the stock market. “You obviously are aware of the fact that stocks and bonds can’t keep pace with inflation,” he continued in a soft voice, “but have you considered diamonds as an alternative?” He explained that diamonds had appreciated “700 percent over the last ten years,” and that they were the “most prudent investment available, since the supply is tightly controlled by a private monopoly.” Without further ado, the caller offered to sell the film producer a selection of “investment diamonds” for $5,000.

“But how can I buy diamonds over the phone,” the producer asked incredulously.

“All the diamonds are sealed in plastic with a certificate guaranteeing their quality,” the caller responded. “And of course you have heard of De Beers.” The more hesitant the producer became, the more determined the caller became. “We can register these diamonds under your wife’s name, which might be helpful for your taxes,” the caller went on.

“Think of how surprised she will be when the diamonds arrive … and you are buying them below wholesale.”

The caller, it turned out, was one of dozens of salesmen seated around a bank of telephones in Scottsdale, Arizona. Like the rest of the men in this boiler room, as it was called, he was making a pitch to sell diamonds and had been supplied with a list of names of individuals around the country who had recently closed brokerage accounts. For every order he sold, he received a commission of up 20 percent. Since the prices were in reality far above wholesale prices, the company could afford to pay its salesmen, most of them “telephone pros,” large commissions. And despite the similarity of its name, De Beers Diamond Investments, Ltd., was in no way connected with De Beers Consolidated Mines. Like a host of other recently formed diamond boiler rooms, with names like Diamond Selection, Ltd., Kimberlite Diamond Resource Company, and Tel-Aviv Diamond Investments, Ltd., this firm was formed to promote “investment diamonds.”

When the mail-order diamonds finally arrive at the purchaser’s home, they are sealed in plastic with the certificate guaranteeing their quality. The customer is then advised of what amounts to a catch-22 situation: The quality of the diamond is only guaranteed as long as it remains sealed in plastic; if the customer takes it out of the plastic to have it independently appraised, the certificate is no longer valid. When customers broke the seal, many found diamonds of inferior or even worthless quality. Complaints to the authorities proliferated at such a rate in New York that the attorney general was forced to mobilize a “Diamond Task Force” to process the hundreds of allegations of fraud.

“It is incredible,” William R. Ralkin, the assistant attorney general said in the New York Times in 1979. “These crooks will get outwardly rational people to buy a sealed bag containing supposed gems. . . . And they have the nerve to tell their victims not to unseal the packet for two to three years, after which they promise to buy back the stones it much higher prices.” He added, “It never falls to amaze mc me how . . . professional people like lawyers [and] medical practitioners will send checks for thousands of dollars to people they never met or heard of after being contacted by these boiler room operators.”

Aside from selling tens of thousands of diamonds a month over the telephone, many of these newly created firms hold “diamond investment seminars” in expensive resort hotels. At such events, they present impressive graphs and data, and typically assisted by a few well-rehearsed shills in the audience, they proceed to sell sealed packets of diamonds to the audience. (Not uncommonly, in dealing with elderly investors, diamond salesmen play on the fear that their relatives might try to seize their cash assets and have them committed to nursing homes. They suggest that the investors can stymie such attempts by putting their money in diamonds and hiding them.

Some of these entrepreneurs were relative newcomers to the diamond business. Rayburne Martin, who went from De Beers Diamond Investments, Ltd., to Tel-Aviv Diamond Investments, Ltd., both domiciled in Scottsdale, Arizona, had a record of embezzlement and security law violations in Arkansas and was a fugitive from justice during most of his tenure in the diamond trade. Harold S. McClintock, also known as Harold Sager, had been convicted of stock fraud in Chicago, and he had been involved in a silver bullion caper in 1974 before he helped organize De Beers Diamond Investments, Ltd. Don Jay Shure, who arranged to set up another De Beers Diamond Investments, Ltd., in Irvine, California, had also formerly been convicted of fraud. Bernhard Dohrmann, the “marketing director” of the International Diamond Corporation, had served time in jail for security fraud in 1976. Donald Nixon, the nephew of President Richard M. Nixon, and Robert L. Vesco, the fugitive financier, were, according to the New York State attorney general, allegedly participating in a high-pressure telephone campaign to sell “over-valued or worthless diamonds” by employing “a battery of silken-voiced radio and television announcers.” Among the diamond salesmen were also a wide array of former commodity and stock brokers who specialized in attempting to sell sealed diamonds to pension funds and retirement plans.

Meanwhile, in London, the real De Beers, unable to stifle all the bogus entrepreneurs in Arizona and California using its name, decided to explore the potential market for investment gems. It announced in March of 1978 a highly unusual sort of “diamond fellowship” for selected retail jewelers. Each jeweler who participated would pay a $2,000 fellowship fee. In return, he would receive a set of certificates for investment-grade diamonds, contractual forms for “buyback” guarantees, promotion material, and training in how to sell these unmounted diamonds to an entirely new category of customers. The target was defined by De Beers as “men aged 55 and over with inherited or self-made wealth to spend.” Rather than sell fine jewels, as they were accustomed to, these selected retailers would sell loose stones with a certificate for $4,000 to $6,000.

De Beers’ modest move into the investment diamond business caused a tremor of concern in the trade. De Beers had strongly opposed retailers selling “investment” diamonds on the grounds that because there was no sentimental attachment to such diamonds customers would eventually attempt to resell them and thereby cause sharp price fluctuations. Indeed, De Beers executives expressed concern that retailers would not be able to cope with the thousands of distressed investors who tried to resell their loose diamonds back to them. In response to this new “diamond fellowship” scheme, the authoritative trade journal, jewelers’ Circular Keystone, observed: “Besides giving De Beers an unusually direct role in retail diamond sales, the program marks a softening of its previous hard-line stand against gem investing. Eric Bruton, the publisher of Retail Jeweler in London, added, “De Beers is standing on the edge of a very slippery slope…. They say it is unwise to sell diamonds directly as an investment, then [they] go ahead with this diamond investment scheme.”

If De Beers had changed its policy toward investment diamonds, it was not because it wanted to encourage the speculative fever that was sweeping America and Europe. Its marketing executives in London realized that speculators could panic at any moment, and by precipitously flooding the market with diamonds they had hoarded, burst the price structure for diamonds. They had, however, “little choice but to get involved,” as one De Beers executive explained. Even though the “De Beers Diamond Investments” in Arizona, which had pioneered in selling diamonds over the telephone, had gone bankrupt, ‘ more than 200 firms had by then entered the business of selling sealed packets of diamonds to the American public over the phone. And aside from these proliferating boiler rooms, many established diamond dealers rushed into the field to sell diamonds to financial institutions, pension plans and serious investors. It soon became apparent in the Diamond Exchange in New York that selling unmounted diamonds to investors was far more profitable than selling them to jewelry shops. By early 1980, David Birnbaum, a leading dealers in New York, estimated that in terms of dollar value, nearly one third of all diamond sales in the United States were for investment diamonds. “Only five years earlier, investment diamonds were only an insignificant part of the business,” he added.

Even if De Beers did not approve of this new market in diamonds, it could hardly ignore one-third of the American diamond trade. It had to take some action.

Mass-marketed investment diamonds was made possible in the 1970s by the invention of the diamond certificate. Diamonds themselves cannot be valued by any single measure, such as weight, and the factors involved in such an assessment-clarity, color, and cut-cannot be made by an individual investor or financial institution. Moreover, since diamonds are not fungible in the sense that one diamond can be exchanged for another diamond of the same weight, some means had to be found of standardizing the quality of diamonds. Certificates, which guaranteed the color, clarity and cut of individual diamonds, provided this medium.

The Gemological Institute of America, a privately owned company established to service jewelers, developed a convenient system for certifying the quality of diamonds. For ascertaining the “cut” of the diamond, the Gemological Institute devised in 1967 a “proportion scope.” This contraption casts a magnified shadow of the stone in question over a diagram that represents the ideal proportions for a diamond of that size. By comparing the overlap between the image of the diamond and the diagram, the deviation from the ideal can be easily measured-and recorded on the certificate. For determining the “clarity” of the diamond, the Gemological Institute developed a “Gemolite” microscope, which has an attachment for rotating a diamond under ten power magnification against a dark background. If no blemishes can be seen in the diamond under this magnification, it is graded “flawless”; if there are blemishes, but they are very difficult to find with this lens, it is graded “VVS,” and with imperfections visible at lower magnifications, it is further downgraded. Finally, to establish the exact color of the diamond, the Gemological Institute introduced the “Diamondlite”: a boxlike machine with a window in it which allows a diamond to be compared with a set of sample stones that span all the color gradations from pure white to yellow. The purest white on this scale is classified as “D”; the next grade of white is classified as “E.” Gradually, by grade “l,” the white is tinted with yellow; and by grade K,” the color is considered to be yellow and of much lower value.

By 1978, diamonds were being routinely certified through these methods, not only by the Gemological Institute of America, but also by other Gemological laboratories in Antwerp, Paris, London and Los Angeles. Since dealers needed certificates for selling investment diamonds, and customers were usually willing to pay a hefty premium for such a document attached to the diamond, the laboratories found it difficult to keep up with the demand. Long lines of diamond dealers usually formed in front of the laboratories, and in many cases, stand-ins were hired to wait in line for impatient dealers.

The certification mechanism, despite all the Rube Goldberg sorts of inventions employed, did not entirely remove the subjective element from diamond evaluation. Not uncommonly, dealers would resubmit the same diamond to the Gemological Institute and receive a different rating for it. It did, however, facilitate the trading of rare diamonds. A diamond certified as D, flawless, was an extreme rarity, and since very few such stones existed, or would ever be extracted from mines, they could be bought and sold on the basis that they were in short supply. The price of these near-perfect diamonds rose from $4,000 a carat in 1967 to $22,000 to $50,000 in 1980. Even though such extravagant prices for D, flawless, diamonds are frequently cited by the press in stories about the appreciation of diamonds, they are atypical of diamond prices. In all the world, there are probably less than one hundred diamonds mined that can be cut into one carat, D, flawless, stones, and only a small proportion of these ever are certified and sold to investors. Moreover, very few diamonds are ever sold for the prices reported in the news stories. “No dealer I know has ever sold a one-carat investment diamond for $50,000,” a New York dealer commented.

The high prices quoted for the few available D, flawless, stones do not necessarily hold for diamonds of an even slightly inferior grade. For example, in 1978, when D, flawless, diamonds were quoted at $22,000 a carat, an H grade white diamond, without any visible imperfections, was valued at only $2,750- Once mounted in a ring or piece of jewelry, it would be extremely difficult for the untrained eye to differentiate between a D and H color (especially since the setting reflects through the diamond). But while this subtle difference makes little difference in the sale of jewelry, it creates nearly 90 percent of the value in an investment diamond. For what is measured by this grading system is not beauty, but the comparative rarity of a given class of diamonds.

Most investors have no choice but to rely on the piece of paper that comes attached to the diamond to specify the grade, and hence the value, of their investment. Not all the certificates, however, emanate from the Gemological Ins Institute of America. Many certificates have been issued by less reputable-or even nonexistent-laboratories, and the diamonds might be of a much lower grade than that certified.

Even if the certificate comes from a bona fide laboratory, its evaluation of the diamond may later be disputed by another assessor. Robert Crowningshield, the New York director of the Gemological Institute, observed, “. . . I’ve never seen two experts agree on the quality of a particular diamond.”

The extent to which the value of diamonds is determined by the eye of the beholder was demonstrated in 1981 by an experiment conducted under the sponsorship of Goldsmith magazine. In this test, four leading diamond evaluators were handed 145 diamonds that had previously been graded by the Gemological Institute of America, the European Gemological Laboratories and the International Gemological Institute. The team of experts was not told how each of the diamonds previously had been graded. After the team had reached its own consensus on the grade of each stone, the results were compared with those of the Gemological institutes. In 92 Out Of 145 cases, the team of evaluators disagreed with the grades previously given on the certificates. Despite all the scientific paraphernalia surrounding the process of certification, diamond grading remained, according to this test, an extraordinarily subjective business.

To make a profit, investors at some point must find buyers who are willing to pay more for their diamonds than they did. Here, however, investors face the same problem as those attempting to sell their jewelry: there is no unified market on which to sell diamonds. Although dealers will quote the prices for which they are willing to sell investment-grade diamonds, they seldom give a set price at which they are willing to buy the same grade diamonds. In 1977, for example, Jewelers’ Circular Keystone polled a large number of retail dealers and found a difference of 100 percent between different offers for the same quality investment grade diamonds. Moreover, even though most investors buy their diamonds at or near retail price, they are forced to sell at wholesale prices. As Forbes magazine pointed out in 1977, “Average investors, unfortunately, have little access to the wholesale market. Ask a jeweler to buy back a stone, and he’ll often begin by quoting a price 30% or more below wholesale.” Since the difference between wholesale and retail tends to be at least 100 percent in investment diamonds, any gain from the appreciation of the diamonds will probably be lost in the act of selling them.

Many New York dealers feared that despite the high pressure telephone techniques, the diamond bubble could suddenly burst. “There’s going to come a day when all those doctors, lawyers and other fools who bought diamonds over the phone take them out of their strong boxes, or wherever, and try to sell them,” one dealer predicted. The principal ingredient in the Diamond boom is expectations that may not be fulfilled.

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Chapter 21 – CAVEAT EMPTOR

No GDP.

No mention, “economy-economic”.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

THE GREAT OVERHANG

Except for those few stones that have been permanently lost, every diamond that has been found and cut into a gem since the beginning of time still exists today. This historic inventory, which overhangs the market, is literally in the public’s hands. Some hundred million women wear diamonds on their person, while millions of others keep them in safe deposit boxes or strong boxes as family heirlooms. It is conservatively estimated that the public holds more than five hundred million carats of gem diamonds in this above-the ground inventory, which is more than fifty times the number of gem diamonds produced by the diamond cartel in any given year. Since the quantity of diamonds needed for engagement rings and other jewelry each year is satisfied by the production from the world’s mines, this prodigious half billion carat overhang of diamonds must be prevented from ever being put on the market. The moment a significant portion of the public began selling diamonds from this inventory, the price of diamonds could not be sustained. For the diamond invention to survive, the public must be psychologically inhibited from ever parting with their diamonds.

In developing a strategy for De Beers in 1953, N. W. Ayer noted: “Diamonds do not wear out and are nor consumed. New diamonds add to the existing supply in trade channels and in the possession of the public. In our opinion old diamonds are in ‘safe hands’ only when widely dispersed and held by individuals as cherished possessions valued far above their market price.” The advertising agency’s basic assignment was to make women value diamonds as permanent possessions, not for their actually worth on the market. It set out to accomplish this task by attempting through subtly designed advertisements to foster a sentimental attachment to diamonds which would make it difficult for a woman to give them up. Women were induced to think of their diamonds as their “best friends.” As far as De Beers and N. W. Ayer were concerned, “safe hands” belonged to those women psychologically conditioned never to sell their diamonds.

This conditioning could not be attained solely by placing advertisements in magazines. The diamond-holding public, which included individuals who inherit diamonds, had to remain convinced that diamonds retained their monetary value. If they saw price fluctuations in the diamond market and attempted to dispose of them to take advantage of these changing prices, the retail market would become chaotic. It was therefore essential that at least the illusion of price stability be maintained.

The extremely delicate positioning of the “overhang” provides one of the main rationalizations for the cartel arrangement. Harry Oppenheimer explained the unique situation of diamonds in the following terms: “A degree of control is necessary for the well being of the industry, not because production is excessive or demand is falling, but simply because wide fluctuations in price, which have, rightly or wrongly, been accepted as normal in the case of most raw materials, would be destructive of public confidence in the case of a pure luxury such as gem diamonds, of which large stocks are held in the form of jewelry by the general public.” During the periods when the production from the mines temporarily exceeds the consumption of diamonds, which is determined mainly by the number of impending marriages in the United States and Japan, the cartel can preserve the vital illusion of price stability by either cutting back the distribution of diamonds at its London sights or by itself buying back diamonds at the wholesale level. The underlying assumption is that as long as the general public never sees the price of diamonds fall, they will not become nervous and begin selling the hundreds of millions of carats worth of diamonds that they hold from prior production. If this overhang ever reached the market, even De Beers and all the Oppenheimer resources could not prevent the price of diamonds from plummeting.

Before the advent of the twentieth century and the mass marketing of diamonds, the “overhang,” though it existed, was far less of an imminent danger. Diamonds were then considered to be the almost exclusive possession of the aristocrats and wealthy elite, who were not expected to precipitously sell their jewels-except under the direst circumstances. In times of revolution, however, this stock did threaten to come cascading onto the market. When the Czar of Russia was deposed in 1917, the Bolsheviks announced that they were selling the mass of diamonds that his family had accumulated over the centuries. The fear that this stockpile of diamonds would come onto the market depressed world diamond prices for over a year. Then Solly Joel, the nephew and heir of Barney Barnato, who controlled the diamond syndicate in London, offered the Bolsheviks one quarter million pounds for the entire hoard sight unseen. The Bolsheviks, desperately in need of cash to finance their revolution, accepted the offer, and delivered the diamonds in fourteen cigar boxes to London. Joel then assured the other diamond merchants that he would keep these diamonds off the market for years, and panic subsided.

With the bulk of the diamonds in the hands of the general public, the problem of the overhang became much more difficult to handle. When the demand for diamonds almost completely abated after the crash of 1929, De Beers shut down the supply of diamonds by closing its mines and buying the production of independent mines for its stockpile in London. It could not, however, prevent diamonds from the overhang seeping into the market. Prices for small gems fell to $5 a carat. De Beers, already heavily in debt, continued through the 1930s to borrow money to buy back as many of these diamonds as it could absorb. But despite all these efforts, enough of the overhang came onto the market to make it impossible for jewelers to buy back diamonds. Public confidence in diamonds as a store of value was nearly destroyed, especially in Europe, and it required more than a generation before diamonds were again to reach their 1929 price level.

In the 1960s, the overhang again threatened to pour onto the market when the Soviet Union began to sell its polished diamonds. De Beers and its allies now no longer controlled the diamond supply. De Beers realized that open competition with the Russians would inevitably lead to “price fluctuations,” as Harry Oppenheimer gingerly put it. This, in turn, would undoubtedly weaken the public’s carefully cultivated confidence in the value of diamonds. Since Oppenheimer assumed that neither party could afford risking the destruction of the diamond invention, he offered the Soviets a straightforward deal: “a single channel” for controlling the world supply of diamonds. In accepting this arrangement, the Russians became partners in the cartel, and co- protectors of the diamond invention. De Beers then devised the “eternity ring,” made up of hundreds of tiny Soviet-sized diamonds, which could be sold to an entirely new market of married women. The advertising campaign designed by N. W. Ayer was based on the theme of recaptured love. Again, sentiments were born out of necessity: American wives received a snake-like ring of miniature diamonds because of the needs of a South African corporation to accommodate the Communist Russia.

As the flow of Soviet diamonds continued into London at an ever-increasing rate, De Beers strategists came to the conclusion that this production could not be entirely absorbed by “eternity rings” or other new concepts in jewelry. They began looking for diamond markets for miniature diamonds outside the confines of the United States. Even though they succeeded beyond their wildest expectation in creating an instant diamond “tradition” in Japan, they were unable to create similar traditions in Brazil, Germany, Austria or Italy. Despite the cost involved in absorbing this hoard of Soviet diamonds each year, De Beers prevented, at least temporarily, the Soviet Union from taking any precipitous actions that might cause the diamond overhang to start sliding down onto the market.

Another threat came in 1977. Sir Philip Oppenheimer and other De Beers executives became concerned about the buildup of Israeli stockpiles of uncut diamonds in Tel Aviv. Most of these diamonds had been pledged as collateral for loans with which the dealers bought still more diamonds. The Israeli banks, who had lent nearly one-third of all of Israel’s foreign exchange on the diamonds, began asking the dealers to repay the loans. To do this, however, dealers would have to sell their diamonds, which could cause an abrupt drop in the price. And if the price began dropping, the banks themselves might be forced to liquidate the remaining stockpiles of diamonds, causing the sort of panic in the diamond market that could conceivably unsettle the overhang.

After establishing liaisons with the Israeli banks, De Beers executives worked out what one of its chief brokers termed “a billion dollar squeeze play.” First, De Beers reduced the number of diamonds provided to the Israeli dealers at the London sights. Then, through a special surcharge, De Beers actually increased the price the dealers had to pay. To get the cash for these diamonds, the latter were forced to reduce their inventories. Meanwhile, De Beers’ publicity department churned out a series of press releases about new surcharges and rising prices that distracted attention from the fluctuation in wholesale prices. Before the year ended, according to Jewelers’ Circular Keystone, about 350 Israeli dealers, unable to repay their loans, were forced into bankruptcy. The wholesale price, cushioned by De Beers’ buying the Israeli operations, wavered but did not collapse. By 1979, stockpile had been successfully dispersed.

The most serious threat to the stability of the diamond overhang came in the 1980s from the sale of “investment” diamonds to speculators in the United States. De Beers had methodically nurtured the idea in America that diamonds were not subject to the vagaries of price that affected other consumer luxuries. To maintain this illusion in the public’s mind, De Beers made it a si . ne qua non condition of its marketing strategy that retail prices should never fall. Price competition between major retailers of diamonds was prohibited by the rules of the game prices. Jewelers’ Circular Keystone, which interviewed dozens of leading retailers in 1979, explained:

“If the giant retailers ever declared a predatory price war on ‘mom and pop’ competitors and each other, they could destroy the image of diamonds as a commodity that always appreciates in value. . . . So a tacit unwritten agreement with De Beers forbids such privileged retailers from engaging in predatory price wars.” Under this system, nationwide Jewelry chains, though they get their diamonds either directly from De Beers or a De Beers sight-holder at a lower price, do not attempt to undercut the small jewelry shop (which acquires its diamonds on consignments at much higher prices). What varies is the profit and markup, not the retail price. As long as individuals do not attempt to resell their diamonds and thereby discover the enormous difference in markups, or “keystones,” as they are called in the trade, it is possible to retain the appearance of stable and gradually increasing prices.

The situation radically changed when the more unsavory sales organizations began selling millions of carats of ” investment” diamonds to men who had no sentimental attachment to the diamonds themselves and acquired them solely for the purpose of reselling them at a higher price. They were not even mounted as jewelry. By 1980, it was estimated that American investors had paid more than a billion dollars for these diamonds. Moreover, many of the companies that had sold the diamonds with the guarantee of a “buy-back” at a fixed price had either gone bankrupt or simply closed their offices and disappeared.

The diamond cartel managed had to absorb or get control over these private stockpiles to prevent them from cascading onto the market and unhinge the entire overhang. If they had not, the illusion would shatter. As one dealer explained, “Investment diamonds are bought for $30,000 a carat, not because any women want to wear them on their fingers, but because the investor believes they will be worth $50,000 a carat. He may borrow heavily to finance his investment. When the price begins to decline, everyone will try to sell their diamonds at once. In the end, of course, there will be no buyers for diamonds at $30,000. At this point, there will be a stampede to sell investment diamonds, and the newspapers will begin writing stories about the great diamond crash.” When women read about a diamond crash, some might attempt to see their own, but find few buyers. At that point, people will realize that diamonds are not forever.

Whether this pessimistic scenario ever unfolds remains to be seen. De Beers has billions of dollars of its cash reserves to buy back diamonds,. Nevertheless, with new diamond mines in Australia and Canada coming on stream, the time is past when De Beers can manipulate prices merely through the expedient of shutting down mines.

The diamond invention is neither eternal nor self-perpetuating. It survived for the past half century because two critical conditions were satisfied: the production of diamonds from the world’s mines was kept in balance with world consumption; and the public refrained from attempting to sell its inventory back onto the market. De Beers satisfied the first of these conditions by owning and controlling the major sources of diamonds and the second of these conditions by fostering the illusion in the public’s mind that diamonds are forever. Both achievements may prove to be temporary phenomena. The diamond craze of the twentieth century could end as abruptly as the tulip mania of the eighteenth century. Under these circumstances, the diamond invention will disintegrate and be remembered only as a historical curiosity, as brilliant in its way as the glittering, brittle, little stones it once made so valuable.

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Chapter 22 – THE GREAT OVERHANG

No GDP.

No mention, “economy-economics”.

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Chapter Notes

No GDP.

4 mentions, “economy-economics”. See if you can find them.

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We started The D I book at 12:38 PM and it is now 6:34 PM.

That’s approximately 5 hours with a break for lunch and multiple cuddles with Mango.

Would anyone like to comment?

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Today at 12:49 PM

12:49 PM

Alan

Very interesting.

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Today at 1:43 PM

1:43 PM

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It is 1:42 PM

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@Alan Woolf, it is much more than very interesting, and you know it.

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You too leave a trail, that you would prefer not.

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On Thursday, at 8:49 AM California time, going on 29 odd hours ago, that is when you should have spoken clearly, but you didn’t.

So this is now the second time you have failed to speak clearly.

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I’m pretty sure English, South African English is your first language.

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What didn’t you understand about my polite, appropriate introduction to you on fb messaging:

I write on the military economy

Have you seen my writings?

What do you do?

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You, Woolf follow the same ugly path as the rest.

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The difference is, you now have to make a different choice to the rest.

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Logic says you should always choose good, because it is a good universe, with the most extraordinary, unimaginable order.

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To think that the greatest scientist in recorded history, at least as great as Pythagoras who we know little about, is Jewish, says everything about the Order to this universe.

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It was the Jewish people who were the first to get “… God is One”.

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There was only one Einstein who captured the imagination of the world.

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The first to dis him were the Jews.

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Einstein didn’t get vindictive.

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How can you be angry at anything when there is such Order and for there to be Order there has to be a Creator as well as a Creator of the Creator without knocking your head against the wall because you can’t figure it all out.

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None of you, and that includes the billions who have died since the establishment of the garbage GDP/Gross National Product even gave a single thought to there being a problem with the GDP.

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How can such a species created out of all the material that dates back at least 13.75 billion years be so utterly stupid, cavalier, cruel?

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To be clear, emotional cripples.

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Where was the Jewish leadership when Einstein was refused a Nobel Prize for General Relativity which put to shame all the work of Newton and those before, and since?

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Again, Einstein couldn’t get angry for good reason.

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The first to get angry are of course the fools who have little knowledge, and big egos such as @Torah Gemach, @Stephanie Marine , and @Tommy Simpson .

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Note how remiss is the toilet paper clown GemACH sic in wishing me and all my friends “Gut Shabbos”.

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Look how long it has been since this clown GemACH sic has made his presence felt here.

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Will GemACH sic ever return?

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I very much doubt it.

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@Alan Woolf, you would know that @Solly Krok who is one of your fb friends is no clown when it comes to business and finance.

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Why didn’t you suggest to member @Solly Krok publicly, here on NSS, “Mr. Krok, clearly you hold Gary Gevisser in high regard, despite his very, extraordinarily, poor opinion of your children, and the no less idiots, they surrounded themselves with, it would be great if you were to now speak up!”.

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@Alan Woolf, are you trying to ingratiate yourself with Mr. Krok?

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Mr. Woolf, have I figured you entirely wrong?

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Einstein made a lot of people who thought The Inquisition had finished us off, most angry.

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BTW, Mr. Woolf, can you scroll back up and tell us exactly when we last heard from the GemACH sic?

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How could a Jew escape such a dragnet that had been in place since prior to the official start of The Inquistion, 1492?

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Who here thinks Einstein didn’t have a good read on history because he was too preoccupied with physics?

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Order in the universe comes down to some very serious realities.

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When you choose wrong, not only can you fail to predict accurately, you can only expect bad things to happen to you in the future which doesn’t end when you take your last breath.

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Each of you choosing wrong should try now to predict what the next wrong person is going to do next.

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See how difficult it is to go against logic-truth.

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Einstein knew before the direct experiments began that he had stumbled upon something totally “out of this world”.

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You couldn’t have precise mathematics predicting such outcomes that no one else had even imagined including Newton who could easily have plagiarized Spinoza or at least been spoon fed what Spinoza had to say which Spinoza did not keep a secret.

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Yes, it would be most difficult, because it is impossible to plaglarize my work.

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Only an extraordinary fool would choose to not be humble.

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Being humble does not mean you allow rotten sons of bitches to walk over you.

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People don’t make a mat out of you, you make a mat out of yourself.

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The first and only time I heard those words out of the mouth of my very good, uncorruptable father Bernie Gevisser, it took me by great surprise.

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I couldn’t even talk.

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I had to wait before I was alone with my no less one of a kind mother Zena to ask her what she thought?

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My mother responded, “Your father is no fool, but you don’t need to sing his praises. Leave that to me!”

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When my parents got divorced after more than 30 years of marriage in the early 80s, the rabbi, who could have been rabbi, whose name was never given to me responded, “Most people get married for the reasons you are getting divorced.”

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All of my 3 siblings were told that exact same information, and they never responded, “Why are you getting divorced?”

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If you are raised like my 3 elder siblings not to be spoon-fed and you end up like everyone else and needing to be spoon-fed, you can only blame God, no one else.

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It means, in other words, that something in your past made you a bloody fool.

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The chances for those who are spoon-fed from the start, “How are you going to make a living to afford the car, the wife, the house, the toys, the boat” turning out good are zero.

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We need to have extraordinarily large numbers of unconscious humans to see how great is God-HER.

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Einstein didn’t need either the fake rabbi Schneerson or this moron of morons, manipulator of manipulators, GemACH sic to tell him how great is Spinoza.

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Einstein went for the jugular.

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He condemned the puppets of The Inquisition in the worst possible way.

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To be clear, he slaughtered them before the eyes of the non-Jewish world.

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Nor did Einstein change his religion to suit the bosses of The Inquisition.

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How easy it would have been for Einstein to convert to Christianity like the SA Oppenheimers.

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Why didn’t he?

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Einstein was born with a conscience.

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The same with Ben Gurion.

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Unimaginable to think that the two greatest Jewish people of the last most troubled century, without forgetting the pogrom in 1888 that made Ben Gurion’s “kinsman” my great maternal grandmother Nechie Becker Bardash [1874-1943] an orphan, would team together to call out the Jewish rats.

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Today at 3:03 PM

3:03 PM

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When the greatest Jewish thinkers, Einstein and Ben Gurion unite to applaud Spinoza who received the worst possible excommunication from the corrupt Jewish High Priests of Amsterdam, and the Dutch were single superpower having landed in the Cape of Good Hope just 4 years before 24 year old Spinoza was handed his death sentence geared toward intimidating any future righteous Jewish person, and the rest of the world’s Jewish communities fail to stand up shoulder to shoulder, you know how utterly successful is The Inquisition.

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But when you know Order, and which Ben Gurion and Einstein perfectly understood because they too were no fools, you don’t need the crowd of fools including those shouting and waving at Woodstock to make you feel good.

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GemACH sic, you remember how many times the GDP/GNP is mentioned in The D I book which brought out your true colors

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you big shit?

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GemACH sic, you talk numbers all day long, and there is even Numbers in the Torah, you remember the 5 Books of Moses with huge, wonderful, flaws that you can drive a MAC truck through, so you know about what 15% means as well as the number of Jewish, Israeli diamond merchants who were squeezed in the greatest extortion racket of all time, going back to Abraham; nothing even close.

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Flaws are even beautiful when it comes to minting coinage.

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Its a rareity .

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How long do you think it would have taken Harry Oppenheimer to get the Schneerson to ask Begin about the welfare of those Israeli diamond merchants bankrupted?

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GemACH sic, again, can you get back to me on the number of Israeli diamond merchants bankrupted?

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GemACH sic, how many of them do you think had families?

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GemACH sic, do you care for anything other than your turkey-fish-cheese-milk-liquified meat stomach?

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@Alan Woolf, I see you have decided not to help me retrieve the information.

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Who thinks GemACH sic, is enjoying this Shabbat better than at any time?

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Who feels sympathetic towards GemACH sic?

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How many of you have been sympathetic towards my mother Zena?

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Not quite, Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends & Influence people.

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Do I hear all “Yes'”?

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I love @Solly Krok.

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He is a prince of a man.

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The only white South African I know with courage, other than my father Bernie.

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I make no excuses for Solly Krok making a ton of money from selling skin lighteners to black South Africans who were as much influenced by billboard and magazine advertising as was Solly and his no less good identical brother Abe who also didn’t sperm perfect offspring, not even close, plus Solly and Abe Krok couldn’t have made that many of the very first bottles themselves.

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You really have to read The D I book to know how diabolical are the SA Oppenheimers; so very deeply involved were the Oppenheimers in the businesses of Jewish South Africans.

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How do I know that Solly and his brother Abe were not part of the SA Oppenheimers’ network?

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They went after Solly and his brother.

3:31 PM
How many chemists have experimented with creams, moisterizers, deodorant, to make money?

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The United States was selling skin lighteners long before Solly and Abe were born.

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Who said it was wrong?

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What’s wrong with everyone’s thinking?

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Solly and Abe decide lets see “if in fact we can sell a few bottles”.

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It’s going great, now 3 employees.

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The 4th employee encourages them on.

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How much encouragement do you need when you are told continue production or you will go bankrupt and we will open next door under a different name?

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Every product coming out of South Africa had to be approved by the SA Oppenheimers.

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When they decide to pull the gun on you, they don’t ask you to squeeze the trigger.

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They put out, how many GemACH sic?

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If there is a God, then God may decide to have GemACH sic speak.

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What else was lost in Israel in its final war with the SA Oppenheimers?

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Who was left to fight for the poor?

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“Hundreds of Israeli dealers”.

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“Hundreds of Israeli dealers” had families.

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These very, very, very good Jewish people – and there were imposters who survived – were out to end the tyranny.

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They were doing good.

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They were doing very good.

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GemACH sic, would know how much time the Schneerson spent with Begin?

Do you know if they ever held hands; not in a homosexual way, but simply as two trustworthy brothers?

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Don’t you look at your country’s balance sheet, and see a problem and call in accountant, piece of shit, The Coupon Clipper is Jack The Ripper member @Jeffrey Essakow, have The Coupon Clipper identify more about that 15% number which I know may still be above The Coupon Clipper’s payscale, and see that they are all Jewish and it can’t be that the person doing it them means good Jewish people well.

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They weren’t out to get the bad Jews.

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They went after the good Jewish people.

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Solly Krok & his brother Abe were not the bad Jews because the SA Oppenheimers protected the bad Jews.

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We learned that from the Jewish Kapos-sellouts in the death factories.

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Should we go back to the start of World War I, or just push ahead to February 24, 1945 when it was unclear whether Ian Gow, who was non-Jewish, was dead or alive?

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Edit: … person doing it to them means …

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Let’s do a quick cut and paste; Chapter 16 WARRING WITH ISRAEL:

To tighten the squeeze on Israel, De Beers abruptly cut off shipments of diamonds to forty of its clients who had been selling large portions of their consignments to Israeli dealers. This dramatic reprisal made De Beers’ 250 or so remaining clients aware of the risks involved in trafficking with Israel.

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@Ayala Weisel what do you think of the wording, “… trafficking with Israel”?

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Who inside De Beers-Oppenheimer would want to see my mother Zena quietened?

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When in modern day Israel has Israel faced such a crisis?

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It was war with Israel.

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Epstein got it right, WARRING WITH ISRAEL.

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Isn’t it all out war with the Oppenheimers?

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Mossad-Israeli Military Intelligence [MIMI] knew everything that is in The D I book.

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GemACH sic, please again, tell me what the Schneerson and Begin were speaking about?

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It must have been huge stuff.

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Certainly bigger than the end of democracy for the world otherwise they would have spoken about it.

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So what could be bigger?

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We have around 180 members here.

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How about each of you making a guess?

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Who thinks the SA Oppenheimers had a hand to play in our Jewish Holocaust?

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@Deborah Sturman Esq., you are prohibited from answering because you know the answer.

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So it looks like in fact we continue to have the most amazing deafening silence, and clearly Woolf had no intention of adding anything positive to the conversation as he could see EXACTLY WHY everyone else was so quiet.

Wouldn’t you agree @Alan Woolf?

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The SA Oppheimers leave nothing to chance.

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They corrupt everyone, if they can.

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Those 290 or so clients were not throwing a lifeline to the hundreds of Israeli diamond merchants being destroyed, not one survived.

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What was Begin thinking, “Schneerson lets just ignore them”.

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So Im being ignored.

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Einstein was ignored.

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Ben Gurion was ignored.

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My mother Zena is being ignored.

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So you ignore me.

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Now what exactly have I done wrong GemACH sic?

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Can anyone here help GemACH sic explain what I have done wrong?

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Why would God need fools as HER spokesperson, other than Moses?

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No indication that Moses was a fool.

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How could you believe in God and let the SA Oppenheimers get away with their crime of crimes?

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Should I read out a list of the million plus murdered in Auschwitz?

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@Stephanie Marine, had you heard of Auschwitz previously?

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Stephanie have you spoken to your son that he is far too big for his boots?

Remember to end, “… and remember you are an intellectual midget; and don’t get me cross!”

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Many of you here have known for 17 odd years the content of The D I book.

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All you have done, in the worst possible way, is to give me and my mother Zena the hardest time.

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As a conscious human being how can you not be livid about what the SA Oppenheimers have done?

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They have fricken destroyed the planet and you all huddle together because you can’t think of anything better to do?

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You have been reading shit in the newspapers and the TV, lets not go there, and yet you are able to put out of your minds The D I book, like it was some fairytale?

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You knew it was not a fairytale.

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It is a nightmare.

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But you didn’t care.

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You only cared about yourselves.

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Every time you heard the TV and no mention of the book and my unique insight, you had to have turned your brain off.

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How do you know when it is time to turn it on?

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Let’s quickly talk Order-Logic before calling it a day.

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You added David Berlinski to the group.

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If you listen to computer scientist specialist, Professor David Hillel Gelernter – david.gelernter@yale.edu – a friend of member @David Berlinski whose daughter @Claire Berlinski is still with us, he explains very precisely that the math simply isnt there for the story of evolutioin according Darwin, because there just isn’t enough time.

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Nor am I suggesting that we ask threatening The Coupon Clipper is Jack The Ripper @Jeffrey Essakow to run the numbers to make sure that Professor Gelernter’s math is right.

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I can only assume that were Professor Gelernter not to have been so severely injured by the Unibomber he would have arrived at God, but that is just my opinion.

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Gelernter does however the most brilliant job of explaining the orchestration of the sequencing of events to have body parts and then get them in the right order for people like idiots GemACH sic and his wife to get it wrong and we all think it is politically incorrect to say nasty things even if they are true.

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To have the mouth right for every species is utterly amazing even if it is the only one of that species to survive.

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Maybe it is time to give a quick math class.

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I have never really taught math.

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I have taught people who speak nonsense to stay quiet, wouldn’t you all agree?

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Everything really stops when we run out of time to do the experiment of the human being and all the rest of the organic and inorganic material.

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No one half-way competent would argue that Professor Gelernter got the math wrong.

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David Berlinski who is also a professional mathematician agrees that Gelernter has the math perfect; it couldnt have happened.

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So what do the fake religious such as GemACH sic say, “God deposited ancient peoples on this earth to make everything look much older than it is”, in other words, this genius GemACH sic and the Schneerson have figured a way around Professor Gelernter’s math.

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Im proving that GemACH sic is highly manipulative.

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He reads everything.

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What else does he have to do all day and up to the wee hours of the morning?

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I wonder aloud.

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Which verse in the 10 Commandments says that God deposited ancient peoples on to this earth?

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How did so many Jewish people come away thinking that Schneerson was a genius?

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Simple.

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Advertising.

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Who remembers reading in The D I book of the SA Oppenheimers owning Madison Avenue-Hollywood-Simon & Schuster going back to September 1938?

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Who remembers what happened on 1 September 1939?

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Stephanie, when did you break out with your first pimple?

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Does Richard still squeeze your pimples?

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@Lee-Anne Dalley, when you get together with Richard Marine, do you still let him squeeze your pimples?

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Put aside the lack of time in the well established 4.54 billion years life of earth.

Just look at the both the hardware and software programming needed to fix internally errors caused by man and the environment on the body-mind.

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You are well on your way to dying of diabetes.

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You bruise your toe, and you still sense it, but still you know that you are going to die a horrible diabetes death.

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But that is not the point.

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The body-mind recognizes the injury and immediately goes to work.

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This is mind-boggling extraordinary.

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Pay attention.

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It is only positive that internal software and hardware are attempting to do and to do it quietly without predjudice to race, color, nationality, or religion, but only to help those who help themslelves.

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You keep all the pathways running smoothly just like a beautiful waterfall with no crap coming in from anywhere, because there will be no cows, and the blood rushing to the toe gets all done that much quicker.

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Who wants to lose their toe but to still enjoy eating something that is killing your toe and other organs but the toe sticks out?

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The engineering required to first think through crime-punishment of the body-mind and then at the end of it all, the players all choose bad.

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This is a very strange species.

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But we remember we began this only talking about logic and now we are coming back to God-HER.

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Who is in favor of the SA Oppenheimers and their shills continuing to rule and keep destroying the planet?

5:24 PM

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Who thinks Einstein and Ben Gurion were both not smart enough to figure out the GDP, and who stood the most to gain?

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Could it be that they were both so dumb?

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If you were in their shoes would you have pointed a finger at the SA Oppenheimers publicly, and without the power, positive nature of The Internet?

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Which leaders would have listened to either?

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But you are not them.

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They were trying to save us Jewish people as best they knew how.

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Who thinks I could have done a better job?

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In what way could I improve my delivery?

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GemACH sic, you must have some suggestions like visiting a shrink?

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GemACH sic, how well do you know the shrink you most trust to listen to your problems?

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We have established that none of you are interested in saving the Jewish people or the planet.

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Does anyone wish to say anything?

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