By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 9, 2024 ~

On Friday, this headline appeared in The Guardian newspaper: “Trump Assembling US Cabinet of Billionaires Worth Combined $340 Billion.” Receiving much less attention is the fact that the indicted Mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, named a billionaire heiress, Jessica Tisch, as the new Commissioner of the New York City Police Department on November 20. Tisch has never been a police officer – of any rank. Nonetheless, she will now oversee 36,000 police officers and 19,000 civilian employees at the NYPD.

Tisch took her office on November 25. Nine days later, an unprecedented assassination of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, took place on a Manhattan sidewalk outside of the New York Hilton Midtown hotel on December 4.

The UnitedHealth Group, Inc., the parent of Thompson’s employer, is a stock component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average with a half-trillion-dollar market cap. Thompson was on his way to a UnitedHealth investors’ conference at the Hilton at the time he was gunned down.

It is now Day 5 since the assassination and the assassin has yet to be captured. The NYPD has released a series of photos of their main suspect, taken by some of the thousands of private and government-owned surveillance cameras located throughout Manhattan that feed their images 24/7 into a massive spy center called the Lower Manhattan Security Coordination Center. In addition to live video feeds, the NYPD surveillance operation uses facial recognition technology, license plate readers, radiation detectors, mobile X-ray vans, and surveillance drones.

Despite all this, a young assassin of a Fortune 500 company CEO remains on the loose.

In 2011, the CBS News program, 60 Minutes, interviewed Tisch when it did a fawning story on the Lower Manhattan Security Coordination Center. The program reported that “Jessica Tisch helps run this $150 million surveillance system that monitors the cameras and all those radiation detectors. A powerful computer, using artificial intelligence actually watches all of the cameras at once….”

The narrative of the 60 Minutes program was the fine job of counter terrorism being done by the NYPD and its Commissioner at the time, Raymond Kelly. It was a triumph in public relations for a police department about to launch brutal physical assaults on citizen activists: pepper spraying and punching peaceful protestors; kicking, ramming and arresting journalists who were attempting to cover the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in lower Manhattan.

What 60 Minutes chose not to report to the public, despite being aware of the facts, was that the center was jointly staffed and operated by the NYPD along with the largest Wall Street banks and trading houses – the same firms under investigation in 50 states for mortgage and foreclosure fraud and widely credited with causing the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. The same Wall Street firms that were involuntarily bailed out by the 99% were now policing the 99%.

JPMorgan Chase, which has been charged with five criminal felony counts by the U.S. Department of Justice, was one of the firms with a workstation in the center, sitting elbow to elbow with the NYPD, with the ability to surveil the comings and goings of their own employees in the streets of Manhattan – ostensibly giving it the ability to detect whistleblowers heading to the doorsteps of the SEC or FBI.

The co-producer of the 60 Minutes program, Robert Anderson, conceded to us in a phone interview that he was aware of the presence of the Wall Street firms in the center. It would have been hard to miss them. The facility was designed with three long rows of computer workstations. The outside of each cubicle bears a brass plaque with the names of the occupants: Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, the New York Fed, etc. We obtained this information from a foreign news service that posted images of the workstations on its public website. The photos were taken during a press briefing at the center.

During the 60 Minutes program, the following exchange took place between the 60 Minutes reporter Scott Pelley and Tisch, who was, at the time, the NYPD Director of Counterterrorism Policy and Planning.

Pelley: “Tisch showed us how the system can search for a suspicious person based on a description – a red shirt for example.”

Tisch: “And I can call up in real time all instances where a camera caught someone wearing a red shirt.”

Pelley: “So the computer looks essentially through all the video, finds all of the red shirts and puts it together for you.”

Tisch: “Video canvasses that used to take days and weeks to do, you’ll now be able to do with the snap of a finger.”

Tisch snaps her fingers for added emphasis.

Tisch was in her early thirties at the time of this 60 Minutes program. She is the granddaughter and one of the heirs to the fortune of now-deceased billionaire Laurence Tisch, who built the Loews Corporation, a conglomerate with holdings in insurance, hotels, and energy. Her father, James Tisch, is the CEO of the Loews Corporation and was previously elected by Wall Street banks to sit on the Board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, representing the public’s interest.

The NYPD acknowledges on its website that it has the ability to use its facial recognition technology to compare images of unidentified suspects to other government photo databases – for example, driver license photo databases.

All of this raises two critical questions for Americans: Is the U.S. being colonized by billionaires and has the blowback begun?