09/30/2002 Entry: "Southern Strategy: Assault on the American Republic"
Southern Strategy: Assault on the American Republic
by John Hoefle
The political success of Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter's "Southern Strategy,'' transforming the White House and Congress into bastions of white Southern power, would have been impossible, without the economic transformation of the United States from the greatest industrial and scientific nation-state in history, to a post-industrial nation of white-collar accountants, real estate brokers, computer programmers, retail clerks, and hamburger-flippers.
This transformation of America, over the past 30-plus years, has been characterized by the collapse of the urban industrial and cultural centers of the North--New York, Detroit, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, etc.--and the gradual emergence of the "New South'' as the heartland of America's post-industrial economy.
Today, Southern cities like Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, and even Charlotte, North Carolina dominate the new economy'' and house the multinational corporate and banking headquarters that preside over the deregulated looting of every last remaining income stream.
This Houston-Atlanta-Charlotte nexus can be dubbed "Southern Strategy, Inc.'' Of course, it was Wall Street--most prominently the financial interests associated with Harriman, Morgan, and Rockefeller--which set this shift in motion. But the deregulated monster represented by such corporate creatures as Enron Corp. in the energy field, the Rainwater interests buying up hospitals, or Corrections Corporation of America in private prison operations, signals as process of financial speculation and physical-economic chaos, which Wall Street can no longer control. With President George W. Bush and Vice President Richard Cheney moving from Texas to Washington, the power of this Southern-based corporate looting apparatus is almost certain to grow at an even more accelerated rate.
We take up one significant slice of that corporate octopus, the Texas-centered network of oil industry giants that have been tied to the political fortunes of the Bush clan for much of the last century.
Sitting at the center of this web, and typifying the level of corruption,
are two Texas-based energy industry giants, each with ties into the nastiest
of the Wall Street and European financial oligarchies: Schlumberger and Enron.
By far the older and filthier of the two is Schlumberger, the intelligence
apparatus masquerading as an oil services company. Schlumberger is one of the
two biggest oilfield services companies in the world, Halliburton being the other. While Schlumberger, the company, was formed in Paris in the
early 1900s, the intelligence network which operates through it is much older,
a part of the banking empire of the interlocked de Neuflize, Schlumberger, and
Mallet-Prevost families, which have been running operations against the United
States since the American Revolution. In Houston, the Schlumberger/Lazard nexus is closely allied with a nest of British assets centered around the
Harriman interests and operating through a group of powerful law firms. E.H.
Harriman was a 19th-Century railroad robber baron whose companies were fronts
for the British royal family and their fellow aristocrats. Harriman's agents
in Houston included Baker & Botts, the law firm of former Bush Secretary of State James A. Baker III, which has
also represented Schlumberger since the 1950s. The Bush family is also a
creature of the Harriman networks and their British controllers, through both
the Bush and the Walker sides of the family. Both George H.W. Bush's father,
Prescott Bush, and his uncle Herbert Walker were top officials of the Harriman
investment bank, and the Harrimans, Lazard, and Scottish banker James Gammell
funded the business and political career of Sir George (Prescott, Herbert, and
Sir George were also members of Skull & Bones, the powerful Yale-based
secret society). Also coming together in Houston were the British intelligence
networks of Col. Edward Mandell House, the global oil cartel, and the
``legendary'' King Ranch.
Enron, which has an energy trading room in its Houston headquarters which
rivals the trading rooms of the big Wall Street investment banks, is perhaps
the single company most responsible for the chaos in today's domestic energy
markets. Its ``success'' in energy speculation has raised virtually every
electricity bill, natural gas bill, and heating oil bill in the country, some
of them by orders of magnitude,
Enron is a relative newcomer, but plays an important role in allowing the
financial sharks, under the guise of deregulation, to get their hands on the
income streams generated from the production and consumption of electricity,
natural gas, and related energy products. Enron's fortunes are directly tied
to the Bush League: Enron is the single largest contributor to the political
campaigns of President George W. Bush, and the firm hired as ``consultants'' a
number of top officials of his father's administration--including James Baker
III, and Commerce Secretary Robert Mosbacher--after they left Washington. In
return, these officials used their political pull to get Enron a series of
lucrative contracts around the world. Enron chairman Kenneth Lay has been
touted as a potential member of the Bush Cabinet, and Southern Strategy zealot
Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) is widely known as ``the Congressman from Enron.''
Enron is ``Dubya'' Bush's biggest career patron, having given him more than
$500,000, according to the Center for Public Integrity.
This Texas-Georgia-New York connection is one of the recurring themes in
this report, exemplified by the Carter-Menil Foundation of former President
Jimmy Carter and Dominique Schlumberger de Menil, and the Houston connections
of Atlanta-based Coca Cola. Coke chairman J.P. Austin was the Trilateral
Commission member who helped Zbigniew Brzezinski recruit and train Jimmy
Carter, to be the President of the Democratic Party's version of the Southern
Strategy. The Lamar tradition also remains strong in Texas: It was in the
Lamar Hotel that the Houston elite gathered to play cards and run much of the
state, and when Texas Commerce Bancshares celebrated the 150th anniversary of
the Republic of Texas with an ad paying homage to the heroes of the Texas
Revolution, leading the list was oligarch Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar, with no
mention of the patriot Sam Houston.
In the late 1800s-early 1900s, the government of the State of Texas was
dominated by an alliance between the King Ranch and Col. Edward House. House,
who later gained fame as Woodrow Wilson's controller, was the son of a wealthy
British plantation owner in Houston. Back in Houston, the House family groomed
young Jesse Jones to take over as Houston's leading light. In the 1920s, Jones
became a real estate developer in New York, and among his partners was Robert
Lovett, who succeeded E.H. Harriman as the head of the style="COLOR: black; BACKGROUND-COLOR: #a0ffff">Union Pacific Railroad.
Jones's personal attorney was Capt. James Addison Baker of Baker & Botts,
a firm which represented Harriman interests in Texas. Jones, in turn, passed
the torch to what became known as the ``8F Crowd,'' so named because they
gathered to play poker and run the state in Room 8F of Jones's Lamar Hotel.
The 8F crowd ran Houston and exerted considerable control over state affairs
from the 1940s to the 1960s, and created institutions that continue to exert
significant power today, notably three of the most powerful law firms in the
country, Baker & Botts, Vinson & Elkins, and Fulbright & Jaworski.
Until the late-1980s demise of the Texas banking system, these law firms were
all closely associated with a major bank: Baker & Botts with Texas
Commerce; Vinson & Elkins with First City; and Fulbright & Jaworski
with Bank of the Southwest.
``Robert Justus Kleberg, Jr., was a god among Texas ranchers,'' the chapter
on the King Ranch began. ``They still talk about him today in reverent tones,
not only on ranches around the world, but at `21,' The Pierre, Saratoga, The
Jockey Club and other exclusive enclaves which he used to frequent during
racing season in the East.''
The New York Times has repeatedly referred to the spread as ``the
legendary King Ranch,'' and Debrett's said that before the ranch opened
itself to oil production, it was known as ``the Walled Kingdom.'' The
Klebergs, Debrett's gushed, had ``lifelong friendships with the
Whitneys, Vanderbilts and other horsey families of the East.'' The ranch has
also been host to some of the most powerful oligarchs in the world, including
Prince Johannes von Thurn und Taxis, hereditary head of the Venetian
intelligence service, and Prince Charles of Britain. Anne Armstrong of the
King Ranch was U.S. Ambassador to Britain in the 1970s, as well as being
chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) from
1982 to 1990, under Reagan and Bush. href="http://members.tripod.com/~american_almanac/[5]">[fn5]
The King Ranch was formed in 1857 by Captain Richard King, who had made his
living as a steamboat captain running cargo and passengers along the Rio
Grande River; he had arrived on the Rio Grande just after Gen. Zachary Taylor
arrived with his army to defend the State of Texas against Mexico. King and
his partner, Mifflin Kenedy, ran supplies for Taylor, in an operation which
was actually an intelligence network operating under the cover of commerce.
Just prior to the Civil War, King and Kenedy bought huge tracts of land just
south of Corpus Christi; another member of the network was Charles Stillman, a
border merchant who later moved to New York to found the National City Bank
(a.k.a. Citibank). King's principal lawyer in the early days was Stephen
Powers of Brownsville, who had previously been a U.S. consul to Switzerland.
During the Civil War, the King Ranch was an important transshipment point
for Confederate supplies, particularly when the Mexican port of Matamoros took
on crucial importance after the Union blockade closed the ports in the South.
The ranch also functioned as an intelligence center for the Confederacy.
The Klebergs entered the picture when Robert Justus Kleberg (``Kleberg the
First,'' according to Debrett's) married Captain King's daughter,
Alice. When Captain King died in 1885, Kleberg took command of the ranch.
Kleberg the First and Alice had two sons and three daughters. The elder son,
Richard Mifflin Kleberg, went to Washington as a Congressmen, and hired a
young man named Lyndon Johnson as an aide. The younger son, Robert, Jr.,
eventually took over the ranch from his father.
The business operations of the ranch in the mid-1980s were run by Jim
Clement, the Princeton-trained son of Martin Clement, a former honcho of the
Pennsylvania Railroad. One of Clement's friends and regular guests was the
late Prince Johannes von Thurn und Taxis, the aforementioned Venetian spook
and oligarch.
The King Ranch got a financial boost when oil was discovered on the
property, and royalties from Humble Oil & Refining (later bought by Exxon)
started rolling in. With their social and political connections, and the oil
money, the King-Kleberg heirs moved into the corporate world. name=6.> href="http://members.tripod.com/~american_almanac/tobacco.htm#[6]">[fn6]
In 1977, Prince Charles visited the Armstrong Ranch to play polo with
Anne's husband, Tobin Armstrong of the Armstrong Ranch; his brother John
Armstrong of the neighboring King Ranch; John's son Charles Armstrong, and oil
heir Will Farish of Houston, among others.
With Schlumberger came two important figures: Jean de Menil and his wife,
Dominique Schlumberger de Menil. Jean, whose background had been deliberately
muddied, was a Tsarist White Russian of some stature, who had fled Russia to
avoid Communist reprisals, while Dominique was the daughter of company
co-founder Conrad Schlumberger. As a top official of Schlumberger, Jean de
Menil's responsibilities included the company's Ibero-American operations,
while Dominique was a cultural and political warfare operative who founded the
Rothko Chapel as a coordinating point for all sorts of unsavory operations,
including terrorist networks involved in the assassination of Egyptian
President Anwar Sadat.
While the full story of Schlumberger's intelligence remains the subject for
further investigation, some aspects are already known. Jean de Menil, as
documented in EIR's book Dope, Inc., was a member of the
Solidarists, a group comprised of Eastern European and White Russian fascists
and feudalists. Many of the Solidarists had been officials of ``quisling''
pro-Hitler governments during World War II. A leading component of the
Solidarist movement was a highly professional espionage, sabotage, and
assassination network called the Narodnyi Trudovoy Soyuz (NTS). The NTS had
been founded by Menshevik circles in Russia in the 1920s, and functioned as
one of British Intelligence's premier spy rings inside Russia. The principal
Western financing conduit for the NTS and the Solidarist movement was the
Tolstoy Foundation of New York, of which Jean de Menil was a director.
De Menil and Schlumberger were involved in helping to put Castro in power
in Cuba, and later in attempts to overthrow him, in operations involving both
the CIA and George Bush's Zapata Offshore oil company. More importantly, Jean
de Menil was a key figure in Permindex, the corporate front for the assassins
of John F. Kennedy and the numerous attempts on the life of French President
Charles de Gaulle. Permindex was closely linked with British Intelligence's
Special Operations Executive of Sir William Stephenson and Col. Louis Mortimer
Bloomfield, and with the FBI's secret Division Five, headed by Bloomfield.
Schlumberger's links with the intelligence community are also indicated by its
close relationship to former CIA director George Bush, and the presence on its
board today of former CIA director John Deutch. This is not to suggest that
Schlumberger is a CIA ``front,'' however, but rather that Schlumberger is part
of a much older oligarchic intelligence network, with tentacles into national
intelligence agencies such as the CIA.
The Schlumberger/de Menil apparatus had strong ties to the Houston
corporate world and ruling elite. Jean de Menil was, for a time, on the board
of Bank of the Southwest, the bank closely interlinked with Fulbright &
Jaworski, the firm which produced Nuremberg and Watergate prosecutor Leon
Jaworski. Baker & Botts partner Dillon Anderson, an official in the
Eisenhower administration, was on the board of the Schlumberger Foundation in
the 1950s, and senior partner George Jewell was on the board of Schlumberger
in the 1980s. Schlumberger is also closely linked with Lazard, which played a
big role in financing Texas companies like George Bush's Zapata and Pennzoil.
Later, Dominique de Menil would co-found the Carter-Menil Center in Atlanta,
with former President Jimmy Carter. A key liaison between Carter and de Menil
was Charles W. Duncan of Houston, who is both a former president of Coca-Cola
and Carter's Secretary of Energy. Both Charles and his brother John House
Duncan sat on numerous corporate boards of relevance to this network,
including John Duncan's seat on the King Ranch board.
Schlumberger family and board member Didier Primat has rather secretive
operations in the Carolinas and Virginia, overlapping the intelligence and
eugenics operations of the Smith-Richard Foundation and the family of Bush
legal counsel C. Boyden
Gray. Primat also held the property title to Mary Sue Terry, who, as
Virginia Attorney General, led a witch-hunt against the Lyndon LaRouche
movement, throwing a number of innocent individuals into state prison on
trumped-up charges.
These Texas-Virginia-Carolina connections also played a role in the rise of
Charlotte, N.C. as a national banking center. Charlotte's North Carolina
National Bank (NCNB) has, through an ever-larger series of acquisitions,
transformed itself into Bank of America, one of the largest banks in the
world, while crosstown rival First Union has grown into a top-ten bank in the
United States. NCNB significantly extended its reach in 1989, when it bought
the bankrupt First RepublicBank of Dallas for virtually nothing, in a move
that helped conceal the maneuvering that was used to keep First RepublicBank's
doors open until after Presidential candidate (and former director) George
Bush had won the Texas primary. NCNB transformed itself into NationsBank in
1991, with the acquisition of C&S/Sovran, itself the union of Georgia and
Virginia banks. After a number of smaller acquisitions, NationsBank bought the
San Francisco-based Bank of America in 1998; with the takeover, NationsBank
renamed itself Bank of America, with the headquarters, and the control,
remaining in Charlotte. Bank of America is number 12 on the list of top
contributors to the political campaigns of Gov. George W. Bush, and in its
NCNB days, the bank was caught running dirty tricks against the LaRouche
movement.
Not long after arriving in Texas, Bush decided to strike out on his own,
forming the Bush-Overbey Company with landman John Overbey, funded with
$300,000 raised through Uncle Bert Walker. A significant portion of that money
came from the City of London and from Scottish investor James (later Sir
James) G.S. Gammell of Edinburgh's Ivory & Sime. Other investors included
the Lazard-linked publisher of The Washington Post, Eugene Meyer, and
daddy Prescott Bush. Gammell, by the way, would later partner with
Schlumberger's Didier Primat in Adams Bank.
In 1953, Bush decided to link up with Midland oilmen the Leidtke brothers,
the sons of a Tulsa judge who became a top lawyer for the Mellons' Gulf Oil.
They formed a new company, Zapata Petroleum, financed through Uncle Herbert;
Herbert kept a chunk of the company for himself, and sold some to James
Gammell, who got a seat on the board. Basically, Herbert Walker raised
$500,000, and the Leidtkes' Tulsa crowd raised a like amount. In 1954, the
company formed Zapata Offshore, a for-hire drilling subsidiary. Officially,
the offshore company was formed to take advantage of the new leases being
offered in the Gulf of Mexico, but there were other reasons as well. Zapata's
first rig, the Scorpion, was leased by Gulf Oil in 1958 (three years before
the Bay of Pigs fiasco) and started drilling just 54 miles north of Isabela,
Cuba, a perfect base for covert intelligence operations against Castro.
In 1959, Bush and the Leidtkes decided to split their company into two
parts, with Bush taking the CIA-connected Zapata Offshore, and the Leidtkes
taking the rest. Bush became CEO of Zapata Offshore and moved it to Houston,
while the Leidtkes expanded Zapata Petroleum through mergers, eventually
transforming it into the Houston-based Pennzoil. But it wasn't long before
Bush cast his eye on politics.
In those days, the Democratic Party, dominant in Texas, was divided into
two camps: a liberal/FDR-influenced wing led by Ralph Yarborough, Sam Rayburn,
and Wright Patman, and a Dixiecrat wing, grouped around former Democratic
Texas Governor Alan Shivers and John Connally, who ultimately ran for
President as a Republican. These Dixiecrats would become the basis for a
Republican takeover of the South, determined to undo the industrial and racial
progress which had occurred in the South under FDR and the war mobilization.
When Bush moved to Houston in 1959, he began socializing with the likes of
James A. Baker III, and the Houston oily-garchs, and became active with the
Harris County Republican Party, of which he became chairman in 1963, helped
both by Harriman money and the sudden dropping out of the race by his
opponent. In September 1963, he announced another Senatorial bid. Bush won the
Republican nomination, but lost the election to Yarborough. But Bush had an
ace up his sleeve, with a lawsuit to force a redrawing of Congressional
districts in Texas. The result was the creation of an entirely new district on
the west side of Houston, an area which Bush had carried in the 1964 election.
Faced with this gift of a friendly district with no incumbent, Bush left
Zapata Offshore in 1966 to run for Congress. Not surprisingly, he won, and in
January 1967, George Bush became a member of the House of Representatives. In
Congress, Bush heavily pushed birth control and malthusian policies, while
defending the oil depletion allowance. Dissatisfied with a seat in the House,
however, Representative Bush decided to run for the Senate in 1970. In that
race, he expected to face Yarborough, but Yarborough lost the Democratic
nomination to Lloyd Bentsen, who beat Bush 53% to 47%.
After the defeat, Bush took a series of non-elective offices. In December
1970, Nixon appointed Bush to the post of U.S. Ambassador to the United
Nations. Bush moved to New York City, and the Waldorf-Astoria. He was
nominally working for Secretary of State William Rogers, but his real boss was
National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger. In 1973, Nixon appointed Bush to
head the Republican National Committee. When Nixon resigned in 1974, Bush
angled for President Gerald Ford to appoint him Vice President, but the job
went to Nelson Rockefeller, and Bush got the job as U.S. Liaison to the
People's Republic of China; since the United States did not have formal
diplomatic relations with China at the time, Bush was not officially an
ambassador, and thus did not require what would likely have been a difficult
confirmation by the Senate. In late 1975, Ford shifted personnel around, in
preparation for his own Presidential bid, and George Bush was appointed
director of the CIA. After a contentious confirmation battle, Bush was
confirmed by the Senate and sworn in as CIA Director on Jan. 30, 1976. It was
a short-lived post, as Ford lost to Carter, and Bush returned to Texas when
Carter took over in 1977.
Back in Houston, Bush was appointed to the board of First International
Bank of Houston, its parent First International Bankshares (a.k.a.,
InterFirst) of Dallas, and InterFirst's London-based First International
Bankshares merchant bank. href="http://members.tripod.com/~american_almanac/tobacco.htm#[8]">[fn8]
Bush also joined a few corporate and educational boards, and became an adjunct
professor at Rice University.
Bush's main preoccupation was building a political machine that would carry
him to the White House, and one of his key allies was James A. Baker III.
Baker was the chairman of the Reagan-Bush campaign in 1980, while fellow Texan
Robert Strauss headed the Carter-Mondale effort. Baker had headed the Ford
campaign in 1976, and had been Ford's Deputy Secretary of Commerce. Oilman
Robert Mosbacher headed up Bush's national finance operation.
Bush formally announced his Presidential candidacy on May 1, 1979, and one
of his campaign themes was the Union of English-Speaking Peoples. ``The
British are the best friend America has in the world today.... Sure, I'm an
Anglophile,'' Bush said at the time. ``We should all be. Britain has never
done anything bad to the United States.''
Coincident with this Southern shift, was the ascension of finance over
industry. U.S. industry had largely been in the hands of the financiers since
the days of J.P. Morgan's creation of the industrial trusts, and that control
was rapidly consolidated during the 1980s. Orchestrated by Bush's masters, the
speculators took over. The corporate raiders, financed by the dirty-money junk
bond networks, bought up significant chunks of corporate America, and
terrified the rest. The raiders' targets, and those who feared they might
become targets, turned to Wall Street's investment banks and law firms for
``protection.'' As such, the leveraged buy-out/junk bond operation functioned
as a giant protection racket, destroying some as a way of collecting tribute
from the rest. At the same time, dirty money poured into the real estate
market, notably through the giant Canadian developers Olympia & York and
Cadillac Fairview. These firms built the skyscrapers which were then filled up
with service workers--bankers, lawyers, accountants, clerks, and other
white-collar types. Having the tallest office building became something of a
fetish for the business leaders, spurring ever larger towers, which in turn
were filled with ever larger numbers of white-collar workers.
The pouring of hot money into the real estate markets caused real estate
prices to rise. The ``wealth'' created by these rising values provided more
money to pump into the bubble. The rising stock market served a similar
function. The cities were transformed into service centers ringed by suburbia,
leaving the inner cities full of the poor and minorities, ripe for Strategic
Bombing Survey decimation through drug distribution and ``Negro removal.''
In the office buildings and the suburbs, the ordinary citizen was also
being hooked on speculation. One of the effects of Fed Chairman Paul Volcker's
deadly interest-rate hikes in 1979-80, was that ordinary savings accounts
suddenly started paying high rates of interest, giving the ordinary citizen a
taste of the action. As more and more of the ``little people'' discovered the
joys of usury, the modern ``my money'' era was born. That process escalated
with the rise in residential real estate prices--homes were transformed from
residences to ``investments,'' with rising equity values adding significantly
to the pools of ``my money.'' The ordinary citizen also began making money
from the rising stock market. Over time, a significant portion of the
population became addicted to usury and speculation, considering it their
right to make money from the manipulation of money. The speculator went from
being the enemy to being the role model; the suckers now identified with the
casino. The old-style productive industry became the realm of ``losers,''
replaced by the hot new ``industries'' of finance and information. Make
derivatives, not steel!
While this transformation was made possible by the policy changes in
Washington and in the states, the mechanism for the change was specific
networks within the corporate world.
The junk-bond market of the 1980s, for example, was a joint operation of
the Morgan/Rothschild Drexel Burnham Lambert investment bank, and the money
laundries of Dope, Inc. Today, the junk bond market is bigger than ever, with
more junk bonds issued in 1998 alone, than in all of the 1980s combined. The
leveraged buy-out (LBO) wave was led by Kohlberg Kravis & Roberts, which
was closely linked to the Harriman/Bush machine, and continues with such new
Bush-connected players as Hicks Muse Tate & Furst, the Carlyle Group, the
Bass Brothers, Richard Rainwater, and Sam Wylie's Maverick Capital hedge fund.
The LBO market declined significantly during the 1990s, as highly inflated
stock prices became the currency of choice for takeovers, but is now making a
comeback as a vehicle for taking key assets private in preparation for a
crash.
The Texas networks have spawned wave after wave of deregulation. The
deregulation of the airline industry began in Texas with Frank Lorenzo and
Texas Air, which became Texas International, and ultimately took over
Continental and Eastern, while the Bush League's Albert Checchi took over
Northwest Airlines. Texas is also the center of energy deregulation, home to
Enron and a host of smaller competitors, such as James A. Baker III's Reliant
Energy (the parent of Houston Lighting & Power) and Dynegy; while many
other players have Houston links, notably North Carolina's Duke Energy and the
Schlumberger-linked CMS and American Electric Power. Enron has also moved into
the private water market in England and the United States, hoping to get a
piece of the income streams from water and sewage.
The effect of all this deregulation and speculation has been the decimation
of the physical economy of the United States. Over the last three decades, the
productive capacity of the U.S. economy has been cut in half, measured in
terms of market baskets of goods on a per-capita, per-household, and
per-square-kilometer basis. At the same time, the monetary claims on that
declining production have risen hyperbolically. The process defined by rapidly
rising claims on a steadily declining production is clearly unsustainable--at
some point, it must break down; the question is not if, but when, that will
occur.
This process is far advanced, both within the United States and
internationally. Take electricity, for example: U.S. firms such as Enron have
been buying up power plants all over the world. One little-known firm, AES
Corp., href="http://members.tripod.com/~american_almanac/tobacco.htm#[9]">[fn9]
is poised to become the largest generator of electricity in Ibero-America,
once its various acquisitions are completed. If you and a cartel of
``competitors'' can control the electricity supply of a continent, you have
tremendous power to decide who survives and who dies, while grabbing as much
of the electricity income stream as the market will bear.
Apply the same process to agriculture, where consolidation among the major
food companies is proceeding at a breathtaking pace. Apply it to the
telecommunications companies, which provide essential communications services;
apply it to the production of strategic minerals and metals that are essential
to modern industrial production. What you are left with, in effect, is a
return to the days of the empires, when imperial trading companies controlled
entire continents, and those who were not involved in making the companies
rich, were considered expendable.
href="http://members.tripod.com/~american_almanac/tobacco.htm#[2]">
href="http://members.tripod.com/~american_almanac/tobacco.htm#[3]">
href="http://members.tripod.com/~american_almanac/tobacco.htm#[4]">
href="http://members.tripod.com/~american_almanac/tobacco.htm#[5]">
href="http://members.tripod.com/~american_almanac/tobacco.htm#[6]">
href="http://members.tripod.com/~american_almanac/tobacco.htm#[7]">
In 1931, W.A. Harriman & Co. merged with the Brown Brothers
investment bank to form Brown Brothers Harriman. The Harriman brothers and
Prescott Bush were senior partners at BBH, while Walker retired to his own
G.H. Walker & Co. Brown Brothers was a spin-off of the British bank
Brown, Shipley, whose best-known partner was Bank of England head Montagu
Norman.
In October 1942, the U.S. government seized the Union Banking Corp. under
the Trading With the Enemy Act for acting as an agent of Nazi Germany. UBC
had been co-founded by Bert Walker, Sr., and its board included Roland
Harriman and Prescott Bush. Several other Harriman-Bush-related companies
were also seized, for the same reason.
href="http://members.tripod.com/~american_almanac/tobacco.htm#[8]">
href="http://members.tripod.com/~american_almanac/tobacco.htm#[9]">