Leslie wexner lives in Columbus, Ohio. He’s a huge financial supporter of Kasich. Bezos is rumored to help fund a kasich run for President in 2020. I’m sure Wexner is involved.
Baker & Hostetler is a huge lobbying firm. Offices all over. Big one in CLE as well. They are dirty.
IMPORTANT!!! GOOGLE (Sergey Brin) & LUCENT
(reposting this from Qresearch general thread)
Been trying to post for a couple days but the new iOS update has this phonefag all messed up.
From Land of Promise by Michael Lind:
"Jack Welch, the CEO of General Electric, sold off Bell Labs to a French Company, Lucent" (p. 437).
Bell Labs was the mostly government funded R&D arm of Ma Bell and began in the late 1800s. When Ma Bell was forced to break up under Antitrust litigation, Bell Labs was sold off to GE (a JP Morgan company).
GOOGLE:
Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was created in response to Sputnik. It was renamed DARPA in 1972, switched back to ARPA in 1993, and back to DARPA again in 1996.
ARPA and MIT created ARPANET (the first internet) and it allowed ARPA researchers to communicate with each other. "In 1986, ARPANET was connected to NSFNET, a network created by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to allow researchers funded by its grants to communicate with each other….A side trail leads us fgrom NSFNET to Vannevar Bush's brainchild, the NSF, from which another side trail goes to a discussion of the Digital Library Initiative (DLI). Among the graduate students funded by the DLI project were Larry Page and SERGEY BRIN, who was also supported by an NSF graduate student fellowship. Their research led them to create a superior search engine and in 1998 - with an initial office in a garage, of course - they incorporated Google, Inc. With the help of Eric Schmidt as CEO, Page and Brin defeated competitors" (p. 420).
Google began as a govt funded project……….!!!!!!!!!
I was the one who posted it on the general thread. I have about a half chapter left. Not to dox myself but I redpill millenials for a living. ;-)
It's a pretty good book. There are nuggets of info that are lesser known. There is a big emphasis on JP Morgan. His dad and grandad were loyal to the crown and agents of the Bank of England.
The book does help to frame the struggle between political ideals in the face of economic upheaval pretty good though
Land of Promise
Chapter 3
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Trade with China and Russia
• Opium, opium, opium and furs; ginseng and sandalwood too
• Drug wars left China shattered until the revolution in 1911
• Merchants such as Etienne Girard and John Jacob Astor were deeply embedded in the drug trade and the institution of slavery
• Astor was the original embodiment of a crony capitalist – buying political influence in order to plunder the public domain
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When the Rich Bailed out the Government
• Today, government is sometimes forced to bailed out the financial sector
• In early America, the rich sometimes bailed out the government
• During the War of 1812, the federal government suffered from financial distress as well as humiliations such as the burning of Washington DC and the defeat of America’s attempt to conquer Canada
• The Madison Administration was forced to turn to Girard and Astor for help; both were foreign-born and joined by another helper, David Parish
They teamed up to buy federal bonds and raise loans during the War of 1812
History kept reminding us that native born Americans did not understand finance, which only reinforced the assumption to agrarians (9/10 of the US population) that trade and finance were foreign and sinister
Land of Promise
Chapter 5
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In 1846 – 1849, Britain was so confident in its industrial supremacy that it adopted free trade and began preaching it to other countries except for its other colonies such as Ireland, Canada, and India; it continued its mercantilist policies there
• Forced inhabitants to buy British goods and exported their raw materials to factories in Britain
• Forced many nations to sign “unequal treaties” with Britain
Siam (1824); Persia (1836 & 1857); Ottoman Empire (1838 & 1861); Japan (1854 – 1911)
After the Opium Wars where Britain and France crippled China, British Empire forced China to sign many unequal treaties resulting in the appointment of a British official as the head of Chinese customs from 1863 – 1908
Chapter 6
The Wharton School of Protectionism
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Pennsylvania, center of American manufacturing, became home to protectionist economics
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Joseph Wharton was the heir of a Philadelphia Quaker family that had made its fortune in real estate and trade, yet, Wharton viewed free trade as a “fungus”
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In 1881, in order to promote protectionism, Wharton founded the first business school in the US
• Wharton School of Finance and Economy at the University of Pennsylvania
Chapter 7
Labor’s Campaign for Immigration Restriction
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The presence of immigrants in the labor markets drove down wages and permitted American employers to engage in divide-and-rule tactics
• An estimate said that if there was no immigration after 1870, the US population would have been 27% smaller in 1910 and the real wage would have been 9% higher
• A manager in one of Carnegie’s Pittsburgh factories said: “My experience has shown that Germans and Irish, Swedes, and what I denominate Buckwheats (young American country boys), judiciously mixed, make the most effective and tractable force you can find.”
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In order to raise wages and bargaining power for workers, the labor movement campaigned for immigration restrictions and frequently used racist arguments
• In 1905, Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) wrote: “Caucasians are not going to let their standard of living be destroyed by Negroes, Chinamen, Japs, or any others.”
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Between the 1880s and the early 1900s, labor activists succeeded with a mixture or economic and racial rhetoric to get Congress to bring most immigration from Asia to a halt
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European immigration did not get restricted until the 1920s
Chapter 8
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The industrialization of R&D and invention became a defining feature of 20th Century industrial capitalism
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In 1901, GE established the first corporate research laboratory followed by DuPont in 1902 and Eastman Kodak in 1913
• Most famous was Bell Labs (AT&T) in 1925
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Eventually, the federal government became an important, if not the most important piece of funding R&D
• It started with the Morrill land-grant college acts in the late 1800s, which created a sophisticated technological innovation system in agriculture
• Large-scale became permanent during and after WWII with the establishment of the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, as well as the military-industrial complex and academic researchers who created the first few generations of computers and the Internet
Thomas Edison and the Rise of R&D
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Edison was a brilliant inventor creating the likes of a stock ticker, vote counter, incandescent lightbulb, phonograph, and motion picture technology
• However, his later inventions such as motion picture technology were created in labs with teams of engineers
• He was not a lone genius; he was the director of his own research lab funded by J.P. Morgan and others
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Edison’s first research lab was founded in 1876 in Menlo Park, NJ and then he moved to a larger lab in West Orange, NJ
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An engineer that worked below Edison, Johann Shukert, later went on to found Siemens in Germany
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GE was Morgan’s first of twelve companies to be included in the DJIA
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In the post-WWI negotiations in Versailles, President Wilson identified three areas of military rivalry between the US and Britain – oil production, merchant shipping, and global telecommunications
• US led in oil production
• Britain led in merchant shipping and global telecommunications
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In 1919, the Navy, led by Assistant Secretary of the Navy, FDR, persuaded GE, Westinghouse, AT&T, and other companies to pool their radio-related patents and form the Radio Corporation of America (RCA)
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Eventually, AT&T solved the business model problem by selling advertising and linking several stations together in a network (1922)
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Threatened by AT&T, Westinghouse, GE and others forced AT&T to sell its stations and agree to lease its long-distance lines to a new network, the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC)
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In 1931, antitrust settlements forced Westinghouse and GE to separate from NBC and RCA was forced to sell its Blue network, which became the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) in 1943
Land of Promise
Chapter 9
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JP Morgan was the dominant figure though and larger than life; his grandfather was a founding investor of both Hartford and Aetna insurance companies
• Morgan often called quarreling industry chiefs to his home, library, or yacht to settle their differences
• He began the consolidation technique with the railroads and began to apply it to other industries
• Morgan created GE, AT&T, the Pullman Company, Nabisco, International Harvester and his biggest – Carnegie Steel
• Morgan paid $480 million for Carnegie Steel and its first capitalization was one billion dollars (twice the size of the federal budget at that time)
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Morganization was the process by which the House of Morgan acquired, consolidated, and reorganized firms and then controlled them by placing Morgan partners on their boards of directors
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Did Morganization produce criminal monopolies or efficient firms that benefitted from technological and commercial economies of scale?
• Probably the latter, the industry dominant firms in 1917 were the same as in 1973
Land of Promise
Chapter 10
German-American Rivalry: Prelude to War
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Geopolitical strategy motivated America’s participation in WWI
• When the German (Holy Roman Empire) states outside the Hapsburg monarchy (Austria, Bohemia, Hungary but still part of the Holy Roman Empire) were unified under Prussia’s dynasty by Otto von Bismarck in 1871, the newly united Germany immediately became the most populous and powerful state in Europe
• Bismarck favored cautious foreign policy but was dismissed by Kaiser William II in 1890 who wanted Germany to be not just first among several European powers but a world power
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The American naval imperialism of the late 1800s and early 1900s was in part a response to Germany’s drive to obtain naval bases in the Caribbean, Mexico, Central America and the Pacific
• US clashed with Germany in Samoa and one of the motivations for the Spanish-American War of 1898, which led to the US domination of Cuba, annexation of Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Hawaii – all to deny Germany potential island bases
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In 1902, Germany, Britain, and Italy blockaded Venezuela to punish the country for not paying creditors among their citizens
• This led to the Roosevelt (Teddy) Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine; the US would intervene in the region on behalf of extrahemispheric parties when necessary, all to deny Germany the ability to use controversies with its citizens and businesses as a pretext for military intervention near US borders
• The US intervened in the Dominican Republic (1916-1924), Haiti (1915-1934), and Nicaragua (1912-1933) and in 1917, the US purchased the Virgin Islands from Denmark
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The Mexican Revolution that erupted in 1911 turned into a proxy war between the US and Imperial Germany
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US started off as neutral during the war (sort of)
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In the hopes of tying down the US along the border, the German ambassador to Mexico encouraged Mexico to attack the US
• The letter was intercepted and decoded by the Brits and then published in American news
• American sentiments changed and soon the US declared War
The House of Morgan Goes to War
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Between January 1915 – April 1917, when the US officially entered the war, JP Morgan and Company acted as the exclusive purchasing agent in the US for the governments of Britain and France
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The House of Morgan created an export department that purchased and shipped arms and supplies
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Also arranged private loans to Britain and France
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Acted more governmental than as a private sector business
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Began the term of war profiteering
Land of Promise
Chapter 10
The War Industries Board
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In July 1917, the War Industries Board (WIB) was created
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In March 1918, President Wilson directed the WIB to mobilize the economy as a whole
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WIB organized 57 commodity sections to deal with particular industries, which worked with businesses and was certified by the US Chamber of Commerce
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WIB sought to overcome shortages with price fixing of critical materials such as iron, steel, rubber, and coke
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WIB tried to eliminate waste by reducing the varieties of products being produced
• Example number of styles of tires was reduced from 287 to 9 in two years
The blurring of lines between public and private (think crony capitalism/plutocracy) made the Jeffersonian populists and leftists in WWI and again in WWII mad
Edison and the Movie Trust
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In 1908, Edison created the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC), a cartel uniting Eastman Kodak, the major supplier of film, and the distributor, George Kleine, with eight motion picture companies in addition to Edison’s motion picture company
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Motion picture industry was an industry with low fixed costs and low barriers to entry in which monopolies and cartels were likely to be predatory
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Independent filmmakers, many of them Jewish immigrants who had started in the nickelodeon business were harassed when they refused to pay licensing fees to the trust (MPPC)
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In order to escape adverse court judgments in New Jersey, they escaped to California, where the legal climate was better and the weather was much more suitable for films and created in Hollywood
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In 1915, a federal court ruled that the MPPC violated federal antitrust law
The Great Migration
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In 1921 supported by organized labor and an ethnic coalition of Anglo-Americans, and the old immigrants of German and Irish descent, Congress enacted a national origins quota system
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System was made permanent in 1924 and used the 1890 census before the flood of new immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, in order to inflate the numbers of German and Irish as well as British immigrants allowed into the US
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The US would admit up to 2% of the number of people from a country who lived in the US in 1890
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In 1924, the shutdown of Asian immigration to the US was complete
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Under the national quota system, 82% of the quota was filled by Northern and Western Europeans, 14% from Southern and Eastern Europe, and immigrants from the rest of the world outside the Western hemisphere received 4%
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Was changed a tad under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations
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Wages rose in the tighter labor markets that immigration restrictions produced
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Black Americans benefitted the most from the end of mass immigration; when the mass immigration of unskilled immigrants resumed in the 1970s, low-income black Americans in particular suffered from lowered wages and job competition
Land of Promise
Chapter 10
From the New Era to the New Deal
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After WWI, global imbalances is how the world was characterized
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US had trade surpluses but did not reduce tariffs or allow more imports
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Europe was heavily indebted
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The middle class was shrinking but the rich were getting richer
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Just before the 1929 crash, American banker and diplomat, Norman Davis wrote, “History teaches us that whenever a newly-arisen, asset-rich nation refuses to open its markets to other countries or fails to effectively channel its financial resources to the development of the world economy, the result is growing conflict between the old order and the new. In the past, these conflicts have led to war, and to the division of the world economy into blocks demarcated by protectionism. Today’s intensifying international economic frictions and the mounting protectionism in the United States are both warning signs that the world is once again faced with such a crisis.”
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In the new era of the 1920s, the US resembled the China of the 2000s
• Both were partly industrialized
• A huge gap existed between the industrial regions and agricultural regions
• Had rapidly growing industrial sector profits but the suppression of industrial worker wages and growing inequality
• Each followed a mercantilist strategy
• In both cases, the combination of limited imports with inadequate domestic demand resulting from low wages for labor and agrarian poverty created a mismatch between overbuilt manufacturing capacity and national global consumer demand
• In each case, domestic and global imbalances contributed to a global economic crisis, the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Recession in 2008
Land of Promise
Chapter 11
The New Deal Coalition
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The New Deal was an alliance of international bankers, international businesses, workers in the industrial core, farmers, and local champions of economic development in the southern and western periphery
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The International bankers and businesses wanted the US to move away from protectionism toward free trade
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Industrial workers wanted to share more of the profits of American industry by means of higher wages, benefits, and shorter hours
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Farmers wanted to rig agricultural markets to reduce price volatility and increase their incomes
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The Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) rebooted during Hoover’s presidency and used to recapitalize banks funded FDR’s Works Progress Administration (WPA)
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New Deal was also a social revolution making a more meritocratic society even without integration
• Italians (AP Giannini), Mormons (Marriner Eccles), George and Herman Brown (Texas businessmen – Halliburton today), Jews, and Irish Americans (Joe Kennedy) all had a place at the table and excelled