BECOME A BRAINOID ON THE SECRET SCAMS OF BIG BUSINESS
These books are seriously recommended to understand planetary dysfunction
caused by selfish transnational corporations.Please do not read them.ON Big Business / UNDUE INFLUENCE of CEO/s of Corporations Chernow, Ron.
The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern
Finance. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990. 812 pages. Author Ron
Chernow divides this history of the House of Morgan into three parts:
the Baronial age, which ended with the death of the famous J.P. Morgan
in 1913, the diplomatic age from 1913-1948 with J.P. Morgan, Jr., Thomas
Lamont, Dwight Morrow, and Russell Leffingwell, and the postwar casino
age, when Morgan was three houses in one. (As required by the 1933
Glass-Steagall Act, it became J.P. Morgan and Company and its bank,
Morgan Guaranty Trust; Morgan Stanley, an investment house; and Morgan
Grenfell in London, an overseas securities house.) In its golden age,
the House of Morgan catered to prominent families such as the Astors,
Guggenheims, DuPonts, and Vanderbilts, and to corporations such as U.S.
Steel, GE, GM, and ATT. By the 1980s they found themselves in a more
competitive Wall Street environment, and made money by engineering
hostile takeovers. Chernow enjoyed unusual cooperation from the Morgan
empire while writing this book. Despite his disapproval of the House of
Morgan's support for fascist Italy and Japan in the 1930s, and his
ability to throw around concepts such as "interlocking directorates," in
the end Chernow is just one more "liberal" scholar who has written a
conservative history. There is no mention, for example, of the 1934
Morgan-DuPont conspiracy involving Smedley D. Butler, to organize a
military coup against Franklin Roosevelt.------------------------------------------------------------------------
Barnet, Richard J. and Mueller, Ronald E. Global Reach: The Power of the
Multinational Corporations. New York: Simon & Schuster (Touchstone),
1974. 508 pages (includes 90 pages of end notes). In the 1970s it was
still possible for scholars to affiliate with think tanks whose budgets
did not depend on huge corporate donations. This didn't always make them
less elitist, but in most cases it made them more honest. Richard J.
Barnet, who has been a member of the Council on Foreign Relations for
more than ten years, was associated with the left-liberal Institute for
Policy Studies when he co-authored this book. "Global Reach" is one of
the first (and only) books to examine the transnational corporation,
which was then just emerging as a separate political and economic
entity, with the potential to subvert the historic social-welfare
functions of the sovereign state, and thereby affect billions of people.
After two decades of collecting dust on our bookshelf, it's amazing how
well this book anticipated our problems. Today's issues are all here,
from free trade and the loss of U.S. jobs, to how the transnationals
also make things worse for most people in the Third World -- whether
through the replacement of culture and tradition with mindless
consumerism, or through the outright concentration of income, rape of
natural resources, elimination of jobs, and increased hunger. For the
1990s, this book merely needs to change is its cover: it ought to be
titled "Global Grab."------------------------------------------------------------------------
Barnet, Richard J. and Cavanagh, John. Global Dreams: Imperial
Corporations and the New World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster
(Touchstone), 1994. 480 pages. Richard Barnet and John Cavanagh are
veterans of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington DC, a
left-of-center think tank, (google up their website!!)Both specialize in
the politics, economics, and culture of transnational corporations. A
1974 book co-authored by Barnet (Global Reach) is more scholarly, while
this one is better described as a series of portraits. About half of
this book, intermingled with the other half, provides a valuable look at
five transnationals and some of the moguls behind them: Bertelsmann,
Citibank, Ford, Philip Morris, and Sony. This snapshot from above is
based on interviews with some of the CEOs in addition to research. The
other half of the book is all over the map, which is perhaps appropriate
for a book about globalization. It consists mainly of anecdotes that
illustrate emerging trends in culture, consumerism, and labor. In the
final chapters, this is contrasted with the frantic speculation that is
now typical of transnational financial markets. The total impression is
of a huge, unstable Disneyland with plenty of waste, and lots of people
standing in line but not yet suffering. A third book is needed that
depicts the poverty and hunger in the Third World, in the shantytowns
just beneath those billboards for Marlboro and Coca-Cola.------------------------------------------------------------------------
Colby, Gerard. DuPont Dynasty. Secaucus NJ: Lyle Stuart, 1984. 968
pages. Gerard Colby, who previously went by the name of Gerard Colby
Zilg, has written the definitive book on the DuPont family. This is an
expanded edition of "Behind the Nylon Curtain" by Colby (then Zilg),
which was nominated for a National Book Award in 1974. When the first
edition came out, the DuPonts played hardball with publisher
Prentice-Hall and anyone who dared review the book favorably. P-H caved
in and slashed its print run and advertising, and despite high demand,
ultimately let it go out of print altogether. Colby first became
interested in the DuPonts while working as a press secretary for
Congressman John Dow of New York. His research on Vietnam war
profiteering led him to the 1934 Senate munitions hearings, which
revealed that the DuPonts made over $250 million in profits from World
War I. In 1934, according to witnesses and the findings of a House
Committee, a plot existed to seize the White House with a march on
Washington by veterans who were to be armed by the DuPonts. The DuPonts,
America's richest dynasty, run a network of companies around the world
from their base in Delaware, a state which is controlled by the family.
To Colby's credit, he avoids much of the titillating family trivia
emphasized by other books on the DuPonts, and concentrates instead on
the DuPonts' political significance in American society.------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lisagor, Nancy and Lipsius, Frank. A Law Unto Itself: The Untold Story
of the Law Firm Sullivan and Cromwell. New York: Paragon House, 1989.
360 pages. After two years in the Princeton library, where the archives
of John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles are stored, the authors knew
about Sullivan and Cromwell's ten-year record of cooperation with
Hitler. Then they approached the law firm for interviews, but soon a
memo went out instructing the lawyers not to cooperate. At that point
the authors found a National Archives microfilm detailing the Justice
Department investigations of John Foster Dulles's wartime collaboration.
They were finally allowed to see a representative of the firm, but he
wouldn't answer any questions. A year later Sullivan and Cromwell
changed chairmen after some embarrassing press concerning three
important partners. Now they were willing to grant interviews to present
their side of the case. But until then the firm didn't like publicity,
and this book helps us understand why. After 100 years of creating power
and wealth by manipulating the interface between government and
business, and with a transnational reach that considers World Wars a
mere inconvenience, the story of Sullivan and Cromwell makes it clear
that there's one set of rules for the rest of us, and no rules at all
for the ruling class.------------------------------------------------------------------------
McCann, Thomas. An American Company: The Tragedy of United Fruit. New
York: Crown Publishers, 1976. 244 pages. Thomas McCann joined United
Fruit in 1952; when he resigned in 1971 he was vice-president in charge
of public relations. United Fruit was the most powerful economic and
political force in Central America during the 1950s. They were cozy with
foreign interventionists and media owners back home, which meant that
they could make or break little countries at will. In 1954, United Fruit
and the CIA broke Guatemala. The media, having been carefully prepped
and by United Fruit's PR experts such as Edward L. Bernays (the "father
of public relations"), cheered from the sidelines. (Forty years of death
squads and tens of thousands of killings later, it remains very much
broken, and our media are happy to keep it buried.) Guatemala's peasants
were powerless against United Fruit, so it took a corporate raider by
the name of Eli Black to bring it down. In 1968, when United Fruit was
70 years old, Black began acquiring shares. After six years as CEO,
making all the wrong decisions and alienating everyone who could help
him, United Fruit was in deep trouble. Black jumped out of his office
window on the 44th floor in 1975, while the SEC investigated his bribes
to Honduran officials for tax relief on banana exports. Now peasants had
only the CIA to worry about -- those thugs from that big banana republic
up north, whose job it is to keep all the little bananas in line.------------------------------------------------------------------------
McCartney, Laton. Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story, The Most
Secret Corporation and How It Engineered the World. New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1988. 273 pages. It's trite to observe that some of the
world's most powerful people and corporations are rarely in the
newspapers. An example of the former is John McCone (1902-1991), who
made $44 million during World War II on an investment of $100,000. Then
he was Deputy to the Secretary of Defense (1948), Under Secretary of the
Air Force (1950-1951), Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission
(1958-1961), and CIA director (1961-1965). McCone was involved in the
1973 coup in Chile as a director of ITT, and his other corporate
connections are too numerous to mention. He didn't give interviews. From
1937-1945 McCone was the president of Bechtel-McCone, which became the
privately-held Bechtel Corporation when he was bought out after the war.
Bechtel thrived on its government and intelligence connections, along
with its huge energy-engineering contracts in the Middle East. After
Steve Bechtel was appointed to the advisory board of the Export-Import
Bank in 1969, generous Exim loans were available for Bechtel projects in
the Philippines, Egypt, Algeria, Indonesia, USSR, and nuclear power
plants in Brazil and elsewhere. When Ronald Reagan needed help at the
White House, all he had to do was to place a call to Bechtel and ask to
have George Shultz and Caspar Weinberger transferred to his
administration.------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nader, Ralph and Taylor, William. The Big Boys: Power and Position in
American Business. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986. 571 pages. Ralph
Nader is still a liberal, which makes it amazing that he still does good
research. If he were to concentrate his commitment, skills, and
resources on issues involving the national security state, they'd have
to shut him down. But as it is, America's foremost consumer advocate
believes that the system merely needs some fine tuning and rational tax
policies, based on an enlightened appreciation of capitalism's long-term
interests. There are no inevitable conflicts of interest in Nader's
repertoire. This book, based on exhaustive research and copiously
documented, provides portraits of nine corporate executives, each in
separate chapters: David Roderick (U.S. Steel), Roger Smith (General
Motors), Paul Oreffice (Dow Chemical), Felix Rohatyn (investment
banker), Charls Walker (tax lobbyist), Whitney MacMillan (Cargill),
Thomas Jones (Northrop), William McGowan (MCI), and William Norris
(Control Data). The chapter on Cargill is fascinating, both for what it
reveals and what it couldn't. Privately-held Cargill is the world's
largest grain trader, one of the largest flour millers, and its
second-largest meatpacker. Extracting information from them is next to
impossible. A year after Nader started, a Cargill vice president still
didn't believe that Nader's sleuths had managed to include some former
Cargill employees among the 175 people they interviewed.------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pacific Northwest Research Center. Rockwell International: Where
Business Gets Down to the Science of War. Eugene OR: PNRC, 1975. Written
by Paul Fitzgerald, John Markoff, Roger Walke, and John Woodmansee, with
a foreword by G. William Domhoff. 69 pages. PNRC was a collective of
researchers that thrived for a time in the 1970s when "power structure
research" meant identifying and tracking the influence of corporate and
government elites. One of PNRC's contributions was this booklet on
Rockwell International's cozy relations with Washington and Pentagon
bigwigs. By looking at Rockwell and its B-1 bomber contract in
particular, this booklet presents an amazing case study of how the
military- industrial complex works. (Nothing has changed since 1975. In
1991 I was employed by Grumman, which along with Rockwell and others was
a contractor for NASA's space station. This latest tax-dollar boondoggle
caused me to resign in disgust after only three months of very fat
paychecks.) By the late 1970s the tendency of "the personal as
political" replaced "power structure research" on the U.S. left, and
progressive funding sources were now controlled by self-interested
feminists and multiculturalists. They succeeded in forcing one foot into
the power structure by legislating and lobbying for preferential
treatment. But this neither exposed nor challenged the way the system
works, and by now it's increasingly clear that they were simply bought
off. -- D.Brandt------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sampson, Anthony. The Money Lenders: Bankers and a World in Turmoil.
New York: Viking Press, 1982. 336 pages. In 1978, Willy Brandt invited
British journalist Anthony Sampson to become an advisor to the Brandt
Commission on North-South relations. "Listening to the discussions and
helping to write the final report, I became more aware that the future
of many developing countries was interlocked with the problems of the
big banks," Sampson explains. The result was this book, which is as good
as it gets on international banking from a liberal perspective. As the
author of The Sovereign State of ITT, The Seven Sisters, and The Arms
Bazaar -- all excellent books on various aspects of transnational big
business -- Anthony Sampson is one of the few journalists qualified to
tackle this complex topic. This is a history of banking, particularly
since World War II with Bretton Woods, the World Bank, the International
Monetary Fund, and then evolving into Eurodollars, the end of the gold
standard, OPEC, and Third World debt. In the end Sampson tries to wrap
it up in the social-democratic package that motivated Willy Brandt,
which might be described as "better world management for the sake of
peace, justice, and jobs." In other words, more international regulation
is needed to achieve better stability. Because by the last chapter it's
clear that no one has a clue, and the whole system is balanced on "the
dangerous edge."------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sampson, Anthony. The Seven Sisters. New York: Bantam Books, 1976. 395
pages. "The Seven Sisters" sorts out the tangled histories of the seven
mega-corporations that dominate international oil: Exxon, Gulf, Texaco,
Mobil, Socal, BP and Shell. Their shifting allegiances, Sampson argues,
are best understood by remembering that the "sisters" are "basically
committees of engineers and accountants preoccupied ... with profit
margins, safeguarding investments, and avoiding taxation." The interests
of the sheikhs of OPEC, media villains at the time Sampson was writing,
clearly lie in defending the world the "sisters" have created. Sampson's
analysis stands up well to subsequent events. The son of a research
scientist, Oxford-educated journalist Anthony Sampson writes elegant and
exhaustively-researched books about powerful and often secretive elite
groups: South Africa's white leadership, Britain's ossified elites, a
multinational pirate corporation, the world oil industry, the
international arms trade, international bankers. Without truckling,
Sampson is able to get far enough inside such circles to show us how the
world looks through their eyes -- while also providing a wealth of
information that makes independent judgment possible. Only recorded
research on fact that the world's biggest oil deposit was right off the
shore of Vietnam and that's why we were there! -- Steve Badrich------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sampson, Anthony. The Sovereign State of ITT. Greenwich CT: Fawcett
Publications, 1974. 335 pages. "The Sovereign State of ITT" (i.e.,
International Telephone and Telegraph) uncovers the history of a
multinational that long ago became an autonomous pirate state. In the
1970s, ITT became famous, briefly, for bribing Nixon aides to back off
an antitrust action, and to intervene to protect ITT interests in
Allende's Chile. Sampson tells us much more -- e.g., spelling out the
deals the stateless ITT cut with Hitler. It's an instructive tale.
Because despite his critics, free-trader George Bush does have a
"vision" -- one of a planet organized by corporations much like ITT, and
run by men much like former ITT head Harold Geneen. The son of a
research scientist, Oxford-educated journalist Anthony Sampson writes
elegant and exhaustively-researched books about powerful and often
secretive elite groups: South Africa's white leadership, Britain's
ossified elites, a multinational pirate corporation, the world oil
industry, the international arms trade, international bankers. Without
truckling, Sampson is able to get far enough inside such circles to show
us how the world looks through their eyes -- while also providing a
wealth of information that makes independent judgment possible. -- Steve
Badrich------------------------------------------------------------------------
Stauber, John C. and Rampton, Sheldon. Toxic Sludge Is Good For You:
Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry. Monroe ME: Common
Courage Press, 1995. 236 pages. As transnationals become more powerful
than many governments, they discover that information control is the key
to further expansion. Today the shock troops of the New World Order are
neither the commandos with U.N. patches, nor the gray men from the CIA,
but rather the flacks and hacks in the public relations industry. Some
academicians estimate that about forty percent of all "news" is fed from
PR firms to newsrooms. Journalists get two versions: a slick final
version, and a raw one that they can edit. Most budget-conscious
newsrooms simply present the slick version as hard news. PR
practitioners in the U.S. now outnumber reporters, and some of the best
journalism schools send more than half of their graduates into these
firms. Along with those catchy "video news releases" that newsrooms love
so much, some PR firms offer industrial espionage, infiltration of civic
and political groups, planted stories, and phony grass-roots campaigns.
Their corporate clients call this "integrated communications." The
grass-roots campaigns, commonly referred to as "astroturf movements,"
are disguised as concerned citizens driven by conscience to petition the
government. Since big money is available just underneath this facade,
many politicians are no doubt grateful for the cover that astroturf
provides.------------------------------------------------------------------------
Woodmansee, John and others. The World of a Giant Corporation. Seattle:
North County Press, 1975. 84 pages. This report, an in-depth look at
General Electric, was produced by a group that came together through the
American Friends Service Committee. AFSC's National Action Research on
the Military Industrial Complex (NARMIC), along with similar efforts
such as the Honeywell Project of Minneapolis, tried to understand the
Vietnam war in terms of the role played by major U.S. corporations. For
the GE project, this group assembled an extensive collection of the
company's publications, such as annual reports, company magazines,
advertisements, and reprints of speeches by executives. Then they
interviewed some GE officials, and combed the press for articles on GE.
Since GE is so diversified, their report followed the same pattern, in
that aspects beyond defense production are also investigated: the labor
environment, public relations, who's who in top management, the
corporate culture, foreign investment, and GE's dependency on the growth
paradigm. Over 300 end notes are included. This is a serious piece of
research, and it's utterly distressing that U.S. culture, or
counterculture, no longer supports similar research projects. Today
you'd have to strip out the end notes along with most of the content,
add stereo and video, and present it as multimedia. And you'd still have
to convince Generation X that it's worth their time to learn about the
folks who are pulling their strings.
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