This was surprising because perhaps the biggest crook of them all was Gerald Ronson. He made his fortune not so much by ‘daring’ bids but by gambling on the stock exchange. His greatest gamble was in 1986 when his friend, the super-swindler Sir Jack Lyons, asked him to buy some shares in Guinness to boost the share price in the firm’s takeover of Distillers. Ronson obliged with a cool £25 million. He lost not a penny on this investment of course, but as a reward for stumping up so much at an awkward time Guinness slipped him a personal donation of £7 million.
Ronson and Lyons were only caught when the biggest swindler of them all, the American stock exchange gangster Boesky, grassed on them to save his skin. The crooked transactions by which Ronson and Lyons rigged the institutions they loved could not possibly have been exposed by ordinary journalists since there was no public record of them whatsoever.
Ronson and Lyons were not ‘rotten apples’ in the capitalist barrel, as has been pretended. On the contrary they were both very close to the grandest apple of them all, the prime minister. Lyons was a personal friend, and Thatcher’s two closest advisers, Tim Bell and Gordon Reece, both in their own right entrepreneurs of the kind she admires, were paid advisers to Guinness at the time.
The ruthlessness with which Thatcher and her cronies pursued the values of free enterprise did not extend to obeying the rules laid down by that free enterprise. Indeed, in a way, one of the central tenets of that free enterprise was that its devotees should feel free to make up their own rules. Paul Foot, article November 1990, ‘All Fall Down’
The stories of Ronson, Gunn and Ashcroft have been repeated over and over again in the last twelve months. Celebrated Thatcherite entrepreneurs like Sophie Mirman of Sock Shop, George Davies of Next, Azil Nadir of Polly Peck, have all come crashing down. Harris Queensway, the brainchild of another Thatcher knight, the carpet king Sir Phil Harris, is now bust (though Harris himself sold out well before the disaster, for a little matter of £60 million).
Even the two top spokesmen for the Thatcher miracle – Murdoch and Maxwell – are in desperate trouble. Scandal after scandal has rocked the City: Barlow Clowes, Dunsdale, Ferranti. What does it all mean? ibid.
If I had not already been a socialist, the astonishing events at the Daily Mirror in the last few days would have quickly made me one. They are calling the Maxwell Robbery the greatest financial scandal of all time.
He robbed some £300 million from the workers at The Mirror, either from their company or from their pension fund.
All around there is a great tut-tutting. Newspapers which only weeks ago were describing Maxwell as a ‘swashbuckling buccaneer’ now fall over one another to denounce him for what he was – a revolting crook. Nowhere is the embarrassment greater than in the City.
In 1971 a distinguished lawyer and a distinguished accountant declared after a careful examination of Maxwell’s relations with a company called Leasco that Maxwell was not fit to chair a public company.
In the early 1980s Maxwell became chairman of one of the biggest public companies in the country, the British Printing Corporation.
In July 1984, on what we on The Mirror called Black Friday, he became chairman of the Mirror Group of Newspapers – which ran five national newspapers with a combined circulation of four million copies every weekday and six million every Sunday. How could this happen? Paul Foot, article December 1991 ‘They All Knew He Was a Crook’
If the corporations steal from their workers, they shouldn’t be surprised that their workers steal. They should expect it. They’re reaping what they’ve sown. Philip Johnson, Loomis Fargo & Co Heist Florida
Weyland Corporation: Building Better Worlds. Prometheus ***** 2012 starring Michael Fassbender & Charlize Theron & Noomi Rapace & Guy Pearce & Logan Marshall-Green & Rafe Spall & Sean Harris & Kate Dickie & Benedict Wong et al, director Ridley Scott, slogan
You know how the game serves us. A definite social purpose. Nations are bankrupt. Gone. None of that tribal warfare any more. Even the corporate wars are a thing of the past. Now we have the majors and their executives. Transport. Food. Communication. Housing. Luxury. Energy. A few of us making decisions on a global basis for the common good ... Corporate society takes care of everything. Rollerball 1975 starring James Caan & John Houseman & Maud Adams & John Beck & Moses Gunn & Pamela Hensley & Barbara Trentham & John Normington & Shame Rimmer & Burt Kwouk et al, director Norman Jewison
Corporate society is an inevitable destiny. Material dream. ibid. Mr Bartholomew to Jonathan
There was a lot riding on the outcome of World War II through the eyes of limitless greed ...The money men who played a direct central role in I G Farben and Hitler’s coup-d’etat were Walter Teagle representing J D Rockefeller senior, banker Paul Warburg whose brother Max Warburg was on the board of I G Farben in Germany, and Edsel Ford. The financing for Hitler and his SS street-thugs came in mostly from the Bank of England and these US firms including Henry Ford in 1922 ... Ford vehicles were used by Germany against American soldiers as they landed in France in 1944. Many US multi-national corporations made millions from Hitler’s military construction programme all the way up through 1942. Among the US corporations that were financing the Nazis were J P Morgan, T W Lamont, The Rockefellers, Standard Oil, National City Bank, Chase and Manhattan Banks, Kuhn Loeb and Company, Union Banking Company led by George Herbert Walker, George Bush senior’s grandfather, and Prescott Bush who was one of only seven shareholders in UBC, a New York bank for the leading Nazi banker and supporter Fritz Thyssen, Brown Brothers Harriman led by Avril Harriman, the railroad tycoon, and Prescott Bush ... In 1933 General Electric made payments to strengthen the Nazi party which helped put the uniforms on Himmler and his SS street-thugs ... Albert Speer and his Gestapo staff employed IBM machines. The Secret Plan of the New World Order
What would have happened if millions of American and British people, struggling with coupons and lines at the gas stations, had learned that in 1942 Standard Oil of New Jersey [part of the Rockefeller empire] managers shipped the enemy’s fuel through neutral Switzerland and that the enemy was shipping Allied fuel? Suppose the public had discovered that the Chase Bank in Nazi-occupied Paris after Pearl Harbor was doing millions of dollars’ worth of business with the enemy with the full knowledge of the head office in Manhattan [the Rockefeller family among others]? Or that Ford trucks were being built for the German occupation troops in France with authorization from Dearborn, Michigan? Or that Colonel Sosthenes Behn, the head of the international American telephone conglomerate ITT, flew from New York to Madrid to Berne during the war to help improve Hitler’s communications systems and improve the robot bombs that devastated London? Or that ITT built the FockeWulfs that dropped bombs on British and American troops? Or that crucial ball-bearings were shipped to Nazi-associated customers in Latin America with the collusion of the vice-chairman of the US War Production Board in partnership with Goering’s cousin in Philadelphia when American forces were desperately short of them? Or that such arrangements were known about in Washington and either sanctioned or deliberately ignored? Charles Higham
IBM, ITT, Ford Motors, Chase Manhattan Bank ... Deutsche Bank. A Fourth Reich in the Sun? Gerrard Williams
ThyssenKrupp Steel: from 1943 until the end of the war they created over 700 dummy corporations on their own outside Nazi Germany. ibid.
Siemens Argentina was huge. ibid.
IBM ran the holocaust. ibid.
Henry Ford was the worst anti-Semite in history. ibid.
The Ford Motor Company produced over a third of all trucks used by the German army in World War II. ibid.
Hugo Boss for example designed all the SS uniforms. ibid.
Americans, mobilise! Stand together. Stand tall. Tell government you’re as mad as hell. No longer cooperate with the government. Do not accept the national ID card. Do everything in your power to restore freedom and your individuality back to America. Stop being a country run by the institutions for the institutions. Aaron Russo, interview Alex Jones
That great city Mystery Babylon ... That great city that encompasses the whole world with its banking and corporate. And commercial status. Commercial Babylon. Mystery Babylon. On the one hand we have then the world rulers who give all of their control and power to the Beast, who is controlled of course by Satan the Dragon behind the scenes. And we know then we have these Illuminati, these men who work with the Anti-Christ and with Satan. And then we have their system, the world-wide system, all of the governments of the world. Texe Marrs, Babylon Illuminati Secret Society Empire
It might come as a shock to many people but the form of government we have in this country today basically is socialistic – we have social programs for everything ... But instead of the benefits going to the people, the benefits go to the corporations ... We have socialism geared to benefit the multinational corporations ... This is pushed along by a fervent nationalism – what’s good for GM is good for the country – our country, right or wrong, and we’re going to take our form of democracy to other countries and if you don’t like it we’ll invade you and occupy you ... That tells us that the form of government that we’re operating under today is national socialism ... a form of fascism ... Benito Mussolini himself said that fascism isn’t really the proper term, it more correctly should have been called Corporatism. That is simply when you have the corporations running the county and controlling the government ... In those countries ... the state took over the corporations; in the United States today the corporations have taken over the state, but the end result is the same. Jim Marrs, cited One Nation Under Siege
In the United States both the upper levels of the Republican and Democratic Parties are in the pay of the corporate media and communication giants. Robert McChesney and John Nichols
To permit every lawless capitalist, every law-defying corporation, to take any action, no matter how iniquitous, in the effort to secure an improper profit and to build up privilege, would be ruinous to the Republic and would mark the abandonment of the effort to secure in the industrial world the spirit of democratic fair dealing. Theodore Roosevelt 8th December 1908
We have corporate control of elected officials, corporate control of the media ... This is not a government of, by and for the people; it is a government of, by and for the corporation, and by definition, when business controls government, that is inescapably fascism. Dave vonKleist