The Big 10 and Up

www.thenation.com... shows the top 10 corporations that as an American media cartel. The corporations are:

AOL Time Warner
AT&T Corporation
General Electric
News Corporation
Viacom
Bertelsmann
Walt Disney Company
Vivendi
Liberty Media Corporation
Sony

However, it is not so straight forward as this. Liberty Media, for example, spun-off from AT&T in 2001, and owns 4% of AOL/Time Warner, 1% of Viacom, and 18% of the News Corporation. AT&T owns 8% percent of the News Corporation, with the Murdoch Family controlling 30%.

Going beyond the chart, using information from www.transnationale.org..., the parent company of AT&T is AT&T ex-SBC Communications Inc, which in turns has as its majority shareholder as Barclays. Barclay’s two major shareholders are China Development Bank and a Singapore based company called Temasek, which is owned by the government in Singapore.
en.wikipedia.org...

As mentioned earlier, Liberty Media has holdings in AOL/Time Warner, Viacom, and the News Corporation, and also Vivendi at 3.6%. Liberty Media, in turn, is owned by Janus Capital Corporation. Which. also owns 6% of AOL/Time Warner. Janus is a subsidiary of Stilwell Financial, which in turns is has its stocks owned in part by… Barclay! However, the majority stockholder of Stilwell, at 10%, is the TCW Group, which is has one shareholder at 51%: the French based Société Générale.

Société Générale is one of the oldest banks in France. The original name was Société Générale pour favoriser le développement du commerce et de l'industrie en France (English: General Society to Support the Development of Commerce and Industry in France). Société Générale is often nicknamed SocGen in the international financial world.

en.wikipedia.org...

The majority stockholder in one of the oldest banks in France is our very own J.P. Morgan Chase!

Lets go back to the original Big 10 chart. Vivendi, which is in part owned by Liberty Media (and thus Janus/Stilwell/TCW/Societe Generale/JP Morgan Chase), is partnered on several websites with the company Bertelsmann.

Bertelsmann AG is a transnational media corporation founded in 1835, based in Gütersloh, Germany. The company operates in 63 countries and employs 102,397 workers (as of December 31, 2007). In 2007 the company reported a €18.758 billion revenue, an operating EBIT of €1.81 billion, and a net income of €405 Million

en.wikipedia.org...

Up until 2008, Bertelsmann had a 50% stake in Sony BMG, which is a subsidiary of Sony.

25% of Bertelsmann was owned by Groupe Bruxelles Lambert, a Belgian industrial holding companies, which was controlled by the richest man in Belgium, Albert Frere. Albert Frere recently sold the 25% to Reinhard Mohn. According to wikipedia, Mohn is an honorary member of the Club of Rome. What is the Club of Rome?

The Club of Rome is a not-for-profit organisation, independent of any political, ideological or religious interests. Its essential mission is "to act as a global catalyst for change through the identification and analysis of the crucial problems facing humanity and the communication of such problems to the most important public and private decision makers as well as to the general public." Its activities should: "adopt a global perspective with awareness of the increasing interdependence of nations. They should, through holistic thinking, achieve a deeper understanding of the complexity of contemporary problems and adopt a trans-disciplinary and long-term perspective focusing on the choices and policies determining the destiny of future generations."

www.clubofrome.org...

Hmm… Let’s continue looking into Groupe Bruxelles Lambert.

GBL’s websites shows a chart of its parent companies:

en.gbl.be...

GBL is owned by Parsega, Parsega by Parjointo, and Pairjointo by two companies: Groupe Frere-Bourgeois/CNP and the Power Corporation du Canada.

At the top of the pyramid is Groupe Frere-Bourgeois, a private holding company that manages the family's money. It's based in Charleroi, the biggest city in French-speaking Wallonia, near Frere's birthplace. Frere- Bourgeois in turn holds direct stakes in two private and one publicly owned corporations with investments across Europe.

www.bloomberg.com...

The Power Corporation of Canada itself reveals some very telling connections. The company is run by Paul Desmarais, who is one of the “10 richest persons in Canada.”

en.wikipedia.org...

Desmarais and GBL are both stockholders in the French big oil company, Total. This whole web is connected to the UN’s Oil-For-Food scandal, as shown by this rather confusing diagram:

westernstandard.blogs.com.../photos/uncategorized/connectingchart.jpg

www.outsidethebeltway.com...

(continued below)

During the Iraq war, for example, I mentioned en passant that Power Corp. is the biggest shareholder in TotalFinaElf, the western corporation closest to Saddam Hussein (it has since changed its name to the Total Group). Total had secured development rights to 25 per cent of Iraq’s oil reserves, a transformative deal that would catapult the company from a second-rank player into the big leagues with Exxon and British Petroleum. For a year, the antiwar crowd had told us it was “all about oil”--that the only reason Iraq was being “liberated” was so Bush, Cheney, Halliburton and the rest of the gang could annex in perpetuity the second biggest oil reserves in the world. But, if it was all about oil, then the fact--fact--is that the only Western leader with a direct stake in the issue was not the Texas oilpatch stooge in Washington, but Jean Chrétien: his daughter, his son-in-law and his grandchildren stood to be massively enriched by the Total-Saddam agreement. It depended on two factors: Saddam remaining in power, and the feeble UN sanctions being either weakened into meaninglessness or quietly dropped. M. Chrétien may have refused to join the Iraq war on “principle,” but fortunately his principles happened to coincide with the business interests of both TotalFinaElf and the Baath party

thekeymonk.blogspot.com...

Things get more tangled here, as if they weren’t tangled enough:

Desmarais sat on the board of the Barrick Gold Corporation, which was founded by international arms dealer Adan Khashoggi. Another board member of this company was George H.W. Bush! One of Khashoggi’s close friends was Richard Perle.

Trireme, set up two months after 9/11, is a venture capital company that invests in technology, goods, and services related to Homeland Security and defense. It argued that the fear of terrorism would increase the demand for such products in Europe and in countries like Saudi Arabia and Singapore. Richard Perle (good friend of former Cercle chairman Brian Crozer) is the company's managing partner, with another partner being Gerald Hillman, a friend of Perle.

Trireme was founded by globalist Conrad Black, and its board of directors include Henry Kissinger, and the aforementioned Paul Volcker, bringing us back to the UN’s Oil-For-Food controversy, and Desmarais. Black also founded Hollinger, which is the parent company for the Sun-Times Media group.

en.wikipedia.org...

The board of directors of Hollinger include Evelyn Rothschild and Sondra Gotlieb, the wife of Canadian public servant Alan Gotlieb.

Gotlieb, Desmarais, and George Bush, as well as Donald Rumsfeld, and Bin Laden’s Brother Shafig Bin Laden, are all members of the Carlyle Group.

The Carlyle Group is a global private equity investment firm, based in Washington, D.C., with more than $91.5 billion of equity capital under management.[1] The firm operates four fund families, focusing on leveraged buyouts, growth capital, real estate and leveraged finance investments. The firm employs more than 575 investment professionals in 21 countries with several offices in the Americas, Europe, Asia and Australia; its portfolio companies employ more than 415,000 people worldwide. Carlyle has over 1200 investors in 68 countries.

The firm has employed political figures and notable investors. Some of these figures include former US President George H. W. Bush and former US Secretary of State James A. Baker III. The State of New York is currently investigating the firm in connection to an illegal kickback scheme with the state's pension fund

en.wikipedia.org...

The Carlyle Group, headquartered in Washington DC and established in 1987, specializes in seizing control of aerospace and defense contractors and then strong-arming, contracts out of the Department of Defense (i.e. United Defense Industries). Carlyle describe themselves as "a private global investment firm". Most famous investor in the Carlyle Group has been George Herbert Walker Bush (->). The Carlyle Group includes former cabinet members of the Elder Bush White House and other oil monopolists, such as James A. Baker III (->), once Secretary of State. Chairman of Carlyle is Frank Carlucci, co-chair of the RAND Center (->). Source: www.rand.org...

911review.org...

Who really sits at the top of the pyramid?

reply to post by Someone336


Earlier, I asked: who sits atop the pyramid? Here is a pretty good guess. I mentioned several key groups in my previous posts: the Club of Rome, Barclays, J.P. Morgan Chase, among others. This could also shed some light on the role of the Council on Foreign Relations. The group in question is the Pilgrim Society.

The Pilgrims Society, founded in 1902, is a British-American society established, in the words of American past-president Joseph Choate, 'to promote good-will, good-fellowship, and everlasting peace between the United States and Great Britain'. Over the years it has boasted an elite membership of politicians, diplomats, businessmen, and writers. It is notable for holding dinners to welcome into office each successive U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom and each new British Ambassador to the United States. The patron of the society is Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

en.wikipedia.org...

This is a quote from John T. Whiteford, in 1940:

"There are several curious things about these Pilgrims functions. In the first place there is present at these dinners an array of notables such as it would be difficult to bring together under one roof for any other purpose and by any other society... Among the guests were John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan, Thomas W. Lamont and other members of the House of Morgan... We are entitled to know what the Pilgrim Society is, what it stands for, and who these powerful Pilgrims are that can call out the great to hear a British Ambassador expound to Americans the virtues of a united democratic front."

www.isgp.eu...

The Institute for the Study of Globalization and Covert Politics amassed an extremely interesting list of banks, law firms, insurance companies, and other businesses run members of the Pilgrims society. These include: Bank of England, Barclays Bank, Chase National Bank, Chase Manhattan, Federal Reserve, Morgan Stanley, Rockefeller Family Associates, J.P. Morgan Chase, and some other familiar faces in light of the recession: AIG, GM, and Dodge.

The membership list of the Pilgrims Society is a long and interesting one. Early members include former CIA head Allen Dulles, CBS founder William S. Paley, and CBS anchor Walter Cronkite.

"Paley's own friendship with Allen Dulles is now known to have been one of the most influential and significant in the communications industry. He provided cover for CIA agents, supplied out-takes of news film, permitted the
debriefing of reporters, and in many ways set the standard for cooperation between the CIA and the major broadcast companies which lasted until the mid-1970s... The [Washington] post men continued to see Paley and Cronkite every Christmas at a dinner given by Allen Dulles at a private club called the Alibi... membership is limited to men in or close to intelligence and is by invitation only."

Other members have included the notorious Henry Kissinger (Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, RAND, Hollinger, Bildeberg, Apsen Institute), John Brademas (CFR, Trilateral Commission, Aspen Institute, friend of the Rockefellers) C. Douglas Dillon (friend of the Rockefellers, Rockefeller Foundation, Chase Manhattan, vice chair of the CFR).

Earlier I mentioned the globalist think tank called the “Club of Rome”. The co-founder, Dean Rusk was the Secretary of State during the Kennedy administration, a Rockefeller Foundation Trustee, and a member, surprise surprise, of the Pilgrims Society.

The Federal Reserve can also be linked to the Pilgrims Society:

The founding of the Federal Reserve system in the United States in 1913, which is often portrayed as a banker's conspiracy, can also be traced to members of the Pilgrims. The conspiracy centered on a meeting at Jekyll Island in November 1910 in which leading bankers worked out the details of setting up a privately-owned central bank in the United States. Those that attended were Senator Nelson Aldrich, whose daughter married John D. Rockefeller, Jr. in 1901 and who was the person to introduce the banker's plan to Congress; Frank Vanderlip, president of the Rockefellers' National City Bank; Henry Davison, a partner of J.P. Morgan & Co. and a representative of the Astor interests; Charles Norton, president of the Morgan-dominated First National Bank of New York; Benjamin Strong, Jr. vice president of the Banker's Trust of New York, also controlled by the Morgans; and Paul Warburg, a partner in Kuhn, Loeb & Co. Pilgrims researcher Charles Savoie has labeled virtually all of the Jekyll Island visitors as Pilgrims

The Pilgrims are also deeply connected to AIG. Following the membership list at www.isgp.eu... , we can see that many members of the Pilgrims Society, including Henry Kissinger and Richard C. Hoolbroke (Vietnam staff for Lyndon Johnson, CFR, Lehman Brothers) have held high positions in AIG. What makes it even more interesting is that the author of the ISGP posits that the Pilgrims were linked to the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird.

Operation Mockingbird was a secret Central Intelligence Agency campaign to influence domestic and foreign media beginning in the 1950s.

The activities, extent and even the existence of the CIA project remain in dispute: the operation was first called Mockingbird in Deborah Davis' 1979 book, Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and her Washington Post Empire. But Davis' book, alleging that the media had been recruited (and infiltrated) by the CIA for propaganda purposes, was itself controversial and has since been shown to have had a number of erroneous assertions.[1] More evidence of Mockingbird's existence emerged in the 2007 memoir American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond, by convicted Watergate "plumber" E. Howard Hunt and The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America by Hugh Wilford (2008)[2].

Mockingbird was established by the first head of the CIA (and former OSS officer) Frank Wisner. His son, Frank G. Wisner is the Vice Chairman of AIG. Furthermore, take a look at this:

reply to post by Someone336


(con't)

...Newly declassified U.S. intelligence files tell the remarkable story of the ultra-secret Insurance Intelligence Unit, a component of the Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the CIA, and its elite counterintelligence branch X-2.

The men behind the insurance unit were OSS head William "Wild Bill" Donovan and California-born insurance magnate Cornelius V. Starr. Starr had started out selling insurance to Chinese in Shanghai in 1919 and, over the next 50 years, would build what is now American International Group, one of the biggest insurance companies in the world...

Starr sent insurance agents into Asia and Europe even before the bombs stopped falling and built what eventually became AIG, which today has its world headquarters in the same downtown New York building where the tiny OSS unit toiled in the deepest secrecy.

www.democraticunderground.com...

www.fromthewilderness.com... is an interesting look at the connection between AIG and the CIA’s drug smuggling in Iran-Contra.

Too big to fail, eh?