The Octopus

Hetch Hetchy

In 1983 , I spent a year investigating the corporate history of California, focussing specifically on Pacific Gas & Electric Co. What I uncovered changed the way I looked at California and it's past. I spent most of that year in the public library, going through the local S.F. newspapers from the 1890's up through 1950.

At the time, the burning issue was PG&E's construction of the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Facility. In 1982, the SF Bay Guardian published an in depth story about Hetch Hetchy that inspired me to look into PG&E's past. There in the newspapers, I would discover the details of the Hetch Hetchy scandal. I would also uncover PG&E's role in the Abe Ruef scandals, the labor battle against PG&E led by Tom Mooney, the political theft of the Central Valley Project, which was to have been California's TVA, and last but not least the immense war against public power.

In those newspapers and long forgotten books I found the dramatic details of San Francisco's buried past. I came to realize that their was a much bigger issue underlying PG&E's emperial behavior. The city's past wasn't about good guys vs bad guys. It was about rich guys who used their economic power to impose their will upon California in a brutal "might makes right" display. Here were the roots of why California has had only 4 sitting democratic governors in over a century. I would discover an alliance of wealth that would be used to brutally impose their economic and political interests in creating plantation California.

Over a century ago, there was a handfull of men who owned California. At the center of this group were the men who built the first transcontinental railroad. Frank Norton would call the Big Four and their Southern Pacific Railroad Crowd, "the Octopus." The heirs of these men, along with the silver kings were also behind PG&E, the Spring Valley Water Company, Wells Fargo and ownership of the most of the California's land.

Rock and Roll

Diablo Canyon

Manifest Destiny

Mexico: 1845

Once I'd opened up the history of California and started to look around in the state's dusty past, it became clear that we were living in a land with a missing history. As children most of us were given romanticized versions of manifest destiny and the gold rush that brought 200,000 people to the state.

With Fremont's invasion and conquest of Spanish forces, the corrupt Anglo land grabs from those who lived here would shift into high gear. The gold rush in 1849 would launch the brutal holocaust of native Californians. The $5 a head paid by the U.S. government for Indians would result in the almost complete annihilation of of 100,000 humans from dozens of tribal communities across the state in just under 30 years.

In what would be the most brutal symbol of degrading deceit, the last Yaki Indian alive would be captured and put on public display, like a caged zoo animal, at the University of California's Parnassus campus, only to die there a few years later.

The Native American perspective about what we have done to them and their land is far worse than what the Nazi's did to the Jewish people of Europe. Dozens of unique native cultures were wiped from the face of the earth.

To this day, they claim that the U.S. has failed to honor a single treaty it ever signed with native people. For example, the Shoshone continue to fight the U.S. construction of the proposed Yucca Mountain high-level nuclear waste dump on their lands, which they have never agreed to sell.

The BLM has been in court for years fighting with tribal authorities over the billions of dollars the government has lost track of that were to have been paid to them for extracted resources. After being the poorest of the poor, tribes were finally given governmental authority over their lands. They have used this new found authority to start construction of gaming businesses, where the unscrupulous have taken advantage of tribes.

Yaki Massacre

California Tribes

The SP Crowd

Collis Huntington

The European conquest of the western hemisphere reached its symbolic zenith with the gold rush that brought hundreds of thousands of greedy Europeans to San Francisco and California. Charles Crocker, Collis Huntington, Mark Hopkins and Leland Stanford would be among those who came here to strike it rich. These four men would soon grab Theodore Judah's idea of constructing the transcontinental railroad that would open the west to exploitation. It would in turn make the Big Four some of wealthiest men in the United States. By the 1870's the Octopus would own over 10% of the state's land. By the turn of the century, these men and their allies at Wells Fargo would own most of the state's best land, all transportation systems in and out of the state, as well as control the entire state's political system. Huntington would spend millions of dollars bribing U.S. representatives to guarantee the health and well being of their empire. At the height of their influence the U.S. Supreme Court would give them corporate personhood.

In an event as startling as the breakup of the SP empire in the 1990's, the sale of the Southern Pacific empire in 1901-2 to EH Harriman and his royalist financial backers would shape California's economic future during the rest of the 20th century.

The mostly uneducated Californians who had conquered the state through brute strength were dying out. They would be replaced by the managerial bankers coming from New York and Europe to organize and build the Anglo profit system. Their colonial skills would organize the plantation culture that would extract vast amounts of wealth for the families and investors who were in charge of the game.

Charles Crocker

Edward Harriman

Southern Pacific's Land

Today, nobody blinks when you mention that a growing percentage of the U.S. is owned by Japanese, Arab or Chinese investors. Yet would Californians' a hundred years ago, most of whom had left Europe to escape the repressive royalist governments, been happy to know that European investors had taken economic and political control of the state?

One of the most important points in my research came when EH Harriman purchased the Southern Pacific in 1902. One of the first things he did was to hand the Wells Fargo bank to IW Hellman of Los Angeles. I couldn't understand why he would give away one of the most powerful banks in the state, until I found the answer on page 309 of Stephen Birmingham's "Our Crowd" about the great Jewish families of New York.

In the book, Prince Poniatowski, who would marry into the Crocker family, described his visit to Elberon, the home of the Seligman-Kuhn Loeb bankers that had financed Harriman's railroad deal. There, right next to the Warburgs, Loeb's Seligman's, Schiff's and and a future Rothschild, was a Hellman relative. It is my belief that the prince was here as an agent of the royalists to gain control of the Southern Pacific empire and thus all of California.

IW Hellman

Prince Andre Poniatowski

GE President Charles Coffin

John Drum

On his trip from Paris to San Francisco in 1892, the Prince first stopped in New York, where he met with the head of JP Morgan's General Electric as well as Harriman's investors who would soon buy the Union Pacific Railroad. He would spend the next decade working with William Crocker, buying mines, constructing railroads, hydro power plants and the longest power line in the world, from the Sierras to San Jose. He and Crocker would buy and consolidate all of the south bay power companies just prior to the formation of PG&E, with his companies being sold to the Wells Fargo insider John Drum.

Not long after the sale of the Southern Pacific was completed he went back to France. The prince would describe his visit to Elberon and how a member of the Hellman family happened to live next door to the bankers who would soon buy the empire that controlled California!

Would it surprise San Franciscans to know that the Selligman clan that sold the land to the city that became Golden Gate Park is related to the heir of Wells Fargo, Waren Hellman? Warren is currently behind the renovation of the museum in the park. What other relationships have been cut by such wealthy families that have shaped the state's history? There are many directions that should be explored from the context of how just a few families were able to use their falsely gained wealth to shape the future of this state.

Kuhn & Loeb's Jacob Schiff

William H Crocker

Wells Fargo Bank Note

Wells Fargo heir: Warren Hellman

Wells Fargo Stock

Golden Gate Park

1970: San Joaquin Corporate Lands

Where did the managerial skills come from that have since guided California to become the 5th largest economy on earth? During the 19th century, colonial Europe was perfecting its own corporate financial powers. Two of the most powerful, J.P. Morgan and the Seligman, Kuhn & Loeb empires are of especial interest. Morgan was outed as an agent of the Bank of England in 1933. While Seligman group linked itself to the Rothschilds and the royalist German Bismarck family.

The immense economic investments pouring into the U.S. at the turn of the century from Europe were well documented. In congressional hearings in 1900 Kuhn & Loeb acknowledged that it had been investing $1 billion a year from Europe, primarily into railroads. Just two years after this hearing Harriman and his backers, Kuhn & Loeb would buy Southern Pacific. Another example of the colonial invasion came when the Englishman Samuel Insull came here to become Thomas Edison's personal secretary. Insull would play a major role in the formation of General Electric Co. as well as the development of the U.S. electric industry for over 40 years.

There are no records of what kind of profits left California to repay the investors. But one thing is for sure, the the corporate structures of Europe were exported here to manage and maximize their investments. Its not politically correct to suggest that California's agribusiness (plantation) structure was and still is the biggest economic and political con job. That is until China and the World Trade Organization get going.

Following the money led me from PG&E, to the Southern Pacific, and then to the European bankers who were representing the wealthy elite of Europe at a time when colonial agendas were still out in the open. Most Americans supposedly take great pride in the Boston tea party, the event that supposedly helped to initiate the American revolution over 200 years ago. But for some reason the details about that event, where the East India Trading Company were given special taxation privileges by King George, that would have wrecked the New England economy, seem to be forgotten.

Lloyd Tevis: Wells Fargo President

& Kern County Land Co.

Miller & Lux properties: circa 1900

Boston Tea Party

Carl Reichardt of Ford, Wells Fargo

PG&E & HSBC

Would Californians want to know that some of the very same economic forces that drove American independence were back to ensnare us in economic investment schemes? More to the point, there is evidence that the same economic interests that built the Southern Pacific empire during the last century pulled out of the state in the 1990's , moving onto China.

In less than a decade all of the old Southern Pacific alliance was sold off: Southern Pacific, then Pacific Bell, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Chevron. All except PG&E. The timing coincided with the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank Co's (HSBC) growing interest in China. Does HSBC, the remnants of English banking empire in Asia and the middle east, have similar ties to California? They Sure do. Crocker, PG&E and Wells Fargo were all major interests of the HSBC family.

I ran out of money in 1984. My $50 a month rents were replaced by $200 and $500 month prices. By the mid 1980's Reagonomics and the real estate barons had destroyed the San Francisco I had come to take part in. I stored my documents and found a niche to hang onto while the city burned to the ground and was replaced by a corporate fantasy land.

East India Trading Co.

King George III

Morgan, Rockefeller & Harriman

So the investigation sat in a box for 20 years.

With the advent of the dot.com era, Enron, energy deregulation, and George W. Bush, a whole new era of corporate warfare opened up. It was time to dust off those old papers and start taking advantage of the new computer tools that would allow such a major project.

A critical shift in my thinking has occurred over the last 20 years. In 1983, I was simply looking for corrupt corporate practices of PG&E as a resource for the antinuclear movement. But what I discovered was far beyond a series of unethical actions by a big corporation. Believe me I found those unethical actions! But buried within the dusty old articles at the Examiner of a hundred years ago were angry voices talking about the Octopus, the Ruef Scandals and the bosses who ran California with an iron fist, while lavishing themselves in wealth not seen but in just a few places on earth. Following the money and lines of power that built the Golden State were to be found everywhere, except in the public's consciousness. Most Californians have come here to find the proverbial golden city of ancient lore. And like nearly all who came, have been ensnared in the the corporate plantation state of the few who gained control of California. Its land, transportation, political and economic structure.

King George IV

Hiram Johnson: Ruef Prosecutor

Abe Ruef

From the 1890's up to 1912 the Octopus and all of its tentacles were behind the growing corruption of the city and the state. Over a century prior to the dot.com bubble, the electric power revolution came to San Francisco and became the hottest new investment scam. The biggest players in town started playing a high stakes poker game, with the goal of pushing everyone else out. The battle would anger the public and help jumpstart the public power campaign in San Francisco.

At the time, franchises to build electric power plants as well as rates to the public were set by the city board of supervisors. The growing bribery scandals in the city and across the country peaked with the Abe Ruef scandals that broke into the open just after the 1906 earthquake.

This corruption helped widen a nationwide campaign for publicly owned water and electric power. In San Francisco, Mayor Phelan supported the idea of public power by building a dam that would later turn into the Hetch Hetchy scandal.

Hetch Hetchy

Samuel Insull

CPUC Logo

JP Morgan

The formation also was timed appropriately for Wall Street investors to consolidate and take over all of the small mom and pop power companies just like like the dot.com battles of the nineties swallowed up all of the innovators that made the Internet and computers such a major revolution. Within years, PG&E would take over hundreds of locally owned power companies. The money making this possible were, you guessed it, the Southern Pacific gang and their Wall Street brethren like J.P. Morgan. By the time the reformers were forced out of office, the PUC's, here and around the country were all in the pocket of lobbyists and the very power brokers it was meant to regulate.

Public control of power hadn't gone away in California. The political battle over public versus private control raged across the country and would become a cornerstone of FDR's New Deal. Today, you wouldn't know it that FDR's most important speeches that swept him into office were built around the raging political battle over public control over electricity.

Ahh! I had entered the world of conspiracies and lost history that the victorious powers had driven out of American's awareness. The battles of our ancestors fought the robber barons. Those battles have long disappeared from all but the dustbins of old books. Note that I didn't use the term "history books". Why? Because corporate America used their economic power to reshape the public power debate into a war against creeping socialism. And they did this using their advertising dollars in the nations media, but more importantly they did so by gaining control of the nations textbook companies.

California Hydro Plant

Public Power = Red Scare

Insull goes to jail

The New Deal Meant public power

FDR would use public power as one of his most important campaign issues. The campaign would peak when Sam Insull's Midwest electric empire collapsed when JP Morgan killed a last ditch loan attempt. Insull would resign his 70 chairmanships and flea to Europe, as hundreds' of thousands would lose their life savings. Insull would flee the U.S., only to be hunted down on a ship off the coast of Turkey a couple of years later.

A multi-year investigation would document the holding company scam's including the largest of them, the Electric Bond & Share Group, which was originally started by J.P. Morgan as a retirement fund for General Electric employees.

Starting on May 21st 1933, FDR's handpicked investigator Ferdinand Pecero carried out hearings within congress that exposed the inner workings of JP Morgan's empire. The power of syndicated trusts linked 167 U.S. corporations as well as the Federal Reserve Bank to the Morgan empire.

The most astounding fact was that Morgan was working for the Bank of England. America's most powerful capitalist was not only an agent of the British government but was part of an elite group that were using the Federal Reserve system, created during a special session of congress with only a few attendees on the Christmas eve of 1913, to stabilize the English financial system.

In just a few short months after taking office, FDR was able to use his powers to expose the following corporate driven agendas:

• The strategic attack on public ownership of power and water;
• Morgan's role in working for the British empire;
• The National City Bank and other syndicated Trust fronts;
• The theft of America's gold reserves;
• The enslavement of America's working people;
• The abuse of power by elite clans of wealthy bandits.

EBASCo Companies

Morgan at Pecero hearings

Rural Electric Association

Boulder (Hoover) Dam

Shasta Dam

The idea that a sitting president would use the trading with the enemies act to stop the British and New York bankers from stealing this country's gold is a statement of just how much trouble America was in when FDR took office. The attempt to assasinate and frame him as a nazi failed. His most important legislative victories were the social security Act, the Glass-Steigal Act, and the Public Utilities Holding Company Act. The later being one of the most bitterly fought legal battles in U.S. history. His public works projects, that put millions of people to work was hightlighted by his support for public power projects that would bring electricity to the rural and urban poor of america. Today, Glass-Steigall and PUHCA are gone. With Social Security under attack by the republican insurgency.

In what would be the first post FDR assault on public power, and following the theft of Hetch Hetchy, PG&E and allies would take over California's Central Valley Project, via legislative tactics that killed funding for power lines from Friant and Shasta Dams. Republicans would then rename Boulder Dam to Hoover Dam as part of their ongoing attack on public power. In every legislative session since the 1980's attempts have been made to dismantle TVA, BPA, PUHCA and all things public power. In 1984 the country's promise of letting public utilities bid on the over 400 dams that were built on public property in the 1920's and 30's was reversed. This meant over 60 dams in California were given outright to PG&E and SoCal Edison.

With the Steve Peace and Pete Wilson's deregulation of California's electric industry, we have watched as PG&E went bankrupt shortly after George Bush's buddy Ken Lay went after the state's power system. Billions of resources were stolen from the state's commonwealth.

The plan to complete the deregulation, or removal of all public oversite of private control over the state's electric system amounts to one of the largest private thefts of public resources in history.

In what has to be one of the longest public relations victories in history, private power interests have succeed in erasing the bitter struggle over public control of electricity.

TV Oil Tycoons: Dallas

Defining Our Dominator Culture's Propaganda

Our socalled "Western Civilization" has been ensnared for millenia by elitist bullies with the intent of maintaining their dominator tactics. Breaking free of these technocratic terrorists who rule the world is the single most important challenge today. America's elite have perfected the art of propaganda via the corporate media. Buried within the media's propaganda tactics that drive our consumer culture are the very tools that could set humanity free.

During the height of the depression, a time when the elite had lost control of the public, a Gallup survey of our wealthiest citizen's showed that a large majority of them were opposed to democracy, favoring some form of monarchy. Is it just a fantasy that the corporate boardrooms of America's largest companies look and behave so much like the royal courts of Europe? How many U.S. companies let their workers vote for their leaders? Corporations have much the same authoritarian relationship with their workers that Kings had with their subjects.

Are we not witnessing a media establishment that demands loyalty
to the corporate bottom line? There are many brilliant
commentaries like Voltaire's Candida, 1984, the Matrix, Network, or the Wizard of Oz on how the ruling class has subdued humans. Whether you are born into it, or buy into it, the purpose of this dominator culture is to extract power, wealth and loyalty.

Only 10% of Americans have ever travelled abroad. An even smaller percentage has ever done so other than as a hotel hopping
tourist. Americans have been straightjacketed by racial tactics
that blind them culturally. Yet, the American dream has been
promoted globally. For decades Hollywood has exported TV series like Dallas or Baywatch planetwide including to the middle east. The 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center was a wake up call on how America's fantasy world looks to devout muslims and other cultures. How dare we think that flaunting our cultural decadence upon the rest of the world wouldn't have impacts!

Thanks to TV and the media, Americans are hardly more than a
bunch of frogs who've had their brains boiled by the corporate
media. Just follow the Yellow Brick Road (American Dream) and the (corporate) Wizard will take care of us!

The corporate media certainly won't pull the curtain away and expose the workings of the corporate establishment. During the 1990's, a careful documentation of PG&E, just one corporation's behavior, would show that the media is incapable of showing us the big picture of criminal actions that would have put any citizen in California away for life.

Its time to start taking back our legal system, our government, airwaves and our society from the thieves who have destroyed it.

With the power of computers to organize and store large amounts of data, we have the potential to reorganize the way we look at history. We can start to deconstruct the corporate ideology for all to see. The worship of Machiavellian power has turned this country into a lair for corporate brainwashing. In the 1970's the U.S. was forced to acknowledge that its addiction to oil was in danger of destroying the country's security. We had reached the peak oil status. The point where our demand for oil was greater than our supplies. The huge gas lines would forever imprint upon Americans the dangerous times ahead if we did not move away from oil.

Those gas lines, just like the food lines of the great depression were warnings. Today we are facing the propaganda of oil oligarchy and military industrial complex's terror tactics. Our oil in the middle east must be preserved or our way of life is threatened with extinction!

Americans today are faced with an ideological battle like nothing since the 1860's. The rich are at war today with America. They are being led by the corporate media that has been behind generations of propaganda. One of the most agregious examples of the war was during the congressional campaign for finance reform. No where did the media once mention that they, themselves were the leading opponent of reform. Nor did they mention a single peep about Collin Powell's son attempted to further concentrate corporate media's grip on America.

Today, there is no greater issue than the tactics of brainwashing that have been used to shape American culture by the corporate media. Americans are a culture of frogs, living in a gigantic pot of hot water that has been turned up so high that they can't recognize what has happened to themselves. Generations of poor children have been criminalized by advertizing tactics. The nag factor has been used for decades to sell the latest toys or addictive sugar coated foods to American children. These same children as adults have been sold a growing mash of dualistic, competition driven authoritarianism.

Get up out of your chairs. Go to the window and shout

I'm Mad as Hell! I'm not gonna take it any more!

"We deal in illusions, man. None of it is true. But you people sit there day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds. We're all you know. You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress like the tube. You eat like the tube. You raise your children like the tube. You even think like the tube. This is mass madness -- you maniacs! In God's name you people are the real thing, WE are the illusion."
-- Peter Finch as Howard Beale in Network

Over 150 years ago, the media led the campaign to wipe American indians from the face of the earth. William Randolph Hearst would use his father's mining wealth to build the first, and still one of the most powerful media conglomerates in the world. He would use his newspapers to invade countries, promote politicians, including the election of FDR. Roosevelt's "communist" ideas would drive Hearst into the arms of Hitler.

They are adamant in pushing ahead with the globalization of the corporate agenda. This antidemocratic agenda if successful will surely bring on a new era of haves and have not's like nothing we have yet to experience. The corporate plantations that will drive the coming Brave New World Order are just around the corner unless we start using our resources to demonstrate to the growing number of Americans just what kind of game plan is being planned for the world and those who don't go along with the corporate agenda.

As more historical material becomes available, it is critical that we start to place these important images and documents into a new format that will help us get a new image of the corporate elephant and what it is doing to our world. This project focusses on the San Francisco Bay Area's corporate Mafia history. It shouldn't be long before such projects come online that help draw us to the other regional Mafia groups across the world. Corporate bullies have the economic power today. It is only a matter of time before they collapse. Our challenge today will be to organize these materials so that our children will find a better way.

Click for speech

Yes, poverty is now a crime and the golden rule has been replaced by the rule of gold. Entire generations of Americans have been ensnared in the dominator model of the Public Relations industry. Americans have run out of time. They barely have the time to read the headlines and yet most, distrust the details as boring or unfashionable. News is nothing more than entertainment or a fashion statement holding no greater importance to most citizens than the pet rock fad 2 decades ago. Real news is locked into the black hole of copyright laws, making it all but impossible to document the past without selling yourself out.

Our senses are ensnared in a corporate media war of sound bytes that is burying our ability to focus on the corporate invasion of the world.

LBJ's War on Poverty

U.S. 20th Century Invasions

US nuclear weapons testing fallout