How colonialism in India funded John 'Forbes' Kerry and American industry

[Guest guest]

"rajiv malhotra" How colonialism in India funded John

'Forbes' Kerry and American industrySat, 4 Dec 2004 11:57:23 -0500

The following was sent to me by Sanjay Garg. It is an eye-opener about

historical facts most of us do not know. The significance of this is not about

Kerry personally, but what it tells us about unacknowledged events in America’s

industrial development and power structure.) :

 

 

- The great grandfather & grandfather of Senator John "Forbes" Kerry amassed a

huge fortune smuggling opium during the Opium Wars. The British wanted to keep

a monopoly on supplying the Chinese with opium grown in India. [indian land was

redistributed to change from other crops to opium because the British needed

opium for trade.] However, during the Opium Wars the British ships were

prevented from delivering their cargoes of opium so American ships under Forbes

sailed the final miles, making huge amounts of money by delivering the opium for

the British.

 

- Many Forbes family members used this fortune to later finance merchant banking

and railroad investment projects around the world.

 

- Kerry's great grandfather, Robert Bennett Forbes, started Russell and Company,

a shipping empire and was later instrumental in the development and endowment of

Yale University.

 

- The Dictionary of American Biography reports that the noted American ship

captain Robert Bennet Forbes played "a prominent role in the outbreak of the

Chinese Opium War."

 

- After the Opium War, the Forbes family hastily cashed out their fortune and

reinvested in Europe and the United States. Some of the population growth of

Chicago and Midwestern Plains states in the middle to late 19th century was due

to John Murray Forbes' railroad projects in Michigan and Chicago. The Chicago,

Burlington & Quincy Railroad Co., from Chicago west to the Pacific was built by

John Murray Forbes.

 

- In 1879, William Forbes, son of John Murray Forbes, used the family fortune to

financially back Alexander Graham Bell's telephone company, and himself become

president of the company. In 1885, Bell Telephone became known as American

Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T), which in 1899 became the overall

holding company for all the Bell ventures, and remains active today.

 

- William Cameron Forbes became an investment banker & used his wealth to become

Governor General of the Philippines between 1908-1913. He was only 38 years old

at the time. He was the son of William Hathaway Forbes, president of the Bell

Telephone Company, and of Edith Emerson, a daughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

 

- William Cameron Forbes' niece Ruth Forbes Paine Young tapped her Forbes family

inheritance to finance the International Peace Academy. Her husband invented the

Bell Helicopter used in the Korean and Vietnam Wars.

 

- Many Forbes family members purchased estates in France and Massachusetts, and

remain very influential there, in local or national politics. John Forbes Kerry

is a U.S. Senator and was a candidate for President of the U.S. and is currently

a beneficiary of several Forbes family trusts (c. 2002)

 

- Kerry's first cousin and childhood friend is Brice Lalonde who was a candidate

for President of France in 1981 & both share the same grandparents. In 1988 he

was named Minister of the Environment, and in 1990 founded the Green Party

Génération Ecologie. Lalonde is currently mayor of Saint-Briac-sur-Mer, a small

French village where the Forbes family keeps an estate. He is the heir to

several Forbes family offshore trusts. Note Kerry's current antipathy to

outsourcing does not extend to outsourcing his

own wealth to offshore trusts.

 

- The Forbes family owns, through the family JM Forbes Naushon Island Trust,

named for the wealthy John Murray Forbes, the private Naushon Island, part of

the Elizabeth Islands NW of Martha's Vineyard and SW of Cape Cod.