The "franchise" is the ownership of certain key industries and the cash those industries generate, which allows for a high degree of political influence and the control of non-business institutions (academia, foundations, religious denominations.) High levels of political influence and control of institutions protect or allow the franchise to grow.
A number of authors, both esteemed academics, like Professor Carrol Quigley, and cranks, have argued that the owners of the franchise are not some amorphous collection of businessmen acting independently at a particular point in time because of similar or naturally aligned economic interests. Rather, some of the esteemed and the less than esteemed, authors have argued that those businessmen actively collude and conspire in secret. They have done so through organizations such as the Milner Group, Rhodes Roundtable, the Council on Foreign Relations, Skull & Bones and other secret societies.
As Quigley and others have pointed out, the World War I era provided a springboard for the owners of the franchise. We would argue that the out-sized profits earned during the World War I era for a leap in control of important industries, politicians and underlying government bureaucracies, and the non-business/non-government institutions.
Was Woodrow Wilson a Victim of Kompromat?
It looks like WWI was viewed by a loose confederation of industrialists and a few families with vast amounts of inherited wealth as the perfect opportunity to obtain permanent financing for the franchise. Aside from the mainstream view as to how and why WWI was started, and how and why the USA decided to enter the war, there is a decent amount of literature that Woodrow Wilson was essentially under the control of the industrialists and wealthy families. We have heard the argument that Wilson was under control for the simple reason that he was not all that bright and was a pushover. Another argument is that Wilson was blackmailed as noted in the last paragraph below. (Wilson being both "blackmailable" and a "dunce" is also believable.)
Original Owners of The Franchise are Still in the Blackmail Business
Every once in a while, a family wealth adviser will throw out the anecdote that most wealthy families will exhaust all of their money within three generations. That is, the heirs of the average wealthy industrialist in 1900 will have usually wasted, squandered, spent whatever they inherited by 1975 (there is no standard for years in a generation [roughly 20 to 30 years].)
Given the ability of heirs, in general, to squander, seeing the same family names associated with both the Woodrow Wilson Administration and Donald Trump Administration leads us to speculate, or even narrow down, who the owners of the Franchise were, and remain.
We don't hear much about Thomas Fortune Ryan much anymore (mentioned above as a financial supporter of Wilson) but the heirs and relatives of his associates are still coming up with plots to protect their positions of power and the broader colluding corporate franchise.
Thomas F. Ryan was one of the founders of the American Tobacco Company with James Buchanan Duke. He was also one of the founders of The Belgian American Coke Ovens Corp.
The Belgian American Coke Ovens Corp. is kind of an obscure sounding company and we are still looking into its origins and what became of it. Nevertheless, it was well capitalized ($143 million in 2019 dollars) at its founding in 1921 and its organizers consist of some of the wealthiest and most influential bankers and industrialists at the time.
Aside from Thomas F. Ryan, George Herbert Walker Bush's grandfather was a board member. The "prominent Belgians" mentioned worked for the Rothschild Bank and then there is Hector Prud'homme. The Prud'homme family is connected through marriage to the Bissell family (Richard Bissell was CIA Director of Plans at the CIA until fired by JFK over the Bay of Pigs debacle.)
Richard Bissell Jr. is also the first cousin once removed from Robert Swan Mueller the 3rd.
