Bribes ... Bribes... Bribes THE LOCKHEED WAY

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Since the end of the Second Aircraft Corporation has paid out at least £13m in bribes, kickbacks and other amenities to agents and officials in countries throughout the world.

That was the picture which emerged from an investigation by the US Senate Subcommittee on Multinational Corporations into the company's financial records.

The most spectacular Lockheed's exploits included:

*7m dollars funnelled to various Japanese officials through ultrarightist kingmaker. Yoshio Kodama to push the F-104 Starfighter and later civilian planes;

*1.1m dollars to high government officials in the Netherlands, almost certainly involving Prince Bernhard, for help in selling the F-104 and the P-2B anti-submarine warfare plane;

*1.6m dollars lavished Italians in connection with the sale of 14 C-130 Hercules cargo planes - two former defence ministers are among those already having been indicted.

Also mentioned as beneficiaries of the Lockheed slush fund are Mexico, Iran, Nigeria and Columbia and the list is anything but complete.

GRAFT

Whoever goes to jail in connection with this seemingly limitless case of graft, it is not likely to be the directors of Lockheed.

The US law cares very little about such things, and the Senate's interest is only to make sure that companies make proper reports of monies spent abroad and keep their tax evasion within plausible limits.

In fact the response of other companies to the Lockheed case has been to come running to the Senate with their tales of international corruption, just to be on the safe side of the law. Among the 85 or so corporations so far reporting are:

-Occidental Petroleum Corporation with 1.6 million dollars to several Venezuelans, including the country's governor on Ene Executive Board of OPEC, Alberto Flores;

-Northrop Corporation with 30 million dollars to foreign officials in Italy, Greece, Portugal, somalia, Turkey and other countries;

-Boeing Aircraft, with foreign political contributions of 70m dollars during the last five years, which the company insists were "certainly legal" and anything but bribes;

Aerospace Corp., which is under heavy attack from the Iranians for having foolishly paid several million dollars in lubrication money to individual agents instead of the Iranian government itself.

The truly international character of this basic activity of capitalism is shown by the recent revelations that Shell and BP contributed respectively £2.5 million and £800,000 to the three political parties of the Italian coalition government between 1969 and 1973.

BP's involvement is particularly embarrassing for the British government, which owns 48% of the company's stock (the Bank of Bernhard which he used to finance the beginnings of the rightist Liberal-Democratic Party, which today governs the country.

Kodama is one of the most powerful of the Japanese ruling class, having made and broken the careers of numerous politicians and on several occasions named the new Prime Minister He became an unofficial (but well-paid) agent of Lockheed in 1958, when the company was about to lose a large contract to Grumman. With the help of Prime Minister Kishi and the pilot who planned the attack on Pearl Harbour, Gen. Minoru Genda (both old prison friends), he got the original decision cancelled and won the campaign for Lockheed.

Kodama's later efforts on behalf of his client did not always succeed, but in 1972 he brought off a similar stunt in the sale of Lockheed TriStars to All-Nippon Airways, after the Douglas DC-10 had already been chosen.

ONE BILLION And a Kodama-inspired deal with the Japanese Airforce for 100 Lockheed anti-submarine P-3C Orions was about to go through for 1 billion dollars (Kodama himself stood to pocket about 1m dollars!) when the scandal broke.

The calls by Japanese "honourable" rightists for Kodama to commit ritual suicide and the unsuccessful attack on his home by hapless porn star Mitsuyasu Maeno could suggest that Kodama was himself on the lunatic fringe, far from the graces of the "respectable" US government. Lockheed TriStar Companies have long made "foreign policy", even in conspiring to bring down governments, without the US getting much bothered about it.

Remember the collusion between ITT and the CIA in 1970 in trying to keep Allende out of power!

SCANDAL

And now that Lockheed's story, and those of dozens of other companies have come before the public eye, the US government is doing all it can to contain scandal, passing on information to the other countries concerned only on condition that it be suppressed except where used in court cases. This is why US officials are so annoyed at the public revelations which have rocked the Italian US government officials have grumbled about the dangers of Lockheed's establishing its own independent "foreign policy". But that is clearly a fraud, given the general unanimity of interests between American-based multinationals and the Us government whose global strategy is calculated to support capitalist exploitation on an international scale.

DISCLOSURE

The Treasury Department even opposes the OECD's pious code of conduct for multinational corporations because it would require public disclosure of information on business operations, sales. and profitability on a country-bycountry basis.

As Sorbonne history professor exploitation, liberty to make and break governments in the scramble for profits, liberty to hawk lethal weapons to fascists and adventurers every corner of the world.

Those liberties are in irreconcilable conflict with the rights and interests of workers to resist exploitation and to fight against imperialist conquest on behalf of all By the struggle to open the books of multinationals workers will strike a deadly blow to the lethal "liberties" of Lockheed:

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