excerpts from the book
Wall Street and FDR
by Antony C. Sutton
Buccaneer Books, 1975, paperback
p72
John D. Rockefeller and his 19th century fellow-capitalists were
convinced of one absolute truth: that no great monetary wealth
could be accumulated under the impartial rules of a competitive
laissez faire society. The only sure road to the acquisition of
massive wealth was monopoly: drive out your competitors, reduce
competition, eliminate laissez-faire, and above all get state
protection for your industry through compliant politicians and
government regulation. This last avenue yields a legal monopoly,
and a legal monopoly always leads to wealth.
p72
The difference between a corporate state monopoly and a socialist
state monopoly is essentially only the identity of the group controlling
the power structure.
p72
The essence of socialism is monopoly control by the state.
p73
Success for the Rockefeller gambit has depended particularly upon
focusing public attention upon largely irrelevant and superficial
historical creations, such as the myth of a struggle between capitalists
and communists, and careful cultivation of political forces by
big business. We call this phenomenon of corporate legal monopoly-market
control acquired by using political influence-by the name of corporate
socialism.
p73
We call [the] phenomenon of corporate legal monopoly-market control
acquired by using political influence-by the name of corporate
socialism.
p73
Corporate socialism is intimately related to making society work
for the few.
p73
Frederick Howe, in his 1906 booklet 'Confessions of a Monopolist'
This is the story of something for nothing
- of making the other fellow pay. This making the other fellow
pay, of getting something for nothing, explains the lust for franchises,
mining rights, tariff privileges, railway control, tax evasions.
All these things mean monopoly, and all monopoly is bottomed on
legislation.
Monopoly laws are born in corruption.
The commercialism of the press, or education, even of sweet charity,
is part of the price we pay for the special privileges created
by law. The desire of something for nothing, of making the other
fellow pay, of monopoly in some form or other, is the cause of
corruption. Monopoly and corruption are cause and effect. Together,
they work in Congress, in our Commonwealths, in our municipalities.
It is always so. It always has been so. Privilege gives birth
to corruption, just as the poisonous sewer breeds disease. Equal
chance, a fair field and no favors, the "square deal"
are never corrupt. They do not appear in legislative halls nor
in Council Chambers. For these things mean labor for labor, value
for value, something for something. This is why the little business
man, the retail and wholesale dealer, the jobber, and the manufacturer
are not the business men whose business corrupts politics.
p74
Frederick Howe, in his 1906 booklet 'Confessions of a Monopolist'
Privilege gives birth to corruption, just
as the poisonous sewer breeds disease. Equal chance, a fair field
and no favors, the "square deal" are never corrupt.
They do not appear in legislative halls nor in Council Chambers.
For these things mean labor for labor, value for value, something
for something. This is why the little business man, the retail
and wholesale dealer, the jobber, and the manufacturer are not
the business men whose business corrupts politics.
p74
Frederick Howe, in his 1906 booklet 'Confessions of a Monopolist'
Monopoly laws are born in corruption.
The commercialism of the press, or education, even of sweet charity,
is part of the price we pay for the special privileges created
by law. The desire of something for nothing, of making the other
fellow pay, of monopoly in some form or other, is the cause of
corruption. Monopoly and corruption are cause and effect. Together,
they work in Congress, in our Commonwealths, in our municipalities.
It is always so. It always has been so. Privilege gives birth
to corruption, just as the poisonous sewer breeds disease. Equal
chance, a fair field and no favors, the "square deal"
are never corrupt. They do not appear in legislative halls nor
in Council Chambers. For these things mean labor for labor, value
for value, something for something. This is why the little business
man, the retail and wholesale dealer, the jobber, and the manufacturer
are not the business men whose business corrupts politics.
p75
Corporate socialism is a system where those few who hold the legal
monopolies of financial and industrial control profit at the expense
of all others in society.
p75
The Federal Reserve System is in effect a private banking monopoly,
not answerable to Congress or the public, but with legal monopoly
control over money supply without let or hindrance or even audit
by the General Accounting Office. It was irresponsible manipulation
of money supply by this Federal Reserve System that brought about
the inflation of the 1920s, the 1929 Depression, and so the presumed
requirement for a Roosevelt New Deal.
p75
The Federal Reserve System is in effect a private banking monopoly,
not answerable to Congress or the public, but with legal monopoly
control over money supply.
p83
[The philosophy of Wall Street financiers was] anything but laissez-faire
competition, which was the last system they envisaged. Socialism,
communism, fascism or their variants were acceptable. The ideal
for these financiers was "cooperation," forced if necessary.
Individualism was out, and competition was immoral... compulsory
cooperation was their golden road to a legal monopoly. Under the
guise of public service, social objectives, and assorted do-goodism
it is fundamentally "Let society go to work for Wall Street."
p85
Former socialist editor Benito Mussolini marched on Rome and established
- with liberal help from the J.P. Morgan Company - the Italian
corporate state whose organizational structure is distinctly reminiscent
of [Franklin] Roosevelt's NRA. In the United States glorification
of Mussolini and his Italian achievements was promoted by the
ever-present financiers Thomas Lamont, Otto Kahn, and others.
p85
Construction of FDR's National Recovery Administration [NRA] was
but one facet of a wider historical process - construction of
economic systems where the few could profit at the expense of
the many, the citizen-taxpayer-in-the-street - and all of course
promoted under the guise of the public good, whether it was Stalin's
Russia, Mussolini's Italy, Hitler's Germany, or Roosevelt's New
Deal.
p91
In the writing of Bernard Baruch [is seen] the basic objectives
of Karl Marx writing in The Communist Manifesto. What is different
between the two systems are the names of the elitist few running
the operation known as state planning; the vanguard of the proletariat
in Karl Marx is replaced by the vanguard of big business in Bernard
Baruch.
p91
Consumer interests are always protected by free competition in
the market place, where goods and services are produced at the
least cost, in the most efficient manner, and the consumer is
given maximum choice among competing producers.
p91
Who benefits from [the] proposals for trade associations and government
coordination of industry? The principal, indeed the only major
benefactors - apart from the swarms of academic advisers, bureaucrats,
and planners - would be the financial elite in Wall Street.
p143
John W. McCormack, Chairman, Special Committee on Un-American
Activities, House of Representatives, February 15, 1935
In the last few weeks of the committee's
official life it received evidence showing that certain persons
had made an attempt to establish a fascist organization in this
country. There is no question that these attempts were discussed,
were planned, and might have been placed in execution when and
if the financial backers deemed it expedient.
... This committee received evidence
from Maj. Gen. Smedley D. Butter (retired), twice decorated by
the Congress of the United States... your committee was able to
verify all the pertinent statements made by General Butler.
p143
On November 21, 1934 The New York Times printed the first portion
of the [General Smedley] Butler story as told to the House Un-American
Activities Committee ... The New York Times report [said] that
General [Smedley] Butler had told friends ... that General Hugh
S. Johnson, former NRA [National Recovery Act] administrator,
was scheduled for the role of dictator, and J.P. Morgan &
Co. as well as Murphy & Co. were behind the plot... After
this promising opening, The New York Times reporting gradually
faded away and finally disappeared.
p144
The central figure in the plot [to overthrow FDR] was Major General
Smedley Darlington Butler, a colorful, popular, widely known Marine
Corps officer, twice decorated with the Congressional Medal of
Honor and a veteran of 33 years of military service. General Butler
testified in 1934 to the McCorrnack-Dickstein Committee investigating
Nazi and Communist activities in the United States that a plan
for a White House dictatorship was outlined to him by two members
of the American Legion.
... General Butler is reported to have
testified that the affair was an attempted coup d'etat to overthrow
President Roosevelt and replace him with a fascist dictator.
p153
The story of an attempted take-over of executive power in the
United States [the plot to overthrow Franklin Roosevelt] was suppressed,
not only by parties directly interested, but also by several institutions
usually regarded as protectors of constitutional liberty and
freedom of inquiry. Among the groups suppressing information were
(1) the Congress of the United States, (2) the press, notably
Time [magazine] and The New York Times, and (3) the White House
itself. It is also notable that no academic inquiry has been conducted
into what is surely one of the more ominous events in recent American
history.
... Suppression by the House Un-American
Activities Committee took the form of deleting extensive excerpts
relating to Wall Street financiers including Guaranty Trust director
Graysori Murphy, J.P. Morgan, the Du Pont interests, Remington
Arms, and others allegedly involved in the plot attempt.
p155
In 1917 Congressman Callaway inserted into The Congressional Record
the following critique of the JP Morgan control of the press:
In March, 1915, the J.P. Morgan interests,
the steel, shipbuilding, and powder interests, and their subsidiary
organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world
and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in
the United States and a sufficient number of them to control generally
the policy of the daily press of the United States.
These 12 men worked the problem out by
selecting 179 newspapers, and then began by an elimination process,
to retain only those necessary for the purpose of controlling
the general policy of the daily press throughout the country.
They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25
of the greatest papers. The 25 papers were agreed upon; emissaries
were sent to purchase the policy, national and international,
of these papers; an agreement was reached; the policy of the papers
was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished
for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding
the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies,
and other things of national and international nature considered
vital to the interests of the purchasers.
This contract is in existence at the present
time, and it accounts for the news columns of the daily press
of the country being filled with all sorts of preparedness arguments
and misrepresentations as to the present condition of the United
States Army and Navy and the possibility and probability of the
United States being attacked by foreign foes.
This policy also included the suppression
of everything in opposition to the wishes of the interests served.
The effectiveness of this scheme has been conclusively demonstrated
by the character of stuff carried in the daily press throughout
the country since March 1915. They have resorted to anything necessary
to commercialize public sentiment and sandbag the National Congress
into making extravagant and wasteful appropriations for the Army
and Navy under the false pretense that it was necessary. Their
stock argument is that it is "patriotism." They are
playing on every prejudice and passion of the American people.
p170
Franklin D. Roosevelt privately believed that the U.S. government
was owned by a financial elite.
p172
[Franklin] Roosevelt was a Wall Streeter, descended from prominent
Wall Street families and backed financially by Wall Street. The
policies implemented by the Roosevelt regime were precisely those
required by the world of international finance.
p173
Corporate socialism [is] the political way of running an economy
[that] is more attractive to big business because it avoids the
rigors and the imposed efficiency of a market system... through
business control or influence in regulatory agencies and the police
power of the state, the political system is an effective way to
gain a monopoly, and a legal monopoly always leads to wealth.
p177
The objective of [the financial elite] is monopoly acquisition
of wealth - corporate socialism. It thrives on the political process,
and it would fade away if it were exposed to the activity of a
free market.
Antony
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