Wall Street and FDR: Chapter 5

Making Society Work for the Few

While society is struggling toward liberty, these famous men who put themselves at its head are filled with the spirit of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They think only of subjecting mankind to the philanthropic tyranny of their own social inventions. Frederic Bastiat, The Law, (New York: Foundation for Economic Education, 1972), p. 52

So FDR gets elected New York Governor after an amazing career on the "Street", racking up the bonding business for the Fidelity Company. He created a network that spanned from Owen Young of General Electric to International Bankers gleaning the harvest in a ruined Germany. He accomplished these feats by using the police power of the state via regulatory agencies, a theme that has continued to the present day. FDR had a competitive edge due to these political devices that are not born of free market economics, but are created by those who have the political power to forge them. These regulatory agencies use political coercion to shut out those deemed by the politicians, who are frequently beneficiaries of the scheme, competitors in the marketplace.

Now lets talk about the two things that the mainstream and conservative (piss stream imo) media don't want you to put together: the words corporate and socialism. You've been trained to think that corporations are diametrically opposed to socialism, but the regular reader of this blog knows that they absolutely LOVE socialism. Why do you think Obama got so much campaign money from big corporations? They WANT him to implement all out state controls on us proles. 

We join our host, Dr. Antony Sutton:

THE ORIGINS OF CORPORATE SOCIALISM

Old 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.

Yes, they hate Ron Paul because he wants us to return to a laissez-faire economy and get rid of regulation. He doesn't want to get rid of just a few regs here and there so as not to disrupt their ongoing quest for worldwide monopoly, but the whole shebang. End the RP plug and moving on..

This robber baron schema is also, under different labels, the socialist plan. The difference between a corporate state monopoly and a socialist state monopoly is essentially only the identity of the group controlling the power structure. The essence of socialism is monopoly control by the state using hired planners and academic sponges. On the other hand, Rockefeller, Morgan, and their corporate friends aimed to acquire and control their monopoly and to maximize its profits through influence in the state political apparatus; this, while it still needs hired planners and academic sponges, is a discreet and far more subtle process than outright state ownership under socialism. 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.

If you don't know who Frederic C. Howe was, you need to check out his book Confessions of a Monopolist, available in my X Files tab. There he spells out how you build a monopoly. He started with his paper route and wound up building a political machine in his town. He's also a player in the Bolshevik Revolution and in the New Deal. He was always hanging around these guys.

Here is a snippet of Howe:

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.
And 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.

Now Dr. Sutton goes on to talk about "compulsion".

The monopoly economic system based on corruption and privilege described by Howe is a politically run economy. It is at the same time also a system of disguised forced labor, called by Ludwig von Mises the Zwangswirtschaft system, a system of compulsion. It is this element of compulsion that is common to all politically run economies: Hitler's New Order, Mussolini's corporate state, Kennedy's New Frontier, Johnson's Great Society, and Nixon's Creative Federalism. Compulsion was also an element in Herbert Hoover's reaction to the depression and much more obviously in Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and the National Recovery Administration.

So compulsion lets a few live off of the many. This is what we see going on today. While many of you will revile the Occupy Wall Streeters, a group I detailed as a total set-up whose purpose, I would surmise was to diffuse any dissent from the obvious shift in wealth. It doesn't make you a communist to point out that a thief just ran out of a bank with two sacks of money. Nor does it make you a communist to point out that men in positions of power rigging an economy through the power of the state wind up pretty damn rich.


Need an old timey example?

 For example, to make the point clear, the Interstate Commerce Commission, created in 1880, exists to restrict competition in the transportation industry, not to get the best deal possible for shippers. Similarly, the Civil Aeronautics Board exists to protect the domestic aviation industry, not the airline traveler.

In brief, regulatory agencies are devices to use the police power of the state to shield favored industries from competition, to protect their inefficiencies, and to guarantee their profits. And, of course, these devices are vehemently defended by their wards: the regulated businessmen or, as we term them, "the corporate socialists."

Enter the Federal Reserve Act: the piece de restistance of money changing at the max:

In modern America the most significant illustration of society as a whole working for the few is the 1913 Federal Reserve Act. 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.⁵ 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. 

Problem-Reaction-Solution. The playbook is always the same, but the general public goes along every time. They think you're stupid because you've let them do it to you. SOPA, NDAA, Patriot Act, GATT, NAFTA you've probably supported one or more of these. I know I did at one point, and now I'm feeling pretty dumb.


But the Elites do what they always do, write books about how doggone Elite they are:

One can trace a literary path by which prominent financiers have pushed for national planning and control for their own benefit and that ultimately evolved into the Roosevelt New Deal.

Two themes are common in these Wall Street literary efforts. First, that individualism, individual effort, and individual initiative are out of date and that "destructive" competition, usually termed "blind competition" or "dog-eat-dog competition" is outmoded, unwanted, and destructive of human ideals. Second, we can identify a theme that follows from this attack on individualism and competition to the effect that great advantages accrue from cooperation, that cooperation advances technology, and that cooperation prevents the "wastes of competition." It is then concluded by these financier philosophers that trade associations and ultimately economic planning—in other words, enforced "cooperation"—are a prime objective for responsible and enlightened modern businessmen.

Ever been to summer camp and told you would be having "mandatory fun"?  In order to grind humanity downward, they have to convince you to be less individualistic and give over some of your brainpower to those who know better. Now we live in a world of "experts" who don't know how to boil water without instructions.

So in true narcissistic Elite function, they all write books telling you how its going to be according to them, the super-geniuses. One such man was Bernard Baruch, whom we've mentioned before in our Bolshevik Studies.

Bernard Baruch was the outstanding corporate socialist whose ideas we shall examine in the next chapter. After Baruch and the Warburgs, also discussed in the next chapter, the next most prolific writer was influential banker Otto Kahn of Kuhn, Loeb & Co.Kahn is notable for his support of both the Bolshevik Revolution and Benito Mussolini, support which he concretized in such totalitarian expressions as, "The deadliest foe of democracy is not autocracy but liberty frenzied." 

Then you've got Robert Brookings of the Brookings Institution where these ideas were codified into policy guides to bring about corporate socialism.

Consequently, but without presenting his evidence, Brookings rejects the free enterprise ideas of Adam Smith and accepts the statist ideas of [Frederick] List—also, by the way, reflected in the Hitlerian corporate state. From rejection of free enterprise Brookings finds it quite easy to deduce a "moral" system rejecting the market place and substituting an approximation to the Marxist labor theory of value. For example, Brookings writes:

A sound system of economic morality demands therefore that instead of our paying labor merely a market wage, the minimum necessary to secure its services, capital should receive the market wage necessary to secure its services, and the balance should go to labor and the consuming public.

Oh, there's lots more Brookings quotes:

The first is the revision of the anti-trust laws in such a way as to permit extensive cooperation."

Efficiently managed corporations have nothing to fear from intelligent public supervision designed to protect the public and the trade alike from grasping and intractable minorities." 

The verbal damning of communism now prevalently popular in the United States will get us nowhere. The decision between capitalism and communism hinges on one point. Can capitalism adjust itself to this new age? Can it move out from its old individualism, dominated by the selfish profit motive, and so create a new co-operative epoch with social planning and social control, that it can serve, better than it has, the welfare of all the people? If it can, it can survive. If it cannot, some form of communism will be forced upon our children. Be sure of that! (The Way Forward, 1932)

Although Italy is an autocracy under the dictatorship of the Duce, every economic interest of the country is afforded opportunity for discussion and negotiation so that they may, by mutual agreement, arrive at a fair compromise of their differences. The government will not permit, however, either through lockouts or strikes, any interference with the productivity of the nation, and if, in the last analysis, the groups fail to agree among themselves, the government through its minister or the labor court determines the solution of all problems. In Italy as elsewhere, however, the autocracy of capital seems to exist, and the general feeling among the working classes is that government favors the employers.

Notice that the people in charge of all this are never named. Their selection is never discussed. These are the people behind the curtain that no one talks about. Even among conservatives who regurgitate talking points about "liberalism" never do name names and connect dots. It's very annoying in a way that we've got the means to put this stuff together, but somehow just like throwing the monkey crap at each other that the Elites drop in our cages by way of the mass media. I'm tired of it.

Let's talk about George W. Perkins, the proprieter of New York Life, the company you keep.

Perkins preached this collectivist theme as one of a series of lectures by businessmen at Columbia University in December 1907. His speech was hardly a roaring success; biographer John Garraty claims that when it was over:

...The President of Columbia, Nicholas Murray Butler, hurried off without a word of congratulations, evidently believing, according to Perkins, that he had unwittingly invited a dangerous radical to Morningside Heights. For Perkins had attacked some of the basic concepts of competition and free enterprise.

Those were the days, when the President of Columbia would be miffed at anti-American ideas being pushed.

Garraty summarizes Perkins' business philosophy:

The fundamental principle of life is co-operation rather than competition —such was the idea that Perkins developed in his talk. Competition is cruel, wasteful, destructive, outmoded; co-operation, inherent in any theory of a well-ordered Universe, is humane, efficient, inevitable and modern.¹⁸

Again, as with Brookings, we find proposals for "elimination of waste" and more "planning" for material and human resources and the concept that big business has "responsibilities to society" and is more likely to act fairly toward labor than small business. These high-sounding phrases are, of course, impressive—particularly if New York Life Insurance had lived up to its social do-good sermons. Unfortunately, when we probe further, we find evidence of wrongdoing by New York Life Insurance and investigation of this wrongdoing by the State of New York, which found a decidedly antisocial ring about New York Life's corporate behavior. In 1905-06 the Armstrong Committee (the New York State Legislature Joint Committee on Investigation of Life Insurance) found that New York Life Insurance Company had been a liberal contributor to the Republican National Committee in 1896, 1900, and 1904. Without question, these financial contributions were to advance the interests of the company in political circles. In 1905 John A. McCall, president of New York Life Insurance, was called before the New York investigating committee and proceeded to advance the idea that the defeat of Byran and free silver coinage was for him amoral issue. According to McCall, "....I consented to a payment to defeat Free Silver, not to defeat the Democratic party, but to defeat the Free Silver heresy, and thank God that I did it."

Here's my Brookings Institution map today. It's kind of rough, but you can see all your same friends which show up every time we investigate anything that's wrong with our world: CFR, Bilderburg, Trilaterals, and the Bailout banks. Heavy media overlap, they're on the trustee/provost at many schools, have held positions all over the government and sit on the boards of many, many big corporations. It's important not to get into guilt by association, however, because that could turn you into a witch-hunt paranoid. But also when you ignore the same bunch in all the same clubs, on the board at all the same corporations and all working in the government like some kind of sick relay team, you are effectively sticking your head in the sand. Meanwhile individual freedom is melting away. Danger, danger Will Robinson.

link to interactive map of Brookings Institution

These people have always been against sound money. Because they can't advance their socialistic schemes without their fake fiat money.

So these people are so sanctimonious and state over and over that they just want to "benefit mankind". That's what the mission statements of their hogwash nonprofits say. Just like the Bible says that in "peace and safety destruction shall come upon them" and "woe to those who confuse evil for good and good, evil", these people use the pretext of helping humanity only to enslave it.

Edward Filene (1860-1937) The Filenes were a family of highly innovative businessmen, owners of the large department store William Filene's Sons Co. in Boston. A vice president of Filene's became one of the three musketeers running the National Recovery Administration in 1933; the other two of the triumvirate were Walter Teagle, president of Standard Oil and John Raskob, vice president of Du Pont and General Motors.

From the turn of the century Edward Filene concerned himself with public affairs. He served as chairman of the Metropolitan Planning Commission of Boston, promoter of people's banks, and provided assistance to various cooperative movements. Filene was active in the Red Cross and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce; a founder of the League to Enforce Peace; a founder and later president of the Cooperative League, subsequently renamed the Twentieth Century Fund; and a member of the Foreign Policy Association and the Council on Foreign Relations. In Roosevelt's era Filene was chairman of the Massachusetts State Recovery Board and active in the 1936 campaign for FDR's reelection. 

My own attitude is that business must undertake social planning, but neither for the purpose of snuffing out new theories nor of preserving old ones, but because there has been a social revolution. The old order has gone and by no possibility can we bring it back. We are living in a new world. It is a world in which mass production has related everybody to everybody; and our plans, therefore, must take everybody into consideration.

You see, because we have technology now, the natural rights of man no longer exist. Your power as an individual has diminished so welcome to the Borg Collective of the New World Order.

No wonder there was war. Peace, it was soon discovered, could be maintained only by a balance of power between the larger competitors, and that balance of power was frequently upset. Eventually the whole impossible situation exploded in the greatest war of human history. The World War did not cause the world change which we have lately been noting. It was, rather, one of the phenomena of that change, just as the French Revolution was a phenomenon of the First Industrial Revolution.

Balance of Power. Hello Henry Kissinger. You see, when the Elite and those studious out there know who I'm talking about, have obtained the Great Merger: one corporation merged with one state, there will be total peace. Because you will be living in a total police state. This is Mystery Babylon type stuff, make no mistake about that.

Now we've heard from Edward, let's here it from Myron C. Taylor, chairman of United States Steel Company. 

The point, then, is to discover what we as a nation possess and to learn to use it rather than go out in search of the new only because it is new. The primary responsibility is on industry to find ways to promote the public interest and the interests of its own producers, employees, distributors, and customers, by making and carrying out whatever constructive plans may be permissible under the present laws, acting openly and, so far as possible, in cooperation with the Government. I confess I find it extremely hard to believe that constructive, cooperative plans sincerely undertaken by a basic industry for rationally adjusting production to demand in that industry, and which avoid any attempt artificially to fix or control prices, can be fairly regarded as in restraint of trade and commerce. For the sole effect would be to remove vital impairments of production, trade, and commerce, and to promote the public interests.

The Standard Oil contribution to this liturgy is expressed by Walter C. Teagle, president of Standard Oil Company of New Jersey and appointed by President Roosevelt to a top position in his NRA. Teagle phrases his version of corporate socialism as follows:

The ills of the oil industry are peculiar to that industry and require peculiar remedies. These are modification of anti-trust laws, cooperation among producers, and the exercise of the policing power of the States.

More bluntly than the others, Teagle wants the police power of the State to enforce voluntary cooperation:

Voluntary cooperation within the industry is not sufficient to remedy its ills. It would not be sufficient even if legal restrictions on cooperation were removed, although tremendous progress would result from the removal of such restrictions.To protect the correlative rights of producers and to enforce adequate conservation laws the police power of the State must be employed. This is a matter for State, rather than Federal action, but cooperation among various States and among the operating units of the industry will also be needed if production in the country at large is to be limited to the nation's markets. The solution of the problem therefore depends upon voluntary cooperation within the industry, upon exercise of the police power of the State, and upon cooperation among the various States concerned and among unites(sic) of the industry in the different States. To permit this both State and Federal anti-trust laws will need to be revised.

Yeah, and Standard Oil would be exempt or loopholed from having to comply with any of it. This would shut down smaller producers in short order and that's exactly what happened. Now there aren't really that many oil companies in the world. How could there be?


And Dr. Sutton sums up what we've seen nicely:

What was the philosophy of the financiers so far described? Certainly 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. On the other hand, cooperation was consistently advocated as moral and worthy, and nowhere is compulsion rejected as immoral. Why? Because, when the verbiage is stripped away from the high-sounding phrases, 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."

Are we getting the picture?? What we are seeing today in our country is what FDR and his cronies laid down a long, long time ago to benefit them and their ilk. You have to understand this: Do NOT project your morality onto these people, for they do not see you as a person at ALL!! They see you as a human resource, a commodity like steel or cattle. What do you do when you have too much? Scrap it. Why do you think they are obsessed with overpopulation? To them it is overproduction, something else they are afraid of. The only thing that will hold them off or repel them is exposure, either by us believers in individualism or if the Lord decides not to Tarry, the Judge himself.


Wall Street and FDR is available in its entirety at Reformed Theology.

(This chapter paves the way and provide the philosophical underpinning of the New Deal, where our subject FDR, will be discussed again at length.)