I. The Plot to Overthrow FDR by JP Morgan Most people know at least a little about the so called
Business Plot to overthrow FDR in a coup and replace him with a figurehead military dictator back in 1933. DuPont and JP Morgan among others (notably Prescott Bush) sought the aid of Major Gen. Smedley Butler of
War is a Racket fame to lead veterans on a march on Washington where they would depose FDR on grounds of physical feebleness.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_PlotThe conspirators turned to Butler, because the other likely candidates---MacArthur, Eisenhower etc.----had participated in an brutal attack against veterans who had come to Washington seeking their pensions early during the Hoover administration, so it was unlikely that former soldiers would follow them anywhere. Butler turned out to be the wrong man for the job. He strung the conspirators along for a bit in order to find out what they were up to, then he turned them all in. The whole thing was covered up, of course. No one in power wanted the masses to hear about how respected businessmen had conspired with Hitler and Mussolini to take over the country. It made fascism sound
un-American at a time when American fascists were still hoping to turn the country to the far right.
Ever wonder
why people like Morgan were so desperate to get rid of FDR? JP Morgan controlled a massive amount of the corporate wealth in this country. One man, even a president could not threaten that kind of empire, could he?
Maybe he could.
II. Meet Ferdinand Pecora, Enemy of the American “Banksters” Bankster was a term coined by
TIME magazine to describe bankers who were guilty of illegal deceptive practices akin to racketeering which defrauded the public. The man who uncovered the criminal ways of the Banksters was Ferdinand Pecora, who took over as the head of a committee investigating the Stock Market Crash of 1929 when FDR was sworn in.
The original committee was created by Hoover in 1932 in response to complaints that investors were trying to manufacture a stock market crisis so that they could buy up stock cheaply. His no teeth investigation was turned into the real thing when FDR was sworn in and an assistant district attorney for New York, Pecora took over.
From
Ferdinand Pecora: An American Hero by Jackie Corr Jan 11, 2003
http://www.counterpunch.org/corr01112003.html First on the stand was Wall Street's "Sunshine Charley" Mitchell, President and Chairman of the Board of the National City Bank, known today as Citicorp. Mitchell was the most powerful banker in the country and was used to doing what he wanted. As president of the National City Company in 1916 he quickly transformed the affiliate to the world's volume seller of securities that the bank was forbidden by law to deal in. He would tell the committee he "did not see it as a problem." In 1921 he became president of the bank and the affiliate promptly began to sell stock in the bank which was also forbidden by law. Mitchell didn't see that as a problem either. Not that he had anything to worry about. He was an old friend of Treasury Secretary Andy Mellon who was running the country for President's Harding, Coolidge and Hoover.
Snip
The hearings would last over a year, hundreds would testify, and much it would be front page news. As Wall Street was to discover, Ferdinand Pecora was a man who did his homework and the first days of the hearings sent the country into an uproar as Charles Mitchell admitted to: Dodging his 1929 income tax with the ruse of a fictitious loan of $2, 800,000 from the National City Company. Confessing that a series of unsecured and unpaid loans for millions of dollars were made to National City insiders to cover stock market losses and were signed off by Mitchell, Baker, Ryan and Percy Rockerfeller. Conspiring with Cuban President Gerado ("The Butcher") Machado as the National City Bank, unloaded $31 million worth of useless Cuban sugar loans by transferring the insolvency to the stockholders of the National City affiliate without their knowledge. To do this the National City Company created a dummy Cuban company, the General Sugar Corporation.
Snip
Pecora would later write about the small investor, "surprised to find all of this going on, who had somehow believed that everything on Wall Street was regulated, overseen, and safe. He has reckoned without the ingenuity of the legal technicians and the complaisance of governmental authorities toward powerful financial and business groups."
Pecora will be remembered for forcing JP Morgan Jr. to admit that from 1930 to 1932 he paid no taxes. While legal under the tax code of the United States, this outraged Americans reeling from the Great Depression.
III. The Pecora Hearings Revealed That Big Business Is A Danger To Our Democracy The author of this piece, Mickey Butts, draws parallels between the crimes Pecora uncovered and recent financial scandals. For instance, there is this Enron like affair.
http://www.commodityville.com/cgi-bin/bbs53x/webbbs_config.pl/noframes/read/934 Pecora kicked off the hearings with a three-day investigation into the collapse of the Insull public utility empire. The $3 billion holding company of over 100 gas, electricity, and transportation firms produced, at its height, approximately 10 percent of the country’s electric power. At the time, the Insull collapse was thought to have been the biggest business failure in the history of the world, and it bears a striking resemblance to today’s Enron case. During the investigations, the nation learned how Samuel Insull, once an assistant to Thomas Edison, personally enriched himself, to the tune of an estimated $170 million, by granting himself huge stock options and conspiring to prop up prices in the shares. His downfall followed a bear raid organized by the House of Morgan, another actor in Pecora’s carefully staged melodrama. Insull later died penniless in Paris.
About the Morgan testimony:
The House of Morgan was not immune to the powerful reach of Pecora’s committee. The son of the legendary J.P. Morgan, “Jack” Morgan was hauled before Congress, just as his father had been called before the Pujo Committee investigations of 1913, which led to the creation of the Federal Reserve. “In the twenties, the House of Morgan had been an arcane shrine, Morgan himself a prince of the realm who dwelt somewhere in the recesses of the marble building on Broad and Wall far removed from the common throng,” writes John Kenneth Galbraith. “Now Pecora haled Morgan before the Senate committee and put to him questions it had not seemed fit to ask him before.” It was one of the great celebrity events of the decade: Befitting a mighty spectacle, Ringling Brothers Circus hired a female midget to pose for a photo at Morgan’s knee, which Morgan endured with dignity, even engaging in conversation with the woman.
The country learned that Morgan partners indulged in transparent tax-evasion schemes, distributed new issues of stock among influential politicians at highly favorable prices, and routinely participated in “pools” to manipulate the price of big-company stocks. Galbraith captured the ethical standards that the House of Morgan had sunk to in a description that will be depressingly familiar to anyone who has followed the revelations of Wall Street analysts touting worthless stocks during the last speculative bubble: “At the height of the New Era frenzy, even the austere standards of J.P. Morgan and Company faltered: the firm now became openly for the first time not only commercial bankers and investment bankers, but corporate promoters.”
Meanwhile, Morgan operated a system of “preferred lists” ― friends who receive low-priced stock in a firm before its Morgan-backed initial public offering (similar, yet again, to what went on among the rich and powerful during the 1990s Internet bubble). The recipients received stock at cost, with the knowledge that the shares could quickly be flipped at a much higher price once the company went public. The system enriched some of the country’s most powerful businessmen, politicians, and public figures, including former president Calvin Coolidge; Senator William McAdoo (then serving on the Banking Committee, as well); F.D.R.’s current secretary of the Treasury, William Woodin; Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts; Alfred P. Sloan of General Motors; Walter Gifford of AT&T; the New York Stock Exchange’s Richard Whitney; and even aviator Charles Lindbergh. The testimony enraged the American public, who hardly relished seeing the elite prosper while they scraped through the worst of the Depression.
And here we see why Morgan thought that he had the right to kick out a president who dared to ask questions of him in public.
Pecora calculated that Morgan held 126 directorships in 89 industrial corporations, with total assets of $20 billion. In short, the House of Morgan directly or indirectly controlled an estimated one-fourth of all corporate wealth in the U.S., “incomparably the greatest reach of power in private hands in our entire history,” Pecora concluded. “It was a great stream that was fed by many sources: by its deposits, by its loans, by its promotions, by its directorships, by its preeminent position as investment bankers, by its control of holding companies which, in turn, controlled scores of subsidiaries, and by the silken bonds of gratitude in which it skillfully enmeshed the chosen ranks of its ‘preferred lists.’ It reached into every corner of the nation and penetrated into public, as well as business affairs. The problem raised by such an institution go far beyond banking regulation in any narrow sense. It might be a formidable rival to government itself.”
Pecora had reached a shocking (to the business community) conclusion. He had suggested that too much money and power in the hands of one individual or small group of individuals might be dangerous to our democracy . This is the secret which Big Business had been hiding for over a century. No wonder they wanted FDR out.
IV. The Result of the Pecora Hearings The JP Morgan coup failed and the Pecora Hearings continued unchecked. Pecora showed the American people that unbridled greed and unchecked wealth are
dangerous and as a result regulation of the previously unregulated markets were enacted. These included the Securities Act of 1933
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securities_Act_of_1933requiring that all sales of securities be registered and the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securities_Exchange_Act_of_1934which contained more anti-fraud provisions. Also the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) was created. Here is a link:
http://www.sechistorical.org/museum/galleries/kennedy/politicians_a.phpAnd for almost fifty years, no one tried any of this shit again. They would not dare. America had seen how corrupt and greedy investment bankers could be. The excesses of wealth which were applauded in the cinema of the early thirties gave way to a new vision of America, a land where people worked for a living and spent what they earned with their own two hands raising families and living the American Dream. The rich were still there, but they were not gods.
----until the New Federalists found themselves an actor president in Ronald Reagan, and they decided to roll back the United States to before the days of FDR----meaning to a time before people asked questions, when the mega-rich were idolized. We got television like
Dallas and
Dynasty and suddenly the wealthy could tell the public “this stock is worth x dollars because we say it is” and the politicians whom they had bought would look the other way while they made a killing robbing ordinary working people of their retirement savings and the nation’s economy went into the toilet and the recession that followed was used as an excuse to cut wages and social services for the poor and seize property and solidify the power of the oligarchy----moving the country one step closer to the dream which JP Morgan Jr. and Prescott Bush and Andrew Mellon had back in the early 1930s of a nice fascist state along the lines of Mussolini’s Italy.
V. The Second American Coup The second time the coup was enacted in Florida 2000, where Republicans shut down a vote count with violence and intimidation and suppressed voters with an illegal felons list and then the Supreme Court made an illegal ruling in Bush v. Gore. And the coup continued in Ohio 2004 where even more voters were suppressed and exit polls were hidden in spite of the public’s right to know. And the coup continues
right now in Wisconsin where the Republican state Attorney General and McCain campaign co-chair is suing to force the state to strip new voters from the rolls and in Michigan where people whose homes are being foreclosed are being warned to stay away from the polls and in Florida where they are purging even more voters than they did in 2000. Because the small cabal of families who want to run this country learned in 1932 that the nation will vote out their Republican tools and vote in progressive Democrats----and demand accountability and regulation---if they have a fair vote.
What did the bankers and mortgage houses get for their coups in 2000 and 2004? A lot. Here is what former
New York Governor Eliot Spitzer wrote in the Washington Post this February, shortly before the feds began their bailouts---with a $50 billion bailout of J P Morgan disguised as a bailout of Bear Stearns, see details below:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8974Everyone knows that Spitzer made a name for himself as a prosecutor who tackled corporate fraud. In his editorial, he denounced the Bush administration, which, in 2003, began to fight back against the efforts of the 50 states to battle predatory lenders. That's right. When the feds would not do their job and protect consumers against predatory lenders, the states stepped up to the plate to do it.
And the business community's hand selected Resident-in-Chief George W. Bush used the power of the Department of Justice to protect the lending industry's right to engage in predatory lending!!! http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/13/AR2008021302783.htmlThis is why Mukasey set Spitzer up on a Mann Act violation (the same phony baloney charge used to bring down boxer Jack Johnson, guilty in the public eye of the crime of being Black while being a winning boxer).
This election is about undoing the 2000 coup and then fixing the mess that the conspirators had made in our country in the last eight years. This election is about making the public realize once again that too much wealth and power in the hands of people motivated only by greed is a very, very dangerous thing.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
