Gen. Smedley Butler's Testimony on The Businessmen's Plot

[RainDog]

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/McCormack-Dickstein_Committee

The Business Plot or The Plot Against FDR or The White House Putsch was an alleged conspiracy brought to light by a retired General, involving moneyed interests who intended to overthrow President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the early years of the Great Depression.

The allegations of the plot came to light when Marine Corps Major General Smedley Darlington Butler notified the McCormack-Dickstein Committee in 1933 and testified to the existence of the plot. The McCormack-Dickstein Committee was the first House Committee On Un-American Activities (HUAC).

In his testimony, Butler stated that a group of several men, representing mainly Wall-Street Banking interests had approached him to help lead a plot to overthrow Roosevelt in a fascist military coup. In their final report, the Congressional committee supported General Butler's claims on the existence of the plot, but no prosecutions or further investigations followed, and the matter was mostly forgotten.

Just wanted to post this on DU as a source. If any of you have read War is a Racket, Butler talks about the "captains of industry" in the U.S. who wanted to stage a fascist coup and put Butler in place as a figurehead that they could manipulate. The coup involved an assassination plot against FDR.

iow, the class war the oily-garchs have been waging on the rest of the nation has been going on for a long time. This war includes the prohibition of cannabis, btw, which was also overseen by members of the DuPont family and buddies of the Mellons... some of whose family members, now, include Richard Scaife - who has funded the extreme right wing in this nation for decades (Coulter, the attempted take-down of Clinton, and, esp. The Heritage Foundation, of which he is a board member.

FDR chose not to bring charges against the monied-men who instituted this.
Ford pardoned Nixon after being placed into office for just this purpose, when the president attempted to steal an election.
Reagan made a deal with the Iranians to delay the release of the hostages until after the election in an attempt to manipulate the hostages' release and use this delay against Jimmy Carter.
The Supreme Court made a one-time ruling in favor of George W. Bush to install him in the executive branch. Bush asked Cheney to select his vice president. Cheney chose himself and proceeded to spend his time accruing more and more unchecked power to the executive branch - which includes bureaucracies like the NSA - who, as part of their function in the federal bureaucracy are supposed to be, with the president, under the scrutiny of Congress.

and, to take this back a few more decades...

Congress decided not to punish the Confederates who had engaged in treason against this nation based upon their determination that it was their right to enslave others for their personal profit. Radical Republicans (who would be considered "the left" at this time in history) wanted to bar these former Confederates from office but they were overruled. Within a generation, the Confederate states had created laws to enslave black men (predominantly) and put them on work gangs. The federal govt. looked away.

There's a pattern here, iow.

[bahrbearian]

1. Book Marked. this will be a Good Read

[yurbud]

2. I hadn't thought to tie Butler all the way back to slave days, but it works.

We should have given freed blacks the 40 acres and a mule out of the assets of the confederate plantations and broken the economic power of the Southern planters forever.

[RainDog]

3. the pattern is that wealthy criminals are not held accountable

for the most part.

...which leaves them free to continue doing the same things, over and over, under various guises.

If you're a rich, entitled motherfucker, you can plot to murder the President with impunity, apparently.

[RainDog]

4. here's where he really ties modern and 18th c. slavery

"I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in.

I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."

"A few profit – and the many pay. But there is a way to stop it. You can't end it by disarmament conferences. You can't eliminate it by peace parleys at Geneva. Well-meaning but impractical groups can't wipe it out by resolutions. It can be smashed effectively only by taking the profit out of war."

War is fought by the poor for the rich.

[Quantess]

5. This looks interesting.

[RainDog]

6. You can download them as pdf files

and put them on a reader, and also save them offline.