piecing together bits of truth about gov't and corporate influence

Sunday, April 4, 2010

Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy by Murray N. Rothbard

Businessmen or manufacturers can either be genuine free enterprisers or statists; they can either make their way on the free market or seek special government favors and privileges. They choose according to their individual preferences and values. But bankers are inherently inclined toward statism.
Commercial bankers, engaged as they are in unsound fractional reserve credit, are, in the free market, always teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Hence they are always reaching for government aid and bailout.
Investment bankers do much of their business underwriting government bonds, in the United States and abroad. Therefore, they have a vested interest in promoting deficits and in forcing taxpayers to redeem government debt. Both sets of bankers, then, tend to be tied in with government policy, and try to influence and control government actions in domestic and foreign affairs.

In the early years of the 19th century, the organized capital market in the United States was largely confined to government bonds (then called "stocks"), along with canal companies and banks themselves. Whatever investment banking existed was therefore concentrated in government debt. From the Civil War until the 1890s, there were virtually no manufacturing corporations; manufacturing and other businesses were partnerships and had not yet reached the size where they needed to adopt the corporate form. The only exception was railroads, the biggest industry in the U.S. The first investment banks, therefore, were concentrated in railroad securities and government bonds.

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Saturday, April 3, 2010

The Bush Crime Family by Dr. Eric Karlstrom

Henry Ford, founder of Ford Motor Company, once stated there are two classes of financiers: 1) Those who profit from war and use their influence to bring about war for profit, and 2) “constructive” financiers. Ford Motor Co., along with about 100 other major U.S. banks and corporations, belongs to the first group (see C. Higham’s Trading with the Enemy). Indeed, Ford himself was actually decorated by the Nazis for his service to Nazism.

Other prominent international banking families that simultaneously bankrolled Hitler, Stalin, and Roosevelt during the first half of the 20th century include the Rockefellers (Standard Oil Company, Chase Bank), the Rothschilds, the Schiffs, the Warburgs, and the Bushes, among others.

Why would the world’s richest individuals simultaneously fund communism in Russia, fascism in Germany, and socialist democracy in the United States? Georgetown historian Carrol Quigley put it this way: “The powers of financial capitalism had a far reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole.” These financial powers had learned that war is the most profitable of all businesses and also the most effective means of changing the global political landscape. Thus, over the past 2 centuries at least, they have covertly manipulated politicians and nations into wars. Their ultimate goal was and is to establish a “New World Order”, a totalitarian one-world government ruled by the very few and very rich, i.e., them. Des Griffin has termed this a “Fourth Reich of the Rich” (Griffin, 1976). George Orwell and Aldous Huxley described what such a world might look like in their classic novels, 1984 and Brave New World.

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