1930s: UNITED STATES. The catastrophe of The Great Depression is compounded by drought and then massive soil erosion in the midwest. This new disaster becomes known as the Dust Bowl. Most of the affected area usually averages about twenty inches of rain per year, barely enough to sustain agriculture. But, in the early thirties, rainfall drops by almost a third. Crop yields fall by up to seventy five percent and, since the price of most farm commodities has fallen as a result of the depression, net farm income is reduced to almost nothing.
Prior to the genocide of native Americans in the nineteenth century, the Great Plains were grassland. When put to the plough, they were subject to massive wind erosion in years with lower rainfall. The droughts of the thirties, combined with high winds, result in vast dust storms which tear millions of tons of topsoil from farmland and blow it for miles across the plains. In May, 1934, a two day-long dust storm drops midwest topsoil over Chicago where it falls like snow. Two days later, the airborne soil reaches Buffalo, Boston, New York City and Washington.
In all, the Dust Bowl affects about one hundred million acres of land, largely in the Texas panhandle, Oklahoma and parts of New Mexico, Colorado and Kansas. Millions of acres of farmland are made useless. The dust storms destroy homes and farm buildings, bury machinery and cause death by "dust pneumonia". By 1940, as many as two and half million people have moved out of the midwest, leaving behind homes and farms which have taken generations to build up.
The "Okies", as they known, go on the road, looking for jobs and food in a country ravaged by the Great Depression. Many head for California where they are often abused and exploited, working for starvation wages and living in appalling squalor.
But for some, the Dust Bowl, like the Depression itself, is not a disaster at all but just another business opportunity. Banks and other lenders are only too happy to foreclose on starving farmers. The Dust Bowl provides the perfect opportunity for large scale, mechanized, industial agriculture to displace the family farm in the midwest.
1933: UNITED STATES/GERMANY. Immediately on Hitler achieving power in Germany, an agreement to coordinate all trade between Nazi Germany and the United States is reached in Berlin between Hitler’s Economics Minister, Hjalmar Schacht, and Rockefeller cousin and proxy John Foster Dulles who acts as shyster for dozens of Nazi enterprises. The Harriman family's Harriman International Company forms a syndicate of some one hundred and fifty corporations under the leadership of Averell Harriman's cousin Oliver to conduct all exports from Germany to the United States.
1933: UNITED STATES/GERMANY. International Telephone and Telegraph’s head, Sosthenes Behn, travels to Germany to congratulate Hitler personally on his ascent to power. Soon, Nazis are on the IT&T board and the company begins gearing up to provide communications systems, bomb parts and other vital war materials for the planned Nazi conquest of Europe and the Soviet Union.
1933-ongoing: UNITED STATES. John D. Rockefeller, whose fortune was largely based on bootlegging during the Civil War, was instrumental in bringing about Prohibition in the U.S. which had the side effect, purely unintended of course, of destroying renewable alcohol fuels (ethanol) as a competitor to Rockefeller's oil.
Now that old John D. and the boys have decided that booze ain't such a bad thing after all, and some nice bootlegging fortunes such as the Kennedy family's have been made, it's time to repeal Prohibition. But first we've got to make sure that ethanol, based on renewable resources and produced by large numbers of small producers, does not become a competitive threat to oil.
The oil barons form an emergency committee to counter the threat to their monopoly. The Sun Oil Company (Sunoco) and others pay American radio stations to run propaganda denigrating alcohol fuel. The paid propaganda pieces are broadcast to an unwitting American public as news items.
1933: UNITED STATES. Joseph "Jittery Joe" Kennedy's fourteen years of partnership with the Mafia in the bootlegging business, along with a lot of garden variety swindling, have seen his fortune grow to about two hundred million dollars. By 1933, the powers-that-be-have wrung as much profit out of Prohibition as they can and it's time to change the rules of the game gain.
As the repeal of Prohibition becomes imminent, Kennedy exploits his position as Franklin Roosevelt's bagman and takes Roosevelt's son James on a little trip to Britain. The Roosevelt name gets Kennedy access to some of Scotland's largest distillers and he returns to the U.S. with the distribution rights to Haig & Haig, Dewar's Scotch and Gordon's Gin. Kennedy is able to exploit his Washington contacts to obtain import licenses for large quantities of liquor for "medicinal purposes" and fills his warehouses with Scotch and gin. When Prohibition is repealed on December 5th, Kennedy is ready to meet the demand and make another fortune.
1934-1935: UNITED STATES. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is created, theoretically to clean up the financial swindling industry which has ravaged the wealth of Americans. Franklin Roosevelt, having a puckish sense of humor and owing a favor or two to Joseph "Jittery Joe" Kennedy for cash received, appoints him as the SEC's first chairman. As one of America's leading financial scam artists and stock market swindlers, Kennedy certainly knows how the crooks work. Roosevelt justifies the appointment by telling an advisor that it takes "a thief to catch a thief." You can't make this shit up.
1933: UNITED STATES. For a year, a commission established by the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs has supposedly been investigating the causes of the Wall Street Crash. Initially, the investigation" is little more than a whitewash. The first two commission counsels are fired and the third resigns in protest because there is no power to subpoena witnesses, which makes the whole exercise a bit of a farce. But things take a remarkable turn when a remarkable man, New York City prosecutor, Ferdinand J. Pecora, accepts the position of Chief Counsel to the commission.
In February, Pecora begins a real investigation of what Franklin Roosevelt called "the ruthless manipulation of professional gamblers and the corporate system" which caused the Great Crash of 1929 and led to the Depression.
By the time Pecora begins calling the boys in the back room to account, forty percent of all U.S. banks have gone belly up taking the savings of nine million Americans with them. Millions of Americans have lost everything on stock market and "investment" scams. Homes, farms and businesses are being repossessed by the thousands. Seventeen million Americans are unemployed. And, through it all, through all the misery and hunger and despair, some people, already unimaginably wealthy, are getting richer and richer.
As the hearings unfold, America's leading financiers and industrialists, the "cream" of American society, the ruling class, are shown to have engaged, yet again, in an almost endless series of ruthless conspiracies against the people of the United States.
Charles Mitchell, President and Chairman of the Board of the Rockefellers' National City Bank (Citicorp) and a director of the American branch of the Nazi cartel, IG Farben, is the first Wall Street tycoon called to testify and his grilling by the courageous Pecora sets the tone for the rest of the hearings.
Pecora uncovers the fact that National City Bank is really little more than an enormous criminal conspiracy dedicated to swindling small investors out of their savings. For years, the bank has been, via a subsidiary, the world's leading shill for what, in the biz, are called "securities", a direct violation of U.S. law which forbids banks to trade in "securities".
Mitchell tells the Committee that he "did not see it as a problem." Of course for National City Bank, it wasn't a problem. His very good friend, Andrew Mellon of Gulf Oil, Mellon Bank and Alcoa had been essentially running the country for the benefit of the ruling class via the presidencies of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover since 1921.
Mitchell is forced to admit to evading his personal income tax by way of imaginary interest payments on an imaginary loan of $2,800,000 from the National City Company. Mitchell was receiving about one and a half million dollars a year a time when the average industrial wage in the U.S. was about fifty cents an hour.
Mitchell is forced to confess that a series of unsecured and unpaid loans for millions of dollars was made to National City insiders to cover their stock market losses. The beneficiaries of this theft from the bank's small stockholders include Percy Rockefeller and Mitchell himself. Mitchell admits to conspiring with the U.S. puppet dictator of Cuba, Gerardo "The Butcher" Machado, to dump $31 million worth of useless Cuban sugar loans on the unsuspecting small stockholders of a National City affiliate.
Pecora uncovers the fact that, in 1927 and 1928, National City Bank dumped $90 million of worthless Peruvian government bonds on customers in the U.S. Pecora forces to Mitchell to concede that millions of dollars were made on insider trading and manipulations of Anaconda Copper subsidiaries by National City Bank insiders including Percy Rockefeller, James Stillman Jr., Mitchell himself and Anaconda President John D. Ryan. The bank and Anaconda conspired to defraud the public through massive manipulation of Anaconda stock, fueling a speculative mania which pushed the stock to record highs far beyond its true value.
Mitchell is forced to confess to a series of National City/Anaconda conspiracies which were the greatest frauds in the history of American banking up until the time of the hearings. It is revealed that Mitchell, Rockefeller and Ryan set up a "joint account" of nearly a million and a half shares of Anaconda stock, at no cost to themselves, which was repackaged and aggressively marketed to the public through a National City affiliate. The "joint account" was manipulated by Mitchell and Ryan who ran the share price up, from $40 in December 1928, to $128 in March of 1929. The trio then dumped their stock. This single scam netted Mitchell, Rockefeller and Ryan at least $150 million. By the time of hearings, Anaconda stock had collapsed to $4 a share.
Scheduled to follow Mitchell for a further uncovering of the Rockefeller-Mitchell-Ryan conspiracies is National City Bank director and Anaconda Copper chairman John D. Ryan. Conveniently, Ryan dies under mysterious circumstances three days before the hearings are scheduled to start and takes his secrets to the grave.
Percy Rockefeller, although apparently not too ill to engage in vast criminal conspiracies with Mitchell and Ryan, is allegedly "too ill" to appear before the Committee to answer Pecora's questions.
When asked by Pecora if he paid any income tax in 1930, J.P. Morgan Jr. replies, "I cannot remember." Neither could Morgan remember if he had paid any income tax in 1931 or 1932. In fact, of course, he had paid not one red cent. Question after question was answered with "I cannot remember." Pecora reveals that all of the Morgan family and their partners in their vast financial empire had paid a total of only $5000 in income taxes in the previous five years on hundreds of millions of dollars of income. And, it was all thanks to Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon who had crafted U.S. income tax law so that the very wealthy, himself notably included, seldom paid any taxes at all.
During the Pecora Hearings, the financial gangsters who had brought ruin to so many came to be known as "banksters". One of the slickest banksters to be summoned before the hearings was Clarence Dillon (nee Lapowski) of the "financial house" of Dillon, Read, by the time of the hearings heavily involved in financing the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in Germany.
Nazi public relations specialist Ivy Lee is hired to "prepare" Dillon for his appearance before the Committee. Among Lee's other esteemed clients are Nazi fuel supplier, William Farish of Standard Oil and the Rockefellers' partner in crimes against humanity, IG Farben.
Clarence Dillon and his son C. Douglas had been directors of United States and International Securities, a massive speculative pyramid scam which swindled Americans out of hundreds of millions of dollars. Miraculously, Dillon, Read insiders cashed in their chips just before the Crash, walking away with $6,844,000 for stock which had cost them $24,110, a return of 28,000%. Ain't "free enterprise" wonderful?
Pecora uncovers the fact that Albert Wiggin, Chairman of the Board of the Rockefellers' Chase National Bank, had surreptitiously sold short 42,000 shares of Chase stock just prior to the Crash through a series of front companies. Other senior executives did the same thing, driving stock prices down and then making millions as share prices collapsed.
It goes without saying that no one named Rockefeller, Mitchell, Morgan, Wiggins, Dillon or even Lapowski ever goes to jail for their crimes and the pinstriped gangsters unmasked by Pecora were no exception. Only a single minion of the ruling class, Richard Whitney, a long time associate of the Morgans and president of the New York Stock Exchange at the time of the Crash, ends up behind bars. But his crime was very serious, stealing from the ruling class.
The misguided Whitney pilfered $800,000 from his father-in-law's estate and then also stole from the New York Stock Exchange Gratuity Fund and, gasp, from the New York Yacht Club, all in order to prop up his liquor business.
Stealing from your clubmates just isn't done, old boy, and Whitney is sentenced to ten years in the slammer for his breach of ruling class etiquette. Of course, he only does three years and is then given a nice little place in the country by his Wall Street buddies, where he lives a quiet and peaceful life until his death in 1974.
As the gangsters in pinstriped suits are called before the Pecora Committee one after the other, one of the biggest swindlers is noticeably absent. It's Joseph "Jittery Joe" Kennedy who, as newly appointed chairman of the SEC, seems to have to be immune to the attentions of the Pecora Committee in the same way he was immune to the draft in World War One.
The Pecora hearings lasted over a year and provoked outrage among Americans. The stupefying greed and criminality of the ruling class so clearly exposed by Pecora, led to the Crash of 1929 and plunged the U.S. and much of the world into the Great Depression, causing untold hardship and misery for hundreds of millions of people. But like so much of American history, the findings of the Pecora hearings and even the fact that they were held, are virtually unknown in the United States.
Following the Pecora hearings, a wave of regulatory legislation attempts to keep America's corporate criminals under control, although "short selling", one of the financial games most beloved of experienced Wall Street swindlers, was not outlawed. Almost all of the protective legislation would vanish or be diluted in the 1990s by William "Slick Willy" Clinton, leaving the savings of Americans once again completely at the mercy of financial racketeers with entirely predictable results.
Legal chicanery and pitch darkness were the banker's stoutest allies. Ferdinand Pecora
1933: UNITED STATES. The meltdown of the U.S. banking system which George Menhinick had warned of in the Wall Street Forecast before being terrorized into silence by J. Edgar Hoover and his G-Thugs, comes to pass. Thousands of banks close their doors forever, taking their customers' money with them. There are runs on banks throughout the U.S. Every bank in the United States is ordered to close its doors for an indefinite period. Depositors have no way of knowing if they will ever reopen or if they will even be able to recover their deposits.Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men. Franklin Roosevelt, Inauguration Speech 1933
1933: UNITED STATES/GERMANY. Allen Dulles becomes a director of the Nazi Schroeder Bank, a position he holds until 1944. The Schroeder Bank is intimately involved in financing Adolf Hitler. Members of the Schroeder family are involved in many other aspects of the Hitler Project with the Dulles bothers, including the Hamburg-Amerika Line and the Thyssen steel trust which provides the Nazi war machine with most of its steel, builds the Bismarck in contravention of the Treaty of Versailles, builds the rail lines to Auschwitz and Treblinka and provides all the steel used by Nazi armaments makers, Flick and Krupp.1933: GERMANY. Adolf Hitler is invited to the Schroeder Bank by a group of industrialists who agree to give Hitler money in return for a pledge to break the trade union movement in Germany. Present at the meeting are, inevitably, Schroeder board members John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles. Allen Dulles is Schroeder's general counsel. The Schroeder Bank is keen to help Hitler gain power following the Nazi Party's defeat in the German elections of 1932.
1933: GERMANY. When asked by a reporter for the Detroit News why he keeps a life-sized portrait of Henry Ford in his office, Adolf Hitler replies, “I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration.”
1933-41: UNITED STATES. Irenee Dupont, whose anti-Semitism puts him in the same league as the Dulles brothers, Henry Ford and Adolf Hitler, begins financing fascist groups in the U.S. The best known is the American Liberty League (ALL), a pro-Nazi organization dedicated to whipping up hatred of blacks and Jews and love of Hitler. Dupont provides half a million dollars in the first year alone to ALL which has a lavish thirty-one-room office in New York City, branches in twenty-six colleges and fifteen subsidiary organizations throughout the U.S. which distribute fifty million copies of pro-Nazi pamphlets.Among the largest contributors of cash to ALL is the "cream" of the American corporate world including J. Howard Pew (Sun Oil), Walter Chrysler (Chrysler), William Farish (Standard Oil), Howard Heinz (Heinz Foods), Andrew Mellon (Mellon Bank, Gulf Oil, Alcoa), H.F. Pitcairn (Pittsburgh Glass), Alfred P. Sloan (General Motors) and senior exectives of Phillips Petroleum, U.S. Steel, First National Bank, General Foods, Grace National Bank, Morgan Partners, Central Hanover Bank and Trust, Westinghouse, JC Penny and B&O Railroad.
1933-45: GERMANY. The Reichstag, the German parliament, is set ablaze, conveniently for Adolf Hitler and the backers of the Hitler Project. Hitler immediately blames the usual bogeyman of the era, the "communists", but the true culprits are never identified. For Hitler, armed and financed by the Duponts, the Bushes, the Harrimans, the Rockefellers, Ford, Standard Oil, IT&T and all the rest, the Reichstag fire is the proverbial "Pearl Harbor-9/11 event" which creates a climate of fear and uncertainty among the German people and serves as a pretext for having political opponents and their supporters arrested without charge or trial. It also serves as the perfect moment for the Nazis to pass the "Enabling Law", a sort of NAZI-Patriot Act, which gives the Hitler regime the power to do pretty well whatever it wants.The American and German corporations behind Hitler see their investment in the Nazis pay off immediately when Hitler dissolves German labor unions and establishes concentration camps for labor leaders and socialists, rendering Germany's workers utterly powerless.
Most corporations operating in Germany, including the many American-owned ones, are quick to take advantage of the situation and dramatically reduce their labor costs. In the first five years of Hitler's reign, Ford cuts its labor costs from fifteen per cent of business volume to only eleven per cent. Coca-Cola's bottling plant in Essen dramatically increases its profits because, in Hitler's state, workers are "little more than serfs forbidden not only to strike, but to change jobs," driven "to work harder (and) faster" while their wages "were deliberately set quite low."As real wages decline, General Motors, Ford and the rest begin receiving massive armaments orders from the Nazis as the program of German rearmament is rushed to completion. Under the Third Reich, corporate profits skyrocket with U.S. corporate leaders, including William Knudsen, chairman of General Motors and Sosthenes Behn of IT&T openly expressing their admiration of der Führer.
After World War II, anti-fascist resistance member Otto Jenssen writes that corporate leaders were happy "that fear of the concentration camp made the German workers as meek as lapdogs."
1933-39: UNITED STATES. The Warburg family, one of the world's wealthiest and most influential Jewish families and owners of one of the world's largest banking empires, was intimately involved in the drafting of the Treaty of Versailles which bankrupted the German republic and set the country up for takeover by the Nazis. The Warburgs are a major force in restoring German arms makers such as Krupp to economic viability while cooperating with the American promoters of Adolf Hitler, particularly the Rockefeller, Harriman and Bush families and the Dulles brothers. Warburg represents the Harriman/Bush interest in the Hamburg-Amerika Line in Germany and exercises the Harriman/Bush voting rights at stockholders' meetings.
The Warburgs are also heavily involved in assembling the massive chemical cartel, IG Farben another major promoter of Adolf Hitler and the manufacturer of Zyklon-B gas which will used to exterminate millions of Jews and other "subhumans". Members of the Warburg family sit on the Farben board of directors.
The Warburgs apply pressure to Jewish organizations in the U.S. to refrain from criticizing Hitler and the Nazis. Max Warburg's son, Erich, sends a cable to his cousin, Frederick M. Warburg, a director of the Harriman railroad system. He asks Frederick to "use all your influence" to stop all anti-Nazi activity in America, including "atrocity news and unfriendly propaganda". Two days later, the American-Jewish Commmittee, controlled by the Warburgs, and the B'nai B'rith, heavily influenced by the Sulzberger family, owners of the New York Times and another powerful and wealthy Jewish family, issues an official joint statement, urging "that no American boycott against Germany be encouraged" and advising "that no further mass meetings be held or similar forms of agitation be employed." The two organizations maintain their "Let's not be beastly to Hitler" stance throughout the 1930s, tragically hampering the fight mounted by many Jews and anti-fascists against the rise of Nazism.It's just good business.....
1933: UNITED STATES. FBI Director J.Edna Hoover's quest for immortality takes precedence over fighting crime and the law itself as police and FBI agents pursue big name criminals across the mid-West. FBI agents arrest Roger "The Terrible" Tuohy, for the kidnapping of a Minnesota brewing magnate. Hoover calls Tuohy, one of the "most vicious and dangerous criminals in the history of American crime." Capturing him was "a credit to the entire Bureau" says Hoover.
In fact, it's just another one of Hoover's countless lies. Tuohy had been spotted by an off-duty policeman while on a fishing trip. Tuohy is convicted and ultimately spends twenty six years in jail on charges which are later proven to have been trumped up. The judge who finally releases Tuohy is scathing in his comments on the FBI's refusal to release files relevant to Tuohy's false conviction.
FBI agents and local police capture George "Machine Gun" Kelly after he leads a chase through six states following a kidnapping. Hoover declares that Kelly's wife, Kathryn, wrote the ransom note and claims "she is a hundred times more vicious and dangerous than a man....she acts with cold brutality seldom found in a man."In 1970, it will be uncovered that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had suppressed the report of its own handwriting expert which exonerated Kelly's wife who spent twenty six years in prison through the corruption and criminality of J. Edgar Hoover.
When Arthur "Pretty Boy" Floyd is captured and wounded, one of J. Edna Hoover's special young "protégés", Melvin Purvis, orders an FBI agent to shoot the injured man again, killing him. Hoover calls Floyd "a yellow rat who needed extermination."1933: GERMANY. The Nazi Party plays catch-up with the U.S. when it passes the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases which is modelled on the Virginia eugenics law of 1927 mandating forced sterilization for "undesirable" Americans.
1933-39: GERMANY. By amazing coincidence, John Foster Dulles, who had been instrumental in drafting the post-World War One Treaty of Versailles which bankrupted the German republic, becomes the key figure in "restructuring the debt" imposed on Germany by the Treaty, a major factor in the rise of Adolf Hitler. Dulles arranges the restructuring under a series of decrees issued by Hitler himself. Dulles ensures that American financiers will still get the interest owned to them by Germany while ensuring that the Nazis will have sufficient cash to fully arm themselves for their conquest of Europe and the Soviet Union.
1933: UNITED STATES. The boys in the back room take the next step in gaining complete control over the U.S. economy when the Gold Reserve Act is passed. The Act makes the private ownership of gold bullion in the land of the free illegal and makes "gold" notes redeemable only for more little pieces of paper printed by the boys. Americans holding gold are subject to ten years in prison. Sure do love all that freedom. Conveniently, however, paper can still be still be redeemed for gold from outside the U.S. By German subsidiaries of American corporations owned by the boys, for example.The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson. Franklin Roosevelt, 1933
1933: UNITED STATES. Eighteen thousand cotton workers go on strike in California. Twelve cotton growers arrive outside a union hall in Pixley and fire into the building in full view of the police station across the road. As the workers flee from the building, two are shot to death and many are wounded. On the same day, another cotton worker is murdered by growers.Truth, Justice or The American Way prevails yet again and the murderers are acquitted due to "insufficient" evidence.
1933: UNITED STATES. By 1933, it well known that asbestos presents enormous health risks to people who work with it. Because of the increased risk of death, many North American insurance companies refuse to insure asbestos workers. An enterprising lawyer brings a number of suits against Johns-Manville, the largest manufacturer of asbestos-related products in the U.S., for injury or death caused by asbestos. Manville pays off the claims and then, according to the minutes of the Johns-Manville Board of Directors' meeting uncovered decades later, "makes arrangements" with the lawyer that he would no longer represent any asbestos victims in bringing suits against Johns-Manville. It's just good business....
1933: CUBA. U.S.-puppet dictator Gerardo "The Butcher" Machado uses increasing levels of terror to suppress dissent during the Depression. His death squads, the dreaded Porra, massacre thousands of Cubans, provoking a spontaneous general strike.
Like many a worn out U.S. puppet dictator before him and many to come after him, Machado has outlived his usefulness to his American masters. The U.S. dispatches thirty warships to hover off the coasts of Cuba, eventually forcing Machado to resign.The Roosevelt regime refuses to recognize the provisional liberal government which replaces Machado, it being insufficiently fascist, and supports instead the power grab of brutal dictator Fulgencio Batista who will serve the U.S. government and the Mafia faithfully for decades to come.
1934: UNITED STATES. The U.S. State Department praises the sham 1934 Italian election in which the Fascists take a remarkable 99% of the vote, stating that the obviously rigged election "demonstrates incontestably the popularity of the Fascist regime." The July 1934 issue of Fortune magazine praises Fascism and its achievements for "accomplishing in mere years what Christendom could not achieve in millennia."
1934: NICARAGUA. Freedom fighter Augusto Sandino is murdered by agents of the U.S. puppet Somoza dictatorship with the explicit approval of the U.S.1934: UNITED STATES. Half a million southern millworkers go on strike. The strike is crushed by private armies using violence and intimidation. The governors of North and South Carolina call in the National Guard to break picket lines. In Georgia, the governor brings in the National Guard to arrest all picketers. The violent suppression of the strike blocks unionization of southern mills for over twenty years.
1934: GERMANY. The American Curtiss-Wright aircraft company reveals U.S. dive bombing techniques to the Luftwaffe. Dive bombing had been invented by the U.S. Navy but kept a closely guarded secret. U.S. aircraft manufacturers had been prohibited from revealing the technique but Curtiss-Wright, with an eye to selling the Nazis their dive bombers, circumvents the prohibition by demonstrating the technique at air shows. A U.S. Senate investigation will later conclude that, "It is apparent that American aviation companies did their part to assist Germany's air armament." And a damn fine job they did too. The Nazis will use the technology to great effect with their Stuka dive bombers.1934: UNITED STATES. Two strikers are killed and over two hundred wounded at the Electric Auto-Lite plant in Toledo, Ohio. Thirteen hundred National Guard troops, including eight rifle companies and three machine gun companies, are used against the strikers.
1934: UNITED STATES. Two longshoremen are shot to death by San Francisco police during an International Longshoreman's and Warehouse Union strike. The shootings provoke a general strike in San Francisco and Oakland. Serving the truth, as usual, the mass media, the city government and corporate interests scream that "foreign Communist agitators (have) seized control of the city".1934: UNITED STATES. Three workers in Woonsocket, Rhode Island are killed while participating in a U.S.-wide movement to obtain a minimum wage for textile workers.
1934: UNITED STATES. Congressman Louis McFadden who had served as Chairman of the Banking and Currency Committee for over ten years makes a statement in Congress about the private company operating under the name of the Federal Reserve.
This evil institution has impoverished and ruined the people of these United States, has bankrupted itself, and has practically bankrupted our Government. It has done this through the defects of the law under which it operates, through the maladministration of that law by the Fed and through the corrupt practices of the moneyed vultures who control it.1933: UNITED STATES. Republican Congressman Louis T. McFadden of Pennsylvania charges the private company known as the Federal Reserve with "having taken over $80 billion from the U.S. Government in the year 1928, with having arbitrarily and unlawfully raised and lowered the rates on money, increased and diminished the volume of currency in circulation for the benefit of private interests and with having conspired to transfer to foreigners and international money lenders title to and control of the financial resources of the U.S."
Some people think that the Federal Reserve Banks are United States Government institutions. They are private monopolies which prey upon the people of these United States for the benefit of themselves and their foreign customers; foreign and domestic speculators and swindlers; and rich and predatory money lender. In that dark crew of financial pirates there are those who would cut a man's throat to get a dollar out of his pocket; there are those who send money into states to buy votes to control our legislatures; there are those who maintain International propaganda for the purpose of deceiving us into granting of new concessions which will permit them to cover up their past misdeeds and set again in motion their gigantic train of crime.
According to McFadden, the Wall Street Crash was a "carefully contrived occurrence. The international bankers sought to bring about a condition of despair so that they might emerge as the rulers of us all."
1933: UNITED STATES. Two attempts are made to assassinate Congressman Louis T. McFadden by gunfire. Both fail. Shortly afterward, McFadden dies unexpectedly, a few hours after attending a banquet, raising suspicion that he was poisoned. That's just another silly conspiracy theory, of course, but whatever the cause of his death, old Louis won't be shooting his mouth off any more.
1934-36: UNITED STATES. The U.S. Senate Special Committee on Investigation of the Munitions Industry, under Chairman Gerald Nye, holds ninety three days of hearings and examines two hundred witnesses.The Committee finds that Dupont had led munitions companies in sabotaging the 1925 League of Nations’ disarmament conference in Geneva and that a Dupont executive bragged that, "even the State Department realized, in effect, who controlled the Nation.”
The Duponts, represented at the hearings by no less than seven lawyers led by Wall Street lawyer and Rockefeller "investigator" William "Wild Bill" Donovan, inevitably claim that filthy commies are behind the Senate hearings, and accuse the Nye Committee of undermining U.S. military power.
The Nye Committee hearings uncover the fact that Samuel Pryor, chairman of Remington Arms, has entered into a cartel agreement with IG Farben and that the Nazis terrorizing the German population into submission are doing it with U.S.-made Remington weapons.
Nye attacks as "war profiteers" and "merchants of death" the arms dealers who manipulate countries into war and then sell arms to both sides, singling out Pryor and Rockefeller-owned Remington Arms.The committee finds that widespread bribery of government officials is normal operating practice of the weapons makers and that bribing officials of other nations to buy additional weapons provokes, in effect, an arms race with neighboring countries, who then feel compelled to purchase addtional arms, increasing the risk of conflict.
The committee finds that the arms industry actively sabotages and opposes peace initiatives throughout the world, including those carried out or sanctioned by the U.S. State Department. The committee also found violations of the Treaty of Versailles, which limited rearmanent by Germany, by Dupont, Sperry Gyroscope and United Aircraft.
The Nye Committee uncovered arms industry propaganda masquerading as news reports designed to mislead the American public about international arms manufacture. Among the guilty parties, Dupont, which had an employee writing false stories under an assumed name. The Committee also uncovered false war scare stories printed in a chain of newspapers at the request of a major naval shipbuilder at a time when a naval bill for over six hundred million dollars was before Congress.
The committee discovered that American arms makers routinely violate U.S. government arms embargoes such as the one against China which the arms makers evaded by shipping weapons via Europe or Panama.
The committee found that American naval shipbuilders had succeeded in sabotaging the 1927 Geneva Disarmament Conference. At the time, American shipyards had been given orders by the Navy for over fifty million dollars in warship contracts, which would have been reduced if the conference had been successful.
The findings of the Nye Committee go on almost forever with their litany of bribery, lies, dishonesty, corruption, manipulation, illegality and, above and beyond everything else, unimaginable greed by the merchants of death.
The powers that be having had enough bad publicity, funding for the Nye Committee is withdrawn in 1936.
1934: CHINA. U.S. Marines invade China at Foochow.
1934-41: UNITED STATES. War monger and media mogul William Randolph Hearst puts the massive propaganda weight of his media empire of nineteen newspapers plus magazines such as Reader’s Digest and his International News Service, behind Hitler and the Nazis, promoting a favorable view of Nazism in the U.S. Space in Hearst’s publications is made available to such worthies as Luftwaffe head Hermann Goering for op-ed pieces. Hearst is reported to have received as much as $400,000 a year for his role in promoting Nazism and Hitler in the U.S.
1934: UNITED STATES. Dupont buys Nazi weapons supplier Remington Arms from "merchant of death" Sam Pryor and the Rockefellers and enters into a partnership with Nazi chemical cartel IG Farben Company for the manufacture of explosives. Better killing through chemistry.1934: UNITED STATES. The Carnegies' little tax avoidance scheme, the Carnegie Institute, decides to stir up the racists in the U.S. when it compiles the family tree of President Franklin Roosevelt which purports to show that FDR was of Jewish descent. Interests opposed to Roosevelt's New Deal used Roosevelt's purported Jewish ancestry to stir up anti-Jewish tensions and create distrust of the President.
1934: UNITED STATES. A Catholic priest, Father Charles Coughlin, founds the imaginatively-named National Union of Social Justice in America, one of the most vitriolic sources of anti-Jewish hate in the U.S.1934: UNITED STATES. Leading U.S. financiers and industrialists, to a large extent the same group which is financing the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, organize a coup against President Franklin Roosevelt whose New Deal and failure to fully support Nazism are repugnant to the U.S. ruling class.
Among the conspirators are: Prescott Bush, grandfather of George W. Bush; Irenee Dupont ultra right wing industrialist, eugenics proponent and founder of the fascist American Liberty League; Grayson Murphy, director of Goodyear, Bethlehem Steel and J.P. Morgan banks; William Doyle, former state commander of the American Legion; John Davis, former Democratic presidential candidate and lawyer for J.P. Morgan; Al Smith, former New York governor and co-director of Dupont’s American Liberty League; John J. Raskob, high ranking Dupont officer and former chairman of the Democratic party; Robert Clark, multi-millionaire Wall Street banker and stockbroker; and Gerald MacGuire, an associate of Clark’s and former Commander of the Connecticut American Legion.
The coup plotters attempt to recruit U.S. Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler, a popular hero, to stage a fascist overthrow of the Roosevelt government. Butler is offered three million dollars to assemble an army of half a million American Legion members to carry out the coup. Remington Arms will supply all the weapons needed. The coup is short-circuited when Butler tells Roosevelt about it. Fearful of arresting and prosecuting the U.S. ruling class for treason, the White House leaks the news to the press, leading to a congressional investigation.Later in the year, Butler testifies before the McCormack-Dickstein Committee and tells it that the plot called for businessmen and generals to run the country as a fascist state. Even though the Committee is ultimately able to confirm everything Butler says and he begs them to call the Duponts and Morgans to account, they refuse. A whitewashed report, carefully omitting the names of the plotters, is issued by the Committee and the story is almost entirely suppressed by U.S. mass media. That shining beacon of truth, Time Magazine, openly ridicules Butler.
It will be forty years before the long-suppressed full report of the McCormack-Dickstein Committee, complete with the names of the plotters and confirming everything Butler said, is uncovered only to be suppressed once more by the ever-vigilant U.S. mass media.
Great is the truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about the truth. Aldous Huxley
1934-ongoing: GERMANY/UNITED STATES. The Rockefellers provide the financing which enables one Leo Strauss to leave Germany, ostensibly as a Jewish refugee from the Nazis. Strauss is a proponent of the three most influential shapers of Nazi philosophy, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt.Carl Schmitt, the leading Nazi legal philosopher, is personally responsible for arranging the Rockefeller Foundation funding which moves Strauss first to France, then England and finally to the U.S. At the Rockefellers' University of Chicago, Strauss will establish himself as the wellspring of neofascist philosophy in the United States and will train legions of elitist neofascists to serve the ruling class.
Truth, Strauss will teach his students, is the private preserve of a select few who have to tell “noble lies” to the ignorant masses of humanity in order to manipulate them. The strong, says Strauss, are fit to rule, while the weak are fit only to be ruled.
Among Strauss's students will be a long list of devoted minions of the ruling elite and convicted, unindicted and pardoned criminals including Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Elliot Abrams, William Kristol, Douglas Feith, Rupert Murdoch and Ahmed Chalabi.
1934: GERMANY. Macht und Erde, (Power and Earth) is published by German geopolitician Karl Haushofer. It implies that Germany has the natural right to seize all of Eurasia, with its fabulously rich oil and gas fields, and to dominate most of the globe. Haushofer's little plan seems remarkably like a precursor to The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives, a plan for world domination by the U.S., written by Rockefeller proxy, Zbigniew "Zieg Heil" Brzezinski.
1934: UNITED STATES. According to testimony of officials of the Harriman-Bush controlled Hamburg-Amerika steamship line, a supervisor from the "Nazi Labor Front" rides with every one of the line's ships; employees of the New York offices are directly organized into the Nazi Labor Front organization; Hamburg-Amerika provides free passage to individuals travelling for Nazi propaganda purposes; and the line subsidizes pro-Nazi newspapers in the U.S., as it had done in Germany in order to bring about the destruction of the constitutional government and the installation of Adolf Hitler.1934-36: PUERTO RICO. Thousands of jíbaros, the peasants thrown off their own land and driven to work for starvation wages on American-owned plantations, following the U.S. invasion, occupation and seizure of Puerto Rico, walk out of the sugar cane fields of the Armstrong-owned plantation in Fajardo. Their wildcat strike spreads. The farmworkers are supported by the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party (PNP) under Pedro Albizu Campos.
The idea of organized mass resistance to the colonial occupation by the U.S. of Puerto Rico terrifies the corporate beneficiaries of the occupation and they form the deceptively-named "Citizens Committee of One Thousand for the Preservation of Peace and Order" who cable Franklin D. Roosevelt that, "A state of actual anarchy exists. Towns in state of siege, police impotent, businesses paralyzed." General Blanton Winship is appointed governor and, his aide, Colonel Francis Riggs is named police chief, to suppress the Puerto Ricans. The island's police are quickly militarized and teams of FBI agents secretly arrive to target the independence movement.Several attempts are made on Albizu Campos's life. After repeated police murders of nationalists, Albizu Campos announces that his movement will respond by targeting representatives of the U.S. occupiers of Puerto Rico. Three Nationalists are killed by police outside the island's main university. Shortly afterwards, the police chief, Colonel Francis Riggs is shot dead. The two young Nationalists who killed him, Elias Beauchamp and Hiram Rosado, are then murdered in police headquarters.
Albizu Campos is charged with seditious conspiracy, conspiring to overthrow the federal government in Puerto Rico. The first trial (in the English-only federal courts) ends when the seven Puerto Ricans on the jury of twelve refuse to convict. Then, under the Truth, Justice or The American Way policy, the U.S. handpicks a new jury with ten Anglo-Americans which obligingly condemns Albizu Campos to the American gulag in late 1936.1934-79: NICARAGUA. With U.S. approval and support, dictator Anastasio Somoza overthrows the democratically-elected government of Juan Sacasa. The U.S. finances, arms and maintains in power the brutal Somoza family dictatorship for over forty years. Tens of thousands of Nicaraguans are kidnapped, tortured, raped and murdered by the Somozas and their infamous U.S.-trained National Guard.
Almost all of the wealth of the country is stolen by the Somozas and their cronies, leaving the vast majority of the population in grinding poverty. The Somoza family alone “acquires” personal land holdings the size of the nation of El Salvador. As part of its bargain with the U.S., the Somoza dictatorship allows Nicaragua to be used as a staging area for illegal attacks by the U.S. on other countries in Central America and the Caribbean including Cuba and Guatemala.
After supporting the destruction of democracy in Nicaragua and the installation of one of the world's most repressive dictatorships, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt is reputed to have said of Somoza, "He may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch." This quote has been attributed to any number of American presidents referring to any number of U.S. puppet dictators over the years but that great liberal Franklin Roosevelt did have a soft spot for this particular mass murdering son of a bitch, as we can see in the cozy scene above.After forty five years of murder, torture, terror and theft of the country's wealth with the direct support of the government of the United States, the Somoza family dictatorship is finally overthrown in a popular revolution led by the socialist Sandinistas in 1979.
