The war hero who was invited by powerful corporate and banking interests to help overthrow President Franklin Roosevelt
For a more complete perspective on "world finance," e.g. Wall Street, banksters, and their financial requirements, we need to step back before WWII and recall the remarks of Marine Major General Smedley Butler. In 1933, anticipating huge war profits and the possible spread of fascism (which they encouraged), Wall Street bankers and financiers had bankrolled successful coups by both Hitler and Mussolini. Brown Brothers Harriman in New York was financing Hitler right up to the day war was declared with Germany. They decided that a fascist dictatorship in the United States, similar to the one in Italy, would be far better for their business interests than Roosevelt's "New Deal," which threatened massive wealth re-distribution in order to recapitalize the working and middle class of America. So the Wall Street tycoons recruited General Butler, who they mistakenly thought would lead the overthrow of the US Government and become a "Secretary of General Affairs," who would:
a) be answerable to Wall Street and not the people,
b) lead his loyal troops to crush social unrest, and
c) shut down all labor unions.
General Butler pretended to go along with the scheme so that he could more completely expose the plot to Congress. And yet Congress, then as now in the pocket of the Wall Street bankers, refused to act. When Roosevelt learned of the planned coup, he demanded the arrest of the plotters, but the plotters then informed Roosevelt that if any one of them were sent to prison, their friends on Wall Street would deliberately collapse America's still-fragile economy and blame Roosevelt for it. Roosevelt was thus unable to act -- until the start of WWII, at which time he prosecuted many of the plotters under the Trading With The Enemy Act. The Congressional minutes of meetings delving into the attempted coup were finally released in 1967 and became the inspiration for the movie, "Seven Days in May" -- but with the true financial villains remaining unidentified in the script, so as to avoid possible retaliation by those villains.
In his published writings, General Butler reflects thusly:
"I spent 33 years and four months in active military service as a member of our country's most agile military force -- the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from second lieutenant to Major General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I suspected I was just a part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all members of the military profession I never had an original thought until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of the higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service. Thus 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 1909-12. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that the Standard Oil went its way unmolested. During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals and promotion. Looking back on it, I feel I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three city districts. I operated on three continents."
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