War Is A Racket by Major General Smedley Butler

[Ed Jewett]

One Minute to Midnight; When We Compromise No More

Posted on June 9, 2010 by willyloman
by Scott Creighton

“Lift me up…”

In 1940 an honored U.S. citizen checked himself into a Naval hospital. He was 58 at the time. A few weeks later, one of the most decorated U.S. Marines in history, Smedley Butler, was gone.
By his own accounting Smedley Butler loved the men who served under him, he loved the Corp, and he loved his country. He was a brave man who possessed a rare combination of physical and moral courage and he was probably killed by cowards. He had taken a course of action in direct opposition to the real power of this country. He had been offered the keys to the kingdom in exchange for doing to this country what he had done to so many others during the span of his illustrious career, yet he refused.
Like Andrew Jackson before him, Smedley Butler chose to expose to his fellow countrymen something that few have ever known; war is a racket and the criminals who run it are the greatest threat to humanity we have ever known.
After a lifetime of service to the corporations and the banks, Smedley Butler refused the last tour of duty they offered him; the violent overthrow of the United States of America and the installation of a fascist state in its place. He had sworn an oath to the constitution and the people of the United States and he took that oath to heart for in 1934 he exposed to America what he called “The Business Plot”… a planned military coup, designed by the business and banking elites of America as a response to Roosevelt’s and John Maynard Keynes’ New Deal policies.
Six years later the two-time Medal of Honor recipient, Smedley Butler, paid for his heroism with his life. But he bought us nearly 70 years with his sacrifice.

Though the Business Plot took on a different tactic (they utilized the works of Edward Bernays with regard to propaganda; Lewis Powell’s memo to set the agenda to demonize the “liberal left”; the hijacking of political parties ie. The Neocons and the “New Dems” and the creation of the “Libertarian” Party; Reganomics, Clintonomics, the Bilderberg Group, American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the CATO Institute, false-flag attacks, unilateral pre-emptive wars, the repeal of Glass -Steagall, derivatives, the Global War on Terror, the deliberate collapse of the global economy, Milton Friedman, Alan Greenspan, the IMF, the World Bank, Glenn Beck, the New York Times, Rachel Maddow, the austerity commission, Diebold, G.H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, G. W. Bush, and Barack Obama.. just to name a few) its end result, it’s desired outcome is exactly the same as it was in 1933 when the treasonous elites of America came to Smedley Butler and offered him 500,000 soldiers and others to take over America and turn it into one of the third world fascist dictatorships he had helped on behalf of business elites all over the world.
Smedley Butler bought us 70 years that he paid for with his life and today the neoliberalization of America, the “Miracle of America”, is right around the corner.
The two political families most responsible for this treason, the Bushs and the Clintons, are still calling the shots today; one from behind the scenes and one from her perch behind the seat of power poisoning the ear of a hollow man.
Congress has accepted this Washington Consensus as a given; that America will fall to her own politically entrenched business and banking elites who have formed alliances with foreign powers and families in order to subvert Abraham Lincoln’s “great experiment” into Pinochet’s Chile or Suharto’s Indonesia or the Shah’s Iran.
A generation of Americans owe more than they will ever know to the sacrifice of Smedley Butler.
They sit back in their fine homes next to the golf course in comfort and security, bought with years of hard work at a time in this country when collective bargaining wasn’t a dirty word, but instead, a matter of pride. They sit back in a level of comfort their own children will never know and they foolishly listen to the likes of Glenn Beck as he demonized Roosevelt and the New Deal and falsely blames the greatest generation for the sins of the rich.
They will never understand how they will be the last Middle Class America ever produces. They applaud the same treasonous policies that were so close to becoming the way of American life back in 1934, policies that will condemn their children and their grandchildren to a life of 3rd world economic desperation, bitterness, and ruin.
Smedley Butler bought them a lifetime of the American dream, where work and fair compensation could produce security and prosperity for all. But no more. While the journalists dance and play with the political elites of our own Vichy Regime in their palatial estates, the carnivorous central bankers and economic hitmen are free to roam the world preying on any and every public institution they can suck a nickel of profit from.
The gates are thrown open and the feeding frenzy has begun and when it is all over, when this nation that so many have fought and bled and died for is picked clean, there will be nothing left of the America that Maj. Gen. Butler saved. In its place will be vast stretch of barren wastes and free-trade industrial parks surrounded by overcrowded shantee-towns and the occasional walled off Green Zones for upper level management, lawyers, doctors and such.. which are inaccessible to the vast majority of the population.
It took them only 30 years to bring us to the brink of all out fascism in this country once they took control of political establishment. Some 60 days after Ronald Reagan won his election because the people of the Republican Party rejected George H. W. Bush in the primary, the son of a family friend of the Bushs shot Reagan on the street. Every day after that assassination attempt, George H. W. Bush took the Presidential Daily Briefing in Reagan’s stead. He became the default president during Reagan reign and then the real one under his own. Later his son would be handed two rigged election victories. The Clinton’s were the Bush’s “go to” political family in Arkansaw. They were already neck-deep in political corporate corruption with the Walton family and Wal-Mart. So when it was time to bring a “democrat” to power after 12 years of Bush rule, Bill was just the ticket. And he never let them down. These two families have passed the Oval office back and forth for 30 years now, completely remaking both the republican and the democratic parties in the process. They have used every bit of their power to ensure that this nation stayed on a tight path to neoliberalization. And here we are.
So while the corporate media extolls the horrors of Social Security and Medicare by virtue of those all important “deficits” and they keep telling America she is a “centrist” nation, more and more disenfranchised people flood to the Tea Parties and the Progressive Caucuses looking for anything that slightly resembles an answer. But they will never look in the right direction because there are people out there on all sides of the phony debates who get paid a lot of money to make sure we never do.

“The Business Plot…”

The Business Plot was simple really; leaders of major industry at the time would finance a new organization, the American Liberty League, which would serve as the epicenter for the coup. They would select a military leader who already proved his courage and conviction on the battlefield as well as in the political realm afterward to run the coup part of the plan. Smedley Butler had just appeared with thousands of soldiers who had gathered in DC determined to get what the government had promised them when they went to war. Hoover had them forcibly removed days after Butler left but the soldiers respected him and the planners of the Business Plot treason decided to take advantage of that.

The planners knew that there were hundreds of thousands of unemployed ex-soldiers who were angry and disaffected and just looking for something to believe in. They promised 500,000 of these men to Butler, nearly three times the number of the standing army at the time. They said they would put this army together and then approach Roosevelt with an offer of a kind of “co-presidency” of sorts and if he didn’t go for it, they could remove him or kill him as need be. The man who approached Butler had claimed that they controlled the media and they could make the “stupid’ American public believe anything they wanted them to believe so in the end they could smooth it all out.

What they wanted was a fascist government to replace the elected administration of Roosevelt which they felt was going in the wrong direction. They wanted a more “business friendly” environment and just like the many small Latin American countries that Butler had overthrown in the past for corporate interests, the United States would be run by dictatorship. Al Smith was chosen to be the probable dictator. Smith was a “conservative” democrat who despised Roosevelt and the New Deal. Smith was one of the first “centrist” democrats and nearly became America’s first dictator.

But Smedley Butler had different plans. A committee was forming to investigate the rumors of a conspiracy to overthrow the government. Butler was called before them.

In the last few weeks of the committee’s official life it received evidence showing that certain persons had made an attempt to establish a fascist organization in this country. No evidence was presented and this committee had none to show a connection between this effort and any fascist activity of any European country. There is no question that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient. This committee received evidence from Maj. Gen Smedley D. Butler (retired), twice decorated by the Congress of the United States. He testified before the committee as to conversations with one Gerald C. MacGuire in which the latter is alleged to have suggested the formation of a fascist army under the leadership of General Butler. McCormack-Dickstein Committee

”You could have had a handful of the wealthiest people in the United States convicted of treason and sentenced to death“
“The coup was aimed at toppling President Franklin D Roosevelt with the help of half-a-million war veterans“… “The investigations mysteriously turned to vapor when it comes time to call them to testify. FDR’s main interest was getting the New Deal passed, and so he struck a deal in which it was agreed that the plotters would walk free if Wall Street would back off of their opposition to the New Deal and let FDR do what he wanted“. BBC “The Whitehouse Coup”

Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler:

“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.” from ”War is a Racket”

A clip from the film The Corporation which deals with Smedley Butler and the Business Plot:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQoBAc95tnw&feature=player_embedded#!
[URL="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQoBAc95tnw&feature=player_embedded#%21"]
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Once the news of the Business Plot came to light, it was over just as quickly as it had begun. The organization they had formed in 1934 to run the operation, the American Liberty League, quietly faded into the background and disbanded eventually in 1940. But the real death of the coup was brought on by Smedley Butler because once he stood opposed to it, they knew they could never get the starving and angry ex-soldiers to sign up; they had to have a leader like Smedley Butler to give them the necessary “patriotism” stamp of approval to get soldiers to unwittingly fight in their fascist army.
In short, the business elites underestimated Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler; they figured anyone could be bought and they were apparently wrong.
Roosevelt is thought to have cut a deal with the business and Wall Street elites to keep them from prosecution; they wouldn’t oppose his New Deal measures and he wouldn’t hang them for treason. With Butler now clearly on the other side and their hopes of a half million man army all but washed away, the businessmen had no other choice but agree to the deal, lick their wounds, and wait.
And wait they did. For 46 years.

“One Minute to Midnight…”

In 1971 the Lewis Powell memo was sent to the Director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Powell’s memo would become the blueprint, the “game plan” if you will, used to transform America from the “unions” and “civili rights” nation it was becoming into a fascist “unregulated free market” based system otherwise known as “business friendly”. The memo carefully lays out strategies of political and media campaigns, but it also describes the creation of what would later be called “Think Tanks” and an overall assault on the education system in America. The think-tanks and the education system reforms were key. The Heritage Foundation, the CATO Institute, American Enterprise Institute, The Center for American Progress… these are but a few of the NGOs that were eventually created to serve the neoliberal needs called for by the 1971 Lewis Powell memo. They are funded by businesses and they all strive to put the needs of the corporations ahead of those of the people of this nation.
In 1971 Richard Nixon ended the gold standard for U.S. dollars, effectively creating what we now have, a completely fiat currency, based entirely on nothing. This was called “The Nixon Shock” and it empowered the privately owned banks that made up the Federal Reserve Bank to arbitrarily create money out of thin air.
In 1972 the Business Roundtable was formed. When you talk about the “shadow banking system” and the corporate elites who pull our politicians strings, this is what you are talking about. The Business Roundtable was created to consolidate corporate power in America and to focus it to their desired end result; turning America away from the unions and the New Deal policies that had empowered a generation of American Blue Collar workers in order to create a 3rd World “Business Friendly” Economic model of unregulated free market ideology (neoliberalism).
In 1973 Richard Nixon had already rejected the suggestion of his advisors to enact a new Milton Friedman neoliberal “economic structural adjustments” program on the people of America. Instead, Nixon allowed Friedman to take his University of Chicago School of Economics theories down to Chile and see if how they worked out down there. We overthrew and killed the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende on Sept. 11th 1973 because he stood in the way of several U.S. corporations down there. Latin America became a laboratory of sorts where these neoliberal economists could try out their “shock therapy” economic theories on entire nations in order to work out the kinks. The “Shock Doctrine” was created and it would be used time and again in nations all over the world to force them to enact cruel economic policies that harmed the vast majority of people while enriching a few businessmen and the dictators who would oversee their implementation.
It took only a decade to put their plan in motion on the presidential level.
George H. W. Bush had been a CIA spook and a long-time friend to the business community. He lost the republican primary to a well-known actor turned governor, Ronald Reagan. The people didn’t trust Bush; he was the som of privilege born to a man, Prescott Bush, who not only had ties to the “Business Plot” treason of 1933, but he also would be later implicated and charged with the “trading with the enemy act” for doing business with Nazi Germany long after the war began.
Though the son of a traitor lost in the primary, the business elites in America still had their plan and were determined to see it through so Rockefeller himself approached Reagan and forced him to make George H. W. Bush his vice president. Reagan reportedly didn’t like him, but he had no choice. 60 days after his inauguration, a family friend of the Bushs tried to assassinate Reagan and the rest is history. The Bush family has been in charge of the republican party ever since.
From that election in 1980, it took them only 3 decades to get us to where we are right now. What they could not do by force in 1933, they have almost accomplished by stealth.
Three decades of incremental changes to our laws, our regulations, our educations system, and our media has resulted in pushing the American working class to the very brink of destitution. There is already talk of repealing the minimum wage laws in America, they flooded our neighbor Mexico with starvation wage employment while destroying their indigenous economy through the implementation of NAFTA and the backing of dictator presidents, one after the other. The open border policies of the neoliberal parties on all sides has resulted in the marked devaluation of skilled labor positions. For this reason and many others, the living wages of the working man have been stagnant or in decline since 1980 while the prison population has seen a vast increase.
They have taught the American population to despise the notions of the social safety net and regulation by blaming them for all our economic ills. They have taught the American people that democracy is only possible in an environment of ”savage capitalism” and that globalization is inevitable. They have taught our nation that “American Exceptionalism” gives us the right and the duty to interfere with any nation, in any way we see fit, in order to spread “freedom” and “democracy” to the rest of the world and that we are locked in “the long war” against those who would possibly do us harm sometime in the future. They have taught the American people that we must abandon certain notions of civil liberties in order to preserve our security and our “way of life”.
Our way of life, the way of life that made this nation great, that bought our workers a decent wage which they could buy a home with and raise their children with, is gone. Our way of life that eventually freed the slaves and our nation’s collective soul at the same time, is gone. Our way of life that promised that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with unalienable rights of man, is gone.
And in their place rises the bloodless ideology of neoliberalism.
We see pundits and politicians all across the country demanding the government take control of the deficit problem. The deficit problem was created by the Wall Street bankers who deliberately crashed our economy and the endless trillion-dollar “Global Free Market Wars” which were created based on lies. The deficit problem was created by a for-profit central banking system that handed over untold trillions to the banking elites in this country and in others.
Yet the talking heads all do their part for the Washington Consensus and they blame the poor, the unemployed, the elderly, the sick, and the defenseless. They blame the workers and the unions for “wanting to much” money, a living wage. They blame the “socialists” as if they have ever held power in America. They blame the “far left extremists” and the “right-wing nut-jobs” for holding any opinion other than the “business friendly centrist” view that the free markets will determine the best course for America. And they are now getting you to do the same.
We stand divided, one minute to midnight, as the elites and their ideological servants are about to slam the “Miracle of Chile” down upon the vast majority of the American people the ramifications of which will be of biblical proportions.

“The Infection is Spreading…”

Thanks to the work of the neoliberals and the “centrists” who have been in charge for the past 30 years or so, America already has the lowest standard of living of any Westernised democracy on the planet. If you don’t believe me, look it up.
We work like dogs and live like slaves as the wealthy just keep getting richer and both main parties keep handing them more and more and more of what is rightfully ours. While once we were the beacon to the rest of the world as they struggled for their independence, we are now the laughing-stock of every true revolutionary thinker on the planet because we are a nation of beggars to our own demise.
But that will change.
All across the globe, not just in Greece and Portugal, Ireland and Spain, but all across the globe our anti-democratic infection is spreading. The Global Free Market Wars promise to convert by the sword any nation which stands opposed to our corrupting influence of IMF and World Bank domination, and the global derivatives scam promises to undermine the rest.
In Germany, in Great Britain, all across the European Union, the war against the working class is underway and ramping up. People will be made to pay for the excesses of the wealthy and the political nobility who serve them.

Forget about a smooth recovery. Finance ministers and central bank governors of the G-20, met this weekend in Busan, South Korea and decided to abandon “tried and true” expansionary fiscal policies for their own strange brew of belt-tightening policies and austerity measures. The EU members are eager to restore the illusory “confidence of the markets”, something that will surely be lost when the eurozone slides back into recession and the hobbled banking sector begins hemorrhaging red ink. Trimming deficits while the economy is still on the mend will weaken demand and force businesses to lay off more workers. That will decrease economic activity and slow growth. It’s a prescription for disaster.

Here’s an excerpt from Paul Krugman’s blog: “Slashing spending while the economy is still deeply depressed is both an extremely costly and quite ineffective way to reduce future debt. Costly, because it depresses the economy further; ineffective, because by depressing the economy, fiscal contraction now reduces tax receipts….

The right thing, overwhelmingly, is to do things that will reduce spending and/or raise revenue after the economy has recovered — specifically, wait until after the economy is strong enough that monetary policy can offset the contractionary effects of fiscal austerity. But no: the deficit hawks want their cuts while unemployment rates are still at near-record highs and monetary policy is still hard up against the zero bound.” Information Clearinghouse

What we have allowed to take hold in the States will soon be spreading throughout the democratic world as it is already the standard measure in many of the dictatorships, puppet regimes, and tyrannies that we ourselves have promoted for decades.

“Even in the face of Armageddon I shall not compromise in this”…

Our history if full of those who would not compromise our freedoms for the favors of the wealthy. Our present is quite different.
Franklin, Lincoln, Jackson, Jefferson, King, Butler, Roosevelt… some the greatest names of our shared history may one day be purged from our children’s history books in service to the business elites and their neoliberal restructuring of America. It is already happening in Texas and it will happen in the rest of the country.
There was once an idea that was America. It stood up to the fascist rule of its occupying nation and it cast off the shackles of an oppressive monarchy. The idea of America was neither perfect nor stagnant as it was formed through the blood and sacrifice of tens of thousands of activists and resistors who helped form our more perfect union over the course of time and pain. But a more perfect union was formed and left to us as both our legacy and our charge to defend it.
There are those who would say we are too far gone and the neoliberal forces mounted against us are too entrenched in the halls of power. But voices like those have been with us since before the time of our declaration of independence and history does not favor the meek.
In India, Ghandi stood with nothing more than an ideal… in South Africa Nelson Mandela endured prison for 27 years with little more than a dream.
In Bolivia, the people gathered to oppose U.S. giant Bechtel’s water privatization scheme which promised the conglomerate ownership of all the water of their nation even to the point of it falling from the sky in the form of rain. The people had enough and they gathered by the tens of thousands to march on their capital to demand the rights of the people over the neoliberalization of their country.
What stood in their way was a corrupt crony political system, military style police force, and the power of the Bolivian army backed by U.S. interests.
But the people had determined there was something bigger at stake and they had drawn the line in the sand. They had decided as a people that “Even in the face of Armageddon (we) shall not compromise in this” and they marched to take back what was theirs by right.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the slaughter…
It is said that an illegal occupation will rarely work because the occupiers will eventually grow weary of the propaganda of their leaders and begin to see through the lies which motivated them in the first place. “Right” has a way of winning out if the spirit is willing to endure long enough.
This was the miscalculation of the Business Plot traitors… this is the miscalculation of the Global War on Terror planners… and this was the flaw in the neoliberal plan for Bolivia.
As the thousands marched to their capital to demand they repeal the Bechtel water privatization, no one showed up to oppose them.
The army, the police, even the crony government representatives failed to materialize to present any opposition to the determined Bolivian people. They didn’t have the stomach to fight their own citizens on behalf of wealthy capitalists half a world away and the people of Bolivia took back their nation by the power of their convictions. But only when they were willing to pull it all down upon their own heads in the process.
Smedley Butler gave us the most prosperous Middle Class generation this nation has ever seen by refusing and exposing the fascist Business Plot treason of 1933. Regulated capitalism combined with a Keynesian economic model helped bring us out of the depression and hold the corporate greed at bay so our citizens could also thrive as America built her future.
We can have it again. We can take control of our future and the futures of our children but there are no more Smedley Butlers left to rely on. Instead, we must look to the examples from our south and we must look to the conviction within our own hearts. We will either live up to the charge left to us by our forefathers or we will become known as the generation of Americans who finally allowed democracy to fall. There is no safe way to end this there is no easy path. You cannot vote your way to freedom nor can you count on a candidate of “CHANGE”.
Freedom is ours if we take it so to is the eternal shame if we don’t.
links
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info...e25643.htm
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/europe...22263.html
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germ...29,00.html
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?c...&aid=19582
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/a_wa..._20100607/
http://en.fondsk.ru/article.php?id=3070

Filed under: Neocons = Neolibs, Scott Creighton