Facing the Corporate Roots of American Fascism
by COAT
April 2004, Press for Conversion! (Issue #53), Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade (COAT)
www.globalresearch.ca 22 April 2004
The URL of this article is:
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/COA404A.html --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In the early 1930s, some of America's wealthiest industrialists and bankers plotted to overthrow the government of President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) and replace it with a fascist dictatorship. Thanks to one of the greatest whistleblowers of all time, we know the names of the prominent Wall Street financiers and politicians (both Democrat and Republican) who organized and backed this plot. The whistleblower who exposed the fascist plot was a U.S. military hero named Major-General Smedley Darlington Butler.
For 33 years, Butler -- a two-time recipient of the prestigious U.S. Medal of Honor -- had fought with the Marines. He helped invade numerous countries, subdued native revolts, oversaw fraudulant elections and forced regime changes on nations to bring them in line with U.S. economic interests. (Sound familiar?) All this, Butler later said, was done in order to protect America's foreign investments. In 1935, describing himself as a "racketeer for capitalism," Butler said, "I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was operate his racket in three city districts. We Marines operated on three continents" (Common Sense magazine, Nov. 1935).
In 1933, the year Hitler took control of Germany, some of Wall Street's top financiers sent representatives to recruit the recently-retired General Butler into a fascist coup d'etat to overthrow FDR. Butler played along in order to find out who was behind the scheme and then, in 1934, he testified under oath before the MacCormack-Dickstein House Committee that was examining Nazi propaganda in the United States. Butler named names and exposed the key fascist plotters. He also identified a high-powered, business organization, the American Liberty League, as the "super-organization" behind the plan for an American coup.
Thanks to General Butler, this Wall Street plan to subvert U.S. democracy was thwarted. However, none of the multi-millionaire behind the plot were ever questioned by legal authorities, let alone charged or put on trial for treason. In fact, they continued to work behind the scenes, through the American Liberty League, to sabotage FDR's "New Deal" administration.
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The April issue of Press for Conversion! contains a detailed account of this fascist plot. It also highlights the Wall Street CEOs who were behind the plan. COAT's magazine traces their corporate legacies to the present and exposes how some of these top U.S. fascists helped finance and equip the rise of Hitler and Mussolini before WWII. Some of these U.S. corporations even sold military hardware and strategic materials to the enemy during that war. Perhaps even more shocking than this history of American complicity with European fascism is the fact that these corporations still wield tremendous influence over U.S. politics today. In fact, many megacorporations whose roots are firmly planted in the fascism of the 1930s, now dominate the globalized marketplace. This issue of Press for Conversion! outlines the corporate genealogy of the wealthiest leaders among America's fascist elite and traces their financial empires right up to the present day.
Other corporate fascists, like President George Walker Bush's grandfather (Prescott Bush) and his great-grandfather (George Herbert Walker -- after whom George W. Bush and his father G.H.W. Bush are both named), not only financed Hitler's rise to power in the 1920s and 1930s, they also made a great fortune from the slave labour that was used in the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz during the war . . . . (more).
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