Gen. Smedley Butler, more relevant than ever

[Octafish]

1. War is Still a Racket

by Ed Rippy
www.globalresearch.ca 25 August 2003

September 11 2001 — we hear over and over — changed everything. In the "War On Terrorism," says President Bush, anyone who isn’t with "us" is with the terrorists. Afghanistan and Iraq are now US clients or protectorates. But a deeper look shows that except for the details and the players, nothing has changed at all.

In the early 1930s Major General Smedley Butler, retired from thirty-three years in the US Marine Corps, had a fit of realization and then a fit of honesty. He began making speeches and published a book, all telling a fundamental, ugly, and timeless truth: War Is A Racket.1 Seventy years later, The Racket is going stronger than ever. It is not so much a conspiracy as a combination political philosophy and business model.

"I helped make Mexico, 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," confessed Butler. The National City Bank’s descendent, Citigroup, is now the biggest bank in the world2 — and the eleventh biggest corporation — and collects revenues in over a hundred "decent places" including Angola, Vietnam, Panama, Saudi Arabia, and Colombia3 — all of which (like most of the world) have had Butler's successors on the scene to keep them "decent."

"I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909–1912," Butler relates, and within years Brown Brothers, by then merged with the Harriman Co., helped pay Hitler’s Wehrmacht to "purify" Europe. Prescott Bush, later a US Senator and then both father and grandfather of US Presidents, ran the New York office of this piece of The Racket.4

"In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested." Later on, the Chinese "molested" Standard Oil, but now they are finding their place in The Racket: the Chinese Academy of Sciences owns part of a company which is in a consortium which has bought the manufacturer of critical parts for US "precision" weapons — and is relocating the factory to China.5

The Racket works in many ways. First it funnels money from taxpayers and consumers to banks and big business. Butler gives some examples from World War I (the numbers have been adjusted for inflation using the US Bureau of Labor Statistics calculator):6

"Take our friends the du Ponts, the powder people . . . . How did they do in the war?. . . Eight hundred and twelve million dollars a year profit we find! Nearly ten times that of normal times. . . .

" 1910–1914 yearly earnings averaged $84,000,000. . . . Then came the war. . . . heir 1914–1918 average was $686,000,000 a year!. . .

"Or, let’s take United States Steel. The normal earnings during the five-year period prior to the war were $1,470,000,000 a year. Not bad. Then along came the war and up went the profits. The average yearly profit for the period 1914–1918 was $3,360,000,000. Not bad."

But "If anyone had the cream of the profits it was the bankers. Being partnerships rather than incorporated organizations, they do not have to report to stockholders. . . . those little secrets never become public. . . ."

FASCISM AND THE RACKET

Powerful Racketeers from US business, political, and military circles have wanted a global fascist order for a long time. (For example, in the mid-1930s, vice-president of General Motors Graeme K. Howard wrote a book titled America and a New World Order, which described the glories of an international fascist regime led by the US.) IBM, ITT, Standard Oil of New Jersey, Ford, General Motors, The Chase Bank, the National City Bank of New York (now Citibank/Citigroup), and other US businesses and banks funded Hitler before and during World War II.7 (As we noted above, Prescott Bush, G. W. Bush’s grandfather, funneled money to the Nazis from New York.8) They also supplied trucks, oil, aircraft engines, communications equipment, transportation, and propaganda to the fascist powers. Allen Dulles and John Foster Dulles, who later became head of the CIA and Secretary of State respectively, were heavily involved in this collaboration. Some of these fascists actually plotted a military coup against President Roosevelt, but it was discovered.9 After the war, the US fascists saw to it that most of the Nazi industrialists — and their capital equipment — remained in place. (The British foreign policy elite, led by the "Round Table" founded by Cecil Rhodes, had secretly wanted to give Nazi Germany enough of Europe to make it a strong bulwark against Communism, but wanted to avoid war.10)

The Office of Naval Intelligence recruited the Mafia to control the New York waterfront and help plan the invasion of Italy. The US military also installed Mafia chiefs as mayors of many towns and cities in Italy (they had set them up as an occupation force to release US troops for the European theater of war). Under Lucky Luciano, the Mafia rebuilt its heroin trade, expanding into Marseille (we shall revisit this in a later section). The Mafia also guarded against Socialist and Communist resurgence, a great aid to US foreign policy. King Ibn Saud (of Saudi Arabia) had supported Hitler; right after the war FDR cut a deal with him (and some other Arab heads of state). The CIA, which adopted hundreds of Nazi spies, scientists, and military officers, set up a fascist network in the Middle East to assure control of oil supplies and to counter Soviet influence. It also brought many Nazis to the US and to South America.

One of the Nazis US Racketeers spirited away to South America was Klaus Barbie. Known as "The Butcher of Lyons," he helped set up the infamous "School of the Americas," a training center for torture and repression, for the US army in the Panama Canal Zone.11 (The school later moved to Fort Benning, GA, and has changed its name to the "Western Hemispheric Institute for Security Co-operation.&quot Barbie’s mercenaries, wearing Swastika armbands, carried out the bloody "Cocaine Coup" of 1980 — the first time in history that an entire government had been bought by drug dealers, according to a State Dept. diplomat. This was part of a regional plan of the US military — involving six South American governments — to rid the continent of "leftists."12

CONTINUED...

http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/RIP308B.html