by DAVID BROWN | CLEARNFO.com | October 20, 2014

In an effort to better understand today’s political and economic structures, it is important to take a look back to discover from whence they came and how they arrived at the apex of the predominant power structure we see all around us today.

Like no other, Carroll Quigley gave us a back-stage introduction of the actual workings of the network who shaped yesterday’s world. (See: Anglo-American Establishment and Tragedy and Hope) In today’s world, we see these same forces, structures and techniques at work from the happy heirs of the power structure set into motion by the Anglo-American Establishment. Some of the names have changed, but there exists an unmistakable lineage that can be exposed by fact, not conjecture or theory.

After a baptism by fire from reading the lucid, unassailable, excruciatingly detailed and painfully documented writings of Quigley, we can see the pieces of this puzzle coming into place, painting a landscape that is clear and in focus. Quigley opened the door, but many others have built upon his great work. These people would include G. Edward Griffin, Antony C. Sutton, Joseph Plummer, James Corbett and Gary Allen to name a few. Others, not aware of Quigley’s work, have inadvertently added critical pieces to the history we never knew. Those would include John Perkins with his ‘Confessions of an Economic Hit Man’ and whistle-blower Sibel Edmonds with her ‘Classified Woman’. Still others as brilliant and sincere as they may be, are completely oblivious and so are sentenced to play within the acceptable boundaries set by the establishment; and in so doing, inadvertently continue the myth by giving credence to the mythology of officially promulgated history. These would include Rush Limbaugh, Michael Medved and Mark Levin. We may be able to wake this last group, but it would require a willingness by them to re-examine their own cherished assumptions which is not likely in my opinion.

For those of us interested in discovering some of the history we never knew –in an effort to better understand the origins, purposes and techniques employed on today’s global stage by the progeny of these forces– I’d like to proffer a few quotes from Antony Sutton’s book, ‘Wall Street and FDR’ which is his second of a three book set concerning Wall Street.

Antony C. Sutton: “The most lucid and frank description of corporate socialism and its mores and objectives is to be found in a 1906 booklet by Frederick Clemson Howe, ‘Confessions of a Monopolist’.”

MAKING SOCIETY WORK FOR THE FEW
(Chapter 5, Page 73, ‘Wall Street and FDR’ by Antony C. Sutton.)

This is the significant theme in Howe’s book, expressed time and time again, with detailed examples of the “let others work for you” system at work. How did Mr. Rockefeller and his fellow monopolists get the globe to work for them? It went like this, according to Howe:

“This is the story of something for nothing—of making the other fellow pay. This making the other fellow pay, of getting something for nothing, explains the lust for franchises, mining rights, tariff privileges, railway control, tax evasions. All these things mean monopoly, and all monopoly is bottomed on legislation.

And monopoly laws are born in corruption. The commercialism of the press, or education, even of sweet charity, is part of the price we pay for the special privileges created by law. The desire of something for nothing, of making the other fellow pay, of monopoly in some form or other, is the cause of corruption. Monopoly and corruption are cause and effect. Together, they work in Congress, in our Commonwealths, in our municipalities. It is always so. It always has been so. Privilege gives birth to corruption, just as the poisonous sewer breeds disease. Equal chance, a fair field and no favors, the “square deal” are never corrupt. They do not appear in legislative halls nor in Council Chambers. For these things mean labor for labor, value for value, something for something. This is why the little business man, the retail and wholesale dealer, the jobber, and the manufacturer are not the business men whose business corrupts politics.”

Howe’s opposite to this system of corrupt monopoly is described as “labor for labor, value for value, something for something.” But these values are also the essential hall marks of a market system, that is, a purely competitive system, where market clearing prices are established by impartial interaction of supply and demand in the market place. Such an impartial system cannot, of course, be influenced or corrupted by politics. The monopoly economic system based on corruption and privilege described by Howe is a politically run economy. It is at the same time also a system of disguised forced labor, called by Ludwig von Mises the Zwangswirtschaft system, a system of compulsion. It is this element of compulsion that is common to all politically run economies: Hitler’s New Order, Mussolini’s corporate state, Kennedy’s New Frontier, Johnson’s Great Society, and Nixon’s Creative Federalism. Compulsion was also an element in Herbert Hoover’s reaction to the depression and much more obviously in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and the National Recovery Administration.

It is this element of compulsion that enables a few—those who hold and gain from the legal monopoly—to live in society at the expense of the many. Those who control or benefit from the legislative franchises and regulation and who influence the government bureaucracies at the same time are determining the rules and regulations to protect their present wealth, prey on the wealth of others, and keep out new entrants from their business. For example, to make the point clear, the Interstate Commerce Commission, created in 1880, exists to restrict competition in the transportation industry, not to get the best deal possible for shippers. Similarly, the Civil Aeronautics Board exists to protect the domestic aviation industry, not the airline traveler. For a current example, among hundreds, witness the CAB seizure in July 1974 of a Philippines Air Lines (PAL) DC-10 at San Francisco airport. What sin had PAL committed? The airline merely substituted a DC-10 plane, for which equipment CAB had not granted permission, for a DC-8. Who gained? The domestic U.S. airlines, because of less competition. Who lost? The traveler denied seats and a choice of equipment. Any doubts about whose side the CAB might be on were dispelled by an article a few weeks later in The Wall Street Journal (August 13, 1974) entitled “CAB Is an Enthusiastic Backer of Moves to Trim Airline Service, Increase Fares.” This piece contained a gem by CAB vice chairman Whitney Gillilland: “We’ve had too much emphasis on passenger convenience in the past.” Gillilland added that the CAB must be more tolerant of capacity-packed planes, “even if it may mean somebody has to wait a day to get a flight.”

In brief, regulatory agencies are devices to use the police power of the state to shield favored industries from competition, to protect their inefficiencies, and to guarantee their profits. And, of course, these devices are vehemently defended by their wards: the regulated businessmen or, as we term them, “the corporate socialists.”

This system of legal compulsion is the modern expression of Frederic Bastiat’s dictum that socialism is a system where everyone attempts to live at the expense of everyone else. Consequently, corporate socialism is a system where those few who hold the legal monopolies of financial and industrial control profit at the expense of all others in society.

In modern America the most significant illustration of society as a whole working for the few is the 1913 Federal Reserve Act. The Federal Reserve System is, in effect, a private banking monopoly, not answerable to Congress or the public, but with legal monopoly control over money supply without let or hindrance or even audit by the General Accounting Office. It was irresponsible manipulation of money supply by this Federal Reserve System that brought about the inflation of the 1920s, the 1929 Depression, and so the presumed requirement for a Roosevelt New Deal. In the next chapter we shall examine more closely the Federal Reserve System and its originators. For the moment, let’s look more closely at the arguments made by the Wall Street financier-philosophers to justify their “making society work for the few” credo.

NOTE: Frederick Clemson Howe wrote ‘Confessions of a Monopolist’ so is not to be confused with Louis Howe, FDR’s right-hand man.

For additional information related to this topic, please see the ClearNFO reading list HERE.