Money Has No Morals

But then, we pretty much all know that by know, don't we? And while a logical corollary — money-lenders (or investment bankers) are IMmoral — does not necessarily follow, I think I'm beginning to notice a pattern here….

Russell Banks, in Dreaming Up America, goes into a discussion, in "Reel Six, The Dark Side Only Gets Darker," on why it was that Wall Street seemed to have an affinity for, and a willingness to support Hitler as he prepared for World War  II. (As for why the US seems to have an affinity for dictatorships, continue on. )

Americans were not on the whole concerned about the rise of Nazism in the period leading up to the war, or even at first during the war, the period of the late 1930s through to 1941. I spoke earlier of the prevailing view of Germany in the United states going all the way back to the late ninteenth century, how Germany was viewed as a kind of natural sibilling to the US, along with England, nearly as close as that; whereas France was viewed more as a cousin than a sibling.  And I described how this had to do with Germany being a northern, Protestant, Anglo-Saxon country, whereas France was somehow seen as Mediterranean, Roman Catholic, Latin, and greatly different therefore from us, and that there might be racist tints to that, a sense that we white, Anglo-Saxon, Northern European, Protestant nations had to stick together! So I don't think what was happening in Germany in the 1930s was as frightening to the US as it would have been had it happened elsewhere, because we trusted them a little more. Also, most of the victims so far seemed to be Jews, and no way was the US going to come to the defense of Jews at that time. Especially if it was going to cost us money. The other thing was our sense simply of the physical distance between the drama being played out across Europe and ourselves. Remember that the distance across the Atlantic Ocean was far, far greater than it is now. The preferred means of transportation was still an ocean linter rather than a plane, and so it was a question of weeks of travel, not hours. It wasn't hard in those years leading into he war for Americans to say, This doesn't concern us. pp. 89-90.

Earlier, on p. 48, Banks makes the point:

Rockefeller didn't believe in the American Dream, but everyone who worked for him did. He believed in the dream of empire. Ford didn't believe in the American Dream, but all those guys assembling Model Ts and Model As down on the assembly line, they did. Those Irishmen and those Italians and those Greeks, they did. All those Hungarians and Poles in the Steel yards in Pittsburgh working for Carnegie, they're the ones who changed American society. Carnegie Didn't. They sacrificed and worked very, very hard for many, many yaers. For generations. And the dream they believed in was still believable, because it was a human-scale, focused on individuals, and strengthened through family ties and in local communities and labor unions. It wasn't the distorted and corrupted dream of Empire. 

So of course my American heroes are not the Carnegies and the Fords. They're the people in the mines and on the assembly lines, in the steelyards and on the docks.

Far more interesting, however, than Russell Banks, are the books of Antony C. Sutton, three of whose books I've been reading. The first, Wall Street and the Bolsehevik Revolution, a 1974 work, documents the machinations of the gang at 120 Broadway, NY, NY (the Metropolitan Life Building), in funding the Lenin-Trotsky side of the Russian revolution (there was apparently another group fighting the czars, one which had more of a democratic flavor — and had even a 700,000-man army. Sutton dedicates this book to them, "those unknown Russian libertarians, also known as the Greens, who in 1919 fought both the Reds and the Whites in their attempt to gain a free and voluntary Russia.")  The US-based folks helping to install the totalitarian regime included folks like J. Ogden Armour [meat-packing], Pierre S. DuPont [chemical plants], Col. Edward M. House, Robert Dollar, William Boyce Thompson [NY Federal Reserve Bank Pres.], Perce A. Rockefeller [Standard Oil, maybe?], Woodrow Wilson [US president, like), Lloyd George [a British guy], Raymond Robins, Sen's Wm. Borah, John Sharp Williams, William N. Calder & Robert L. Owen, Reps. Henry Cooper and Henry Flood, Henry Ford,Charles A. Coffin, Frederick C. Howe, Oscar S. Strauss, J. Pierpont Morgan [something to do with banking], Julius Hammer [baking soda?], Harry Hopkins, Ivy Lee, Otto H. Kahn, Harold H. Swift [Swift's Premium, right?], Olof Aschberg [gold melters & re-packagers], Alexander Nyberg, John Reed [Ten Days That Shook The World, a propaganda work, mostly], etc. [What about To the Finland Station?]

While the German high command shipped Lenin and his gang to Petrograd from Switzerland, the US facilitated Trotsky's transfer from Manhattan to Petrograd. As Sutton puts it, "Brockdorff-Rantzau's [the German minister in Copenhagen] ideas of directing or controlling the revolutionaries, parallel, as we shall see, those of the Wall Street financiers. It was J.P. Morgan and the American International Corporation that attempted to control both domestic and foreign revolutionaries in the US for their own purposes." 

Then, in 1986, Sutton published America's Secret Establishment, a book that goes into the workings of "The Order," or "322," or, as it's more commonly known, the ever-so-secret Skull & Bones Society at Yale University, that boasts members like Not-Quite-President, but Sen. John Kerry, Acting Vice President George W. Bush, x-pres. George H.W. Bush, x-Sen. Prescott Walker Bush, the Bundy Brothers, etc.

 The other, the 1971 Volume II, Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development, 1930 to 1945 of a three-volume study of the transfer of technology from the US, as well as the UK and France, to the U.S.S.R. since the 1917 Russian Revolution through 1965. (In 1973, Sutton's National Suicide: Military Aid to the Soviet Union in 1973, was published. One source says it was this book that caused him to be removed from the Leland Stanford Junior University. (So far as I know, while there are many Junior Colleges in the US, there is only one Junior University, and that is Stanford.)

Sutton concludes that 95% of the USSR's economic development over the period from 1917 to 1973 was based on imports from the West, most of it coming from the USA in the form of US consultants, US factory equipment plus US installers and consultants and operators, entire factories, with US installers and consulting operators, legitimate or illegitimate acquisition of equipment (that is, by purchase or theft), or illicit acquisition of plans, blue-prints, etc., via the extensive industrial espionage presence the USSR maintained in the US. 

However, the official government position on any "help" the US, its big-bucks financiers, its multi-national corporations might have given, or the significant impact of any of that money and assistance might have had on the USSR's economic development, was that it was de minimis, insignificant, negligible. This may have been deliberate lying, ignorance, sloth. Or some combination thereof. Hard to tell. But as Sutton writes in his Introduction:

The State Department Decimal File [Sutton also calls this "the central file"--maybe the info has now all been transferred into Poindexter's Total Awareness System, whaddya think?] was found to be a superlative source of material in the form of reports from attachés and diplomatic offices, but the Department has not used this data for its own assessments; indeed, public statements by the Department are completely at variance both with previous academic assumptions and with the empirical findings of this study, itself based heavily upon the Decimal File. 

For example, Edwin M. Martin, Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, made the following statement in 1961 [Dec. 8, 1961, to House Select Committee on Export Control]: "I don't think there is convincing evidence that the net advantage to the Soviet Union of the continuation of trade is a major factor — or a particularly significant factor in the rate of their overall economic development in the long term."

As an example of such information, Sutton cites this:

The Max Miller unit at Baku [oilfield] was erected under the supervision of Miller Company Chief Engineer Werner Hofmann. Twice during its construction Hofmann left the Soviet Union and was interviewed on the progress of his work. In December 1931 he reported problems with refinery construction; … on one job, he said that there were "one thousand leaks where there should have not have been more than ten or twenty."
In November 1932, leaving for the last time, he was more caustic in his comments on the Soviet Union in general and the Max Miller plant in particular. After dismissing the Soviet Union with the statement that "the entire present regime is one big lie," he said that the Miller plant had cost $5 million but that only $25 worth of maintenance tools were available, adding that one shop had a half million dollars invested in one type of machine but that he couldn't get rags to wipe off the oil. Hofmann himself bought cloth in the foreigners' store to make wiping rags, but the workers took it to make children's clothes. These workers, he added, had neither protective clothing nor work clothes." [US State Dept. Decimal Files 861.5017—Living Conditions/389]. p. 87

Sutton writes (in my favorite footnote thus far):

There are statements, from 1918 … to 1968 by State Department officials from the Secretary of State downwards, to the effect that trade and the transfer mechanisms described in this and the previous volume have had no major effect on Soviet economic Development. On the other had, there is a report in the State Department files that names Kuhn, Loeb & Co (the long - established and important financial house in New York) as the financier of the First Five Year Plan. See US State Dept. Decimal File, 811.51/3711 and 861.50 Five Year Plan/236. p 340

  I'm still looking for the footnote in Western Technology where Sutton explains how the State Department Decimal filing system caused this problem, but it apparently has to do with mis-filing or, rather, mis-categorizing debriefing statements made by or reports filed by US contractors and consultants, which were filed under "living conditions," yet had detailed information about the impact of the technology. 

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