National Socialism, FDR Style

This topic was addressed earlier here.

In this short clip, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and the US Department of Energy tell us how the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration treated private property.  Don't let the war fool you.  FDR and his gang could not care less about private property rights before or during World War II.

View the High Definition version at: http://youtu.be/Iwgg_YsYTKA
Video from the Y-12, A Nuclear Family series is fair use, Title 17, Section 107, United States Code.

Note from the video, and historian D. Ray Smith, that Cades Cove was made a part of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and people were moved.  What is not mentioned is that Cades Cove was a 1934 big government project to turn a wilderness with a few people living within its boundaries into a big giant happy park, with nobody but federal employees (Parks Service) living within its boundaries.  At least they didn't name the place after a politician.  It was so darn important to the world, that FDR stopped by to "dedicate" the place in 1940, six years after he had the residents dragged out.

Then FDR had another brilliant idea to build hydroelectric dams all over the countryside.  Some were in the Tennessee River Valley, others were in the west.  The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) evicted families, by force if needed, out of the Clinch river valley that formed the Norris Dam reservoir.  Norris Dam is a monument to government named after George W. Norris, a U.S. Senator from Nebraska.

Some of those people who were booted from Cades Cove by FDR and then booted from "Norris" by FDR settled in Bear Creek Valley, and were booted from there by FDR for the Manhattan Project.

Another Memory Hole: The Buchanan Committee

Congressman Frank Buchanan

Did you ever hear of the House of Representatives Buchanan Committee aka United States House Select Committee on Lobbying Activities?  What about one by Clinton Anderson in 1944? I hadn't either until the great Brian Doherty of Reason informed me of its existence during a Book TV interview with Doug Bandow of the CATO institute.  You can find a link to Doherty's book Radicals for Capitalism in the left column of this page.

What was the Buchanan Committee?  It was a 1950s congressional committee to suppress freedom Franklin Delano Roosevelt style.  In this case, any speaking against the government, not unlike similar activities during the Wilson administration.

Good luck finding out much about it.  For some reason, anything that does not fit the Socialist narrative either fails to emerge in WikiPedia and gets deleted from YouTube.  Compare to the McCarthy hearings where every single person called before the joint House and Senate Committee was in fact guilty as sin, but not a one of them spent a day in jail and none were falsely maligned.  If you do not believe that last sentence, then produce one.  Nobody can, but that does not stop Leftists from claiming that there were.  After the release of the Venona Decrypts and the Soviet Archives, every single person who appeared before McCarthy, Kennedy, and Nixon has been confirmed as working for Stalin's Soviet Union.

One of the only places to find information on this Liberal Fascist commission is at TheFreeManOnline.Org. (Italics and links mine)

The Day FEE Was Called before Congress

After a failed effort to set up a Senate-House joint committee, the House assigned the investigation to a committee led by Rep. Frank Buchanan of Pennsylvania. Buchanan was not only a stalwart Fair Dealer but had his own axe to grind because the CCG (Committee for Constitutional Government) had successfully fought expanded public housing, a goal he had championed. He defined lobbying in the broadest possible terms to include groups that had an indirect influence on the formation of public opinion. The committee sent out a probing questionnaire to 166 businesses and organizations, most of them opponents of the Fair Deal. The Buchanan committee ignored lobbying by government agencies, but perhaps for the sake of balance a questionnaire also went to the Civil Rights Congress, an organization with close ties to the Communist Party.

When Buchanan’s staffers, armed with a dragnet subpoena, arrived in force at FEE’s (Foundation for Economic Education) headquarters in early 1949, Read reluctantly cooperated. It became readily apparent to him, however, that the investigators were leaving no stone unturned in the hope of finding something—anything—to discredit the organization. It was also clear that the committee had formed a working alliance with key New Deal interest groups and journalists. Almost immediately after the committee rummaged through FEE’s offices, someone leaked the information to Drew Pearson. Pearson’s column publicized the best-known names on FEE’s “secret” contributor list and quoted liberally from internal correspondence. Mullendore expressed his outrage about the leak in a letter to Buchanan: “Those who seek to extend the power of government try to close the mouths of citizens who dare to oppose them. . . . Your inquisitorial and extremely burdensome demand for information which you have no moral right to demand is a most alarming example of the use of this means of intimidation.”

Read the whole thing. Some of the names mentioned are researchable.  Fair warning, if you think the MSM has a left bias, just wait until you read this stuff.

The Socialist Workers Writers at the Village Voice made mention of the CGC once, in 2010, while praising a Marxist takeover of the Albany Senate.  Note: it was really a Democrat takeover, but leave it to the Village Voice to wordsmythe it into a second coming of Lenin.  Beyond that, it is difficult to find anything about the group that committed the sin of opposing oppressive government regulation.

Leading up to this was an FDR tactic, later to only be mentioned in articles about Richard M. Nixon, the Treasury Department was ordered directly by the President (FDR) to "audit" newspaper publisher Moses Annenberg, and others who were vocally against the New Deal, even after major portions of it like the National Recovery Act (NRA) were ruled unconstitutional and FDR advocated packing the United States Supreme Court with National Socialism friendly Justices.

How, seriously, do the Socialists get away Scott free with these shenanigans?

What Do Mussolini, Hitler, Obama and Newt Gingrich Have In Common?

What Do Mussolini, Hitler, Obama and Newt Gingrich Have In Common?

They loved FDR, in the beginning.

They all praised Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a great President with great policies.  Yes, it is true, Mussolini and Hitler praised FDR  in the same way that Progressive Newt Gingrich does today.  As George F. Will wrote on December 2, 2011 of Gingrich:

Gingrich, who would have made a marvelous Marxist, believes everything is related to everything else and only he understands how. Conservatism, in contrast, is both cause and effect of modesty about understanding society’s complexities, controlling its trajectory and improving upon its spontaneous order. Conservatism inoculates against the hubristic volatility that Gingrich exemplifies and Genesis deplores: “Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel.”

As any thinking person knows, there is precious little difference between Marxism and the other Socialisms, beyond marketing.  "Progressive" is just the latest relabeling of National Socialism, an authoritarian system of government that began as Yellow Socialism in France, but did not catch on in Europe after it was made popular in the USA by Theodore Roosevelt, his cousin FDR, and Woodrow Wilson.

If that is not enough, just read this: Newt Gingrich Praised SEIU Head Andy Stern's Forward-Looking Vision. If you have been following this blog, you will know that Andy Stern is a Socialist who endorses the latest crony capitalism/central planning developments in Red China.  The Huffington Post quotes Gingrich as saying this in his book Real Chance: From the World That Fails to the World That Works:

Andy Stern, the head of the Service Employees International Union, is the union leader who probably best understands the challenge of the world market and the need to make American union members productive in the face of world competition. Sadly, he is a distinct minority among union leaders.

The thing that divides Progressives like Newt Gingrich from libertarians like Ron Paul is freedom, especially the freedom for the consumer to chose in a free market. The sad thing is, Gingrich can play the nomination game better than the Ron Pauls of the world.

What Is So Bad About Monopolies?

Can a monopoly be sexy?

A monopoly (from Greek monos / μονος (alone or single) + polein / πωλειν (to sell)) exists when a specific person or enterprise is the only supplier of a particular commodity.

Thankfully, the question in the subject line is not so alien today as it was in the mid 1990s when my Strategic Management instructor used that as a lecture topic.  I was in the same boat then as many reading this today, with my reaction somewhere along the lines of How can you even ask that?  Of course they are bad!  They destroy the competition in the marketplace!

He, being a great lecturer, listened to a few of our comments and then launched into a quick destruction of them all: monopolies are short lived and competition destroys them.  Barriers to entry eventually disappear with new innovations and alternate products.  Of course, the lecture was much longer than that.

Now, there has been this lie spread through non-business academia and the mainstream media that once a monopoly is established, nobody can compete with it any more.  The consumer is a captive slave of the monopolist and that is that until the government does something.  As usual, the poets and news readers get this as wrong as one can possibly get anything wrong.  The persistent monopoly exists because of the intervention of government, not a lack of government action.

Need a few examples?

One often cited is Standard Oil of New Jersey.  The way it is told by Professors of History is that Standard had taken over the oil business (omitting that it was primarily kerosine, a replacement for whale oil in lamps, and a replacement for coal fired engines) and was gouging consumers.  They beat their competitors to a pulp and ran the show from derrick to home.

In reality, Standard had about 20% of the refining capacity by the time their case came before the United States Supreme Court and gained that through buying out their competition.  Some monopoly, huh?  By the time the case got to court, crude oil and refining competitors were emerging in the Western States and Getty (the primary shareholder) was boycotting those States because they were not giving him favorable deals to expand Standard to that part of the country.

Another falsehood in this Liberal Arts Department fable is that Standard owned oil fields.  In fact, they did not own a single oil well and were delighted when suppliers undercut each other on the price of crude.  When the government "broke them up" they were "divided" into different firms, all with the same owners with the same proportion of ownership as Standard of New Jersey.  All the government did was add inefficiency to the mix.

In reality, Standard had a short lived spike in market dominance that was going away through competition and a lack of government support from Western States.

The AT&T story is a study in the other half of the monopoly lie.  The story goes that "Ma Bell" (American Bell Telephone Company) created and protected their monopoly on voice telephone service through various sorts of dastardly acts and they thwarted government action to break them up until the feds were finally able to break the monopoly in the early 1980s.

First, the only reason that "Ma Bell" had any monopoly at all was because the federal government granted them one, as a national utility, under the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration in 1934.  In spite of being granted a monopoly, the US Justice Department decided to muck around and make some headlines for themselves in the 1950s and got the monopoly throttled back to 85% of the US market, along with restrictions on their foreign business.

By the 1980s, the American Bell System had had enough and asked the government nicely to become a "regular" company and compete without the umbrella of government monopoly power.  The agreed settlement resulted in a breakup of the firm into regional operating companies and an explosion in innovation and profit due to normal competition.  Those profits came in spite of overwhelming persistant government regulation that continues to this day.

Note also, in both of the above examples, National Socialist regimes were behind all of the government meddling with businesses that would have succeeded just fine with normal competition.

AOL CD Throne

AOL disk dress

CD bikini

Now for a few "monopoly" examples that should make anybody laugh: AOL, Netflix, Walmart (also accused of being a 'monopsony', NBC, Microsoft, and IBM.

So You Thought FDR Ended The Great Depression With The New Deal? WRONG!

This bum and FDR have a lot in common.

One of the persistent myths perpetuated by both Socialistic academics and their news writing mouth pieces alike is the myth of the New Deal ending the Great Depression.  Even though there is ample evidence against that notion, even though the most casual observation indicates that it is patently false.

Jim Powell, Michale Barone (C-SPAN Video) and others have researched this extensively.  The only reply that the socialists can give is "everybody knows that FDR ended the Great Depression."  Well, there is something to the socialistic/Keynesian view in that everybody who attended government run schools in the English speaking world has had this myth beaten into their noggins.

Here is another item exposing the truth about the FDR myth:

FDR's New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression

A groundbreaking study by UCLA economists Harold Cole and Lee Ohanian demonstrates that President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s excessively pro-labor, anti-competitive New Deal actually prolonged for seven long years the severe economic pain immortalized in John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath.”

Using 1929 data, the two researchers calculated what wages and prices would have been had without the New Deal, and then compared them to actual wages and prices at the time. Their findings were startling: In 11 key industries, actual wages averaged 25 percent higher than market conditions warranted, but unemployment was also 25 percent higher as well. Meanwhile, the New Deal pushed up prices 23 percent higher than they should have been, so consumers couldn’t afford to buy, leading to even more unemployment.

Cole and Ohanian blame FDR’s National Industrial Recovery Act for “short-circuiting the market’s self-correcting forces.” Instead of stimulating the economy, they argue, FDR managed to depress it even further. Without government intervention, the Great Depression would have ended in 1936 instead of 1943. If FDR unnecessarily prolonged the Great Depression, thank the Federal Reserve Bank for starting it. Current Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke conceded the central bank’s culpability in a Nov. 8, 2002 speech honoring University of Chicago free market economist Milton Friedman on his 90th birthday.

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/editorials/2008/10/fdrs-new-deal-prolonged-great-depression#ixzz1ab6ID89x

Get it on Amazon.

Senator Joseph McCarthy Was Right And The Elite Left Knew It All Along

The fakes were drawing the cartoons.

If this 'revelation' is new to you, then shame on you.  Even the most pedestrian of the Lenin/Stalin/Mao t-shirt wearing academic crowd should know this by now.  Getting them to admit to it is like getting them to admit that the Rosenbergs were spies, rather than victims of Jewish bigotry or that Alger Hiss really was a spy for the Soviet Union.

At the time of this writing, several Red Diaper Babies as diverse as David Horowitz and Carl Bernstein have corroborated that Joe McCarthy was correct.  The Venona decrypts of secret Soviet communications and the Soviet archives have confirmed it too.  What other evidence do you people need?  Point your favorite search engine at the topic and look it up yourself.  This one is too easy to find to require help.

As for my charge that the elite Left knew it all along, well, they were part of the plan and they were read into it.  Franklin Delano Roosevelt had his diplomats warn the Soviets of their tapped phones after being presented with evidence of Soviet infiltration of the US government, including the military.  He himself packed the Pentagon full of Soviet agents and sympathizers.

FDR's successor, Harry Truman was informed of the extent of Soviet infiltration and blew it off as ammunition that the Republicans might use against him, in typical Democrat fashion.

This lunacy of fiction, that the Soviets were either so adept at infiltrating the US government that not a single one was caught, or conversely, that the Soviets were really nice guys who would never spy on an ally or an enemy, has infected our history so deeply that even the Pentagon tour guides describe the courtyard hotdog stand in this manner:

“Rumor has it that during the Cold War the Russians never had any less than two missiles aimed at this hot dog stand,” Brett Eaton, an information and communications officer for Washington Headquarters Services, said while standing in front of the building. “They thought this was the Pentagon’s most top secret meeting room, and the entire Pentagon was a large fortress built around this hot dog stand.”

Reportedly, by using satellite imagery, the Soviets could see groups of U.S. military officers entering and exiting the hot dog stand at about the same time every day. They concluded that the stand was the entrance to an underground bunker. “They (Soviets) thought the officers were going to get their top secret briefings in a protected area, but really they were just going to get lunch,” Eaton said with a chuckle.

The legend surrounding the hot dog stand is even spun by official Pentagon tour guides during public tours of the building. “It's rumored that a portion of their (Soviet) nuclear arsenal was directed at that building, the Pentagon hot dog stand,” tour guides tell visitors as they pass the stand. “This is where the building earned the nickname Cafe Ground Zero, the deadliest hot dog stand in the world.”

Satellite imagery to see the rank insignia on the shoulders of military personnel?  US current satellite imagery could not even identify bin Laden with that level of confidence in 2001-2011.  when one targets anything with any size munition. center mass is where you are supposed to aim, exactly where the hot dog stand is located and it was common to program multiple warheads on important targets, just in case some do not make it to the target.

Instead of admitting the obvious answer, that has been out there for everybody to know including those in "the commanding heights of society", a big long story base on bullshit had to be spun.

Mind you, those who spread the "academic research" and "media research" that McCarthy was on a "witch hunt" are the same people who blow off The Red Terror.  The same people who excuse "The Great Leap Forward" in Mao's China and ignore the 67 million deaths that were the result.  The same people who do not bother to inform anybody that the Cultural Revolution was a destruction of Chinese culture.  The same people who blame Stalin's extermination of Ukrainians on a "famine" and refuse to equate it with the Nazi Holocaust.

Yes, the same people who try to further the falsehood that National Socialism was the "polar opposite" of International Socialism and that Hitler was worse than the French, Soviets, Red Chinese, Communist Vietnamese, and the rest.

Again I ask the academics and news media, show us a polar opposite of Socialism that was brutal, even a little mean.  There must be some actual "Right Wing" laissez-faire regime somewhere that they can point to with honesty, right?

Sovereign Immunity and the Asbestos Inquisitions

Nobody does sovereign immunity better than the Socialist.  To the Socialist, the individual is nothing more than a single cell in the body of the state.  If some individual was wronged by the state, well, too bad, stop rocking the boat and get over your asbestosis.

The National Socialist extremes of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration during World War II set the stage for one of the biggest showdowns in American legal history just a few decades later: The Asbestos Inquisitions.

In Dangerous When In Power, (Reason magazine, March, 2007) Overlawered.Com's Walter Olson describes how the US Navy threw existing asbestos precautions to the wind while constructing the war machine used by FDR to defeat the National Socialist regimes of Hitler and Mussolini, and then left the American workers to twist in the wind with no government compensation after the war was won.

The shipyard workers did win compensation, eventually, from parties who had nothing at all to do with their plight: asbestos manufacturers.

As usual, the culprit is the government, not the individual.

Wikipedia is not evidence, but . . .

I never much looked into the FDR concentration camps for Italians and Germans during WWII.  Most everybody knows of the FDR concentration camps for Japanese Americans and I have heard a lot of justification for it from different sides.  Well, more like different flavors of Leftists.  I suppose that the support was the usual boilerplate on their favorite National Socialist in the USA.  Anyway, the links above have some numbers to go with them, use it as you will.

In her well researched and documented book It Happened In Italy, Elizabeth Bettina documents how Jews were treated in Italy during the days of Il Duce.  Contrary to some accounts, she has documentation of concentration camps being set up well before the 1943 German invasion of Italy.  However, the personal accounts of the survivors are quite a bit sunnier than those of the Japanese who were rounded up by FDR and heavenly when contrasted against any concentration camp survivor under Hitler.

These differences are the basis for a section in Would You Like Borders With That Socialism? that compares the various National Socialist regimes that were at war with each other from the onset of the Spanish Civil War through the Cold War. A comparison between National Socialism and International Socialism is in the works for another section, but honestly, there is so little difference that it is hard to write very much on that.