The USA has been Owned since before you were born

In researching the last post, I found a real gem of a book, America's Sixty Families, 1937, by Ferdinand Lundberg. On reading through it (still not finished), it became apparent that this guy was really on the money about the politics of the day, and quite prophetic about the future.

Here are a few choice passages:

Of the world's wealthy ruling classes, those of America and England alone retain the full substance.. Alone do they still speak confidently and act decisively for themselves, not driven to utilize bizarre intermediaries like a Hitler or a Mussolini to hypnotize the multitudes. (Now we have Bush and Obama)

The United States, it is apparent even to the blind, is a nightmare of contradictions. It has not only nurtured the wealthiest class history has ever known, but it has also spawned an immense, possibly permanent, army of paupers the unemployed. One naturally expects to find millions of impoverished in backward economies such as India, China, Japan, or czarist Russia. In the advanced economic and cultural environment of North America, with all its natural resources, the phenomenon is little short of incredible. In the light of the nation's professed ideals it is tragically absurd.

... the personal income of Mr. Rockefeller in 1924 may have been $30,000,000 to $50,000,000.

The annual revenue of the late Czar of Russia varied from only $10,000,000 to $12,000,000... At most the income of the King (of England) is $4,500,000.

The uprush of the American fortunes, led by the monolithic Rockefeller accumulation, emphasizes that although the United States was once a great political democracy it has not remained one (don't forget he's writing this in 1937). Citizens may still be equals at the polls, where little is decided; but they are not equals at the bank tellers' wickets, where much is decided.

.. corporations are merely the instruments or tools of control behind which the living masters hide in discreet anonymity.

Marcus Alonzo Hanna, commissar extraordinary of John D. Rockefeller, became the political architect of the new era.. In the three decades preceding the advent of Hanna in Washington, the grip of the new special interests upon government had been extemporaneous, unorganized, individualistic; under Hanna the hold was made conscious, formal, and systematic, to be exercised with careful premeditation on behalf of the whole clique of big industrial proprietors.

Before Hanna the fledgling industrialists had prompted the two dominant political parties in hoarsely contradictory and discordant voices from the outside (although they did have obliging friends in office) ; under Hanna the industrialists and bankers moved in, a consolidated body, and constituted themselves the two political parties.

Before Hanna the unconstitutional control by the industrialists had been furtive, half ashamed, and vehemently denied even in the face of the most damning evidence; under Hanna the control was for the first time brazenly admitted and, cynically or sincerely, justified on the pretense that it was in the national interest. Control, it became obvious to the magnates, had to be wielded openly, as a prescriptive right of big capital, rather than covertly; otherwise, the rising chorus of protest might develop into an overwhelming mass movement.

After Hanna crude bribery by men of wealth was no longer a prime essential to the control of government; first, because the men placed in the highest public offices from McKinley through Hoover were all the political creations of the wealthy; and, second, because the community of wealth had finally obtained the rich treasure trove it had been ceaselessly seeking in the maze of frauds and trickeries that extended from the Civil War to the end of the century.

In 1860 more than half the land area of the nation was held in trust for the people by the government, but by 1900 fully nine-tenths of it had been given away, under the stimulus of corrupt payments, to railroads, mining syndicates, speculative land enterprises, and homesteaders. Whatever of more than average value fell into the hands of the latter innocents was soon taken away by mortgage or by fraud, by force or by wit, by hook or by crook. (Sound familiar?)

It is a challenging fact that most of the natural resources owned today by the United States Steel Corporation, the Aluminum Corporation, the Standard Oil Company, the railroads, and, in fact, nearly all private corporations, were in 1860 communally owned under political auspices.

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What more needs to be said? The USA has been pwned since way before any of us were born. Raised on the notion that the US was the land of equal opportunity, when nothing has been further from the truth. The massive poverty and homelessness we see is not the result of lazy people, but the result of these corrupt industrialists screwing over the entire nation planet.

A great man once said, "We know what they want... which is more for themselves and less for everybody else." It's time to put these bastards in their place. Here's a thought- If you are a bodyguard or chauffeur for a billionaire scumbag, drive them to a secure location and 'interview' them for youtube.

When all is said and done, We The People will have that stolen land back, as well as the money that's been looted from the treasury and working class Americans for decades. We will REPEAL the income tax act, and reinstate corporate taxes. We will REPEAL NAFTA, the TSA, the Patriot Act and yes, even the phony "War on Terror". We are not buying your bullshit anymore! It started with Wisconsin, but the attitude is spreading state to state, STORM THE CAPITOL! STORM THE TV STATION!

http://www.squattable.com/blog/birdflip/030911/usa-has-been-owned-you-were-born

more from the book:

Contrary to the impression even in relatively well-informed quarters, the versatile Morgan partners themselves own very little stock.. It is the Morgan clients that own the stock.

J. P. Morgan and Company delights to baffle inquiring senators and the public alike by pointing out blandly, how slight are the holdings of the partners in various corporations. The most salient instance in which the Morgans referred to their puny participation was in rejoinder to the weighty charge that they maneuvered America into the World War, when J. P. Morgan and Company was purchasing agent for the Allies at a commission of one per cent...

Whereas J. P. Morgan and Company has often been sternly criticized, its clients, have scarcely been mentioned in condemnation. The banking firm, absorbing the blows of public opinion, acts as a great buffer between the public and the ultimate beneficiaries of collective acts and policies that stir up public resentment.

n/t

:shrug:

n/t

the Robber Barons and Wall Street Bankers never went away - they just went global, and we are now also owned by the Saudis, the Emirs, Swiss Insurance companies, Japanese corporations, and Chinese state conglomerates.

We didn't fix this situation during the Depression and after World War Two, when we had the power and sovereignty to do so, and now look where we are. Fully owned and shocked to "discover" it.

became a tool for their globalization efforts.

But, how much do you want to bet they won't?

Owned, lock stock and barrel.

A couple of years ago, I bought a copy of his One Thousand Americans: The Real Rulers of the U.S.A. (1947) -- but I never got around to reading it. I've just pulled it off the shelf, though, and I'm going to work my way through it. I suspect it complements the book you're talking about very nicely.

Chapter titles that still echo today's headlines include such things as "NAM-to-Press-to-Congress," "Big Business in the War," "du Pont, Hoover and Hitler," "Who Buys the Elections?" Some of the players have changed -- what Hearst was then, Murdoch is now -- but the pattern of large corporations, banks, insurance companies, and corporate media remains the same.

The 10 largest corporations in 1947 (as listed in an appendix) were Metropolitan Life, Bell Telephone, Prudential Ins,, Bank of America, National City Bank (now Citibank), Chase National (now JP Morgan Chase), Equitable Life, New York Life, Guaranty Trust (merged with JP Morgan in 1959), and Standard Oil of New Jersey.

Here's a typical quote:

"A whole generation has been spent in whitewashing Wall Street, gilding the name of Morgan. So restored to public favor have both become that they suffered no ill effects whatever in 1946 when the Department of Justice instituted an investigation which produced the evidence that six most powrful banking groups of the nation, headed by Morgan, Stanley & Company, hold a monopoly on the nation's commerce, manipulate giant corporations, railroads, utilities and banks, and so completely dominate big industry that the term 'free enterprise'--which was also a semantic trick to take the curse off the ill-fated term 'capitalism after the breakdown of 1929--could become the homeric laugh of the century."

Good stuff.

for the price of UPS shipping (or a swap): http://www.librarything.com/work/5881614/members

And if the terms were still 28+28 years, they would be.

There are times I more than half suspect that a strong secondary motivation for the endless extensions of copyright is that there were a lot of truth-telling materials published between 1923 and the early 50's that somebody is trying to kill. Certainly right-wing materials from that period are far more available, whether online or through reprints, than almost anything from the left.

On edit: And don't even get me started on the current efforts to make e-books non-resellable. If that isn't resisted, large portions of current history could effectively be released.

I don't remember discussing this in history class.