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Banned
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roachboy, your World Health Org. article reinforces my theory about the American "one party: system:
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Gore Vidal - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"[t]here is only one party in the United States, the Property Party...and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt—until recently... and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties."
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Our history shows that our presidents opted for the advice and practice of extreme right thugs, no matter what political party held the white house:
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John J. McCloy and the "Splendid Reconciliation"
....As the United States began the transition from occupation to supervision a year later, McCloy became U.S. High Commissioner, a position that demanded the talents of a diplomat and administrator. McCloy was particularly effective as he enjoyed the confidence of and excellent relations with the President, the U.S. Army and Averell Harriman, the top administrator of Marshall Plan aid. He used his almost dictatorial powers to scrupulously promote the growth of German democracy and the rejuvenation of the German economy, even when it meant treading on dangerous political ground, as was the case when he overturned the Nuremberg judgements against the Krupp family. During his tenure, he helped lay the basis for the more "normal" relations that a sovereign German government would one day carry on with the new U.S. Embassy in Bad Godesberg....
The SS Brotherhood of the Bell: The ... - Google Book Search
...We do know what another prominent member of the Warren Commission was up to before the war: John J. McCloy. FOr those who may have forgotten, John J, McCloy was the post-war American Higher Commissioner for (West) Germany, and was responsible for pardoning many Nazis from their war crimes sentences in order to expedite their extradition to the U.S.A. and their use in Operation Paperclip and similar projects.
But before the war John J. McCloy was so highly placed, so "in" on the "inside track," that he managed to share a box with Adolf Hitler at the 1936 Berlin Olympics in what may have been his first television appearance. But why such high honors for an American lawyer? This is in part because he was an attorney for the German chemical cartel I.G. Farben before the war.
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Ultimate Insider, Ultimate Outsider - New York Times
Ultimate Insider, Ultimate Outsider
By JOSEPH FINDER;
Published: April 12, 1992
THE journalist Richard Rovere was once challenged to name the chairman of the Establishment, that predominantly WASP ruling class that for decades had steered American domestic and foreign policy. He pondered for a while. "Suddenly the right name sprang to my lips. 'John J. McCloy,' " Rovere declared. "My God, how could I have hesitated?"
It was a logical choice: John J. McCloy, the friend and adviser to nine Presidents, the Wall Street lawyer par excellence, the chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations (emblematic institution of the Establishment if ever there was one), the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the Chase Manhattan Bank, the president of the World Bank, the virtual dictator of postwar Germany for three years as commissioner of occupied Germany, a member of the Warren Commission . . . and the resume goes on and on.....
...As Mr. Bird writes, he was responsible "more than any other individual" for getting the President to issue the infamous Executive Order 9066, calling for the resettlement of more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans from the West Coast to "relocation centers" (or, as Roosevelt more bluntly called them, "concentration camps"). McCloy justified the decision by proclaiming, "If it is a question of safety of the country, [ or ] the Constitution of the United States, why, the Constitution is just a scrap of paper to me."...
.....He became a well-regarded corporate attorney at several New York law firms and joined all the right clubs. Recruited to Washington by Franklin D. Roosevelt's Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, McCloy was eventually appointed Assistant Secretary of War. Like Woody Allen's Zelig, he seemed to turn up everywhere -- smoking cigars with Churchill amid the ruins of the House of Commons; consulting with Charles de Gaulle, George Patton and George Marshall; participating in the discussions over whether to drop the atomic bomb on Japan.....
Ultimate Insider, Ultimate Outsider - New York Times
...In March 1945 Roosevelt greeted McCloy in the Oval Office with arm extended in a Nazi salute, saying, "Heil McCloy -- Hochkommissar fur Deutschland." McCloy declined the position, urging that Roosevelt pick a military man. But when Harry S. Truman offered him the same job four years later, he finally accepted, thus entering one of the most controversial periods of his long career.
AS High Commissioner for occupied Germany, McCloy granted clemency to dozens of Nazi war criminals. He freed, or reduced the sentences of, most of the 20 SS extermination squad leaders, whose crimes he freely conceded were "historic in their magnitude and horror." Of the 15 death sentences handed down at the Nuremberg trials, McCloy carried out a mere five. Of the remaining 74 war criminals who were sentenced at Nuremberg to prison terms, he let many go free -- most notoriously the industrialist Alfried Krupp, who had been sentenced at Nuremberg to 12 years in prison for using concentration camp inmates as slave labor. Krupp, accompanied by most of his board of directors, walked out of the Landsberg prison in 1951 to a cheering crowd and a champagne breakfast -- with his fortune and industrial empire intact.
Much of the world was outraged. "Why," Eleanor Roosevelt wrote to McCloy, "are we freeing so many Nazis?.....
Ultimate Insider, Ultimate Outsider - New York Times
....Throughout the late 1960's and the 70's, McCloy continued to exert an enormous influence on American foreign policy. In 1979, when David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger began pressing the Carter Administration to admit the deposed Shah of Iran to the United States for medical treatment (actually, for asylum), they asked McCloy to orchestrate the extensive lobbying effort. His motivations were not entirely disinterested: Milbank, Tweed provided legal counsel to the Shah, who also had billions of dollars on deposit with Chase. Every Christmas, the Shah sent his friend Jack McCloy five pounds of Beluga caviar....
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The House That Krupp Rebuilt - TIME
Monday, Aug. 19, 1957
The House That Krupp Rebuilt
The wealthiest man in Europe—and perhaps in the world—rose shortly before 8 one morning this week in a modest ranch-style house overlooking the city of Essen on West Germany's Ruhr River. Tall and spare, with steel-grey eyes and finely cut features, he slipped into a dressing gown and carefully selected an expensively tailored dark business suit from his wardrobe. After shaving, he sat down to his usual solitary breakfast of coffee and a single egg, read newspapers and personal mail as he ate. Though his normally taciturn air and faithfulness to morning routine gave little hint of it, the day was an important one in the life of Alfried Felix Alwyn Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, ruler and sole owner of Germany's $1 billion Krupp industrial empire....
The House That Krupp Rebuilt - TIME
....Kruppianer Spirit. Krupp was confident from the first that his prison sentence would be reduced. In 1951. having made an investigation of Krupp's war guilt. U.S. High Commissioner for Germany John J. McCloy commuted the sentences of Alfried and his directors to time already served. Said Lawyer McCloy: "I can find no personal guilt in Defendant Krupp, based upon the charges in this case, sufficient to distinguish him above all others sentenced by the Nurnberg courts." He therefore ordered Krupp's property returned to him though Krupp later had to sign the Mehlen Accord which split up his empire. On a foggy February morning, after six years in prison, Krupp walked forth from Landsberg prison, went off with brother Berthold to a champagne breakfast in a nearby hotel. Said he to correspondents: "I hope it will never be necessary to produce arms again."
He began rebuilding the Krupp empire as soon as he was permitted to return to his Essen headquarters. To finance the comeback, he dug out the firm's accumulated deposits from still-existing bank accounts, borrowed upwards of $17 million from commercial banks, used the $2,600,000 that he (and each of his brothers and sisters) got from the Allied sale of Krupp properties. With the help of this capital and generous tax write-offs from the West German government, Krupp had spent some $40 million in plant rebuilding by 1955. Since 1954, the firm has been making a profit. ....
Krupp on the March -- Printout -- TIME
Monday, Jan. 19, 1959
Krupp on the March
"We have a moral obligation, and I will not look for escapes." Thus spoke West Germany's Alfried Krupp (TIME Cover, Aug. 19, 1957) of his pledge to the Allies to sell the coal and steel companies in his industrial empire. Last week, instead of selling, Alfried Krupp got permission from the High Authority of the European Coal and Steel Community to buy another steelmaker. The firm: Bochumer Verein, Germany's biggest producer of special steel. The purchase would give Krupp the biggest steelmaking capacity (4,000,000 tons) in Europe.
The Allied ruling on Krupp, later written into German law, was designed to break up the huge combine that supplied Hitler with much of his arms. Krupp won extensions from the original March 1958 deadline by pleading he could not find a buyer for the Rheinhausen works, center of his coal and steel holdings. Permission for Rheinhausen to buy the new company made it almost certain that Krupp will not have to keep his promise to dispose of his coal and steel holdings this year. Said a Krupp spokesman: "The promise was given under compulsion."
The Allies themselves are divided on Krupp. Both the U.S. and France have let the West German government know that they are not opposed to letting Krupp keep his property. Only the British have insisted on holding Krupp to his promise. Since there is little they can—or want to —do about it, the Allies may now decide to release Krupp formally from his pledge. Krupp is already believed to own 75% of Bochumer Verein's stock, obtained through the good offices of his friend, Swedish Industrialist Axel Wenner-Gren.
The Big Eight. The trend toward reconcentration of West German industry affects more than Krupp. Eight big firms—Krupp (with Bochumer Verein), Dortmund-Horder Hlittenunion, Phoenix-Rheinrohr, Mannesmann, Hoesch Werke, Klockner-Werke, August Thyssen-Hütte, Hüttenwerk Oberhausen—control 75% of West Germany's steel production, almost 40% of German coal.
To make the ring even tighter, August Thyssen-Hütte, one of the keystones of a huge Third Reich steel combine of 177 companies, has applied to the High Authority to merge with Phoenix-Rheinrohr, West Germany's third biggest steel producer. The move would create a giant even bigger than Krupp-Bochumer Verein, with a 6,000,000-ton capacity and nearly $1 billion in sales. Mannesmann, the No. 4 steel producer, recently eliminated several of its subsidiaries, absorbed them into the main firm. The trend to growth extends beyond iron and coal. Friedrich Flick, a prewar steel baron who was forced to sell off many of his holdings after he was sent to prison as a war criminal, has built a new empire in autos. He got control of Daimler-Benz, joined it with the big Auto Union manufacturer to form Germany's biggest auto moneymaker.
The Big Three. To finance industrial reconcentration, many West German banks have gone down the reconcentration path themselves. Last September the last of the Big Three commercial banks, the Commerzbank, linked its semi-independent units into one big house; Deutsche and Dresdner banks, the other members of the Big Three, did the same two years ago.
Some Germans are worried about the trend. Said Chancellor Konrad Adenauer: "There is great future danger that a handful of economic structures will control the German economy to such a degree that government will be forced to take drastic steps against them." But the opposition to bigness is largely weak and scattered. German firms argue that they are forced to merge by anticartel laws which prevent them from making price and production agreements, point at such foreign combines as the Luxembourg's ARBED steel combine as proof that they are not alone in the need to merge. Asked a Krupp official last week: "Is it bad for Germans to be big, and not bad for others?"....
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