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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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Join the Abraham Brigade
Wednesday 16 May @ 11:01:12 |
 by ED FELIEN
Last week’s issue was dedicated to past revolutionaries. This edition is dedicated to the future. We have invited Marv Davidov, Polly Mann and the Anti-War Committee to share their vision for the future.
 In that spirit, I would propose the following strategy: progressives, revolutionaries, antiwar activists, anarchists and anyone else who wants an end to the war in the Middle East and Single Payer Health Care in Minnesota should caucus next March in the Republican Party.
HISTORICAL PRECEDENT
There is an important historical precedent for this. In 1915, in North Dakota, upset with the price of grain and the exploitation they suffered from the railroads and the banks, farmers formed the Non-Partisan League. They joined the Republican Party and won control of the State House in 1916 and elected a farmer, Lynn Frazier, as governor with 79 percent of the vote. In 1918 they controlled both houses of the Legislature and established state-run enterprises like the North Dakota Mill and Elevator and the Bank of North Dakota.
They became the model for the Farmer-Labor Association of Minnesota and that led to the election of populist governors Floyd B. Olson and Elmer Benson.
 THE ABRAHAM LINCOLN BRIGADE
In 1936 when Republican Spain was fighting for its life against the combined fascist forces of Franco, Mussolini and Hitler, a group of Americans dedicated to defending democracy and freedom formed the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and went over to fight in Spain on behalf of the Republican government. Ernest Hemingway made his reputation as a writer with novels like “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and “A Farewell to Arms” covering this struggle. The U.S. government, controlled in many areas by pro-fascist and pro-Nazi elements, passed a strict neutrality act to prohibit arms or military personnel from reaching Republican Spain. Only one member of Congress voted against this act. He was John T. Bernard, a Farmer-Labor congressman from the Iron Range.
We need a new Abraham Lincoln Brigade to go into the Republican Party and fight fascism here in America.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY
Yes, the Republican Party was founded as an anti-slavery party and led the struggle for emancipation, but it was also a party in opposition to big business and in support of small shopkeepers and working people. In a letter to William Elkins, Nov. 21, 1864, President Abraham Lincoln wrote: “I see in the near future a crisis approaching. It unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. The money powers prey upon the nation in times of peace and conspire against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than a monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. It denounces as public enemies all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes. I have two great enemies, the Southern Army in front of me and the financial institutions at the rear; the latter is my greatest foe. Corporations have been enthroned, and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in the hands of a few, and the Republic is destroyed.”
Of course, Lincoln’s vision was prophetic. The money interests soon took over the Republican Party. Mark Hanna was a wealthy industrialist from Cleveland. He was close to John D. Rockefeller and the conservative wing of the Republican Party. He helped McKinley win the Ohio governor’s seat in 1891 and 1893. The phrase “backroom deal in a smoke filled room” was first used to describe the way Hanna got the nomination of McKinley for President in the 1896 election. Hanna defined the modern presidential election. He raised an unprecedented $3.5 million and outspent William Jennings Bryan 12 to 1. It was the most expensive campaign in history, and it demonstrated how big business could buy an election.
During McKinley’s first term Hanna was able to manipulate the federal government to allow trusts and monopoly interests to control commerce. Hanna once told an attorney general from Ohio who was suing to break up the Rockefeller Standard Oil monopoly to drop the suit. He said, “Come on, you’ve been in politics long enough to know that no man in public life owes the public anything.” It seemed that big business was firmly in control of the Republican Party, but, then, McKinley was assassinated early in his second term and Teddy Roosevelt, the Trust Buster and representative of the more liberal wing of the Republican Party, became president. Hanna’s comment: “Now that damn cowboy is president.”
It was Roosevelt who later said, “To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but it is morally treasonable to the American public.”
Some of the trusts were broken up and the heavily industrial wing of the party had to make peace with the more moderate or liberal wing. It was during the First World War that the Bush family found its footing within the industrial wing. Wilson appointed Sam Bush, the great-grandfather to the current President, chairman of the War Industries Board section on guns, small arms and ammunition in 1918. It was with his new friends, Remington and Dupont, that Bush controlled the production of munitions and war material during the war and after. Sam also took an interest in directing public policy. After the war he started the National Association of Manufacturers to lobby against unions and for industry. It grew to have considerable clout with legislation and elections.
But times were tough for the munitions industry in the ’20s and ’30s. There were few opportunities.
Sam’s son, Prescott, along with his Yale Skull and Bones buddies joined Brown Brothers Harriman after college and started making serious money. The biggest buck to be made in the 1920s was in re-arming Germany. Harriman & Co. set up Union Banking Corp. with Prescott as manager to trade with Nazi financier Fritz Thyssen. They bought a steamship line to ship Remington arms to Germany through a dummy corporation in Holland. Harriman & Co. bought Dresser Industries (manufacturers of oil pipeline equipment) in 1929 and Prescott became a director, and he continued to run Dresser from the board for the rest of his life. They, along with John Foster Dulles and others, bankrolled Hitler as a shrewd business strategy. But it wasn’t just business for Prescott. He and his father-in-law, George Walker, hosted the Third International Congress of Eugenics on Long Island in 1931. The purpose of the conference was to call for the forced sterilization of 14 million Americans. Many of the proposals discussed at the conference were later adopted and implemented by Nazi Germany. Prescott became managing director of Union Bank in 1934 at the height of trade with Germany. In 1939 he took direct management of some of the slave labor camps in Poland to aid Nazi armament, according to Dutch intelligence sources.
In October of 1942, more than 10 months after the Declaration of War, the U.S. government seized the assets of Union Bank and three other of Prescott’s industries: the steamship line, the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation (suppliers of steel, wire and explosives to the Nazis) and the Silesian-American Company (the coal mining company he managed along with John Foster Dulles on behalf of the Nazi Economic Minister). This didn’t really close Prescott and the munitions makers down. Once the war started they simply started supplying the other side.
During the War, Bonesmen were active in forming the OSS and its later incarnation, the CIA. Prescott’s relationship with Dulles would become very useful during the Eisenhower years, with John Foster as secretary of state and his brother, Allen Dulles, as director of the CIA. Prescott and Dresser Industries were kept well inside the loop. Hans Gisevius, the German intelligence agent who acted as the go-between with Allen Dulles in Switzerland and Admiral Canaris in the German High Command, after the war acted as go-between with Dulles, Dresser Industries and Prescott Bush.
 Wendell Willkie was the Republican candidate for President in 1940. He was from the moderate wing of the Party. Once the war began, he supported it unreservedly. Roosevelt asked him to take a goodwill tour around the world and talk to our allies and assure them of American support. Willkie wrote about his experiences in “One World.” He was unafraid to speak his mind. He said, “It is the utmost folly—it is just short of suicide—to take the position that citizens of any country should hold their tongues for fear of causing distress to the immediate and sometimes tortuous policies of their leaders.”
His analysis of the problems in Iraq and Iran are prophetic: “The next day, flying from Baghdad to Tehran, I was thinking over the events of the night before. And I became aware of certain sober undercurrents that had been beneath the gaiety, the same undercurrents I had noticed before in talking with students, newspapermen, and soldiers throughout the Middle East. It all added up to the conviction that these newly awakened people will be followers of some extremist leader in this generation if their new hunger for education and opportunity for a release from old restrictive religious and governmental practice is not met by their own rulers and their foreign overlords.
“Again and again I was asked: Does America intend to support a system by which our politics are dominated by foreigners, however politely, our lives dominated by foreigners, however indirectly, because we happen to be strategic points on military roads and trade routes of the world?
 “… [T]he current ‘protective’ colonial system … is completely antipathetic to all the principles for which we claim to fight. Furthermore, the more we preach those principles, the more we
stimulate the ferment that
endangers the system.
If we believe in the ends we proclaim and if we want the stirring new forces within the Middle East to work with us toward those ends, we must cease trying to perpetuate control by manipulation of native forces, by playing off one against the other for our own ends.”
President Eisenhower appointed John Foster Dulles as secretary of state and his brother Allen Dulles as head of the new CIA. He must have known about their past collaboration with the Nazis, but they were probably the prime choice of the industrial wing of the Party. Obviously, Eisenhower had reservations about his choice, and, in his final address to the American people, he (like Lincoln) warned of the influence of the military-industrial-complex: “This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience.
The total influence: economic, political, even spiritual is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
Clearly, then, there has always been this struggle inside the Republican Party between the military-industrial-complex allied with big business and represented by the Bush family and the liberal, moderate wing that cared about small business, fairness in trade and in the workplace and fought for honesty in government. But the election of Reagan and Bush meant the industrial faction had won and was in control of the Party.
 CRIMINAL WAR PROFITEERING AND CONFLICTS OF INTEREST
Since the 1930s the Bush family has owned and controlled Dresser Industries. When Cheney was CEO of Halliburton, in between his stint as Secretary of Defense under Bush I and Vice President under Bush II. He went hunting with the Bush family and decided after the trip to have Halliburton buy Dresser Industries for $8 billion. Wall Street thought that was too steep a price and the value of Halliburton stock dropped by a third. Halliburton was only worth about $8 billion before the sale, so it has to be assumed that the principals of Dresser actually took control of Halliburton. George W. Bush, as the oldest son, is probably the director of the Bush family fortune, so he is probably the principal director of Halliburton, which is convenient because he’s also President of the United States and Commander-In-Chief of the Armed Services.
Why hasn’t Congress investigated this obvious conflict of interest? Doesn’t the awarding of no-bid multi-billion dollar contracts to a family business constitute criminal war profiteering?
THE END OF LIBERTY
The current Bush administration has taken away our basic civil rights. If the Department of Homeland Security declares you a threat you may be locked up for years without ever having charges brought against you. The right of habeas corpus, your right to know the charges and see the evidence against you, is a right St. Paul asserted against the Romans. It was reasserted as a basic right in the Magna Carta. It is the foundation of a society based on law.
Bush has said he has the right to tap anyone’s telephone and monitor anyone’s speech. This is an intolerable infringement on our freedom of speech.
Any criticism of Bush in the press is said to be unpatriotic and helpful to the terrorists. Any criticism of the war is seen as defeatism. And Bush continues to bankrupt the treasury and our children’s children to give fat defense contracts to his family and friends.
Is this fascism? Mussolini, the first fascist theorist, said, “Corporati il Stati,” that is, the corporation is the state. He thought a better word would have been Corporatism, rather than fascism. The experience of fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany showed close collaboration between the major industrialists and the fascist and Nazi political parties. Bush has achieved the perfect merger of corporation and state.
Terror is a useful instrument of the fascist state. In his movie, Borat tells a rodeo audience, “We support the U.S. war of terror.” The crowd cheers. Did they hear him right? Do they understand that it is their government that is waging a war of terror against them? Is it possible that all these orange alerts and security checks are just manipulative tools to control, to insure obedience and to stifle dissent?
Fascism needs a total and perpetual war to unify the country and make dissent a treasonable offense. Bush got the Congress to declare a war on terror, not a war on a specific country, but a war on a concept. If it was a war on a country, the war could be waged and won and we’d be done with it. If it’s a war on a concept it could go on forever.
WHAT IS TO BE DONE?
We need progressive people to caucus with the Republican Party next March. Certainly there is enough good in the politics of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Wendell Willkie and Eisenhower’s “Beware the military-industrial-complex” to rally around and challenge the current set of gangsters running the show. Polly Mann, one of the co-founders of Women Against Military Madness, has agreed to allow us to place her name in nomination for President. We need to attend the precinct caucuses, get elected delegates to the State and Congressional Conventions, and elect national delegates to place Polly Mann in nomination for President. It would be quite wonderful in fall 2008 to hear Polly Mann address a national audience from the St. Paul Xcel Energy Center on an immediate end to war and a complete dismantling of all our thousand foreign bases in a hundred countries.
Further, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade must advocate for Single Payer Health Care. We need as good a health care program as every other industrialized nation. We need a health care program that will unequivocally take care of all our citizens, and we need a program that will stop being a burden to small businesses.
If you want more information, or if you want to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and be notified of meetings, please go to abrahamlincolnbrigade.org.
(Some of the ideas and statements in this article previously appeared in “Covered in oil” and “The resistible rise of American fascism” in Pulse.)
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