The Swamp of Corporate Socialism | Something for Nothing

Antony Sutton (1975) - Old John D. Rockefeller and his 19th century fellow-capitalists were convinced of one absolute truth: that no great monetary wealth could be accumulated under the impartial rules of a competitive laissez faire society. The only sure road to the acquisition of massive wealth was monopoly: drive out your competitors, reduce competition, eliminate laissez-faire, and above all get state protection for your industry through compliant politicians and government regulation. This last avenue yields a legal monopoly, and a legal monopoly always leads to wealth.

This robber baron schema is also, under different labels, the socialist plan. The difference between a corporate state monopoly and a socialist state monopoly is essentially only the identity of the group controlling the power structure. The essence of socialism is monopoly control by the state using hired planners and academic sponges. On the other hand, Rockefeller, Morgan, and their corporate friends aimed to acquire and control their monopoly and to maximize its profits through influence in the state political apparatus; this, while it still needs hired planners and academic sponges, is a discreet and far more subtle process than outright state ownership under socialism. Success for the Rockefeller gambit has depended particularly upon focusing public attention upon largely irrelevant and superficial historical creations, such as the myth of a struggle between capitalists and communists, and careful cultivation of political forces by big business. We call this phenomenon of corporate legal monopoly — market control acquired by using political influence — by the name of corporate socialism.The most lucid and frank description of corporate socialism and its mores and objectives is to be found in a 1906 booklet by Frederic Clemson Howe, Confessions of a Monopolist [...]:

"This is the story of something for nothing — of making the other fellow pay. This making the other fellow pay, of getting something for nothing, explains the lust for franchises, mining rights, tariff privileges, railway control, tax evasions. All these things mean monopoly, and all monopoly is bottomed on legislation. And monopoly laws are born in corruption. The commercialism of the press, or education, even of sweet charity, is part of the price we pay for the special privileges created by law. The desire of something for nothing, of making the other fellow pay, of monopoly in some form or other, is the cause of corruption. Monopoly and corruption are cause and effect. Together, they work in Congress, in our Commonwealths, in our municipalities. It is always so. It always has been so. Privilege gives birth to corruption, just as the poisonous sewer breeds disease. Equal chance, a fair field and no favors, the "square deal" are never corrupt. They do not appear in legislative halls nor in Council Chambers. For these things mean labor for labor, value for value, something for something. This is why the little business man, the retail and wholesale dealer, the jobber, and the manufacturer are not the business men whose business corrupts politics."

Howe's opposite to this system of corrupt monopoly is described as "labor for labor, value for value, something for something." But these values are also the essential hall marks of a market system, that is, a purely competitive system, where market clearing prices are established by impartial interaction of supply and demand in the market place. Such an impartial system cannot, of course, be influenced or corrupted by politics. The monopoly economic system based on corruption and privilege described by Howe is a politically run economy. It is at the same time also a system of disguised forced labor, called by Ludwig von Mises the Zwangswirtschaft, a system of compulsion. It is this element of compulsion that is common to all politically run economies: Hitler's New Order, Mussolini's corporate state, Kennedy's New Frontier, Johnson's Great Society, and Nixon's Creative Federalism. Compulsion was also an element in Herbert Hoover's reaction to the depression and much more obviously in Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and the National Recovery Administration.

[...] In modern America the most significant illustration of society as a whole working for the few is the 1913 Federal Reserve Act. The Federal Reserve System is, in effect, a private banking monopoly, not answerable to Congress or the public, but with legal monopoly control over money supply without let or hindrance or even audit by the General Accounting Office. More HERE

George Marechal's Stock Market Forecast 1933 to 1948 │ Law of the Market

In 1933 the incoming U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt reached out to Roger Ward Babson for a long range forecast for the stock markets. Babson, a very successful entrepreneur, economist, business theorist, investor, and philantroph with a huge fortune, was a household name since he had predicted, back on September 5th 1929, that "a crash is coming, and it may be terrific". Later that very same day the stock market on Wall Street declined by 3% and this became known as the "Babson Break". The big crash with most catastrophic losses followed on October 24 and 29, 1929 (Black Thursday and Black Tuesday). When the U.S. finally reached the height of the Great Depression in 1932 and the stock market was at an all-time low, 75% of its value was wiped out, and shares in any company were virtually worthless. Thousands of people were ruined, and soup kitchens sprang up on street corners as people lost their jobs, savings and homes. 

To comply with President Roosevelt’s demand, Babson in turn consulted the largely unknown Canadian mathematician George Marechal, who recently had managed to work out how the highs and lows of the Dow Jones Industrial Index repeated themselves in predetermined sequences. So finally it was Marechal who produced a Dow Jones Index Forecast Chart over the next 15 years for the Roosevelt administration, that proved to be spectacularly accurate. So confident was Marechal in his prediction at the time that he had his chart copyrighted. His friend Alan H. Andrews (the inventor of Andrews’ Pitchfork) described it as a "chart no government economist, no college professor has enough knowledge to even approach or courage to try to duplicate." 

Comparison of Marechal's 1933 forecast with actual data of the Dow Jones Index from 1934 through April 1951
[published by Garfield A. Drew and Edward R. Dewey in Cycles Magazine, October 1962].

Edward R. Dewey confirmed in 1962 that still little to nothing was known of Marechal's method, though a fund manager had offered him $20,000 for his secrets, or, alternatively, to operate a five million dollar fund on the basis of these secrets and to share profits. But Marechal did not accept either offer, and finally died at the age of 90 without ever revealing how he was able to calculate market movements with such uncanny accuracy. However, what is clear is that he was using a version of Babson's Normal Line. The annotations to his chart later added by his friend Alan Andrews show that Marechal plotted turns with what are now known as Median Lines. Dewey concluded:

"The important thing about this study [chart of Marechal] is not the exact precision by which it came true, or the amount of money you would or would not have made if you had followed it. The important thing is that it shows that the market has predictable patterns. In other words, that the seeming disorder of market fluctuations really is subject to law, and that this law is learnable."

In 1948 Garfield A. Drew, another friend of Marechal, reproduced the forecast in his book "New Methods For Profit in the Stock Market". Drew stated that one of the original copies of the forecast had been in his possession since 1935, and as each year was divided into six parts he added in his book the actual fluctuations of the Dow Jones Industrial Averages by plotting the high and low for each two-month period. Drew commented on the famous chart:

"Clearly, the pattern of the forecast and the actual pattern of the market miss many times in detail and exact timing. Nevertheless, the broad picture of the trends from 1934 through 1947, at least, is remarkably similar. The basic downtrend from 1936-37 to 1942 is plain, and likewise the uptrend from 1942 to 1946, although the latter shows up as a much more zigzag pattern in the forecast than was actually the case. Thus, the year 1944 by itself, for example, appears as a down period, whereas it was really an up year. When the year 1947 ended, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had spent 16 months within a 16% price range. As far as the situation at the time the comparison in [the figure] ends is concerned, it is evident that, if the broad accuracy of the preceding 14 years is to be maintained, 1948 must, on the whole, witness a rising price level. A definite down trend going substantially into new low territory by the year-end would produce a greater discrepancy between the forecast pattern and the actual course of prices than at any other time in the record. The fact remains to be seen at this writing, but, in line with his original forecast made years before, Marechal always insisted that 1946-47 was not a "bear market" but an interruption in a long upward trend comparable to the break and market hesitancy during 1926 in the long upswing from 1921 to 1929.”

"In this figure the Dow Jones Averages are plotted from 1897 through 1962. On this chart are a number
of "resistance" lines. The original worksheets for Marechal's forecast look just about like this chart,
except that there were a great many more lines and, thus, a great many more intersecting points.
Marechal's secrets consist fundamentally of how to draw the resistance lines and how to select the
significant intersections" [Edward R. Dewey in Cycles Magazine, October 1962].