An Interview with Smedley Butler
 

http://www.vfp109rcc.org/an_intervie...ley_butler.htm

An excerpt:

Q: There has been a lot of evidence of corporate profiteering on this current war, extending to the highest levels. What's you view?

General Butler: War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of the war a few people make huge fortunes. New millionaires and billionaires are created in a war. How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle? Out of war, nations acquire additional territory. They just take it. This newly acquired territory is exploited by the few – the self-same few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill. And what is this bill? This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations. Truly, war is a racket.

Q: Finally, general, how do we end this war racket?

General Butler: Well, it's a racket all right. A few profit, and the many pay. But there is a way to stop it. You can't end it by disarmament conferences, peace parlays in Geneva or well-meaning resolutions. It can be smashed effectively only by taking the profit out of war.

Democracy's Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent' by Ern
 

http://www.latimes.com/style/la-bk-r...n15-story.html

(He once called so************************m "merely Christianity in action.")

I understand now why the semi-official "History of the Marine Corps" book I have here gives short shift to Butler. It's not his attempt to out the 'Business Plot,' as I sort of thought. It's is anti-capitalist and pacifist ideas.

The Marines are a warrior religion at heart, no suprize there.

Sent from my SM-N900V using Tapatalk

Fortunately, he did out the business plot.

Business can't outright lie because they will get caught. They twist the truth. Things like "I wasn't aware at the time".

More than that. Some businesses sale contaminated product to a another business and that business may do some lab testing of the product and it comes back contaminated (they are off the hook) beyond United States law. The company doing the testing does not report it but sends it back to the seller so that the seller can re-sale it to a business that does not do testing. Everyone is really in cahoots and money is the reason.

It is the same in government, war and the like. If profit were taken out of the equation, none of this stuff would happen.

General Butler completely gets it.

Industry will not rat each other out so to speak. They are all the same. Any one at the top of the industry chain knows this.

I can bet you that anyone that owns a business (any business) already knows this.