Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: shades who wrote (67521)	8/14/2005 9:12:57 PM
From: Slagle	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74559

Shades Re: "Trading with the enemy" I don't know where your grandfather lived in 1933 but if the town had a bank on March 6th that bank was closed and the bank president got a letter citing the 1919 "Trading With the Enemy Act" as the authority. Years later when there was a war on and an actual real "enemy" to deal with the act was used with reckless abandon, especially against political enemies. After all, the New Deal was getting a little "long in the tooth" and there were always elections upcoming, even in wartime. Along with Prescott Bush you could list the Dulles brothers and hundreds of others who were subjected to the same orders by the Roosevelt administration. Now nobody even among the hard line New Dealers really thought that Prescott Bush or the Dulles brothers were aiding the Nazis; if they were they would have been put in jail. These companies you list were German (or Dutch) businesses, not Nazi businesses, many of them big companies back when Adolph was just a little boy in Austria. And some of them had been through all this once before back in 1917 when the US entered WWI. Whatever business any of the companies did with the US effectively ended in September 1939 under the pressure of the Royal Navy blockade though most activities would have been perfectly legal under US law until we were at war with Germany in December 1941. But there hadn't been any business to conduct for years. How could there have been? Early in the war there were a few well disguised German tramp steamers that were able to sneak through the British blockade but by the invasion of France in May 1940 that was ended and the French coast blockaded too. The Royal Navy even sunk most of the French fleet just to make sure. You mention Thyssen but he fled Germany before the war and the Nazi government siezed and operated his facilities and why not? There was a war on. But as for the lefie "Bush worked for Hitler" mythology I just don't get it. They were businessmen and the government filed a civil action against the business they were involved with. So what. I suppose, that beyond politics, as these New York branches or US business offices of these German companies had been engaged with the mother country, at least before the war, that the government had every right to shut them down for the duration. But they were shut down anyway. You couldn't send as much as a letter or a telegram to Germany and there hadn't been any actual trade for years. And NO, we didn't "give" the Germans any money. This was back in those days before "foreign aid". In 1923 vast loans were made, actually bonds, and using the German national raliroad system (which was owned by the Weimar government) as collateral. German railroad bonds, and they were mostly defaulted. And when you say "we" should have squashed them, under what authority? We were not even members of the League of Nations. Slagle