CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Trump’s War Inspires the Return of an Old Scourge: War Profiteers

Photo by Camille Brodard

Harry Truman was certainly not FDR’s preference as his running mate at the Democratic Party’s 1944 convention. An obscure second-term Senator from Missouri, Truman was the pick of the cabal of conservative and racist Democrats who orchestrated the nomination of the country’s most popular president’s new running mate for what would be his fourth term in the White House. They chose Truman because they and the corporate leaders behind them desperately wanted to prevent the ailing Roosevelt from being succeeded by his incumbent, left-leaning VP Henry Wallace, whom they knew, should he assume the presidency upon FDR’s death, would continue and expand on his New Deal welfare state policies. In Truman, they had a conservative, redneck Democrat, but also a Senator who had been making something of a name for himself in the prior two years by calling out, and authoring legislation to rein in war profiteers.

At a time when US soldiers, sailors and airmen in Europe and the Asia Pacific were dying in large numbers fighting fascism on two fronts, Americans were livid at the way many of the nation’s capitalists were gouging both the public and the Pentagon, taking advantage of wartime shortages to raise prices.

It was, in fact, quite similar to the situation today, only the war grifters these days appear to be not just captains of industry producing shoddy products for the troops (though there is that), but the politicians themselves, who reportedly have been taking advantage of early insider tips on President Trump’s latest on-again/off-again war on Iran to buy or sell the stock market and to make illegal bets on the movement of the price of oil.

But the worst war profiteers, at least in my view, of this Middle East Trump fiasco........

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