The slump in automobile sales was paralleled by the decline in the construction of new housing, causing unemployment in the building trades. Fewer suburban houses meant fewer markets for appliances, wall coverings, and other activities related to home building.

The economy was in trouble but people, dazzled by a surging stock market, ignored it. Agriculture was in a depression as farmers sold in a competitive market while having to buy in a protective market because US business subverted free enterprise by having the government tax foreign manufactured goods high enough to guarantee sales to US producers. Improvements in farm technology, which allowed farmers to produce more, only made the situation worse for demand was inelastic. The consumer economy was slowing as incomes skewed to the rich. In 1929, the richest 10% of families received 39% of disposal personal income while the bottom 10% only got 2%.

People seemed to be forgetting that capitalism needs to expand, that demand for housing, clothes, automobiles, stoves, and many other consumer goods generates demand in other sectors of the economy. But mass production necessitates mass consumption. Mass consumption necessitates an income distribution that allows consumers to buy. Without the appropriate income distribution, warehouses will burst at their seams and production lines will clog. Ethnic discrimination usually meant lower pay for the affected groups. The coal industry was in economic trouble as US consumers and businesses switched more and more to petroleum or hydroelectric sources of power. The introduction of synthetic fibers, such as nylon, dealt body blows to the cotton and wool textile industries. The wealthy bought luxuries but could not buy enough to sustain the consumer economy.

Many of the wealthy, as well as others, joined the speculative stock market sending stock prices to greater and greater without regard to company performance; In October, 1929, the bubble burst. The crash meant the tremendous loss of capital as prices declined $74 billion from 1929 to 1932 and the repatriation of much of US investment abroad. The Germany economy collapsed followed by the British and french economies. Germany could not pay the reparations it owed to the victors of WWI or make debt payments to US lenders, setting off a chain reaction. The world entered an economic depression.

President Herbert Hoover did not know how to meet this crisis. His government began buying farm surpluses in order to prop up prices but it did not buy enough to make a difference. The Farm Board loaned money to farmers to establish cooperatives (a socialist measure) but the millions of farmers scattered across millions of miles had difficulty in cooperating. Farm income went from $8 billion in 1929 to $3 billion in 1993, a decline of 62.5%.

Republican wisdom said that high tariffs were good for the economy and, besides, in a time of world crisis countries tend to become very nationalistic, so the Congress passed, with Hoover's acquiescence, the very high Hawley-Smoot Tariff in 1930. Raising the tariff made things worse because it meant that foreigners could sell less in the US and thus earn fewer US dollars with which to buy US goods or make payments on debts owed to US citizens. Exports fell 50%.

As historians Peter N. Carroll and David W. Noble note, Hoover feared that the collapse of the large corporations would bring down the entire US capitalist system. After all, one percent of the banks held 50% of banking assets. Three corporations—Ford, Chrysler, General Motors—manufactured 85% of the automobiles sold in the US. Chain stores dominated retail sales and their difficulties had national repercussions.

Business and industry met the crisis as they had always done—they cut production, lowered wages, reduced working hours, and fired workers. Unemployment rose from 1.5 million in 1929 to 13 million in 1933, a figure which represented 25% of the labor force. Even such a high percentage hid the dimensions of the problem because it did not what percentage had been forced the part-time work. Industrial wages fell from425 a week to $17 a week, a decline of 32%. By 1932, sawmill workers were only earning five to ten cents an hour; Tennessee female mill workers earned $2.39 for 50 hours work; and Connecticut women got between 60 cents to a dollar for a 55 hour week. To help the situation, the Hoover administration sept close to a billion dollars in public works programs but he would not go further. Nor would he argue for direct relief to the unemployed and starving because he feared that doing so would corrupt them. Although he had administered relief progress in Europe after the First World War, he saw that as only an emergency measure caused by war. He believed that doing a similar thing in the the US would become a permanent practice. To many, he was callous. As people lost their homes and created shanty towns, they derisively called the "Hoovervilles." Hoover argued that private charities and state and local governments should be the institutions to provide relief. But they were suffering as well and could not deal with a problem of this magnitude.

Hoover and the Republicans saw aid to corporations as being different. Whereas they believed that helping the individual citizen weather the Depression would corrupt him or her, aiding corporations and other business was different. To many, it appeared that the Republicans were only interested in the rich. The newly-created Reconstruction Finance Corporation aided only the large corporations.

Hoover broke precedent because the national government assumed some responsibility for what happens during an economic depression but he was not willing to go far enough. He believed that the depression was part of the normal business cycle and had been caused by international factors and not US ones. to him, "prosperity was just around the corner." The best thing for the country to do would be to wait the crisis out.

When we look back someday at the catastrophe that was the Bush administration, we will think of many things: the tragedy of the Iraq war, the shame of Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, the erosion of civil liberties. The damage done to the American economy does not make front-page headlines every day, but the repercussions will be felt beyond the lifetime of anyone reading this page.

I can hear an irritated counterthrust already. The president has not driven the United States into a recession during his almost seven years in office. Unemployment stands at a respectable 4.6 percent. Well, fine. But the other side of the ledger groans with distress: a tax code that has become hideously biased in favor of the rich; a national debt that will probably have grown 70 percent by the time this president leaves Washington; a swelling cascade of mortgage defaults; a record near-$850 billion trade deficit; oil prices that are higher than they have ever been; and a dollar so weak that for an American to buy a cup of coffee in London or Paris—or even the Yukon—becomes a venture in high finance.

And it gets worse. After almost seven years of this president, the United States is less prepared than ever to face the future. We have not been educating enough engineers and scientists, people with the skills we will need to compete with China and India. We have not been investing in the kinds of basic research that made us the technological powerhouse of the late 20th century. And although the president now understands—or so he says—that we must begin to wean ourselves from oil and coal, we have on his watch become more deeply dependent on both.

Up to now, the conventional wisdom has been that Herbert Hoover, whose policies aggravated the Great Depression, is the odds-on claimant for the mantle “worst president” when it comes to stewardship of the American economy.Once Franklin Roosevelt assumed office and reversed Hoover’s policies, the country began to recover. The economic effects of Bush’s presidency are more insidious than those of Hoover, harder to reverse, and likely to be longer-lasting. There is no threat of America’s being displaced from its position as the world’s richest economy. But our grandchildren will still be living with, and struggling with, the economic consequences of Mr. Bush.

As with 911 and Pearl Harbor, the Reichstag fire enabled the the government to inflame the masses, to justify taking away their freedoms, and to justify war. From then on, the Communists were blamed for just about anything that went on. Still to this day it is not known exactly who started the Reichstag fire. But one thing is known, Hitler knew that the fire would work to his advantage. After word had got out that all Communists had been captured, Communism practically ceased to exist in Germany. The public now feared the Communists and entrusted themselves in Hitler. They thought that the country was under attack by dangerous extremists. In such an emergency situation they would be more likely to support the government, and at the time, the Nazis were the government. Hitler now had the nation exactly where he wanted it.

Wall Street financed the German cartels in the mid-1920's which in turn proceeded to bring Hitler to power. The financing for Hitler and his S.S. street thugs came in part from affiliates or subsidiaries of U.S. firms, including Henry Ford in 1922, payments by I.G. Farben and General Electric in 1933, followed by the Standard Oil of New Jersey and I.T.T. subsidiary payments to Heinrich Himmler up to 1944. US multi-nationals under the control of Wall Street profited handsomely from Hitler's military construction program in the 1930's and at least until 1942. These same international bankers used political influence in the U.S. to cover up their wartime collaboration and to do this, infiltrated the U.S. Control Commission for Germany.
The plans for WWI German reparations were formulated by Wall Streeters, temporarily wearing the hats of statesmen, and these loans generated a rain of profits for these international bankers. Owen Young of General Electric, Hjalmar Schacht, A. Voegler, and others intimately connected with Hitler's accession to power had earlier been the negotiation for the US and German sides, respectively. Three Wall Street houses - Dillon, Read; Harris, Forbes; and, National City Company - handled three-quarters of the reparations loans used to create the German cartel system, including the dominant I.G. Farben and Vereinigte Stahlwerke, which together produced 95 percent of the explosives for the Nazi side in World War II.

The directors of American I.G. (Farben) were prominent American businessmen: Walter Teagle, a close Roosevelt associate and backer and an NRA administrator; banker Paul Warburg (his brother Max Warburg was on the board of I.G. Farben in Germany); and Edsel Ford. Farben contributed 400,000 RM directly to Schacht and Hess for use in the crucial 1933 elections and Farben was subsequently in the forefront of military development in Nazi Germany.

A donation of 60,000 RM was made to Hitler by German General Electric (A.E.G.), which had four directors and a 25-30 percent interest held by the U.S. General Electric parent company. This role was described in Chapter Three, and we found that Gerard Swope, an originator of Roosevelt's New Deal (its National Recovery Administration segment), together with Owen Young of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Clark Minor of International General Electric, were the dominant Wall Streeters in A.E.G. and the most significant single influence.

The International Telephone and Telegraph Company, one of the more notorious multi-nationals, worked both sides of World War II through Baron Kurt von Schroder, of the Schroder banking group. I.T.T. also held a 28-percent interest in Focke-Wolfe aircraft, which manufactured excellent German fighter planes. We also found that Texaco (Texas Oil Company) was involved in Nazi endeavors through German attorney Westrick, but dropped its chairman of the board Rieber when these endeavors were publicized.

Henry Ford was an early (1922) Hitler backer and Edsel Ford continued the family tradition in 1942 by encouraging French Ford to profit from arming the German Wehrmacht. Subsequently, these Ford-produced vehicles were used against American soldiers as they landed in France in 1944. For his early recognition of, and timely assistance to, the Nazis, Henry Ford received a Nazi medal in 1938. The records of French Ford suggest Ford Motor received kid glove treatment from the Nazis after 1940.

So who financed Adolf Hitler? you can indict Wall Street, and a group of international bankers and businessmen. There were several Roosevelt associates, including Teagle of Standard Oil, the Warburg family, and Gerard Swope, and Putzi Hanfstaengl, another Roosevelt friend and a participant in the Reichstag fire. A book was suppressed in 1934 called the "myth of 'Sidney Warburg." . The book accused the Rockefellers, the Warburgs, and the major oil companies of financing Hitler. While the name "Sidney Warburg" was no doubt an invention, the extraordinary fact remains that the argument is the suppressed "Sidney Warburg" book is remarkably close to the evidence presented now. We must examine the roles of the Morgan and Chase Banks in World War II, specifically their collaboration with the Nazis in France while a major war was raging.

Hitler was unique in his ability to control people's emotions with his his oratory. He was used by the globalists of his time to create war and wealth for themselves, and destruction and death for everyone else. These same criminals are hard at work today. The forces that put Hitler into power, and made WWII happen, are now using international terrorism to achive their goals. History is a great teacher, but sadly, the mind numbed masses of today don't seem to be listening.