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do it there. Thank you. I want to welcome ever
run back to the Pekanana show. Filos Miscellany hasn't been
here in a while, but he's back. What's going on
Filos now much.
Speaker 2: It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having
me back.
Speaker 1: You are welcome. I can't wait for this because there
was a name that came up in the recent series
I did with Stormy on The Robber Barons, and we
never really dove into who that was, and you had
mentioned that you had a book on him, and then
you started researching him and going down a rabbit hole,
and it was like, hey, let's talk about this on
the show. Who are we talking about today, Filos?
Speaker 2: We are talking about a man named Bernard Baruch, But
I'm not going to say it like that because it's
going to get really obnoxious, So I'm just going to
call him Baruch. The book that was written about him
is a hagiography written while he was still alive by
a woman named Margaret Quoite in nineteen fifty seven. Mister
Baruch himself commissioned the book, and she spent seven years writing.
She had access to all of his personal papers, interviewed
everyone that he knew, but Baruk disliked the final product
so much that he entirely withdrew permission to access his
private papers, and the author vowed never to write the
biography of a living person again, but that doesn't tell
you so much about who the man is. To keep
it very brief, he is responsible for the mobilization of
commodities and the logistics operations behind most of World War
One and a good portion of World War Two. And
he was a close adviser to every US president from
Wilson all the way through to Truman before he fell
out of favor with President Truman in the late nineteen
forties and sort of retired from politics. He was a
political connection to a vast majority of any powerful people
within Washington at the time, I'm and he was responsible
for geuring the wartime economies in both of those wars.
He is a critical piece of understanding the American rearmament
for World War One and World War Two.
Speaker 1: That sounds like somebody who not only can pull strings,
but I mean, where does somewhere like that come from?
Like what's the I mean, I know people know what
the early life is, but what's the early life on?
Bernard Beruke hated he how'd he get to where he got? So?
Speaker 2: He was born in eighteen seventy, five years after the
end of the Civil War, in Camden, South Carolina, But
he was not a Southern boy. His parents and his
grandparents and all of his previous lineage on both sides
of the family was Jewish, and his parents were not
born in the United States proper. So there's a whole
thing about his Jewish lineage, which I'll get into in
a bit. But he was the son of Simon Bruch,
who was a surgeon in the Confederate Army, and that man,
as a surgeon, was very involved with the Confederacy and
the treatment of the wounded during the war and after
the war. He was a member of the KKK, which
would explain the prominent democratic political partisan tendency that mister
Baruch had for his entire life, and also his connection
with many other Jews throughout his career. So a lot
of the connections that he makes are Jews, and we
can get all into that, but that's the gist of
his background in the South.
Speaker 1: I think something that some people bring up some times
is the fact that you know, there were a lot
of a lot of Jews in the South, and even
like Judah, Benjamin obviously is the most obvious one when
it comes to the war, and when it comes to
the Southern government. Some people make the make the argument
that one of the reasons why the South didn't win
is because the well, there was a what some would
call a historically subversive element in charge and in power
and controlling a lot of wealth in the South. So
what would you say from what you've studied is there?
Can you comment on that?
Speaker 2: I can't comment generally as to it. But as to
his family specifically, they were immensely wealthy for first generations.
They owned several plantations, they had a column to mansion,
kind of the idyllic Southern childhood mammy, so to speak.
So evidently the family's fortunes were not destroyed in the
war as much as many other Southerners. So I'll leave
you to draw your own conclusions from that.
Speaker 1: So, when he's making connections and he's growing power, how
is he accumulating his power to get to the point
where he can influence presidents and basically have a good
part in controlling the two biggest wars of all time.
Speaker 2: So the rise is pretty interesting. He's a smart man,
a good boxer. At age ten, he moves up to
New York City and at the time Jews were not
allowed in the IVY leagues in the United States, they
were simply forbidden from attending. And instead of going to
an IVY league, he went to City University in New York,
which is the primary pathway for very powerful Jews to
get a college degree and make business network connections. And
there was a sort of funneling effect where the nation's
wealthiest and most powerful ones would go to this college,
generally on their own merit. They had kind of uniquely
as far as colleges go, universal entrance exams that Jews
would go through and get on to the program. But
he also meets very interesting people when he's at City College.
He befriends a man called Lewis Rothschild that might come
up later, you know. I'm sure your audience knows about
the Rothchilds. He also meets a man called Josephus Daniels,
and after college, sort of the network of people he's
meeting include people like Guggenheim. And to get back to
kind of his time in school a little bit here,
he is a very athletic guy. Most Jews in the
eighteen nineties that were kind of known for boxing. Strangely enough,
this is something that's not widely known today very talented boxer.
He was a very tall guy for a jew. Non
Jewish sources will say six feet tall. Jewish sources will
say six foot three. To kind of compensate. He goes
in eighteen ninety to where his parents were born, in
Schwelsend in East Prussia, to meet his grandparents. There's a
few interesting lines here about his Jewish background that I'll
kind of read. This is right out of his biography.
Quote when he saw the handsome Prussian hussars and nice
uniforms and scarred faces, something tightened within him. For his
was the heritage of eighteen forty eight, and this was
the hateful militarism from which his father had fled. There's
another interesting anecdote, which is that he meets his grandparents
who are still living there, and his grandfather takes him
into the closet and shows him a human skull that
has writings of various languages on it, like Hebrew, Portuguese, Spanish,
and German, and I quote even tongues long forgotten and
spoken no more. This was the genealogy of the Baruch family,
descended from the Baruch who was in Jeremiah's scrolls in
the Babylonian captivity. So there's probably some cabalistic magic going
on or some kind of weird past background, because, as
their audience may or may not know, I was raised
Jewish and I've never met another Jewish family that has
a skull in the closet. Very unusual. I want to
talk a little bit now about how he makes his fortune.
I'll keep it brief. He is He joins a small
firm on Wall Street, and he speculates on rubber, gets
very wealthy. He's a millionaire by the time he's thirty
in nineteen oh five, and he starts making a whole
bunch of connections, and he's known for getting people what
they need when they need it. So he's described in
the book as not necessarily the frontman of industry, like
a Carnegie or a JP Morgan, but he knew the
key players in back places. One such example of this
is there was a man named Josephus Daniels who needed
a whole bunch of zinc, and in order to facilitate
this connection for the New Jersey Zinc Company, he met
with some very strange people to facilitate raw commodities, and
later on in his career this back dealing becomes a
tremendous strength of his later on, he's very successful in
the commodity trading and he ends up getting very very
close also with key members of the Democratic Party. I'm
thinking specifically of a guy called Colonel House, who I
believe you've talked about before, Pete, maybe briefly, but for
those who don't know, Colonel House was kind of the
go to man in Washington between nineteen twelve and nineteen eighteen,
and he was kind of the one running the show
for Wilson if it wasn't for his wife's involvement. President
Wilson's wife at the end of the war, so it
gets very close with Colonel House. He gets very close
with the president and chairman of the DNC, a guy
named William McAdoo, and all these connections that he's making
lobby very hard for Baruk's involvement in politics. The man
who was kind of his mentor, McAdoo, was Wilson's key
man and married Wilson's daughter in nineteen fourteen for his
second marriage. Very close connections. That man was the Treasury
Secretary at the outbreak of World War One. In addition,
and this is the last kind of connection, and then
I'll go into his World War One career. Baruch was
also friends with Justice Lewis Brandeis, who also supported Baruch's
career progression to President Wilson as well. So I don't
believe it's a matter of coincidence that every powerful Jew
in the Wilson administration was known to Baruch through his
time at City College in New York and also his
business connections prior to World War One.
Speaker 1: So you had mentioned, and I know you said we
talked about this a little bit the first time you
were on that you were raised Jewish. What do you know.
Speaker 2: Of his religious involvement?
Speaker 1: You you Yeah, you mentioned that you were raised Jewish.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so my background, uh, born and raised Jewish went
through the whole thing, reat me law, bow meetsva. I
lived for a few years in Israel, and then uh,
eventually I recognize that Christ is the Messiah. And you
can't remain a Jew if you decide and know that
Christ is the Messiah. So I became a Christian, married
a Christian woman. Uh, my wife and I are Orthodox Christians.
So I no longer believe in Judaism. But I could
tell you that the the the patronage network of things
is very powerful even today as far as getting into
places that you wouldn't be able to get into otherwise.
Having career advancement, you know, and I know that a
lot of business dealings, a lot of things happened over
shah about dinners and uh you know, there's it's it's
it's very I think also a lot of my early
career success, which I won't go into ioe to my
Jewish background, the education that I got, the people that
I met. I think that's that's that's kind of the
strength the in group preferences.
Speaker 1: So is that it is it in group preferences or
is it the high verbal.
Speaker 2: Iq Not all of us have high verbal IQs, even
though I'm talking a lot. It's uh no, it's it's
also it's a bifurcation. It's it's a split between being
an ethnicity and being a religion. So whenever you need to,
you can switch between the two. You can sort of
play up the ethnic card, right, So for example, I
could claim that I'm white or that I'm Jewish selectively,
or it's a religious thing that I have some kind
of mystical connection with the divine being chosen. And I
remember as a kid, part of the kid's books that
we would read in the synagogue would have like the
Prague Golum and stuff is like this avatar of Jewish
sentiment against bigotry. And you know, when you're a kid,
you don't really question any of this stuff. But you know,
I lived in Israel for a few years. It's a
religious ethno state, and you know, when you do that
long enough, you know it's kind of like, h maybe
regular Joe Schmoe in America should kind of have this too.
You know, these connections, these benefits, these opportunities, and maybe
they should be able to be proud of their heritage
and believe in their own narrative and their understanding of history.
Like maybe they shouldn't be shamed for that intrinsically.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, And I know that from reading shahak
Once you once a Jew does start professing Christ, their
their life and Israel is pretty much over.
Speaker 2: Oh toast, Like my rabbi like wouldn't even wouldn't even
speak to me, like the whole the whole Jewish side
of the family that ostracized me, and uh it's uh yeah,
you know, it's this weird thing because like you're dead
to them and for for what exactly, Like you're still
ethnically Jewish, and uh, the funny part is like eighty
percent of Jews or something don't even believe in God,
and uh, he kind of you know, that's the whole thing.
I mean, Oh my gosh, it's just a mess. It's
just a total, total mess.
Speaker 1: All right, let's get back to mister Baruch. Since we
know that you don't have any in your family, doesn't
have any skulls hiding in the closet. Yeah, yeah, so
we're let's get into World War One, because that's uh,
you know, when somebody has that much power to do
the kind of things he did when he some explanations
for that.
Speaker 2: So he is appointed by Wilson to head the War
Industries Board. And I'm not an economist, but the best
I can figure what the War Industry's Board does in
World War One is they acquire raw commodities for industries
and then they go in with the backing and blessing
of the federal government to dictate to corporations what they're
producing for the war effort. And because they're the federal government,
they can control the commodity supply chain and the production
and the logistics of shipping the final product overseas. They're
doing this for the Americans before the entry into World
War One. They're doing this for the French and the British,
so a lot of the material assistance that we see
during World War One. The reason that the Allies were
able to hold out so long against the Central Power
was because of the American logistics that were backing them up.
And that's a pretty neutral statement. But what's not a
neutral statement is how he went about getting the materials
and also how he profited from being in charge of this. Now,
technically speaking, Wilson's executive order that created this war Industry's
board stated that the chairman could not explicitly set the
price of things. But if you're the man that's controlling
the supply of the commodity and the demand of where
it goes to, you're going to have an innate knowledge
of that item's price. So he was able to strike
these insane deals. One example of a deal is he
talked to Daniel Guggenheim into selling forty five million pounds
of copper at half the market price, saving three point
seven million dollars in nineteen sixteen nineteen seventeen dollars, which
is an insane deal. And the War Industries Board created
all these facilities all over the country to coordinate the food,
the fuel, the railway administration, the shipping Board, the War
Trade Board. Every decision of the commodities and the production
of the economy and wartime passed by him. But this
was not something that was created by an Act of Congress.
And you know he was also backed up by all
of Wilson's cabinet and Colonel House as well. Let's see here.
So word on the street even during World War One
was that Bernard Baruch was profiteering from the War Industries Board,
and he was. It's very difficult to know. And I
believe that before Baruch himself in this biography ordered the
stripping out of all the details of personal correspondence, that
there was probably some pretty damning stuff in there. But
one thing that stayed in the book was that in
nineteen seventeen he wrote a check for five million dollars
worth of bonds for the first Liberty Loan Drive. As
you know, wars are very expensive and there's three main
ways you can finance war taxation, borrowing, and the expedients
of printing money. So in World War One, under his plan,
according to the Fed's website, the Federal Reserve, that is,
the government, relied on a mix of one third new
taxes and two thirds borrowing from the general population. The
securities were issued by the Treasury, but the Federal Reserve
and its member banks conducted the bond sales. They taxed
the richest and exempted the poor. The highest marginal rate
eventually reached seventy seven percent on incomes over one million dollars.
This was of an effort to not only sell the bonds,
but to sell the war. So I want to break
this down because that sounds very financial and technical. But
the way that I perceive it is that the federal
government is shutting down private industry and excessively taxing very
wealthy people. And yes, it funds the war, but it
also destroys an aristocratic class of people that had existed
and made their money outside of the federal government in
private corporations. Baruch during the war had a system of
interlocking committees and a single controllable outlet for each separate commodity.
Washington put forth to the demand and industry gives out
the supply. So you know, in terms of profiteering, you
just have to look at the facts. In the book,
Bruchs was working with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who boasted in
nineteen twenty he had broken enough laws during the war
to go to jail for nine hundred years. In June
nineteen eighteen, there was such a shortage of vital steel
that the United States steal their net income for nineteen seventeen.
The previous year was two hundred and twenty four million,
with dividends of seven dollars and sixty two cents a
common share. So just to like make that make sense,
these numbers were not reached again by this company until
nineteen fifty four. So somebody's making a whole shit ton
of money. Excuse my language, And I want to also
point to some other very interesting profiteering and economic machinations
that are going on for this. So one thing that
you have to supply in warfare is explosives, a whole
lot of ordinance, and Baruch was the man for explosives.
His big thing was nitrates, and nitrates have a dual use.
You can use them in explosives but you also need
them for fertilizer. The Ally encountered a situation where most
nitrate production they were getting was from Chile. German owned
nitrate facilities in Chile as well as Chile having their
gold reserves in Germany. So to seize these German owned
nitrate factories would violate the Trading with the Enemy act
that they had set, and so what happened was every
Allied buyer of nitrates just withdrew from the Chilean market
for three months, and that left Chile with no ability
to sell their nitrate. The country almost was on the
verge of starvation. And then the Allies returned to the
market and bought their nitrates at four and one eighth
cents a pound, which is just dirt cheap for nitrate.
A very interesting thing I know that Stormy mentioned the
DuPont family. Baruch screwed over the DuPont Company and required
them to turn over all nitrates to the government when
they had made a previous deal with Chile before this
strategy was in effect. So the way I kind of
conceive of this big picture is they're kind of squeezing
the old aristocracy of all of their money and they're
federalizing a lot of these different industries. He also did
the same supply and demand machinations on southern cotton to
go like and let me go, let me know if
this gets like way too granular. Stormy also mentioned that
in America in the nineteenth century, there were these factories
that would produce perhaps something as small as a niche
little button, and that industry. Those types of industries were
totally destroyed in the twentieth century, and I believe that
this is the root of how they began to get destroyed.
Within the book, it details that war conservation had reduced styles,
varieties and colors of clothing, and had standardized sizes of
machine It had outlawed two hundred and fifty different types
of plow models, seven hundred and fifty five types of drills,
two hundred and thirty two different types of buggy wheels,
nearly six thousand different shapes and sizes of pocket knives
vantaged from country stores. So what does that mean? That
means that like, your town pocket knife factory is toast
because there's a big one near the city that's been
federalized for the war effort that can produce a standardized
one at the government's request for the military, and that
kills a lot of very small industries, but it has
like a parallel benefit.
Speaker 1: Yes, and it doesn't go and it doesn't go out
of it doesn't close after the war ends.
Speaker 2: No, not at all.
Speaker 1: This is going.
Speaker 2: This is something where like most people on the right
know that Japan really industrial eyed after World War Two,
they know that the Soviet Union really industrialized, and China
during the Cultural Revolution kind of failed but did a
lot of different things to modernize their economy. But this
is sort of how it happened really within the United
States as far as the synchronization of both state and
private industry. Like previously, these were very separate things, but
through the coordinate coordination of the central government in the
US and like the war effort, it totally changed the
economic landscape. So here's an example. In nineteen fourteen, the
US produced five hundred and ninety one tons of chromite
into nineteen eighteen, at the end of the war, it
produced sixty thousand tons. So similar to World War Two,
we were the only economy that was in this position
at scale. There was a kind of international austerity that
gripped the world. France couldn't give up its gold for
the American cars, and Germany had no gold and few
raw materials left. So I want to get into briefly
the Paris Peace Conference and why I think that this
man did some really evil actions during his lifetime. So
Bernard Barreuch was named the peace commission at the Paris
Peace Conference in January nineteen nineteen by executive order. One
hundred and fifty thousand dollars or two point seven million
was put at his personal disposal to assemble a staff
and do what he wished. So he supported Wilson's having
France seize Germany's coal in the roar. The plan from
mister Beru was to and this in these proceedings he
was considered the voice of reason, if you can believe this.
The plan was to let Germany build up enough industry
to just be bled further financially, as Pete's mentioned on
previous streams. But to the audience's knowledge, the average German
citizen at this time was consuming just eight or nine
hundred calories a day. That's starvation level. American soldiers were
eating steaks, and British soldiers at the time threatened to
open mutiny they were seeing children wandering around the streets starving.
Baruch continued the blockade along with other people in Wilson's administration.
When Herbert Hoover did account as president looking back on it,
he assessed that three and a half million German children
were of subnormal physical stature due to malnutrition due to
this blockade. Baruch was also in favor of an army
of occupation of the Allies remaining for twenty five years
in Germany and the Ruer as well, just completely devastating Germany.
And that I do think is an evil act.
Speaker 1: But yeah, but the question it always comes back to,
you know, my favorite question of why.
Speaker 2: Well, uh, I believe it was too personally financially enrich
Baruch and a lot of other Jews and a lot
of other wealthy and powerful people in Europe and the
United States.
Speaker 1: Is that just by basically stealing all of their all
of their natural resources. I know that Italy and the
Czech Republic or Czechoslovakia at the time had control of
southern parts of Prussia. You know, obviously Poland had parts
of parts of Prussia, and uh, is that just basically
while you're starving these people, you're fleecing and taking taking
their forests and forest deforestation, things like that.
Speaker 2: Totally, and they would do stuff like withhold the sale
of nitrates like I mentioned very you know, briefly earlier.
Uh So, on the one hand, they're getting carved up
and they're not able. Germany isn't able to produce materials
and let's say they can bring a car to market somehow,
they are now dealing with an American industry which has
spent the last four years standardizing and making the cheapest
possible and highest quality car and there's just no way
on the macro scale that you can compete with that.
It stuns me that nobody at the Paris Peace Conference
really was able to kind of see the long term
implications of this. And a few people were, but generally, like,
I mean, it's interesting because like the centralization of stuff
with the economy is Bruce's similar playbook in World War Two,
which is fascinating. I mean, it's just a very similar
thing he you know, you have to understand also, and
this is speculation. You know, the man's parents were driven
out of Prussia one generation prior for some reason that
we don't know, and that he was in somewhere in
the lineage there was an eighteen forty eight er type
communist mindset, and that you know, he was a Democrat
and a lot of people he was hanging around Harry Hopkins,
very left leaning people, And I think there is a
general trend of resentment against Germany. I mean, in the book,
it really describes it more in the thirties and forties.
But you know, it's very strange that he writes about
an eighteen ninety going to Prussia and disliking what he
sees with Prussian people. So I can't I think you
have to take a man holistically, and I think that
you know, there's all these different things that suggest he
had a real personal animosity towards Germany.
Speaker 1: That seems to be a pattern, especially when you know,
when you see certain people within our government so intense
on destroying Russia.
Speaker 2: I don't agree with that.
Speaker 1: So let's go We're at Paris Peace conce Paris Peace Conference,
quote unquote, and we're moving forward with mister.
Speaker 2: Bib absolutely, So we are going to look a little
bit at the twenties and then the thirties and then
World War Two. There is let's let me just go
crack open the book here real quick too. Baruch came
under attack in the Dearborn Independent, that's Henry Ford's newspaper,
in a exposition exactly like I don't know, like five
years ago, I wouldn't have thought this, but now I'm
looking at the just man based so the scope of
Jewish dictatorship in the United States, the details of which
have already been described. He wrote a friend that the
outstanding man himself must expect attack and jealousy. Uh anti
Semitic bigotry restricted his activity in the Democratic Party. You know,
but of course we know that he's doing all of
his business dealings with Jews, and he's making all of
his money off of doing these multi multi million dollar
deal with the Guggenheims and Josepha's Daniels and he Knew
brand Ice and all these others. And you know, they're
then coming into these companies around the country and telling
them what they should produce and how much of it
they should produce. And you know, he's not like a
Cincinnatus figure who just walks away at the end of
the war and goes back to private business. No, like
he continues onwards politically. In nineteen twenty seven, he begins
to sell off all of his liquid. I don't know money.
I'm not an economist, so I'm probably gonna screw a
lot of this up. He sells most of his stuff
before the Great Depression and profit of profits off of it.
In nineteen twenty nine in February, he points out the
Coolidge and Melon, we're responsible for stimulating public parties, the
patient in the stock market, which he was against. He
was concerned over the lowered rates from the Federal Reserve,
and he was in favor of the gold standard. He
had some pretty so and again profits off of the
Great Depression. He was very close to Henry Morgenthal. And
then of course after the Great Depression, he's advising all
these people. He mostly is spending his time working with
the farmers on a mass bargaining scale for I think
trying to help out with the dust bowl circumstances that
are going on, but I'm not too clear on the specifics,
getting into, of course, the more relevant political part here.
He was very close friends with FDR, going all the
way back to World War One and continuing through the
nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties. He was also Churchills Winston
Churchill's oldest American friend, so he kind of stays in
the circle the whole time. He very much disliked the
brain Trust Committee or organization of group of men of
the New Deal. As far as his own political views,
he supported the eight hour workday, and he put the
first private money into a public housing project. One of
his other opinions, especially of John Mayner Kaynes, he said
of economists that if they knew the rules, they would
not be writing books, they would be making money. I
want to transition briefly to World War two here in
the early nineteen thirties, far earlier than people have an
idea of. In nineteen thirty two, Baruch starts advocating for
the consolidation of rubber and steel stockpiles in the United
States because he he has a pretty good idea and
anticipation that World War two is going to occur, and
he kind of sets up the nineteen thirties to rearm
and bolster the American wartime economy in a very similar
manner to way to how he had conducted himself during
World War One. And as you know, I've listened to
your previous dreams. A lot of the United States is
very isolationist and even sympathetic perhaps to Germany, and this
was a very unusual view at the time he was.
Let's see, in nineteen thirty eight, he meets with FDR.
He knows, and he tells FDR that Germany has spent
one hundred and five million German marks rearming the country.
He advises FDR that fifty thousand long range bombers be built.
He also in the mid and late nineteen thirties is
building munitions factories, and as we learned in your earlier
podcast and streams, these were producing non American ammunition and
even more interesting, in nineteen thirty eight and nineteen thirty nine,
he's urging Harry Hopkins to take the secretaryship of War,
and Harry Hopkins did the lend lease arrangement. So that's
sort of the administrative element here behind Harry Hopkins and
the rearmament and the munitions. And you also have to
consider that he's again similar theme, he's profiteering off of
all of this. He's making a whole lot of money
doing this because he knows from his career all the
commodity prices and all the productions that go into wartime
He suggested total embargo economically of Japan in the ear
in the early nineteen forties, late nineteen thirties. He believes
that nothing should be sold to the enemy, that there
should be no assistance given to any other nation except
the United States. He was very close friends with George Marshall,
and this is something I didn't know. Most rationing in
World War Two, the rubber rationing, the Victory gardens, the bonds,
that was all done at Baruch's request, and he was
very frustrated with anything going on in the economy that
wasn't orient and towards wartime production. His daughter bought an
airplane in nineteen forty and he was evidently tremendously upset
about this. And he was also very opposed to the
efforts of a certain James Forrestall, who I would love
to do a stream on because I think he's a hero,
and there's very interesting facts about him as well, very
positive facts, unlike the negative facts of mister Baruch. Do
that to kind of sum up here, he was a
troubleshooter in a sense. The word troubleshooter was kind of
used to describe him because he would come into these
big bureaucracies where you'd have a corporation with a lot
of power and industry and he would use the leverage
of the federal government to kind of squeeze them for everything.
And he was known throughout his career as going industry
to industry and just basically bending them over, and is
responsible for a lot of the change in the federalization
of the economy. I did some outside research on mister Baruch,
separate from the main hagiography was written about him during
his lifetime. I read a little bit of the section
from Tragedy and Hope on him, and there's another great
book called The Fabian Freeway. The Fabian Freeway quote is
that the phrase Colonel House is the man behind Wilson
or has his hands in everything that was attributed to
Bernard Baruch and in Tragedy and Hope. Bernard Baruch has
mentioned in relation to his nineteen forty six efforts to
present a plan to the United Nations to set up
an international control body for nuclear energy, he advocated for
international inspection both Soviet and American so that the American
stockpile of nuclear bombs would be dismantled after the war,
and that they would all be placed in the hands
of this magical agency. He was also back in World
War One very favor of the League of Nations, the
one world governance model, the Baruch Plan in nineteen forty
six was rejected by the Soviet Union, and like many
many other figures that were prominent in FDR's term, he
fell out of favor with Truman, and I think from
reading other people's lives, especially the life of James forrestall
pretty much everyone got on Truman's bad side eventually, and
after that, after the late nineteen forties, he kind of
semi retired. He would hang around in a place called
Hyde Park where he'd sit on a bench. He was
a very powerful connected man with a lot of money,
and he generally just moved back to his estate. The
book was written when he was about eighty years old.
It's absolutely glowing and how it discribes the man. So
a lot of the coverage that I got was biased,
and I think we'll never know exactly how much he
profiteered off of what he was doing. However, he dies
in nineteen sixty five, and like many many other people,
he is forgotten about to history. We know the names
of people like MacArthur and Eisenhower, Hitler and Churchill. But
there were a lot of these other figures that, perhaps
on purpose or perhaps accidentally, we no longer know about.
So that kind of concludes the life of Bernard Bruch.
Speaker 1: Well, I was going to ask a question until you
got to the end and you started talking about like
League of Nations things like that. I was going to
ask what was his what you would say his ideology was?
Did he have an ideology? It's so, I mean, there's
some free there's some free market in there. It seems
like he was probably a gold standard guy. Also, you know,
the but saying oh, the United States, no one should
have nuclear weapons except this one. You know, global organization
is kind of insane.
Speaker 2: It's I guess. So I am working from a biased biography.
Speaker 1: But but some of those are the best, because sometimes
the best biographies are biased because they're bragging about what
they do in them mm hmm. People brag about what
they do and it's like and they present it as
a good thing, and then you're just like, well, wait
a minute, no, no, I don't think this is a
good thing at all.
Speaker 2: So I get the sense that he was really more
of a numbers man than anything else. The book never
paints him as like a orthodox New dealer. I mean,
he's in the inner circle and he has a lot
of sway and he's very close to FDR because Eleanor
Roosevelt likes him and he just for the gold standard.
So he's described in economic terms in the book as conservative.
But he was a staunch the whole time. He was
a staunch member of the Democratic Party. He knew every
major player. He would work very diligently on appointments. He
didn't really have any moral scruples about working with guys
like Harry Hopkins or Colonel House. So it seems like
the cdier elements the Democratic Party didn't really phase him.
I think he you know that there wasn't. I'm alsto
not seeing like a particular ethnic love from him, Like
when he's when he's at the Paris Peace Conference, there's
a part where Jews come up and there's like this
bickering between like for whatever reason, there's a Jewish sort
of delegation there, or a Jewish question that has to
be settled in Poland, and he's not really on the
side of the Jews in Poland. He kind of asserts
that they need to just become poles. Singularly, no hyphenates
as that that was That's an interesting term at the time,
hyphenates for people. So it seems as though he worked
with a lot of Jews. He's certainly benefited from their power.
He was a strident, so they're in a Democrat. And
I think also primarily there was this weird streak of
like because he was doing so much for the US economy,
and he was changing so many things and federalizing so
many things. I really did think he I don't know
if nationalist is the word, but he was in favor
of a strong America, America that would win in warfare.
That was kind of his single minded effort. And I
also think as terms of ideology, this didn't really stop
his freedom of association. He had to meet with all
kinds of people in politics and members of various businesses
and corporations. And I'm not seeing anything in the book
that really paints him as like ideologically attached to, you know,
the Democrats, beyond like the power politics of it. I
don't see that he's, you know, this this flaming communist
or anything. But I mean, he he worked with a
lot of communists, and he helped out Harry Hopkins, and
he is directly responsible for Communists and the New Dealers
and everything else gaining a huge amount of ground in
this country.
Speaker 1: Hmm. Was there any evidence that he, like what was
his opinion on the founding of Israel and Israel from
nineteen forty eight forward? Did you see anything?
Speaker 2: Mmm? Let me see. He'll just give me one moment too.
Actually it might be another question. Me see here, yeah, m.
Speaker 1: So I wonder yeah, God, yeah.
Speaker 2: Sorry, let me just let me just look to the
index here. I'm not seeing him as present, so I'm
actually looking at my forest All notes because Forestall was
in the cabinet in May of nineteen forty eight and
like took notes on everything. So Bruch wasn't there.
Speaker 1: Let me see he because like later in life, like
even Henry Morgenthau became like a financial advisor to Israel.
And you know, there were a lot of people who
just even though Morgan Thhou died in the United States,
he immediately a lot of people. I found it like good, I.
Speaker 2: Found Sorry again, there's like so many streams of research
for this, Okay. February third, nineteen forty eight, Secretary of
Defense James Forrestall goes to lunch with Bernard Baruch. I'm
reading this from the forest All Diaries. From Bernard Baruch quote.
He took the line of advising me not to be
active in this particular matter, that is on Zionism, and
Forestall was against the creation of the state of Israel.
So Baruch is basically telling him stop worrying about it,
and that I Forestall was already identified to agree that
this was not in my own interests with opposition to
the United Nations policy on Palestine, Baruch, I'm just going
to insert it here. Baruch said he himself did not
approve of the Zionist's actions, but in the next breath
said that the Democratic Party could only lose by trying
to get our government's policy reversed, and said that it
was a most inequitable thing to let the British arm
the Arabs and for us not to furnish similar equipment
to the Jews. So I can kind of clarify that statement,
if that makes sense. So in nineteen forty eight, there's
the Truman Duil election and both are trying to win
over the support of very powerful Jews within the party,
and Baruch knows that any major member of Truman's cabinet
standing against the creation of Israel might compromise the Democratic
parties political chances in the upcoming election by trying to
change the policy which was like kind of broadly pro Israel.
And he was also in favor of arming the Israelis
as well. Baruch was because of course, I mean, and
you have to just connect it to his career, like
the guy made his money by arming people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was thinking that, It's like, it's like he
doesn't necessarily have to ideologically agree with the found that
of the State of Israel. But I mean, this is
there's a guy who made money during war. Sure, arming
them is profitable.
Speaker 2: And you also have to consider that in nineteen forty eight,
like the Ilgun, the Haganah, these organizations that were operating
in Israel, they were terrorists. They were killing a whole
lot of Brits. And that's a huge problem because I mean,
the American people are perceiving, you know, there's not like
this Schofield Bible weird Apak style warship of Jews in
nineteen forty eight. In the US, people are looking at
this and saying like these people are terrorists. And I
think Baruk is really only concerned with that time about
the political fortunes of the Democratic Party. I mean, I
think that really is his prime, very concerned throughout his
career because that is his ability to have access to
power is through that party and through those types.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the uh what was I think in Yeah, it's
when you take into consideration polls that were done in
the late nineteen thirties about you know what Americans, what
heritage Americans, what their opinions were of Jews. It wasn't good.
It was I think seventy seventy percent, as high as
eighty percent. It didn't trust them. So, yeah, what changes?
What changed? You know, what's going to change in the
matter of ten years. A lot can change in the
matter of ten years, but not much. Not the not
the the public's opinion full opinion of a group that
they consider to be outsiders.
Speaker 2: Totally and through the biography. Right, He's not going around
the world presenting himself as a Jewish guy. He's presenting
himself as a Southern Democrat, like that is his persona,
as it's described in the book. The woman who wrote
his biography. Previously wrote a book about John Calhoun, a
very positive book.
Speaker 1: That I'd be interested in reading, because I think when
we were talking, when we were talking on the phone
the other day, I said that I think Calhoun is
the greatest political thinker in American history. And I've read
his Disquisition on Government, the whole thing on my podcasts.
He's just a great, a great thinker. And you know,
one of those guys was like, we can't have do
this Mexican We can't do this Mexican American War in
the eighteen forties because Mexicans are gonna end up coming
here and they're not like us.
Speaker 2: You know, That's that's very astute considering like the way
people understood the US involvement in Mexico. Like that's really
far thinking. That's interesting stuff. I haven't I haven't really
read anything about John Calhoun.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, if you read his Disquisition on Government, it's
one hundred pages. I mean, it's just it's great. Another
thing I think that's very interesting about Baruk is when
you look when you look at pictures of him, he
does present as a Southern Democrat. Oh totally suits. The
way he wears his hair, everything, even the manner he
takes pictures, the way he takes pictures.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, you gotta like this is this is
kind of like there's a thing in Judaism where like
like the more white you look, the more you can
kind of blend. The guy was six foot, blue eyes,
wasp looking, you know, came from like a wealthy South
Carolina family. I mean outside of the last name and
going to city college. Like, there's really not much about
him that would give him away. And you know, throughout
his life he never really draws attention to his Judaism
at all. I never in the whole like nine hundred
page book, I never read about him going to synagogue.
I think, let me see here, I think he yeah,
he married an Episcopalian. You know, the family was raised,
their children were raised Episcopalian. Like, I don't think he
ever the Judaism thing didn't really matter much for him.
Besides like business connections. He also owned a gigantic, seventeen
thousand acre plantation in South Carolina that had Negro quarters
on it, and so you know it made like a
huge effort to help with the Southern heritage and the
history there, and you know, it's not like some defense
of the man. But you know, when you read these
like huge biographies about people like you know, it's it's
it's not black and white, good or evil, like you know,
schemer or not. But he definitely did a lot of
He did a lot of bad stuff, for sure.
Speaker 1: What I'm reminded of when you mentioned City College of
New York, the libertarian thinker Murray Rothbard. He used to
he used to jokingly refer to that because it was
the only school that one of the only colleges Jews
could get into. He would call it circumcised Citizens of
New York.
Speaker 2: It's pretty good. It's pretty good. Oh man, oh man,
that's funny. Yeah, yeah, no, definitely, I mean it is
like the big thing. It's like NYU kind of.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's just crazy when you start looking at
like his you know, in the Klan, you know, a
slave owner, plantation owner. I mean, it's just yeah, it's wild,
wild stuff. I mean, and you know, the he was
a US representative to the United States Atomic Energy Commission,
you know, through the is just amazing, just amazing the
things he was able to. You know, it's I refer
to people like him as like they're like Forrest Gump.
They show up every you know how he would always
show up at everything, any kind of popular thing that like, yeah,
if you if you look at anything from like the
first half of the twentieth century, there Bernard Bruf is there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, it's it's kind of incredible, and I think
I'm a lot of it's again speculation, but he was
close with Colonel House for like eight years straight. And
Colonel House had this very interesting style of going about
his network, which was kind of he was totally unavailable
except people had to come to a house, and in
his house he had this whole network of telephone lines
that would connect to the Army and connect to the Navy,
and you could very directly access all these different politicians
in a time when you had to have like a
like a phone operator, right, so you had to have
a room with a switchboard somewhere that people would route
your phone calls through. He kind of made his house
into a node and also made himself very exclusive and
hard to contact, and so he was like the central
point of connection for all of these people. And if
mister Baruf was working with him and knew him personally,
for all this time, and most of the quotes and information,
the famous ones about Colonel House we know from Baruch
of all people, that suggests he picked up a lot
of his methods. And you know he you know, all
the all the I don't know if you want to
call him anti Semitic, but like he was accused of
profiteering off the war she did. He was accused of
consolidating industry and putting all these companies out of business
and monopoly, and he did, and he was written about
by the Dearborn Independent. And you know it's like every
allegation they throw at him, it's kind of true. And
you know, as far as having a network of people
and knowing all the like most powerful people in the
early twentieth century, Jewish or not, you know, he's this
point of connection. He's facilitating all these things, and you
know he's getting these crazy rates on everything around him.
I mean again, to bring up that example, forty five
million pounds of cotton for half of a copper excuse me,
during wartime for half the market price from another Jewish person.
Like would that deal ever exist in normal circumstances? I
doubt it. And it also put a huge amount of
independent businesses, smaller businesses out of commission and kind of
left him and his friends in charge the American economy.
You know, you have the Federal Reserve, which most people
know that most people that are libertarians have probably read
Secrets of the Temple or the Creature of Jackoliland. And yes,
the finance stuff is fascinating, but you have to look
at the logistics and the materials, the physical items that
were being produced and how they came about. And you know,
the man not only had these powers during both world Wars,
but he had it for the entire nineteen twenties and
nineteen thirties through something like four other presidents. Harding, he
was close with him, Calvin Coolidge, close with him, close
with Herbert Hoover, and close with FDR the whole time.
So no one else, no other figure throughout that time
period had that much power and connection to the presidents
of the United States, no one. And it's very interesting
that this man is just kind of there and making
money the whole time. And yeah, I think that to
get to go back to your earlier point, very briefly,
I think that's why he's not some kind of hardline ideologue.
There's a certain pragmatism where you're meeting all of these
people and you're interacting with all these different top figures,
and you kind of have to be almost sociopathically apolitical
in order to get what you want done, right, And
his really his only interest was ordinance and rearmament and
federal control over corporations and supply and demand.
Speaker 1: Wow, well, I appreciate this. Thank you. Going to do
anything for your YouTube channel yet? Ever?
Speaker 2: Yeah, No, I have to have I have a whole
bunch of books back here and I have to put
out some more content.
Speaker 1: Yes, maybe don't put out if you're going to put
it on YouTube. Some of those books you may not
want to cover on YouTube. It's not it's not it's
not smart to cover those on YouTube.
Speaker 2: Yeah, very good to know. Hopefully in the Trump if
I'm made a few final points, I hope in the
Trump administration censorship is not as bad and that content
creators can just kind of speak more freely. It is
critical and I think also one thing I forgot to
mention at the very start of the stream is that
if you look at the incoming Trump administration, it's not
just the people that are going to be saying the
party line and having the right opinion. It's going to
be the people that have the administrative strength and the
ability to muster and marshall with just sticks and power
into onshore manufacturing and to produce stuff in this country
for this country. And I mean, maybe not a man
like Baruch, but you know the way that he went
about consolidating American industry and getting everyone to sing to
the same tune. I think the Trump administration would benefit
tremendously from having someone who can sit down every company
in the country and just make stuff happen, make manufacturing happen,
make standardization happen, and restore the American economy.
Speaker 1: Well that is yet to be seen. And of course
black pilling over it now when you know nothing's been
done is foolish and literally retarded. So we're in a
wait and see mode now. And uh yeah, I mean
everybody's picking apart every little thing that he says or
any anything his uh his appointees say, so yeah, it's
just annoying. I try to spend his little time on
Twitter now unless I'm trying to bait congressmen into admitting
that they're traders to traders of the United States.
Speaker 2: Unbelievable, unbelievable, that guy, what are they paying him? I'm
so curious what they could possibly be paying him that
much in money?
Speaker 1: Did you see did you? Yeah? One point one point
one million for like Nebraska congressman. That makes no sense whatsoever.
Speaker 2: The only thing I could think of is some kind
of defense contract that's like totally not publicly known. But
there's no reason, like, you know, he's uh looking into him.
He had kind of, you know, support for the uh,
you know, the October seventh whatever ploc remlation. They you
know a lot of these like lip service moves that
they do in Congress anytime Israel does anything. But there's
just like it's uh, yeah, I couldn't. I couldn't believe
what he said to you. It was unreal for sitting
US congressman.
Speaker 1: I think Stormy made a really good point. He said,
if you go from being a brigadier general to a congressman,
that's like the biggest emotion in the world. What the
hell are you doing in Congress? Generals have their own
fiefdoms in the military. Why are you in Congress?
Speaker 2: I would presume it would be for the money, but uh.
Speaker 1: But there's you can make much more.
Speaker 2: I don't know, Hey, maybe not. Maybe some people can't
and themselves outside at Congress. Maybe they're not capable outside
of that organization.
Speaker 1: You would think a brigadier general can just be appointed
to the board of like, you know, twenty different military
contractors or something like that. I don't know. I find it.
I find it odd, And I also find it odd
that he's fighting with people on Twitter. Yeah, if it's him,
If it's him.
Speaker 2: A general is more of a staff position in the
sense that I mean, not all of them, right, Obviously
there are generals that you know, I agree with Stormy,
they say something, stuff happens. But you also have to
consider that something like the Navy has more admirals than ships,
and that there's a lot of it. It's a lot
of It's just kind of an upgraded kernel in a sense.
As far as the administrative bloat goes. You know that
the managerial aspect of like a general now is something
very different. Not all again, not all of them. There
are war fighters out there, but uh there there there
are there are men like this man out there as well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I gotta get going, thank you. And until
the next time when I think we just may have
to cover.
Speaker 2: Mister Forrest all absolutely a true hero, unlike mister Bruce.
Speaker 1: All Right man, have a good night, you two.
Speaker 2: Take care. Pete H.