| | In May 1933, the Thomas Amendment to the [[Agricultural Adjustment Act]] (AAA) was passed, giving the president the authority to increase the money supply by $3 billion in unbacked bills and to reduce the value of the gold dollar by up to half. In June, a supine Congress delivered to FDR the joint resolution he had requested, forbidding private debtors to fulfill their obligations in gold and relieving the government of its own sworn obligations. <ref>''The New Ordeal'', Freeman Tilden, The North American Review, v. 239, February 1935, p. 131-7.</ref> | | In May 1933, the Thomas Amendment to the [[Agricultural Adjustment Act]] (AAA) was passed, giving the president the authority to increase the money supply by $3 billion in unbacked bills and to reduce the value of the gold dollar by up to half. In June, a supine Congress delivered to FDR the joint resolution he had requested, forbidding private debtors to fulfill their obligations in gold and relieving the government of its own sworn obligations. <ref>''The New Ordeal'', Freeman Tilden, The North American Review, v. 239, February 1935, p. 131-7.</ref> |
| | + | In 1933 Italian Premier [[Benito Mussolini]] was a towering figure. Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, <ref>[http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,774563-4,00.html Axis (1936-1943)], [[TIME magazine]], Sep. 20, 1943,</ref> President of Columbia University and [[Nobel Prize for Peace]], said of [[fascism]], it is as a “form of government of the very first order of excellence”; and found it “safe to predict that just as Cromwell made modern England, so Mussolini would make modern Italy.” <ref>[http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/wright/1943/10/italy.htm What To Do With Italy?], John G. Wright, From Fourth International, Vol.4 No.10, October 1943, pp.308-311.</ref> Chariman [[Sol Bloom]] of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the U. S. House of Representives, suggested Mussolini was a great man and had something the [[United States]] government might well look to for imitation. <ref>John T. Flynn, ''As We Go Marching'', Doubleday, 1944, p. 70.</ref> What they liked particularly was his [[corporative]] system. Mussolini organized each trade or industrial group or professional group into a state supervised trade association. He called it a corporative. <ref>[The New Deal and Corporatism], Prof. Emeritus Gene Smiley, Marquette University, Presented at the Committee for Monetary Research and Education,October 19, 2006,</ref> These corporatives operated under state supervision and could plan production, quality, prices, distribution, labor standards, etc. The National Recovery Act, or NRA as it came to be called, provided that a corporative system in America for each industry should be organized into a federally supervised trade association. It was not called a corporative. It was called a [[Code Authority]]. It [[Nazi]] Germany such government run concerns built on the Italian model were called [[industrial cartel]]s. This was the same as fascism. <ref>[http://www.rooseveltmyth.com/book/hbzfrm.htm ''The Roosevelt Myth''], John T. Flynn, Fox and Wilkes, 1948, Ch. 6.</ref> These code authorities could regulate production, quantities, qualities, prices, distribution methods, etc., under the supervision of the NRA. Anti-trust laws forbade such organizations. Roosevelt had denounced Hoover for not enforcing these laws sufficiently. Now Roosevelt suspended the anti-trust laws and compelled men to combine. |