The Business Plot

Aw yeah! Again And Again!

Left Foot! Left Foot!

Good Foot! Good Foot!

🎶It was good enough for Smedley Butler!🎶

Before the plot, you need the man.

Smedley Darlington Butler enlisted in the Marines at seventeen, fought in the Spanish-American War, the Philippine-American War, the Boxer Rebellion, Nicaragua, Honduras, Haiti, Mexico, and France in World War One. He received the Medal of Honor twice.

By the time he retired in 1931 as a Major General, the highest rank in the Corps, he was the most decorated Marine in American history and one of the most recognizable military figures in the country.

He was also, by his own account, a hired instrument of American corporate and financial interests for three decades. His summary of his own career, delivered in speeches after his retirement, is worth quoting directly because nothing written about him matches the precision of his self-assessment, he was as he said, “a racketeer for capitalism.”

A high-class muscle man for Wall Street, for the City of London, for the international bankers. He helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests. He helped make Haiti and Cuba decent places for the National City Bank to collect revenue.

He helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers. He helped bring the Dominican Republic into line for American sugar interests. He helped make China safe for Standard Oil.

This is Butler’s own accounting of his service record mapped against the financial interests that preceded American military intervention in each theater. That’s the context for everything that followed.

War Is A Racket, published in 1935, was the systematic argument built from that accounting. The thesis was simple, war is not fought for the reasons given. It’s fought for profit. The profits go to a small number of men who are never present in the fighting.

The costs, in lives, in bodies, in debt, are paid by everyone else. Butler named the industries, named the profit margins, named the mechanism. It sold widely. It was dismissed by the political class. It has never been out of print.

He wrote it knowing what he knew. He wrote it because of what had happened in 1933.

In the summer of 1933, a bond salesman named Gerald MacGuire contacted Butler through an intermediary. MacGuire was connected to Grayson Murphy, a director of Guaranty Trust and a board member of several corporations with deep ties to the Morgan banking network.

The approach was indirect at first, flattery, shared concerns about the veterans’ bonus, talk of organizing former servicemen.

Over several meetings the proposal clarified. The country was in crisis. Roosevelt was implementing policies, the New Deal, the abandonment of the gold standard, banking regulation, labor protections, that the men MacGuire represented regarded as an existential threat to the existing financial order.

What was needed was a change in the structure of government.

A Secretary of General Affairs, a new position, would hold actual executive power. Roosevelt could remain as a figurehead or be removed. The model was explicitly European, they cited Mussolini’s Italy and the French Croix de Feu as organizational templates.

They needed a leader, someone the veterans would follow.

Someone with Butler’s profile and Butler’s credibility.

The financing was in place.

MacGuire told Butler they had three million dollars immediately available and could raise three hundred million. The organizational infrastructure of the American Legion would be used as the recruitment base. The target force was five hundred thousand men.

Butler listened to all of it across multiple meetings. He asked enough questions to get the full shape of the operation. Then he went to the FBI and to the House Special Committee on Un-American Activities, then chaired by John McCormack and Samuel Dickstein, and told them everything.

The names behind MacGuire that Butler identified and that the committee’s own investigation confirmed included, Grayson Murphy, Robert Sterling Clark of the Singer sewing machine fortune, and figures connected to the American Liberty League, which had been founded that same year and whose donor base included the Du Pont family and the Morgan banking network.

The committee’s own investigator confirmed the broad outline of Butler’s account. The committee’s final report stated that there was no question that a plot existed.

The report redacted the most powerful names. No one was charged. No one was prosecuted. The men named in testimony returned to their offices.

The American Liberty League continued to operate and continued to fund opposition to the New Deal for years afterward. MacGuire died in 1935 before he could be called back to testify further. The institutional response was to confirm the plot was real and ensure no one who mattered faced any consequence for it.

Butler spent the rest of his life speaking about it. He died in 1940. He was not believed widely until the documents were. The McCormack-Dickstein committee record is in the National Archives.

The plot is in it.

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The Business Plot wasn’t an aberration. It was the logical extension of the argument Butler had been making since he retired.

The men who profit from war, from the financing of it, the supplying of it, the reconstruction after it, are the same men who, when a democratic government threatens their accumulation through regulation or redistribution, will move against that government.

The military racket and the domestic coup attempt are not separate phenomena.

They are the same class of people applying the same logic in two different directions. Outward, when there is money to be made in foreign theaters. Inward, when the domestic political arrangement becomes a threat.

Butler was their instrument in both directions, until he wasn’t.

They came to him in 1933 because he had what they lacked: the loyalty of men who had actually been in the wars. His refusal was not complicated. He knew what it cost to be the instrument.

The men recruiting him had never been anywhere near the cost. That gap, between those who arrange consequences and those who absorb them, is the only thing Butler ever really wrote about.

The Business Plot failed at the recruitment stage. Butler refused. What followed in the decades after was a question of whether the class of men Butler described would find a method that didn’t require recruiting anyone who might refuse.

They did. It took roughly seventy years and it ran through legitimate channels almost entirely. Here is the documented sequence.

The Powell Memo, written in 1971 by Lewis Powell at the request of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, is the strategic blueprint. It identified the American university, the media, the courts, and the political system as targets for coordinated conservative business investment.

It argued explicitly that the survival of the free enterprise system required organized, long-term political engagement by the business community.

It was a document written by a corporate lawyer for the Chamber of Commerce telling American capital that it needed to get into the business of owning institutions. Powell sent it confidentially in August 1971.

Nixon nominated him to the Supreme Court two months later.

The memo was never disclosed to the Senate during confirmation. It became public in September 1972 when journalist Jack Anderson obtained and reported on it, by which point Powell was already seated on the Court.

The Heritage Foundation was founded in 1973. The Cato Institute in 1977. The Federalist Society in 1982. The Club for Growth in 1999.

Each of these organizations served a specific function in the institutional capture Powell had outlined, Heritage as the policy production arm, Cato as the ideological infrastructure, the Federalist Society as the judicial pipeline, the Club for Growth as the electoral enforcement mechanism, primarying any Republican who voted for anything that could be characterized as expanding government.

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I feel like I have some background here:

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The Koch network funded significant portions of all of them and built its own parallel electoral infrastructure on top.

By 2016 the judiciary pipeline had been running for thirty years. By 2020 it had produced a Supreme Court majority. By 2022 that majority had overturned Roe v. Wade, weakened the administrative state’s regulatory authority in West Virginia v. EPA, and was working through a docket that systematically reduced the federal government’s capacity to regulate concentrated private wealth.

None of this required a march on Washington. It required sustained investment in the right institutions over the right timeline.

This is the track that succeeded.

It is the Business Plot executed through legitimate channels over seven decades. The Liberty League spent money on politics to protect concentrated wealth from democratic redistribution and lost because Roosevelt’s coalition was too large and the institutions were still intact. The post-Powell network spent money on institutions until the institutions were theirs. Different method. Identical objective.

The second track is the one that looks more like 1933.

On November 19, 2020, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Jenna Ellis held a press conference at the Republican National Committee headquarters alleging a coordinated international conspiracy to steal the presidential election. None of the allegations were supported by evidence.

They were presented anyway, in sixty-plus court cases that were uniformly dismissed, by judges appointed by both parties, for lack of evidence.

Between November 2020 and January 6, 2021, the following is documented in the January 6th Committee’s final report, in federal court filings, and in communication records entered into evidence:

Mark Meadows, the White House Chief of Staff, received a text from Representative-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene on November 7, 2020, the day the election was called for Biden, proposing martial law. He received similar communications from other members of Congress and from outside advisors. These texts are in the committee record.

John Eastman, a lawyer working with the Trump campaign, produced two memos outlining a theory by which Vice President Pence could either refuse to certify the electoral college results or send them back to the states.

Eastman later acknowledged in communications entered into evidence that he knew the theory would not survive Supreme Court review. He proposed it anyway. Pence’s counsel wrote back that the theory was without legal merit. Pence ultimately refused to act on it.

On January 5th, Trump’s allies organized rallies.

The Oath Keepers and Proud Boys coordinated in advance of January 6th through encrypted communications that were later recovered and entered into evidence in their federal prosecutions. Stewart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers and Enrique Tarrio of the Proud Boys were both convicted of seditious conspiracy. This is the federal record.

On January 6th, Trump spoke at the Ellipse, told the crowd the election had been stolen, told them to march to the Capitol, said he would be with them, and returned to the White House where he watched television for several hours while the Capitol was breached.

His Chief of Staff documented that he resisted calls to act for one hundred and eighty-seven minutes. This is in the committee record, sourced from testimony by his own staff.

General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was sufficiently concerned in the period between the election and January 20th about the possibility of an illegal military deployment that he took steps to ensure that any nuclear command order would require his involvement.

This is documented in Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s *Peril*, sourced from Milley’s own account and corroborated by other participants.

Milley was the closest contemporary figure to Butler’s position, a senior military officer who understood what was being attempted and declined to be its instrument.

The institutional response, the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys leadership was convicted. The political figures whose communications are in the evidence record faced no criminal accountability.

Trump was indicted by a federal grand jury on four counts related to the effort to overturn the election.

Those charges were managed through the judicial system, first delayed, then assigned to a judge whose recusal was debated, then rendered moot when Trump won the 2024 election, at which point the Justice Department dropped them consistent with its policy against prosecuting a sitting president.

He is now president again.

The structure of the institutional response to January 6th is identical to the institutional response to the Business Plot, confirm what happened, prosecute the foot soldiers, protect the planners, move on.

In 1933 the money ran through identifiable firms. Du Pont. Morgan. The Liberty League donor list was documented in the committee record.

The contemporary financial network is more complex and more thoroughly documented simultaneously.

Jared Kushner served as Senior Advisor to the President throughout the first Trump administration. His portfolio included the Middle East, specifically the Abraham Accords normalization agreements between Israel and Gulf states.

Within months of leaving office, his firm Affinity Partners received a two billion dollar commitment from the Saudi Public Investment Fund, controlled by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

The Senate Finance Committee investigated this transfer. Kushner had no private equity track record. The Saudis cited his potential for delivering returns as the justification. The transfer is in the financial disclosure record.

Steve Mnuchin, Treasury Secretary in the first Trump administration, launched Liberty Strategic Capital after leaving office. It received sovereign wealth investment from the same Gulf network, including the Saudi Public Investment Fund.

Steven Schwarzman of Blackstone, Ken Griffin of Citadel, and the broader private equity donor class funded the 2024 Trump campaign at levels that dwarfed their previous political investment.

Blackstone and other private equity firms have direct financial interests in the deregulatory agenda, the rollback of the CFPB, and the restructuring of federal pension investment rules that the current administration is executing. The donor disclosures are public record.

Elon Musk contributed approximately two hundred and seventy-seven to two hundred and ninety million dollars to the 2024 Trump campaign and affiliated PACs, depending on which FEC filings are included in the count, making him the largest single political donor in the 2024 cycle.

He is simultaneously the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, which is not a statutory agency but an advisory body operating inside the executive branch with access to federal payment systems, personnel records, and agency data. His companies, SpaceX, Tesla, Starlink, hold billions in federal contracts.

The conflict of interest is structural, visible, and has not resulted in his removal or recusal.

Peter Thiel funded J.D. Vance’s 2022 Senate campaign at a foundational level when Vance had no meaningful political base. Vance is now Vice President. Thiel’s political investment returned a vice president.

The pattern here is not a secret meeting in 1933.

It is an investment thesis operating openly across a decade, place financial bets on political outcomes, fund the candidates and infrastructure that produce those outcomes, and collect on the regulatory and contractual environment those outcomes create.

This is legal. It is documented. And it is the same logic, private financial interests purchasing public political power, that Butler identified in 1935 and that the men behind MacGuire were attempting to execute by force in 1933.

They don’t need force now. They bought the process.

Butler’s argument was never that the men doing this were uniquely evil.

It was that they were doing what their class had always done, that the system was structured to let them do it, and that the people paying the price were always somewhere else.

The contemporary record confirms the argument without requiring any inferential leap. The same financial class that profits from war is the same financial class funding the political infrastructure that decides when and where wars happen and who gets the contracts.

The same network that captures regulatory agencies is the same network that captures the foreign policy apparatus. The same men positioning for Gaza reconstruction contracts are the men negotiating the ceasefire. These are not separate phenomena connected by theory.

They are the same people, documented in the same financial disclosure records, operating across the same interlocking institutional positions.

The Business Plot failed because Butler refused. The contemporary version did not need Butler to agree. It needed enough money, enough time, and enough access to the institutions that process political power. It had all three.

The gravestones still go up. The contracts still get paid. The men who arrange it are still nowhere near the front.

That is the documented record. Butler recognized it in 1935. The names have changed. The mechanism has not

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