The Mellons: Tax-free hate & paintings

PART 6

By Stephen Millies

In 1925 U.S. Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon praised Italian dictator Benito Mussolini as “a strong man with sound ideas and the force to make these ideas effective.” Mellon liked the way Mussolini used fascist thugs to break strikes of Italian workers and to assassinate their leaders. That’s what Pennsylvania millionaires like Mellon had been doing for decades with their Coal and Iron police.

In 1892 Andrew Mellon’s closest friend, Henry Clay Frick, ordered Pinkerton thugs to shoot striking steelworkers in Homestead, Pa. Mellon wasn’t the only rich scoundrel in the U.S. who thought fascism was swell.

Both Henry Ford and IBM head Thomas Watson Sr. were awarded medals by Adolf Hitler. IBM and its German subsidiary supplied the punch cards that helped organize the extermination of Jewish and Roma people.

Another Mellon is currently the biggest sugar daddy for the ultraright in the U.S. By 1999 Richard Mellon Scaife had given $340 million to outfits like the Committee on the Present Danger, the Heritage Foundation and the Hoover Institution. (Washington Post, May 3, 1999)

All of these hate groups want to turn back the clock on poor and working people’s rights.

Millions more have flowed from Scaife’s fortune to reaction in the past decade. Every cent was ripped off from workers in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the U.S. And almost every cent was tax deductible.

Richard Mellon Scaife was a partner of John Goff, a newspaper publisher. Goff was indicted in 1986 as an unregistered foreign agent of the apartheid regime that oppressed and exploited Black people in South Africa. Scaife and Goff bought the Sacramento Union newspaper.

Scaife currently owns the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. He also operated Forum World Features, a CIA front that peddled lying stories to 300 newspapers until its exposure in 1975.

Another favorite recipient of Richard Mellon Sciafe’s beneficence is the Free Congress Foundation, which published “The Homosexual Agenda,” a vicious attack on LGBT people.

Racism was on the FCF agenda, too. FCR staffer William Lynd wrote in 1999, “The real damage to race relations in the South came not from slavery, but from Reconstruction,” referring to the period after the Civil War when formerly enslaved Black people made the most advances.

Scaife is notorious for spending millions in digging up dirt on Bill and Hillary Clinton. But Scaife’s “Arkansas Project” was forgotten when he saw a Black man running for president.

Just before the Pennsylvania primary in 2008, Richard Mellon Scaife threw his support to Hillary Clinton instead of Barack Obama in his Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

Scaife continues a family tradition by funding the Competitive Enterprise Institute, one of the biggest Astroturf groups behind the bigots who mobilized for recent town hall meetings on health care reform.

Andrew Mellon helped finance a phony group called the Ex-Service Men’s Anti-Bonus League in an attempt to derail the efforts of 43,000 World War I veterans and family members who came to Washington, D.C., in 1932 to demand their promised but unreceived bonuses. The vets and their supporters were violently dispersed by U.S. troops led by Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

Tax-deductible art gallery

Probably the biggest depository of Mellon family wealth today is the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which is worth around $6 billion. Billionaire families like the Mellons, the DuPonts, the Fords and the Rockefellers use foundations to avoid inheritance taxes. Foundations were established to preserve family fortunes. Charity was an afterthought.

Thomas Mellon, the founder of the family fortune, wasn’t a charitable man. He didn’t even want Pittsburgh to spend money on a library. His son Andrew Mellon refused to lend $1 million to save the Bank of Pittsburgh in 1931.

As a consequence of this refusal, 17,000 depositors lost everything. But what was more important from the Mellon family point of view was that another Mellon competitor had bitten the dust. By the late 1960s the Mellon National Bank had 52 percent of the commercial bank deposits in the Pittsburgh area.

The Mellons’ real charity was themselves. East of Pittsburgh they own the 12,000-acre Rolling Rock Club, which they use for fox hunting and golfing.

Andrew Mellon was so hated during the Great Depression that he started the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., to get off charges of income tax evasion. By donating his collection of paintings, Mellon also saved $32 million in taxes.

This didn’t help any living artists, 50,000 of whom were only temporarily employed at the time by the Works Progress Administration and other government programs.

Andrew Mellon’s son Paul spent his entire life collecting art and horses. His autobiography is appropriately called “Reflections in a Silver Spoon.”

All of the Mellons put together don’t hold a candle to baseball player Roberto Clemente regarding charity. Born in Puerto Rico, the great Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder died in a plane crash on Dec. 31, 1972, trying to deliver aid to victims of the Managua, Nicaragua earthquake.

Next: Deindustrializing Pittsburgh

Source:“Mellon’s Millions” by Harvey O’Connor

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Part 1: Mellons over Pittsburgh and the planet

Part 2: Coal mines and machine guns

Part 3: Keeping Pittsburgh poor

Part 4: Blood, oil and profits

Part 5: Making people miserable with aluminum

Part 6: Tax-free hate & paintings

Part 7: Deindustrializing Pittsburgh

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