Financial oligarchy

“ The supremacy of finance-capital over all other forms of capital means the rule of the investor and of financial oligarchy, or the crystallisation of a small number of financially powerful States out of the general body. ”

“ The extraordinarily high rate of profit from the issue of securities, which is one of the chief functions of finance-capital, plays a large part in the development and stabilisation of the financial oligarchy. "There is not in the whole country a single business bringing in profits like the issue of foreign loans," says the German journal Die Bank." ”

“ We have seen that this whole movement, which tends to transform the great majority of the independent citizens of a republic, into the financial slaves of an oligarchy, is the natural outgrowth of the competitive system. Taught by history, we know, that [Pg 410] as the oligarchy rises and reigns, the republic dies. ”

“ It is manufactured, and by reckless and dishonest men, who stop at nothing, and who care not for the prosperity of the nation, or of the government, when their own interests are in view. They drain the country of its wealth, concentrate it in Wall street, and there spend it in stock and gold gambling; and this hot-bed of corruption which has no counterpart, save in the infernal regions, has raised such a combination throughout the country as to control the whole financial policy, and compels even the secretary of the treasury to yield to its de [Pg 199] mands. ”

“ Here was the headquarters of the gold power in this country, and having a monopoly of money, it bore to the people the relation of a Universal Creditor and absorbed the ENTIRE SURPLUS created by their labor to meet its demand for interest, etc. Here was practically determined the amount allowed to producers on one hand, and the price charged to consumers on the other. This power was the unquestioned dictator in every sphere of human activity. But we will visit the vaults of the great money kings of that time, which were the actual head-center of this oppressive oligarchy of wealth. ”

“ The money oligarchy, now in control of all lines of finance, transportation, distribution and of most lines of production, works for the profit of the few to the great detriment of the many. These plutocrats control a slavish metropolitan press, in order that the masses of our people may be governed for the benefit of the few. ”

“ We saw disappear that financial corporation oppressing France beyond endurance, and by leases, whose monstrous government exceeded in expense and profit the receipts of the royal treasury, whose immense code, now here recorded, formed an occult science which its agents alone had the right or the means of interpreting, and which, in rewarding perjury and informers, exercised over all unprotected men a boundless and remorseless tyranny. ”

“ It embodies the heavy dignity of those Victorian financiers who ruled the generation between the pioneers and the brisk "sales-engineers" and created a somber oligarchy by gaining control of banks, mills, land, railroads, mines. ”

“ Do they imagine that a hundred thousand men, possessed of two thousand millions of dollars, which they feel the spirit of the age is seeking to tear from their grasp, will not eagerly catch at all the support they can obtain by getting the control of the government? In a land where the dollar is almighty, "where the sin of not being rich is only atoned for by the effort to become so," do they doubt that such an oligarchy will generally succeed? Besides, banking and manufacturing stocks are not urged by despair to seek a controlling influence in politics. ”

“ Read first these quotations from their own lips and from their own pens which prove that these Federal Reserve oligarchs deliberately staged the greatest financial debacle in all human history. Nothing in human history approaches it for cold-blooded, wanton, ruthless slaughter of values. ”

“ I desire to go on record right here in declaring that all financial institutions which in any way are engaged in taking from the people the money that is their surplus earnings or their capital, for the ostensible purpose of safeguarding it, or putting it in use for them, or exchanging it for stocks, bonds, policies, or other paper evidences of worth, are a part of the machinery for the plundering of the people. ”

“ You may ask if I desire to convey the idea that the great financial institutions and trusts of this country, which have their head centre in Wall Street, are all concerned in a conspiracy to rob the people of their savings. ”

“ Unscrupulous men, versed in all the dark ways of the financial world, found their opportunity in those palmy days, and, purchasing and amalgamating, converted prosperous private firms into unwieldy and over-capitalised public companies. In the thick of all this juggling with millions, and snatching of commissions and vendors’ profits, the bubble burst, and an honourable and highly prosperous industry was wrecked, and became a bye-word and a reproach all the world over. ”

“ While barring out the money of the Constitution this law opens the printing mints of the Treasury to the free coinage of bank paper money, to enrich the few and impoverish the many. "We pledge anew the People's party never to cease the agitation until this great financial conspiracy is blotted from the statute books, the Lincoln greenback restored, the bonds all paid, and all corporation money forever retired. ”

“ So says the constitution under which we live, and which it is the duty of every citizen to protect, preserve, and defend. But a new power has sprung up among us, and has annulled the whole of these prohibitions. That new power is the oligarchy of banks. It has filled the whole land with bills of credit; for it is admitted on all hands that bank notes, not convertible into specie, are bills of credit. It has suppressed the constitutional currency, and made depreciated paper money a forced tender in payment of every debt. ”

“ The duty of the American people is to unloosen the thraldom of the "System" on our financial mechanism; to pluck out of their high places the dishonest usurpers who have degraded the purposes of our financial institutions, and to restore those institutions to their legitimate functions. When the people are fully awakened to the condition I describe, surely they will arise in their wrath and sweep the money-changers from the temple. ”

“ If any attempt at repudiation were made, all sorts of property, either directly or indirectly connected with the orderly execution of Governmental functions, would suffer, banks would become involved, great businesses would stagger, and the whole financial community would protest. ”

“ Capital, through the banks, has great financial interests in the lands that are to be confiscated without compensation; in case of a partial division on the basis of capitalist property, the financial interests of capital will inevitably get control of the land through loans, etc., and all the evils of private ownership prevail. ”

“ This financial alchemy, this pecuniary perpetual motion, this fountain of eternal wealth, are the same old failures with new names. Something cannot be made out of nothing. Nothing is a poor capital to, carry on business with, and makes a very unsatisfactory balance at your bankers.
Let me tell you another thing. The Democrats seem to think that you can fail to keep a promise so long that it is as good as though you had kept it. They say you can stamp the sovereignty of the Government upon paper. ”

“ Combinations of capital to fix prices, and raise or depress wages, increase or decrease the supply of commodities, and drive out competition, with a more effective and autocratic power than was ever exercised by any absolute monarch of any old world dynasty. Unscrupulous adventurers, casting behind them all the restrictions of honor, decency and fair play, with millions accumulated from reck- less gambling or downright extortion, buying their way to the highest legislative or executive offices, to disport their vanity and corrupt the public conscience. ”

“ Specious arguments could easily be brought forward against the greed and extortion of the bankers, who were realizing fortunes by the loose financial administration which made the King's revenue pass through their hands, and subjected it to a heavy toll upon which they throve. ”

“ Were the feudal, the hierarchical, the banking, the funding, the lottery, and the protecting-duty modes of accumulating wealth in a few hands, all forged in nature's workhouse? Instead of detecting fraudulent laws, and then reasoning from the principle, that free will, industry, demand and supply, would naturally regulate the acquisition of capital; all the European systems of political economy, finally draw their conclusions, however copiously they may be sprinkled with just principles, from legal abuses. ”

“ Capital has placed its tyrant grip upon the throat of the Goddess of Liberty. The power of railroad and telegraph corporations, and associated capital invested in monopolies which oppress the many, while ministering to the wealth, the comfort and the luxury of the few, has become omnipotent in halls of legislation, courts of justice, and even in the Executive Chambers of great States, so that the poor, the oppressed and the defrauded appeal in vain for justice. ”

“ The chief rule of every real oligarchy of money is, while they hold the lower classes in general under their yoke with great severity, to keep dangerous elements in good humor at the expense of the state. ”

“ While our government is republican in name it is in fact controlled by an oligarchy. The whole government has become a prey to the class of corporations above named, and is administered in their interest. Their influence controls the legislative department, the courts of the country, and its finances. This is a sweeping assertion, but who will deny it. Further, the very men who by their votes in congress have created these monopolies, have themselves in many instances received pecuniary consideration for their votes, either in corporate stock, or direct payment. ”

“ In such a state, wealth exerts its power indirectly, but all the more safely. This is done partly in the form of direct corruption of officials, after the classical type of the United States, or in the form of an alliance between government and bankers which is established all the more easily when the public debt increases and when corporations concentrate in their hands not only the means of transportation, but also production itself, using the stock exchange as a center. ”

“ Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. ”

“ Instead of employing the vast power and the immense wealth intrusted to you to conserve the interests of your policy-holders, you have made yourself a part of the cruel robbing machine which the "System" has created to deprive the American people of their savings. Under the pretence of seeking profitable investment, your [478] corporation has been perverted into a vast stock-gambling agency. You have filled the high places in your corporation with your own children and relatives and their relatives, and conferred on them great salaries out of which they have grown rich. ”

“ The people, accustomed to invest their money in the legitimate securities of the country, had time and again lost hundreds of millions without dreaming that they had been as ruthlessly robbed as though held up at a pistol-point by a highwayman. They imagined that the great capitalists whose names were emblazoned in the [512] press throughout the land, and who managed the banks and trust companies and insurance corporations to which their savings were intrusted, were noble and public-spirited gentlemen of the highest moral principles and of absolute integrity. ”

“ That if you were so prodigal of your wealth for the support of rebellion and faction, can you refuse these revenues, which are now no longer your own, but in possession of the enemies of the establishment, who chiefly gained them at first by stock-jobbing and extortion, and now keep them as the prizes of disloyalty and treason ”

“ It is, therefore, mere suicide for the holders of real estate, who have the power of supplying an indefinite amount of capital for mechanics and merchants—and [Pg 34] who can make themselves and everybody else rich by supplying it—to suffer that power to be usurped by any such small body of men as those who now monopolize it, through mere favoritism, corruption, and tyranny, on the part of the government, and not because they have any claim to it. ”

“ Capitalists with idle money found the avenues to profitable investment closed by the inability of Congress to offer protection to either manufacturing or shipping; creditors with money at interest witnessed with alarm the inability or unwillingness of state legislatures to resist [Pg 27] attacks upon private contracts and public credit; holders of public securities shared the general contempt for a Government, which, so far from providing for the ultimate redemption of its obligations, could not even pay interest on its debts ”

“ Corporate control of the volume of money has been the means of dividing society into hostile classes, of an unjust distribution of the products of labor, and of building up monopolies of associated capital, endowed with power to confiscate private property. ”

“ I am showing that this commercial genius is no better than a high talent, for financial jugglery, and that its successes are achieved by a calculated disregard of the laws of the game. The "System's" fortunes have been won by means of marked cards and cogged dice, crooked wheels and bribed umpires—in other words, by the corruption of legislatures, the undermining of competitors, the evasion of railway rates, the wrongful manipulation of stocks, the perversion of justice, by intrigue, graft, and four play. Once the people realize this, the "System" is doomed ”