HOW WALL STREET'S MANIPULATIONS AFFECT THE COUNTRY
What is the connection between the "System" and the minor financial
institutions throughout the country which are owned and controlled by
groups of sturdy men who know not Wall Street and its frenzied votaries,
and who are ignorant of "made dollars"? Let us see. We will take five
national banks in different parts of the country, each having a capital
of $200,000 and deposits of $2,000,000. One is in the farming district
of Kansas; another is in Louisiana in a cotton district; a third is in
the orange groves of California; in the mining district of Montana is a
fourth; the fifth in the logging and lumber country of Maine. These
$10,000,000 of deposits represent savings earned by the type of men who
have made America what it is, and who laugh when they read in their
local papers: "Panic in Wall Street; stocks shrink a billion dollars in
a day." "Fools and their money are easily parted," they say, "but Wall
Street gets none of our honestly earned money." Now the officers of
these five banks are honest men and they know nothing of the "System,"
yet the day of the panic they each telegraph to their Illinois
correspondent, the big Chicago bank, "Loan our balance, $200,000, at
best rate." That day the Chicago bank with similar telegrams from
forty-five other correspondents in various parts of the country, wires
its New York correspondent, the big Wall Street bank, "Loan our balance,
$2,000,000, at best rates."
Thereupon the great New York bank sends its brokers out upon "the
Street" to loan on inflated securities of one kind or another which its
officers, the votaries of the "System," have purchased in immense
quantities at slaughter prices the millions belonging to the Chicago
bank and to other correspondents of its own in Cincinnati and Omaha and
St. Louis and other big cities. The decline is stayed, and then the
world learns that the panic is over and that the stocks, of which the
people have been "shaken out" to the extent of a billion dollars, have
recovered in a day $500,000,000 of it, and that probably in a few days
more will recover the other $500,000,000. Who has _recovered_ this vast
sum? The people who had been "shaken out"? No, indeed! The votaries of
the "System" have made it--they and the frenzied financiers whose haunt
is Wall Street, and whose harvest is in such wreckage.
The part that the five little banks innocently played in this terrific
robbery was unimportant. What is important is that it was the funds of
their depositors and others like them which the "System" used to turn
the Stock Market and make an immense profit out of the recovery of
values. It is true the banks received but two and one-half or three per
cent. for the use of their balances, and their officers would scorn the
suggestion that they had put any of their money in jeopardy in a Wall
Street gamble. But what I have outlined happened, and has happened many
a time before and since, and goes to prove my assertion that every
financial institution which is taking the money of the people for the
ostensible purpose of safeguarding it or putting it to use for them, is
a part of the machinery for the plundering of the people.
Sooner or later, every dollar taken by the "System" through Wall
Street's manipulation of stocks directly affects every man, woman, and
child in the United States. Let us, for example, see how a stock slump
in New York affects the owner of a small life-insurance policy in
Wyoming. The shares of the American and English ocean steamship
companies were bought up by the "System" at double their worth and
converted into a "trust." New stocks and bonds to a number of times
their value were issued and sold to the public. The great insurance
companies bought many millions worth of these securities, using for the
purpose the money they had collected from the policy-holders, a dollar
at a time. This "investment," at the moment it was made, actually
represented a loss to the purchasing insurance companies of millions of
money, for millions more than the property was worth or could possibly
be made worth had gone to the people who formerly owned the steamship
properties, and many millions more to the "System" as its share of the
swag. And it should be remembered that the men who organized the
steamship trust were the men who invested the insurance company's money
in its securities.
The policy-holder in Wyoming knows about the steamship trust and about
the terrible loss sustained by those who invested in its securities. He
does not realize, however, that his insurance company has been buying
such poor stuff, for he is persuaded it is a great and noble
institution, and far above Wall Street and its rash gamblers. Even when
he and his kind find their yearly dividends on their policies growing
less and less and their premiums rising "because of the tremendous
increase in the expense of doing business," they do not dream of
connecting these misfortunes with the "System's" trustifications of
inflated securities; nor do they associate them with the glowing
accounts of the half-million-dollar seaside palace built by the
insurance company's officer who entered the employ of the institution a
few years before, with his salary for his fortune, and who is now
pointed to as an example of thrift, being worth from ten to fifteen
millions.