Re: the Kennedys' finagling....
Some of the devious ways are old man Joe's cornering of the market for Scotch whiskey while ambassador to the UK during prohibition (which was not such a bad thing) and then cheating several people out of commissions due, for one devious reason or the other. It has been documented (not by me) that he made arrangements with the Chicago mob to turn out the votes they controlled for Jack's election. There are quite a few other misdeeds which have been reported in several documentary biographies. Since they are too numerous to mention,I won't.
And that's that? Whiskey skullduggery in the 1920s? Gee! how about this:
[...]
While some multimillionaires started in poverty, most did not. A study of the origins of 303 textile, railroad, and steel executives of the 1870s showed that 90 percent came from middle- or upper-class families. The Horatio Alger stories of ''rags to riches'' were true for a few men, but mostly a myth, and a useful myth for control.
Most of the fortune building was done legally, with the collaboration of the government and the courts. Sometimes the collaboration had to be paid for. Thomas Edison promised New Jersey politicians $1,000 each in return for favorable legislation. Daniel Drew and Jay Gould spent $1 million to bribe the New York legislature to legalize their issue of $8 million in ''watered stock'' (stock not representing real value) on the Erie Railroad.
The first transcontinental railroad was built with blood, sweat, politics and thievery, out of the meeting of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads. The Central Pacific started on the West Coast going east; it spent $200,000 in Washington on bribes to get 9 million acres of free land and $24 million in bonds, and paid $79 million, an overpayment of $36 million, to a construction company which really was its own. The construction was done by three thousand Irish and ten thousand Chinese, over a period of four years, working for one or two dollars a day.
The Union Pacific started in Nebraska going west. It had been given 12 million acres of free land and $27 million in government bonds. It created the Credit Mobilier company and gave them $94 million for constructiuon when the actual cost was $44 million. Shares were sold cheaply to Congressmen to prevent investigation. This was the suggestion of Massachusetts Congressman Oakes Ames, a shovel manufacturer and director of Credit Mobilier, who said: ''There is no difficulty in getting men to look after their own property.'' The Union Pacific used twenty thousand workers --war veterans and Irish immigrants, who laid 5 miles of track a day and died by the hundreds in the heat, the cold, and the battles with Indians opposing the invasion of their territory.
Both railroads used longer, twisting routes to get subsidies from towns they went through. In 1869, amid music and speeches, the two crooked lines met in Utah.
The wild fraud on the railroads led to more control of railroad finances by bankers, who wanted more stability --profit by law rather than by theft. By the 1890s, most of the country's railway mileage was concentrated in six huge systems. Four of these were completely or partially controlled by the House of Morgan, and two others by the bankers Kuhn, Loeb, and Company.
J.P. Morgan had started before the [civil] war, as the son of a banker who began selling stocks for the railroads for good commissions. During the Civil War he bought five thousand rifles for $3.50 each from an army arsenal, and sold them to a general in the field for $22 each. The rifles were defective and would shoot off the thumbs of the soldiers using them. A congressional committee noted this in the small print of an obscure report, but a federal judge upheld the deal as the fullfilment of a valid legal contract.
Morgan had escaped military service in the Civil War by paying $300 to a substitute. So did John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Philip Armour, Jay Gould, and James Mellon. Mellon's father had written to him that ''a man may be a patriot without risking his own life or sacrificing his health. There are plenty of lives less valuable.''
It was the firm of Drexel, Morgan and Company that was given a US government contract to float a bond issue of $260 million. The government could have sold the bonds directly; it chose to pay the bankers $5 million in commission.
On January 2, 1889, as Gustavus Myers reports:
... a circular marked ''Private and Confidential'' was issued by the three banking houses of Drexel, Morgan & Company, Brown Brothers & Company, and Kidder, Peabody & Company. The most painstaking care was exercised that this document should not find its way into the press or otherwise become public.... Why this fear? Because the circular was an invitation... to the great railroad magnates to assemble at Morgan's house, No. 219 Madison Avenue, there to form, in the phrase of the day, an iron-clad combination.... a compact which would efface competition among certain railroads, and unite those interests in an agreement by which the people of the United States would be bled even more effectively than before.
There was a human cost to this exciting story of financial ingenuity. That year, 1889, records of the Interstate Commerce Commission showed that 22,000 railroad workers were killed or injured. [...]
Excerpt from A People's History of the United States, by Howard Zinn, 1980, Harper & Row Publishers.
And again: sorry to have stained your great Protestant icons....
Gustave. |
