I started re-reading Howard Zinn's
A People's History of the US and came across this passage i wanted to share:
"JP Morgan had started before the war, as the son of a banker who began selling stocks for the railroads for good commissions. During the Civil War he bought 5,000 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 fulfillment of a valid legal contract.
Morgan had escaped military service in the Civil War by paying $300 to a substitute. So did Jon 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 Meyer reports:
... a circular marked "Private and Confidential" was issued by the three banking houses of Drexel, Morgan and 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 human cost to this financial story of ingenuity. That year, 1889, records of the Interstate Commerce Commission showed that 22,000 railroad workers were killed or injured.
Does any of that sound familiar to you guys? Do things ever really change?
This is my second time through People's History (first time was roughly 15 years ago) and i purchased a copy after i got a few pages into the Library one i had borrowed. It's an important work and i would urge anyone who hasn't read it to pick up a copy. It's fascinating, angering, inspiring, enlightening,... just a good read.
BTW, i hope y'all appreciate that i typed that up... took me damn near an hour as i'm an awful typist....
;)
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
