"Your World Almanac of 1950, page 652, gives for 1945 as many as 250,881 manufacturing establishments, with wholesale value of manufacturing at $74,425,825,000 on page 656 for 1948, and retail sales at $130,000,000,000. Whatever you purchase has also an added cost by billions of dollars for advertising, from your biggest article down to your match or piece of chewing gum.
"Your credit sales and charge accounts have not only increased the cost of your purchases, but have intensified the demand for luxuries you do not need or can't afford. You buy these things on the installment plan, even if you have to pay more, plus interest, to carry your account.
"Commissions, and fee payments on your purchases, sales, and rental collections to stock, bond, real estate, and commodity brokers plus your attorneys' fees is another enormous and excessive drain on your resources.
"The economic financial incubuses you have created now control your lives, from the day of your conception, until long after your death. With your money they directly control your most essential industries; and indirectly hold ownership through their loans, and mortgages, of your business, your homes, farms, stock, lands. They are on the Board of Directors, guiding the policy and controlling all your financial institutions and your most profitable enterprises taking most of the profit for themselves by devious methods. To hide and not openly show their large earnings, they often by subterfuge, declare and cut 'melons' to their stockholders by exchanging three, four or more shares of the same company for every one of their shares. By this artifice, they endeavor to show a smaller dividend as well as make the new issue of shares of a lower value, for manipulative and trading purposes. They also continuously increase their capitalizations or lower their par value sometimes for the same purpose.
"They even control your new discoveries, and inventions, which they get possession of, for mere pittances. They often suppress some of them to suit their convenience. Through their financial power they directly and indirectly control and influence the political status of your land. They control operations of agriculture, commerce, industry, transportation, utilities, shipping and all kinds of intercommunication, your wineries, breweries, distilleries, and your tobacco industries, from the smallest business to your largest enterprise. Ultimately restricting your opportunities for economic advancement.
"All these are interrelated: your Banks, Trust Companies, Business Banks, Savings Banks, Financial Companies, Loan Companies, Life and other Insurance Companies, Stock Companies and Exchanges, Boards of Trade, and other exchanges. Stock brokers, real estate brokers, pawn brokers, with numerous branches covering the best locations in the United States, occupy many buildings and establishments, and send their private wires over every section of your nation and foreign countries. All of them are maintained at your expense through your large deposit reservoir and your earnings.
"Your moneyism has weakened you mentally, physically, and morally and has created in you an unquenchable desire for their acquisition; from your poorest to purchase his bare necessities to your richest to get richer, bringing on deficit spending, mounting debts, increasing taxes, incessant relief and unemployment payments. All these with no end in sight.
"Everywhere, everyone among you always has a demand, and you create the demand for more and more money. You always have need for more of it, for more financing, and there never seems to be enough of it. But it is only your few who seem to get it and hold it."
FOOTNOTES:
[21] Story of Money, Norman Angell, Garden City, Publ. Co., 1929. p. 72.