"You who are called the general public; farmer, professional man, small businessman, white collar worker, laborer, widow, orphan, old person; those who pinched penny by penny to accumulate a little nest egg, those who mortgaged your homes, those who saved it at extreme sacrifices, denying yourselves certain luxuries or necessities, to the point of avarice—you have listened to the evil persuasion of high pressure. You have read the enticing overstatements in your newspapers, financial papers, and company reports, you have listened to professional tipsters, financial wizards, or your bank's financial expert and adviser offering you a lifetime opportunity to purchase investments supposed to pay good interest and dividends. Or you have diligently read your stockbrokers' pamphlets and daily sheets. You have watched stock and bond fluctuations on ticker or boards in their sumptuous board rooms. You have been enticed into high finance, stock exchanges, boards of trade, and commodities—all of them types of gambling producing revenue. It is a wonderful system to fleece you of your savings. Your big financiers with their executives, whom you helped to elect with your proxies, have a permanent stranglehold on all your basic industries. They always aim to have you 'the public,' invest your money into their companies and corporations, in fact, become majority holders of their securities. It's with your money that they finance them. They are satisfied to be the insiders with control and management holding a minority of stock. Presumptuously, these executives not only pay themselves from $50,000 to $600,000 and over, yearly salaries, but some of them also have the impudence to get themselves voted large yearly lifetime retirement pensions. They are past masters in creating and influencing a demand for their stock among you, declaring and increasing interests and dividends, manipulating the stock markets to create an artificial boom, and spreading news of a bull market. They load you with the supposed gilt-edged investments at high prices from their portfolios, that they are gradually emptying. After they have sold their securities to you and have entirely emptied their strongboxes of them, these philanthropists sell you more on 'short' sales of shares they don't possess. Thus they make you the 'holder of the bag.'
"Then they start their bearish news and decrease and even pass interest and dividends, bringing on a depression, forcing you to sell at a sacrifice. They wipe out your margin and your collateral bank loans; then they gradually purchase the shares back again at bargain prices.
"They are very discriminating. They do not purchase back securities of those enterprises which by their mismanagement they wrecked. They are sure of getting control of them again for a song during reorganization. Thus, you are left with many valueless stock and bond certificates and with a complete loss of your savings. Every ten or fifteen years they use the same scheme to plunder and to again entrap you, adding new dupes each time. Your stock market collapse of 1929 was not a natural phenomenon, but a man-made concerted crime. With their old tactics of surreptitiously bidding for stocks, they created a boom and a demand for the securities, until every one of you got the stock-buying fever and craze. No one of you was immune—the street sweeper, dishwasher, bellboy, all were becoming rich, pyramiding your stock holdings, and your paper profits were increasing from day to day. Then the time came when the financiers generously unloaded the last of their securities on you, as well as sold you more on short sales. They then stopped bidding for stocks, taking out the props from under the market and letting it decline through its own momentum.
"The market was like a large overflowing lake with a weak dam. It burst and created a flood overwhelming your whole house of cards in your financial world. It was followed by the most drastic panicky drive against all commodities and industrial production prices. The crash brought on ruin by closing weak banks, building and loan companies, and financial houses. It wiped out the savings of millions of people through bankruptcies and foreclosures of an unprecedented panic. The result was a large world wide depression which lasted for years.
"And when you, the public, had finished throwing over securities at the bottom of market prices, who purchased them? Why, those who originally sold them to you.
"Not content to rig the stock markets, they also trade and corner in futures of your most staple commodities. Again, the 'public' is inveigled, and again you are made the losers, not only in the gambling losses but also in the increase of your costs of bread, meats, sugar, coffee, and other necessities.
"These people are more treacherous to each other than wolves. They would just as soon ruin their own set as not. Their financial activities according to your laws are not only legal, but very respectable.
"They are among the most respected of your world. They belong and are the leaders of not only your most exclusive clubs, and societies, but are the top members of your so-called high class social world, and live in the utmost luxury and affluence.
"The Octopus has other mediums in which his tentacles excel. To exploit from you enormous profits, he craftily and mercilessly by seductive propaganda, and intensive methods of advertising, subverted and succeeded in turning 90% of your Earth population toward habits of indulgence, greatly contributing to your extensive organic diseases, and early deaths.
"Your federal, state and city governments attempt to enforce laws but are powerless against organized crime, because so many of your citizens prefer criminal activity for its easy money. They control gambling, narcotic drug sales and other illegal vices in lucrative territories by their strong-arm methods or corruption.