What became of this huge lootage wrung from America's brawn and brain for the year 1920? Here's where it went. Dividends to the people who provided the capital, i.e., the scores of thousands of member bank stockholders, amounted to just a pitiful 6 per cent or $5,654,018 out of $151,408,031, or about one-thirtieth of the amount! Ought the real providers of the real capital, upon which stupendous profits were made, to be fobbed off with one-thirtieth of its real earnings? Ought their money to be commandeered at 6 per cent, profiteered upon at 160 per cent and they be practically sandbagged out of 154 per cent? But it's the law, you say! Of course it's the law and that's one of the infamies of the System! On the one hand it sandbags commandeered investors, on the other hand it filches from industry and then with both hands this legalized parasitism smugly pouches the proceeds into its bottomless bag of greed!
These twelve octopi have a surplus account and then another receptacle for loot called a super-surplus account. There was swept for the year 1920 into the surplus account $78,168,287 and into the super-surplus account $6,747,727. The remainder went as a franchise tax, so called, to the Government. In a subsequent chapter you will read of this franchise tax chimera.
The total surplus of the twelve Federal Reserve Banks at the close of 1920, after they had sandbagged out a profit of 160.7 per cent upon their paid in capital for that year, amounted to the stupendous total of $202,036,367 upon a paid in capital of $94,234,000 or 214.8 per cent—accumulated in practically but six years of operations!
Shylock was a pure philanthropist, the Rothschilds and J.P. Morgan & Co. are just alms givers compared with these gigantic toll takers on industry's pike.
Do you know or do you know anybody who does know, or have you a friend who knows of anybody who knows of any such gigantic banking predacity on earth? The people through their ownership of the member banks in the Federal Reserve System provide the capital—commandeered from them—for these Federal Reserve octopi. Why should they be restricted to a 6 per cent dividend when these Federal Reserve Banks "earned" 160 per cent or over 25 times as much? How do you like to have your money commandeered for capital and get for one year less than one dollar out of twenty-five dollars made? Is that "democratizing" banking or is it bourbonizing banking? Is that "emancipating credit" or is it shackling it with you wearing the shackles? Can any sane or honest man—outside the ranks of its lolling beneficiaries—defend any such division of profits as fair or just or equitable? In this banking the lamb (the people) and the lion (the Federal Reserve System) lie down together—with the lamb inside the lion! But you say you're not a stockholder in any of the commandeered Banks of the Federal Reserve System and aren't hurt. Very well then. But the chances are that you are a depositor in one of those member banks and you are furnishing the Federal Reserve System with a part of its huge conscripted reserve deposits with no interest paid on them. If member banks were getting the interest they should get from these octopi they could pay you more interest than they do pay you.
The fact is that the real owners of the commandeered capital and of the conscripted deposits get the "rind" only of the huge "melon" when it's cut. The juicy interior of the "melon" goes to the Federal Reserve bureaucrats and to their money-masters who batten and fatten and thrive on the pillagement of real production.