Mental Bankruptcy Of Bankers
MUNSON, GORHAM
Mental Bankruptcy Of Bankers ' -By GORHAM MUNSON__ ' (In Dynamic America) WHAT IS THE worst thing that is wrong with th« bankers? The worst thing about the big international bankers is their...
...There is the one serious question that breeds fear and doubt in the hearts of thoughtful citizens...
...It has simply nothing to contribute to the problem of better distribution of abundant real wealth...
...second, because we should keep our political neutrality so far as possible, not to save our own hides but to have some influence in directing or helping to direct world settlement for a just peace...
...COMPARE their mind with the mind of the medical profession or the literary profession or the teaching profession, and you will be shocked at the sterility of the banking mind...
...It's much easier, you know, to get people stirred over mysterious spies than it is over just plain incompetence...
...Even in 1939, before the great rearmament drive was launched, there were 23,700 factory fires, of which 10,500 were caused by explosions, with' damage totaling $62,900,000...
...We used to like the William Allen White who was editor of the Emporia Gazette and President of the American Civil Liberties Union...
...This leads to the third and main count, which is the intellectual incapacity of bankers...
...That's the rub...
...Nevertheless, he does discern, like historians of the calibre of Brooks Adams and R. McNair Wilson, a hidden hand of Money Power manipulating governments and revolutions to produce political results favorable to the financial oligarchy...
...At the budget hearings last week he announced he would appoint a 15-member commission to investigate the investigation made by his own secret police...
...WY SECOND COUNT against bankers as a class is that they make a mystery of finance...
...Though Chamberlain has gone, these reactionary traits survive in all too many of us...
...The simple question which the scientist asks about the mysterious appearances and disappearances of anything—• 'Where does it come from and where does it go to?'—¦ suffice whether we deal with matter, energy or money...
...It is their tradition to work quietly, to move behind the scenes, to be the unknown power behind the throne...
...Just now, war seems to be spreading to the Balkans...
...dence of their leaders and carry out the policies of the big bankers blindly...
...The Progressive prefers to string along with another William Allen White, the William Allen White of a year ago, before Wall Street sold him on intervention...
...It is well to be generous with a defeated leader, once his power to harm has been removed...
...By reactionary I mean that the banker reacts against the revolutionary fact of Plenty for All and yearns for an earlier period when banking worked better...
...For only a just peace will be a lasting peace...
...White is master-blinding the strategy which is calculated to plunge this country into war...
...War is a pestilence which may attack any land when the plague is abroad in the earth...
...finally the new brand of Republican "economy" is emerging in all its glory...
...If we are a belligerent, weakened economically and biased politically with the others, at this war's close our voice will not have behind it the power that we will have if we remain economically strong and politically fairly neutral...
...Meanwhile, the snoopers' bureau is managing to get rid of $100,000 of the taxpayers' money biennially compiling reports which nobody reads until a second and super-sleuthing body is appointed to probe the probe...
...Then there's the Republican-controlled tax commission which has admitted refunding more than $171,000 in income taxes to 25 big corporations, including virtually every utility in the state...
...When it finished its report, Heil took it, tucked it away in a drawer, and forgot about it...
...As a class, they are uncritical followers of power maniacs because they themselves are reactionary, secretive, and, worst of all, unintelligent about the problems of their profession...
...TV/COST BANKERS, however, are not in the eonfi-Wm...
...the worat thing about all bankers as a class is their stupidity...
...That period used to be the years before 1914...
...Thus, while we reject the crude fantasy of a diabolical plot for world-control by an evil clique of bankers, we must not reject the fact of more subtle influence upon world-events exerted by "the internationale of finance whose Kremlin is the City of London," to use Taylor's words again...
...The question now is, What are our people doing to prevent our entrance into war ? Above everything, we should keep out of this war—first, because we should maintain our economic integrity so far as possible...
...The possibility of sabotage is present, he points out, but a large proportion of the accidents are doubtless caused by the tremendous speed-up program which produces accidents...
...The Republican administration's snoopers' bureau had spent countless hours and thousands of tax dollars investigating the punch-weary conservation commission...
...We liked him in spite of the fact that, like the late William E. Borah, he would raise hell with the Republican Party for three and a half out of every , four years, but jump back to the reservation come campaign time...
...As chairman of the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, sometimes known as the America Second Committee, Mr...
...The William Allen White we used to know had a keen understanding of what war would mean to America, and here is how he expressed it this Very year in an editorial in his Emporia Gazette on January 18, 1940: "The great task before the American people is •to keep out of this war...
...The worst thing about the big international bankers is their power mania...
...Sabotage And Incompetence ATTORNEY GENERAL Robert H. Jackson cuts through a lot of hysterical headlines and talks common sense when he warns the nation against finding a spy or saboteur behind every industrial fire or explosion in the United States...
...The small town banker does this within the sphere of his influence just as much as does Montagu Norman or J. P. Morgan...
...No party, no Congress can get us into war unless we weakly yield to war's trumpets of hate...
...The most obvious was failure to recognize early enough the threat which Hitler embodied and the power that he could muster...
...No President can lead us into war against our will...
...Tomorrow it may threaten the Americas...
...Chamberlain Still Lives (From The New Republic) r^N THE DEATH of Neville Chamberlain at the end of a tragic career of failure, the newspaper editors in his own country have evidently tried to comment in as kindly a manner as possible...
...No plan, no specific course all thought out in advance, no formula of any kind will keep us out of war...
...Is it not a striking fact that bankers never make any discoveries in monetary science, never formulate the problem of adjusting banking principles to a power age economy, never invent a new economic system, never show any originality in their thinking...
...Last week the people of Wisconsin were permitted a new glimpse into the inside workings of "business efficiency...
...Whitewash At Riom (From The Detroit Free Press) Three former French Premiers will be convicted, thus proving that Hitler had no part in making this war...
...Responsibility for those errors was not his alone, but was shared by his predecessors, his party, a large section of the British public, and many like-minded men in other nations...
...The majority of bankers cannot answer the questions posed by Soddy...
...Baker's reply was, "Pretty nearly...
...We must implement our sturdy resolution by an intelligent citizenship...
...The three R's of 1939—Rebate, Refund, and Reduction—for special privilege are being invoked all over again...
...The Republican-controlled public service commission has revealed that it is making the Wisconsin Telephone Company a quarter of a million gift of handset funds paid by subscribers into a fund which was supposed~Fo revert back to subscribers if the extra charge were found to be excessive, as it has been...
...For that we shall have to resort to amateurs like Douglas, Gesell or Soddy, and the fact that we have to go outside the banking world to find fresh thought about banking damns the moneychangers as unscientific and unimaginative...
...However voluminous the writings of those who have essayed to teach the public the mysteries of money, these are the questions that are not asked and the inference is that the orthodox money experts either cannot or dare not answer them...
...More fundamental, however, and less generally recognized, were the stolid conservative traits, combined with unrealistic optimism, which produced a world in which Hitler could arise, which failed to see that democracy could not be preserved unless its revolutionary implications were realized throughout the world, which declined to accept the eternal imperative of growth and change...
...And...
...Too many factory owners who are negligent in providing adequately against fire and safety hazards will be tempted to cry sabotage every time their own shortsightedness and greed result in an explosion or a fire...
...Another was a mis judgment of the whole Nazi character and program, so that it was possible to believe in the efficacy of appeasement...
...Didn't George F. Baker, Chairman of the First National Bank of New York, large stockholder in six other banks, director of twenty-nine railroads, speak for all bankers in 1912 when the Pujo Investigating Committee asked him: "You think everything is all right as it is in this world, do you not...
...This making a mystery of finance does definitely hamper serious students of money...
...Just how poverty-stricken the banking mind is in dealing with first questions first has been summed up by the eminent scientist Frederick Soddy, who writes: "Modern science can unravel secrets vastly more intricate and well concealed than that of a modsrn money system, and when unravelled they do not need more than ordinary commonsense to see through...
...As Reginald Mc-Kenna, Chairman of the Midland Bank, London, has remarked, "There is still a wide field of Inquiry on both the practical and theoretical sides," ~mt students are impeded in their inquiries by inaccessible data...
...The intelligent critic of banking has, of course, no truck with a Grand Guignol theory of history, the Elders of Zion, and all that...
...Yet after all, only the sturdy resolution of the American people to avoid the conflict will keep us out of war...
...It is not, however, an unnecessary injury to his memory but a warning to those who survive him if we remember the fata, errors which he symbolized...
...Are we up to it...
...Nor is this an isolated whiff from the capitol...
...Fiscal experts estimated last week that on the basis of Heil's budget hearings, the executive budget would total $75,000,000, or nearly $4,000,000 more than was included in the 1939-1941 budget, 'which itself broke all previous records for extravagance...
...The big international bankers dare not answer, because the answer would flood the source of their power with unwelcome light...
...Otherwise, we shall be swept off our feet by emotions...
...William Allen White Reneges WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE is having himself a bragging spree these days, as a story elsewhere in this issue of The Progressive reveals...
...He knows that this hidden hand is active today although he agrees with Edmond Taylor, author of The Strategy of Terror, that "it is still too early to establish clearly the roles of the British and French cabinets and the individual ministers who composed them, to determine the exact relations between politics and international finance in the Czech drama...
...Whiffs From The Capitol TECHNICALLY Wisconsin doesn't get its second dose of the Republican "business administration" until January 6 when Julius P. Heil is inaugurated all over again,, Nevertheless, from the preliminary whiffs which have been floating out of the capitol during the past two or three weeks, it begins to appear that the second term wouldn't smell any better than the first, if as well...
...The economist John Maynard Keynes is not held in disesteem by bankers and it was he who said that, "One is often warned that a scientific treatment of currency is impossible because the banking world is intellectually incapable of understanding its own problems...
Vol. 4 • October 1940 • No. 50
