Russ Feingold Quotes
I don't know how it could be more stark or clear: this entire society is being dominated by corporate power in a way that may exceed what happened in the late nineteenth century, early twentieth century.
Feingold, Russ. "An Interview with Russ Feingold." Interview by Matthew Rothschild. The Progressive, vol. 75, no. 5, May 2011, p. 33.
He had just retired after 24 years in Congress.
His last speech before his appointment to the court.
The National City Company was formed expressly as an attempt to dominate and monopolize the United States economy. It was a holding company that included Standard Oil, National City Bank, 16 other banks, and the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific railroads among others, all controlled by the same 3 men--William Rockefeller, .James Stillman, and Frank Vanderlip.
At the time, there was generally only a single newspaper in an area in New Zealand.
The “rebate agony” referred to a corrupt practice of the Railroads and the Large Monopolies. The railroads charged a very high rate for the transportation of important products like beef and oil. However, secretly they gave back a large percentage of the transportation rate charged to the trusts. They in turn could cut their prices and undersell all the smaller competitors who were paying “full freight” and could not afford to match the lower price. As soon as the smaller competitors were driven out of business in an area, the trust raised its rates even higher than they charged originally. The Railroad had made a small but reasonable profit on the freight of the trusts but they were guaranteed all their business. They also made huge profits on the higher rates that the small companies paid until those companies were driven out of business. Journalists like Ray Baker and Ida Tarbell had uncovered the rebate scheme which enabled the trusts to steal high amounts from the general public through unreasonably high prices. President Theodore Roosevelt was committed to try and regulate the railroads and not allow rebates but charge the same public rate to all with no rebates. Socialists like Sinclair, thought that this attempt would be hopeless—that the damage had already been done, and the trusts now had so much money that they could buy state legislatures and many in Congress to preserve their dominance.
Russell Dana Feingold is an American lawyer and politician who served as a United States Senator from Wisconsin from 1993 to 2011. A member of the Democratic Party, he was its nominee in the 2016 election for the same U.S. Senate seat he had previously occupied. From 1983 to 1993, he was a Wisconsin State Senator representing the 27th District.
