James B. Clark Quotes
I would fill the penitentiaries and jails of the United States so full of Trust magnates that their arms and legs would stick out the windows.
James B. (Champ) Clark, 1850-1921, U. S. Congressman (Democrat, MO), Speaker of the House, Quoted in Dulles, The United States Since 1865, University of Michigan Press, 1959
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
In the Great Recession thousands of bank executives of the banks that received government bailouts committed fraud and perjury providing false information under oath and foreclosing on mortgages illegally. There were so many bank felons that the Justice Department decided not to prosecute any of them and let the Banks pay relatively small fines instead. Then the banks paid the crooked employees bonuses. Paul was one of the few members of Congress who favored prosecution of all the guilty bankers regardless of the number.
The Senator asked Justice Department officials if the reason that there had been no prosecutions of any major financial figures associated with the Meltdown of 2008 and the Great Recession is that they were “too big to jail.” This appears to be the first public official to use this phrase. See {637991} for the Attorney General’s sad but truthful reply.
The then attorney general had begun a series of investigation which discovered that most of the major Wall Street brokerage houses were engaged in systematic frauds to cheat small investors. One dramatic fraud he uncovered was that the research expert analysts of major firms would recommend the stock of businesses that their firm was doing investment banking for even when they knew that the companies were not doing well or were even in deep financial trouble. See {627544}.
Money was backed by gold then and therefore limited and the country was growing, and needed more money to finance development. But the only way to then have more money in circulation was for the government to borrow it from the people who had it—mostly wealthy people in the East and in England. These gold owners charged very high interest rates. However there was much more silver in the U. S. and more was being mined every day. So for many populists, the answer was to make silver a basis for money. But those who had gold backed money wanted to maintain the shortage of currency in the growing nation The populists naively thought that if there was sufficient money supply all other problems like labor strife would disappear. Some did when the money supply was finally expanded, but it was no panacea.
Marcopolos had discovered the Bernie Madoff Ponzi Scheme Fraud 9 years before the government discovered the largest consumer fraud ($68 billion) in American financial history. He repeatedly sent warnings and explanations to the SEC investigators, most of which turned out to be exactly right. They ignored all of it I an era of deregulation, and never even investigated Madoff to see if there might be anything amiss.
At this time it was 6 years after the Home Financing Crisis and the Meltdown of 2008 and despite tens of thousands of law violations by the bank, the Justice Department was finally finishing their investigations and requiring some penalties. Other negotiations with other banks were in progress, but no bank executives were going to jail for the millions they handled fraudulently, whereas a burglar who stole household goods would do jail time.
She had done a monumental exposé of the Standard Oil Company illegal and immoral activities. The public was so aroused that many reforms were instituted and the Standard Oil Company Trust was broken up into many smaller companies. Tarbell was then, in the words of S. S. McClure, “the most famous woman in America.”
The two politicians were amazed as they learned more and more about some of industrial leaders of the country. This is the language they used in private communications.
James Beauchamp Clark was an American politician and attorney who represented Missouri in the United States House of Representatives and served as Speaker of the House from 1911 to 1919.
