Bailout Deja Vu

"...Economic power in this country does not rest in the mass of the people as it must if a democracy is to endure. Wealth is not equitably distributed nor do its owners in the main even manage and control it. On the contrary, wealth has become so great and so concentrated that as a matter of fact, it controls those who possess it.

About one-half of the wealth of this country is in corporate form, and over one-half of it is under the domination of 200 corporations, which in turn are controlled by what Ferdinand Lundberg in his recent book referred to as “America’s 60 Families.”

Eight years ago America’s 60 families had held in their hands, since the close of the World War, complete dominion over the economic and political life of the country. They had lulled the American people into the conviction that if the people would grant conditions in which these 60 families would have confidence that they would do as they pleased, the 60 families would put capital to work; enterprise would boom, wages would rise, stocks would soar and there would be two cars in every garage.

The people gave the 60 families this confidence; gave the 60 families this trust in their benevolent despotism—in short, gave the sixty families then what they ask for today, and what happened? Out of their divinely claimed genius as managers of private enterprise the 60 families promptly led the American people into the worst peacetime catastrophe ever known.

Then the disillusioned people changed the government.

The new government bailed the 60 families out of the consequences of their own mesmeric miscalculations and their unintelligent leadership of the system of private enterprise of which they had pretended to be master managers. It preserved the corporate structures in which their capital was invested from going through the wringer of bankruptcy and reorganization and stock assessment..."

Harold Ickes
Secretary of the Interior
January 8, 1938

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