"They are on the wrong side of history..."

"They are on the wrong side of history..."

1933:

For a year, a commission established by the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs has supposedly been investigating the causes of the Wall Street Crash.

Initially, the investigation" is little more than a whitewash. The first two commission counsels are fired and the third resigns in protest because there is no power to subpoena witnesses, which makes the whole exercise a bit of a farce.

But things take a remarkable turn when a remarkable man, New York City prosecutor, Ferdinand J. Pecora, accepts the position of Chief Counsel to the commission.

In February, Pecora begins a real investigation of what Franklin Roosevelt called "the ruthless manipulation of professional gamblers and the corporate system" which caused the Great Crash of 1929 and led to the Depression.

By the time Pecora begins calling the boys in the back room to account, forty percent of all U.S. banks have gone belly up taking the savings of nine million Americans with them. Millions of Americans have lost everything on stock market and "investment" scams. Homes, farms and businesses are being repossessed by the thousands. Seventeen million Americans are unemployed. And, through it all, through all the misery and hunger and despair, some people, already unimaginably wealthy, are getting richer and richer.

As the hearings unfold, America's leading financiers and industrialists, the "cream" of American society, the ruling class, are shown to have engaged, yet again, in an almost endless series of ruthless conspiracies against the people of the United States.

Charles Mitchell, President and Chairman of the Board of the Rockefellers' National City Bank (Citicorp) and a director of the American branch of the Nazi cartel, IG Farben, is the first Wall Street tycoon called to testify and his grilling by the courageous Pecora sets the tone for the rest of the hearings.

Pecora uncovers the fact that National City Bank is really little more than an enormous criminal conspiracy dedicated to swindling small investors out of their savings.

For years, the bank has been, via a subsidiary, the world's leading shill for what, in the biz, are called "securities", a direct violation of U.S. law which forbids banks to trade in "securities".

Mitchell tells the Committee that he "did not see it as a problem."

Of course for National City Bank, it wasn't a problem. His very good friend, Andrew Mellon of Gulf Oil, Mellon Bank and Alcoa had been essentially running the country for the benefit of the ruling class via the presidencies of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover since 1921.

Mitchell is forced to admit to evading his personal income tax by way of imaginary interest payments on an imaginary loan of $2,800,000 from the National City Company.

 Mitchell was receiving about one and a half million dollars a year a time when the average industrial wage in the U.S. was about fifty cents an hour.

Mitchell is forced to confess that a series of unsecured and unpaid loans for millions of dollars was made to National City insiders to cover their stock market losses. The beneficiaries of this theft from the bank's small stockholders include Percy Rockefeller and Mitchell himself.

Mitchell admits to conspiring with the U.S. puppet dictator of Cuba, Gerardo "The Butcher" Machado, to dump $31 million worth of useless Cuban sugar loans on the unsuspecting small stockholders of a National City affiliate.

Pecora uncovers the fact that, in 1927 and 1928, National City Bank dumped $90 million of worthless Peruvian government bonds on customers in the U.S. Pecora forces to Mitchell to concede that millions of dollars were made on insider trading and manipulations of Anaconda Copper subsidiaries by National City Bank insiders including Percy Rockefeller, James Stillman Jr., Mitchell himself and Anaconda President John D. Ryan.

The bank and Anaconda conspired to defraud the public through massive manipulation of Anaconda stock, fueling a speculative mania which pushed the stock to record highs far beyond its true value.

Mitchell is forced to confess to a series of National City/Anaconda conspiracies which were the greatest frauds in the history of American banking up until the time of the hearings.

It is revealed that Mitchell, Rockefeller and Ryan set up a "joint account" of nearly a million and a half shares of Anaconda stock, at no cost to themselves, which was repackaged and aggressively marketed to the public through a National City affiliate. The "joint account" was manipulated by Mitchell and Ryan who ran the share price up, from $40 in December 1928, to $128 in March of 1929. The trio then dumped their stock.

 This single scam netted Mitchell, Rockefeller and Ryan at least $150 million. By the time of hearings, Anaconda stock had collapsed to $4 a share.

Scheduled to follow Mitchell for a further uncovering of the Rockefeller-Mitchell-Ryan conspiracies is National City Bank director and Anaconda Copper chairman John D. Ryan. Conveniently, Ryan dies under mysterious circumstances three days before the hearings are scheduled to start and takes his secrets to the grave.

Percy Rockefeller, although apparently not too ill to engage in vast criminal conspiracies with Mitchell and Ryan, is allegedly "too ill" to appear before the Committee to answer Pecora's questions.

When asked by Pecora if he paid any income tax in 1930, J.P. Morgan Jr. replies, "I cannot remember."

Neither could Morgan remember if he had paid any income tax in 1931 or 1932. In fact, of course, he had paid not one red cent. Question after question was answered with "I cannot remember."

Pecora reveals that all of the Morgan family and their partners in their vast financial empire had paid a total of only $5000 in income taxes in the previous five years on hundreds of millions of dollars of income. And, it was all thanks to Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon who had crafted U.S. income tax law so that the very wealthy, himself notably included, seldom paid any taxes at all.

During the Pecora Hearings, the financial gangsters who had brought ruin to so many came to be known as "banksters".

One of the slickest banksters to be summoned before the hearings was Clarence Dillon (nee Lapowski) of the "financial house" of Dillon, Read, by the time of the hearings heavily involved in financing the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in Germany.

Nazi public relations specialist Ivy Lee is hired to "prepare" Dillon for his appearance before the Committee. Among Lee's other esteemed clients are Nazi fuel supplier, William Farish of Standard Oil and the Rockefellers' partner in crimes against humanity, IG Farben.

Clarence Dillon and his son C. Douglas had been directors of United States and International Securities, a massive speculative pyramid scam which swindled Americans out of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Miraculously, Dillon, Read insiders cashed in their chips just before the Crash, walking away with $6,844,000 for stock which had cost them $24,110, a return of 28,000%.

 Ain't "free enterprise" wonderful?

Pecora uncovers the fact that Albert Wiggin, Chairman of the Board of the Rockefellers' Chase National Bank, had surreptitiously sold short 42,000 shares of Chase stock just prior to the Crash through a series of front companies. Other senior executives did the same thing, driving stock prices down and then making millions as share prices collapsed.

It goes without saying that no one named Rockefeller, Mitchell, Morgan, Wiggins, Dillon or even Lapowski ever goes to jail for their crimes and the pinstriped gangsters unmasked by Pecora were no exception.

Only a single minion of the ruling class, Richard Whitney, a long time associate of the Morgans and president of the New York Stock Exchange at the time of the Crash, ends up behind bars. But his crime was very serious, stealing from the ruling class.

The misguided Whitney pilfered $800,000 from his father-in-law's estate and then also stole from the New York Stock Exchange Gratuity Fund and, gasp, from the New York Yacht Club, all in order to prop up his liquor business.

Stealing from your clubmates just isn't done, old boy, and Whitney is sentenced to ten years in the slammer for his breach of ruling class etiquette.

Of course, he only does three years and is then given a nice little place in the country by his Wall Street buddies, where he lives a quiet and peaceful life until his death in 1974.

As the gangsters in pinstriped suits are called before the Pecora Committee one after the other, one of the biggest swindlers is noticeably absent.

It's Joseph "Jittery Joe" Kennedy who, as newly appointed chairman of the SEC, seems to have to be immune to the attentions of the Pecora Committee in the same way he was immune to the draft in World War One.

The Pecora hearings lasted over a year and provoked outrage among Americans. The stupefying greed and criminality of the ruling class so clearly exposed by Pecora, led to the Crash of 1929 and plunged the U.S. and much of the world into the Great Depression, causing untold hardship and misery for hundreds of millions of people.

But like so much of American history, the findings of the Pecora hearings and even the fact that they were held, are virtually unknown in the United States.

Following the Pecora hearings, a wave of regulatory legislation attempts to keep America's corporate criminals under control, although "short selling", one of the financial games most beloved of experienced Wall Street swindlers, was not outlawed.

Almost all of the protective legislation would vanish or be diluted in the 1990s by William "Slick Willy" Clinton, leaving the savings of Americans once again completely at the mercy of financial racketeers with entirely predictable results.

"Legal chicanery and pitch darkness were the banker's stoutest allies."

 

 Ferdinand Pecora

1934:

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is created, theoretically to clean up the financial swindling industry which has ravaged the wealth of Americans. Franklin Roosevelt, having a puckish sense of humor and owing a favor or two to Joseph "Jittery Joe" Kennedy for cash received, appoints him as the SEC's first chairman.

As one of America's leading financial scam artists and stock market swindlers, Kennedy certainly knows how the crooks work. Roosevelt justifies the appointment by telling an advisor that it takes "a thief to catch a thief."

You can't make this shit up.