John Ruskin on Wealth

As you read the following remarks by John Ruskin think about all the cases where excess money or greed for it has ruined lives, destroyed families, friendships, and destroyed nations. Regarding lent money, almost all of the wars fought in world history, the vicious atrocities, the crusades, etc., were financed by borrowed money.

Ruskin: “You will find it quite indisputably true — that whenever money is the principal object of life with either man or nation, it is both got ill, and spent ill; and does harm both in the getting and spending; but when it is not the principal object, it and all other things will be well got, and well spent. And here is the test, with every man, of whether money is the principal object with him, or not. If in mid-life he could pause and say, "Now I have enough to live upon, I'll live upon it; and having well earned it, I will also well spend it, and go out of the world poor, as I came into it," then money is not principal with him; but if, having enough to live upon in the manner befitting his character and rank, he still wants to make more, and to die rich, then money is the principal object with him, and it becomes a curse to himself, and generally to those who spend it after him For you know it must be spent some day; the only question is whether the man who makes it shall spend it, or some one else. And generally it is better for the maker to spend it, for he will know best its value and use. This IS the true law of life. And if a man does not choose thus to spend his money, he must either hoard it or lend it, and the worst thing he can generally do is to lend it; for borrowers are nearly always ill spenders, and it is with lent money that all evil is mainly done, and all unjust war protracted.

For observe what the real fact is, respecting loans to foreign military governments, and how strange it is. If your little boy came to you to ask for money to spend in squibs and crackers, you would think twice before you gave it him; and you would have some idea that it was wasted, when you saw it fly off in fireworks, even though he did no mischief with it. But the Russian children, and Austrian children, come to you, borrowing money, not to spend in innocent squibs, but in cartridges and bayonets to attack you in India with, and to keep down all noble life in Italy with, and to murder Polish women and children with; and that you will give at once because they pay you interest for it. Now, in order to pay you that interest, they must tax every working peasant in their dominions; and on that work you live you therefore at once rob the Austrian peasant, assassinate or banish the Polish peasant, and you live on the produce of the theft, and the bribe for the assassination ~ That is the broad fact — that is the practical meaning of your foreign loans, and of most large interest of money and then you quarrel with Bishop Colenso, forsooth as if he denied the Bible, and you believed it though wretches as you are, every deliberate act of your lives is a new defiance of its primary orders; and as if, for most of the rich men of England at this moment, it were not indeed to be desired, as the best thing at least for [33-34] them, that the Bible should not be true, since against them these words are written in it: " The rust of your gold and silver shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh, as it were fire."

Mark Twain & Upton Sinclair on Corporate Corruption

Mark Twain, in his autobiography, which he instructed would not be published until after his death, made the following observation written in 1906. This observation is of a report published in the New York Sun and could have appeared in your local newspaper yesterday and you would know exactly what Twain was referring to. All you have to do is substitute the names of a few companies and events and you have the current corrupt “big business" and the lack of concern for America and the rest of society. Things have changed very little in the last 100 years and apparently little in the last 2000.

Twain: “Day before yesterday’s New York Sun has a paragraph or two from its London correspondent which enables me to locate myself. The correspondent mentions a few of our American events of the past twelvemonth, such as the limitless rottenness of our insurance companies, where theft has been carried on by our most distinguished commercial men as a profession; the exposures of conscienceless graft, colossal graft, in great municipalities like Philadelphia, St. Louis and other large cities; the recent exposure of millionfold graft in the great Pennsylvania Railway system – with minor uncoverings of commercial swindles from one end of the United States to the other; and finally today’s lurid exposure, by Upton Sinclair, of the most titanic and death-dealing swindle of them all, the Beef Trust, an exposure which has moved the President to demand of a reluctant Congress a law which shall protect America and Europe from falling, in a mass, into the hands of a doctor and the undertaker.

According to that correspondent, Europe is beginning to wonder if there is really an honest human creature left in the United States. A year ago I was satisfied there was no such person on American soil except myself. That exception has since been rubbed out and now it is my belief there isn’t a single American male human being in America who is honest. I held the belt all along, until last January. Then I went down, with Rockefeller and Carnegie and a group of Goulds and Vanderbilts and other professional grafters, and swore off my taxes like the most conscienceless of the lot. It was a great loss to America because I was irreplaceable. It is my belief that it will take fifty years to produce my successor. I believe the entire population of the United States – exclusive of the women – to be rotten, as far as the dollar is concerned. Understand, I am saying this as a dead person. I should consider it indiscreet in any live one to make these remarks publicly.”

Upton Sinclair’s exposure of the meat packing industry, referred to above by Twain as the Beef Trust, and the “big business” of 1906 can be easily compared to the “big business” of 2009.

In the early 1900's, strikes, riots, labor unions, and new political parties arose across the country. The Government, with its laissez-faire attitude, allowed business to consolidate into trusts, and with lack of competition, into powerful monopolies. These multi-million dollar monopolies were able to exploit every opportunity to make greater fortunes regardless of human consequences.

Upton Sinclair, via his novel “The Jungle”, exposed to the public what was known as the “Beef Trust” scandal and is a good example of "big business" corruption and the lack of concern for workers and the rest of society. "The Jungle," was filled with page after page of nauseating detail Sinclair had researched about the meat-packing industry, and dropped it on an astonished nation in 1906.

An instant best-seller, Sinclair's book reeked with the stink of the Chicago stockyards. He told how dead rats were shoveled into sausage-grinding machines; how bribed inspectors looked the other way when diseased cows were slaughtered for beef, and how filth and guts were swept off the floor and packaged as "potted ham."

In short, "The Jungle" did as much as any animal-rights activist of today to turn Americans into vegetarians. But it did more than that. Within months, the aroused -- and gagging -- public demanded sweeping reforms in the meat industry.

President Theodore Roosevelt was sickened after reading an advance copy. He called upon Congress to pass a law establishing the Food and Drug Administration and, for the first time, setting up federal inspection standards for meat.

Although the main thrust of Sinclair’s book was to draw attention to the horrible treatment of American workers by the corrupt Beef Trust, it was more effective at greatly improving food safety and production. Sinclair considered his triumph empty. He complained that the tragedy of industrial life and his socialist preaching were being lost in the meat controversy. He famously stated, "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach,"

"The Jungle", was a factual account of the beef and slaughterhouse industry and gives a heart-breaking portrayal of the hardships faced by the countless poverty stricken laborers in the slaughterhouses of Chicago but it could have been applied at the time to those in East St Louis, Illinois and elsewhere. In Sinclair’s portrayal a struggling family would undergo months of back- breaking labor only to lose their house at the drop of a hat. It was a desperate and unmerciful time when an accidentally fractured ankle cost a man his job and his family food and shelter.

One quote from the book that describes the power that "big business" had during this time period is, "In the national capital it had the power to falsify government reports; it violated the rebate laws, and when an investigation was threatened it burned its books and sent its criminal agents across the country."

During this time period there was not a great deal of government regulation on businesses, and "big business" was able to take advantage of not only the workers, but also the American public.

Deja vu all over again.

Gary