Chapter XIX Money in the Atomic Age

production and the manpower of the nation. It will make it impossible for a man, within a few years to rise from poverty to assets running into the millions. Throughout the United States, those who enjoy the creation of debt dollars are using this almost worthless money to buy all property. Our lands are passing rapidly into the hands of a few. Our industries are being consolidated into the hands of a few. Men speak of their 85,000-acre ranches. . . contractors boast of having a half billion contracts to build great dams or to do other works of magnitude. All of this, while the toiling, working, suffering masses struggle for a bare subsistence. The small business man is rapidly being crowded out. The small farmers are being driven from their farms. The small industries are being consolidated under a few giant corporations. The duPonts, as a horrible example, not only control the productions of arms and ammunition, extensive industrial corporations, but are deep in the banking business, the business of issuing billions of debt dollars and using them to buy up the resources of the Nation — and all the time fomenting wars because wars, as nothing else, make billionaires. Congressman Patman quoted in the Congressional Record, a few days ago said: "I believe it was Lenin who said. . . when asked why America did not go Communistic, that as long as America has a system wherein so many people are engaged in small business and have a stake in their economy the country will never go Communistic." Our ocean of debt dollars, dollars secured through corporation stock which the corporations will never pay for. . . they get the debt dollar, and continue to enjoy its power and profit, but they don't have to worry about the repayment of those notes, as the small business man must worry; this will drown us. The Government builds great dams, makes possible thousands of acres of irrigated fertile land, but these acres have been bought up before the dam is well started by the men with debt dollars in the billions, and the family who might improve its living standards on 50 or 75 acres must stay in the hinterland, and corporations farm with big tractors and few labourers, blocks of a thousand acres. And their