PDA

View Full Version : Thomas Mellon says we should Repudiate the Debt and Defaut.




Dustancostine
05-16-2011, 05:37 PM
Thomas Mellon, the father of Andrew Mellon, and founder for the Mellon Banking Dynasty said this in Thomas Mellon and His Times, his autobiography about public debt:

"I have often been struck in the course of my life by the readiness and ease with which the rankest injustice can be clothed with the invulnerable robe of legislative and judicial authority; the hideous features of wrong are thus made to wear the sober face of justice. In our day this is most frequently consummated in the creation of public debts both state and municiple, legalized under the pretext of public wants, but in reality for private gain. Corrupt rings, by manipulating elections and the members of legislative bodies after the election, obtain the legalization of their schemes, always on some pretext or other but with the certainty of plundering the industrial class (productive class) in the end. No matter how iniquitous or unjust such bonds and subsidies may be in their origin, the taxpayers are always held liable by the courts for their payment......... Bonds of the kind may be without valuable consideration,, and the municipal corporation may receive no benefit from their issue, and they may be contrary to law and constitutional rights, and may be issued in amounts exceeding the value of the taxable property of the citizen; but still the ingenuity of the judges can find some plausible pretext for holding them valid and enforcing payment.

There was a time when the law and judicial policy and public sentiment was otherwise -- even as late as the early part of my professional life it was otherwise. Strict construction and limitation of delegated authority to state and municipal bodies in contracting debts was then the rule. Bonds or other securities of such bodies were held to be utterly null and void, no matter in whose hands they were found, unless there was a clear right and plain statute law and constitutional authority to authorize them. It was held that the purchaser of such securities was bound to look to their consideration and the law and circumstances of their creation, and was not protected by the arbitrary rules of commercial paper..... But this ceased to be the doctrine since the piling up of debts against states and counties, cities and boroughs, became the business of immense profit and controlling importance to certain classes of politicians and capitalist.

The fact of repudiation is held up as a term of reproach, and the government and people of the repudiating community are stigmatized as dishonest, when it truth and in fact there is in many such cases no more injustice or dishonesty in their repudiation than would be in the repudiation of a forged note or check by the party on whom it was forged.

If the industrial class (productive class) shall become wiser, and better organized in their own interest, the repudiation of iniquitous municipal debts will become respectable, and be oftener resorted to, until this trade of public plunderers is broken up. Such will have to be the result in the end. It is a wrong principle to allow irresponsible politicians, mostly without any property interest of their own, to mortgage at will the private property of citizens. It must bring about ultimate disaster.

This thing of contracting debts for other people to pay, and converting the proceeds so often to the subsistence of those who contract them, is communism in the livery of the law."

WOW