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In her book titled, "The History of the Standard Oil Company," Ida Tarbell, chronicled one of many, John D. Rockefeller and the colossus he built by circumventing laws and crushing competition ruthlessly.
Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner first coined the term "gilded age," reflecting the rampant greed, pervasive fraud, corruption, and speculative frenzy during America's greatest ever growth period, creating enormous wealth and corporate power through politically aided deal-making.
For example, Ulysses S. Grant's administration reeked of graft, mismanagement, and corruption, he and his son going bankrupt from fraudulent investments gone sour. Succeeding administrations were also tainted by letting business entrepreneurs operate freely with little government interference.
They took full advantage, including through insider trading, stock manipulation, and other forms of fraud. In the late 1800s, it enriched men like Jay Gould, James Fisk, Russell Sage, Edward Henry Harriman, JP Morgan, and Daniel Drew, deal-maker pioneers of swindling, double-dealing, and other forms of financial chicanery to amass fortunes, that in Drew's case left him broke when he died in 1879, ruined by fellow manipulators.
An earlier article continued the story with the 1913 Federal Reserve Act, giving banks money creation power, letting them more than ever game the system fraudulently. The 1920s stock selling scandals followed, culminating in the 1929 crash, the Great Depression, WW II, post-war prosperity, resulting excesses, late 1960s - 70s turbulence, inflation, the beginning of modern deregulation, neoliberalism and globalization, what Reagan and his successors accelerated.
Reaganomics spawned savings and loan fraud, junk bonds, leveraged buyouts, greenmailing, Boesky, Milken, Dennis Levine, then more crime on the order of Enron, Worldcom, Madoff, other Ponzi schemes, market manipulation, bubbles, false accounting, phony financial products, misrepresentation, and other scams, conspiracies, bankers plundering the Treasury, and "foreclosuregate."
Involved is massive fraud, forged documents, fabricated and backdated ones, perjury, lost paperwork, and false affidavits causing millions of mortgage defaults, evicting owners after seizing their properties illegally.
Fraudulent Foreclosures
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