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By David Rothman

image image How’s this for a litany of Wall Street sins and other financial crimes? Stock market manipulation. Insider trading and related pump-and-dump schemes. Use of friends and relatives to provide corporate services. Monopolies and ruthless crimes against rivals. Lethal corner-cutting in the areas of worker safety and defense contracting. Corruption of newspapers.

In The Money Changers, near the end of which a swindled socialite kills herself, Upton Sinclair gives us a whole catalog of business sins. This book from the early 1900s should be required reading in schools of business, law, journalism and accounting; and accrediting agencies should immediately drop schools that don’t heed the just-given advice. You can download free copies from Google Book Search, Manybooks.net and Project Gutenberg.

Thanks to the SEC in the U.S. and similar agencies in other countries, financial chicanery may not as common as it was in 1908 when Sinclair published his novel. But it does go on, as shown by the Madoff scandals, which actually involved a pyramid scheme. No doubt similar crimes were happening in the Sinclair era as well. The glory of The Money Changers is that it takes us everywhere, from a hotel room of colluding financiers to a Mississippi steel mill where a worker dies caught up in machinery. Sinclair’s moralizing at times can be a little heavy handed, but the plotting and realism compelled me to read on. A snippet of dialogue from a journalist:

”…We had the greatest scoop that a newspaper ever had in this country–if only the Express were a newspaper. But Hodges isn’t publishing the news, you see; he’s serving his masters, whoever they are. I knew that it meant trouble when he bought into the Express. He used to be managing editor of the Gazette, you know; and he made his fortune selling the policy of that paper—its financial news is edited to this very hour in the offices of Wyman’s bankers, and I can prove it to anybody who wants me to. That’s the sort of proposition a man’s up against; and what’s the use of gathering the news?”

Something to think about, no—when the AP and friends war against new media rivals? The more players, the more chance of manipulation being exposed: both the financial kind and the media kind. While I doubt that most media manipulation today is direct as described above, it isn’t as if more subtle formats have died out.

Related: The Brass Check, about newspapers, and of course Sinclair’s most famous book, The Jungle, his expose of the meat packers.

 
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