Investment Fraud Quotes
Marcus Garvey was the best known of the Black leaders of his day. One of his programs for Blacks was to build Black pride by creating a Black owned Steamship Line. He could not get any Bank to finance this enterprise and so he formed his corporation and sold stock in it to Blacks throughout the country. However either Garvey or the people raising the money for him were using illegal means of selling the stock. Du Bois warned his relatives from investing in the Black Star line which went bankrupt as the vessels they bought either sank or floundered. To this day, there are some who believe that the bankruptcy was caused by white establishment harassment of Garvey’s enterprise while other historians believe that while there certainly was white harassment, Garvey’s lack of training and familiarity with the complexities of running a steamship line led to its downfall.
It was not known whether he actually believes such an extreme statement, or he just made it to pander to the extreme right wing of the Republican Party who were a large part of his political base. In effect he was calling the Great Republican Presidents after WWII like Eisenhower a con artist. See {622864}. A Ponzi Scheme is an illegal investment scheme designed so that the early investors get paid by the later investors and the crook running it skims money off the top and has no intention whatso ever to pay off the later investors. It is named after a Bostom Crook who ran the scam in the early 20th century.
