THE DECLINE OF CAPITALISM
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workers can receive only a maximum of $100 yearly. And this applies only to those now employed, for whom insurance funds will be gradua l l y built up. As for the masses of those totally unemployed now and part-time workers, they are left out of consideration altogether. If the capitalists have callously forced the toiling masses into starvation conditions they have, however, very carefully looked after their own interests. "During the first nine months of 1930, our national industrial and business system was able to and did pay $432,000,000 more in dividends and $191,000,000 more in interest than it did in 1929; in the first nine months of 1931, the second year of the depression, it paid $347,000,000 more in dividends and $338,000,000 more in interest than it did in the first nine months of 1929." 6 The Publishers Financial Bureau, (New York American, Mar. 19, 1932), states that the industrial dividends paid in 1931 are "the largest for any year previous to 1929." Anna Rochester says: "In September, 1931, the New York Times reported that of 5,000 companies, 50% had continued dividend payments without reduction; 20% were paying smaller dividends; and only 30% had omitted payments entirely. . . . For October, 1931, the total dividends plus bond interest by a large group of corporations were only 4% below the high record 6
America Faces the Future, p. 370.