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Hepburn Act

The Hepburn Act is a 1906 United States federal law that expanded the jurisdiction of the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) and gave it the power to set maximum railroad rates. This led to the discontinuation of free passes to loyal shippers. In addition, the ICC could view the railroads' financial records, a task simplified by standardized bookkeeping systems. For any railroad that resisted, the ICC's conditions would remain in effect until the outcome of legislation said otherwise. By the Hepburn Act, the ICC's authority was extended to cover bridges, terminals, ferries, railroad sleeping cars, express companies and oil pipelines.

Overview
The Hepburn Act was named for its sponsor, ten-term Iowa Republican congressman William Peters Hepburn. The final version was close to what President Theodore Roosevelt had asked for, and it easily passed Congress, with only three dissenting votes. The Act, along with the Elkins Act of 1903, was a component of one of Roosevelt's major policy goals: railroad regulation.

The most important provision of the law gave the ICC price control power to replace existing rates with "just-and-reasonable" maximum rates, and authorized the Commission to define what was just and reasonable. The Act made ICC orders binding; that is, the railroads had to either obey or contest the ICC orders in federal court. To speed the rate-setting process, the Act specified that appeals from rulings of the district courts would go directly to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Anti-rebate provisions were toughened, free passes were outlawed, and the penalties for violation were increased. The ICC staff grew from 104 in 1890 to 178 in 1905, 330 in 1907, and 527 in 1909. Finally, the ICC gained the power to prescribe a uniform system of accounting, require standardized reports, and inspect railroad accounts.

The limitation on railroad rates depreciated the value of railroad securities, a factor in causing the Panic of 1907.

Significance
Scholars consider the Hepburn Act the most important piece of legislation affecting railroads in the first half of the 20th century. Economists and historians debate whether it crippled the railroads, giving so much advantage to the shippers that a giant unregulated trucking industry—undreamed of in 1906—eventually took away their business.

Follow-up legislation
Congress passed the Mann–Elkins Act in 1910 during the administration of President William Howard Taft, to address limitations in implementation of the Hepburn Act. The Mann–Elkins Act authorized the ICC to initiate reviews of railroad rate increases, rather than simply responding to complaints from shippers. The 1910 law empowered the ICC to set "just and reasonable" maximum rates and placed the burden of proof upon the railroad for demonstrating reasonableness.

title: Hepburn Act


text:
Payne–Aldrich Tariff Act

The Payne–Aldrich Tariff Act of 1909 (ch. 6, 36 Stat. 11), named for Representative Sereno E. Payne (R–NY) and Senator Nelson W. Aldrich (R–RI), began in the United States House of Representatives as a bill raising certain tariffs on goods entering the United States. The high rates angered Republican reformers, and led to a deep split in the Republican Party.

History
Protectionism was the ideological cement holding the Republican coalition together. High tariffs were used by Republicans to promise higher sales to business, higher wages to industrial workers, and higher demand for farm products. Progressive insurgents said it promoted monopoly. Democrats said it was a tax on the little man. It had greatest support in the Northeast, and greatest opposition in the South and West. The Midwest was the battle ground.

President Taft was disliked by Theodore Roosevelt because he didn't reduce tariffs which led to Roosevelt running for re-election. Since there were two Republicans in the vote, it led to the party's votes being split. That soon led to Woodrow Wilson being elected. However, the United States Senate speedily substituted a bill written by Aldrich, calling for fewer reductions and more increases in tariffs. It was the first change in tariff laws since the Dingley Act of 1897. Progressive Republicans wanted to lower tariffs but Conservative leader Senator Aldrich prevailed by winning over some Democrats (despite the Democratic national platform calling for lower tariffs). These Democrats represented states with industry facing imports of iron ore, lumber, hides, coal, and other items. Senator Joseph Bailey of Texas defended the votes but Democrats William Jennings Bryan, Henry Watterson, and Josephus Daniels denounced them. In response the Democratic caucus imposed more discipline before the Democrats took control of the House in 1911.

An additional provision of the bill provided for the creation of a tariff board to study the problem of tariff modification in full and to collect information on the subject for the use of Congress and the President in future tariff considerations. Another provision allowed for free trade with the Philippines, then under American control. Congress passed the bill officially on April 9, 1909. The bill states it would "take effect the day following its passage." President Taft officially signed the bill at 5:05 pm on August 5, 1909.

Impact
The Payne Act had the immediate effect of frustrating proponents of reducing tariffs. In particular, the bill greatly angered Progressives, who began to withdraw support from President Taft. Because it increased the duty on print paper used by publishers, the publishing industry viciously criticized the President, further tarnishing his image. Although Taft met and consulted with Congress during its deliberations on the bill, critics charged that he ought to have imposed more of his own recommendations on the bill such as that of a slower schedule. However, unlike his predecessor (Theodore Roosevelt), Taft felt that the president should not dictate lawmaking and should leave Congress free to act as it saw fit. Taft signed the bill with enthusiasm on 5 August 1909, expecting it would stimulate the economy and enhance his political standing. He especially praised the provision empowering the president to raise rates on countries which discriminated against American products, and the provision for free trade with the Philippines.

The defection of insurgent Republicans from the Midwest began Taft's slippage of support. It heralded conflicts over conservation, patronage, and progressive legislation. The debate over the tariff thus split the Republican Party into Progressives and Old Guards and led the split party to lose the 1910 congressional election.

Corporate Income Tax
The bill also enacted a small income tax on the privilege of conducting business as a corporation, which was affirmed in the Supreme Court decision Flint v. Stone Tracy Co. (also known as the Corporation Tax case).

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Payne–Aldrich Tariff Act


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Clear and Present Danger

Clear and Present Danger is a political thriller novel, written by Tom Clancy and published on August 17, 1989. A sequel to The Cardinal of the Kremlin (1988), main character Jack Ryan becomes acting Deputy Director of Intelligence in the Central Intelligence Agency, and discovers that he is being kept in the dark by his colleagues who are conducting a covert war against a drug cartel based in Colombia. It debuted at number one on The New York Times bestseller list. A film adaptation, featuring Harrison Ford reprising his role as Ryan, was released on August 3, 1994.

Plot
The President of the United States is running for reelection. His fierce opponent in Ohio, Governor J. Robert Fowler, has rallied the American public behind the current administration's failures in the War on Drugs. National Security Advisor James Cutter seizes an opportunity to help the president initiate covert operations within Colombia with the intent to disrupt the illegal drug trade there. Aided by CIA Deputy Director (Operations) Robert Ritter and CIA director Arthur Moore, the plan involves inserting light infantry troops of Hispanic descent (divided into four 11 man teams, codenamed BANNER, KNIFE, OMEN and FEATURE) into the country to stake out airstrips used by the cartel (SHOWBOAT), which then allows F-15 Eagles to intercept drug flights (EAGLE EYE). In addition, mobile phone communications between cartel management are intercepted through CAPER, which is also the communications arm for SHOWBOAT.

Meanwhile, a United States Coast Guard Cutter intercepts a yacht in the Caribbean Sea; two Hispanic men are found cleaning the vessel after murdering its owner and his family. When a senior crewman says the murderers could escape justice by claiming they found the ship after the murders took place, the Coast Guard captain orders a mock trial and execution, and the killers are forced to confess their crimes; it is later learned that the murdered owner was a businessman involved in a money laundering scheme for a Colombian drug cartel. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) seizes laundered money and other assets from several U.S. and European banks totaling over $650 million.

The seizure of the cartel money by the FBI infuriates drug cartel leader Ernesto Escobedo, who ordered the hit on the American businessman. Meanwhile, his intelligence officer, Felix Cortez, starts dating the secretary of FBI director Emil Jacobs and finds out about Jacobs's official visit to the Attorney General of Colombia. Escobedo orders the assassination of Jacobs without informing Cortez. Upon arriving in the city of Bogotá, the FBI director's motorcade is ambushed, killing him as well as the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration and the U.S. ambassador to Colombia. Enraged, the President authorizes Operation RECIPROCITY, stepping up Cutter's operations and declaring war on Escobedo's drug organization.

Later, a surgical airstrike on a drug kingpin's mansion during a meeting of several cartel members kills everyone inside. Escobedo did not attend the meeting and sent Cortez to represent him; Cortez was delayed and witnessed the explosion as a result. Cortez later deduces that the Americans have been conducting operations against the Colombian drug cartel, but plays along, planning to engineer a war within the cartel that will leave him in a position to seize power. He dispatches cartel men to hunt down the American troops, and later blackmails Cutter in a secret meeting into shutting down all covert operations against the cartel in exchange for reducing drug exports to the United States. The point man for team BANNER, not paying attention due to suffering from food poisoning, accidentally blunders the team into an encampment of cartel men, which results in a firefight that kills half of them, with the survivors later meeting up with team KNIFE.

Meanwhile, Jack Ryan, former Marine and acting CIA Deputy Director (Intelligence) after his boss, Admiral James Greer, was hospitalized for pancreatic cancer, suspects the Agency's involvement in the situation in Colombia. His position enables him to be aware of most operations, but he realizes he is being kept out of the loop on what is happening in South America. After his friend, fighter pilot Robby Jackson, makes an inquiry into activity in the region, Ryan becomes determined to find out what is going on. He learns about the covert operations by breaking into Ritter's files. Outraged, he seeks help from the FBI and later meets John Clark, a CIA field operative and former Navy SEAL coordinating CAPER. The cartel men surround and attack team KNIFE and the survivors of BANNER, killing most of them, leaving just Staff Sergeant Domingo "Ding" Chavez and a few other escaping survivors, while suffering heavy casualties of their own.

Having been previously ordered by the President to shut down all covert operations against the cartel to avoid the political fallout, Cutter does so after his secret meeting with Cortez. He secretly provides Cortez with the coordinates of the American troops in Colombia for him to hunt down. Their meeting having been shadowed by the FBI, Ryan and Clark are outraged. They team up to rescue American troops left behind in Colombia, using a U.S. Air Force special operations helicopter. This results in their missing Greer's funeral, which raises the suspicions of Moore and Ritter. Although the rescue team suffers casualties from the cartel men hunting the American soldiers in Colombia, they successfully extract the survivors, including Chavez. Later, the team captures Cortez and Escobedo in a raid on the cartel's command post. They then fly out to sea, where they safely land on the cutter Panache.

After being confronted by Clark with evidence of his treason, Cutter commits suicide by jumping in front of a bus. Ryan confronts a defiant President for not informing him about the covert operations in Colombia and nearly starting a war. After he briefs the heads of the Special Intelligence Committee, the President deliberately throws the election to Fowler in order to hide the operations and protect the honor of those involved.

Escobedo is turned over to his fellow cartel chieftains, who will surely execute him. Cortez is later returned to Cuba, where he has been branded as a traitor by his former DGI colleagues. Meanwhile, Clark takes Chavez under his wing and recruits him into the CIA.

United States

 * The President (unnamed)
 * Vice Admiral James A. Cutter, Jr.: Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs
 * Judge Arthur Moore: Director of Central Intelligence
 * Vice Admiral James Greer: Deputy Director (Intelligence)
 * Jack Ryan: Acting CIA Deputy Director (Intelligence)
 * Robert Ritter: CIA Deputy Director (Operations)
 * Emil Jacobs: Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation
 * Dan Murray: Deputy assistant director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation
 * Moira Wolfe: Executive secretary to FBI Director Jacobs. Seduced by Cortez in order to obtain information about his boss and the FBI, especially his secret trip to the Attorney General of Colombia.
 * Mark Bright: Assistant special-agent-in-charge of the FBI office in Mobile, Alabama. Assigned to the Pirates Case involving the two Hispanic men who killed the American businessman and his family in a yacht in the Caribbean Sea.
 * Red Wegener: Commanding officer of the United States Coast Guard cutter Panache, nicknamed "the King of SAR (Search and Rescue)"
 * Robby Jackson: Naval aviator serving aboard USS Ranger (CV-61)
 * Jonathan Robert Fowler: Governor of Ohio and the President's main opponent in the presidential elections, which he later wins

Colombia

 * John Clark: CIA operations officer
 * Felix Cortez: Chief security and intelligence officer for Escobedo, a former colonel in the Cuban intelligence service (DGI)
 * Ernesto Escobedo: One of the leaders of the Medellín drug cartel
 * Domingo “Ding” Chavez: Staff sergeant for the United States Army, of Hispanic descent and a former Los Angeles gang member
 * Julio "Oso" Vega: First sergeant for the U.S. Army, assigned to Chavez's squad of light infantry troops in Colombia.
 * Captain Ramirez: U.S. Army officer who leads Chavez's squad. Later dies in a battle with the cartel.
 * Buck Zimmer: U.S. Air Force senior master sergeant and crew chief of the Sikorsky MH-53 Pave Low helicopter used for the covert troop insertions and later for the rescue mission. Mortally wounded by ground fire during the rescue, he later dies in Ryan's arms; Ryan vows to financially help his family, a Laotian wife and seven children living in Florida and keeps his word.
 * Captain Jeff "Bronco" Winters: U.S. Air Force F-15 pilot assigned to EAGLE EYE
 * Colonel Paul "PJ" Johns: U.S. Air Force officer assigned to the 1st Special Operations Wing in Florida, in charge of the Pave Low covert ops helicopters
 * Carlos Larson: CIA operative in Colombia, operating undercover as a general-aviation pilot and flight instructor who often does business with the cartel.

Themes
Clear and Present Danger is considered to be a work of dystopian fiction. It talks about the abuse of political and military power, and addresses the dangers of a government bureaucracy where no one can be held accountable for actions implied to be illegal by a democratic society. The book was released around the time of the Iran-Contra affair, which strikingly bears many parallels with the novel. Additionally, it pushes the narrative that the War on Drugs, which was also a major issue during the time of the book's publication, is corrupting law enforcement, and that the status quo is enforced in this struggle.

Commercial
The book debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list, and stayed on the chart for several years as well as its paperback edition. It became the best-selling novel of the 1980s, selling 1,625,544 hardcover copies.

Critical
The book received wide critical acclaim. The Washington Post praised it as a “rousing adventure” and “a crackling good yarn”. The New York Times remarked in its review: “The issues raised are real ones, and a jump ahead of the headlines.” Publishers Weekly hailed it as Clancy's best work since The Hunt for Red October.

Year-end lists

 * 5th – David Stupich, The Milwaukee Journal

Film adaptation
The book was adapted as a feature film, which was released on August 3, 1994. Harrison Ford reprised his role from the previous movie Patriot Games (1992) as Ryan, while Willem Dafoe played Clark. The film received positive reviews, with Rotten Tomatoes giving it a rating of 80% based on 40 reviews. It was a major financial success, earning over $200 million at the box office.

As in the previous film Patriot Games, Clancy was less than pleased with the movie due to script changes. He favored John Milius’s initial script, which was written before Patriot Games started production and closer to the book. However, when Donald Stewart was hired by Paramount Pictures to rewrite the script due to Ryan not being the central character, Clancy lambasted the new screenplay as “really awful” and criticized its technical inaccuracies. “First things first,” Clancy continued, “Clear and Present Danger was the No. 1 best-selling novel of the 1980s. One might conclude that the novel’s basic story line had some quality to it. Why, then, has nearly every aspect of the book been tossed away?” Regarding the different ending, in which Ryan testified before Congress about the covert operations instead of privately confronting the President, Ford said: ”We have softened somewhat the political bias [Clancy] brings to the subject, not because we’re bleeding-heart liberals, but because we wanted to divest it of some of its baggage and let it walk on its own two legs.”

In a 2018 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan creators Carlton Cuse and Graham Roland revealed that they originally opted to adapt Clear and Present Danger for television. Roland then explained: “About a month into it, we realized the reason the Clancy books worked so well was because they were relevant for the time that they were written. So we had to take the spirit of what he did and create our own original story.”

title: Clear and Present Danger


text:
Federal Farm Loan Act

The Federal Farm Loan Act of 1916 was a United States federal law aimed at increasing credit to rural family farmers. It did so by creating a federal farm loan board, twelve regional farm loan banks and tens of farm loan associations. The act was signed into law by President of the United States Woodrow Wilson.

Background
In 1908, the Administration of Theodore Roosevelt commissioned a study on the problems facing rural families. At this point in U.S. history, these families made up the largest demographic of Americans. The commission concluded that access to credit was one of the most serious problems facing rural farmers and recommended the introduction of a cooperative credit system.

Four years later, Presidents William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson sent a commission of Americans to study cooperative credit systems for farmers in Europe. Components of such European programs at the time included cooperative land-mortgage banks and rural credit unions. This commission concluded that the best form of cooperative credit system would include both long-term credit to cover land mortgages and short-term credit to cover regular business needs.

Effect on the rural farmer
The most visible component of the Act were the loans to individual farmers and their families. Under the act, farmers could borrow up to 50% of the value of their land and 20% of the value of their improvements. The minimum loan was $100 and the maximum was $10,000. Loans made through the Act were paid off through amortization over 5 to 40 years.

Borrowers also purchased shares of the National Farm Loan Association. This meant that it served as a cooperative agency that lent money from farmer to farmer. This was heavily influenced by a successful cooperative credit system in Germany called Landschaft.

The next most visible component of the Act were the mortgage-backed bonds that were issued. The rate of interest on the mortgages could be no more than 1 percent higher than the rate of interest on the bonds. This spread covered the issuers' administrative costs, but did not lead to a significant profit. In addition, the maximum rate of interest on the bonds was 6 percent, ensuring that borrowing costs for farmers was often much lower than before the Act was passed.

The act furthered Wilson's reputation against trusts and big business. By providing small farmers with competitive loans, they were now more able to compete with big business. As a result, the likelihood of agricultural monopolies decreased.

While Wilson's commission suggested that short-term credit also be incorporated in any nationalized credit system, the Act lacked this crucial component. Due to increased competition and the need for agriculture machinery, a system for short-term credit was incorporated into the current system in Agricultural Credits Act of 1923.

Sponsored by Senator Henry F. Hollis (D) of New Hampshire and Representative Asbury F. Lever (D) of South Carolina, it was a reintroduced version of the Hollis-Bulkley Act of 1914 that had not passed Congress due to Wilson's opposition.

Structure of implementation
The Act established the Federal Farm Loan Board to oversee and supervise federal land banks and national farm loan associations. It was also responsible for setting benchmark rates of interest for mortgages and bonds. Finally, it could intervene when it thought specific banks were making irresponsible loans.

The twelve Federal Land Banks were required to hold at least $750,000 in capital. Stock ownership of the banks were held by national farm loan associations and other interested investors, including any individual, corporation or fund. In the case of insufficient capital, the U.S. Treasury (through the Federal Farm Loan Board) made up the difference. When additional subscriptions were made from other sources, federal ownership in the banks was retired.

National Farm Loan Associations were established groups of 10 or more mortgage-holding farmers who together owned 5% or more of a federal land bank. Once formed, they were subject to a charter review process by the Federal Farm Loan Board. This structure aimed to align the incentives of individual farmers with the banks, as farmers held two roles: borrowers and lenders.

Subsequent history
Under the administration of Herbert Hoover, the Agricultural Marketing Act of 1929 established the Federal Farm Board from the Federal Farm Loan Board established by the Federal Farm Loan Act with a revolving fund of half a billion dollars.

title: Federal Farm Loan Act


text:
Railway Labor Act

The Railway Labor Act is a United States federal law that governs labor relations in the railroad and airline industries. The Act, enacted in 1926 and amended in 1934 and 1936, seeks to substitute bargaining, arbitration, and mediation for strikes to resolve labor disputes. Its provisions were originally enforced under the Board of Mediation, but they were later enforced under a National Mediation Board.

Earlier laws
In 1877, protests broke out in Martinsburg, West Virginia when the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O) cut worker pay for the third time in a year. West Virginia Governor Henry M. Mathews sent militia under Colonel Charles J. Faulkner to restore order but was unsuccessful largely because of militia sympathies with the workers. The governor reluctantly called for federal assistance, which restored peace to Martinsburg but proved to be controversial, with many newspapers critical of the governor's characterization of the strikes as an "insurrection", rather than an act of desperation. One notable paper recorded a striking worker's perspective that he "had might as well die by the bullet as to starve to death by inches." A day after federal troops had restored order in Martinsburg, similar protests erupted in Maryland and spread to New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Missouri. The strikes, which lasted six weeks, would come to be known as the Great Railroad Strike of 1877.

Congress later passed the Arbitration Act of 1888, which authorized the creation of arbitration panels with the power to investigate the causes of labor disputes and to issue non-binding arbitration awards. The Act was a complete failure since only one panel was ever convened under the Act: in the case of the 1894 Pullman Strike, it issued its report only after the strike had been ended by a federal court injunction, backed by federal troops.

Congress attempted to correct the shortcomings in the Erdman Act, enacted in 1898. The Erdman Act likewise provided for voluntary arbitration but made any award issued by the panel binding and enforceable in federal court. It also outlawed discrimination against employees for union activities, prohibited "yellow dog contracts" (in which an employee agreed not to join a union during employment), and required both sides to maintain the status quo during any arbitration proceedings and for three months after an award was issued. The arbitration procedures were rarely used. A successor statute, the Newlands Labor Act of 1913, which created the Board of Mediation, proved to be more effective. It was largely superseded when the federal government nationalized the railroads in 1917, after the US entered World War I. (See United States Railroad Administration.)

The Adamson Act, enacted in 1916, provided workers with an eight-hour day at the same daily wage they had received previously for a ten-hour day, and it required time-and-a-half pay for overtime work. Another law enacted that year, amid increasing concerns about the war in Europe, gave US President Woodrow Wilson the power to "take possession of and assume control of any system of transportation" for transportation of troops and war material.

Wilson exercised that authority on December 26, 1917. While Congress considered nationalizing the railroads on a permanent basis after the war, the Wilson administration announced that it was returning the railroad system to its owners. However, Congress tried to preserve, the most successful features of the federal wartime administration, which were the adjustment boards, by creating a Railroad Labor Board (RLB) with the power to issue nonbinding proposals for the resolution of labor disputes, as part of the Esch–Cummins Act (Transportation Act of 1920).

The RLB soon destroyed whatever moral authority its decisions might have had in a series of decisions. In 1921, it ordered a twelve percent reduction in employees' wages, which the railroads were quick to implement. The following year, when shop employees of the railroads launched a national strike, the RLB issued a declaration that purported to outlaw the strike, and the US Department of Justice obtained an injunction that carried out that declaration. From then on, railway unions refused to have anything to do with the RLB.

Passage and amendment
The RLA was the product of negotiations between the major railroad companies and the unions that represented their employees. Like its predecessors, it relied on boards of adjustment, established by the parties, to resolve labor disputes, with a government-appointed Board of Mediation to attempt to resolve those disputes that board of adjustment could not. The RLA promoted voluntary arbitration as the best method for resolving those disputes that the Board of Mediation could not settle.

Congress strengthened the procedures in the 1934 amendments to the Act, which created a procedure for resolving whether a union had the support of the majority of employees in a particular "craft or class", while turning the Board of Mediation into a permanent agency, the National Mediation Board (NMB), with broader powers.

Congress extended the RLA to cover airline employees in 1936.

Bargaining and strikes
Unlike the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which adopts a less interventionist approach to the way the parties conduct collective bargaining or resolve their disputes arising under collective bargaining agreements, the RLA specifies both (1) the negotiation and mediation procedures that unions and employers must exhaust before they may change the status quo and (2) the methods for resolving "minor" disputes over the interpretation or application of collective bargaining agreements.

The RLA permits strikes over major disputes only after the union has exhausted the RLA's negotiation and mediation procedures and bars almost all strikes over minor disputes. The RLA also authorizes the courts to enjoin strikes if the union has not exhausted those procedures.

On the other hand, the RLA imposes fewer restrictions on the tactics that unions may use when they do have the right to strike. The RLA, unlike the NLRA, allows secondary boycotts against other RLA-regulated carriers and permits employees to engage in other types of strikes, such as intermittent strikes, that might be unprotected under the NLRA.

"Major" and "minor" disputes
The RLA categorizes all labor disputes as either "major" disputes, which concern the making or modification of the collective bargaining agreement between the parties, or "minor" disputes, which involve the interpretation or application of collective bargaining agreements. Unions can strike over major disputes only after they have exhausted the RLA's "almost interminable" negotiation and mediation procedures. They cannot, on the other hand, strike over minor disputes, either during the arbitration procedures or after an award is issued.

The federal courts have the power to enjoin a strike over a major dispute if the union has not exhausted the RLA's negotiation and mediation procedures. The Norris-LaGuardia Act dictates the procedures that the court must follow. Once the NMB releases the parties from mediation, however, they retain the power to engage in strikes or lockouts, even if they subsequently resume negotiations or the NMB offers mediation again.

The federal courts likewise have the power to enjoin a union from striking over arbitrable disputes, that is minor disputes. The court may, on the other hand, also require the employer to restore the status quo as a condition of any injunctive relief against a strike.

Major dispute bargaining is handled through the "Section 6" process, named for the section of the Act that describes the bargaining process. The railroad carriers have formed a coalition for national handling of Railway Labor Act bargaining under Section 6, named the National Carriers Conference Committee (NCCC). The railroad unions also form coalitions of various unions to increase bargaining power in the Section 6 process.

Discipline and replacement of strikers
Carriers may lawfully replace strikers engaged in a lawful strike but may not, however, discharge them except for misconduct or eliminate their jobs to retaliate against them for striking. It is not clear whether the employer can discharge workers for striking before all of the RLA's bargaining and mediation processes have been exhausted.

The employer must also allow strikers to replace replacements hired on a temporary basis and permanent replacements who have not completed the training required before they can become active employees. The employer may, on the other hand, allow less senior employees who crossed the picket line to keep the jobs they were given after crossing the line, even if the seniority rules in effect before the strike would have required the employer to reassign their jobs to returning strikers.

Representation elections
The NMB has the responsibility for conducting elections when a union claims to represent a carrier's employees. The NMB defines the craft or class of employees eligible to vote, which almost always extends to all of the employees performing a particular job function throughout the company's operations, rather than just those at a particular site or in a particular region.

A union seeking to represent an unorganized group of employees must produce signed and dated authorization cards or other proof of support from at least 50% of the craft or class. A party attempting to oust an incumbent union must produce evidence of support from a majority of the craft or class and then the NMB must conduct an election. If the employees are unrepresented and the employer agrees, the NMB may certify the union based on the authorization cards alone.

The NMB usually uses mail ballots to conduct elections, unlike the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which has historically preferred walk-in elections under the NLRA. The NMB can order a rerun election if it determines that either an employer or union has interfered with employees' free choice.

Protecting employees' rights
Unlike the NLRA, which gives the NLRB nearly exclusive power to enforce the Act, the RLA allows employees to sue in federal court to challenge an employer's violation of the Act. The courts can grant employees reinstatement and backpay, along with other forms of equitable relief.

Constitutionality
At least one court has ruled that imposition of railroad contract terms does not violate the Constitution's prohibition in Article I, Section 9 against bills of attainder, because they are not a punishment for specific people.

title: Railway Labor Act


text:
Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914

The Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 (, codified at, ), is a part of United States antitrust law with the goal of adding further substance to the U.S. antitrust law regime; the Clayton Act seeks to prevent anticompetitive practices in their incipiency. That regime started with the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, the first Federal law outlawing practices that were harmful to consumers (monopolies, cartels, and trusts). The Clayton Act specified particular prohibited conduct, the three-level enforcement scheme, the exemptions, and the remedial measures. Like the Sherman Act, much of the substance of the Clayton Act has been developed and animated by the U.S. courts, particularly the Supreme Court.

Background
Since the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, courts in the United States had interpreted the law on cartels as applying against trade unions. This had created a problem for workers, who needed to organize to balance the equal bargaining power against their employers. The Sherman Act had also triggered the largest wave of mergers in US history, as businesses realized that instead of creating a cartel they could simply fuse into a single corporation, and have all the benefits of market power that a cartel could bring. At the end of the Taft administration, and the start of the Woodrow Wilson administration, a Commission on Industrial Relations was established. During its proceedings, and in anticipation of its first report on October 23, 1914, legislation was introduced by Alabama Democrat Henry De Lamar Clayton Jr. in the U.S. House of Representatives. The Clayton Act passed by a vote of 277 to 54 on June 5, 1914. Though the Senate passed its own version on September 2, 1914, by a vote of 46–16, the final version of the law (written after deliberation between Senate and the House), did not pass the Senate until October 6 and the House until October 8 of 1914.

Contents
The Clayton Act made both substantive and procedural modifications to federal antitrust law. Substantively, the act seeks to capture anticompetitive practices in their incipiency by prohibiting particular types of conduct not deemed in the best interest of a competitive market. There are 4 sections of the bill that proposed substantive changes in the antitrust laws by way of supplementing the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. In those sections, the Act thoroughly discusses the following four principles of economic trade and business:

 * price discrimination between different purchasers if such a discrimination substantially lessens competition or tends to create a monopoly in any line of commerce (Act Section 2, codified at );
 * sales on the condition that (A) the buyer or lessee not deal with the competitors of the seller or lessor ("exclusive dealings") or (B) the buyer also purchase another different product ("tying") but only when these acts substantially lessen competition (Act Section 3, codified at );
 * mergers and acquisitions where the effect may substantially lessen competition (Act Section 7, codified at ) or where the voting securities and assets threshold is met (Act Section 7a, codified at );
 * any person from being a director of two or more competing corporations, if those corporations would violate the antitrust criteria by merging (Act Section 8; codified 1200 at ).

Comparisons to other acts
Unilateral price discrimination is clearly outside the reach of Section 1 of the Sherman Act, which only extended to "concerted activities" (agreements). Exclusive dealing, tying, and mergers are all agreements, and theoretically, within the reach of Section 1 of the Sherman Act. Likewise, mergers that create monopolies would be actionable under Sherman Act Section 2.

Section 7 of the Clayton Act allows greater regulation of mergers than just Sherman Act Section 2, since it does not require a merger-to-monopoly before there is a violation. It allows the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice to regulate all mergers, and gives the government discretion whether to give approval to a merger or not, which it still commonly does today. The government often employs the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) test for market concentration to determine whether the merger is presumptively anticompetitive; if the HHI level for a particular merger exceeds a certain level, the government will investigate further to determine its probable competitive impact.

Section 7
Section 7 elaborates on specific and crucial concepts of the Clayton Act; "holding company" defined as "a company whose primary purpose is to hold stocks of other companies", which the government saw as a "common and favorite method of promoting monopoly" and a mere corporated form of the 'old fashioned' trust. Section 7 prohibits acquisitions where the effect may be substantially to lessen competition, or to tend to create a monopoly.

Another important factor to consider is the amendment passed in Congress on Section 7 of the Clayton Act in 1950. This original position of the US government on mergers and acquisitions was strengthened by the Celler-Kefauver amendments of 1950, so as to cover asset as well as stock acquisitions.

Pre-merger notification
Section 7a,, requires that companies notify the Federal Trade Commission and the Assistant Attorney General of the United States Department of Justice Antitrust Division of any contemplated mergers and acquisitions that meet or exceed certain thresholds. Pursuant to the Hart–Scott–Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act, section 7A(a)(2) requires the Federal Trade Commission to revise those thresholds annually, based on the change in gross national product, in accordance with Section 8(a)(5) and take effect 30 days after publication in the Federal Register. (For example, see and .)

Section 8
Section 8 of the Act refers to the prohibition of one person of serving as director of two or more corporations if the certain threshold values are met, which are required to be set by regulation of the Federal Trade Commission, revised annually based on the change in gross national product, pursuant to the Hart–Scott–Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act. (For example, see .)

Other
Because the act singles out exclusive dealing and tying arrangements, one may assume they would be subject to heightened scrutiny, perhaps they would even be illegal per se. That remains true for tying, under the authority of Jefferson Parish Hospital District No. 2 v. Hyde. However, when exclusive dealings are challenged under Clayton-3 (or Sherman-1), they are treated under the rule of reason. Under the 'rule of reason', the conduct is only illegal, and the plaintiff can only prevail, upon proving to the court that the defendants are doing substantial economic harm.

Exemptions
An important difference between the Clayton Act and its predecessor, the Sherman Act, is that the Clayton Act contained safe harbors for union activities. Section 6 of the Act (codified at ) exempts labor unions and agricultural organizations, saying "that the labor of a human being is not a commodity or article of commerce, and permit[ting] labor organizations to carry out their legitimate objective". Therefore, boycotts, peaceful strikes, peaceful picketing, and collective bargaining are not regulated by this statute. Injunctions could be used to settle labor disputes only when property damage was threatened. The AFL strongly supported Section 6 of the Act, with AFL head Samuel Gompers describing the law as "Labor's Magna Charta" or "Bill of Rights."

The Supreme Court ruled in the 1922 case Federal Baseball Club v. National League that Major League Baseball was not "interstate commerce" and thus was not subject to federal antitrust law.

Enforcement
Procedurally, the Act empowers private parties injured by violations of the Act to sue for treble damages under Section 4 and injunctive relief under Section 16. The Supreme Court has held that divestiture is a form of "injunctive relief" authorized by Section 16.

Under the Clayton Act, only civil suits could be brought to the court's attention and a provision "permits a suit in the federal courts for three times the actual damages caused by anything forbidden in the antitrust laws", including court costs and attorney's fees.

The Act is enforced by the Federal Trade Commission, which was also created and empowered during the Wilson Presidency by the Federal Trade Commission Act, and also the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice.

title: Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914


text:
Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914

The Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914 is a United States federal law which established the Federal Trade Commission. The Act was signed into law by US President Woodrow Wilson in 1914 and outlaws unfair methods of competition and unfair acts or practices that affect commerce.

Background
The inspiration and motivation for this act started in 1890, when the Sherman Antitrust Act was passed. There was a strong antitrust movement to prevent manufacturers from joining price-fixing cartels. After Northern Securities Co. v. United States, a 1904 case that dismantled a J. P. Morgan company, antitrust enforcement became institutionalized. Soon, US President Theodore Roosevelt created the Bureau of Corporations, an agency that reported on the economy and businesses in the industry. The agency was the predecessor to the Federal Trade Commission.

In 1913, Congress expanded on the agency by passing the Federal Trade Commissions Act and the Clayton Antitrust Act. The Federal Trade Commission Act was designed for business reform. Congress passed the act in the hopes of protecting consumers against methods of deception in advertisement and of forcing the business to be upfront and truthful about items being sold.

The act was part of a bigger movement in the early 20th century to use special groups like commissions to regulate and oversee certain forms of business. The Federal Trade Commission Act works in conjunction with the Sherman Act and the Clayton Act. Any violations of the Sherman Act also violates the Federal Trade Commission Act and so the Federal Trade Commission can act on cases that violate either act. The Federal Trade Commission Act and both antitrust laws were created for the sole objective to "protect the process of competition for the benefit of consumers, making sure there are strong incentives for businesses to operate efficiently, keep prices down, and keep quality up." The acts are considered the core of antitrust laws and are still very important in today's society.

This commission was authorized to issue "cease and desist" orders to large corporations to curb unfair trade practices. In addition, the Federal Trade Commission Act is also considered a measure that protects privacy since it allows the FTC to penalize companies that violate their own policies by false advertising and other actions that can harm consumers. Some of the unfair methods of competition that were targeted include deceptive advertisements and pricing.

The act passed the Senate by a 43-5 vote on September 8, 1914 and the House on September 10 without a tally of yeas and nays. It was signed into law by President Wilson on September 26.

Summary

The Federal Trade Commission Act does more than create the Commission:

"Under this Act, the Commission is empowered, among other things, to (a) prevent unfair methods of competition, and unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce; (b) seek monetary redress and other relief for conduct injurious to consumers; (c) prescribe trade regulation rules defining with specificity acts or practices that are unfair or deceptive, and establishing requirements designed to prevent such acts or practices; (d) conduct investigations relating to the organization, business, practices, and management of entities engaged in commerce; and (e) make reports and legislative recommendations to Congress."

The FTC Act prohibits unfair methods of competition, unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce. The Commission is empowered to enforce the act's provisions against all persons, partnerships or corporations, with several exceptions, including banks, savings and loans institutions, federal credit unions—each as described in the FTC Act. Banks, savings and loans institutions, federal credit unions and certain other financial entities are instead under the jurisdiction of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The Commission enforces the FTC Act through its federal rulemaking authority to issue industry-wide rules and regulations, adjudicatory powers, and statutory authority to file civil actions in certain circumstances. The FTC Act does not give consumers the right to sue for violations of the act, but consumers may complain to the Commission about acts or practices they believe to be unfair or deceptive. Consumers may, however, be authorized to sue under a state "UDAP" (unfair, deceptive and abusive practices) statute, sometimes called a "Little FTC Act."

Deception
An act or practice is "deceptive" under the FTC Act when there is a representation, omission or practice that is likely to mislead a consumer acting reasonably in the circumstances. The representation, omission or practice must also be material, in that it is likely to affect the consumer's conduct or decision regarding the product or service. If the representation or practice is directed to a particular group, the Commission will consider reasonableness from that targeted group's perspective. Notably, there is no requirement that the actor intend for their acts to be misleading.

Unfairness
An act or practice is "unfair" under the FTC Act if it "causes or is likely to cause substantial injury" to consumers when the injury is "not reasonably avoidable by consumers themselves." Further, for an act or practice to be unfair, the injury cannot be outweighed by countervailing benefits to consumers or competition. An example of an injury that rises to the level of "substantial" for unfairness purposes would be the coercion of consumers into purchasing defective goods or services on credit without the ability to assert creditor claims or defenses against the transaction. Although public policy is not a specific criterion, it may be considered in determining how substantial an injury might be.

Administrative adjudication
If after investigating, the Commission has reason to believe an actor has violated the FTC Act's prohibition on unfair methods of competition or unfair or deceptive acts or practices, and that a proceeding against the actor is in the public's best interest, the Commission is authorized to commence administrative proceedings against the actor in administrative court. Other parties may apply to intervene and appear at the hearing. If, after the administrative hearing, the Commission determines the actor has violated the FTC Act's prohibitions on unfair and deceptive acts, it must provide the actor with findings of fact and issue and serve a cease and desist order against the violation. The enjoined party may appeal the FTC's cease and desist order to the U.S. Court of Appeals in "any circuit where the method of competition or act or practice in question was used or where such person, partnership or corporation resides or carries on business . . . ."

Civil actions against parties subject to administrative cease and desist order
When a cease and desist order against a person's act or practice of unfair and deceptive practices becomes final, the Commission may then seek relief for the violation in either a U.S. district court or "in any competent jurisdiction of a State." If the court determines that the act or practice in question is "one in which a reasonable man would have known under the circumstances was dishonest or fraudulent," the court may grant relief that the "court finds necessary to redress injury to consumers or other persons, partnerships, and corporations" resulting from the violation or unfair or deceptive act or practice. The statute provides a non-exhaustive list of relief available, including rescission or reformation of contracts, refunds or returns of property, damages, or public notice of the violation.

In addition, if an actor subject to a cease and desist order violates the Commission's final and in-effect order to cease and desist engaging in an unfair or deceptive act or practice, the enjoined actor is automatically liable for a civil penalty up to $10,000 per violation, the amount of which is to be determined by a district court. In such circumstances, the FTC Act gives U.S. district courts the power to grant mandatory injunctions and "such other and further equitable relief as they deem appropriate" in order to enforce the Commission's final order.

Other civil actions
The Commission is also authorized to commence civil actions in a U.S. district court—without first adjudicating the matter in administrative court—against actors it finds to be in violation of the Commission's promulgated rules prohibiting deceptive and unfair practices. It may do so, however, only in certain circumstances, including if it determines that the actor had actual knowledge or "knowledge fairly implied on the basis of objective circumstances" that the act is unfair or deceptive.

If the Commission issued a final and in-effect cease and desist order through its administrative proceedings with regard to an unlawful act or practice, it may initiate civil proceedings against another actor for engaging in the same unlawful act or practice, even when the new actor was not subject to the initial cease and desist order. However, the Commission may do so only if the actor had engaged in the act or practice with "actual knowledge" that the act or practice was both "unfair or deceptive" and unlawful.

Actual knowledge can be established with a showing that the Commission provided the actor with a copy of its determination or a synopsis of such determination that led to the relevant cease and desist order. Both types of actions will result in an up to $10,000 civil penalty to be determined by the court.

The FTC Act also authorizes the Commission in particular cases to obtain a permanent injunction through a civil action in federal court against any actor under the Commission's jurisdiction if it believes the actor "is violating, or is about to violate, any provision of law" enforced by the Commission. The U.S. Supreme Court has determined that the provision providing the Commission with its power to seek a permanent injunction does not give it the extra power to seek an award of "equitable monetary relief such as restitution or disgorgement."

title: Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914


text:
Federal Reserve Act

The Federal Reserve Act was passed by the 63rd United States Congress and signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson on December 23, 1913. The law created the Federal Reserve System, the central banking system of the United States.

The Panic of 1907 convinced many Americans of the need to establish a central banking system, which the country had lacked since the Bank War of the 1830s. After Democrats won unified control of Congress and the presidency in the 1912 elections, President Wilson, Congressman Carter Glass, and Senator Robert Latham Owen crafted a central banking bill that occupied a middle ground between the Aldrich Plan, which called for private control of the central banking system, and progressives like William Jennings Bryan, who favored government control over the central banking system. Wilson made the bill a top priority of his New Freedom domestic agenda, and he helped ensure that it passed both houses of Congress without major amendments.

The Federal Reserve Act created the Federal Reserve System, consisting of twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks jointly responsible for managing the country's money supply, making loans and providing oversight to banks, and serving as a lender of last resort. To lead the Federal Reserve System, the act established the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, members of which are appointed by the president. The 1933 Banking Act amended the Federal Reserve Act to create the Federal Open Market Committee, which oversees the Federal Reserve's open market operations. A later amendment requires the Federal Reserve "to promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates."

Overview
The Federal Reserve Act created a system of private and public entities. There were to be at least eight and no more than twelve private regional Federal Reserve banks. Twelve were established, and each had various branches, a board of directors, and district boundaries. The Federal Reserve Board, consisting of seven members, was created as the governing body of the Fed. Each member is appointed by the U.S. president and confirmed by the U.S. Senate. In 1935, the Board was renamed and restructured. Also created as part of the Federal Reserve System was a 12-member Federal Advisory Committee and a single new United States currency, the Federal Reserve Note. The Federal Reserve Act created a national currency and a monetary system that could respond effectively to the stresses in the banking system and create a stable financial system. With the goal of creating a national monetary system and financial stability, the Federal Reserve Act also provided many other functions and financial services for the economy, such as check clearing and collection for all members of the Federal Reserve.

With the passing of the Federal Reserve Act, Congress required that all nationally chartered banks become members of the Federal Reserve System. These banks were required to purchase specified non-transferable stock in their regional Federal Reserve banks, and to set aside a stipulated amount of non-interest bearing reserves with their respective reserve banks. Since 1980, all depository institutions have been required to set aside reserves with the Federal Reserve. Such institutions are entitled to certain Federal Reserve services. State chartered banks were given the option of becoming members of the Federal Reserve System and in the case of the exercise of such option were to be subject to supervision, in part, by the Federal Reserve System. Member banks became entitled to have access to discounted loans at the discount window in their respective reserve banks, to a 6% annual dividend in their Federal Reserve stock, and to other services.

Background
Central banking has made various institutional appearances throughout the history of the United States. These institutions started with the First and Second banks of the United States, which were championed in large part by Alexander Hamilton.

First Bank of United States
The American financial system was deeply fragmented after the American Revolutionary War. The government was burdened with large wartime debts, and the new republic needed a strong financial institution to give the country a resilient financial footing. Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson had opposing views regarding whether or not the US could benefit from a European-style national financial institution. Hamilton was in favor of building a strong centralized political and economic institution to solve the country's financial problem. He argued that a central bank could bring order to the US monetary system, manage the government's revenues and payments, and provide credit to both the public and private sectors. On the other hand, Jefferson was deeply suspicious of a central bank because, he argued, it would undermine democracy. Jefferson and Southern members of congress also believed that a strong central financial institution would serve commercial interests of the north at the expense of Southern-based agriculture interests whose credit was provided by local banks during the post-revolutionary war era. The First Bank of the United States was established in 1791 chartered for a period of twenty years. The US government was the largest shareholder of the bank. Despite its shareholder status, the government was not permitted to participate in management of the bank. The bank accepted deposits, issued bank notes, and provided short-term loans to the government. It also functioned as a clearinghouse for government debt. The bank could also regulate state-chartered banks to prevent overproduction of banknotes. The bank was very successful in financing the government and stimulating the economy. In spite of its successes, hostility against the bank did not fade. Jeffersonians questioned the bank's constitutionality. In 1811, the first bank of the United States failed to be renewed by one vote in both the House and the Senate.

Second Bank of the United States
After the War of 1812, economic instability necessitated the creation of a second national bank. Due to expanding money supply and lack of supervision, individual bank activity sparked high inflation. In 1816, a second national bank was created with a charter of twenty years. Three years later, during the panic of 1819 the second bank of the United States was blamed for overextending credit in a land boom, and would tighten up credit policies following the panic. The Second bank was unpopular among the western and southern state-chartered banks, and constitutionality of a national bank was questioned. President Jackson would come into office, and wished to end the current central bank during his presidency. Under the premise that the bank favored a small economic and political elite at the expense of the public majority, the Second Bank became private after its charter expired in 1836, and would undergo liquidation in 1841.

For nearly 80 years, the U.S. was without a central bank after the charter for the Second Bank of the United States was allowed to expire. After various financial panics, particularly a severe one in 1907, some Americans became persuaded that the country needed some sort of banking and currency reform that would, when threatened by financial panics, provide a ready reserve of liquid assets, and furthermore allow for currency and credit to expand and contract seasonally within the U.S. economy.

Some of this was chronicled in the reports of the National Monetary Commission (1909–1912), which was created by the Aldrich–Vreeland Act in 1908. Included in a report of the Commission, submitted to Congress on January 9, 1912, were recommendations and draft legislation with 59 sections, for proposed changes in U.S. banking and currency laws. The proposed legislation was known as the Aldrich Plan, named after the chairman of the Commission, Republican Senator Nelson W. Aldrich of Rhode Island.

The Plan called for the establishment of a National Reserve Association with 15 regional district branches and 46 geographically dispersed directors primarily from the banking profession. The Reserve Association would make emergency loans to member banks, print money, and act as the fiscal agent for the U.S. government. State and nationally chartered banks would have the option of subscribing to specified stock in their local association branch. It is generally believed that the outline of the Plan had been formulated in a secret meeting on Jekyll Island in November 1910, which Aldrich and other well connected financiers attended.

Since the Aldrich Plan gave too little power to the government, there was strong opposition to it from rural and western states because of fears that it would become a tool of bankers, specifically the Money Trust of New York City. Indeed, from May 1912 through January 1913 the Pujo Committee, a subcommittee of the House Committee on Banking and Currency, held investigative hearings on the alleged Money Trust and its interlocking directorates. These hearings were chaired by Rep. Arsene Pujo, a Democratic representative from Louisiana.

In the election of 1912, the Democratic Party won control of the White House and both chambers of Congress. The party's platform stated strong opposition to the Aldrich Plan. The platform also called for a systematic revision of banking laws in ways that would provide relief from financial panics, unemployment and business depression, and would protect the public from the "domination by what is known as the Money Trust." The final plan, however, was quite similar to the Aldrich Plan, with a few revisions. Sen. Carter Glass made these revisions, although the main premise of the Aldrich Plan was in there. Changes in the Banking and Currency System of the United States]. House Report No. 69, 63rd Congress to accompany H.R. 7837, submitted to the full House by Carter Glass, from the House Committee on Banking and Currency, September 9, 1913. A discussion of the deficiencies of the then current banking system as well as those in the Aldrich Plan and quotations from the 1912 Democratic platform are laid out in this report, pages 3–11.

Legislative history
Attempts to reform currency and banking had been made in the United States prior to the introduction of H.R. 7837. The first major form of this type of legislation came through with the First Bank of the United States in 1791. Championed by Alexander Hamilton, this established a central bank that included in a three-part expansion of federal fiscal and monetary power (including federal mint and excise taxes). Attempts were made to extend this bank's charter, but they would fail before the charters expiration in 1811. This led to the creation of the Second Bank of the United States. In 1816, the U.S. Congress chartered this Second bank for a twenty-year period to create irredeemable currency with which to pay for the costs of the War of 1812. The creation of congressionally authorized irredeemable currency by the Second Bank of the United States opened the door to the possibility of taxation by inflation. Congress did not want state-chartered banks as competition in the inflation of currency. The charter for the Second Bank would expire in 1836, leaving the U.S. without a central bank for nearly eighty years.

In the aftermath of the Panic of 1907, there was general agreement among leaders in both parties of the necessity to create some sort of central banking system to provide coordination during financial emergencies. Most leaders also sought currency reform, as they believed that the roughly $3.8 billion in coins and banknotes did not provide an adequate money supply during financial panics. Under conservative Republican Senator Nelson Aldrich's leadership, the National Monetary Commission had put forward a plan to establish a central banking system that would issue currency and provide oversight and loans to the nation's banks. However, many progressives distrusted the plan due to the degree of influence bankers would have over the central banking system. Relying heavily on the advice of Louis Brandeis, Wilson sought a middle ground between progressives such as William Jennings Bryan and conservative Republicans like Aldrich. He declared that the banking system must be "public not private, [and] must be vested in the government itself so that the banks must be the instruments, not the masters, of business."

Democratic Congressman Carter Glass and Senator Robert L. Owen crafted a compromise plan in which private banks would control twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks, but a controlling interest in the system was placed in a central board filled with presidential appointees. The system of twelve regional banks was designed with the goal of diminishing Wall Street's influence. Wilson convinced Bryan's supporters that the plan met their demands for an elastic currency because Federal Reserve notes would be obligations of the government. The bill passed the House in September 1913, but it faced stronger opposition in the Senate. After Wilson convinced just enough Democrats to defeat an amendment put forth by bank president Frank A. Vanderlip that would have given private banks greater control over the central banking system, the Senate voted 54–34 to approve the Federal Reserve Act. Wilson signed the bill into law in December 1913.

Amendments
The Federal Reserve Act was amended in major ways over time, e.g. to account for Hawaii and Alaska's admission to the Union, for restructuring of the Fed's districts, and to specify jurisdictions.

Monetary expansion in World War I
In June 1917 Congress passed major amendments to the Act in order to enable monetary expansion to cover the expected costs of World War I, which the US had just entered in April. The amendments allowed a more flexible definition of the gold backing the dollar currency in circulation. This relaxation de facto allowed less gold backing for each dollar note, and enabled the currency in circulation to more than double from $465m to $1247m just from June to December 1917. This reform has been argued to have been necessary to finance the expected $2 billion dollar cost of participating in the war for a year. Price inflation followed.

Charter extension
The Federal Reserve Act originally granted a twenty-year charter to the Federal Reserve Banks: "To have succession for a period of twenty years from its organization unless it is sooner dissolved by an Act of Congress, or unless its franchise becomes forfeited by some violation of law.". This clause was amended on February 25, 1927: "To have succession after the approval of this Act until dissolved by Act of Congress or until forfeiture of franchise for violation of law." The success of this amendment is notable, as in 1933, the US was in the throes of the Great Depression and public sentiment with regards to the Federal Reserve System and the banking community in general had significantly deteriorated. Given the political climate, including of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration and New Deal legislation, it is uncertain whether the Federal Reserve System would have survived.

Federal Open Market Committee
In 1933, by way of the Banking Act of 1933, the Federal Reserve Act was amended to create the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), which consists of the seven members of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and five representatives from the Federal Reserve Banks. The FOMC is required to meet at least four times a year (in practice, the FOMC usually meets eight times) and has the power to direct all open-market operations of the Federal Reserve banks.

12 USC § 225a
On November 16, 1977, the Federal Reserve Act was amended to require the Board and the FOMC "to promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates." The Chairman was also required to appear before Congress at semi-annual hearings to report on the conduct of monetary policy, on economic development, and on the prospects for the future. The Federal Reserve Act has been amended by some 200 subsequent laws of Congress. It continues to be one of the principal banking laws of the United States.

Impact
The passing of the Federal Reserve act of 1913 carried implications both domestically and internationally for the United States economic system. The absence of a central banking structure in the U.S. previous to this act left a financial essence that was characterized by immobile reserves and inelastic currency. Creating the Federal Reserve gave the Federal Reserve control to regulate inflation, even though the government control over such powers would eventually lead to decisions that were controversial. Some of the most prominent implications include the internationalization of the U.S. Dollar as a global currency, the impact from the perception of the Central Bank structure as a public good by creating a system of financial stability (Parthemos 19-28), and the Impact of the Federal Reserve in response to economic panics. The Federal Reserve Act also permitted national banks to make mortgage loans for farm land, which had not been permitted previously.

Criticisms
Throughout the history of the United States, there has been an enduring economic and political debate regarding the costs and benefits of central banking. Since the inception of a central bank in the United States, there were multiple opposing views to this type of economic system. Opposition was based on protectionist sentiment; a central bank would serve a handful of financiers at the expense of small producers, businesses, farmers and consumers, and could destabilize the economy through speculation and inflation. This created even further controversy over who would select the decision-makers in charge of the Federal Reserve. Proponents argued that a strong banking system could provide enough credit for a growing economy and avoid economic depressions. Other critical views included the belief that the bill gave too much power to the federal government after the senate revised the bill to create 12 board members who were each appointed by the president.

Preceding the creation of the Federal Reserve, no U.S. central banking systems lasted for more than 25 years. Some of the questions raised include: whether Congress has the Constitutional power to delegate its power to coin money (Article 1, Sec. 8, Clause 5, states: "The Congress shall have power To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures"), whether the structure of the federal reserve is transparent enough, whether the Federal Reserve is a public Cartel of private banks (also called a private banking cartel) established to protect powerful financial interests, fears of inflation, high government deficits, and whether the Federal Reserve's actions increased the severity of the Great Depression in the 1930s (and/or the severity or frequency of other boom-bust economic cycles, such as the late 2000s recession).

title: Federal Reserve Act


text:
Mann Act

The Mann Act, previously called the White-Slave Traffic Act of 1910, is a United States federal law, passed June 25, 1910 (ch. 395, ; codified as amended at ). It is named after Congressman James Robert Mann of Illinois.

In its original form, the act made it a felony to engage in interstate or foreign commerce transport of "any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose". Its primary stated intent was to address prostitution, immorality, and human trafficking, particularly where trafficking was for the purposes of prostitution. It was one of several acts of protective legislation aimed at moral reform during the Progressive Era. In practice, its ambiguous language about "immorality" resulted in it being used to criminalize even consensual sexual behavior between adults. It was amended by Congress in 1978 and again in 1986 to limit its application to transport for the purpose of prostitution or other illegal sexual acts.

Promotion
In the 19th century, many of America's cities had designated legally protected areas of prostitution. Increased urbanization, as well as greater numbers of young women entering the workforce, led to greater flexibility in courtship without supervision. It was in this changing social sphere that concern over "white slavery" began. This term referred to women kidnapped for the purposes of prostitution and derives from Charles Sumner's 1847 description of the Barbary slave trade.

Numerous communities appointed vice commissions to investigate the extent of local prostitution, whether prostitutes participated in it willingly or were forced into it, and the degree to which it was organized by any cartel-type organizations. The second significant action at the local level was to close the brothels and the red-light districts. From 1910 to 1913, city after city changed previously tolerant approaches and forced the closing of their brothels. Opposition to openly practiced prostitution had been growing steadily throughout the last decades of the 19th century. The federal government's response was the Mann Act. The purpose of the act was to make it a crime to "transport or cause to be transported, or aid to assist in obtaining transportation for" or to "persuade, induce, entice or coerce" a woman to travel. Many of the changes that occurred after 1900 were a result of tensions between social ideals and practical realities. Family form and functions changed in response to a complex set of circumstances that were the effects of economic class and ethnicity.

According to historian Mark Thomas Connelly, "a group of books and pamphlets appeared announcing a startling claim: a pervasive and depraved conspiracy was at large in the land, brutally trapping and seducing American girls into lives of enforced prostitution, or 'white slavery.' These white slave narratives, or white-slave tracts, began to circulate around 1909." Such narratives often portrayed innocent girls "victimized by a huge, secret and powerful conspiracy controlled by foreigners", as they were drugged or imprisoned and forced into prostitution.

This excerpt from The War on the White Slave Trade was written by the United States District Attorney in Chicago:

"One thing should be made very clear to the girl who comes up to the city, and that is that the ordinary ice cream parlor is very likely to be a spider's web for her entanglement. This is perhaps especially true of those ice cream saloons and fruit stores kept by foreigners. Scores of cases are on record where young girls have taken their first step towards 'white slavery' in places of this character."

According to Connelly, such concerns represented an "hysterical" version of genuine and long-standing issues arising from the concentration of young women from rural backgrounds in the expanding cities of the era, many of whom were drawn into prostitution for "mundane" economic reasons. A number of Vice Commission reports had drawn attention to the issue. Some contemporaries questioned the idea of abduction and foreign control of prostitution through cartels. For example, noted radical and feminist Emma Goldman asked "What is really the cause of the trade in women? Not merely white women, but yellow and black women as well. Exploitation, of course; the merciless Moloch of capitalism that fattens on underpaid labor, thus driving thousands of women and girls into prostitution. With Mrs. Warren these girls feel, 'Why waste your life working for a few shillings a week in a scullery, eighteen hours a day?' ... Whether our reformers admit it or not, the economic and social inferiority of woman is responsible for prostitution." While prostitution was widespread, contemporary studies by local vice commissions indicate that it was "overwhelmingly locally organized without any large business structure, and willingly engaged in by the prostitutes."

Suffrage activists, especially Harriet Burton Laidlaw and Rose Livingston, took up the concerns. They worked in New York City's Chinatown and in other cities to rescue young white and Chinese girls from forced prostitution, and helped pass the Mann Act to make interstate sex trafficking a federal crime. Other groups like the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and Hull House focused on children of prostitutes and poverty in community life while trying to pass protective legislation. The American Purity Alliance also supported the Mann Act.

Legal application
Although the law was created to stop forced sexual slavery of women, the most common use of the Mann Act was to prosecute men for having sex with underage females. The phrase "immoral purpose" in the statute allowed a broad application of the law following its affirmation in

In addition to its stated purpose of preventing human trafficking, the law was used to prosecute unlawful premarital, extramarital, and interracial relationships. The penalties would be applied to men whether or not the woman involved consented and, if she had consented, the woman could be considered an accessory to the offense. Some attribute enactment of the law to the case of world champion heavyweight boxer Jack Johnson. Johnson was known to be intimate with white women, some of whom he met at the fighting venue after his fights. In 1912 he was prosecuted, and later convicted, for "transporting women across state lines for immoral purposes" as a result of his relationship with a white prostitute named Belle Schreiber; the month prior to the prosecution, Johnson had been charged with violating the Mann Act due to traveling with his white girlfriend, Lucille Cameron, who refused to cooperate with the prosecution and whom he married soon thereafter.

The 1948 prosecution of Frank LaSalle for abducting Florence Sally Horner is believed to have been an inspiration for Vladimir Nabokov in writing his novel Lolita. Humbert Humbert, the narrator, at one point explicitly refers to LaSalle. The Mann Act has also been used by the U.S. federal government to prosecute polygamists (such as Mormon fundamentalists ) because the U.S. has no federal law against polygamy. All U.S. states have anti-polygamy laws, but only in recent years have state authorities used them to prosecute bigamy. Colorado City, Arizona; Hildale, Utah; Bountiful, British Columbia; and sites in Mexico are historic locations of several Mormon sects that practiced polygamy, although The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has expressly forbidden polygamy since the start of the 20th century. Sect leaders and individuals have been charged under the Mann Act when "wives" are transported across the Utah–Arizona state line or the U.S.–Canadian and U.S.–Mexican borders.

Notable individuals prosecuted under the Act

 * Anwar al-Awlaki, an American Islamist cleric, was investigated for violations of Mann Act, authorities primarily wanting to arrest him for his ties to the 9/11 hijackers, but left the United States for Yemen before he could be detained.
 * Dušan Popov, a World War II Allied double agent with a "James Bond" lifestyle, was threatened with arrest under the Mann Act.
 * Individuals associated with the Emperors Club VIP prostitution ring that had Eliot Spitzer as a client while he was governor of New York.
 * Individuals associated with the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), such as Warren Jeffs and Merril Jessop have refused to answer questions during depositions and court hearings, citing the 5th Amendment, over concerns of self-incrimination related to "potential state investigation still ongoing, as well as criminal investigations under the Mann Act out of the U.S. Attorney's Office."

Mann Act case decisions by the United States Supreme Court

 * Hoke v. United States, . The Court held that Congress could not regulate prostitution per se, as that was strictly the province of the states. Congress could, however, regulate interstate travel for purposes of prostitution or "immoral purposes".
 * Athanasaw v. United States, . The Court decided that the law was not limited strictly to prostitution, but to "debauchery" as well.
 * Caminetti v. United States, . The Court decided that the Mann Act applied not strictly to purposes of prostitution, but to other noncommercial consensual sexual liaisons. Thus consensual extramarital sex falls within the genre of "immoral sex".
 * The Court ruled that consent by the victim to their own transportation does not constitute conspiracy or culpability under the Act.
 * Cleveland v. United States, . The Court decided that a person can be prosecuted under the Mann Act even when married to the woman if the marriage is polygamous. Thus polygamous marriage was determined to be an "immoral purpose".
 * Bell v. United States, . The Court decided that simultaneous transportation of two women across state lines constituted only one violation of the Mann Act, not two violations.
 * The Court affirmed that a victim can be compelled to testify against a spouse who violated the Act, in exception to the common law spousal privilege rule.
 * The Court ruled that it is not impossible for a victim of the Act to be charged with conspiracy under specific circumstances. The requirements for conspiracy by a victim of the Act were limited in a later ruling,

Congressional amendments to the law
In 1978, Congress updated the act's definition of "transportation" and added protections against commercial sexual exploitation for minors. It added a 1986 amendment which further protected minors and added protection for adult males. In particular, as part of a larger 1986 bill focused on criminalizing various aspects of child pornography that passed unanimously in both houses of Congress, the Mann Act was further amended to replace the ambiguous "debauchery" and "any other immoral purpose" with the more specific "any sexual activity for which any person can be charged with a criminal offense" as well as to make it gender-neutral.

Effects and alterations of the Mann Act
While the Mann Act was meant to combat forced prostitution, it had repercussions that extended into consensual sexual activity. Because it lacked specificity, it criminalized many who were not participating in prostitution. It became a way to persecute large numbers of unmarried couples participating in premarital or extramarital activities, especially when it involved black males such as Chuck Berry and Jack Johnson. The Mann Act also became a form of blackmail, by wives who were suspicious of cheating husbands or other women. This was the case for both Drew Caminetti and Maury Diggs. Both men from Sacramento, California, were married, and took their mistresses (Lola Norris and Marsha Warrington, respectively) to Reno, Nevada. The men's wives contacted the police, and the men were arrested in Reno and found guilty under the Mann Act. One author wrote:

"In 1914 a woman by the name of Jessie A. Cope was arrested in Chicago for attempting to bribe an official to assist her in the blackmail of Colonel Charles Alexander of Providence, Rhode Island, on a white slavery charge. The two had met two years previous in LA, Alexander had promised to divorce his wife, and marry her. When he attempted to leave her, Cope and her mother pursued him to Providence. Cope consulted lawyers in Providence and LA, then brought the charges in Chicago, where she was arrested."

Upon continuous blackmail accounts, The New York Times became an advocate against the Mann Act. In 1915, the paper published an editorial pointing out how the act led to extortion. In 1916, it labeled the Mann Act "The Blackmail Act", arguing that its dangers had been clear from the start as the act could make a harmless spree or simple elopement a crime. The paper also called the "blackmail that resulted from the Mann Act [...] worse than the prostitution it sought to suppress".

While the Mann Act has never been repealed, it has been amended and altered since its initial passing. The Mann Act continued essentially unchanged until 1978 amendments that expanded coverage to issues around child pornography and exploitation. Most recently, in 1986, the Mann Act was significantly altered to make the whole Act gender neutral and to redress the specific ambiguous phrasing that had enabled decades of unjust applications of the Act. With the 1986 amendments, the Mann Act outlaws interstate or foreign transport of "any person" for purposes of "any sexual activity for which any person can be charged with a criminal offense." Prior to the Supreme Court ruling in Lawrence v. Texas (2003), sodomy was illegal in many states which left open the possibility of prosecution under the Mann Act of consenting adult couples, especially gay couples, though there is no record of such enforcement actions.

title: Mann Act


text:
Mann–Elkins Act

The Mann–Elkins Act, also called the Railway Rate Act of 1910, was a United States federal law that strengthened the authority of the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) over railroad rates. The law also expanded the ICC's jurisdiction to include regulation of telephone, telegraph and wireless companies, and created a commerce court.

Background
President William Howard Taft was concerned about controlling unfair trade practices and competition in the railroad industry. His administration argued that the Interstate Commerce Act (1887) and the Hepburn Act (1906) were only partially effective in addressing problems that the railroads had imposed upon the national economy. Taft supported amending the Interstate Commerce Act to allow the ICC's initiation of suspending of railroad rate increases (rather than just by responding to complaints). Taft also recommended that railroads should be allowed to arrange rate increases among themselves. (The latter proposal was not adopted in the enacted legislation.)

Overview
The Mann-Elkins Act was a piece of reform legislation developed during the Progressive era. The principal sponsors were Congressmen Stephen Benton Elkins and James Robert Mann. While there had been concern in Congress about the limited effectiveness of the ICC generally, the act was developed in direct response to rate increases that western railroads announced in 1910.

Rate setting
The 1910 act amended the 1887 and 1906 acts by authorizing the ICC to investigate railroad rate increases, suspending rates where warranted and placing the burden of proof upon the railroad for demonstrating reasonableness. The law mandated that the ICC is "empowered to determine and prescribe what will be the just and reasonable individual or joint rate or rates..." This was the first federal law to authorize setting of maximum rates for a single industry during peacetime. The "long-and-short haul" clause of the 1887 act was strengthened to prohibit railroads from charging passengers more for a short trip, compared to a longer ride, over the same route unless specifically approved by the ICC.

The Act terminated the railroad companies' ability to give free or discounted rates to those who were employees or family of employees.

Regulation of additional industries
The act extended the authority of the ICC to regulate the telecommunications industry, and designated telephone, telegraph and wireless companies as common carriers.

Commerce court
The act created the short-lived United States Commerce Court for adjudication of railway disputes. Any appeals from commerce court decisions would go directly to the United States Supreme Court, to increase the efficiency and speed of cases. This disallowed the railroad companies from dragging out long court cases. The Court presided until 1913, when it was abolished by Congress.

Aftermath
Following implementation of the act, railroads had difficulty securing revenue sufficient to keep pace with their rising costs, although the ICC had allowed some rate increases. Investors had overexpanded the nation's trackage, so by late 1915 fully one-sixth of the railroad trackage in the country belonged to roads in receivership (bankruptcy). The national railway investment of 17.5 billion dollars, of which more than half was funded debt, had an estimated worth of sixteen billion dollars. As the United States considered entering World War I, the government identified nationwide inadequacies in terminals, trackage, and rolling stock. In December 1917 the ICC recommended federal control of the railroad industry to ensure efficient operation during wartime. President Woodrow Wilson issued an order for nationalisation of the railroads on December 26, 1917. The United States Railroad Administration was established to manage the railroads during the war, and was abolished in 1920 by the Esch–Cummins Act.

The Mann–Elkins Act paved the way for the Communications Act of 1934. The 1934 law consolidated portions of the Mann-Elkins Act and other laws affecting the telephone and radio industries, to create a unified authority for telecommunications within a new agency, the Federal Communications Commission.

title: Mann–Elkins Act


text:
Agricultural Marketing Act of 1929

The Agricultural Marketing Act of 1929, under the administration of Herbert Hoover, established the Federal Farm Board from the Federal Farm Loan Board established by the Federal Farm Loan Act of 1916 with a revolving fund of half a billion dollars. The original act was sponsored by Hoover in an attempt to stop the downward spiral of crop prices by seeking to buy, sell and store agricultural surpluses or by generously lending money to farm organizations. Money was lent out to the farmers in order to buy seed and food for the livestock, which was especially important since there had previously been a drought in the Democratic South. However, Hoover refused to lend to the farmers themselves, as he thought that it would be unconstitutional to do so and if they were lent money, they would become dependent on government money.

Effects
The Federal Farm Board's purchase of surplus could not keep up with the production; as farmers realized that they could just sell the government their crops, they reimplemented the use of fertilizers and other techniques to increase production. Overall, the deflation could not be countered because of a massive fault in the bill: there was no production limit. Had there been a production limit, the deflation might have been helped somewhat. The funds appropriated were eventually exhausted and the losses of the farmers kept rising.

The H.R. 1 legislation was passed by the 71st Congressional session and enacted by the 31st President of the United States Herbert Hoover on June 15, 1929.

The Act was the precursor to the Agricultural Adjustment Act.

title: Agricultural Marketing Act of 1929