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Vol. 15 No. 5…Dedicated to the Dialogue on
Race…February 3, 2011
Intuit's Vibe
Wall Street Was a Slave Market
By Alan Singer
The
Occupy Wall Street movement brought a lot of attention to Wall Street and the 
hedge
fund operators who dominate the global economy and politics in the
The Wall Street wealthy are equal opportunity buyers of influence, contributing
mightily to both major political parties. In the 2008 presidential election,
political action committees (PACs), employees, and owners of major Wall Street
firms gave money to both Democrats and Republicans. The Obama campaign received
over a million dollars from PACs, individuals, and groups associated with
Goldman Sachs, $800,000 from JP Morgan Chase, $700,000 from Citigroup, and
$500,000 from Morgan Stanley. The McCain campaign, while it did not fare quite
as well, received over $300,000 from PACs, individuals, and groups associated
with JP Morgan Chase and Citigroup, a quarter of a million dollars from Goldman
Sachs, $200,000 from Wachovia, and over $350,000 from Merrill Lynch.
According to the
non-partisan Americans for Campaign Reform, individuals and PACs in finance, insurance,
and real estate contributed over $2 billion to federal campaigns between 1990
and 2008. "Members of the U.S. House and Senate received an average
$142,663 and $1,042,663, respectively, in Wall Street contributions as of July
28, 2008." The total Wall Street "contribution" to people
running for federal office in 2008 was over THREE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS.
Wall Street
influence and the battle between
"Wall Street
owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people,
and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for
Wall Street. The great common people of this country are slaves, and monopoly
is the master... Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes
and honesty in rags."
But the sordid
history of Wall Street is actually much older and darker. December 13, 2011 was
the three hundredth anniversary of the law passed by the New York City Common
Council that made Wall Street the city's official slave market for the sale and
rental of enslaved Africans.
1711 Law Appointing
a Place for the More Convenient Hiring of Slaves Source: Minutes of the Common
Council of the City of
Be
it Ordained by the Mayor Recorder Aldermen and Assistants of the City of New
York Convened in Common Council and it is hereby Ordained by the Authority of
the same That all Negro and Indian slaves that are lett out to hire within this
City do take up their Standing in Order to be hired at the Markett house at the
Wall Street Slip untill Such time as they are hired, whereby all Persons may
Know where to hire slaves as their Occasions Shall require and also Masters
discover when their Slaves are so hired and all the Inhabitants of this City
are to take Notice hereof Accordingly.
The predecessor bank
of Citibank, which has offices at
There is now an
online petition addressed to Mayor Bloomberg and the City Council calling for a
historical marker at the site of the Wall Street slave market detailing its
role in the history of
December 13th is the
300th anniversary of the law establishing the first slave market in
The fact is that
Even after the
discovery of a massive, 6.6 acre burial ground where Africans -- free and
enslaved -- were buried, with thousands of individuals possibly still in the
ground, their contribution to New York is and has been completely invisible.
After 300 years it is finally time to tell their story. (Source: www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-singer/wall-street-was-a-slave-m_b_1208536.html)
Moses
Born January 11, 1806 in
By
age 15, Taylor was already immersed in the business of shipping; he held an
entry level position at J. D. Brown shippers, before moving on to a clerk's
position in the firm of G. G. & S. Howland Company of New York, a shipping
and import firm that traded with South America.
By 1832, at age 26, Moses had amassed sufficient wealth to marry, leaving
Howland company to start his own business as a sugar broker. Moses dealt with
Cuban sugar growers that relied on slave labor; he found buyers for their
product, exchanged currency, and advised and assisted sugar growers with their
investments.
During the Panic of 1837 Astor gained control of the City Bank of
In the 1850s
An ambivalent War Democrat with personal and business ties to the South,
Taylor, who assisted the
Today,
The Pyne family of
The descendants of Moses Taylor's son Henry Augustus Coit Taylor were
prominent
How Slavery Led to Modern Capitalism
By Sven Beckert and
Seth Rockman
When
Brown was among the
world's most powerful dealers in raw cotton, and his family's firm, Brown
Brothers & Co., served as one of the most important sources of capital and
foreign exchange to the
Brown was hardly
unusual among the capitalists of the North. Nicholas Biddle's United States
Bank of
The story we tell
about slavery is almost always regional, rather than national. We remember it
as a cruel institution of the southern states that would later secede from the
Yet to understand
slavery's centrality to the rise of American capitalism, just consider the
history of an antebellum
Reparations lawsuits
(since dismissed) generated evidence of slave insurance policies by Aetna and
put
Such revelations are
hardly surprising in light of slavery's role in spurring the nation's economic
development.
The
This recognizably
modern capitalist economy was no less reliant on slavery than the mercantilist
economy of the preceding century. Rather, it offered a wider range of
opportunities to profit from the remote labor of slaves, especially as cotton
emerged as the indispensable commodity of the age of industry.
In the North, where
slavery had been abolished and cotton failed to grow, the enterprising might
transform slave-grown cotton into clothing; market other manufactured goods,
such as hoes and hats, to plantation owners; or invest in securities tied to
next year's crop prices in places such as Liverpool and
A major financial
crisis in 1837 revealed the interdependence of cotton planters, manufacturers
and investors, and their collective dependence on the labor of slaves.
Leveraged cotton -- pledged but not yet picked -- led overseers to whip their
slaves to pick more, and prodded auctioneers to liquidate slave families to
cover the debts of the overextended.
The plantation
didn't just produce the commodities that fueled the broader economy, it also
generated innovative business practices that would come to typify modern
management. As some of the most heavily capitalized enterprises in antebellum
The perverse reality
of a capitalized labor force led to new accounting methods that incorporated
(human) property depreciation in the bottom line as slaves aged, as well as new
actuarial techniques to indemnify slaveholders from loss or damage to the men
and women they owned. Property rights in human beings also created a lengthy
set of judicial opinions that would influence the broader sanctity of private
property in
So important was
slavery to the American economy that on the eve of the Civil War, many commentators
predicted that the North would kill "its golden goose." That
prediction didn't come to pass, and as a result, slavery's importance to
American economic development has been obscured.
But as scholars
delve deeper into corporate archives and think more critically about coerced
labor and capitalism -- perhaps informed by the current scale of human
trafficking -- the importance of slavery to American economic history will
become inescapable. (Source: www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-24/how-slavery-led-to-modern-capitalism-echoes.html)
"Slavery by
Another Name"
Imagine
this...You do some research into your family tree and discover that your uncle,
who was born nearly 30 years after slavery, 
was
one of thousands of black men pulled back into a forced labor system in which
they were arrested - largely on trumped up charges - and compelled to work
without pay as prisoners.
Imagine that this
"convict leasing" system saw the groups of prisoners sold to private
parties - like plantation owners or corporations - and that it was not only
tolerated by both the North and South, but largely ignored by the
Now, imagine that
nearly a century after your uncle served 366 days in this penal labor system,
you find yourself married to the head of the
Dr. Sharon Malone,
wife of US Attorney General Eric Holder, tells the heartbreaking story of her
uncle Henry in the upcoming 90-minute PBS documentary "Slavery by Another
Name." The film, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Wall Street
Journal senior writer Douglas A. Blackmon, explores the little-known story of
the post-Emancipation era and the labor practices and laws that effectively
created a new form of slavery in the South that persisted well into the 20th
century. Slavery by Another Name challenges one of
Dr.
Malone told EURweb exclusively at a Television Critics Association press tour,
"I want people to understand that this is not something that's divorced
and separate, and this doesn't have anything to do with them. If you were a
black person who grew up in the South, some way or the other - whether or not
you were directly involved in the system as my uncle was - you knew somebody who
was, or your daily lives were circumscribed by those circumstances."
"But more
importantly," she continues, "why I really want people to see this
film is because this is American history. This isn't just southern history, or
African American history. It explains a lot of who we are as a people. It is a
missing puzzle piece for what happened. You had the Civil War, you had
reconstruction, gap, gap, gap, and then you're at Martin Luther King. This
fills in that gap."
Narrated by Laurence
Fishburne, produced by Twin Cities Public Television and directed by Sam
Pollard, "Slavery by Another Name" is must see TV. The documentary
premieres Monday, February 13, 2012 at 9 p.m. ET on PBS. You can watch a promo
for the documentary online at www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=5s8ccKepCms.
In addition to the
promo, please watch the two-part Bill Moyers' interview with Douglas A.
Blackmon at www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&v=GLSJbdGs8DA&NR=1
and www.youtube.com/watch?v=FY0GZ46IgDg&NR=1&feature=endscreen.
This interview is truly eye-opening in that it gives you an idea of the
brutally exploitative system that thrived in the
5 Republican Lies About Income Inequality
By David Morris
Recent comments by
Mitt Romney, the probable Republican nominee for President, all but guarantee
the inequality issue will remain front and center this election year.
When asked whether
people who question the current distribution of wealth and power are motivated
by "jealousy or fairness" Romney insisted, "I think it's about
envy. I think it's about class warfare." And in this election year he advised
that if we do discuss inequality we do so "in quiet rooms" not in
public debates.
A public debate, of
course, is inevitable. And welcome. To help that debate along I'll address five
major statements that comprise the Republican argument on inequality.
1. Income is not all
that unequal. Actually it is. Since 1980 the top 1 percent has increased its
share of the national income by an astounding $1.1 trillion. Today 300,000 very
rich Americans enjoy almost as much income as 150 million.
Since 1980, the
income of the bottom 90 percent of Americans has increased a meager $303 or 1
percent. The top 1 percent's income has more than doubled, increasing by about
$500,000. And the really, really rich, the top 10th of 1 percent, made out,
dare I say, like bandits, quadrupling their income to $22 million.
Meanwhile a
full-time worker's wage was 11 percent lower in 2004 than in 1973, adjusting
for inflation even though their productivity increased by 78 percent.
Productivity gains swelled corporate profits, which reached an all time high in
2010. And that in turn fueled an unprecedented inequality within the workplace
itself. In 2010, according to the Institute for Policy Studies, the average CEO
in large companies earned 325 times more than the average worker.
2. Inequality
doesn't matter because in
3. Income inequality
is not a result of tax policy. A painstaking analysis by economists Thomas
Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Stefanie Stantcheva found "a strong correlation
between the reductions in top tax rates and the increases in top 1% pre-tax
income shares from 1975-79 to 2004-08". For example, the
4. Taxing the rich
will slow economic growth. An examination of 18 OECD countries found
"little empirical support for the claim that reducing the progressivity of
the tax code has spurred economic growth, business formation or job
growth." Indeed, Piketty, Saez and Stantcheva's rigorous analysis came to
the opposite conclusion. Our economy may be growing more slowly because we are
taxing the rich too little, not too much. Economists Peter Diamond and Saez
estimated the optimal top tax rate, that is the tax rate that would maximize
revenue without slowing economic growth, could be as high as 83 percent.
Redistributing
income stimulates economies in part because when 1% make more they save whereas
when the 99% make more they spend. As a result, according to Mark Zandi, chief
economist for Moody's, a dollar in tax cuts on capital gains adds .38 cents of
economic growth while a dollar in unemployment benefits gives the economy a
boost of $1.63 and a dollar of food stamps adds $1.73.
5. Taxing the rich
would not raise much money. Of course it would. If only the richest 400
families, whose average income in 2008 was an astounding $270 million actually
paid the statutory rate of 39 percent (revived as of next January 1st) an
additional $500 billion would be raised over 10 years, putting a substantial
dent in the projected deficit.
In 2010 hedge fund
manager John Paulson made $5 billion. That year, according to Pulitzer Prize
winner David Cay Johnston, Paulson paid no income taxes. Am I envious Mr.
Romney? You bet I am. But I'm also angry at the stark injustice of it all. And
terrified of the power such wealth can wield in a country that allows billionaires
to spend unlimited sums influencing legislation and elections.
A recent survey by
the
Mailbox: E-Mails, Faxes &
Telephone Calls
Dear Dot:
Government, slavery, discrimination, and "property rights"...I was
interested in Ron Paul's elusive answer to Candy Crowley's question. He insists
on the sanctity of "property rights", but this was precisely the
issue in slavery: Government in the South provided institutional support for
property rights in human beings because those who voted insisted on it -- any
politician who openly opposed slavery would never have been elected to pass
laws against it. His argument that slavery persisted because some venal entity
called "Government" somehow imposed it against the will of the voters
is preposterous. To be consistent, he should have denounced the action of