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Unbossed and unbought news and information you can use Vol. 15 No. 5…Dedicated to the Dialogue on Race…Feb. 3, 2012
Wall Street Was a Slave Market By Alan Singer
The Occupy Wall Street movement brought a lot of attention to Wall Street and the New York City financial district as the center of economic inequality in the United States. The 1 percent, the bankers, brokers, and hedge fund operators who dominate the global economy and politics in the United States own and make their home on Wall Street.
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 Main Street and Wall Street stretches way back in US history. Mary E. Lease was a well-known "stump" speaker for the Farmers' Alliance and the Populist Party. They called her and her colleagues stump speakers because they stood on tree stumps to be seen over the crowd. Between 1890 and 1896 she toured the country making speeches telling farmers to "raise less corn and more hell." Some scholars believe she was the model for Dorothy in Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. In one of her best-known speeches she told her audience:
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 New York, vol. II, 458, December 13, 1711 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 111 Wall Street, was actually founded by a banker and sugar trader deeply involved in financing the illegal slave trade bringing Africans into Cuba in the 19th century. When Moses Taylor died in 1882, he was one of the wealthiest men of that century with an estate reportedly worth $70 million, or about $1.6 billion in today's dollars. 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 New York City. I signed the petition and welcome others to join the campaign. The letter reads: December 13th is the 300th anniversary of the law establishing the first slave market in New York. That market was located at the end of Wall Street where present day Water Street is. Yet there is not a single sign, plaque, marker, statue, memorial or monument with any reference to slavery or the slave trade in Lower Manhattan (with the exception of the African Burial Ground memorial). The fact is that New York's first City Hall was built with slave labor. The first Congress passed the Bill of Rights there and George Washington gave his inaugural speech there. Slaves helped build the wall that Wall Street is named for. Slavery was such a big part of early New York that during the colonial era one in five people living in New York was an enslaved African. One in five. Yet there are no permanent signs acknowledging the role slaves played in early New York. 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 Taylor (1806 - 1882)
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. Taylor soon discovered that loans and investments provided returns that were as good as, or better than, those from the sugar business. By the 1840s his income was largely from interest and investments. By 1847, Taylor was listed as one of New York City's 25 millionaires. During the Panic of 1837 Astor gained control of the City Bank of New York (Citibank) and named Taylor as its director. Taylor doubled his fortune during the panic, and brought his growing financial connections to the bank. He acquired equity in the bank and in 1855 became its president, operating it largely in support of his and his associates' businesses and investments. In the 1850s Taylor invested in iron and coal, and began purchasing interest in the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western (LD&W) railroad. In the Panic of 1857, Taylor gained control of the railroad. With the railroad on the brink of bankruptcy, he purchased its outstanding shares for a mere $5 a share. Within seven years, a share of DL&W, the nation's premier railroad, was worth $240, and Taylor held 20,000 shares worth almost $50 million. Taylor also held an interest in the New York, Newfoundland, and London Telegraph Company, which became the first transatlantic telegraph company (1866). An ambivalent War Democrat with personal and business ties to the South, Taylor, who assisted the Union in financing its Civil War debt, continued to invest in iron, railroads, and real estate. A life-long supporter of Boss Tweed of New York's Tammany Hall and an important member of August Belmont's clique of Democratic businessmen, Taylor sat on the 1871 committee, which was made up of New York's most influential and successful businessmen, and signed his name to a report that commended Tweed's controller for his honesty and integrity, the report was a notorious whitewash of Tweed's corruption. Taylor died on May 23, 1882 and is buried in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. Despite his considerable wealth, about $1.6 billion in today's dollars, Taylor was not known for his philanthropy, unlike the wealthy men of his day, such as Rockefeller and Carnegie who gave away a large part of their wealth in high profile public projects. However, Taylor did donate $250,000 to build a hospital in Scranton, Pennsylvania. The Moses Taylor hospital continues in operation today. The remainder of Taylor's fortune was left to his wife and children. Today, Taylor's descendants are some of the most prominent and wealthiest families in the country. Taylor's descendants include the Winthrop family. John Winthrop inherited the wealth of Taylor's daughter Katherine Wilson Taylor (1839-1925) who married Robert Winthrop (1833-1892). Katherine's daughter married Hamilton Fish Kean (1862-1941), ancestor of the political Kean family which includes the former governor of New Jersey. The Pyne family of New York and New Jersey inherited the wealth of Moses' daughter Albertina Shelton Taylor (1833-1900) who married Percy Rivington Pyne (1820-1895). Percy's son Moses Taylor Pyne was a great benefactor of Princeton University. The descendants of Moses Taylor's son Henry Augustus Coit Taylor were prominent New York and Newport socialites. (Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moses_Taylor, www.biography-book.net/the-business-career-of-moses-taylor, www.s9.com/Biography/Taylor-Moses, and www.nypl.org/archives/1957) How Slavery Led to Modern Capitalism By Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman
When New York City banker James Brown tallied his wealth
in 1842, he had to look far below Wall Street to trace its origins. His
investments in the American South exceeded $1.5 million, a quarter of which
was directly bound up in the
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 U.S. economy. Still, no small amount of his time was devoted to managing slaves from the study of his Leonard Street brownstone in Lower Manhattan. Brown was hardly unusual among the capitalists of the North. Nicholas Biddle's United States Bank of Philadelphia funded banks in Mississippi to promote the expansion of plantation lands. Biddle recognized that slave-grown cotton was the only thing made in the U.S. that had the capacity to bring gold and silver into the vaults of the nation's banks. Likewise, the architects of New England's industrial revolution watched the price of cotton with rapt attention, for their textile mills would have been silent without the labor of slaves on distant plantations. 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 Union. Slavery, in this telling, appears limited in scope, an unfortunate detour on the nation's march to modernity, and certainly not the engine of American economic prosperity. Yet to understand slavery's centrality to the rise of American capitalism, just consider the history of an antebellum Alabama dry-goods outfit called Lehman Brothers or a Rhode Island textile manufacturer that would become the antecedent firm of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Reparations lawsuits (since dismissed) generated evidence of slave insurance policies by Aetna and put Brown University and other elite educational institutions on notice that the slave-trade enterprises of their early benefactors were potential legal liabilities. Recent state and municipal disclosure ordinances have forced firms such as JP Morgan Chase & Co. and Wachovia Corp. to confront unsettling ancestors on their corporate family trees. Such revelations are hardly surprising in light of slavery's role in spurring the nation's economic development. America's "take-off" in the 19th century wasn't in spite of slavery; it was largely thanks to it. And recent research in economic history goes further: It highlights the role that commodified human beings played in the emergence of modern capitalism itself. The U.S. won its independence from Britain just as it was becoming possible to imagine a liberal alternative to the mercantilist policies of the colonial era. Those best situated to take advantage of these new opportunities -- those who would soon be called "capitalists" -- rarely started from scratch, but instead drew on wealth generated earlier in the robust Atlantic economy of slaves, sugar and tobacco. Fathers who made their fortunes outfitting ships for distant voyages begat sons who built factories, chartered banks, incorporated canal and railroad enterprises, invested in government securities, and speculated in new financial instruments. 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 Le Havre. This network linked Mississippi planters and Massachusetts manufacturers to the era's great financial firms: the Barings, Browns and Rothschilds. 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 America, plantations offered early examples of time-motion studies and regimentation through clocks and bells. Seeking ever-greater efficiencies in cotton picking, slaveholders reorganized their fields, regimented the workday, and implemented a system of vertical reporting that made overseers into managers answerable to those above for the labor of those below. 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 US law. 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.
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 US Justice Department, who, ironically, just so happens to be the first African American in the position. 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 America's most cherished assumptions: the belief that slavery in the US ended with Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of 1863.
"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 US following the Civil War, a system that benefitted whites but had a detrimental impact on the lives of black people. At www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oOMlqns8Lg&feature=related, you can also watch a two-part Tavis Smiley interview with Blackmon that delves into how dependent the South was on free black labor and the complicity of the North in the despicable system that lasted well into the 20th century. 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.
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 America ambition and hard work can make a pauper a millionaire. This is folklore. A worker's initial position in the income distribution is highly predictive of how much he or she earns later in the career. And as the Brookings Institution reports "there is growing evidence of less intergenerational economic mobility in the United States than in many other rich industrialized countries." The bitter fact is that it is harder for a poor person in America to become rich than in virtually any other industrialized country. 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 U.S. slashed the top income tax rate by 35 percent and witnessed a large ten percent increase in its top 1% pre-tax income share. "By contrast, France or Germany saw very little change in their top tax rates and their top 1% income shares during the same period." 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 Pew Research Center found that two-thirds of Americans now believe the conflict between rich and poor is our greatest source of tension. I agree. It is a conflict that deserves to be aired fully and in public. (Source: www.alternet.org/story/153874/5_republican_lies_about_income_inequality)
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Side Orders
Desserts
Irvin Grice, Photographer
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The DISH is based on T.H.I.N.C. (Teaching Humanity In New Consciousness) Send comments/inquiries or questions about making a donation to thedish@thedish.org
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The DISH© 2011
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.
"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."
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. 
ownership
of slave plantations.
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 US Justice
Department. 
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."
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.
rnment
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 Lincoln in unlawfully
(under then-existing laws) depriving slave owners of property rights by
emancipating slaves (only in Confederate-held territory). It would be
interesting to force Paul to the wall by pursuing this question to its logical
conclusion, and not let him escape by chattering about "individual liberty".
Jim Crow laws again were not imposed by Reconstructionist state governments
supported by Federal bayonets -- they were enacted by the elected
representatives of the white voters, doing the wishes of those who elected
them. Was Bull Connor supporting "property rights" in Ron Paul's view? Would
he have supported Bull Connor or Martin Luther King? Would he have supported
Pres. Eisenhower sending tanks into Little Rock to enforce desegregation, or
would he have supported Gov. Faubus and George Wallace? These are the hard
questions that should be put to him to cut through the verbal smog he emits. I
do agree that other parts of the US should look to their own "dirty history"
of race relations instead of conveniently dumping their consciences on the
South. (Not that the South doesn't deserve this.) After growing up in
southmost Texas at a time when legal segregation still existed, I was
astonished to go to Illinois, where every town cemetery sports a monument to
the Civil War dead and GAR veterans, to find that informal segregation reigned
supreme even in places like the University of Illinois, and the surrounding
community, and subsequently to find that it had been the "custom of the land"
in Tucson, Arizona, where I've been on the faculty of the University of
Arizona. One woman of Asian ancestry here recently renewed her marriage vows
on her 50th wedding anniversary, because Arizona state law had forbidden
cross-racial (as legally defined) marriage when she first wanted to get
married, so she and her fiancé had to go to New Mexico to be legally wed.
Schools here and in Texas used to regularly punish students for speaking
Spanish on the playground or in class, by keeping them after school in what
was called "Spanish detention" -- this was legally acquiesced in prior to the
Civil Rights Act. I have no doubt that without the Act, these sorts of
"hidden" discrimination would still be practiced. Happy New Year! Rudy
