4 Ways
American Corporations Supported Slavery and Horrific Racial Oppression
Many of the
modern-day practices of our free-market capitalist system are at least partly
responsible for the oppression of black people in America. By Paul Buchheit / AlterNet January 18, 2015
http://worldtraining.net/slavery.htm
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http://worldtraining.net/slavery5.htm
America is
gradually, but unrelentingly, destroying part of itself. The facts to support
this are well-documented, told in many ways from past
to present.
The most egregious example of Americide is our country's treatment of African-Americans.
Almost everyone agrees about the evils of slavery, once dismissed simply as a Peculiar
Institution. But a debate goes
on about reparations, with passionate arguments on both sides, ranging from a
demand for a Reparations
Superfund for jobs and education, to a claim that blacks
actually benefited from
slavery because of the years of 'reparations' received through poverty
programs.
Reparations opponents insist that
there is no clear modern connection to the era of slavery. But there is a
connection, and it's exhibited in the many profitable corporations --
manufacturers, banks, insurance, railroad -- that had
their roots in slavery. Reparations haven't been paid, or, if they have been
extended in the form of poverty programs, they haven't worked. Standards of
living for blacks have worsened relative to whites in the past half-century.
Many of the modern-day practices of our free-market capitalist system are at
least partly responsible for this.
1. American Corporations Are Partly Responsible for the Sale of Human Beings
Horace
Greeley, Editor of the New York Tribune and an abolitionist, described a slave auction:
"The negroes were examined with as little consideration as if they had
been brutes indeed; the buyers pulling their mouths open to see their teeth, pinching their limbs to find how muscular they
were, walking them up and down to detect any signs of lameness, making them
stoop and bend in different ways that they might be certain there was no
concealed rupture or wound.."
The slaves on the auction
block, 500 of them, stood nervously waiting as the buyers lit cigars and
studied their log books, scanning the list of 'chattel' available to them,
preparing to start the bidding. The facial expression of each slave stepping on
the auction block was the same -- anguish about an unknown future, despair at
the thought of never again seeing their loved ones.
The
abject heartlessness of forever dividing families was captured by Mark Twain,
when he sat on his front porch in 1874 and listened to his servant, Mary Ann
Cord, whom the writer had come to know as "Aunt Rachel."
"Dey begin to sell my chil'en an'
take dem away, an' I begin to cry; an' de man say, 'Shet up yo' dam blubberin',' an' hit me on de mouf
wid his han'. An' when de las' one was gone but my little Henry, I grab' him clost up to my breas' so, an' I ris up an' says, 'You shan't
take him away,' I says; 'I'll kill de man dat tetch him!' ... But dey got him –
dey got him, de men did.. "
Corporations linked to
the present day
had a lot to
do with these slave sales:
----Wall
Street: Banks made loans to slave owners, processed transactions through
the New York Cotton Exchange, and held slave auctions outside their doors. JP
Morgan, Bank of America, and Wachovia (Wells Fargo) admitted the roles of their
predecessor banks.
----Manufacturing: The textile
industry was so vital to
northeastern states that the mayor of
New York City turned against the Union, encouraging citizens to support
"our aggrieved brethren of the Slave States."
----Insurance: Companies
like Aetna and New
York Life issued policies protecting slaves as property.
----Railroad: Predecessors
of the Norfolk
Southern leased slaves for year-long
terms of hard labor.
2. American Corporations Are Partly Responsible for the First Vagrancy Laws
These
are the Pig Laws of
a century or more ago, which penalized trivial - sometimes nonexistent -
offenses, in a similar manner as theBroken
Windows
3.
American Corporations Are Partly Responsible for WW2 Slave Labor
Slave labor in the Nazi years
generated massive profits for many of our most prominent corporations.
----Ford
Motors: Henry Ford, who had published "The
International Jew: The WorldÕs Foremost Problem," was a friend of Nazi
Germany. His company used prison labor to
produce a third of the military trucks for the German army. Ford's German affiliate
was called an
"arsenal of Nazism."
----General Motors worked with
the German company that built Auschwitz.
----IBM was
responsible for the punch card machines
that allowed the Nazis to tabulate train shipments to the death camps.
----Numerous
other companies were involved. General
Electric partnered with a German company that used slave labor, and
invested in the builder of gas chambers. Kodak used prison labor for
the manufacture of German arms. Nestle admitted acquiring a company
that used forced labor during the war.
4. American Corporations Are Partly Responsible for Today's Deadening
Racial Oppression
They may not be the mine shafts of
Tennessee Coal, but modern private prisons such as Corrections Corporation of
America and G4S generate massive profits, selling
inmate labor to corporations like Chevron, Bank of America,
AT&T, and IBM. Nearly a million prisoners work in factories and call
centers for as little as 17 cents an
hour.
Black and white crime rates for
drugs, weapons, and assault are approximately the same. Yet blacks are arrested
for drug offenses at three times the rate of whites,
and according to the Sentencing
Project more than 60 percent of U.S. prisoners are minorities.
As summarized by
the Economic Policy Institute, society has chosen to use incarceration
rather than education and job training to deal with racial economic issues.
----Little
Earnings for Blacks: Corporate profits are at their highest level in at 85 years,
yet S&P companies spent an incredible 95% of
their profits on stock buybacks to enrich executives and shareholders.
Corporations
generally hire minority workers for low-wage jobs. Stunningly, over half of
the black college graduates of recent years were underemployed in 2013,
working in occupations that typically do not require a four-year college
degree.
It gets even worse for blacks, and then worse
again. A 2003 Harvard/Chicago study found
that job applicants were about 50
percent more likely to be called back if they had "white" names.
Another study found
that white job applicants with criminal records received more favorable
treatment than blacks without criminal records.
----Fewer Educational Opportunities: Almost half of
black kids are in poverty. Education is their best way out. Numerous
studies have shown that with pre-school, all children
achieve more and earn more through adulthood, with the most disadvantaged benefiting
the most. But Head Start was recently hit with the worst
cutbacks in its history.
----Poor
Health, Slow Death: Many reputable studies have
documented the link between financial stress and illness.
Median
black household wealth went down by 33.7 percent from 2010 to 2013,
while median white household wealth actually increased. Black males are living
over four years
less than white males. Black women are four times as
likely to die from pregnancy-related causes as white women.
It's all part of the gradual, unyielding, insidious process of a nation
disposing of an unwanted part of itself.