Americide
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
January 19, 2015 "ICH"
- "Alternet"
- 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 policies employed today. A
'vagrancy' offense got 22-year-old Green
Cottenham arrested in 1908.
Cottenham was sentenced to thirty days of
hard labor. When he was unable to pay court
fees, his sentence was extended to a full
year, and he was sold to Tennessee Coal, a
subsidiary of US Steel. The company forced
him to live and work in a mineshaft deep in
the cold, black earth, where he worked every
day from 3 AM to 8 PM digging and loading
tons of coal. If he slowed down he was
whipped. He drank the water he was standing
in. He was surrounded by pitch-dark caverns
filled with poison gas and walls that often
collapsed, crushing or suffocating miners.
At night he was chained to a wooden
barracks. Crazed men were always nearby,
filthy and sweaty, some homicidal, some
sexual predators. A boy from the Alabama
countryside had been cast into the center of
hell.
----US Steel, which absorbed Tennessee Coal,
is one of the largest steel companies in the
world, with over $17 billion in sales in
2013.
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 World’s 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 atthree
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 wereunderemployed 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.
Paul Buchheit teaches
economic inequality at DePaul University. He
is the founder and developer of the Web
sites UsAgainstGreed.org, PayUpNow.org and
RappingHistory.org, and the editor and main
author of "American Wars: Illusions and
Realities" (Clarity Press). He can be
reached at paul@UsAgainstGreed.org
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