STILL in BUSINESS

[spectre]

http://spectrevision.net/2012/02/03/still-in-business/
https://financialcrimeswalkingtour.crowdmap.com

SUCCESS STORIES of the WALL STREET SLAVE MARKET
http://ajhudson.wordpress.com/2012/01/28/wall-street-was-founded-on-slavery/

Wall Street is a highly influential financial district but its history
is rarely talked about. In order to understand the largesse of Wall
Street and the system of global capitalism, it is crucial to know Wall
Street’s history. Wall Street was founded on slavery and, to this day,
it remains a key pillar in upholding racial inequality and economic
oppression.

New York City was a Dutch settlement known as New Amsterdam in the
Dutch colonial province called New Netherland during much of the 17th
century. Through the Dutch West India Company, the Dutch utilized
labor of enslaved Africans who were first brought to colony around
1627. The African slaves built the wall that gives Wall Street its
name, forming the northern boundary of the colony and warded off
resisting natives who wanted their land back. In addition, the slaves
cleared the forests, built roads and buildings, and turned up the soil
for farming. Slavery was not phenomenon limited to the southern
American colonies. Northern colonies, such as Boston and New York,
participated in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

In 1664, control of the colony was handed over Britain and New
Amsterdam was renamed New York in honor of James II, the Duke of York.
The Royal African Company had a royal monopoly on the British slave
trade and James II was a major shareholder. With the Dutch gone, the
British maintained the system of slavery in New York. They immediately
created a series of laws to protect it. In 1665, a law was passed that
legalized slavery. In 1682, slave masters were given the power of life-
and-death over their slaves. Twenty years later, in 1702, New York
adopted its first comprehensive slave code and it equated slave status
with being African. The entire system of slavery was justified by an
ideology of white supremacy that considers black Africans inferior and
white Europeans superior — an ideology that still exists.

Slavery became the backbone of New York’s economic prosperity in the
1700s. To normalize this massive trade in human beings, in 1711, New
York officials established a slave market on Wall Street. Slave
auctions were held at Wall Street selling African slaves as property
to traders wanting to buy them. Between 1700 and 1722, over 5,000
African slaves entered New York, most of whom came directly from
Africa, while the rest from British colonies in the Caribbean and
southern colonies. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, as Phyllis
Eckhaus points out, New York had “the largest urban slave population
in mainland North America”. Therefore, New York was a crucial location
in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which established it as the world’s
financial capital. Many well-known companies and financial
institutions benefitted from the trans-Atlantic slave trade.They
include Lehman Brothers (which went bankrupt in 2008), J.P. Morgan
Chase, Wachovia Bank of North Carolina, Aetna Insurance, Bank of
America, and the Royal Bank of Scotland. Banks, such as Wachovia’s
predecessors Bank of Charleston, South Carolina, and the Bank of North
America, and J.P. Morgan Chase’s predecessor banks, made loans to
slave owners and accepted slaves as “collateral”. When the slave
owners defaulted on their loans, the banks became the new owners. The
Lehman family members who established Lehman Brothers started their
company to trade and invest in cotton, a cash crop produced by African
slaves. Aetna sold insurance to slave owners who wanted to protect
their investments in slaves aboard slave ships in case one of them
died (this was a very common occurrence as millions of African slaves
died on ships carrying them from Africa to the Americas). The
insurance company’s policies compensated slave owners for the loss of
people who were considered “property”. To this day, there are lawsuits
against these corporations to seek reparations for their participation
in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

The trans-Atlantic slave trade built the foundation for modern global
capitalism. Millions of Africans (somewhere between 12 to 30 million
or more) were ripped away from their homes in Africa to work as slaves
in European colonies in North and South America and the Caribbean.
Unlike native Americans and other white Europeans, free African labor
was plentiful (if one died, they could be replaced with another from
Africa), Africans had no connections to American lands, and they knew
how to grow essential cash crops like cotton and sugar that grew in
both Africa and the Caribbean and southeastern United States. These
factors made Africans the perfect slave labor force for European
colonial powers. The slaves, along with performing many other
services, were used to produce commodities that were sold in
international markets for a profit (a characteristic of modern
capitalism). In addition, slaves, themselves, were considered property
and sold on markets. The benefits of this went to slave owners and
investors — not the slaves. As a result, wealth was transferred from
black African slaves (and their descendants) to white European slave
owners and other whites who benefitted from this system (this laid the
foundation for current wealth inequality between whites and blacks).
This ensured that blacks would remain socioeconomically subordinate to
whites for generations to come. Slavery went on for nearly 300 years
from the sixteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century when Britain,
America, and other countries that participated in the trans-Atlantic
slave trade abolished it. Even after it ended, the foundation of
modern capitalism and racial inequality was already built.

The end of slavery brought new political rights for black people in
America, such as the right to vote. However, these political rights
were very limited, particularly under the Jim Crow system in the
American South. This system barred blacks from voting, segregated them
in inferior schools, confined them to low-paying jobs, discriminated
against them in numerous areas of life, and perpetuated heinous acts
of racist violence against black people, such as lynching. While
northern states did not have a de jure system of racial
discrimination, there was similar de facto racial discrimination in
housing and employment. The civil rights movement of the 1950s and
’60s eliminated legalized racial discrimination with the Civil Rights
Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, thereby dealing a deathblow
to Jim Crow. Despite the end of slavery and advancements of the civil
rights movement, African-Americans remain socioeconomically oppressed.
Black people disproportionately suffer more poverty, unemployment, and
socioeconomic misery compared to whites and other ethnic groups. As of
December 2011,unemployment for African-Americans is 15.8%, the same as
it was at the beginning of 2011. While unemployment for whites is
7.5%, down from 8.5% at the beginning of the year. According to the
Census Bureau’s Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage report
for 2010, the poverty rate (defined as a family of four earning less
than $22,314 a year) for African-Americans is 27.4%, while for whites
it is 13% and 36.6% for Latinos.

The financial sector plays a substantial role in economically
oppressing African-Americans. Racial segregation in housing long
existed in the United States as a way to keep African-Americans living
in separate, poorer neighborhoods away from whites. Redlining, which
is the practice of denying or increasing the price of insurance and
other financial services to certain neighborhoods based on race,
contributed to racial segregation in America for much of the twentieth
century. The practice began in the 1930s when the Home Owners’ Loan
Corporation (HOLC), established to send loans to homeowners at risk of
foreclosure, created a risk-rating system for communities to be used
by mortgage lenders. The idea was to protect the long-term value of
the property, which was undermined by the introduction of
“undesirables” (usually blacks but also Latinos, Asians, and Jews)
into a neighborhood. Using real-estate maps, the HOLC developed a
classification system for communities. There were four
classifications. Type A areas, coded green, were affluent areas in the
suburbs and the most desirable for investment. Type B areas, coded
blue, were still desirable, fully developed, but less affluent. Type
C, coded yellow, were older, declining areas. Type D areas, coded red,
were those with low homeownership rates, poor housing conditions, were
in older, inner-city neighborhoods heavily populated by black people.
These areas were considered undesirable and too risky for investment —
hence the term “redlining”. As a result, HOLC did not provide any
loans for black people at risk of foreclosure during the 1930s. This
created a system, perpetuated by the Federal Housing Administration
(FHA), lending institutions, and insurance companies, that made it
difficult for black people to own homes and accumulate wealth in their
communities, thereby, entrenching racial segregation and inequality.

While redlining was outlawed by the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and
Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, similar racial discriminatory
practices continue and achieve the same effect as redlining — further
racial segregation and inequality. One common practice is known as
steering. Real estate agents will steer people to neighborhoods
predominantly populated by people of similar ethnic background. Whites
are steered to “better”, white neighborhoods, while blacks and Latinos
are steered toward neighborhoods with more black and Latinos, which
tend to be poorer. Another racial discriminatory practice, which led
to the financial crash and current depression, is predatory lending.
Rather than deny financial services, financial institutions targeted
the black community, and other nonwhite communities, to sell them
risky, high-priced subprime mortgage loans. Because of this, the
practice is also known as “reverse redlining”. Subprime loans are
typically made to people with poor credit histories and, hence, come
with higher interest rates. According to a 2009 NAACP “Discrimination
and Mortgage Lending in America” report, “even when income and credit
risk are equal, African Americans are up to 34 percent more likely to
receive higher-rate and subprime loans” than whites. This predatory
lending perpetuated a decade-long housing bubble from the late-1990s
to late-2000s.

Wells Fargo is one of many financial institutions that engaged in
predatory lending in black communities. As the New York Times reported
in June 2009, Wells Fargo “saw the black community as fertile ground
for subprime mortgages, as working-class blacks were hungry to be a
part of the nation’s home-owning mania.” Revealing the big bank’s true
racism, loan officers at Wells Fargo commonly referred to African-
Americans as “mud people” and subprime loans as “ghetto loans”. Wells
Fargo has been sued by individuals and groups, such as the NAACP, for
its racial discriminatory practices. In late-November 2011, a
regretful former regional vice president of Chase Home Finance in
southern Florida (a subsidiary of JP Morgan Chase, whose roots lie in
slavery), James Theckston, admitted the predatory lending practices of
big banks to New York Times columnist Nick Kristof. In fact, predatory
lending was incentivized since lenders earned higher commissions from
subprime loans than normal prime loans. In his column, Kristof notes:

“One memory particularly troubles Theckston. He says that some account
executives earned a commission seven times higher from subprime loans,
rather than prime mortgages. Sothey looked for less savvy borrowers —
those with less education, without previous mortgage experience, or
without fluent English — and nudged them toward subprime loans.
These less savvy borrowers were disproportionately blacks and Latinos,
he said, and they ended paying a higher rate so that they were more
likely to lose their homes. Senior executives seemed aware of this
racial mismatch, he recalled, and frantically tried to cover it up.”
So not only did big banks intentionally push black people and other
people of color to buy subprime loans but they were well aware of the
racism behind their actions. Moreover, the banks did not care if
people lost their homes because of these risky, high-priced subprime
mortgages.

The reason why subprime mortgage loans were aggressively pushed on to
millions of people was so they could be bundled up into mortgage-
backed securities. In 1999, the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated
commercial from investment banking, was repealed under Clinton. This
made it easier for subprime mortgage loans to be bundled into
securities and sold on Wall Street for massive profits. When the
housing bubble burst in 2007, that led to the financial crash in
September 2008 and the current economic depression. Wall Street got
bailed out but the people got stuck with massive poverty and
unemployment. Millions of people lost their homes and many are on the
edge of foreclosure. Black and Latino households were hit the hardest.
As the Center for Responsible Lending points out, around 25% of all
black and Latino borrowers lost their home to foreclosure or are close
to foreclosure, compared to under 12% of all white borrowers. Home
equity makes up the largest portion of overall wealth in black and
Latino communities. Because of the collapse of the housing bubble and
resulting foreclosures, black and Latino communities have experienced
a dramatic wealth decrease in their communities. According to a recent
Pew Research Center report, in 2005, median net worth (or total
household wealth) of white households was $134,992, for Latinos it was
$18,359, and $12,124 for blacks. In 2009, median net worth for white
households dropped 16% to $113,149, Latino households experienced a
66% drop to $6,325, while black households experienced a 53% drop to
$5,677. Pew rightly attributes this drop to the bursting of the
housing bubble and recession that followed from it.

Wall Street, since its founding as a slave market, continues to play a
substantial role in oppressing African-Americans and other working-
class people. To fully understand racial inequality, it is important
to know Wall Street’s historical roots in the trans-Atlantic slave
trade. With this knowledge, we can combat the oppression of African-
Americans by challenging the greed and oligarchy of Wall Street.
Fortunately, there is already a movement doing just that — Occupy Wall
Street.

--------

Historical sources:

David McNally, Another World Is Possible: Globalization & Anti-
Capitalism, (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2006), Ch. 4, pp. 137
– 204
Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492 – Present,
(New York: HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 2003), Ch, 2, pp. 23 – 39
Lerone Bennett, Jr., Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America,
(New York: Johnson Publishing Company, Inc., 1982)
James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American
History Textbook Got Wrong, (New York: Simon & Schuster Inc., 1995)
See also Douglas Massey & Nancy Denton, American Apartheid:
Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Harvard University
Press, 1993) for history of racial segregation in the U.S.


http://www.africanburialground.gov/ABG_History.htm

African American history in New York City began in the Dutch colonies.
The first Africans arrived in New Amsterdam as enslaved men in 1625
and 1626; the first enslaved women in 1628. They worked as farmers and
builders and in the fur trade of the Dutch West India Company. Some
helped build the wall intended to keep settlers safe from the native
population at the location of today's Wall Street. In 1644, the
Company granted "conditional freedom" to the enslaved on condition
that they make an annual fixed payment of farm produce. The children
of the "conditionally freed" people, born and unborn, remained the
property of the Company. Most of the families received grants to lands
they had been farming before becoming "free." At the time the area was
generally undesirable swamp land. Today most of the area is in
Greenwich Village. The Dutch continued to expand and to import
enslaved Africans to meet growing labor needs. Between 1649 and 1659
they imported hundreds of men, women and children. In New Amsterdam,
the first sales tax, an import tax of 10%, was imposed to discourage
merchants from selling "human cargo" outside of the colony. Though not
comprehensive, Dutch records do note that there were Africans who had
never been enslaved who were living on the "free Negro lots" which
today are located on land between from Astor Place and Prince Street.

In 1665, the Dutch surrendered New Amsterdam/New Netherlands to the
British. For most European settlers, little changed in what became New
York. For African New Yorkers, both enslaved and freed, British
occupation meant severe change. Under Dutch rule, some Africans had
gained half or full freedom. Even if enslaved, they had legal and
social rights. One example is that no master could whip an enslaved
African without the permission of the Dutch Common Council. This and
other rules changed under the British rule. In a move toward
commercial efficiency, the British formed the Royal African Company to
import slaves directly from Africa to New York. "From the start of the
English occupation the creation of a commercially profitable slave
system became a joint project of both government and private
interests. Unlike the Dutch West India Company which used slavery to
implement colonial policy, the Royal African Company used the colony
to implement slavery." (Historian Edgar J. McManus) New York's first
slave market during the British period was established at Wall Street
and the East River in 1709. In the early 1700's there were 800 African
men, women, and children in the city; about 15% of the total
population. Local and state documents did not distinguish between free
and enslaved Africans until 1756. Before then the term "slave" was
used to describe all Africans and their decedents. They were all
looked upon as valuable sources of labor.

The British enacted numerous laws that restricted where Africans could
be employed and how they could be freed. Laws were passed to prevent
free Africans from aiding runaway slaves. The New York "Slave Codes"
grew so numerous that they are seen as a major cause of the 1712 slave
revolt. In the revolt, enslaved Africans and natives gathered in an
orchard on Maiden Lane with hatchets, guns, knives, and hoes and set
out to burn and destroy property in the area. Nine whites were killed
during the revolt. Twenty-one enslaved Africans were executed and six
were reported to have committed suicide. After the revolt more laws
were passed that prohibited Africans and natives from carrying weapons
and entering military service. There were strict curfews and laws
against gathering of more than two or three enslaved people. The
revolt emphasized the growing fear that European New Yorkers had of
the growing African population. At this time, Europeans in New York
outnumbered people of African descent five to one, but the city
contained the largest absolute number of enslaved Africans of any
English colonial settlement except Charleston, South Carolina, and
held the largest proportion of enslaved Africans of any northern
settlement. By the first decade of the 1700's, forty percent of New
York's households contained at least one enslaved African; again, the
largest proportion of any northern settlement.

FREE MARKET
http://maap.columbia.edu/place/22.html

In 1711, New York was growing quickly, and the growing needs of the
city were often supplied by slave labor. Nearly 1,000 out of about
6,400 New Yorkers were black, and at least 40 percent of the white
households included a slave. In these homes, enslaved workers cooked,
washed, sewed, hauled water, emptied the chamber pots, swept out the
fireplaces and the chimneys, and cared for the children. Along the
East River they built, loaded, and unloaded, the ships. They cleared
the land uptown, and then planted and harvested the crops. And up and
down the narrow streets they pedaled their master’s goods and even
supplied the city’s first fast foods—fresh oysters and steaming hot
corn on the cob. As the number of slaves imported into the city
soared, barrel makers, butchers, carpenters, blacksmiths, and tin
workers began to purchase young enslaved men in order to teach them
their trades. Typically, when a slave owner ran out of work, they
hired their slaves out at half the rate of free labor. Often the
slaves themselves were sent out to find work. In a time when fear of a
slave uprising was ever-present, the sight of so many enslaved men
walking the streets looking to be hired caused alarm. Fearful white
citizens began to complain. They demanded a market where slaves could
be hired, bought, and sold. Finally, on December 13, 1711, the City
Council passed a law “that all Negro and Indian slaves that are let
out to hire…be hired at the Market house at the Wall Street Slip…”
This market, known as the Meal Market (because grains were sold
there), was located at the foot of Wall Street on the East River. It
was the city’s first slave market.


http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/2457/the_northern_slave_trade/
The hidden history of slavery in New York calls myths of American
morality into question
by Phyllis Eckhaus / January 6, 2006

Americans excel at ego-boosting myths of exceptionalism: It’s our
ingenuity, energy and can-do attitude that explain our rise from
frontier to world power. But what if slavery were the real secret of
our success? We like to condemn slavery as an exotic evil perpetrated
by plantation Southerners, but two new books and a museum exhibit
provide nightmarish reminders that slavery was the norm in the early
years of this country, and that up through the eve of the Civil War,
Northern bankers, brokers and entrepreneurs were among slavery’s
staunchest defenders. In Complicity, a team of Hartford Courant
journalists investigates this history, producing 10 stories that
explore how deeply the fortunes of New York and New England were tied
to the slave trade. “Slavery in New York,” an exhibit at the New York
Historical Society through March 5, reveals New York as a city
substantially built by slaves. The companion book of the same name,
elegantly designed and illustrated, anchors the exhibit in a series of
scholarly essays. Together, these works echo and amplify each other,
providing a kind of surround-sound opportunity for an anguished
identity crisis: If our supposedly freedom-loving forebears were not
“good guys,” what were they? And what are we?

From the get-go, Americans were profiteers, and plundering the New
World was backbreaking work. Writing in 1645 to John Winthrop,
governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, his brother-in-law Emanuel
Downing complained, “I do not see how we can thrive until we get a
stock of slaves sufficient to do all our business.” Further south, in
New Amsterdam, slaves built Wall Street’s wall and cleared what became
Harlem and Route 1. When a new shipload of slaves proved
insufficiently hardy, Director General Peter Stuyvesant expressed his
displeasure to the Dutch West India Company, insisting that the
company supply the best slaves to Christian and company enterprises,
while unloading the feeble on “Spaniards and unbelieving Jews.” For
much of the 17th and 18th centuries, New York boasted the largest
urban slave population in mainland North America. Slaves made up one-
fifth the population. And white New Yorkers lived in terror of slave
revolt. An alleged 1741 plot led to the jailing and torture of scores
of slaves, 30 of whom were executed, 17 by burning at the stake. For
slaves, the Revolutionary War was a liberating experience–but only if
they fought for the British, who promised them freedom. Though George
Washington sought to reclaim the colonists’ slaves, British General
Guy Carleton oversaw the evacuation of more than 3,000 black
Loyalists, who fled New York for Nova Scotia and other British
outposts.

New York slowly and reluctantly abolished slavery; federal census
figures showed slaves in the state until 1850. But the death of
slavery in New York scarcely impeded the city’s business in the slave
trade. In the peak years of 1859 and 1860, two slave ships bound for
Africa left New York harbor every month. Although the trade was
technically illegal, no one cared: A slave bought for $50 in Africa
could be sold for $1,000 in Cuba, a profit margin so high that loss of
slave life was easily absorbed. For every hundred slaves purchased in
Africa, perhaps 48 survived the trip to the New World. By the end of
the voyage, the ships that held the packed, shackled and naked human
cargo were so filthy that it was cheaper to burn some vessels than
decontaminate them. Law-abiding Northerners made money off slavery
through the cotton trade. “King Cotton” was to antebellum America what
oil is to the Middle East. Whole New England textile cities sprang up
to manufacture cloth from cotton picked and processed by millions of
slaves. In 1861, the United States produced more than 2 billion pounds
of cotton, exporting much of it to Great Britain via New York. No
wonder then that as the South began to talk secession, so too did New
York Mayor Fernando Wood, who proposed that Manhattan become an
independent island nation, its cotton trade intact.

How do we reconcile these facts with our mythology of the Civil War
and our convenient conviction that the evils of slavery were contained
within the South? Obviously, we can’t. Slavery was such a huge and
gruesome enterprise, supported by so many, that it explodes inflated
notions of American character. Instead, we might appropriately draw
parallels between antebellum America and Nazi Germany. This is not to
assert that ordinary Americans were “evil,” but rather that our
insistent sorting of the world into “good guys” and “evildoers”
distorts reality. Today, progressives are justly suspicious of the
high-flown “freedom” rhetoric our government deploys to advance
American empire. But we need always to be skeptical of reductive,
righteous narratives. Far from promoting morality, such fictions allow
us to hide our worst impulses from ourselves.