(a) Title: “TOP 6 COUNTRIES THAT GREW FILTHY RICH FROM ENSLAVING BLACK PEOPLE” (Visit the website of Black Atlantic Star)
1) The UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA)
Slavery transformed America into an economic power. ... read full comment
(a) Title: “TOP 6 COUNTRIES THAT GREW FILTHY RICH FROM ENSLAVING BLACK PEOPLE” (Visit the website of Black Atlantic Star)
1) The UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA)
Slavery transformed America into an economic power. The exploitation of black people for free labor made the South the richest and most politically powerful region in the country. British demand for American cotton made the southern stretch of the Mississippi River the Silicon Valley of its era, boasting the single largest concentration of the nation’s millionaires.
But slavery was a national enterprise. Many firms on Wall Street such as JPMorgan Chase, New York Life and now-defunct Lehman Brothers made fortunes from investing in the slave trade the most profitable economic activity in New York’s 350 year history. Slavery was so important to the city that New York was one of the most pro-slavery urban municipalities in the North.
According to Harper’s magazine (November 2000), the United States stole an estimated $100 trillion for 222,505,049 hours of forced labor between 1619 and 1865, with a compounded interest of 6 percent.
2) ENGLAND
Between 1761 and 1808, British traders hauled 1,428,000 African captives across the Atlantic and pocketed $96.5 million – about $13 billion in value today – from selling them as slaves.
From 1500 to 1860, by very modest estimations, around 12 million Africans were traded into slavery in the Americas. In British vessels alone, 3.25 million Africans were shipped. These voyages were often very profitable. For instance, in the 17th century, the Royal Africa Company could buy an enslaved African with trade goods worth $5 and sell that person in the Americas for $32, making an average net profit of 38 percent per voyage.
Slave-owning planters and merchants who dealt in slaves and slave produce were among the richest people in 18th-century Britain, but many other British citizens benefited from the human trafficking industry.
Profits from slavery were used to endow All Souls College, Oxford, with a splendid library; to build a score of banks, including the Bank of London and Barclays; and to finance the experiments of James Watt, inventor of the first efficient steam engine.
As the primary catalyst for the Industrial Revolution, the transatlantic slave trade provided factory owners who dealt in textiles, iron, glass and gun-making a mega-market in West Africa, where their goods were traded for slaves. Birmingham had over 4,000 gun-makers, with 100,000 guns a year going to slave-traders. The boom in manufacturing provided many jobs for ordinary people in Britain who, in addition to working in factories, could be employed to build roads and bridges, and in whaling, mining, etc.
3) FRANCE
With over 1,600,000 enslaved Africans transported to the West Indies, France was clearly a major player in the trade. Its slave ports were a major contributor to the country’s economic advancements in the 18th century. Many of its cities on the west coast, such as Nantes, Lorient, La Rochelle, and Bordeaux, built their wealth through the major profits of triangular slave trade.
Between 1738 and 1745, from Nantes, France’s leading slave port, 55,000 slaves were taken to the New World in 180 ships. From 1713 to 1775, nearly 800 vessels in the slave trade sailed from Nantes.
By the late 1780s, French Saint Domingue, which is modern-day Haiti, became the richest and most prosperous colony in the West Indies, cementing its status as a vital port in the Americas for goods and products flowing to and from France and Europe.
The income and taxes from slave-based sugar production became a major source of the French national budget. Each year over 600 vessels visited the ports of Haiti to carry its sugar, coffee, cotton, indigo, and cacao to European consumers.
4) NETHERLANDS
The Dutch West India Company, a chartered company of Dutch merchants, was established in 1621 as a monopoly over the African slave trade to Brazil, the Caribbean and North America.
WIC had offices in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Hoorn, Middelburg and Groningen, but one-fourth of Africans transported across the Atlantic by the company were moved in slave ships from Amsterdam. Almost all of the money that financed slave plantations in Suriname and the Antilles came from bankers in Amsterdam, just as many of the ships used to transport slaves were built there.
Many of the raw materials that were turned into finished goods in Amsterdam, such as sugar and coffee, were grown in the colonies using slave labor and then refined in factories in the Jordaan neighborhood.
Revenue from the goods produced with slave labor funded much of The Netherlands’ golden age in the 17th century, a period renowned for its artistic, literary, scientific, and philosophical achievements.
Slave labor created vast sources of wealth for the Dutch in the form of precious metals, sugar, tobacco, cocoa, coffee and cotton and other goods, and helped to fund the creation of Amsterdam’s beautiful and famous canals and city center.
5) PORTUGAL
Portugal was the first of all European countries to become involved in the Atlantic slave trade. From the 15th to 19th century, the Portuguese exported 4.5 million Africans as slaves to the Americas, making it Europe’s largest trafficker of human beings.
Slave labor was the driving force behind the growth of the sugar economy in Portugal’s colony of Brazil, and sugar was the primary export from 1600 to 1650. Gold and diamond deposits were discovered in Brazil in 1690, which sparked an increase in the importation of African slaves to power this newly profitable market.
The large portion of the Brazilian inland where gold was extracted was known as the Minas Gerais (General Mines). Gold mining in this area became the main economic activity of colonial Brazil during the 18th century. In Portugal, the gold was mainly used to pay for industrialized goods such as textiles and weapons, and to build magnificent baroque monuments like the Convent of Mafra.
6) SPAIN
Starting in 1492, Spain was the first European country to colonize the New World, where they established an economic monopoly in the territories of Florida and other parts of North America, Mexico, Trinidad, Cuba and other Caribbean islands. The native populations of these colonies were mostly dying from disease or enslavement, so the Spanish were forced to increasingly rely on African slave labor to run their colonies.
The money generated from these settlements created great wealth for the Hapsburg and Bourbon dynasties throughout Spain’s hold on the area. But it also attracted Spain’s European rivals, prompting Spanish rulers to spend the riches from the Americas to fuel successive European wars.
Spanish treasure fleets were used to protect the cargo transported across the Atlantic Ocean. The ships’ cargo included lumber, manufactured goods, various metal resources and expensive luxury goods including silver, gold, gems, pearls, spices, sugar, tobacco leaf and silk.
Port cities in Spain flourished. Seville, which had a royal monopoly on New World trade, was transformed from a provincial port into a major city and political center. Since the Spanish colonists were not yet producing their own staples such as wine, oil, flour, arms and leather, and had large financial reserves to pay for them, prices in Castile and Andalusia rose sharply as traders bought up goods to ship out.
Prices of oil, wine and wheat tripled between 1511 and 1539. The great vineyards of Jerez, the olive groves of Jaén, and the arms and leather industry of Toledo were established on their present scale during these years.
(b) Title: “15 MAJOR CORPORATIONS YOU NEVER KNEW BENEFITTED FROM SLAVERY” (Visit the websites of Occupy Wall Street and Black Atlantic Star for more information)
The enslavement of African people in the Americas by the nations and peoples of Western Europe, created the economic engine that funded modern capitalism. Therefore it comes as no surprise that most of the major corporations that were founded by Western European and American merchants prior to roughly 100 years ago, benefited directly from slavery.
Lehman Brothers, whose business empire started in the slave trade, recently admitted their part in the business of slavery. According to the Sun Times, the financial services firm acknowledged recently that its founding partners owned not one, but several enslaved Africans during the Civil War era and that, “in all likelihood,” it “profited significantly” from slavery. “This is a sad part of our heritage …We’re deeply apologetic … It was a terrible thing … There’s no one sitting in the United States in the year 2005, hopefully, who would ever, in a million years, defend the practice,” said Joe Polizzotto, general counsel of Lehman Brothers.
Aetna, Inc., the United States’ largest health insurer, apologized for selling policies in the 1850s that reimbursed slave owners for financial losses when the enslaved Africans they owned died. “Aetna has long acknowledged that for several years shortly after its founding in 1853 that the company may have insured the lives of slaves,” said Aetna spokesman Fred Laberge in 2002. “We express our deep regret over any participation at all in this deplorable practice.”
JPMorgan Chase recently admitted their company’s links to slavery. “Today, we are reporting that this research found that, between 1831 and 1865, two of our predecessor banks—Citizens Bank and Canal Bank in Louisiana—accepted approximately 13,000 enslaved individuals as collateral on loans and took ownership of approximately 1,250 of them when the plantation owners defaulted on the loans,” the company wrote in a statement.
New York Life Insurance Company is the largest mutual life insurance company in the United States. They also took part in slavery by selling insurance policies on enslaved Africans. According to USA Today, evidence of 10 more New York Life slave policies comes from an 1847 account book kept by the company’s Natchez, Miss. agent, W.A. Britton. The book, part of a collection at Louisiana State University, contains Britton’s notes on slave policies he wrote for amounts ranging from $375 to $600. A 1906 history of New York Life says 339 of the company’s first 1,000 policies were written on the lives of slaves.
USA Today reported that Wachovia Corporation (now owned by Wells Fargo) has apologized for its ties to slavery after disclosing that two of its historical predecessors owned enslaved Africans and accepted them as payment. “On behalf of Wachovia Corporation, I apologize to all Americans, and especially to African-Americans and people of African descent,” said Ken Thompson, Wachovia chairman and chief executive officer, in the statement released late Wednesday. “We are deeply saddened by these findings.”
N M Rothschild & Sons Bank in London was linked to slavery. The company that was one of the biggest names in the City of London had previously undisclosed links to slavery in the British colonies. Documents seen by the Financial Times have revealed that Nathan Mayer Rothschild, the banking family’s 19th-century patriarch, made his first personal gains by using enslaved Africans as collateral in dealings with a slave owner.
Norfolk Southern also has a history in the slave trade. The Mobile & Girard Company, which is now part of Norfolk Southern, offered slaveholders $180 ($3,379 today) apiece for enslaved Africans they would rent to the railroad for one year, according to the records. The Central of Georgia, another company aligned with Norfolk Southern Line today, valued its slaves at $31,303 ($663,033 today) on record.
USA Today has found that their own parent company, E.W. Scripps and Gannett, has had links to the slave trade.
There is evidence that FleetBoston evolved from an earlier financial institution, Providence Bank, founded by John Brown who was a slave trader and owned ships used to transport enslaved Africans. The bank financed Brown’s slave voyages and profited from them. Brown even reportedly helped charter what became Brown University.
CSX used slave labor to construct portions of some U.S. rail lines under the political and legal system that was in place more than a century ago. Two enslaved Africans who the company rented were identified as John Henry and Reuben. The record states, “they were to be returned clothed when they arrived to work for the company.” Individual enslaved Africans cost up to $200 – the equivalent of $3,800 today - to rent for a season and CSX took full advantage.
The Canadian National Railway Company is a Canadian Class I railway headquartered in Montreal, Quebec that serves Canada and the Midwestern and southern United States. The company also has a history in which it benefited from slavery. The Mobile & Ohio, now part of Canadian National, valued their slaves lost to the war and emancipation at $199,691 on record. That amount is currently worth $2.2 million.
Brown Brothers Harriman is the oldest and largest private investment bank and securities firm in the United States, founded in 1818. USA Today found that the New York merchant bank of James and William Brown, currently known as Brown Bros. Harriman owned hundreds of enslaved Africans and financed the cotton economy by lending millions to southern planters, merchants and cotton brokers.
Brooks Brothers, the high end suit retailer got their start selling slave clothing to various slave traders back in the 1800s. What a way to get rich in the immoral slave industry!
Barclays, the British multinational banking and financial services company headquartered in London, United Kingdom has now conceded that companies it bought over the years may have been involved in the slave trade.
USA Today reported that New York-based AIG completed the purchase of American General Financial Group, a Houston-based insurer that owns U.S. Life Insurance Company. A U.S. Life policy on an enslaved African living in Kentucky was reprinted in a 1935 article about slave insurance in The American Conservationist magazine. AIG says it has “found documentation indicating” U.S. Life insured enslaved Africans.
francis kwarteng 8 years ago
Title: "Slaves: The Capital that Made Capitalism ("Rethinking Capitalism")"
Author: Julia Ott (April 9, 2014)
Racialized chattel slaves were the capital that made capitalism. While most theories of capitalism set slaver ... read full comment
Title: "Slaves: The Capital that Made Capitalism ("Rethinking Capitalism")"
Author: Julia Ott (April 9, 2014)
Racialized chattel slaves were the capital that made capitalism. While most theories of capitalism set slavery apart, as something utterly distinct, because under slavery, workers do not labor for a wage, new historical research reveals that for centuries, a single economic system encompassed both the plantation and the factory.
At the dawn of the industrial age commentators like Rev. Thomas Malthus could not envision that capital — an asset that is used but not consumed in the production of goods and services — could compound and diversify its forms, increasing productivity and engendering economic growth. Yet, ironically, when Malthus penned his Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798, the economies of Western Europe already had crawled their way out of the so-called “Malthusian trap.” The New World yielded vast quantities of “drug foods” like tobacco, tea, coffee, chocolate, and sugar for world markets. Europeans worked a little bit harder to satiate their hunger for these “drug foods.” The luxury-commodities of the seventeenth century became integrated into the new middle-class rituals like tea-drinking in the eighteenth century. By the nineteenth century, these commodities became a caloric and stimulative necessity for the denizens of the dark satanic mills. The New World yielded food for proletarians and fiber for factories at reasonable (even falling) prices. The “industrious revolution” that began in the sixteenth century set the stage for the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
But the “demand-side” tells only part of the story. A new form of capital, racialized chattel slaves, proved essential for the industrious revolution — and for the industrial one that followed.
The systematic application of African slaves in staple export crop production began in the sixteenth century, with sugar in Brazil. The African slave trade populated the plantations of the Caribbean, landing on the shores of the Chesapeake at the end of the seventeenth century. African slaves held the legal status of chattel: moveable, alienable property. When owners hold living creatures as chattel, they gain additional property rights: the ownership of the offspring of any chattel, and the ownership of their offspring, and so on and so forth. Chattel becomes self-augmenting capital.
While slavery existed in human societies since prehistoric times, chattel status had never been applied so thoroughly to human beings as it would be to Africans and African-Americans beginning in the sixteenth century. But this was not done easily, especially in those New World regions where African slaves survived, worked alongside European indentured servants and landless “free” men and women, and bore offspring — as they did in Britain’s mainland colonies in North America.
In the seventeenth century, African slaves and European indentured servants worked together to build what Ira Berlin characterizes as a “society with slaves” along the Chesapeake Bay. These Africans were slaves, but before the end of the seventeenth century, these Africans were not chattel, not fully. Planters and overseers didn’t use them that differently than their indentured servants. Slaves and servants alike were subject to routine corporeal punishment. Slaves occupied the furthest point along a continuum of unequal and coercive labor relations. (Also, see here and here.) Even so, 20% of the Africans brought into the Chesapeake before 1675 became free, and some of those freed even received the head-right — a plot of land — promised to European indentures. Some of those free Africans would command white indentures and own African slaves.
To the British inhabitants of the Chesapeake, Africans looked different. They sounded different. They acted different. But that was true of the Irish, as well. Africans were pagans, but the kind of people who wound up indentured in the Chesapeake weren’t exactly model Christians. European and African laborers worked, fornicated, fought, wept, birthed, ate, died, drank, danced, traded with one another, and with the indigenous population. Neither laws nor customs set them apart.
And this would become a problem.
By the 1670s, large landowners — some local planters, some absentees — began to consolidate plantations. This pushed the head-rights out to the least-productive lands on the frontier. In 1676, poor whites joined forces with those of African descent under the leadership of Nathaniel Bacon. They torched Jamestown, the colony’s capital. It took British troops several years to bring the Chesapeake under control.
Ultimately, planter elites thwarted class conflict by writing laws and by modeling and encouraging social practices that persuaded those with white skin to imagine that tremendous social significance — inherent difference and inferiority — lay underneath black skin. (Also, see here and here.) New laws regulated social relations — sex, marriage, sociability, trade, assembly, religion — between the “races” that those very laws, in fact, helped to create.
The law of chattel applied to African and African-descended slaves to the fullest extent on eighteenth century plantations. Under racialized chattel slavery, master-enslavers possessed the right to torture and maim, the right to kill, the right to rape, the right to alienate, and the right to own offspring — specifically, the offspring of the female slave. The exploitation of enslaved women’s reproductive labor became a prerogative that masters shared with other white men. Any offspring resulting from rape increased the master’s stock of capital.
Global commerce in slaves and the commodities they produced gave rise to modern finance, to new industries, and to wage-labor in the eighteenth century. Anchored in London, complex trans-Atlantic networks of trading partnerships, insurers, and banks financed the trade in slaves and slave-produced commodities. (Also, see here.) Merchant-financiers located in the seaports all around the Atlantic world provided a form of international currency by discounting the bills of exchange generated in the “triangle trade.” These merchant-financiers connected British creditors to colonial planter-debtors. Some of the world’s first financial derivatives — cotton futures contracts — traded on the Cotton Exchange in Liverpool. British industry blossomed. According to Eric Williams, the capital accumulated from the transatlantic trade in slaves and slave-produced commodities financed British sugar refining, rum distillation, metal-working, gun-making, cotton manufacture, transportation infrastructure, and even James Watt’s steam engine.
After the American Revolution, racialized chattel slavery appeared — to some — as inconsistent with the natural rights and liberties of man. Northern states emancipated their few enslaved residents. But more often, racialized chattel slavery served as the negative referent that affirmed the freedom of white males. (Also, see here.) In Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), Thomas Jefferson — who never freed his enslaved sister-in-law, the mother of his own children — postulated that skin color signaled immutable, inheritable inferiority:
"It is not their condition then, but nature, which has produced the distinction… blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind … This unfortunate difference of colour, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people."
Even so, the former plantation colonies of the Upper South stood in a sorry state after Independence, beset by plummeting commodity prices and depleted soils. After the introduction of the cotton gin in 1791, these master-enslavers found a market for their surplus slave-capital.
The expanding cotton frontier needed capital and the Upper South provided it. Racialized chattel slavery proved itself the most efficient way to produce the world’s most important crop. The U.S. produced no cotton for export in 1790. In the antebellum period, the United States supplied most of the world’s most traded commodity, the key raw ingredient of the Industrial Revolution. Thanks to cotton, the United States ranked as the world’s largest economy on the eve of the Civil War.
From about 1790 until the Civil War, slave-traders and enslavers chained 1 million Americans of African descent into coffles and marched or shipped them down to southeast and southwest states and territories. They were sold at auction houses located in every city in the greater Mississippi Valley.
Capital and capitalist constituted one another at auction. At auction, slaves were stripped and assaulted to judge their strength and their capacity to produce more capital or to gratify the sexual appetites of masters. Perceived markers of docility or defiance informed the imaginative, deeply social practice of valuing slave-capital. In this capital market, Walter Johnson reveals, slaves shaped their sale and masters bought their own selves.
After auction, reconstituted coffles traveled ever deeper into the dark heart of the Cotton Kingdom (also, see here) and after 1836, into the new Republic of Texas. Five times more slaves lived in the United States in 1861 than in 1790, despite the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808 and despite the high levels of infant mortality in the Cotton Kingdom. Slavery was no dying institution.
By 1820, the slave-labor camps that stretched west from South Carolina to Arkansas and south to the Gulf Coast allowed the United States to achieve dominance in the world market for cotton, the most crucial commodity of the Industrial Revolution. At that date, U.S. cotton was the world’s most widely traded commodity. Without those exports, the national economy as a whole could not acquire the goods and the credit it required from abroad.
And the Industrial Revolution that produced those goods depended absolutely on what Kenneth Pomeranz identifies as the “ghost acres” of the New World: those acres seeded, tended, and harvested by slaves of African descent. Pomeranz estimates that if, in 1830, Great Britain had to grow for itself, on its own soil the calories that its workers consumed as sugar, or if it had to raise enough sheep to replace the cotton it imported from the United States, this would have required no less than an additional 25 million acres of land.
In New England and (mostly) Manchester, waged-workers spun cotton thread which steam-powered mills spun into cloth. Once a luxury good, cotton cloth now radically transformed the way human beings across the globe outfitted themselves and their surroundings. Manchester and Lowell discovered an enormous market in the same African-American slaves that grew, tended and cleaned raw cotton, along with the same workers who operated the machines that spun and wove that cotton into cloth. According to Seth Rockman’s forthcoming book, Plantation Goods and the National Economy of Slavery, the ready-made clothing industry emerged in response to the demand from planters for cheap garments to clothe their slaves.
The explosion in cotton supply did not occur simply because more land came under cultivation. It came from increased productivity, as new work by Ed Baptist illustrates. The Cotton Kings combined the bullwhip with new methods of surveilling, measuring, and accounting for the productivity of the enslaved, radically reorganizing patterns of plantation labor. Planter-enslavers compelled their slave-capital to invent ways to increase their productivity — think of bidexterous Patsey in Solomon Northrup’s Twelve Years a Slave. At the end of every day, the overseer weighed the pickings of each individual, chalking up the numbers on a slate. Results were compared to each individual’s quota. Shortfalls were “settled” in lashes. Later the master copied those picking totals into his ledger and erased the slate (both mass-produced by burgeoning new industries up North). Then he set new quotas. And the quotas always increased. Between 1800 and 1860, productivity increases on established plantations matched the productivity increases of the workers that tended to the spinning machines in Manchester in the same period, according to Ed Baptist.
Slavery proved crucial in the emergence of American finance. Profits from commerce, finance, and insurance related to cotton and to slaves flowed to merchant-financiers located in New Orleans and mid-Atlantic port cities, including New York City, where a global financial center grew up on Wall Street.
Cotton Kings themselves devised financial innovations that channeled the savings of investors across the nation and Western Europe to the Mississippi Valley. Cotton Kings, slave traders, and cotton merchants demanded vast amounts of credit to fund their ceaseless speculation and expansion. Planter-enslavers held valuable, liquid collateral: 2 million slaves worth $2 billion, a third of the wealth owned by all U.S. citizens, according to Ed Baptist. With the help of firms like Baring Brothers, Brown Brothers, and Rothschilds, the Cotton Kings sold bonds to capitalize new banks from which they secured loans (pledging their slaves and land for collateral). These bonds were secured by the full faith and credit of the state that chartered the bank. Even as northern states and European empires emancipated their own slaves, investors from these regions shared in the profits of the slave-labor camps in the Cotton Kingdom.
The Cotton Kings did something that neither Freddy, nor Fannie, nor any of “too big to fail” banks managed to do. They secured an explicit and total government guarantee for their banks, placing taxpayers on the hook for interest and principal.
It all ended in the Panic of 1837, when the bubble in southeastern land and slaves burst. Southern taxpayers refused to pay the debts of the planter-banks. Southern States defaulted on those bonds, hampering the South’s ability to raise money through the securities markets for more than a century. Cotton Kings would become dependent as individuals on financial intermediaries tied to Wall Street, firms like Lehman Brothers (founded in Alabama).
It didn’t take very long for the flow of credit to resume. By mid-century, racialized chattel slavery had built not only a wealthy and powerful South. It had also given rise to an industrializing and diversifying North. In New England, where sharp Yankees once amassed profits by plying the transatlantic slave trade — and continued to profit by transporting slave-produced commodities and insuring the enslaved — new industries rose up alongside the textile mills. High protective tariffs on foreign manufactures made the products of U.S. mills and factories competitive in domestic markets, especially in markets supplying plantations.
After the Erie Canal opened in 1824, the North slowly began to reorient towards timber and coal extraction, grain production, livestock, transportation construction, and the manufacture of a vast array of commodities for all manner of domestic and international markets. Chicago supplanted New Orleans. By the 1850s, industrial and agricultural capitalists above the Mason-Dixon line no longer needed cotton to the same extent that they once did. With the notable exception of Wall Street interests in New York City, Northerners began to resist the political power — and the territorial ambitions — of the Cotton Kings. Sectional animosity set the stage for the Civil War.
But up to that point, slave-capital proved indispensable to the emergence of industrial capitalism and to the ascent of the United States as a global economic power. Indeed, the violent dispossession of racialized chattel slaves from their labor, their bodies, and their families — not the enclosure of the commons identified by Karl Marx — set capitalism in motion and sustained capital accumulation for three centuries.
Kwamebeba 8 years ago
I like this chick’s name and the way she thinks. It isn’t a wishful thinking, any sane person can tell from the available accounts of history that Jesus was a Negro. Therefore, I find minds that can come to this realiza ... read full comment
I like this chick’s name and the way she thinks. It isn’t a wishful thinking, any sane person can tell from the available accounts of history that Jesus was a Negro. Therefore, I find minds that can come to this realization fascinating.
Also, I like her “frontal quarters”. Eish, bobby paaa n’abu sei?
Kwamebeba 8 years ago
This is not a comment of mine. There seems to be a mishap!
This is not a comment of mine. There seems to be a mishap!
Kwamebeba 8 years ago
The writer is full of self contradictions. He will say it was not slavery that let the slave nations obtain their capital and go on to say Lincoln attested that abolishing slavely was a costly act. He might say Brazil is re ... read full comment
The writer is full of self contradictions. He will say it was not slavery that let the slave nations obtain their capital and go on to say Lincoln attested that abolishing slavely was a costly act. He might say Brazil is relatively less rich compared to US or UK forgetting that they would have been much more poorer without slavery. Baidoo is in fact, telling us that slavery was not wrong and did not make any nation gain the capital to pursue capitalism.
So is it mere wickedness, callousness and racialism that let the UK, US and all other nations that were involved in slavery come to Africa to kill and pillage when they knew there was no economic benefit from their actions as Baidoo wants us to belief?
As I said, this writer is full of self contradiction and dogmatic to refuse to be scientific. As he wrote "You can feed somebody and, yet he may still think of you as a bastard. That is still his prerogative so long as it stays in his little head." applies to him more than anyone else.
francis kwarteng 8 years ago
Kwamebeba,
Baidoo is refusing to think. That is all I can say. I have advised him to be a bit rational in his arguments. He is allowing the emotionalism of civil libertarianism, another "useless" concept, to take over and ... read full comment
Kwamebeba,
Baidoo is refusing to think. That is all I can say. I have advised him to be a bit rational in his arguments. He is allowing the emotionalism of civil libertarianism, another "useless" concept, to take over and consume his senses (That is why I call him Mr. Oxymoron Civil Libertarian. Most of these right-wing civil libertarians are shameless hypocrites).
This is why I have repeatedly said he has not advanced any intelligent argument as far as his articles are concerned.
Either he is contradicting himself, fabricating facts or lying, or clueless about what the "scientific" facts are with regards to history and historiography.
Fundamentally he is a sentimental or emotional writer. He has nothing "scientifically" substantial to add to the slavery, racism, and capitalism debate.
I don't even think he knows what goes on in the intellectual community with regard to these important topics.
This is clear from the standpoint of his emotional articles. The facts are against his uninformed positions. To tell you the truth Kwamebeba, sometimes I don't know where to start or how to deal with his serious intellectual shortcomings on most of the topics he chooses to write on in his wayward series.
This is all I can say for now. I will leave other well-informed or knowledgeable readers to say what they have on their mind. In fact I briefly discuss some of the contradictions you point in my rejoinder to this very piece. The two postings I have here undermine his arguments.
Thanks.
Kwame 8 years ago
Brain washing is a form of capitalist dehumanization that is why the capitalist make sure that he destroys institutions that he came to meet in Africa, including religious ones. Even Negroes in Asia, Europe, U.S. and other pa ... read full comment
Brain washing is a form of capitalist dehumanization that is why the capitalist make sure that he destroys institutions that he came to meet in Africa, including religious ones. Even Negroes in Asia, Europe, U.S. and other parts of the world are told by the capitalist that their forefathers came and plug the Negro from top tree. Even people in Saudi Arabia profess that they give the African thong because he was without one.
Capitalism is a soulless society the reason why it puts its victim under some form of self deception and hallucination to assume that he gets the best in this world from the capitalist system.
Even some of our people including some presidents who should know better praise the capitalist slave trade, colonization and neocolonialism with the illusion that without them we should not have made progress. The fact however is that the capitalist sold everything to us from religion, education and technology. We bought all that with the toil of our bows and ache from our elbows.
Baidoo you wrote about hunger in socialist countries, but the fact remains that China is the most populated country in the world, yet she feed her people through the state involvement in agriculture and food marketing. There is still a lot of people going hungry in India, though the state there also buys and market food because it is a capitalist state that has not been able to do away with the caste system.
Baidoo you do not have facts about food security in the Koreas. The fact is that South Korea which is not prevented from using nuclear technology, buy food from any part in the world alone buys 30% of meat and maize in the world. It means that there is hunger in South Korea as well. I have been in the Soviet Union and Cuba and have not gone hungry whiles I was there because I go to the same market with the nationals to buy whatever I want.
People like you are ready to loose their human dignity and self respect so long as some crumb of bread fall from the table of someone into your pathetic palm. We had a prime minister who prefer servitude in tranquility even under apartheid because just like you you do not find anything wrong with any fascist regime. It is only moles and warms that do not have eyes to see, so in reality you are like a visionless animal in society. You are pathetic when it comes to scholarship.
ONUA 8 years ago
Are you serious? really? food security in Russia and Cuba and the likes? You are truly insane.
Are you serious? really? food security in Russia and Cuba and the likes? You are truly insane.
Philip Kobina Baidoo 8 years ago
Hello Onua, thank you for noticing how these people lie shamelessly while people die.
Hello Onua, thank you for noticing how these people lie shamelessly while people die.
Kwamebeba 8 years ago
Trust me! Baidoo, even though a fool is still 1000 times better than both the useless guys, francis kwarteng and Lungu.
Trust me! Baidoo, even though a fool is still 1000 times better than both the useless guys, francis kwarteng and Lungu.
Kwamebeba 8 years ago
You are short of ideas and have resulted to character assassination but you know it won't work. People can read inbetween the lines. We take it that everything you are saying is to the contrally, meaning Mr. Kwarten is a mi ... read full comment
You are short of ideas and have resulted to character assassination but you know it won't work. People can read inbetween the lines. We take it that everything you are saying is to the contrally, meaning Mr. Kwarten is a million times wiser.
YAW 8 years ago
The opening gambit says it all. Mr Baidoo, some of us do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday. You seem to get your distorted facts from your imagination and your numerous contradictions to la ... read full comment
The opening gambit says it all. Mr Baidoo, some of us do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday. You seem to get your distorted facts from your imagination and your numerous contradictions to lack of understanding any of the topics you write about. Do you think the chasm created by "vampire capitalist & slavers" over centuries can be easily crossed by your puerile,baseless and infantile articles written on Ghanaweb? You are carrying your love/praise for capitalism to the point of ineptitude.
Baidoo, is obviously well past his look -at-me,hear me and the pointless yell-by date.
Kwartemaa 8 years ago
Look Francis Kwarteng you seems to be a big time disgrace, do you envy Baidoo?
What is all that your nonsense for, are you mad?
Look Francis Kwarteng you seems to be a big time disgrace, do you envy Baidoo?
What is all that your nonsense for, are you mad?
Philip Kobina Baidoo 8 years ago
Hello Kwartemaa, I have actually advised him already to see a shrink before he finds himself in an asylum. Thank you for your input.
Hello Kwartemaa, I have actually advised him already to see a shrink before he finds himself in an asylum. Thank you for your input.
francis kwarteng 8 years ago
Mr. Oxymoron Civil Libertarian,
I am rather envious of the likes of Paul Krugman, Thomas Picketty, Noam Chomsky, etc.
Mr. Oxymoron Civil Libetarian is merely a Ghanaweb writer (not even a good one; a mediocre wtiter in ... read full comment
Mr. Oxymoron Civil Libertarian,
I am rather envious of the likes of Paul Krugman, Thomas Picketty, Noam Chomsky, etc.
Mr. Oxymoron Civil Libetarian is merely a Ghanaweb writer (not even a good one; a mediocre wtiter in terms of the way he argues).
In other words Mr. Oxymoron Civil Libertarian is not someone I can't quote elsewhere where serious discussions takes place. Unless it is nothing really serioues.
But you can quote intelligent scholars like Picketty, Krugman, Chomsky, and those I cite in my works. Some discuss Mr. Oxymoron Civil Libertarian's Ghanaweb when we have nothing serious to talk about. It is fun doing that.
Jealous of Mr. Oxynoron Civil Libertarian? Apuu! I have friends who have impacted the world in a way Mr. Oxymoron Civil Libertarian can never dream of with his middle-school articles, yet I am not even jealous of them.
What has he written for Ghanaweb that most first year university students (and studious/good high school pupils) in a history class cannot writer and write better! None. So what if the point of being jealous of him?
Mr. Oxymoron Civil Libertarian feels good only in his uninformed little world and small corner. He has not made any impact on Ghanaweb, not to talk of his village, then Ghana and the world. Let him stay in that small corner of his and he well be fine
Like I said, I respond to his article merely for the sake of his unsuspecting readership. Other readers advise me to ignore him while others push me to respond to his infantile articles. And he is an easy target.
Thanks.
Prof Lungu 8 years ago
YAW,
Your: "...Baidoo, is obviously well past his look -at-me,hear me and the pointless yell-by date..."
WE SAY: We agree!
You know, for some rather odd reason, Baidoo told us to look at him the other day:
"Look at ... read full comment
YAW,
Your: "...Baidoo, is obviously well past his look -at-me,hear me and the pointless yell-by date..."
WE SAY: We agree!
You know, for some rather odd reason, Baidoo told us to look at him the other day:
"Look at me, I am Civil Libertarian."
The question is, why does totalitarian Baidoo feel the need to qualify his "Libertarian" streak. Is it because he has no love for anarchy, which itself is the natural progression of that ideology.
We believe there is something around that corner worth exploring by those who have time, and are interested.
It is all absent-minded and bizarre - that luxury and "need" to be "Civil"!
Might it be: "Look at me in London, I am Lonely, But Civil?"
C.Y. ANDY-K 8 years ago
I am increasingly astonished at the depth of the ignorance being displayed by Baidoo. He is just like one of those Holocaust Deniers, or the Flat Earthers who continued to argue that the earth was flat despite all the evidenc ... read full comment
I am increasingly astonished at the depth of the ignorance being displayed by Baidoo. He is just like one of those Holocaust Deniers, or the Flat Earthers who continued to argue that the earth was flat despite all the evidence to the contrary until the WWI EXPOSED THEIR LIES TO THEIR GULLIBLE AUDIENCE and put them out of business. The group has been revived though. Won't surprise me if Baidoo joins them!
A major finding of the vast European Project, with which the name of Stein Rokkan is associated (I studied in the AdmOrG. Dept of the Univ Bergen where once plied his scholarly trade), was that religion, for that matter Catholicism, was the single most important variable that caused the fall back of the countries of southern Europe, Italy, Spain and Portugal. This vast research work corroborated Max Weber and his Protestant Ethics.
Baidoo displays a vast ignorance about how primitive accumulation as existed during the mercantilist period,involving the plundering and looting of other countries (begger your neighbour style) and enslaving others to work for you laid the basis of modern capitalism. Nyebro Yaw has posted enough to enlighten even the most ignorance.
But here is a bit about the relationship or link between the cotton gin, slavery and capitalism as spelt out on one website on Eli Whitney.
"It has been argued by some historians that Whitney's cotton gin was an important if unintended cause of the American Civil War. Before the invention of the cotton gin, slavery had been on the decline; in fact many slaveholders had even given away their slaves.[citation needed] After Whitney's invention, the plantation slavery industry was rejuvenated, eventually culminating in the Civil War.[8]
And the cotton gin transformed Southern agriculture and the national economy.[9] Southern cotton found ready markets in Europe and in the burgeoning textile mills of New England. Cotton exports from the U.S. boomed after the cotton gin's appearance – from less than 500,000 pounds (230,000 kg) in 1793 to 93 million pounds (42,000,000 kg) by 1810.[10] Cotton was a staple that could be stored for long periods and shipped long distances, unlike most agricultural products. It became the U.S.'s chief export, representing over half the value of U.S. exports from 1820 to 1860.
Paradoxically, the cotton gin, a labor-saving device, helped preserve slavery in the U.S. Before the 1790s, slave labor was primarily employed in growing rice, tobacco, and indigo, none of which were especially profitable any more. Neither was cotton, due to the difficulty of seed removal. But with the gin, growing cotton with slave labor became highly profitable – the chief source of wealth in the American South, and the basis of frontier settlement from Georgia to Texas. "King Cotton" became a dominant economic force, and slavery was sustained as a key institution of Southern society."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eli_Whitney
So there we have it. How can an industry based on slavery which was contributing over 50% of teh exports of the US, not to mention feeding the factories of the North, be said not to have contributed to the wealth of America?
BTw, slave ships from even the Northern states of the US sailed to Africa. Even the then racist Quakers who were in principle opposed to slavery, invested in slave ships!
Baidoo doesn't know what he is writing about. He is as bad as Prof. George Ayittey, who I had accused of indulging in false and abstract empiricism.
Andy-K
francis kwarteng 8 years ago
Nyebro Yao,
Don't mind this lost-in-the-wilderness Mr. Oxymoron Civil Libertarian.
Nearly the facts are against his arguments. He should discard his 10,000-year-old ideas and start reading seriously. He is way way way ... read full comment
Nyebro Yao,
Don't mind this lost-in-the-wilderness Mr. Oxymoron Civil Libertarian.
Nearly the facts are against his arguments. He should discard his 10,000-year-old ideas and start reading seriously. He is way way way behind the facts of history.
Thanks again for straightening this man.
Philip Kobina Baidoo 8 years ago
Hello Yaw, I am looking forward to your well-research version of the topic to learn something and become wiser. Thank you.
Hello Yaw, I am looking forward to your well-research version of the topic to learn something and become wiser. Thank you.
Prof Lungu 8 years ago
READ: "...If slavery is what made America rich, the sensible question anybody should ask is why Brazil is not as rich as America? The fact is Brazil consumed more slaves than America. Some of the records even suggest twice as ... read full comment
READ: "...If slavery is what made America rich, the sensible question anybody should ask is why Brazil is not as rich as America? The fact is Brazil consumed more slaves than America. Some of the records even suggest twice as much. Of course, due the proximity of Brazil to Africa slaves were much cheaper. Let’s conclude that slavery is what enriched America, as the stupidity of Mr Kwarteng has been trumpeting all along. Per his ignorance, it is even logical to conclude that if slavery is what made America rich then Brazil should be twice richer. I don’t have to tell you the answer; anybody who reads this article is smart enough to know. Besides, it wasn’t just Brazil in the Southern American continent that consumed slaves; there are many more – Columbia, Peru Bolivia etc., but can you compare their current state to America?..."
WE SAY: Imagine such a question from the Libertarian!
Brazil consumed more slaves!
Brazil in the Southern American continent that consumed slaves!
ITEM: That a broken record!
No amount of scholarship will help Mr. Phillip Kobina Baidoo!
We won't even waste our time further!
GORGORDUTOR 8 years ago
SYMPTOMS: The patient presents with the following: Febrile brain dysfunction, logical displacement, intellectual shallowness, insult as argument and lack of rational amalysis, never mind the profound unwillingness to avail hi ... read full comment
SYMPTOMS: The patient presents with the following: Febrile brain dysfunction, logical displacement, intellectual shallowness, insult as argument and lack of rational amalysis, never mind the profound unwillingness to avail himself of facts and an inability to engage facts and theorems that challenge his world view!!
DIAGNOSIS: Symptoms indicate subject suffers from :SELF ABASEMENT, RACIAL INFERIORITY COMPLEX, NON- INTELLECTUAL HUBRIS, ARGUMENTAE NON-COGENTA, INSULTIS NON-RATIONAE, AFRICANUS SERVILII & sundry other leading indicators of ACQUIRED NEOCOLONIAL INTELLECTUAL DEPENDENCY SYNDROME aka IMPERIALIST RUNNING DOG COMPLEX or in the vernacular: BRAINWASHED WANNABE WHITEMAN DISEASE aka BLACK/BROWN COCONUT.
PROGNOSIS: Subject is beyond intellectual assistance as he is constantly ingesting the mental toxins that have resulted in his current state!!
TREATMENT PROTOCOL: NONE, concerned observers must endeavor to inoculate the general populace as subject is a StageIV victim where subject feels compelled to attempt to spread the syndrome!! Fortunately he is fast approaching terminal stage.
Philip Kobina Baidoo 8 years ago
You guys are desperate. If I were you I would have stopped reading what you and your ilk perceive as neo-colonialism hogwash. Yet, you can’t have enough of my nonsense, and you keep coming back for more. What an irony! It i ... read full comment
You guys are desperate. If I were you I would have stopped reading what you and your ilk perceive as neo-colonialism hogwash. Yet, you can’t have enough of my nonsense, and you keep coming back for more. What an irony! It is the classic hallmark of a dying faith – Nkrumahism.
francis kwarteng 8 years ago
Mr. Oxymoron Civil Libertarian,
Hahahaha...Is that all you can say? I thought you had all the words in the world.
I mean all you can say is "desperate." Your psychiatrist gives you an excellent diagnosis and prognosis ... read full comment
Mr. Oxymoron Civil Libertarian,
Hahahaha...Is that all you can say? I thought you had all the words in the world.
I mean all you can say is "desperate." Your psychiatrist gives you an excellent diagnosis and prognosis and all you can say is "desperate."
Are you in a state of confusion or suffering from intellectual bipolarity? I love Gorgortudor's diagnosis.
And you know he is better informed than you, right? Please go back and read some of his critiques which make your arguments look foolish. Unfortunatly you stuck in that mud we call neocolianism hogwash. Your chilsh articles are products of a neocolonial hogwash mindset. Can't you see)
Hahahaha....
Thank him.
Philip Kobina Baidoo 8 years ago
You need serious help. You are fighting your own shadow. I feel pity for you. I initially thought I should do something to save you, but you are lost cause.
You need serious help. You are fighting your own shadow. I feel pity for you. I initially thought I should do something to save you, but you are lost cause.
francis kwarteng 8 years ago
Are you okay, you keep responding to Gorgortudor and me?
SYMPTOMS: The patient presents with the following: Febrile brain dysfunction, logical displacement, intellectual shallowness, insult as argument and lack of rationa ... read full comment
Are you okay, you keep responding to Gorgortudor and me?
SYMPTOMS: The patient presents with the following: Febrile brain dysfunction, logical displacement, intellectual shallowness, insult as argument and lack of rational amalysis, never mind the profound unwillingness to avail himself of facts and an inability to engage facts and theorems that challenge his world view!!
DIAGNOSIS: Symptoms indicate subject suffers from :SELF ABASEMENT, RACIAL INFERIORITY COMPLEX, NON- INTELLECTUAL HUBRIS, ARGUMENTAE NON-COGENTA, INSULTIS NON-RATIONAE, AFRICANUS SERVILII & sundry other leading indicators of ACQUIRED NEOCOLONIAL INTELLECTUAL DEPENDENCY SYNDROME aka IMPERIALIST RUNNING DOG COMPLEX or in the vernacular: BRAINWASHED WANNABE WHITEMAN DISEASE aka BLACK/BROWN COCONUT.
PROGNOSIS: Subject is beyond intellectual assistance as he is constantly ingesting the mental toxins that have resulted in his current state!!
TREATMENT PROTOCOL: NONE, concerned observers must endeavor to inoculate the general populace as subject is a StageIV victim where subject feels compelled to attempt to spread the syndrome!! Fortunately he is fast approaching terminal stage.
GORGORDUTOR 8 years ago
I had resolved to not comment on PKB's intellectually shallow write-ups. Any half decent student of history, political economy and current world affairs can refute the infantile irrational non analytical vomit he insists on s ... read full comment
I had resolved to not comment on PKB's intellectually shallow write-ups. Any half decent student of history, political economy and current world affairs can refute the infantile irrational non analytical vomit he insists on spewing in this forum without breaking a sweat. Egya Kwarteng & Prof Lungu come to mind in this regard. However his sniveling sense of grievance which manifests in the gratuitous insult that lard his writing compelled my earlier comment. I am working on a satirical commentary on his losing battle with Master Kwarteng which will take the form of a newspaper report on prizefight. Stay tuned! GORGORDUTOR for the PEOPLE will rest till then!!
(a) Title: “TOP 6 COUNTRIES THAT GREW FILTHY RICH FROM ENSLAVING BLACK PEOPLE” (Visit the website of Black Atlantic Star)
1) The UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA)
Slavery transformed America into an economic power. ...
read full comment
Title: "Slaves: The Capital that Made Capitalism ("Rethinking Capitalism")"
Author: Julia Ott (April 9, 2014)
Racialized chattel slaves were the capital that made capitalism. While most theories of capitalism set slaver ...
read full comment
I like this chick’s name and the way she thinks. It isn’t a wishful thinking, any sane person can tell from the available accounts of history that Jesus was a Negro. Therefore, I find minds that can come to this realiza ...
read full comment
This is not a comment of mine. There seems to be a mishap!
The writer is full of self contradictions. He will say it was not slavery that let the slave nations obtain their capital and go on to say Lincoln attested that abolishing slavely was a costly act. He might say Brazil is re ...
read full comment
Kwamebeba,
Baidoo is refusing to think. That is all I can say. I have advised him to be a bit rational in his arguments. He is allowing the emotionalism of civil libertarianism, another "useless" concept, to take over and ...
read full comment
Brain washing is a form of capitalist dehumanization that is why the capitalist make sure that he destroys institutions that he came to meet in Africa, including religious ones. Even Negroes in Asia, Europe, U.S. and other pa ...
read full comment
Are you serious? really? food security in Russia and Cuba and the likes? You are truly insane.
Hello Onua, thank you for noticing how these people lie shamelessly while people die.
Trust me! Baidoo, even though a fool is still 1000 times better than both the useless guys, francis kwarteng and Lungu.
You are short of ideas and have resulted to character assassination but you know it won't work. People can read inbetween the lines. We take it that everything you are saying is to the contrally, meaning Mr. Kwarten is a mi ...
read full comment
The opening gambit says it all. Mr Baidoo, some of us do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday. You seem to get your distorted facts from your imagination and your numerous contradictions to la ...
read full comment
Look Francis Kwarteng you seems to be a big time disgrace, do you envy Baidoo?
What is all that your nonsense for, are you mad?
Hello Kwartemaa, I have actually advised him already to see a shrink before he finds himself in an asylum. Thank you for your input.
Mr. Oxymoron Civil Libertarian,
I am rather envious of the likes of Paul Krugman, Thomas Picketty, Noam Chomsky, etc.
Mr. Oxymoron Civil Libetarian is merely a Ghanaweb writer (not even a good one; a mediocre wtiter in ...
read full comment
YAW,
Your: "...Baidoo, is obviously well past his look -at-me,hear me and the pointless yell-by date..."
WE SAY: We agree!
You know, for some rather odd reason, Baidoo told us to look at him the other day:
"Look at ...
read full comment
I am increasingly astonished at the depth of the ignorance being displayed by Baidoo. He is just like one of those Holocaust Deniers, or the Flat Earthers who continued to argue that the earth was flat despite all the evidenc ...
read full comment
Nyebro Yao,
Don't mind this lost-in-the-wilderness Mr. Oxymoron Civil Libertarian.
Nearly the facts are against his arguments. He should discard his 10,000-year-old ideas and start reading seriously. He is way way way ...
read full comment
Hello Yaw, I am looking forward to your well-research version of the topic to learn something and become wiser. Thank you.
READ: "...If slavery is what made America rich, the sensible question anybody should ask is why Brazil is not as rich as America? The fact is Brazil consumed more slaves than America. Some of the records even suggest twice as ...
read full comment
SYMPTOMS: The patient presents with the following: Febrile brain dysfunction, logical displacement, intellectual shallowness, insult as argument and lack of rational amalysis, never mind the profound unwillingness to avail hi ...
read full comment
You guys are desperate. If I were you I would have stopped reading what you and your ilk perceive as neo-colonialism hogwash. Yet, you can’t have enough of my nonsense, and you keep coming back for more. What an irony! It i ...
read full comment
Mr. Oxymoron Civil Libertarian,
Hahahaha...Is that all you can say? I thought you had all the words in the world.
I mean all you can say is "desperate." Your psychiatrist gives you an excellent diagnosis and prognosis ...
read full comment
You need serious help. You are fighting your own shadow. I feel pity for you. I initially thought I should do something to save you, but you are lost cause.
Are you okay, you keep responding to Gorgortudor and me?
SYMPTOMS: The patient presents with the following: Febrile brain dysfunction, logical displacement, intellectual shallowness, insult as argument and lack of rationa ...
read full comment
I had resolved to not comment on PKB's intellectually shallow write-ups. Any half decent student of history, political economy and current world affairs can refute the infantile irrational non analytical vomit he insists on s ...
read full comment