Slavery and debt

JP Morgan Chase, the second-biggest bank in the U.S., put it ever so delicately: "[The bank] had predecessors that had customers that appear to have used enslaved individuals."

That is how a Jan. 20 statement began that was written so as not to offend--well, not to offend those tied to the slave owners, anyway. JP Morgan Chase offered its "apologies" for its links to slavery, admitting that its predecessor banks had "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."

It is the tip of an iceberg. The role of the banks in financing slavery, particularly New York banks that were also tied in with the cotton trade, remains mostly a hidden history in this country. Even JP Morgan Chase's statement hides this history, attributing all of its transgressions to a Louisiana-based bank that it merged with in the 1930s. This month--Black History Month--would be a very good time to expose the full history of JP Morgan Chase and the other Wall Street institutions in the enslavement of African peoples before slavery was abolished by the Civil War.

A movement has grown up in this country among the descendants of the enslaved Africans to demand reparations from those who became rich through slavery. One case brought to court named JP Morgan Chase as one of 18 companies involved in slavery. The list also included Lloyds of London, FleetBoston, RJ Reynolds Tobacco, Brown & Williamson, CSX Corporation and Lehman Brothers.

The wealth of these giant banks, financial institutions and corporate monopolies is immense. Yet it was gained from the stolen labor of enslaved peoples. Any fair-minded person would agree that they owe reparations, big time.

There's really no reason that the reparations owed should be limited to those who live in this country. The countries of Africa were devastated by the European slavers, who delivered their human cargoes mostly to the Americas. The devastation was so deep that recovery has been impossible to this day.

In "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa," Walter Rodney gives the details: "No one has been able to come up with a figure representing total losses to the African population sustained through the extraction of slave labor from all areas to all destinations over the many centuries that slave trade existed. However, on every other continent from the 15th century onwards, the population showed constant and sometimes spectacular natural increase; while it is striking that the same did not apply to Africa."

Rodney explains further: "All of the countries named as 'underdeveloped' in the world are exploited by others; and the underdevelopment with which the world is now preoccupied is a product of capitalist, imperialist and colonialist exploitation. African and Asian societies were developing independently until they were taken over directly or indirectly by the capitalist powers. When that happened, exploitation increased and the export of surplus ensued, depriving the societies of the benefit of their natural resources and labor. That is an integral part of underdevelopment in the contemporary sense."

So what happened when the world's seven imperialist powers--the U.S., Britain, Japan, France, Germany, Italy and Canada--met as the Group of Seven in early February? They made a showy announcement of an "African debt relief plan." The news reports said that they would be "forgiving the debt of some of the world's poorest countries." The fine print of what they are actually doing was quite different.

Turns out to be another publicity stunt, when what is really needed now is not just full cancellation of all "debt," but also payment of reparations. Only such a payment can begin to end the poverty and devastation that is the legacy of slavery and imperialism.