Pirate's Cove

Think ahead to July 2021: other than a few uber-leftist cities defunding their police, either partially or totally, causing a massive spike in criminal activity and people and companies abandoning those cities, nothing will have been done for real on police reform. Why? Because uber-leftists added all their pet issues into the mix, making it too convoluted to care about, and people just tune out

What Do the Racial Wealth Gap, Police Brutality, and the Climate Crisis Have in Common? Wall Street

In case you missed their tweets and statements, Wall Street wants you to know that it is definitely, without a doubt, very much not racist. Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, even took a knee for one particularly well-lit photo opportunity. Yet, peek behind the curtain and it’s clear that white supremacy continues to pull Wall Street’s strings.

Not that this should surprise anyone.

For generations, the slave trade and the financial system operated in a twisted symbiosis. Banks provided loans to white plantation owners to buy black slaves. Plantation owners used slaves as collateral to take out more loans. In southern states, as many as eighty percent of mortgages were taken out using enslaved black people as collateral.

That was hundreds of years ago. The people involved are long dead.

When plantation owners defaulted on their debts, banks would take direct ownership of slaves. JPMorgan Chase has admitted that its forebears owned more than 1,250 enslaved people. It should surprise no one that Wall Street was New York’s first slave market. And banks weren’t the only ones making a killing. Insurance companies like AIG and New York Life sold policies to slave owners guaranteeing pay-outs if their slaves were killed or injured. In all, forty percent of cotton revenue may have ended up in New York.

Sounds like we have to #CancelNYC.

A report by the Action Center on Race and the Economy has highlighted how Wall Street made $891 million in profit from what they call police brutality bonds―high-interest rate loans to cities and counties that cover the costs of police brutality legal settlements.

Um, what of those cities and counties with the claims? Oh, right, uber-far left Common Dreams will excuse them because they are mostly run by Democrats.

Then there is the fact that since the Paris Agreement was signed, the world’s largest banks have loaned more than $2.7 trillion to the fossil fuel industry. JPMorgan Chase alone has provided over $296 billion to the fossil fuel industry in that time.

The fossil fuel corporations funded by Wall Street cause vast harm to black communities; yet, black communities reap almost no benefit from the industry. As a 2014 NAACP report documented, 68% of African Americans live within thirty miles of a coal-fired power plant, resulting in higher rates of birth defects, cancers, heart disease, and other maladies, as well as lower property values. Yet, African Americans hold only 1.1% of the nation’s energy jobs and claim just 0.001% of the revenue from energy industries.

Of course, fossil fuel companies are also wrecking our planet’s climate. As the 130 organizations in the Stop the Money Pipeline coalition have been pointing out, the money that Wall Street pipes to the fossil fuel industry is the oxygen upon which the fire of global warming burns. Without it, the fossil fuel industry simply couldn’t afford to build its new coal mines and oil pipelines.

Wall Street, it turns out, is every bit as complicit in the climate crisis as it was in the slave trade.

When will Common Dreams call out all the people who actually use fossil fuels, such as the Democrats campaigning across the country?