'WHO DID YOU EXPLOIT TODAY?'

‘Who did you exploit today?’ That’s what Tahmel Morton asks men working on Wall Street in New York. Filmed as a comedy sketch for the MTV2 programme ‘Wonder Showzen,’ what makes it so funny is how it sheds light on a brutal yet taboo reality.

With its origins dating back to 1711, Wall Street emerged as none other than a slave market where stolen Africans were auctioned as cattle and commodities to the highest bidder. The founders and their descendants of top Wall Street financial institutions, such as Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citibank, and JP Morgan (to name a few), made astronomically large sums of money through the labour of enslaved Africans in the US South, Cuba, and other Caribbean islands. And speaking about the US South, let’s not forget the US North. Their businesses and institutions equally profited from chattel slavery by building slave ships, financing plantations in the US South, trading enslaved Africans to and from the Caribbean islands and beyond, and benefitting from slave labour at so-called prestigious colleges, such as Princeton, Harvard and Brown.

By the end of the 19th century, Wall Street banks embarked on a brutal mission of colonial expansion into the Caribbean, targeting countries such as Haiti, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Puerto Rico and Panama with the goal of taking over local banks, forcing them to rely on the US dollar, opening Caribbean branches of Wall Street banks, controlling commodity financing, and re-organising national debt owed to Europe.

Wall Street investment firms have since destroyed the lives of many working-class African-descent people in the United States by controlling the housing market and buying up entire neighbourhoods, putting the ownership of single-family homes out of reach for millions of people. They have created a global economic order in which a worker’s most important task is to maximise a company’s share value.

The question to investment bankers, hedge-fund managers, stockbrokers and financial managers on Wall Street remains: Who did you exploit today?

Video credit: @mtv2Sources:https://jacobin.com/2024/05/single-family-homes-rentals-wall-street

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/peter-james-hudson-bankers-and-empire

https://time.com/6692434/wall-street-slavery-essay

https://www.thestreet.com/investing/wall-street-legacy-in-slavery

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-49476247

https://www.democracynow.org/2013/11/29/ebony_and_ivy_the_secret_history