As the colonial COVID-19 virus wreaks havoc on the African and Indigenous communities, the U.S. government is bailing out the parasitic Wall Street banks with trillions of dollars.
A look back at the Obama-era bailouts gives us some indication of who will be the primary recipients of Trump’s Coronavirus economic stimulus package.
As reported on March 31, 2020 by WallStreetOnParade.com, the Federal Reserve from December 2007 to November 2011 funneled over $29 trillion to banks on Wall Street, with just 14 global financial institutions receiving over $16 trillion of it.
Those banks included: CitiGroup, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase.
Let’s put these numbers into perspective: $29 trillion is nearly one-and-a-half times the gross domestic product (GDP) of the entire U.S. economy.
In other words, if you took the final price of every single good and service produced in the U.S. in one year, added that up and multiplied it by one-and-a-half, you would have the amount of money shoveled over to the banks during the Obama years.
The COVID-19 “relief” stimulus package signed into law by Trump last month allocated $425 billion for corporations.
That money is going to the Federal Reserve, as a down payment on a loan ten times the size of the investment.
This means the real size of the bailout going to the banks and corporations is going to be $4 trillion.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
The New York Fed has pumped hundreds of billions of dollars a week into Wall Street’s trading houses since September of 2019, amounting to up to more than $9 trillion in cumulative loans made at dirt-cheap borrowing rates.
If you are adding this up, don’t forget the $1.5 trillion in short-term loans the New York Fed gave to the banks in early March. Now we’re looking at $14.5 trillion in the past seven months!
That is just the beginning. According to U.S. government officials, another stimulus package is in the works.
Capitalism and Wall Street: Built on slavery and genocide
The trillions of dollars being forked over to the banks represent the accumulated value of hundreds of years of stolen African labor and resources.
The banking industry and the whole economy of parasitic capitalism are built on the enslavement and exploitation of African people.
Buildings in the New York financial district are literally constructed on a cemetery of enslaved African human beings.
As Chairman Omali Yeshitela of the African People’s Socialist Party has explained, the origins of the capitalist economic system are in the enslavement of African people, who were forced to function as the “start-up capital” for the whole capitalist enterprise.
Africans were transformed into commodities and forced to labor for hundreds of years for no pay.
Wall Street became the city’s first official market for the sale and rental of enslaved Africans and Indigenous people in 1711.
The first “stock” traded on the New York Stock Exchange was African human beings.
During the period of chattel slavery, New York received 40 percent of U.S. cotton revenue through money that its financial firms, shipping businesses and insurance companies earned.
Some of the largest insurance firms in the U.S.—New York Life, AIG and Aetna —sold policies that ensured slave owners would be compensated if the enslaved Africans they owned were injured or killed.
In 2005, JP Morgan Chase—a Coronavirus profiteer—admitted that two of its subsidiaries—Citizens’ Bank and Canal Bank in Louisiana—accepted enslaved African people as collateral for loans.
If plantation owners defaulted on loan payments, the banks took ownership of the enslaved Africans. Citibank, Bank of America and Wells Fargo also benefited from the slave trade.
These are the same banks who are engorging themselves today on trillions of dollars in bailout money stained in the blood of slavery, colonialism and genocide, as Africans are dying in droves from the colonialvirus.
Minutes away from the towering buildings on Wall Street where corporate CEOs drool over their stock portfolios, refrigerated trucks are parked on the side of a Queens hospital to handle the influx of dead bodies; most are Africans.
Reparations are owed—way more than $29 trillion
The People’s War strategy of the African People’s Socialist Party demands reparations from the parasitic Wall Street elite.
As point #11 of the APSP 14-Point Platform states, “[w]e want the U.S. and the international European ruling class and states to pay Africa and African people for the centuries of genocide, oppression, and enslavement of our people.”
This is why the Party is building its own independent anti-colonial African working-class economic foundation on the road to socialism and the defeat of parasitic capitalism.
The Party’s organization of white solidarity with African liberation, the African People’s Solidarity Committee and its mass front, Uhuru Solidarity Movement, are building a national campaign to “Make Wall Street Pay Reparations.”
The campaign will be launched at the “Reparations Uprising” National Conference hosted by USM on Zoom on April 18-19.
More information is available at UhuruSolidarity.org/Convention.
Victory to The People’s War!
Reparations Now!
No More Bailouts for the Billionaires!
Uhuru!
