http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-24/how-slavery-led-to-modern-capitalism-echoes.html
Excerpt 1:
When the New York City banker James Brown tallied his wealth in 1842, he had to look far below Wall Street to trace its origins. His investments in the American South exceeded $1.5 million, a quarter of which was directly bound up in the ownership of slave plantations.
Brown was among the world’s most powerful dealers in raw cotton, and his family’s firm, Brown Brothers & Co., served as one of the most important sources of capital and foreign exchange to the U.S. economy. Still, no small amount of his time was devoted to managing slaves from the study of his Leonard Street brownstone in Lower Manhattan.
Excerpt 2:
This recognizably modern capitalist economy was no less reliant on slavery than the mercantilist economy of the preceding century. Rather, it offered a wider range of opportunities to profit from the remote labor of slaves, especially as cotton emerged as the indispensable commodity of the age of industry.
Comment:
See that part there in bold from excerpt 2? Apple just disclosed record blowout earnings and reported they have $97 billion in cash. They have those Chinese factories going 24 hours a day, and the owner of the company that assembles Apple products had a management seminar where he called his employees animals.
How different in its economic repercussions is this remote exploitable labor than black American slavery?
The main difference that I can see is that it’s very far away and easy to folks from when you put a shiny iPad in their hands.
