Power Corrupts - 342

A Link between Slavery & Big Oil

 Noam Chomsky, one of the world's most quoted authors, expresses his opinion of the Big Oil misinformation campaign: "I don't know what word in the language—I can't find one—that applies to people of that kind, who are willing to sacrifice the existence of organized human life, not in the distant future, so they can put a few more dollars in highly overstuffed pockets. The word 'evil' doesn't begin to approach it."

Was there another time in US history when evil ruled?  Let's look at the United States before the Civil War. In the South, there were 4 million enslaved people. The slaves, or their parents, or grandparents, or someone in their lineage had been kidnapped, shackled, and shipped to the Americas to spend their lives with no freedom whatsoever. This criminal operation started in 1619 and accelerated until the Union forces ended it.

The black humans had no rights and were conveniently labeled as less than human. They were worked as farm animals, as beasts of burden. They could be legally whipped,  beaten, and killed. Their offspring could be taken from them and sold.

If an enslaved person showed disobedience against their enslavers, they were severely beaten. Enslaved people, enraged by their treatment, sometimes reacted violently. These slaves were often hung but sometimes were burnt alive. Their remains were frequently left out where the hogs could feast on their corpses.  

How could this be? What is the nature of man? Could have the authors of the Constitution prohibited slavery in our country?

The men who wrote the Constitution included enslaver protections to ensure Southern participation to keep them in the country.  

One enslaver protection was a clever political maneuver that flew in the face of democracy. It was the 3/5s clause. Even though the Southern Whites did not consider blacks human, they demanded that, for congressional representation in Washington, DC, each enslaved person be regarded as 3/5s of a citizen. So, for every 5 slaves they were allowed to count 3 of them for the census.  This allowed the southern states to count 2.4 million of their 4 million slaves  for the sake of the national census representation. This gave the South more congressmen than their voting public was justified.

This also helps explains why we have an electoral college. In those days the Constitution mandated that Congress elect the President. Giving the South 3/5s of the 4 million enslaved people not only padded their congressional seats in the House of Representatives but gave them a leg up in Presidential races. The Electoral College is an archaic relic of our government's protection of slavery.

For good measure, the authors of the Constitution threw in the Slave Trade and Fugitive Slave Trade Clauses protecting the enslavers and the slave trade.

This happened while the rest of the world began to see slavery as the inhumane practice it was. Mexico, Canada, and Great Britain condemned the institution of slavery. In 1829, it was prohibited in Mexico and outlawed in the English Empire in 1833.

In 1829 when Mexico outlawed slavery, Texans owned at least 5,000 enslaved people. In 1835, Texas revolted and seceded from Mexico. Eventually, Texas was integrated into the US as a slave state.

While the rest of the world was cracking down on slavery and the North was growing critical of the practice, the South doubled down on it, hoping to spread slavery west into the territories and then south to Central and South America. Some Southern "Gentlemen" even suggested Africa be conquered and turned into a slave continent.

When the Civil War began, the Southern States enshrined slavery immediately into their constitutions.

What drove this love of an evil practice? It was the massive profits of plantation owners who grew cotton. In the early 1800s, the world had yet to industrialize. The power to get things done came primarily from animals like horses, mules, and oxen or from humans. The more beasts of burden you owned, the more land you could cultivate and the more cotton you could bring to market.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, the Mississippi River Valley had more millionaires than any other US region. Cotton was king.

Three-quarters of whites in the South were not plantation owners and owned only a few or no enslaved people.

When the Civil War broke out, though, the less wealthy Southerners filled the ranks of the Confederate Army. This has always puzzled me. A white craftsman or laborer in the South would have found it difficult to compete with a slaveowner in the marketplace. The plantation enslaver could underbid others with free labor. 

To make this even more ironic, when the Confederacy started to draft men into the army, they granted slave owners with more than 20 slaves a pass to stay on the plantation.

Why did these men fight for this dehumanizing system that did not serve them?  

First, the South was not a free society. It was an oligarchy of slave owners whose money pulled all the political power levers.

The plantation owners hired thugs to run newspapers out-of-town If those newspapers were critical of slavery. Abolitionists were tarred and feathered; the abolitionist printing presses were thrown in the river. Printed newspapers critical of slavery were burnt before they could be read.

When Lincoln ran and won the 1860 election, he was not even on the ballot in most Southern States.

The Southern plantation owners built another parallel narrative that put them at the peak of gentility and high-minded codes of honor.

 In this near-feudal land of one-sided information, a myth was created. No matter how wide the gap between rich and poor whites, the Southern propaganda cemented into the psyche of the Southerners that whites were the "superior race." The propaganda was so convincing they believed they were doing God's work, taking care of what they believed were an inferior people. When hostilities broke out, they believed they were on God's side.

I do not know why the South attempted to secede. As noted, they were given unfair extra representation in Congress. And the Conservative Supreme Court was controlled by proslavery judges.  By the time the South seceded, the Taney Supreme Court had ruled that enslaved people were the property of their owners no matter where that enslaved person was. Then, they ruled a black person could never be a citizen.

This is what happens when money corrupts. Today, Big Oil is making unprecedented profits. Like the slave-owning plantation owners, they have the money to control the propaganda machines and levers of power. Like the pre-civil war Supreme Court, our current Supreme Court has sided with Big Oil money. It has ruled against the Environmental Protection Agency's authority to protect us from pollution and climate catastrophe.

Today, newspapers are not only beset with financial hurdles, but the newspaper owners are under political pressure, just as newspapers were in the pre-civil war South. Jeff Bezos caved to political pressure and muzzled the work of his staff when they attempted to endorse Kamala Harris. In response to his caving to political pressure, seven high-ranking Washington Post staff members left.

Social media, already riddled with misinformation, are now billionaire playgrounds of propaganda. If Mark Zuckerburg ever cared about accuracy on his social media platform, he has now made it official. He announced that truth is not in the wheelhouse of Facebook and Meta. Facebook/Meta will cease any efforts to weed out lies.

The most irresponsible billionaire who bought his own social media company has turned it into his own propaganda platform. Twitter/X is vetted not for truth but for loyalty to Elon Musk.

One thing I have learned is humans love to gossip. Information, good or evil, flows from this banter. Either constructive ideas emerge out of this chatter, or destructive ideas prevail. Humans are easily fooled.

In the case of the South, information was subverted. The rich were able to control who they wished to and intimidate the rest. Without a voice against slavery, the Southerners bought into the lie that slavery was a God-approved good. It is incredible how moral truths can be turned on their heads in our heads.

What should the years running up to the Civil War teach us?

Can we draw any correlations between the evils of Slavery and the evils of the oil industry which is causing irreparable damage to our climate?  Both are controlled by the richest people in the country for the sole purpose of increasing profits.  Both have been described as “evil”.  Both have done irreparable harm, and both will go down in history as being wrong to support.  

Two things to remember:

First, money can corrupt us all. To remain free of corruption, we must resist corruptive influences.

Second, we are all susceptible to propaganda. We all must become wise consumers of information. Every nook and cranny of our information system is under threat. If we do not search out good sources of information, then the sources we do consume will poison us just like they did in the Confederate South, or Nazi Germany, or Fascist Italy.

This is no time to be intellectually lazy.