Monopoly capitalism monopolizes all wealth.
It bogarts the air, the land, and the water.
It bogarts our labor and the things we produce.
It bogarts our food.
It bogarts our creativity.
Monopoly capital steals from us.
It steals our kinship and turns us against one another.
It even steals our kinship with the Earth that nourishes us.
Monopoly capitalism is a parasite that is killing its host.
In my last post I made reference to the verbal gymnastics of the Supreme Court in justifying the seizure of Indigenous territories by the United States. And I linked to some things I wrote about an early case, Fletcher v. Peck, 10 U.S. 87 (1810) in a previous post, from January. But that earlier post had a slightly different focus, so I want to revisit that Court decision here. It is an example of what I mean when I say that the Declaration of Independence was, among other things, a license for private land speculators to use the US Army to back them up when they were selling Native land that they decided was theirs to sell: to steal cultivated farms, houses, and community buildings from Native people; to force them, at gunpoint, to move hundreds of miles to land occupied by other Native people - land to which the white speculators also had no right. It is what I mean when I say that the US Army fought against Indigenous peoples for over a hundred years after the American Revolution to get actual (and not just pretended) sovereignty over what we now think of as the United States.
This is as good a place as any to emphasize that phrase: “cultivated farms, houses, and community buildings.” If you, the reader, received a typical education in US history you will have been left with the impression that Native Americans simply roamed freely over their territories. People frequently post maps that unintentionally reinforce that misconception by putting tribal names on ill-defined areas. In contrast, I am including here a map showing the area that is western New York State today, and that people imagine was already New York 250 years ago. It presents the settlements as they were shortly before the American Revolution. Note that every one of those triangles is an Indigenous town, whether Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, or Oneida. The squares represent British forts.
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| from Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History, Helen Hornbeck Tanner |
Another way of understanding just how developed these Native towns and farms were is by looking at Army records of their destruction. In 1779, during the Revolutionary War, George Washington ordered General John Sullivan and one-third of the Continental Army to raid that area and destroy the homes and crops. You will notice that I emphasize the number of troops Washington committed at a time when he was fighting the mighty British Army. It shows how difficult he thought the task would be, but also how important. The Continental troops burned forty towns, 160,000 bushels of corn, and an uncounted volume of fruits and vegetables. These were settled, well-developed communities. I’ll quote the US National Parks Service website:
Many of the troops were shocked upon entering these villages. They found not the crude bark huts or longhouses of "Savages," but instead orderly rows of houses built of hewn timbers and frame houses with windows. Well-cultivated vegetable fields extended out from the villages, along with extensive apple, peach, and cherry orchards. Many of these Indian villages rivaled or surpassed the towns that the soldiers had come from.
Again, I hope this changes your understanding of what it meant to steal Native land and why I employ a metaphor about some Russian oligarch seizing your house to build a theme park. And the same things were true about the Native lands seized in the south. Those thefts were not about building settlements in the forest. They were about white people taking Natives' houses, farms, orchards, and businesses. They were even about stealing furniture and utensils.
Back to Fletcher v. Peck. In 1795 the state of Georgia claimed lands west of its modern boundaries that included much of what is now Alabama and Mississippi, what was then called the Yazoo District. I say “claimed” not just because other states had conflicting claims, but also because it was the home of Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Muskogee Creeks who had never relinquished their own claims to that land, claims that were backed up by the fact that they actually lived there, and had been living there as long as anybody could remember, that their houses and towns and farms were there, that the graves of their ancestors were there. The Georgia State Legislature had no particular way of actually pressing this claim and so they knew they would soon have to cede that territory to the United States government. But before acknowledging it as US - not Georgia - territory the Georgia State Legislature sold that land (land they did not control) to real estate speculation companies for a little over a penny an acre, which was a ridiculously low price even then. The sale wasn’t just fraudulent because Georgia didn’t really own or control the land. It wasn’t just fraudulent because the price suggested a crony deal. It was fraudulent because virtually every member of the legislature who voted for it either were shareholders in the purchasing companies, or received bribes for their votes, or both. The scandal was so notorious that almost every one of them were kicked out by the voters in the next election. The new legislature immediately repudiated the sale, going so far as burning all copies of the original law in public.
In light of this repudiation, did the contested land belong to the speculators or not? The very public nature of the scandal made it hard for them to rely on public sympathy if they sued. But what if a third party brought suit? Somebody who was “innocent” because they purchased Yazoo land from the speculators without knowing about the scandal. In order to make such a case, the speculators arranged a sale to a collaborator, arranged for that purchaser to sue them (the speculators), and even hired an attorney to represent the man suing them!
The first thing you should know is that the attorney for the “defendant” (the speculators) was himself one of those speculators, a member of Congress who left office in order to argue the lawsuit and who was subsequently made a Justice of the Court less than a year later. The second thing you should know is that Chief Justice John Marshall, while not directly involved in the Yazoo lands, was a speculator in other Native lands for which there was also no actual title. You will not be surprised, then, to learn that the Court decided in favor of the speculators, insisting that the new Georgia legislature had no authority to nullify a sale by the previous legislature, regardless of how much bribery and self-dealing there had been in making that sale. But there was no discussion of whether Georgia had a right to sell Native land. That is simply assumed!
What the Court could never do through its decision was make the Yazoo district available to white settlers in the real world. First the US Army had to fight a series of wars against the Native inhabitants. Then Congress had to pass an Indian Removal Act to bar the Indigenous people from their own homes. Then the Army had to go again to actually remove them.
And that is not the end of the federal subsidy to the speculators. They didn’t really want the land themselves, of course. They just wanted to profit on the difference between the penny an acre they paid and the price they could get from the white people who did want to move there. And those people couldn’t possibly afford it without being offered credit by the US government. More on that in another post.
Let us imagine for a moment that some Russian (or Saudi or Singaporean) billionaire decided to turn your neighborhood into a truck depot (or exclusive waterpark or luxury high-rise block).
Let’s imagine that this billionaire claimed to have bought the property from someone with some spurious claim to it. When their employees show up and tell you that your home is scheduled for demolition you and your neighbors object. So they turn to the Russian (or Saudi or Singaporean) military to evict all of you. The only reason this scenario feels implausible to a white American is because the US military is stronger than those others. So you’ll have to imagine for a moment that it isn’t.
This is the essence of settler colonialism. One important reason for the American Revolution was that the colonies were issuing warrants for Native lands west of the Appalachians and the British government wouldn’t support those claims. (Let’s note that the reason was not concern for the rights of Indigenous peoples; it was Parliament’s reluctance to fund a new war against the Natives while they were already heavily indebted for the Seven-Years’ War against the French.) George Washington was one of the leading speculators in those Trans-Appalachian grants.
So the Declaration of Independence was, among other things, a license for private land speculators to use the US Army to back them up when they were selling Native land that they decided was theirs to sell. To steal cultivated farms, houses, and community buildings from Native people. To force them, at gunpoint, to move hundreds of miles to land occupied by other Native people - land to which the white speculators also had no right.
This pattern continued all the way to the Pacific. Did you think that when Napoleon sold Jefferson 828,000 square miles of land, including all or part of thirteen states, he actually owned it? Or even controlled it? The basis of France’s claim to what they called Louisiana was just that: they claimed it. The exact same thing was true of the 529,000 square miles, including 7 states, that the United States forced Mexico to sell after occupying their capital city. And the 586,000 square miles of Alaska for which the US gave Russia 2¢ an acre.
All this land was home to a vast population of indigenous people who had been living there always. I won’t begin to discuss here the verbal gymnastics US courts have gone through to pretend it was legal to mount the subsequent military operations to evict the Native occupants and to replace them with white people (and the Black people they enslaved to make this eviction economically productive.) For over a hundred years after the American Revolution the US Army fought against Indigenous peoples to get actual and not just pretended sovereignty over what we now think of as the United States. The maps in your history book showing the Louisiana Purchase, the Mexican Cession, and the Oregon Treaty obscure all of this by pretending that diplomats in capitals many thousands of miles away had the legal authority to dispose of territory that they never even controlled.
I am more than discomfited by people blocking access to a synagogue. I hate the menacing, macing, cursing, and physically attacking the people entering, or anybody around wearing a kippah. I am sickened by self-styled allies of Palestine who enter a subway car - masked! - and demand that any Zionists present raise their hands. All that shit is simply indefensible.
But I am also deeply shamed by friends who are quick to denounce these things and imply that their adversaries who do not also denounce them are hypocritical when they themselves are silent about the demolition of the Great Omari Mosque, the Khalid bin al Waleed Mosque, the Church of St. Porphyria’s, etc. by the IDF. They are all quick to say that Hamas combatants use the churches and mosques of Gaza without knowing anything whatever in particular about the individual case.
Welcoming real estate pimps who are selling condos on land that has yet to even be transferred by colonial courts may not be as bad as hiding the perpetrators of the atrocities of October 7. But then again, the antisemitic hoods in LA didn’t raze Adas Israel to the ground.
Last month we learned of a committee of billionaires who offered to purchase Mayor Adams’s police action to break up student protest camps at Columbia and NYU. Today Reuters reports on largely-secret influence operations by the government of Israel inside the US Congress and elsewhere. But when people call attention to these things they are accused of employing old antisemitic tropes. This reminds me of the definition of chutzpah: murdering your parents and asking for the mercy of the court as an orphan. We live in a bizarro universe in which Marjorie Taylor Greene(!), who traffics regularly in antisemitic conspiracy theories (Jewish space lasers?) feels free to denounce the “disgusting antisemitism” of the Democratic Party. I am at a loss.
I have been watching with dismay as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which used to pretend that it didn't try to affect elections, has poured $15 million+ into a Democratic Congressional primary - not general - election to defeat my former representative, Jamaal Bowman. Interestingly, most of their flyers and ads and robocalls aren't even focusing on his call for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. Instead they lie that he opposes President Biden's agenda, which he does not, and which his opponent supports only lukewarmly. But the reason isn't really his call for that ceasefire, nor even his support for the human rights of Palestinian people.
No, AIPAC is moving against Jamaal because he refused to tone down those positions when they advised him to do so. Moreover, they are making an example of him because they think he is vulnerable as representative of a district with a large proportion of Jewish voters. But the money they are spending to overwhelm Representative Bowman's grassroots campaign is not about getting one congressman out of office. It is meant as a message to other politicians who don't follow AIPAC's advice: what we did to him, we can do to you.
This is what happens when people who have money and power choose to act as gangsters. It brought to mind an old story about the US and Nicaragua:
In 1979, the dictatorial dynasty of the Somoza family in Nicaragua was brought down by the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional. The United States had supported the Somoza dictatorship for decades after installing it with the armed support of the US Marine Corp in 1933. (See the book War is a Racket by two-time Medal of Honor winner Major General Medley Butler.) As soon as the Somozas were ousted, the CIA began funding anti-government Contra rebels in Nicaragua to harass and - they hoped - bring down the new government to replace it with a more friendly one. Even after Congress explicitly barred aid to the Contras, the Reagan Administration found ways to illegally get weapons to them. That was one part of the Iran-Contra Affair for which Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North was granted immunity from prosecution. It was complicated, but the gist of it was that the Administration was illegally selling arms to Iran and using some of Iran's payments to fund arms for the Contras, also illegally.
Novelist Salman Rushdie visited Nicaragua during this period and published The Jaguar Smile about his observations. He spoke at great length with the Sandinista's foreign minister, Father Miguel d'Escoto who was attempting to negotiate with the US government to end the CIA's intervention. In his book, Rushdie repeated this story that Father Miguel told him:
D’Escoto described the visit to Managua of a White House emissary - whom I’ll call ‘Rocky. During their talks, he told us, he himself had repeatedly emphasized that, given good will on both sides, he was convinced that the difficulties between the US and Nicaragua could fairly straightforwardly be resolved. ‘’We understand,” I said, “that you have certain security requirements in this region. That’s fin. We can discuss all those. We are pragmatic people, and we want a working deal with the United States.”’
Eventually (d’Escoto continued), Rocky took up the gauntlet. If they were hypothetically to suppose that this hypothetical good will might hypothetically exist, on what basis did the padre think that negotiations might begin?
‘Well,’ d’Escoto said, ‘suppose we both agreed to abide by international law? That would be a fairly objective basis.’
‘That’s your problem, Father,’ Rocky told him. ‘You’re a philosopher. You won’t concentrate on the facts.’
And what were the facts? D’Escoto, an excellent raconteur, performed Rocky’s reply. ‘These contras on your frontier, Padre. They give you lots of trouble, don’t they?’ Yes, d’Escoto had replied, but they wouldn’t if you stopped funding them. ‘There you go again,’ Rocky said. ‘More philosophy. You’re hopeless, Father. The reality is that these people have been funded, are being funded and will continue to be funded. And they give you trouble. Those are facts.’ He then said he thought Father Miguel looked pretty intelligent. ‘And intelligent men don’t want trouble. And you’ve got trouble.’
So what did he suggest, d’Escoto asked. ‘It’s easy, came the reply. ‘Just do as we say. Just do as we say, and you’ll see how this trouble you’ve got will disappear. Overnight. As if by magic. It just won’t be there anymore. You’ll be astonished. Just do as we say.’
This is what AIPAC is telling the other members of Congress who call for ceasefire, who call for an end to illegal occupation, who call for human rights for Palestinians. They are not asking for a particular position, a specific vote, a one-time compromise. They are saying: "Just do as we say."
