The Debtor-Slaver, A Study in American Class Psychology

Mia walks through the history of a curious kind of guy responsible for vast swaths of the devastation wrought over 500 years of colonialism in America

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Dick It Happened Here podcast about things being
absolutely atrocious. I'm your host, Meo Ball, and today we're
going to do something a little different. Instead of our
normal sort of escapades through the torment and the sort
of crumbles of the modern world, We're going to take
a step back into history to trace through the history

(00:27):
and class psychology of a kind of guy who is
a recurring character in the history of North America and
who are responsible, to a greater extent than you think
for some of the worst atrocities this world has ever seen. Now,
I hesitate to use the word class as a way
to actually describe these people, because the people were going

(00:51):
to be talking about are from completely different economies, completely
different class structures, completely different systems of production. So we're
sticking with the loose term kind of guy. And this
kind of guy is a kind of guy that I
have termed the debtor slaver. Now this, at first glance,

(01:12):
this this is a confusing term. My word processor, at
the very least, gets very very angry with me every
time I try to write it and insist that no, no, no,
I must in fact mean debtor slave. But no, I
do not mean debtor slave. What I'm actually referring to
as a kind of guy who is both hopelessly in

(01:33):
debt and also in command of enormous economic abilitary resources,
most often slaves. To get a sense of what I'm
talking about here, we're going to start with the archetypical
debtor slaver, her Nan Cortes. Her name Cortes is, by
all reputable accounts, an enormous piece of ship. A broke

(01:55):
noble born in Spain in five Cortes managed to parlay
an inn initially successful career as a sort of adventurer
into a slave plantation in Cuba after he helped after
he helped conquer the island in fifteen eleven. From there,
through a combination of I shore you know this is
this is actually what the historical records say about him.

(02:16):
Wearing too many gold chains and spending too much money
on his wife, his finances imploded and he fell into debt.
This led him to embark on his infamous conquest of
Mexican attempt to pay office creditors. Here, I'm going to
turn to the work of the anthropologist David Graber. Rest
in Peace, Smissy Buddy. Graver describes the absolute horror of

(02:42):
entire population sold into slavery slaves with faces covered in
brands indicating who they've been bought and sold by, entire
populations worked to death, and minds empires drained of wealth
by men whose lust for gold and silver seemed to
know no end. And he somehow, both Cortes and his
men seemed to have come out of the other end

(03:04):
of one of the most important conquests in human history
completely broke. Now it's easier to explain how Cortes as
men came out of this broke. They came out of
his broke because Cortes and his officers were extorting and
robbing them mercilessly at literally every step of the campaign,

(03:24):
by charging them utterly exorbitant prices for everything from bandages
to like having to buy their own weapons, which were
being sold by guests who Cortez and his officers who
had to sort of cabal going on with everyone who
could sell things. And once the conquest was done, Cortes
as officers simply seized most of the share of the
loot from their menness payment for all of the stuff

(03:47):
that they needed. And I mentioned this not to inspire
sympathy for the conquistadors like these are These are some
of the worst human beings who have ever lived, and
managing to somehow lose money on one of the most
brutal sackings of a city in human history is like
the least of the punishment they deserve. But on the

(04:10):
other hand, their debt and the debt of Cortez himself,
goes a long way to explain what happened next. Here's graper.
These were the men who ended up in control of
the provinces and who established local administration, taxes and labor regimes,
which makes it a little easier to understand the descriptions

(04:32):
of Indians with their faces covered by names, like so
many counter endorsed checks, with the mind surrounded by miles
of rotting corpses. We are not dealing with psychology of cold,
calculating greed, but a more complicated mix of shame and
righteous indignation, and of the frantic urgency of debts that

(04:53):
would only compound and accumulate. These were almost certainly interest
bearing loans in the outrage at the idea that, after
all they had gone through, they should be held to
owe anything to begin with. Now this is the sort
of trademark psychology of the debtor slaver. It's an incredibly

(05:14):
toxic mix of shame, indignation, outrage, and desperation that breathes
an incredible kind of violence and is determined in large
part by the conditions of modern compound debt itself. Here's
Graver again. Money always has the potential to become a

(05:34):
moral imperative one to itself, allow it to expand, and
it can quickly become a morality so imperative that all
others seem frivolous in comparison. For the debtor, the world
is reduced to a collection of potential dangers, potential tools,
and potential merchandise. Even human relationships become a matter of

(05:55):
cost benefit calculation. Clearly, this is the way they conquistadors
viewed the worlds that they set out to conquer. Now
it doesn't take long until not only human relations but
human beings themselves become a matter of cost benefit calculation,
a set of merchandise that value could be extracted from,

(06:19):
And here emerges the debtor slaver. Now, very clearly, all
debtors do not behave like this. In fact, almost all
debtors across all places and all times. Do not behave
this way, or the world would be a place that
makes even how we live in now look like a paradise.

(06:43):
There's another factor at work here that distinguishes the debtor
from the debtor slaver, and that's power. The debder slaver
already wields or has wielded, enormous power over other people,
either through direct violence or, as we'll see later, through
the command of economic power. This is one of the

(07:06):
products of the righteous indignation Grapery described earlier. These are
people who are used to wielding power, who are suddenly
now beholden in a real and immediate way to someone else,
and so they set about solving the problem the way
they've solved everything else in their life, throwing violence at it. Now,

(07:28):
if you've been paying attention closely, you might realize that
I've actually been describing two different sort of ranks of
debtor slaves who sort of fuse into one mass and
quartets conquissadors on the lower end, the people who kind
of loosely be called adventurers, essentially a kind of mercenary

(07:51):
out for a big score. Be that slaves be that
land be that stolen loot that could vault them out
of debton into the aristocracy. This is the sort of
build general military base of the conquistador army itself. On
the higher end of people like Cortez who having already
technically who you know who are who are already technically

(08:13):
plantation owners, but their own ineptitude, have still managed to
become heavily indebted. Combined, they form a group responsible for
three centuries of the greatest evil the world has ever seen. Now,
these two groups, in a broad sense, need each other.
The adventurers may have weapons, they may have some training,

(08:36):
but at the end of the day, they have very
little in terms of liquid capital. At liquid capital is
something that you need in order to run a military campaign.
Because in order to keep all of these people, all
of these sort of adventurers, all of these sort of
debtor slavers, all of these sort of would be conquistadors
in the field, you have to produce, you know, things

(08:58):
like food, things like boots, things like medical supplies. And
this is where the plantation owners come in, because those
are people who even though they're enormously in debt, and
even though very often they're either fleeing their debtors or
their all of their debts about to be called in.
These are people who still technically have lines of credit

(09:18):
open and they and you know also there are also
people who sometimes have allies in more sort of solvent
people in the same class, so they're able to sort
of funnel liquid capital into these sort of ventures. And
this is a process that we are going to see
again after these ads. And we're back moving forward in

(09:53):
time a few hundred years and north a few thousand miles,
we come into another scene of debt subjugation and violen
the plantations of the American South. Now, this is not
the primitive, unhallowed fifteen hundreds, where slaves would be marked
like tally sticks as they were passed back and forth
between sword and pike wielding Spanish barbarians as they slaughtered

(10:16):
their way through one of the greatest cities the world
had ever known. This is the benighted eighteen hundreds. This
is the age of steam power and railroads, the age
of electricity, the advent of the global telecommunications network. What
would come of this new era of progress. One of
the greatest of all world historical crimes, the conversion of

(10:37):
human beings into increasingly complex financial instruments plantation owners contrary
to their depiction in media, which they've gotten almost those
those people have gotten almost as good PR as cops,
which is fairly incredible considering they haven't really existed as
the sort of slave owning classes they used to be

(10:58):
in you know, a hundred hundred years. I don't know,
discuss among yourselves when you think share cropping has sort
of decreased to an amount where these people like are
no no longer around as a class. But you know, okay,
just despite the sort of pr but these like Southern
gentlemen get these people are constantly in debt, and they're

(11:24):
you know, constantly attempting to solve the problem of them
being in debt with the only thing they know how
to do, which is slavery. And when I say they're
trying to solve this problem through slavery, um, we're we're
going to get to the more complicated ways to try
to solve this with slavery. One of the big ways
I try try to solve this with slavery is just
whipping people harder. It's brutal and horrible, and yeah, you

(11:50):
know this, this this is a system that is, who's
the the efficiency of which is just built on profound
human violence. So let's let's let's just established that right
off the bat. This is the worst kind of slavery
anyone's really ever done. Yeah, now you know, another factor
for these people essentially turning into debt or slavers is

(12:12):
the fact that these people are constantly putting themselves in
self inflicted debt in order to do speculation. And this
is the part where they start doing ship that is
difficult for me to even try to explain will adequately
capturing the horror of the process. The Southern planters began

(12:33):
to create an entire separate financial network based entirely off
of the quote unquote value of their slaves and their land.
From the historian Edward B. Baptiste, Yet enslavers had already
by the end of the eighteen twenties created a highly
innovative alternative to existing financial structure. The Consolidated Association of

(12:57):
Louisiana Planters, despite his name it c APL was still
a bank, created more leverage for enslavers at less cost
and on longer terms. It did so by securitizing slaves,
hedging even more effectively against the individual investors loss, so
long as the financial system itself did not fail. Here

(13:20):
is how it worked. Potential borrowers, mortgage slaves and cultivated
land to the c APL, which entitled them to borrow
up to half of the assessed value of their property
from the CIAPL and bank notes. To convince others to
accept the banknotes thus distributed at face value, the ci

(13:41):
ap L convinced the Louisiana legislature to back two point
five million dollars in bank bonds do win ten to
fifteen years bearing five percent interest with the faith and
credit of the people of the state. The Great British
Merchant bank bearing brother has agreed to advance the c

(14:01):
APL the equivalent of two point five million dollars in
Sterling bills. By the way, that is a unfathomable amount
of money. Now that's not five million dollars that is
that is it? That is an amount of money that
will make your ears bleed the equivalent of two point
five million in sterling bills and market the bonds on

(14:21):
European securities markets. The bonds effectively converted in slavery's biggest investment,
human beings or quote unquote hands from Maryland and Virginia
and North Carolina and Kentucky into multiple streams of income,
all under their control. Since all borrowers were officially stakeholders

(14:44):
in the bank, the sale of the bonds created a
high quality credit pool to be lent back to the
planters at a significantly lower rate, sorry at a rate
significantly lower than the rate of return they could expect
that money to produce. The pool could be used for
all sorts of income generating purposes, buying more slaves to

(15:07):
produce more cotton and sugar and hence more income, or
lending to other enslavers. Ver borrowers could pure amid their
leverage even higher by borrowing on the same collateral from
multiple lenders, while also getting unsecured short term commercial loans
from the c apl by purchasing new slaves with the

(15:30):
money they borrowed and borrowing on them too. They had
mortgaged their slaves, sometimes multiple times, and sometimes they even
mortgage fictitious slaves. But in contrast to what Walsh had promised,
Nulty in this type of mortgage gave the enslaver tremendous

(15:50):
margins control and flexibility. It was hard to imagine that
such borrows would be foreclosed even if they fell behind
on their aiments. After all, the borrowers owned the bank.
Using the C A p L model, slave owners were
now able to monetize their slaves by securitizing them and

(16:12):
then leveraging them multiple times on the international financial markets. Now, okay,
having having just spent a decent amount of time running
through the sort of finance of this, I need to reiterate.
These are human beings who are being enslaved and tortured constantly,

(16:32):
the ownership of whom is being mortgaged to a bank
and then sold and traded as assets on the financial market.
What what they have done here is like two thousand
eight style financial collapse, like set of collateralized loan obligations,
except the loans are backed by fucking human beings they

(16:55):
forced into slavery. It is a level of evil that
is almost incomprehensible because the very financial language that is
necessary to explain what they're doing, by necessity, conceals the
horror of what's actually being done and was actually being
done here is hundreds of thousands of people are being

(17:17):
sold into slavery and forced to clear land and work
on land that has just been stolen literally like you know,
sometimes in some cases like the day before, by indigenous
people who have just been sent on the trail of tears.
And this is this is being done to fuel these
new financial instruments. Now, in a somewhat ironic twist, the

(17:40):
product of this entire thing, the product of all of
this land clearing, the product of Andrew Jackson's war on
the Second Bank of the US, the product of all
of this sort of speculation is the plantations wind up
producing too much cotton, too much slave cotton, and this
quickly becomes an absolute fiasco. Debt suddenly outpaced the entire

(18:05):
value of the slave crop, and you know, the entire
financial system begins to implode. So it starts, It starts
in sort of the UK and the European markets that
had taken a bunch of these these sort of slave bonds.
But eventually the financial collapse spreads, and you know, as
we heard in the article, right the way these banks
are set off, the way these again like these these

(18:26):
banks that are just all of the bank is just slaves.
And I guess, I guess I should also take an
aside here to mention that like the normal banks are
also doing stuff like this. It's just that the South
not being content to just have normal banks taking you know,
doing mortgages, like they're taking out mortgages on houses with

(18:48):
slaves as collateral. Uh, they've they've credit decided to create
like they're in their own entire financial network that's just
slaves and nothing else. Well land too, but yeah, slaves
and land, and this entire thing sort of just collapses
in on itself and this leads to it to an
even larger mass of deader slavery plantation owners. And this

(19:14):
is where we turn from plantation slavery to some good
old fashioned conquistadoring what what have the sort of myths
of slavery with the way that you know, slavery has
been sort of understood in the West, particularly in sort
of Europe, well, particularly in the U S and the UK,
which have these sort of like complexes about you know,

(19:41):
like this sort of inevitability of ebolitionism and the sort
of benevolent empire against abolition or whatever. You know, there's
there's this sort of like that you get these economic
organis to that that the people people will argue that
you know, slavery was like going to collapse anyways, Like
people just let it go, it would have fell on apart,

(20:03):
and that that is just sort of nonsense. And one
of the things that this, one of the things that
this conceals is that slave power was constantly expansionary. It's
never sort of like slavery was never a system that
was sort of just contained in one place, right. It
was always pushing. It was always attempting to you know,

(20:25):
seize new land. It was always attempting to seize new slaves.
Was it was a system that could only really survive
if it was constantly able to seize new territory and
seize new slaves in order to work it. And so
there's a lot of sort of products of this, right.
One of the sort of earlier ones, you get these
settlers pushing west, attempting to turn sort of new states

(20:48):
and the slave states, and these are you know, these
are often, like the settlers here, often the sort of
men like euphemistically described as adventurers, with like you know,
these are people who portize right like they are people
desperately attempting to stay one step ahead of their creditors
by invoking the time honored American tradition of slaughtering indigenous
people for their land, which you know, could then be

(21:10):
turned over to speculators, you could be turned over to
the sort of wealthier backers. And these men and in
this period these are almost always men. I thought that's
going to change pretty soon. But these men are so
violent and so disruptive that at various points in the
late seventeen hundreds and early eight hundreds, the US like

(21:30):
attempts to stop them from settling any further less they
sort of disturb American foreign policy efforts. Um. And these
efforts fail, and the product of this is that manifest destinies,
you know, trail of corpses pushes even further and further west.

(21:55):
Now by the by the eighteen fifties, there there's a
new sort of conquistador who's setting out to you know,
conquer in the name of the Cross and paying off
their creditors. And they're called filibusters. Now this is actually
where these people are where the term filibuster as a
sort of like like thing that you do in the
sentence and not let people do stuff like that. This

(22:15):
this is where that comes from. It's these people. Um,
these are okay, so you know, the official descriptions of
them will say things like private armies. I there are
more these kind of like ragged bands of like slavery
mongering gennis ideas who are backed by, you know, largely

(22:36):
by southern plantation owners, sometimes by Southern states, occasionally by
just northern banks, because the place they're trying to go
somewhere the banks, the northern Banks want to sort of
seize control of. And you know, these people set out
to conquer new slave states by you know, straight up
season control of places like Cuba or Mexico. They do
a bunch of this stuff in Texas doesn't really work,

(22:59):
but you know they I mean, part of the complicated
thing and talking about the filibusters is that like, in
some sense, the most successful like attempt to do something
like this was actually Texas, but those people weren't really
phil about. Like the people who actually successfully sees control
of Texas, like Sam Adam and his sort of crew

(23:22):
of merry miscreant slave owners. Those guys aren't technically filibusters,
but you know, they they do sort of succeed in
bringing in Texas as a slave state. But yeah, you know,
I mean these people are they keep they keep launching
invasions of fucking Cuba. They keep launching use invasions everywhere
that There's a really great movie called Walker that's a

(23:44):
sort of fictionalized account of probably the most famous filibuster,
a guy named William Walker. And well, okay, so it
starts with his attempt to like conquered Mexico, which doesn't
go well, but then it sets out for his ataept
to conquered in Charagua, which like kind of works, actually
takes Nicaragua for a little bit. You know. But this

(24:05):
this this movie version of it's also like it's an
anti war film about the US backing the contrast, and
it rules. I'm talking about it because nobody's ever watched
this thing. And the studio when when they they actually
figured out what Walker was and that it was, you know,
like an an anti war film about the contrast, they
literally killed the entire movie and the director, Alex Cox,

(24:29):
here's the guy you should repo man like, he literally
never worked in Hollywood again after this. So yeah, go
watch Walker. Understand it's a little it's a bit fictionalized.
It's mostly an anti war film about the contrast, but
you know, part of what you try to track down
and personally, that is very important about this is that
you know, the there's this, there's these sort of lineages
of American colonialism, and part of these lineary edges is

(24:53):
that you know, like the that literally does not matter
like what century you're in, the US is trying to
see his introl of Nicaragua. Now, okay, so but back
back to the soil. The filibusters mainline. Unlike the Conquistadors,
who were kind of like I don't know, they had
a combination of being really really lucky and also like

(25:15):
genu winely having some pretty good leadership even though you know,
good leadership, but for evil I those guys were really successful.
The Philip Buzzers they mostly failed because again this is
these these are mostly sort of just like bands of
like marauders. They almost they barely have supply lines, like

(25:38):
I don't know, sometimes they have real weapons, but they're
not especially competent. But what what what they did do
is they kill a lot of people. And this this
is one of those things that's sort of like I
don't know, it gets sort of romanticized or it gets
sort of like brushed over. Is that like, yeah, I know,

(26:00):
these these people like they're they're like these groups are
basically like rolling lynch mobs, and so you know, there
they'll they'll be doing something that run into a town.
They'll just they'll just kill everyone. They will enslave people,
they were rape people, they do ship that is just
they're absolutely imborrant. And that's that's the sort of legacy

(26:24):
of this stuff. And you know, they probably would have
kept doing it and you know, except they were stopped. Right.
One of one of the sort of like legacies of
these people is eventually the sort of slave powers like
wind Up and Bleeding Kansas, which is the sort of
semi civil war between the pro slavery anti slavery forces
in Kansas that leads to the regular Civil War. But

(26:48):
you know, I mean, I think I think it's sort
of important to understand about this entire thing is that
these people just kept accumulating power and kept accumulating power
and kept a commulating power do someone stopped them. And
that was also true of the conquistadors, right, Like I mean,
you know, and like arguably arguably the sort of sentences
those people are still in power. But like, you know,

(27:10):
the Spanish were not run out of the places that
they had conquered until people sort of fought them. Now,
the last thing I want to do is we're also
not free of this kind of guy. Um. It kind
of manifests in different ways in sort of more recent times.

(27:31):
I think probably the the closest we have to the
sort of like corporate Cortez thing are the people behind
the sort of it gets it gets re read it
as mergens and acquisitions. But the people behind the like
leveraged buy out um, like corporate radar stuff on Wall
Street in the eighties, who you know. And then the reason,

(27:55):
the reason they sort of they behave and they think
in a lot of the very in a lot of
the same ways as these sort of as a sort
of debt or slavers, is that their their financial techniques
leave them in basically the same situation as um as
as your Cortez, which is that the way that these
people take over a company, and these these are basically

(28:16):
financed people. These are investors who have figured out a
way to seize control of companies. And the way they
figured out to do it is they they essentially they
still bonds other investors. So the short version of it
is that, yeah, they they go into an enormous amount
of debt personally, right in order to you know, have
enough money to just buy up the stock prices of

(28:37):
the company. And you know, they say, okay, we're gonna
buy say say say your stock prices thirty five dollars,
are like, okay, we're gonna buy the stock at forty
and unless the company can you know, like somehow raise
their stock price above that in order to defend them off.
You know, this one person who's taking on an enormous
amount of debt now suddenly just owns the company and

(28:57):
he could transfer the debt onto the company, and then
he has to start, you know, just upping assets from it. Right.
He has to find ways to make money. He has
to find ways to sort of raise the stock price
of this thing, you know. And this is usually done
by like stripping people's pensions, by firing people, by just
destroying entire like entire sort of like people's livelihoods. This

(29:18):
is done by just dismantling companies wholesale like towards Arouse
is the last company that sort of famously had this
happened to them. They just get completely dismembered and they
get completely dismembered because the people who buy these companies, right,
and you know this eventually short of transider firms instead, etcetera, etcetera.
But those people are also unbelievably in debt, right, and

(29:40):
you know it's that that they've imposed on themselves. It
isn't that you know, the sort of psychological effects of
it are very similar. And you know, I think I
think the thing about sort of like the late century
is that the violence gets outsourced. So you know, these

(30:01):
people still have slaves, but the slaves are like you
know that the slaves are owned by a contractor who's
our contractor of a contractor like somewhere way down the line.
But you know, the the sort of strategic stuff and
the way that these people behave is very similar. And

(30:23):
I think it's worth knowing that there's there's two there's
people who there's coople people who come out of this
era who are very important now. One is that one
of the people who comes out of this sort of
eighties nineties era who was also constantly in debt, and
it's also just sort of like a murderous, like incredibly
vengeful person who who's also sort of dealing with these
same kinds of like you know, the who's tapping into

(30:47):
the sort of emotions of the sort of like indignation
and outrage and desperation, like is Donald Trump and you know,
in Toronald Trump, I think is a sort of tragedy
version of it. And then you get to see it.
We've been getting to see it, uh with Elon Musk
as a sort of farst version of it, where he's
you know, increasingly desperate to try to dig himself out

(31:07):
of the hole that he got by buying by having
to leverage himself so much to buy Twitter. But yeah,
we are, we well remain haunted by the specter of
this kind of guy. And they've done They've done enormous
harm to the world. They're probably going to keep doing
enormous harm in the world. And yeah, but but again,

(31:28):
I I think it is worth thinking about them psychologically
and worth understanding that it's not that you know, like
at the core of sort of like the capitalist death machine,
are not necessarily these like incredibly cold, rational calculating people.
It's a bunch of people who are frantic, who are desperate,
who are very very angry, and that doesn't make them

(31:50):
sort of you know, doesn't make them more sympathetic, it
just makes them more violence. It Could Happen Here as
a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from
cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com,
or check us out on the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
find sources for It could Happen Here, updated monthly at

(32:13):
cool zone Media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.