#and jefferson refused. even though he was provided the means to pay his debt! the reason he said he didnt want to give up slaves

[mejomonster]

There's a podcast I found on youtube called Behind the Bastards that goes into the history of awful people in history. Listened to the Thomas Jefferson episodes recently and. Wow rich people always have been shit (as a group)

Jefferson admired the roman 'farmers' who were land owners who had slaves work their land. He and his peers were virginia landowners who also had slaves farm for them. The ideal he read about and admired were "hard working self sufficient farmers" but this image is not of a man hunting and farming himself or with his family, but a man living in comfort with slaves to do the work and provide the comfort.

Now the big trend among conservatives is tradwifes and the image men are sold about it - a woman cleaning their home, farming for them, providing for them and obeying them. Which on the small scale is to like appease poor men and poor women - to give poor men this illusion that they could have a stay at home wife and afford for her to not work eventually (and also serve him), to give poor women (that they could afford to not work for money one day and serve a man who loves them for being the 'right' kind of woman). The people who are actually achieving this lifestyle are rich men (and women who end up working since... if you're an influencer that's your job, so it's all an illusion since the lifestyle could not be achieved without money coming in).

It's just a symptom of a bigger pattern. Conservative circles push this lifestyle as idealized to the masses (a man being served by someone for free, able to control them absolutely). If the masses aspire to that, hope for that, then the masses will continue to think they'll be billionaires one day who WILL have that and DESERVE to have that. And instead of fighting the billionaires, they'll think that is the goal to be admired as a sign of success.

Meanwhile our whole world, our current world, is at the mercy of some very very rich fucks. Who are attempting to sap what wealth everyone else has, and take it for themselves. These billionaires live in comfort! Far more comfort than slave owners of centuries past! These billionaires have so much money, they can buy any service they want, land, websites, politicians. And yet its never 'enough' money to these bastards. They need to buy more property to rent to the masses, and drive rent prices up by using housing as assets. They need healthcare gutted because god forbid the masses pay less for healthcare - they SHOULD pay 100,0000 to live after an accident! God forbid the masses own property, and therefore have a little wealth and security for their family - if they're less housing stable, they'll quit shitty jobs less. You can abuse them more! God forbid the majority of humans have food, water, shelter, healthcare. Got to raise the price of all groceries, because you can! Because you need to get ALL the money the masses manage to make, and funnel it to yourself. Billionaires are just like those illusions of "self sufficient farmers" who own slaves and rely on slaves to both provide necessities and luxuries.

Billionaires really spew the bullshit they're self sufficient, then don't pay their employees living wages. Billionaires have nothing to offer without the efforts of their employees, and the money those employees earned for them (or the rent they charged etc). They certainly aren't self sufficient, they're also not a single benefit to society. They dream of a world where everyone serves them, provides for them, and gives them always MORE. In many ways the world probably already is this, all of us buy something that eventually contributes to a billionaire, or work for one (or for a company that serves one), or pay taxes to a government that coddles a billionaire, buy groceries. But billionaires always want MORE. More more more. They're destructive in their existence. In what they choose to do, which is take from others to give themselves more, to give themselves SO much they can't even use it all. They'd still be rich enough to buy a politician off, to buy an island or a website, if they paid their employees a living wage and charged reasonable prices. Once you have enough money you simply cannot spend it all in your lifetime, in your grandchildrens lifetimes, even if you buy absolutely everything you ever want. They don't have to seek to take from others endlessly, to continue existing with the lifestyle they do. But they still seek to take more and more and more. In the process they hurt most people, and hurt the world we live in as a whole. And they don't care, even though it would not hurt them at all and would not take a single tangible benefit they receive, to stop being Such destructive presences in the world.

[haitichristiannews]

This is How Ignorant You Have to Be to Call Haiti a 'S***hole'

The president had no respect for Haiti. He could see as well as anyone following the news that the country was a basket case — racked by political unrest, filthy, incapable of handling its own affairs. There was no doubt his opinion of the black republic was informed by his blatant racism, which included praising members of the Ku Klux Klan. He had criticized his predecessors’ foreign wars while running for office. But in the White House, he realized he was willing to flex the country’s muscles abroad, as long as the mission fit his motto: “America first.”

Taking Haiti was a U.S. priority, he decided. The United States would invade.

That president was Woodrow Wilson. The year was 1915. And if that was the beginning of a story you’ve never heard before, you aren’t alone.

Since news broke that Wilson’s unwitting heir, President Donald Trump, called Haiti - along with El Salvador and seemingly all 54 nations in Africa — “s---hole countries,” the president’s defenders made it clear not only that they do not know Haiti’s history but also that they’re unaware of their own. As soon as they heard his comments, Trump’s partisans went defensive, claiming that while Trump might have been rude, he was right.

Fox News regular Tomi Lahren tweeted: “If they aren’t s---hole countries, why don’t their citizens stay there?”

“Trump should ‘vehemently condemn’ the Haitian government for running a shithole country,” wrote Will Chamberlain, one of the organizers of last year’s inaugural “DeploraBall.”

Some on the right particularly applauded a segment on CNN in which National Review editor Rich Lowry asked political commentator Joan Walsh whether she would “rather live in Norway or Haiti.” It was a reference to Trump’s reported wish that the United States ring in more Nordic immigrants instead of those from Latin America or Africa. Walsh refused to answer, noting she’d never visited either country. Tucker Carlson accused her of dishonesty. “Those places are dangerous, they’re dirty, they’re corrupt and they’re poor,” the Fox News host said, with an indignation Wilson would have admired. “Why can’t you say that?”

Trump’s supporters on cable news appear to believe that they, and he, are brave tellers of unvarnished truths others are too timid or politically correct to say out loud. (Never mind that Trump is a notorious, if not pathological, liar — or that, hours later, he tried weakly to walk back the “s---hole” remark after his favorite TV show told him to.)

But in reality, they don’t know many truths at all. To rail against poverty in countries such as Haiti and argue that it’s some naturally occurring, objective reality ignores why that poverty exists and what the United States’s role has been in creating it. And ignoring that means not only making bad and hateful decisions today but risks repeating the errors of the past.

—

Haiti was founded Jan. 1, 1804, by people of African descent who were tired of being slaves. They fought and won a revolution against France, ultimately defeating an expeditionary force of Napoleon Bonaparte’s army, then the most powerful in the world.

France fought so hard to keep the colony because it was basically the Saudi Arabia of coffee and sugar at the time, providing the majority of both commodities consumed in Europe. The money it generated fueled the entire French empire. But it was made with blood. The slave regime necessary to produce those crops was so deadly that 1 in 10 enslaved Africans kidnapped and brought to the island died each year. As historian Laurent Dubois has noted, the French decided that it was cheaper to bring in new slaves than to keep the ones they had alive.

As soon as Haiti was free, the world’s most powerful empires did everything they could to undermine it. France refused to acknowledge the new nation existed. In the United States — then the only other independent country in the Americas — President Thomas Jefferson, a slaveholder, was uninterested in seeing a free black nation succeed nearby. The slaveholding powers refused to set up official trade with Haiti, forcing the country into predatory relationships. Haiti’s independence remained a cautionary tale U.S. slavers used to counter abolitionists until the Civil War.

France finally offered much-needed diplomatic recognition in 1825, at gunpoint. King Charles X demanded the Haitian government pay restitution of 150 million gold francs — billions of dollars in today’s money — to French landowners still angry about the loss of their land and the Haitians’ own bodies in the war. If they didn’t pay, he would invade.

Haiti’s leaders agreed. They spent the next decades raiding their own coffers and redirecting customs revenue to paying France for the independence they had already won, ravaging the economy. By the 1880s, Haiti had paid what France had wanted. But now it owed huge sums to foreign banks, from which it had borrowed heavily to make ends meet. In the early 20th century, much of that debt belonged to banks in the United States. Americans had also established extensive business interests in Haiti, exporting sugar and other commodities.

The United States, meanwhile, was looking to expand. Starting in 1898, we began using our military to secure new territory and markets overseas. By 1914, we had annexed the Philippines, Hawaii, Guam and other islands in the Pacific. In the Caribbean, we had Puerto Rico and a permanent base in Cuba at Guantanamo Bay. The Marine Corps had also helped carve out a new Central American country, Panama, in exchange for rights to dig a canal providing a trade route to Asia — and the United States invaded Nicaragua, Honduras, Mexico and elsewhere.

Haiti was next. Haiti’s politics, roiled by the economic turmoil caused by the debt, were in a tailspin. Presidents were repeatedly assassinated and governments overthrown. The banks demanded payment; U.S. businessmen wanted more security and control. Newspapers had been paving the way for U.S. public opinion — a New York Times dispatch in 1912 declared, “Haitians acknowledge the failure of a ‘Black Republic’ and look forward to coming into the Union.”

In late 1914, U.S. Marines came ashore in Port-au-Prince, marched into the national reserve and carried out all the gold. It was hauled back to the National City Bank in New York - known as Citibank today. Months later, declaring his concern that European powers, especially Germany, might gain a foothold in the Caribbean (even though they were all busy with World War I), Wilson ordered an invasion, then a full occupation.

Click here for more.

SOURCE: The Washington Post - Jonathan Katz, a freelance journalist, is the author of “The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster.” He is the director of the media and journalism initiative at Duke University’s John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute.