The New Dark Age

U.S. steals Haitian wealth, deports Haitian workers

The Trump regime’s mass deportations of Haitian people have begun. A planeload of more than 160 expelled Haitians landed in Cap-Haitien, Haiti, on Aug. 20.

That’s 235 years after Dutty Boukman, an enslaved African, began the Haitian Revolution in August 1791 that overthrew slavery and threw out the French colonialists. The Haitian Revolution was the only successful revolution of enslaved people.

The Haitian people were able to accomplish what Spartacus —

whose thousands of defeated followers were crucified by Roman aristocrats 2,000 years ago — was unable to do. They defeated armies sent by Britain and Napoleon. U.S. and European capitalists never forgave Haiti for it.

Six members of the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Bigot-in-Chief’s revocation of protective status for Haitian immigrants. They ignored the Trump regime’s obvious racism as pointed out in Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent, which was joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Kagan reminded the court that during the 2024 presidential campaign both Donald Trump and JD Vance claimed Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating cats and other pets. Trillionaire Elon Musk repeated these lies to his over 200 million followers on X.

This is the sort of racist poison that the Ku Klux Klan and Nazis use to instigate lynchings and pogroms. A neo-Nazi gang called the Blood Tribe echoed the same message when they marched through Springfield in August, 2024, carrying swastika flags.

Some 112,000 Haitians are employed across the United States in health care. Trump’s mass round-ups can only increase the shortage of these absolutely essential workers.

Disabled people will suffer. The New York State Nurses Association has denounced these deportations.

Meanwhile, the White House has welcomed thousands of wealthy white farmers from South Africa who exploited Black people for generations under apartheid.

We urge New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to follow the example of the abolitionists who fought the Fugitive Slave Act. Do the right thing and refuse to fire Haitian workers whose immigration status was revoked by Trump.

Financing the industrial revolution

From Texas to Maryland, U.S. slave masters lived in fear of “another Haiti” breaking out on their plantations. Denmark Vesey’s 1822 plans to rise up in Charleston, South Carolina, were modeled on the Haitian Revolution. So was the 1811 German Coast Uprising in South Louisiana. That’s when armed slaves freed themselves from plantations along the Mississippi River, emancipating others as they marched to take the city of New Orleans and form a free Black republic.

Forty years after Dutty Boukman began his revolt, Nat Turner and his followers rose up in Virginia on Aug. 21, 1831. Black August includes the assassination of Black Panther Party Field Marshal George Jackson on Aug. 21, 1971.

Haitian President Alexandre Pétion gave Simón Bolívar ships and guns to liberate much of South America from Spanish colonialism.

It wasn’t until the U.S. Civil War that Washington established diplomatic relations with Haiti.

The riches produced by enslaved Africans working the sugar plantation death camps of Haiti and other Caribbean colonies jump-started the industrial revolution. James Watt’s steam engines were financed by the slave trade. The historian Eric Williams, who was the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, showed this in his classic 1944 book, “Capitalism and Slavery.”

Capitalism’s revenge against Haiti included the restored French Bourbon monarchy outrageously demanding reparations in 1825 from Haitians for overthrowing slavery. President Jean-Bertrand Aristide — who was overthrown twice by the CIA — calculated the total amount at over $21 billion.

It wasn’t paid off until 1947. More than anything else, this odious debt made Haiti poor.

On Dec. 17, 1914, U.S. Marines marched into the National Bank of Haiti and carried off $500,000 in gold — about half the bank’s reserve. The loot went straight to the vaults of the National City Bank in New York, now called Citibank, whose parent Citigroup holds $2.9 trillion in assets. Citibank needs to pay reparations, too.

Seven months later, white supremacist President Woodrow Wilson sent troops to occupy Haiti. The Marines landed on July 28, 1915, and stayed for 19 years, until 1934.
NAACP leader James Weldon Johnson described Marine Corps raids rounding up Haitians to perform unpaid road building “most closely resembled the African slave raids of past centuries.” (Scott Nearing and Joseph Freeman, “Dollar Diplomacy”) Weldon wrote the lyrics to the anthem “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”

Haitian leader Charlemagne Pėralte, who resisted this invasion, was assassinated by Marines who were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for this war crime.

Haitian wealth helped build Philadelphia

The richest man in the United States from before 1810 until his death in 1831 was the Philadelphia shipowner and banker Stephen Girard. He made his wealth off the slave trade and by ripping off Asian countries while exploiting sailors mercilessly.

Girard was the biggest shareholder in the Bank of the United States. After the bank’s charter expired, the miser launched the Girard Bank on May 12, 1812, with a capital of $1.2 million. The year before, the entire U.S. federal budget had been just $8 million. (Allen Schick, “The Federal Budget: Politics, Policy, Process”)

Key to Girard’s rapid accumulation of loot was sending out two ships that were supposed to rescue the slave masters in Haiti.

Instead of saving their worthless lives by getting on Girard’s ships, these slavers were so greedy that they loaded their gold and other valuables instead. Black Panther Party leader Dr. Huey P. Newton would have called them “avaricious.”

Their delay in getting out of Haiti allowed the liberator Jean-Jacques Dessalines and the Haitian people to administer justice to these monsters. They never got to enjoy their luxuries or torture Africans again.

Girard used the estimated $50,000 worth of valuables — equivalent to many millions today — to build ships that made big profits off Chinese tea and silks. He became one of the biggest Philadelphia landlords and subscribed $200,000 toward one of the first railroads in Pennsylvania, the Danville and Pottsville.

Girard’s example of continuously reinvesting his profits is what Karl Marx called “the process of capitalist ­accumulation” in Capital.

Historian Joel A. Rogers wrote that Girard actually stole much more money from Haiti. Rogers claimed that Girard took $6 million from Haitian leader Toussaint Louverture, which Girard refused to return after Napoleon treacherously imprisoned Louverture.

Girard also invested the wealth stolen from enslaved Africans in Pennsylvania canals and coal mining lands. By 1942, almost 120 million tons of anthracite coal had been mined from Girard’s thousands of acres. (James J. Raciti, “Girard: America’s Colonial Olympian”)

Irish miners dug this coal, and 20 Irish miners — the “Molly Maguires” — were framed and executed for organizing a union. The same capitalist class that hanged these heroes bombed the MOVE house on May 13, 1985, killing 11 Black people including five children. It framed Mumia Abu-Jamal and has kept him in prison for nearly 45 years.

By 1982, when it was gobbled up by the Mellon Bank — named after the billionaire family that controlled Alcoa, Gulf Oil and the city of Pittsburgh — the Girard Bank had 145 branches.

Today its successor, the Bank of New York Mellon, has assets “under management” of $525 billion. But its “assets under custody and/or administration around the world” area are a whopping $59 trillion!

That’s around $7,000 for every human being on the planet! But the capitalists and their media tell us we don’t have enough money for health care.

We need to fight for justice for Haiti, and to free Mumia Abu-Jamal and all political prisoners. We also need to rename Philadelphia’s Girard Avenue after Jean-Jacques Dessalines.

(A source for this article was “History of the Great American Fortunes” by Gustavus Myers.)

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