The Debtor-Slaver, A Study in American Class Psychology

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 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 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,

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 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 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.

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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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.

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

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, 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 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 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, 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

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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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

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, 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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

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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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.

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, 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 cool zone Media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.