Payment Pending.
Between 1619 and 1865 (the abolition of slavery) the USA alone benefited from a total of 222,505,049 hours of forced labour valued at the US minimum wage with a modest rate of interest – $97 trillion.
14 Caribbean nations are suing Britain for slavery reparations, they have pointed out that when Britain abolished slavery it paid slave owners compensation worth £20 million but nothing to the slaves. If the slaves were compensated for lost wages alone it would total around £300 billion and it is worth noting that this tells nothing of the share they are owed of the value they produced and compensation for the trauma they endured (12 – 15 million Africans shipped across, of which, between 1.2 and 2.4 million died en route).
It’s fair to say that the success of the western world was built, entirely, on the back of this.
Also interesting to note that this little rampage was funded by previous excursions into Latin America between 1490 and 1600 when the Europeans reduced the Latin American population from between, an estimated, 50 – 100 million to around 3.5 million, About 95% were killed through genocide and slavery in the process of stealing 100 million kilogrammes of precious metals which would now be worth – in modern equivalents if invested in 1800 at 5% interest – $165 trillion, around double the entire world’s GDP in 2015.
And we’re fed up of immigrants coming over here and claiming benefits…
Concerning the ancient Egyptian Pharaohs Henry David Thereau wrote,
“As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder about in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their entire lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.”
Imbeciles
“I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it”
Mark Twain
“He who dies with most toys wins”
Just a Game?
“Monopoly was originally called The Landlord’s Game, and was invented as a teaching tool used to demonstrate the evils of concentrated ownership and the tendency of wealth to accumulate in the hands of the already rich”.
Falling Words
Words are like leaves and where they most abound much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found.
A Question of Value
Bizarrely it’s precisely the jobs that shift money around – creating next to nothing of tangible value – that net the best salaries. It’s a fascinating, paradoxical state of afairs. How is it possible that those agents of posterity – the teachers, the police officers, the nurses – are paid so poorly, while the unimportant, superfluous and even destructive shifters do so well?
“Don’t hope without reason, or fear without reason”
Hans Rosling
“Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory”
Franklin Pierce Adams