Speaker 1: Welcome to Dick It Happened Here podcast about things being
Speaker 1: absolutely atrocious. I'm your host, Meo Ball, and today we're
Speaker 1: going to do something a little different. Instead of our
Speaker 1: normal sort of escapades through the torment and the sort
Speaker 1: of crumbles of the modern world, We're going to take
Speaker 1: a step back into history to trace through the history
Speaker 1: and class psychology of a kind of guy who is
Speaker 1: a recurring character in the history of North America and
Speaker 1: who are responsible, to a greater extent than you think
Speaker 1: for some of the worst atrocities this world has ever seen. Now,
Speaker 1: I hesitate to use the word class as a way
Speaker 1: to actually describe these people, because the people were going
Speaker 1: to be talking about are from completely different economies, completely
Speaker 1: different class structures, completely different systems of production. So we're
Speaker 1: sticking with the loose term kind of guy. And this
Speaker 1: kind of guy is a kind of guy that I
Speaker 1: have termed the debtor slaver. Now this, at first glance,
Speaker 1: this this is a confusing term. My word processor, at
Speaker 1: the very least, gets very very angry with me every
Speaker 1: time I try to write it and insist that no, no, no,
Speaker 1: I must in fact mean debtor slave. But no, I
Speaker 1: do not mean debtor slave. What I'm actually referring to
Speaker 1: as a kind of guy who is both hopelessly in
Speaker 1: debt and also in command of enormous economic abilitary resources,
Speaker 1: most often slaves. To get a sense of what I'm
Speaker 1: talking about here, we're going to start with the archetypical
Speaker 1: debtor slaver, her Nan Cortes. Her name Cortes is, by
Speaker 1: all reputable accounts, an enormous piece of ship. A broke
Speaker 1: noble born in Spain in five Cortes managed to parlay
Speaker 1: an inn initially successful career as a sort of adventurer
Speaker 1: into a slave plantation in Cuba after he helped after
Speaker 1: he helped conquer the island in fifteen eleven. From there,
Speaker 1: through a combination of I shore you know this is
Speaker 1: this is actually what the historical records say about him.
Speaker 1: Wearing too many gold chains and spending too much money
Speaker 1: on his wife, his finances imploded and he fell into debt.
Speaker 1: This led him to embark on his infamous conquest of
Speaker 1: Mexican attempt to pay office creditors. Here, I'm going to
Speaker 1: turn to the work of the anthropologist David Graber. Rest
Speaker 1: in Peace, Smissy Buddy. Graver describes the absolute horror of
Speaker 1: entire population sold into slavery slaves with faces covered in
Speaker 1: brands indicating who they've been bought and sold by, entire
Speaker 1: populations worked to death, and minds empires drained of wealth
Speaker 1: by men whose lust for gold and silver seemed to
Speaker 1: know no end. And he somehow, both Cortes and his
Speaker 1: men seemed to have come out of the other end
Speaker 1: of one of the most important conquests in human history
Speaker 1: completely broke. Now it's easier to explain how Cortes as
Speaker 1: men came out of this broke. They came out of
Speaker 1: his broke because Cortes and his officers were extorting and
Speaker 1: robbing them mercilessly at literally every step of the campaign,
Speaker 1: by charging them utterly exorbitant prices for everything from bandages
Speaker 1: to like having to buy their own weapons, which were
Speaker 1: being sold by guests who Cortez and his officers who
Speaker 1: had to sort of cabal going on with everyone who
Speaker 1: could sell things. And once the conquest was done, Cortes
Speaker 1: as officers simply seized most of the share of the
Speaker 1: loot from their menness payment for all of the stuff
Speaker 1: that they needed. And I mentioned this not to inspire
Speaker 1: sympathy for the conquistadors like these are These are some
Speaker 1: of the worst human beings who have ever lived, and
Speaker 1: managing to somehow lose money on one of the most
Speaker 1: brutal sackings of a city in human history is like
Speaker 1: the least of the punishment they deserve. But on the
Speaker 1: other hand, their debt and the debt of Cortez himself,
Speaker 1: goes a long way to explain what happened next. Here's graper.
Speaker 1: These were the men who ended up in control of
Speaker 1: the provinces and who established local administration, taxes and labor regimes,
Speaker 1: which makes it a little easier to understand the descriptions
Speaker 1: of Indians with their faces covered by names, like so
Speaker 1: many counter endorsed checks, with the mind surrounded by miles
Speaker 1: of rotting corpses. We are not dealing with psychology of cold,
Speaker 1: calculating greed, but a more complicated mix of shame and
Speaker 1: righteous indignation, and of the frantic urgency of debts that
Speaker 1: would only compound and accumulate. These were almost certainly interest
Speaker 1: bearing loans in the outrage at the idea that, after
Speaker 1: all they had gone through, they should be held to
Speaker 1: owe anything to begin with. Now this is the sort
Speaker 1: of trademark psychology of the debtor slaver. It's an incredibly
Speaker 1: toxic mix of shame, indignation, outrage, and desperation that breathes
Speaker 1: an incredible kind of violence and is determined in large
Speaker 1: part by the conditions of modern compound debt itself. Here's
Speaker 1: Graver again. Money always has the potential to become a
Speaker 1: moral imperative one to itself, allow it to expand, and
Speaker 1: it can quickly become a morality so imperative that all
Speaker 1: others seem frivolous in comparison. For the debtor, the world
Speaker 1: is reduced to a collection of potential dangers, potential tools,
Speaker 1: and potential merchandise. Even human relationships become a matter of
Speaker 1: cost benefit calculation. Clearly, this is the way they conquistadors
Speaker 1: viewed the worlds that they set out to conquer. Now
Speaker 1: it doesn't take long until not only human relations but
Speaker 1: human beings themselves become a matter of cost benefit calculation,
Speaker 1: a set of merchandise that value could be extracted from,
Speaker 1: And here emerges the debtor slaver. Now, very clearly, all
Speaker 1: debtors do not behave like this. In fact, almost all
Speaker 1: debtors across all places and all times. Do not behave
Speaker 1: this way, or the world would be a place that
Speaker 1: makes even how we live in now look like a paradise.
Speaker 1: There's another factor at work here that distinguishes the debtor
Speaker 1: from the debtor slaver, and that's power. The debder slaver
Speaker 1: already wields or has wielded, enormous power over other people,
Speaker 1: either through direct violence or, as we'll see later, through
Speaker 1: the command of economic power. This is one of the
Speaker 1: products of the righteous indignation Grapery described earlier. These are
Speaker 1: people who are used to wielding power, who are suddenly
Speaker 1: now beholden in a real and immediate way to someone else,
Speaker 1: and so they set about solving the problem the way
Speaker 1: they've solved everything else in their life, throwing violence at it. Now,
Speaker 1: if you've been paying attention closely, you might realize that
Speaker 1: I've actually been describing two different sort of ranks of
Speaker 1: debtor slaves who sort of fuse into one mass and
Speaker 1: quartets conquissadors on the lower end, the people who kind
Speaker 1: of loosely be called adventurers, essentially a kind of mercenary
Speaker 1: out for a big score. Be that slaves be that
Speaker 1: land be that stolen loot that could vault them out
Speaker 1: of debton into the aristocracy. This is the sort of
Speaker 1: build general military base of the conquistador army itself. On
Speaker 1: the higher end of people like Cortez who having already
Speaker 1: technically who you know who are who are already technically
Speaker 1: plantation owners, but their own ineptitude, have still managed to
Speaker 1: become heavily indebted. Combined, they form a group responsible for
Speaker 1: three centuries of the greatest evil the world has ever seen. Now,
Speaker 1: these two groups, in a broad sense, need each other.
Speaker 1: The adventurers may have weapons, they may have some training,
Speaker 1: but at the end of the day, they have very
Speaker 1: little in terms of liquid capital. At liquid capital is
Speaker 1: something that you need in order to run a military campaign.
Speaker 1: Because in order to keep all of these people, all
Speaker 1: of these sort of adventurers, all of these sort of
Speaker 1: debtor slavers, all of these sort of would be conquistadors
Speaker 1: in the field, you have to produce, you know, things
Speaker 1: like food, things like boots, things like medical supplies. And
Speaker 1: this is where the plantation owners come in, because those
Speaker 1: are people who even though they're enormously in debt, and
Speaker 1: even though very often they're either fleeing their debtors or
Speaker 1: their all of their debts about to be called in.
Speaker 1: These are people who still technically have lines of credit
Speaker 1: open and they and you know also there are also
Speaker 1: people who sometimes have allies in more sort of solvent
Speaker 1: people in the same class, so they're able to sort
Speaker 1: of funnel liquid capital into these sort of ventures. And
Speaker 1: this is a process that we are going to see
Speaker 1: again after these ads. And we're back moving forward in
Speaker 1: time a few hundred years and north a few thousand miles,
Speaker 1: we come into another scene of debt subjugation and violen
Speaker 1: the plantations of the American South. Now, this is not
Speaker 1: the primitive, unhallowed fifteen hundreds, where slaves would be marked
Speaker 1: like tally sticks as they were passed back and forth
Speaker 1: between sword and pike wielding Spanish barbarians as they slaughtered
Speaker 1: their way through one of the greatest cities the world
Speaker 1: had ever known. This is the benighted eighteen hundreds. This
Speaker 1: is the age of steam power and railroads, the age
Speaker 1: of electricity, the advent of the global telecommunications network. What
Speaker 1: would come of this new era of progress. One of
Speaker 1: the greatest of all world historical crimes, the conversion of
Speaker 1: human beings into increasingly complex financial instruments plantation owners contrary
Speaker 1: to their depiction in media, which they've gotten almost those
Speaker 1: those people have gotten almost as good PR as cops,
Speaker 1: which is fairly incredible considering they haven't really existed as
Speaker 1: the sort of slave owning classes they used to be
Speaker 1: in you know, a hundred hundred years. I don't know,
Speaker 1: discuss among yourselves when you think share cropping has sort
Speaker 1: of decreased to an amount where these people like are
Speaker 1: no no longer around as a class. But you know, okay,
Speaker 1: just despite the sort of pr but these like Southern
Speaker 1: gentlemen get these people are constantly in debt, and they're
Speaker 1: you know, constantly attempting to solve the problem of them
Speaker 1: being in debt with the only thing they know how
Speaker 1: to do, which is slavery. And when I say they're
Speaker 1: trying to solve this problem through slavery, um, we're we're
Speaker 1: going to get to the more complicated ways to try
Speaker 1: to solve this with slavery. One of the big ways
Speaker 1: I try try to solve this with slavery is just
Speaker 1: whipping people harder. It's brutal and horrible, and yeah, you
Speaker 1: know this, this this is a system that is, who's
Speaker 1: the the efficiency of which is just built on profound
Speaker 1: human violence. So let's let's let's just established that right
Speaker 1: off the bat. This is the worst kind of slavery
Speaker 1: anyone's really ever done. Yeah, now you know, another factor
Speaker 1: for these people essentially turning into debt or slavers is
Speaker 1: the fact that these people are constantly putting themselves in
Speaker 1: self inflicted debt in order to do speculation. And this
Speaker 1: is the part where they start doing ship that is
Speaker 1: difficult for me to even try to explain will adequately
Speaker 1: capturing the horror of the process. The Southern planters began
Speaker 1: to create an entire separate financial network based entirely off
Speaker 1: of the quote unquote value of their slaves and their land.
Speaker 1: From the historian Edward B. Baptiste, Yet enslavers had already
Speaker 1: by the end of the eighteen twenties created a highly
Speaker 1: innovative alternative to existing financial structure. The Consolidated Association of
Speaker 1: Louisiana Planters, despite his name it c APL was still
Speaker 1: a bank, created more leverage for enslavers at less cost
Speaker 1: and on longer terms. It did so by securitizing slaves,
Speaker 1: hedging even more effectively against the individual investors loss, so
Speaker 1: long as the financial system itself did not fail. Here
Speaker 1: is how it worked. Potential borrowers, mortgage slaves and cultivated
Speaker 1: land to the c APL, which entitled them to borrow
Speaker 1: up to half of the assessed value of their property
Speaker 1: from the CIAPL and bank notes. To convince others to
Speaker 1: accept the banknotes thus distributed at face value, the ci
Speaker 1: ap L convinced the Louisiana legislature to back two point
Speaker 1: five million dollars in bank bonds do win ten to
Speaker 1: fifteen years bearing five percent interest with the faith and
Speaker 1: credit of the people of the state. The Great British
Speaker 1: Merchant bank bearing brother has agreed to advance the c
Speaker 1: APL the equivalent of two point five million dollars in
Speaker 1: Sterling bills. By the way, that is a unfathomable amount
Speaker 1: of money. Now that's not five million dollars that is
Speaker 1: that is it? That is an amount of money that
Speaker 1: will make your ears bleed the equivalent of two point
Speaker 1: five million in sterling bills and market the bonds on
Speaker 1: European securities markets. The bonds effectively converted in slavery's biggest investment,
Speaker 1: human beings or quote unquote hands from Maryland and Virginia
Speaker 1: and North Carolina and Kentucky into multiple streams of income,
Speaker 1: all under their control. Since all borrowers were officially stakeholders
Speaker 1: in the bank, the sale of the bonds created a
Speaker 1: high quality credit pool to be lent back to the
Speaker 1: planters at a significantly lower rate, sorry at a rate
Speaker 1: significantly lower than the rate of return they could expect
Speaker 1: that money to produce. The pool could be used for
Speaker 1: all sorts of income generating purposes, buying more slaves to
Speaker 1: produce more cotton and sugar and hence more income, or
Speaker 1: lending to other enslavers. Ver borrowers could pure amid their
Speaker 1: leverage even higher by borrowing on the same collateral from
Speaker 1: multiple lenders, while also getting unsecured short term commercial loans
Speaker 1: from the c apl by purchasing new slaves with the
Speaker 1: money they borrowed and borrowing on them too. They had
Speaker 1: mortgaged their slaves, sometimes multiple times, and sometimes they even
Speaker 1: mortgage fictitious slaves. But in contrast to what Walsh had promised,
Speaker 1: Nulty in this type of mortgage gave the enslaver tremendous
Speaker 1: margins control and flexibility. It was hard to imagine that
Speaker 1: such borrows would be foreclosed even if they fell behind
Speaker 1: on their aiments. After all, the borrowers owned the bank.
Speaker 1: Using the C A p L model, slave owners were
Speaker 1: now able to monetize their slaves by securitizing them and
Speaker 1: then leveraging them multiple times on the international financial markets. Now, okay,
Speaker 1: having having just spent a decent amount of time running
Speaker 1: through the sort of finance of this, I need to reiterate.
Speaker 1: These are human beings who are being enslaved and tortured constantly,
Speaker 1: the ownership of whom is being mortgaged to a bank
Speaker 1: and then sold and traded as assets on the financial market.
Speaker 1: What what they have done here is like two thousand
Speaker 1: eight style financial collapse, like set of collateralized loan obligations,
Speaker 1: except the loans are backed by fucking human beings they
Speaker 1: forced into slavery. It is a level of evil that
Speaker 1: is almost incomprehensible because the very financial language that is
Speaker 1: necessary to explain what they're doing, by necessity, conceals the
Speaker 1: horror of what's actually being done and was actually being
Speaker 1: done here is hundreds of thousands of people are being
Speaker 1: sold into slavery and forced to clear land and work
Speaker 1: on land that has just been stolen literally like you know,
Speaker 1: sometimes in some cases like the day before, by indigenous
Speaker 1: people who have just been sent on the trail of tears.
Speaker 1: And this is this is being done to fuel these
Speaker 1: new financial instruments. Now, in a somewhat ironic twist, the
Speaker 1: product of this entire thing, the product of all of
Speaker 1: this land clearing, the product of Andrew Jackson's war on
Speaker 1: the Second Bank of the US, the product of all
Speaker 1: of this sort of speculation is the plantations wind up
Speaker 1: producing too much cotton, too much slave cotton, and this
Speaker 1: quickly becomes an absolute fiasco. Debt suddenly outpaced the entire
Speaker 1: value of the slave crop, and you know, the entire
Speaker 1: financial system begins to implode. So it starts, It starts
Speaker 1: in sort of the UK and the European markets that
Speaker 1: had taken a bunch of these these sort of slave bonds.
Speaker 1: But eventually the financial collapse spreads, and you know, as
Speaker 1: we heard in the article, right the way these banks
Speaker 1: are set off, the way these again like these these
Speaker 1: banks that are just all of the bank is just slaves.
Speaker 1: And I guess, I guess I should also take an
Speaker 1: aside here to mention that like the normal banks are
Speaker 1: also doing stuff like this. It's just that the South
Speaker 1: not being content to just have normal banks taking you know,
Speaker 1: doing mortgages, like they're taking out mortgages on houses with
Speaker 1: slaves as collateral. Uh, they've they've credit decided to create
Speaker 1: like they're in their own entire financial network that's just
Speaker 1: slaves and nothing else. Well land too, but yeah, slaves
Speaker 1: and land, and this entire thing sort of just collapses
Speaker 1: in on itself and this leads to it to an
Speaker 1: even larger mass of deader slavery plantation owners. And this
Speaker 1: is where we turn from plantation slavery to some good
Speaker 1: old fashioned conquistadoring what what have the sort of myths
Speaker 1: of slavery with the way that you know, slavery has
Speaker 1: been sort of understood in the West, particularly in sort
Speaker 1: of Europe, well, particularly in the U S and the UK,
Speaker 1: which have these sort of like complexes about you know,
Speaker 1: like this sort of inevitability of ebolitionism and the sort
Speaker 1: of benevolent empire against abolition or whatever. You know, there's
Speaker 1: there's this sort of like that you get these economic
Speaker 1: organis to that that the people people will argue that
Speaker 1: you know, slavery was like going to collapse anyways, Like
Speaker 1: people just let it go, it would have fell on apart,
Speaker 1: and that that is just sort of nonsense. And one
Speaker 1: of the things that this, one of the things that
Speaker 1: this conceals is that slave power was constantly expansionary. It's
Speaker 1: never sort of like slavery was never a system that
Speaker 1: was sort of just contained in one place, right. It
Speaker 1: was always pushing. It was always attempting to you know,
Speaker 1: seize new land. It was always attempting to seize new slaves.
Speaker 1: Was it was a system that could only really survive
Speaker 1: if it was constantly able to seize new territory and
Speaker 1: seize new slaves in order to work it. And so
Speaker 1: there's a lot of sort of products of this, right.
Speaker 1: One of the sort of earlier ones, you get these
Speaker 1: settlers pushing west, attempting to turn sort of new states
Speaker 1: and the slave states, and these are you know, these
Speaker 1: are often, like the settlers here, often the sort of
Speaker 1: men like euphemistically described as adventurers, with like you know,
Speaker 1: these are people who portize right like they are people
Speaker 1: desperately attempting to stay one step ahead of their creditors
Speaker 1: by invoking the time honored American tradition of slaughtering indigenous
Speaker 1: people for their land, which you know, could then be
Speaker 1: turned over to speculators, you could be turned over to
Speaker 1: the sort of wealthier backers. And these men and in
Speaker 1: this period these are almost always men. I thought that's
Speaker 1: going to change pretty soon. But these men are so
Speaker 1: violent and so disruptive that at various points in the
Speaker 1: late seventeen hundreds and early eight hundreds, the US like
Speaker 1: attempts to stop them from settling any further less they
Speaker 1: sort of disturb American foreign policy efforts. Um. And these
Speaker 1: efforts fail, and the product of this is that manifest destinies,
Speaker 1: you know, trail of corpses pushes even further and further west.
Speaker 1: Now by the by the eighteen fifties, there there's a
Speaker 1: new sort of conquistador who's setting out to you know,
Speaker 1: conquer in the name of the Cross and paying off
Speaker 1: their creditors. And they're called filibusters. Now this is actually
Speaker 1: where these people are where the term filibuster as a
Speaker 1: sort of like like thing that you do in the
Speaker 1: sentence and not let people do stuff like that. This
Speaker 1: this is where that comes from. It's these people. Um,
Speaker 1: these are okay, so you know, the official descriptions of
Speaker 1: them will say things like private armies. I there are
Speaker 1: more these kind of like ragged bands of like slavery
Speaker 1: mongering gennis ideas who are backed by, you know, largely
Speaker 1: by southern plantation owners, sometimes by Southern states, occasionally by
Speaker 1: just northern banks, because the place they're trying to go
Speaker 1: somewhere the banks, the northern Banks want to sort of
Speaker 1: seize control of. And you know, these people set out
Speaker 1: to conquer new slave states by you know, straight up
Speaker 1: season control of places like Cuba or Mexico. They do
Speaker 1: a bunch of this stuff in Texas doesn't really work,
Speaker 1: but you know they I mean, part of the complicated
Speaker 1: thing and talking about the filibusters is that like, in
Speaker 1: some sense, the most successful like attempt to do something
Speaker 1: like this was actually Texas, but those people weren't really
Speaker 1: phil about. Like the people who actually successfully sees control
Speaker 1: of Texas, like Sam Adam and his sort of crew
Speaker 1: of merry miscreant slave owners. Those guys aren't technically filibusters,
Speaker 1: but you know, they they do sort of succeed in
Speaker 1: bringing in Texas as a slave state. But yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean these people are they keep they keep launching
Speaker 1: invasions of fucking Cuba. They keep launching use invasions everywhere
Speaker 1: that There's a really great movie called Walker that's a
Speaker 1: sort of fictionalized account of probably the most famous filibuster,
Speaker 1: a guy named William Walker. And well, okay, so it
Speaker 1: starts with his attempt to like conquered Mexico, which doesn't
Speaker 1: go well, but then it sets out for his ataept
Speaker 1: to conquered in Charagua, which like kind of works, actually
Speaker 1: takes Nicaragua for a little bit. You know. But this
Speaker 1: this this movie version of it's also like it's an
Speaker 1: anti war film about the US backing the contrast, and
Speaker 1: it rules. I'm talking about it because nobody's ever watched
Speaker 1: this thing. And the studio when when they they actually
Speaker 1: figured out what Walker was and that it was, you know,
Speaker 1: like an an anti war film about the contrast, they
Speaker 1: literally killed the entire movie and the director, Alex Cox,
Speaker 1: here's the guy you should repo man like, he literally
Speaker 1: never worked in Hollywood again after this. So yeah, go
Speaker 1: watch Walker. Understand it's a little it's a bit fictionalized.
Speaker 1: It's mostly an anti war film about the contrast, but
Speaker 1: you know, part of what you try to track down
Speaker 1: and personally, that is very important about this is that
Speaker 1: you know, the there's this, there's these sort of lineages
Speaker 1: of American colonialism, and part of these lineary edges is
Speaker 1: that you know, like the that literally does not matter
Speaker 1: like what century you're in, the US is trying to
Speaker 1: see his introl of Nicaragua. Now, okay, so but back
Speaker 1: back to the soil. The filibusters mainline. Unlike the Conquistadors,
Speaker 1: who were kind of like I don't know, they had
Speaker 1: a combination of being really really lucky and also like
Speaker 1: genu winely having some pretty good leadership even though you know,
Speaker 1: good leadership, but for evil I those guys were really successful.
Speaker 1: The Philip Buzzers they mostly failed because again this is
Speaker 1: these these are mostly sort of just like bands of
Speaker 1: like marauders. They almost they barely have supply lines, like
Speaker 1: I don't know, sometimes they have real weapons, but they're
Speaker 1: not especially competent. But what what what they did do
Speaker 1: is they kill a lot of people. And this this
Speaker 1: is one of those things that's sort of like I
Speaker 1: don't know, it gets sort of romanticized or it gets
Speaker 1: sort of like brushed over. Is that like, yeah, I know,
Speaker 1: these these people like they're they're like these groups are
Speaker 1: basically like rolling lynch mobs, and so you know, there
Speaker 1: they'll they'll be doing something that run into a town.
Speaker 1: They'll just they'll just kill everyone. They will enslave people,
Speaker 1: they were rape people, they do ship that is just
Speaker 1: they're absolutely imborrant. And that's that's the sort of legacy
Speaker 1: of this stuff. And you know, they probably would have
Speaker 1: kept doing it and you know, except they were stopped. Right.
Speaker 1: One of one of the sort of like legacies of
Speaker 1: these people is eventually the sort of slave powers like
Speaker 1: wind Up and Bleeding Kansas, which is the sort of
Speaker 1: semi civil war between the pro slavery anti slavery forces
Speaker 1: in Kansas that leads to the regular Civil War. But
Speaker 1: you know, I mean, I think I think it's sort
Speaker 1: of important to understand about this entire thing is that
Speaker 1: these people just kept accumulating power and kept accumulating power
Speaker 1: and kept a commulating power do someone stopped them. And
Speaker 1: that was also true of the conquistadors, right, Like I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, and like arguably arguably the sort of sentences
Speaker 1: those people are still in power. But like, you know,
Speaker 1: the Spanish were not run out of the places that
Speaker 1: they had conquered until people sort of fought them. Now,
Speaker 1: the last thing I want to do is we're also
Speaker 1: not free of this kind of guy. Um. It kind
Speaker 1: of manifests in different ways in sort of more recent times.
Speaker 1: I think probably the the closest we have to the
Speaker 1: sort of like corporate Cortez thing are the people behind
Speaker 1: the sort of it gets it gets re read it
Speaker 1: as mergens and acquisitions. But the people behind the like
Speaker 1: leveraged buy out um, like corporate radar stuff on Wall
Speaker 1: Street in the eighties, who you know. And then the reason,
Speaker 1: the reason they sort of they behave and they think
Speaker 1: in a lot of the very in a lot of
Speaker 1: the same ways as these sort of as a sort
Speaker 1: of debt or slavers, is that their their financial techniques
Speaker 1: leave them in basically the same situation as um as
Speaker 1: as your Cortez, which is that the way that these
Speaker 1: people take over a company, and these these are basically
Speaker 1: financed people. These are investors who have figured out a
Speaker 1: way to seize control of companies. And the way they
Speaker 1: figured out to do it is they they essentially they
Speaker 1: still bonds other investors. So the short version of it
Speaker 1: is that, yeah, they they go into an enormous amount
Speaker 1: of debt personally, right in order to you know, have
Speaker 1: enough money to just buy up the stock prices of
Speaker 1: the company. And you know, they say, okay, we're gonna
Speaker 1: buy say say say your stock prices thirty five dollars,
Speaker 1: are like, okay, we're gonna buy the stock at forty
Speaker 1: and unless the company can you know, like somehow raise
Speaker 1: their stock price above that in order to defend them off.
Speaker 1: You know, this one person who's taking on an enormous
Speaker 1: amount of debt now suddenly just owns the company and
Speaker 1: he could transfer the debt onto the company, and then
Speaker 1: he has to start, you know, just upping assets from it. Right.
Speaker 1: He has to find ways to make money. He has
Speaker 1: to find ways to sort of raise the stock price
Speaker 1: of this thing, you know. And this is usually done
Speaker 1: by like stripping people's pensions, by firing people, by just
Speaker 1: destroying entire like entire sort of like people's livelihoods. This
Speaker 1: is done by just dismantling companies wholesale like towards Arouse
Speaker 1: is the last company that sort of famously had this
Speaker 1: happened to them. They just get completely dismembered and they
Speaker 1: get completely dismembered because the people who buy these companies, right,
Speaker 1: and you know this eventually short of transider firms instead, etcetera, etcetera.
Speaker 1: But those people are also unbelievably in debt, right, and
Speaker 1: you know it's that that they've imposed on themselves. It
Speaker 1: isn't that you know, the sort of psychological effects of
Speaker 1: it are very similar. And you know, I think I
Speaker 1: think the thing about sort of like the late century
Speaker 1: is that the violence gets outsourced. So you know, these
Speaker 1: people still have slaves, but the slaves are like you
Speaker 1: know that the slaves are owned by a contractor who's
Speaker 1: our contractor of a contractor like somewhere way down the line.
Speaker 1: But you know, the the sort of strategic stuff and
Speaker 1: the way that these people behave is very similar. And
Speaker 1: I think it's worth knowing that there's there's two there's
Speaker 1: people who there's coople people who come out of this
Speaker 1: era who are very important now. One is that one
Speaker 1: of the people who comes out of this sort of
Speaker 1: eighties nineties era who was also constantly in debt, and
Speaker 1: it's also just sort of like a murderous, like incredibly
Speaker 1: vengeful person who who's also sort of dealing with these
Speaker 1: same kinds of like you know, the who's tapping into
Speaker 1: the sort of emotions of the sort of like indignation
Speaker 1: and outrage and desperation, like is Donald Trump and you know,
Speaker 1: in Toronald Trump, I think is a sort of tragedy
Speaker 1: version of it. And then you get to see it.
Speaker 1: We've been getting to see it, uh with Elon Musk
Speaker 1: as a sort of farst version of it, where he's
Speaker 1: you know, increasingly desperate to try to dig himself out
Speaker 1: of the hole that he got by buying by having
Speaker 1: to leverage himself so much to buy Twitter. But yeah,
Speaker 1: we are, we well remain haunted by the specter of
Speaker 1: this kind of guy. And they've done They've done enormous
Speaker 1: harm to the world. They're probably going to keep doing
Speaker 1: enormous harm in the world. And yeah, but but again,
Speaker 1: I I think it is worth thinking about them psychologically
Speaker 1: and worth understanding that it's not that you know, like
Speaker 1: at the core of sort of like the capitalist death machine,
Speaker 1: are not necessarily these like incredibly cold, rational calculating people.
Speaker 1: It's a bunch of people who are frantic, who are desperate,
Speaker 1: who are very very angry, and that doesn't make them
Speaker 1: sort of you know, doesn't make them more sympathetic, it
Speaker 1: just makes them more violence. It Could Happen Here as
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