How financial cleansing supplanted ethnic cleansing in the United States

Once upon a time, the once mighty Roman Empire collapsed in Western Europe, but not before inculcating who owned the land, and how land should be used, into both its historic residents and the halfway Romanized barbarian invaders and settlers who inherited it.

First the Roman Senate, and then for over 400 years Roman Emperors, decided who owned all the land. Land was granted to Senators, to veteran soldiers, to loyal “natives,” to Italian colonists on what had been other people’s land. IOW, a central authority ultimately determined who could own land, how much of it, and where.

The landowner could then use the land in whatever way he wished to make money, live in style and, if he didn’t piss off whoever was Emperor at the time, pass it on to his heirs. (Below: portrait of a Roman estate)

After the Empire fell, the Germanic barbarian kings simply adopted the old imperial system for themselves. The king owned all the land in the kingdom, and granted fiefs to his henchmen, who then did the same thing with that land, and the people on it, that the Roman aristocracy had done—they both exploited them and protected them when it was in their interests to do so.

Today, we call it real property. “Real” comes from the Spanish real, which means royal. Real property literally means royal property for, ultimately, all land theoretically belonged to the king, though over time feudal lords began to consider their fiefs their own, something that the king should not be allowed to arbitrarily take away. That’s one reason the Magna Carta was written by the English barons.

Think about what this meant for the people at the time. In order to be truly free, to be able to control one’s own destiny, one had to own one’s own land. As early capitalism took hold in the 16th and 17th Centuries, land was seen to be something that was both held and improved, or used to create surplus value which could be turned into wealth, which in turn could buy one freedom from both the old landed aristocracy and other capitalists.

IOW, in order to be free, one must own his own land, and work it. After several millennia of knowing just what owning land meant, Europeans began doing the same thing in the Americas, but not just the nobility.

Now, for the first time in memory, everyone theoretically had the chance of gaining freedom by taking and holding his own land. It was a tonic, a grail, a compulsion for many. I cannot exaggerate how powerful this motivation was.

The indigenous Americans found this attitude incomprehensible. They all knew that the people belonged to the land, not the other way around. The settlers, with a few exceptions, were just as baffled by this indigenous attitude that hadn’t been seen in England since before the Roman Conquest.

Baffled or contemptuous, the settlers were bound and determined to gain that freedom they had been promised by their betters, and they took the land they needed in order to accomplish that end.

Of course, it wasn’t quite that simple and the devil resides in the details. Usually, settlers bought land from speculators who had gotten the titles from governors and legislatures by surveying the land, then placing bribes in the right pockets. George Washington himself was such a land speculator.

Many of the claims were absurdly large in area, not to mention unenforceable until some law arrived in any new settlement. In fact, absurd claims were the norm for land speculators. (Below: map of land as claimed by the British colonies, c. 1760)

Settlers by the dozen—yes, the numbers were that small early on—would purchase tracts from a map and move lock, stock, and barrel to claim it, build on it, and usually farm it.

Then, all it took was one indigenous raid, one bad harvest, an epidemic, an accident, or a war to make the settler unable to pay back the speculator, who could then take the land and sell it to someone else.

Sound familiar? One paycheck from homelessness, anyone?

The indigenous people were eventually subdued—a process that took nearly 3 centuries—the settlers spread all the way to California, and land ownership remains a prerequisite for both legal and economic freedom to this day.

Which is exactly why land is increasingly difficult to obtain and to keep if you are anything other than very wealthy—our rulers do not want us to have the freedom that comes with owning our own land.

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In fact, they never did. There were usually strings attached, but even if there were not and some powerful interest wanted your land, then they’d change the law or do whatever else was necessary to drive you off of it. Terrorism was common.

Indigenous Americans are very well aware of this history, and so are minority groups like Blacks and Latinos who saw all sorts of nefarious tactics used against them to either prevent them owning land in the first place or driving them off of it if they already did. There are people writing right now that this was, and is, white supremacy. Often it was.

What those writers will never tell you is that white people have been financially cleansed out of their homes as much or more often than anyone else throughout our history, albeit not because they were white. Mainly it was because they had the property some banker could take at the time.

After World War II, when there were factories, no international industrial competition, millions of men who knew how to use weapons home from the war, and Communism was alive and well and an alternative, it was prudent for the industrial capitalists of the time to let their workers have a taste of the freedom of home ownership.

And so the American Dream was created.

All of that is long gone. Our economy is nearly all finance and services now. The labor movement was crushed decades ago, employers no longer fear their employees, there is very serious international economic competition, and our ruling finance capitalists want to control us, not to placate us.

One of the easiest ways to control us is to deny us the freedom of owning our own land. Furthermore, since finance capital can and does make huge profits off of owning land, any land they don’t own becomes a target for acquisition.

Anyone who owns his or her own real property, even someone who inherited it from their parents or grandparents and only needs to pay for maintenance and property taxes, is a potential victim of modern financial cleansing.

These are the largest corporations in the world that you may never have heard of:

And they’re buying up land left and right. They have a new model. No longer is it necessary to send in settlers to clear the land of inconvenient people and wildlife, and then encourage them to take out loans or run up credit card debt or gamble or wait for them to get sick and for the health insurance industry to break them, all to make them default and thus sell their property cheap to the financial vampires waiting in the banks.

Oh, that still works and happens, but it’s not efficient. It’s difficult to force everybody in an entire neighborhood you want to buy—and raze and gentrify— to leave by bad decisions or bad luck. Fortunately for finance capitalism, we have natural disasters galore these days.

All they have to do is to wait for some fire or flood or wind to come along, and they’ve been doing it for a solid 20 years. Some would even say they arranged for a few fires to be set, and for a few levees to break.

It started with Hurricane Katrina. Neglect the levees. Let it flood.

Insurance companies were allowed to avoid paying claims. Homes were foreclosed. Much of the Black population of New Orleans had to move elsewhere. The waters receded, the old homes were razed, the old neighborhoods gentrified.

This has happened many times since, and it’s been equal opportunity. The Texas, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida Gulf Coasts. The eastern seaboard from North Carolina to Miami. Fires in the West year after year after year. Maui. Pacific Palisades.

Asheville.

Washington State.

And if there’s no natural disaster? No problem. Just poison the water supply. It can be fixed after those people in Flint and Jackson give up and leave. The Federal Government will do nothing because the corporate land grabbers own it, and state politicians come even cheaper.

The capitalism that drove my ancestors to settle on Comanche land in Texas is gone, but a new transnational finance capitalism has risen to take its place. These capitalists know that all wealth and power ultimately flows to who controls the land, and they’ve decided that will be them.

They want to be the central authority that ultimately owns all the land, like the kings and Roman Emperors of old.

Remember, land ownership confers some degree of power and independence, and they definitely don’t want you or me to have any of that.

Your ethnicity, the history of your ancestors, does not matter to the likes of Larry Fink, or to Donald Trump, for that matter. All that matters is that if you own your own land, no matter who or where you are, you are a potential target.

If you don’t own land, then the reason you find it so difficult to buy it can be found in the executive suites of corporations like Blackrock and Vanguard.

They don’t want you to buy. They want you to rent, from them, and then die. Preferably without any children because they don’t need us for our labor anymore, which is one reason why homosexuality is now so encouraged and celebrated by our ruling class.

It used to be, not all that long ago, that white working and middle class Americans were less systematically targeted than minority people were(eg New Orleans), but that is no longer the case. White people who owned homes in Maui, Pacific Palisades, and Asheville recently learned that lesson the hard way, and very soon Washington Staters will be sharing their misery.

The objective of finance capital is clear: Monopolize the land. All of it. Everywhere. Then rule.

We must all join together in our common interest to overthrow these bloodsuckers. Then we need to re-examine how we value and use our land. The way of capitalism is destructive to both the land and its people. It is far past time to find better ways, and the indigenous American way offers some valuable lessons for us all to consider.

We must all realize that, to people like Larry Fink of Blackrock, we are all indigenous now. We are all subject to being systematically financially cleansed from whatever land we stand or sit upon. All of our neighborhoods, all of our towns, are subject to the same thing.

We are all either resources to be exploited or obstacles to be removed.

Financial cleansing is so much neater than old-fashioned ethnic cleansing. It’s easier to keep under people’s radar. You see a lot of talk about Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign in Palestine, but when was the last time you heard anything about Pacific Palisades or Asheville?

While it is neater for the elites, it’s still devastating for entire families and communities. It’s still capitalism working in exactly the way it was intended—more profits soonest regardless. It’s still settler-colonialism, except the settlers wear suits, drink lattes, and sometimes fly to private islands to rent sex slaves, while the financially cleansed now come in all the colors of the rainbow.

It’s still about the land, and the power that can be derived from the land.

Thank you for reading, good day or night, and good luck.

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