BLACK AGENDA REPORT (Intro)
“This is not high-way robbery; it can be better called international burglary.”
In 1934, Marcus Garvey wrote a short commentary for The Black Man titled “The American Dollar.” Published at the height of the Great Depression, “The American Dollar” is a short and succinct evisceration of the global financial elite – and an impassioned defense of the international working classes against predatory policies. Garvey argues that financial speculators have been able to enrich themselves through the manipulation of the price of international currencies like the British pound, the French franc, the German mark, and the U.S. dollar. This speculation has created a global economy that enriches the already rich, while furthering impoverishing the already poor. For Garvey, such speculators – he calls them “scientific financiers” – make up the most dangerous class in the world.
Garvey must have held a special bitterness towards this class. In 1923, after years of being hounded by the “Garvey Must Go” campaigners and the FBI, Garvey was convicted of one count of mail fraud in relation to the sale of stock in The Black Star Line. He was fined $1,000 and sentenced to five years in prison, the maximum penalty under the law. He served about half his sentence before he was deported to Jamaica in 1927. Meanwhile, Charles E. Mitchell, the president of the National City Bank of New York, and Albert H. Wiggin, President of the Chase National Bank, engaged in years of fraudulent and illegal stock manipulation that cost the US public millions of dollars and pushed the world to economic collapse. Neither Mitchell nor Wiggin faced any sort of punishment.
The resonances between Garvey’s times and our own are obvious – and Garvey’s “The American Dollar” seems as relevant now as it was in the 1930s. We reprinted it below.
The American dollar
by MARCUS GARVEY
The American dollar is still low. The Pound Sterling still values more than the $5 bill, and so another world financial situation is at hand. Business people everywhere who have been dealing with the dollar have had to change suddenly their methods either for good or ill. This will affect America toward one way or the other. Some business people had been dealing with the English pound rather than the American dollar for some time, because it was of greater advantage to them. Now that the dollar is gone down, there is a switch from the pound to the dollar, and so there is an up and down in finance; but have we ever stopped to think why this inflation and deflation go on? It is simply because a school of scientific financiers and speculators have worked out a system by which they can upset the pocket-book of every citizen, and take out of it as much change as they want from time to time. Sometimes they take out extract change for the English pound and then at another time they do the same thing for the American dollar and the French franc and the German mark, but when a totalization takes place, the difference of change goes to the financiers and to the speculators and the citizens go back to work again to fill their pocket-books. This is not high-way robbery; it can be better called international burglary.
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