Disavowing

First off, Hillary doesn't seem to be running on explicitly pro-Wall Street rhetoric, so I'm not clear on the point.

But on the issue at hand, quoting this paper:

Black Belt white elites faced two interrelated threats. The first was political. In areas where blacks outnumbered whites (in some cases 9 to 1), the abrupt enfranchisement of blacks threatened white control over local politics (Du Bois, 1935; Key, 1949; Kousser, 1974). This gave whites in former slaveholding counties an incentive to promote an environment of violence and intimidation against the new freedmen, with the purpose of election fraud and disenfrachisement (Du Bois, 1935; Kousser, 1974). The second threat to white elites was economic. The emancipation of slaves after the Civil War was a major shock to the Southern economy: blacks now had to be paid wages (Higgs, 1977). Furthermore, emancipation brought blacks some freedom over the amount of labor they supplied, and many ex-slaves chose to work for themselves rather than for the white ruling class (Ransom and Sutch, 2001b). This both reduced the labor supply and increased labor costs sharply, threatening the Southern plantation economy (Ransom and Sutch, 2001b; Alston and Ferrie, 1993). Whites therefore had an incentive to establish not just new forms of labor coercion that could replace slavery but also new political restrictions that would help protect white hegemony.

Since black populations and large-scale agricultural production were greatest in former slaveholding counties, it was in these counties that Southern elites exerted greater efforts toward repression (Kousser, 1974). These repressive techniques are well documented in the economics and history literatures (Alston and Ferrie, 1993; Blackmon, 2008; Lichtenstein, 1996; Wiener, 1978). For example, Wiener (1978, p. 62) describes how “planters used [Ku Klux] Klan terror to keep blacks from leaving the plantation regions, to get them to work, and keep them at work, in the cotton field.” Also well documented is the fact that poor whites were complicit with the landowning elite and would engage in and support violent acts towards blacks, even though such violence could presumably also lower white wages (Du Bois, 1935; Blackmon, 2008; Roithmayr, 2010).

If you can't tell the difference between a white supremacist terrorist organization that came into being to enforce coercive economic and political relations that resembled slavery from bankers, I really don't know what to say to you.

/r/PoliticalDiscussion Thread