The Financial Transaction TaxPart 2 of 6
Finance and empire
The financial markets grew up to pay for empires. Today they hold the value of what was stolen.
Financial markets and imperialism
Merchant banking and insurance sectors were built to trade in and finance 16th century enslavement of people and colonial plunder of resources and lands that decimated cultures, traditions and languages.
Banks and exchanges developed the financial markets as we know them today to firstly exchange and bet on plundered physical goods, and more recently, financial assets on paper from colonial wealth. A clear line can be drawn through history from these atrocities to the financial sector, who continue to act with impunity, in the global north and global south.
Financial markets encompass trades and bets on shares, or bonds, currencies, gold and silver, and other metals, wheat, sugar, oil and gas, carbon credits, and almost every other conceivable financial and commodity asset, on paper or mined.
Trillions of dollars worth of trades take place between the world’s biggest organisations and the world’s richest people every day. These bets are carried out through organised exchanges like the New York and London Stock Exchanges or off-exchange, or in the over-the-counter (OTC) market bilaterally between investments banks.
The total ‘spoils’ from enslavement and colonialism can be found in the financial markets
The trillions traded in financial markets each day represent the value of the global economy created by imperialists through enslavement and colonialism. The financial markets represents the sum total of debt, asset investments, natural resources yet to plundered, our past and future stolen labour value, future corporate profits, banker’s bonuses and so on. The financial markets are the best indicator of the sum total of the ill gotten ‘spoils’ of enslavement and colonialism. It finance terms, it can be considered the ‘present day value’ of enslavement and colonialism and future imperialism and subjugation.
Financial markets enable trillions of pounds of capital to flow between countries and companies for investment returns; these include companies who supply weapons of mass destruction, fossil fuel companies, mining companies using private militias, companies paying poverty wages, companies whose value chains require human trafficking and modern slavery to survive. The financial markets are a trillions per day global casino, legitimised by a legal system built on colonial ideologies.
The financial markets are opaque, with virtually no public oversight. They cannot even be regulated by their governments, and are offered bailouts despite manipulating markets, currencies, interest rates and crashing economies. Nearly 75% of all trading through financial markets around the world comes out of London and New York – the legacy of colonialism and an indicator of true imperialist power.
Tainted, blood-stained fiat currency (currency whose value is derived in the ‘free-market’) can never adequately honour those enslaved and killed at sea through the Middle Passage, murdered on plantations, or their descendants’ experiences with the violence of structural racism and other systemic injustices from imperialism. In the short-term and as a first step however, reparations from the financial markets are atonements for stolen indigenous people, lands, civilisations, cultures, tongues, economies and faiths to enable us to speak our truth, heal and repair.
In the longer term, the tax will ratchet up so as to interrupt and weaken financial flows, capitalism, and imperialist power, enabling systems change for justice, peace, equality and sustainability.