History

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5964407

This one was supposed to come out tomorrow because I already published an essay Sunday, but I must have messed up somewhere. Anyway since we're talking about Korea a lot with the hostilities ramping up around the DMZ I think it's very timely that you get to read this piece ASAP!

Starting in 1979 and continuing for 33 years, she meticulously recorded television broadcasts around the clock, amassing a staggering collection of 70,000 VHS tapes containing over 400,000 hours of footage.

Stokes' motivation stemmed from a deep distrust of mainstream media and a belief in the importance of preserving unfiltered information. She lived through a time of significant social and political change, and she recognized that television news played a powerful role in shaping public opinion. By capturing this footage, she sought to create a resource that would allow people to critically examine how events were portrayed and to form their own conclusions.

Stokes' archive is remarkable for its comprehensiveness. She recorded not only major news events but also everyday programming, capturing the cultural and social trends of the time. This makes her collection an invaluable resource for researchers, historians, and anyone interested in understanding the evolution of television and its impact on society.

After her death in 2012, Stokes' collection was donated to the Internet Archive, which is currently working to digitize the tapes and make them available online. This massive undertaking will ensure that Stokes' legacy of preserving history is accessible to all.

10.03.24

This post is part of a series highlighting some of our favorite entries from the archives. Read the rests of the posts here.

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What does history add to the study of law and political economy? As Karen Tani has observed, while history rarely provides an obvious road map to solving new legal problems, it can nevertheless help us understand why the legal landscape looks the way it does and illuminate the consequences of particular legal choices. It can also, Sam Aber & Caroline Parker have argued, reveal contingencies in the established order and make it easier to see potential alternatives. Finally, at its best and as some of the posts below demonstrate, history can offer detailed descriptions and analyses of domination’s force and show how social movements can obstruct, resist, and even bring to an end particular forms of domination. So without further ado, here are just a few of our favorite LPE & History posts.

The Making of a New Working Class – Gabriel Winant

Gabriel Winant’s *The Next Shift *is a historical study of care work, a subject so intimately tied up with law and political economy that the Blog published a symposium on it. In his opening post, Winant explains how industrial and labor policy reflected a too-narrow template of what constituted an industry, excluding healthcare workers from labor protections and producing a health care system that squeezed both patients and workers. As COVID-19 periodically resurfaces, each time sickening and disabling individuals, the lessons of Winant’s study—how the “crisis of care that we witness every day is both deeply historically rooted and, potentially, a lever of change for the millions of us whom the health care system touches”—becomes more urgent.

Tax Havens: Legal Recoding of Colonial Plunder – Vanessa Ogle

Vanessa Ogle, a historian of capitalism and empire, identifies a surprising connection between decolonization and the expansion of tax havens in the mid-twentieth century. To avoid the possibility of having to share the wealth they had extracted from their former subjects, white settlers in Kenya and Rhodesia sent their money to the Bahamas and British Channel Islands, while their counterparts in the French colonies of Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria sent their money to Switzerland. Ogle recounts how lawyers took on this work, creating tax havens and using legal recoding mechanisms to make capital more mobile, such that foreign investment in stocks and bonds outstripped direct investments by the 1970s. These former colonies were thus left with the project of developing new states without much in the way of a tax base and in extensive arrears from white settlers’ refusal to tax themselves during the halcyon days of empire.

K-Sue Park on How She Teaches Property

For K-Sue Park, “the histories of conquest and enslavement are key to understanding our property system, both why property remains such a major driver of racial inequality and also how it explains the shape and the dynamics of the real estate market today.” In this interview, Park offers a précis of how she teaches the history of discovery doctrine through Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823) and how she teaches labor through the connection between John Locke and land acquisition. Park also describes her use of *The Antelope *to teach about the history of slavery. While these are not, Park explains, the extent of how one might teach about race in the property course, they offer focused descriptions of how to teach the histories of conquest and slavery, both of which are central to the law of property.

Historicizing Consumer Protection – Luke Herrine

If we hope to revive a moral economy framework for thinking about consumer protection law, Luke Herrine argues, we need to debunk the conventional story about what happened when the FTC supposedly imbued the notion of “unfairness” with too much moral content. According to this morality tale, when the FTC tried to use its unfairness authority to ban children’s advertising in the 1970s, the public recoiled, and Congress forced the FTC to develop a more objective standard for determining whether something is “unfair”—a standard grounded in consumer choice. As Herrine explains, however, what really happened was that the FTC was blindsided by an increasingly radical business lobby, and a faction of neoliberals within the agency took advantage of the moment to press their view of how the FTC should think about its authority.

The Young Lords: Building Power through Direct Action – Johanna Fernández

Creative and strategic militancy interrupts the normal functioning of society, shifts the terms of debate in public discourse, and expands the definition of the common good. Never has this been more evident than when the Young Lords barricaded themselves inside The First Spanish United Methodist Church in East Harlem. As Johanna Fernández describes, this Puerto Rican counterpart of the Black Panthers had simply been looking for a space to feed breakfast to poor children before school and the church was closed except for a couple of hours on Sunday. But after the priest denied their request, the Young Lords occupied the building and transformed it into a staging ground for their vision of a just society. They provided hundreds of free meals to children, ran a medical clinic and a lead and anemia testing drive, and used the Church as a headquarters for redress of community grievances and needs. After 11 days, the Young Lords abandoned the church; that same night, Republican governor Nelson Rockefeller proposed launching a breakfast program for 35,000 poor children in the city

The Long History of Anti-CRT Politics – Aziz Rana

Recent attacks on CRT often claim that the United States, since its founding, has been committed to principles of liberty and equality. As Aziz Rana reveals, however, this strategic use of American universalism, along with an explicit focus on public education, has been perhaps the dominant way of articulating white resistance to racial reform for the better part of a century. Since the early 20th century, such “civic nationalists” have argued that the enlightenment arrived in the US, as opposed to elsewhere, because of the culturally exceptional nature of the individuals that settled North America: Anglo-Europeans. And they have used such claims to justify restricting the immigration of disfavored groups and to promote an intense project of Americanization, in which those from less culturally “mature” societies were to be aggressively inculcated with American values.

Racial Myths, Market Myths, and the Policy Roots of Predatory Lending in 1970s Chicago – Beryl Satter

Beryl Satter’s contribution to the symposium on Mehrsa Baradaran’s The Color of Money focuses on the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968. As Satter recounts, lenders skimmed profits at every step—first by charging origination fees on inflated mortgages and then by selling mortgages to a secondary market. By contrast, buyers were the victims of accelerated foreclosure schedules, the result of FHA-insured mortgages’ perverse incentives to vacate homes as quickly as possible in order for lenders to collected payment on defaulted loans. The structure of the FHA and HUD Acts created asymmetric structures that spurred lending to a captive market of Black and Latino borrowers, enacting through law and practice a siphon of wealth from minority borrowers to lenders.

Plantation Capitalism’s Legacy Produced the Maui Wildfires – Uʻilani Tanigawa Lum and Kaulu Luʻuwai

In the aftermath of the wildfires that ravaged Maui in August 2023, Tanigawa Lum and Lu’uwai explained that while drought and high winds were the proximate cause of the disaster, there was also a deeper human-focused explanation: the history of plantation capitalism. Haole (foreign) capitalists established sugar plantations across the islands throughout the late nineteenth century, decimating the local biodiversity in favor of monoculture sugarcane and imposing the colossal irrigation systems needed to sustain it. Even as the sugar plantations have closed, Tanigawa Lum and Lu’uwai explain, “the tourism industry has mirrored and reinforced the legacy of plantation capitalism through power structures that persist in disenfranchising Kānaka Maoli and other marginalized immigrant communities living in Hawaiʻi,” including the large Filipino population living on the islands and serving as the primary low-wage workforce. Through recent litigation and legal reform, however, Kānaka Maoli are working to restore Hawai’ian self-determination and make the islands sustainable again.

Constitutional Political Economy for a Democracy, Not an Oligarchy – William E. Forbath & Joseph Fishkin

In this introductory post to the symposium on their *The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution, *Forbath and Fishkin note that while their work has emerged amidst the blossoming movement for law and political economy, many in this movement are skeptical of the usefulness of constitutional argument, largely because they are skeptical of how such arguments play out in courts. While they share this skepticism of the judicial supremacy, they argue that for much of American history, constitutional arguments were not the exclusive province of courts. Instead, there was a vibrant  “democracy of opportunity” tradition that impelled legislators and executives to restrain oligarchy, build a broad, wide-open middle class, and construct a political economy that is inclusive across racial lines. By abandoning this tradition, late 20th century liberals mistakenly ceded the ground of constitutional argumentation to the right.

The Origins of the Nonprofit Industrial Complex – Claire Dunning

Despite receiving more revenue from the U.S. government than from private donors, the nonprofit sector is often cast as an independent realm that stands apart from both state and market. This picture, Claire Dunning argues, is not merely misleading, but dangerous, as it naturalizes the idea that the needs of certain citizens are best met by private supplement, rather than by more expansive, more equal government provision. As Dunning explains, the nonprofit industrial complex first emerged in the postwar city, where segregation persisted and demands for freedom and equality grew. While federal grants were, for a time, able to circumvent local governments committed to maintaining segregation, this outsourcing approach created organizations vulnerable to future budget cuts and cast the needs of those traditionally excluded from the full rights of citizenship as optional luxuries rather than essential functions of government.

What the Telegraph Can Teach Us About the Moral Economy – Evelyn Atkinson

Evelyn Atkinson argues that as we grapple with the law’s power to address corporations, one interesting yet largely forgotten set of cases can help us find our bearing: what are known as the “death telegram” cases. These suits, which occurred during the turn of the twentieth century, involved claims for emotional distress against telegraph corporations for failing to deliver telegrams involving the death or illness of a family member. Despite a long-established common law rule that mental anguish alone could not be recognized, the Courts made an exception because telegraph companies and patrons were understood not to be in an arms-length, impersonal market transaction, but one based on affective, emotional duties—in part because they were understood as “public service corporations.” This perspective, Atkinson suggests, can open up new ways of thinking about powerful, monopolistic corporations today.

After World War II, US hegemony faced a unique challenge. African and Asian countries began liberating themselves from their colonial masters, whose armies could no longer sustain the oppressive violence needed to maintain their colonies. Capitalism had been thoroughly discredited—not only in the Eastern Bloc, where anti-fascist governments took power, but in Western Europe as well. Intellectuals, artists, and musicians in Western Europe increasingly embraced Marxism as the prevailing ideology. While US industrial power had an awe-inspiring reputation for producing unprecedented consumer goods, culturally, the US was viewed as a backwater that created no innovative works of art, music, or literature.

Classical music was seen as a European creation. Hollywood still had not perfected its blockbusters. The American authors who were known abroad such as Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck had socialist leanings, which would not be of any help for the US government officials who were trying to sell American capitalism abroad.

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In the effort to win influence over the world, the US has two big problems: their actions around the world made it clear that the US wanted to replace former colonial powers, second, the racial discrimination in the US made it difficult to win influence in countries populated mainly by people of color.

Their efforts to win influence amongst people of color was severely hampered by the overt racial discrimination that black people faced in the USA. They could not convince African heads of state that they envisioned a partnership on equal footing, when most black people were oppressed at home through overt racial segregation and the more insidious economic discrimination.

In Western Europe, the traditional leftist artists, in their expressions, used art for politics, which often highlighted the crimes of colonialism. For example, Pablo Picasso, who was a Marxist, used his art for political messages. One example is his painting “Massacre in Korea” which highlighted the atrocities committed by the US in the Korean war.

Massacre in Korea by Picasso

A conversation on the grounds of colonial crimes, was one that the US could now win. Therefore, the US strategy was to change the conversation. This problem was tackled by two agencies: the United States Information Agency, which was created in 1953, and operated under the state department and within US embassies. The CIA also took to sponsoring many umbrella organizations aimed at this effort.

They focused on art forms that removed political messages from the traditional leftist art. One of the art forms that they chose to sponsor was modern art, whose abstract expressions steered the conversation about the boundaries and definitions of what is actually art and it steered the conversation away from political commentary. In fact, the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) was filled with national security ties.

MOMA was founded in 1929 by Abby Rockefeller. In 1939, her son Nelson Rockefeller became the President of MOMA. He was also appointed by the Roosevelt administration to serve as the Assistant Secretary of State in Latin America. Its executive secretary between 1948-1949, Thomas Braden went on later to join the CIA. In a Saturday Evening Post article entitled, “I’m glad the CIA Immoral”, he wrote that modern art “won more acclaim for the U.S. …than John Foster Dulles or Dwight D. Eisenhower could have bought with a hundred speeches.”

Under the secret patronage of the CIA, MOMA arranged many art exhibits all throughout the world. In fact, the State Department in 1946 spent thousands top purchase modern art pieces featuring artists like Georgia O’Keeffe and Jackson Pollack.

In the field of literature, the United States Government sponsored many magazines around the world such as London-based Encounter and the French-language Preuves. They featured writers who strived away from critiquing concrete actions of the United States to celebrating more abstract notions like “freedom” and “democracy.” This helped create what later CIA employee Cord Meyer described as a “compatible left.”

The field of music was used to combat the most heavy criticisms levied against the US, namely the brutal racial oppression faced by Black Americans. The US had an uphill battle of convincing many newly freed African nations that it was interested in being an equal partner, when Black Americans faced overt segregation and more insidious forms of economic discrimination within the USA. Their answer to this was to promote Jazz music. In one embarrassing incident, two Ghanian Diplomats faced discrimination inside a Denny’s in Delaware, which prompted the Eisenhower administration to desegregate a stretch of highway between New York and Washington, which diplomats frequently travelled between.

Unlike classical music, Jazz music could be touted as a uniquely American form of expression. It started in New Orleans, mainly from Black Americans, who would use a mix of rhythms and fast-paced improvisation. With predominant artists being mainly Black Americans, they could showcase them on a world stage, which would alleviate the charges of the US engaging in active racial discrimination.

Under these guises, the State Department arranged for “Jazz Diplomacy” tours around the world. They sponsored artists such as Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong to tour around Africa. Of course, being sponsored by the State Department did soften the harsh critics both of these artists had about the racism at home.

In 1954, after the US Supreme Court ruled in Brown vs Board of Education that segregation, was inherently unequal, the instructed the states to proceed to desegregate “with all deliberate speed.” But of course, most states did the opposite and tried to hinder any efforts at integration at every step. In 1957, when then Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus deployed the Arkansas National Guard to surround the Central High School, to prevent the nine students from enrolling in the school, Louis Armstrong’s critique was harsh and unwavering. He said, “The way they're treating my people in the south … the government can go to hell."

However, after accepting his position as a Jazz Ambassador in 1960, when asked about the race relations within the US, his reply was, “I don’t know anything about it; I’m just a trumpet player.”

On top of muting the critics of these once strong musicians, the Jazz tours did not only promote diplomacy, but they helped aid the efforts of the US National Security State, in other ways, unbeknownst to these musicians.

On June 30, 1960, Congo had just earned its independence from Belgium after one of the most brutal colonial rules. Joseph Conrad, in his book, “The Heart of Darkness” wrote about the depths of humanity’s depravity which took place in King Leopold’s Congo. King Leopold desperately wanted a colony, and nations such as the United States and the United Kingdom obliged in the Berlin conference by establishing the Congo Free State. Unlike other colonies, the Congo Free State did not belong to the country of Belgium, but instead of King Leopold’s personal fiefdom. With the patenting of rubber tires by John Dunlap in 1888, demand for a new resource skyrocketed exponentially. Congo, being rich in rubber trees was lucrative for the profit for the profiteers.

Brutality of the Free State of Congo Unprecedented

In order to meet the exorbitant demand for rubber, the Congolese people were forced to harvest wild rubber through daily quotas which was enforced through the vicious Force Publique, King Leopold’s personal mercenary force. Failure to meet the rubber quota meant that the Force Publique would chop off the hands of the Congolese villagers as one of the most brutal forms of retribution.

Later, in part due to the atrocities in Congo under King Leopold, in 1908, Belgium took over the management of Congo as Belgian Congo. Around this time, Congo’s rich deposits of copper became known, which led to the opening of the mining concession Union Minere, which exploited the rich copper deposits in the province of Katanga.

While Belgians exploited the minerals in the tune of billions of dollars, Congolese were left with very little to show for it. Besides the mineral-rich region of Katanga, there were not many highways joining the country together. Schools were few and far between and mostly serviced Belgian pupils. The Belgian colonization in Congo was so brutal that in 1960 when Belgian finally left Congo, the average life expectancy was 40.2 years. Diseases were rampant.

Amidst this backdrop, a young, visionary Patrice Lumumba was elected the first Prime Minister of an independent Congo, which became independent on June 30, 1960. During the independence day processions, Belgium King Baudouin took the stage, where he praised the King Leopold II. He also stated that he hoped the Congolese would prove worthy of the “trust” placed in them by the Belgian colonial powers. Soon afterwards, Patrice Lumumba took up the stage with a fiery speech that highlighted the brutalities of Belgian rule in Congo. He said, “We remember the ridicule, insults, and beatings we had to endure morning, noon and night, because we were ‘negroes’. We recollect the atrocious suffering of those persecuted for political opinions or religious beliefs. Exiled in their own homeland, their fate was really worse than death itself,” he said, recalling that this independence was indeed the fruit of a “struggle.”

Lumumba also expressed desire to use the vast mineral wealth in Congo in order to develop it economically. Immediately, this speech painted a target on his back where Washington and Brussels were concerned. On August 18, 1960, the CIA head Allen Dulles met with Eisenhower in order to plan the overthrow of Patrice Lumumba. Soon, the main plans were made, which involved supporting Joseph Mobutu and his militia to take over the country.

When Louis Armstrong began his tour in Congo in October, Lumumba was already under house-arrest. His tour was promoted in a west, as a way of distracting western audiences from the actual goings on in Congo. The first stop was Leopoldville (Kinshasa) where he played to a large crowd. The more curious aspect of his tour was the second stop: Elizabethville, which was what the capital of the mineral-rich province of Katanga was called.

While the US, formally, did publicly recognize Katanga as an independent republic, they provided the rebels with military support through back channels. The US had established a covert action program. Through, their allies in Apartheid South Africa, they created channels to recruit both mercenaries and also send arms to the rebel group.

While under the pretext of attending a Louis Armstrong concert, the CIA attache Larry Devlin, who was under the cover of being an embassy staffer was able to move freely in Katanga. Embassy staffers also met with the self-declared President in Katanga, without the US giving actual recognition. Ambassador Clare Timberlake went for the event, as well as the CIA chief Devlin. It was later admitted that ‘The object was to talk to Tshombe, the elected president of the Congolese province of Katanga, without recognizing him as the president of an independent state.’

While the concert itself did not enable the coup, it allowed for key meetings between coup-plotters and embassy staff to occur. It gave them the necessary cover to have these meetings without drawing attention to the planning of the coup. A few months after the concert, the Democratically elected leader Patrice Lumumba was assassinated. Of course, even without Louis Armstrong’s Jazz concerts in Congo, the CIA would probably have found a way to meet with key figures that enabled them to create an armed resistance to install the western-friendly Joseph Mubuto into power.

The mineral wealth of Congo remained in the hands of western companies like Union minere.

While the Jazz diplomacy ended in the 1990s, the State Department continues to sponsor similar programs in the interests of its national security state. Nowadays, much of the function of the CIA has been taken over by the National Endowment for Democracy, who continue to give grants to various artists and radio programs.

The US State Department and the US national Security state continues to use music and art to promote its agenda. Most recently, it named Rapper Chuck D, as the Global Ambassador for Rap, and we interviewed him about his transition from “Fighting the system” to “Representing the system.” In his interview with us, he tried to explain that “the devil does not use the same trick twice” and he is not being used in a similar manner as Luis Armstrong and other musicians from the past. But, only time will tell if that is indeed the case.

In the photo, French Prime Minister Edouard Daladier shakes hands with Benito Mussolini, with German Chancellor Adolf Hitler and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in the background.

At the same time , throughout 1938, right-wing and nationalist deputies in France demanded a ban on the French Communist Party. And more than 400 newspapers, picking up on the theses of Mein Kampf, spoke of communists as conductors of foreign influence in the country and a conspiracy of world Jewry.

British intelligence MI6 worked with the US CIA to commit this atrocity. Mohammad Mossadegh was a prominent figure in Iran’s secular democracy and resistance to colonialism. He nationalized the oil industry and implemented radical measures like land reform, social security and wealth redistribution.

His popular policies directly threatened Western interests, and the response of the US and British intelligence to Mossadegh in “Operation Ajax” is a manual that has been repeated against anti-colonial and anti-imperialist leaders of the Global South many times since.

Not a new revelation, but the article pulls from good sources and it's nice to see this myth repudiated in a mainstream outlet.