Nigeria Scam Artist Anthem

If anybody was curious, here’s a link to the “I Go Chop Your Dollar” music video celebrating Nigeria’s criminal subculture of Internet scam artists. In the song the artist Nkem Owoh sings the virtues of advanced-free fraud (falsely promising large sums of money for an upfront payment,) referring to his marks as “the mugus” and himself as “the master.” Before the advent of the Internet enterprising Nigerians would scam Western European traders by promising below market-rate prices for crude oil for cash upfront.

The scam has a long and storied lineage, originating in 18th century America and continued well into the early 20th century.  Confidence men of that era used this false promise of wealth to prey upon the gullible and credulous.   The growing popularity of the scams created unwanted exposure in the press; the scams mostly collapsed as the federal government’s capability for monetary enforcement grew in the wake of the Civil War. Before its resurgence in Nigerian criminal circles, this tactic was referred to as “The Spanish Prisoner Swindle,” in reference to the type of story usually associated with such crimes (wealthy prisoner wrongfully imprisoned in Spain ready to greatly compensate any victim willing to pay his traveling fees/bribes in advance.)

It can be argued that for the working class scams were a sort of financial innovation; whereas the wealthy could indulge in the exotic financial instruments of their time the poor were left to contend with conditions left in their wake.  The predatory nature of scam artists often mirrored the behaviors of their ruling class, contributing to a culture of exploitation that was an important facet of much of urban life in newly industrialized America.

An article on the history of these scams in Nigeria:

P.S.  I don’t think any of the con men of yesteryear had a beat this catchy.

The Hard Work Of Being Poor: now and then

 

 

In Seth Rockman’s 6^th chapter of the book “Scraping by: Wage Labor, Slavery and Survival in Early Baltimore” under the heading “The Hard Work of Being Poor”, the author discusses the plight of the impoverished in the late 18th and early 19th century. Rockman succinctly articulated the central thesis of the chapter when he wrote, “Finding a job did not secure men, women, and children from the pangs of hunger or the shivers of winter, though it might postpone the threat of real privation for a time”.  Simply put, no matter how hard one worked, even earning approximately $1 a day, it was often impossible for a poor household to meet its daily needs in terms of food, shelter, and basic necessities.

Rockman begins by discussing how the poor were organized in terms of economic units, specifically discussing the household. Typically but not always a household was a family unit, with a white male head of household, which may also include “unrelated laborers”. Often women contributed to the household’s cash income as seamstresses, housekeepers or maids, to support their families in addition to the many contributions they made within the home, such as preparing food, laundry, and cleaning. But despite the ability of women to earn wages, they did not measure equal to that of a man. Whereas half of houses led by only women, presumably because they were without a husband, were “ too poor to owe city taxes”, only every third male lead household fell below that threshold. This definitely parallels today’s situation, where women still earn less than men, and often struggle when raising a family on their own.

Another factor that Rockman discusses is the issue of race, which also has strong resonances with today. African American households were even poorer than the white poor in the early 19th century, when they were free at all. Often black families would face unique challenges, such as having children, spouses or other loved ones that were enslaved, and whose freedom was extremely expensive. Still today many African American families suffer from low wages and bad jobs as a legacy of slavery, and the continued economic and political discrimination that continued after emancipation. In my opinion the case for reparations is strengthened in light of the strong evidence presented that slavery was still an immense burden to emancipated African Americans, whether it was the cost of freeing relatives or the fear of kidnapping.

It is important to recognize that although the circumstances have changed, and undoubtedly improved even for the poor, poverty still exists. It is often ignored, yet the data show that it is still very much with us. For example in 2015 “The Atlantic” stated that there are “47 million people, falling below the poverty threshold of about $24,000 for the year” in the United States out of a population of 318.9 million citizens. This statistic personally shocked me. Rockman’s focus on women and African Americans has a straight parallel pulled in “The Atlantic” in the quote: “The news was, of course, worse for minorities and women. The rate of poverty among blacks and Hispanics was well over 20 percent. Women, too, remained more likely to struggle to make ends meet, especially elderly women, whose poverty rate was nearly double that of men in the 75 and older age group.” This is not due to any of these minorities being less active, less talented, or less hard working. Contemporary poverty and suffering are due to many of  the same structural factors that have existed since the time Rockmann discusses “The Hard Work of Being Poor.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/americas-poverty-problem/405700/

A Nation of Deadbeats: False Hope in the South

The success of southern economy in the panic of 1857 garnered a sense of false hope for southern planters and slaveholders. In chapters eight and nine of His book A Nation of Deadbeats Scott Reynolds Nelson outlines the events leading up to the civil war. He explains how the north’s wheat economy allowed for financial success regardless of the loss of america’s greatest cash crop, cotton. The southern states believed that they could be fiscally independent after succession from the union, but they failed to consider previous relations with european merchants. Nelson writes “ In 1841, Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi had declared that his state was right in repudiating its debts to foreign capitalists.” Jefferson Davis was chosen as the provisional president of the confederacy, and the south found it extremely difficult to gain loans from Europe in order to fight the civil war. Meanwhile, the northern legislature was quickly building infrastructure to create a wheat based economy. Between 1860 and 1861 wheat exports grew exponentially. The north’s republican congress passed the homestead act, that gave settlers free land in exchange for the cultivation of wheat. Congress also strengthened wheat export growth by creating a national currency, “ These National Bank Notes were designed to marry private banks with the federal government”. With a strong cash crop, and a unified banking system the north had a strong enough infrastructure to fiscally support a war. The south on the other hand did not, without the export of cotton, the confederacy was unable to successfully finance the war.

The quick increase of American wheat exports into Europe wreaked havoc on the European economy. What was most surprising to me was how quickly the Panic became international, affecting american markets within a year of failures in Europe. Even though American economy was in disarray immigrants came flooding into the country from Europe. I found it interesting that American corporations would choose to import laborers when the american working class was already struggling, it reminded me of big corporate tendencies to outsource manufacturing jobs in the modern American economy.

The Consistent Confidence Man

In “The Confidence Man,” the second chapter from Wall Street: America’s Dream Place, Steve Fraser explains the figure of the confidence man in the antebellum American economy. Fraser introduces this figure, first, by explaining the Great Diamond Hoax of 1872, which “was the biggest fraud to hit the American West” (55). Confidence men, Phillip Arnold and John Slack, were able to get a number of high profile investors on board before their fraud was revealed (56 – 57). Even after they were caught, Slack was able to disappear and Arnold returned to his Kentucky homestead as a sort of a folk hero (58).

While Slack and Arnold’s hoax positions them both as archetypal confidence men, Fraser illustrates throughout the chapter that there were many other types of antebellum businessmen who were similarly dependent on confidence. As Fraser explains, “Confidence men appear particularly at the frontier zones of market society;” this particularly applies to the Jacksonian era, as “it is arguably the case that the whole country represented such a frontier in the antebellum years” (59 – 60). So much of the rapidly growing American economy was built on speculation that it could be difficult to distinguish between the confidence men who dealt in fraud, and those whose dealings were considered legitimate. This confusion is evidenced by James Gordon Bennett, publisher of the New York Herald, who drew comparisons between the “petty swindler” William Thomas, and Wall Street financiers (67). Bennet seems to maintain that the only reason Thomas wound up in jail, was that his aims were too low; as Bennet wrote of Thomas, “‘let him rot, then, in ‘the Tombs’…while the genuine ‘Confidence Man’ stands one of the Corinthian Column of society… the ‘Confidence Man’ of Wall Street—the ‘Confidence Man’ of the Palace uptown’” (68).

In many ways, the confidence man is a quintessentially American figure. As Scott Sandage discusses in “Born Losers,” the nineteenth century saw a shift in values as “Republican public usefulness evolved into the liberal virtue of self-made man-hood—the basis for the American gospel of success, the doctrine of achieved identity” (39). The confidence man embodies the value of achieved identity, as his success is wholly dependent on his ability to control and manipulate how others perceive him. Perhaps this helps to explain why a community would receive a hoaxer as a hero. Fraser goes on to explain that this societal shift would manifest itself as a widely popularized faith “that what really distinguished the American spirit was its audacity, its eagerness to venture into the unknown, its inspiring confidence that what lay beyond the borders of the familiar was bound to be good” (62). It just so happened that occasionally, “what lay beyond the borders of the familiar” also lay beyond the borders of legality.

An American obsession with the figure of the confidence man appears to persist to this day. Countless examples from literature to television provide instances of villains made heroes, praised for their individuality and ingenuity. The figure of the confidence man has even influenced my perception of my own grandfather. For much of my mother’s childhood, her father was in prison in Idaho and later Oregon, having been convicted on charges of felony fraud. When I knew him, he owned a cattle ranch; still, there were always a couple fields littered with old cars, understood to have been accepted as payment from various friends. Whenever I’ve heard stories of my grandfather’s ‘dirty dealings,’ the emphasis has not been on the immorality of breaking the law, nor the potential damage his actions may have caused, but rather on his ingenuity, guile, and charisma; thus perpetuating the trope of confidence man as folk hero.

The Many Panics of 1837

In The Many Panics of 1837 Jessica M. Lepler describes how important the Panic of 1837 is and how this specific panic set the stage for the rest of the panics in the future. She begins her dissertation on May 2nd 1837, when Théodore Nicolet, the Swiss consul and the founder of New Orleans’s first Francophone Evangelical Church committed suicide that morning. People assumed that he committed suicide due to the detrimental effects that the Panic of 1837 had on him. However, the date of his death and the official start of the panic did not add up. He committed suicide 8 days previously than what most of the textbooks say. When Nicolet committed suicide days before the announcement of the actual panic happened, historians knew that the panic started before.

The actual panic started on March 4th 1837, but many people did not realize it until May because businesses were not failing miserably and people seemed optimistic. Also, the technology was not as good as it is now, so news about the economy and businesses took longer than it did back then. When the news finally reached people, more damaged could have occurred.  Similar to the panic of 2007, no one talked about it until September 2008 when the stock market fell dramatically. On September 29th 2008, the Dow Jones dropped 778 points or 7%. When no one said anything in March of 1837 and December 2007, it was because the government wanted people to feel optimistic about the economy and not panic. However, when no one said anything, there were larger consequences in May 1837 and September 2008 which led to more panic. If businesses and the government made people aware of the recessions when it first happened, then maybe there would have been less of a panic, and people would not have been as frantic to remove their money from the banks.

For example, in The Many Panics of 1837, Lepler describes different companies that were very successful and very rich and suffered a lot due to the Panic of 1837. One example is the company of A. Tappan and Company. Tappan were brothers that were successful in trading with other businesses. When there company failed, this was the first of other businesses that became successful and eventually failed. Lucky for the Tappan brothers, they fixed their company and started again and ended their careers with a good amount of money. However, not many companies were not able to fix themselves again. An industry that was very successful and then failed was the cotton industry. Cotton has been very successful for decades in the United States. However, due to the panic, the cost of cotton increased significantly. During the Panic of 1873, it was very similar, but it was with Northern Pacific Railroad. When Jay Cooke and Company invested a lot of money into the railroad, and overestimated the amount of capital they had, the company filed for bankruptcy. When Jay Cooke and Company filed for bankruptcy, that was the start of many other businesses failing. The same thing happened in 2008 when Lehman Brothers, the fourth largest investment bank in the U.S., filed for bankruptcy and eventually closed down due to the 2008 crash.

Wheat & Woe in Nelson’s “A Nation of Deadbeats”

Certainly, “A Storm of Wheat” brewed across the Atlantic in the years leading up to the Panic of 1873. As Scott Reynolds Nelson recounts in the ninth chapter of A Nation of Deadbeats: An Uncommon History of America’s Financial Disasters, 1873 saw a financial crisis more widespread than perhaps any before. Understandably, this crisis had causes which were as disparate as the regions throughout which its effects were felt.

In North America, the Republican-dominated wartime congress of the United States placed a heavy emphasis on growing wheat in hopes of ending the reign of King Cotton. While this boosted the Union economy during the Civil War, it had the additional consequence of depreciating the value of Austro-Hungarian wheat, thereby contributing to the collapse of the central European economy. The United States’ entrance into competition with European markets was so destabilizing it would come to be known as “Commercial Invasion” (162). May 9th 1973 would see a major stock-market crash in Vienna so disastrous the day was dubbed “Black Friday” (163). This, and subsequent crashes, would lead to the Bank of England raising interests rates, and the panic which American exports had played significant role in causing, would begin to be felt back across the Atlantic.

Stateside, hundreds of American banks collapsed—beginning with that of the financier of the nation, Jay Cooke (166). Of course, it’s unlikely this was of great concern to the many European emigrants who sought better opportunities in the United Sates in wake of the panic. As Nelson writes, “After 1870 the cheap delivery of Bohemians, Poles, and Russians to the United States changed the face of American emigration” (169).
It may seem counter-intuitive that Europeans would be interested in moving to the United States at a time of such economic turmoil. One explanation might be found in the incentive to immigrate provided by American businesses, which would offer to pay workers’ transportation to the U.S., the cost of which would be taken out of those workers’ pay once they arrived at their jobs (171). This option appealed to American business owners in an era that marked some of the most violent labor strikes in the history of the United States. Factory owners and mine operators hiring workers from across the Atlantic had found that the “solution was to bring in strikebreakers in advance of a strike” (170). This solution may have worked for a time, however, this “mortgage-transportation-contract system” was made illegal by the Foran Act in 1885 (171).

While the Foran Act may seem like an improvement, it achieved little compared to the exploitation of workers across the nation, and the globe, which would continue for decades, if not to this day. Nelson’s closing note in the chapter conveys the tremendous work there was to be done by immigrant laborers in the wake of the Panic of 1873: “Cheap American wheat had destroyed the livelihood of their parents; ships bearing American wheat to Europe bore them back in its wake. It would take another financial crisis to bind this substantial group of industrial workers together” (179).

A Nation of Deadbeats: The Panic of 1873

May 9th, 1873 marked two very separate occasions. One was a birth and one was a death. The birth was that of Anton J. Cermak Jr. and the death was of the European and American economy. This date is also referred to as “Black Friday” in Europe.

Nelson starts off the ninth chapter from his book “A Nation of Deadbeats: An Uncommon History of America’s Financial Disasters” with a short biography on Tony Cermak, a native of the Austro-Hungarian empire and the future mayor of Chicago, and the events that occurred that lead to the panic of 1873. The coincidence of Tony and this horrible event that will change his life forever is unimaginable and almost meant to be. Due to the financial crisis of Europe, Tony’s family flees to America and eventually settled in Chicago.

The cause of this massive panic, as Nelson argues, begins with America. American companies started mass-producing and selling wheat to countries in Europe, particularly, to the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the surrounding areas. The cheap wheat product that was being offered by the American’s completely drove out local business in Europe and created a ripple effect of European stocks plummeting down and crashing.

This system of Americans going into a country and practically destroying it is a very common trope. It has happened economically, politically, militarily, and socially/culturally. The Panic of 1873 was created by the United States wheat industry which first affected their consumers in Europe and then boomeranged back to create one of the world’s first major depressions.

Despite the massive economic destruction that the panic created, one interesting outcome is that it created the business model that America is famous for: the capitalist cooperate company. This completely changed how the American economy, politics, and labor worked and the future of such systems.

 

Comparing Clerks and Porters; Managers and Servers

Every business in America has a social hierarchy between the employers, and the employees that the business chooses to hire. Throughout the rank structure in American businesses today it is less common to find a group of people that are restricted to a certain type of job based on their gender, ethnicity, or race. During the mid-nineteenth century in America, businesses hired African Americans, and Irish men as laborers, or porters, and were rarely given a chance to gain position within that business. The next tier above the porters were the clerks that were typically white men.  In Brian Luskey’s chapter entitled, The Humble Laborer in the White Collar, he outlines the general skills, tasks, and ambitions of clerks, and porters in America during the mid-nineteenth century.

As Luskey points out clerks were the workers that kept up with bookkeeping, “carrying mail to a departing steamer, or depositing bank checks”. As well as covering down for the porters when one of them was absent, or if there was more manual labor to be done than head-work. Luskey also draws attention to the fact that while clerks may have respected the fact that their job entailed manual labor–It would have been unwise for the clerks to praise working alongside the porters since the porters were often Irish-men or African Americans, the job as a porter had a connotation that it was a job for a second-class citizen, and would tarnish the reputation that the clerk was trying to build upon.

A positive reputation seemed to be what the clerks strived for the most after the obvious monetary goal. The men that were filling the rolls of being a clerk were already physically able to perform manual labor, and were in the position that they were because of their penmanship skills. Clerks worked in the position that they did in hopes that one day they would progress through the ranks of a business enough that they themselves could become a merchant.

When reading the Luskey piece about clerks and porters the first thing that comes to mind is the sort of hierarchy that can be found in restaurants today. It can be argued that the lower tier, of the restaurant hierarchy, would be the busboy, server, junior cook, dishwasher, or a bar back. This lower rung of the restaurant’s infrastructure could be relatable to the porters in the sense that almost anyone can fill one of the jobs previously listed with little to no experience, similar to a porter.

Jobs that seem to be in a similar standing to that of a clerk could be a head chef, or a manager. The manager and head chef often set schedules, order necessary products, and make sure that everything is running smoothly. These positions also require previous restaurant experience.  If an instance were to come up where, for instance, a server or a dishwasher didn’t show up, a manager of a restaurant or a head chef have the ability to fill that roll in order for the restaurant to succeed. While it is hard to speak for all managers and chefs that work in restaurants, the jobs that they hold could potentially be followed up with one day owning their own business.

This comparison of restaurant employees to clerks and porters seems to be the closest one can get now since it is rare that an entire tier of workers are stuck in their job based on race as they often were in nineteenth-century America.     

“If You Have Money, You Get in For Free”: The Hypocrisy Underlying American Capitalism

The Hard Work of Being Poor, by Seth Rockman, outlines how capitalism functioned as a system that did not, or perhaps could not, benefit the poor or black citizens, or, as the two spheres often intersected, the poor black citizens in the nineteenth century.  For instance, marriage represented how deeply capitalism delved into everyday life and magnified these divides. Marriage seemed to be more about mutual benefit than emotion. Men would depend on women for the unpaid duties in the home, such as cooking and doing laundry, and women would depend on men for the money they made at their jobs. African Americans, on the other hand, had trouble even forming traditional families with traditional gender roles at all, because of the gender imbalance; there were more black women than black men. Thus, even such a basic – and mostly economic – institution was denied to African-Americans. Though marriage enforced gender roles, it also created a sense of economic stability within the family, propagating economic inequality and uncertainty.

Additionally, free blacks who were trying to free their family members had to either work as indentured servants or have the person they were buying work for a white employer to pay it off. This, of course, immediately compromised the ‘freedom’ they had just purchased; they were technically free, but they still had to work for a white landowner who could treat them essentially however he wanted.

Rockman also describes other challenges, including the underground economy and the fact that, as he states, “…being poor was expensive” (174). The unsettling truth about this piece, however, is how relevant these issues still are.

For example, in Flint, Michigan, a predominantly black city and therefore a somewhat government-neglected one, forty percent of the citizens are living under the poverty line. However, they are still paying the highest water tax in the nation for lead-infested water, which emphasizes the costliness of poverty. Residents of Flint not only have to pay for poisonous water in order to avoid being charged with child neglect, but also for bottled water to bathe in, cook with, and drink. Families, particularly the ones with children, have also have to pay for expensive hospital bills as a result of the lead poisoning. As a result of these extra expenses, the poor are continuously becoming more poor.

Many conservatives like to pinpoint the blame of the poor on the poor for being ‘lazy’ or for ‘not trying hard enough’, when clearly, that is oversimplified and simply not accurate in most cases. Although some may find it shocking, most low-income families, particularly if they find it difficult to afford basic needs, such as decent food or medicine, generally don’t enjoy being poor.

Even if it were true that a majority of the poor is somehow deserving of their poverty, the fact that people view them with contempt is worth noting. While the impoverished are blamed for their destitution, white mass murderers are viewed with sympathy by the media. They are simply ‘misunderstood’ or ‘mentally-ill’ (which is problematic and ableist in its own right), not violent criminals. The murderers who are incarcerated are especially seen more as victims than people who are just reaping what they have sown. People living in poverty are not treated with the same humanity, even though their destitution has absolutely no effect on anyone but themselves and their family. They are the only ones being harmed, and they are still the ones who are blamed.

Rockman Response

The chapter by Seth Rockman “The Hard Work of Being Poor” is an insightful look into how the people who work the hardest and longest, make the least money and end up having to spend more to survive. So many different factors played into how poor families survived, and many of the daily choices made were in support of their survival. Some families were dependent upon the male of the household to provide, while others needed everyone including the woman and children to work in order to contribute. Many woman would live together to compile resources. Similarly, some families would live together or poor their income together. Having children was a large source of income for many families, as children as young as eight were put to work in factories or inside the home. Families would sometimes have more children just to have more hands in order to contribute to the families income. Looking at the situation in another way, children also could present families with a problem of having to feed and provide for more mouths. Overall though it seems that having more children was better than not. Women’s role in the family started playing a much bigger role, and as Rockman states a woman leaving the family could destroy it. Women’s roles were just as important as a mans, even if they were not brining in the income. I would have been interested in hearing form the perspective of a woman at the time. Both men and woman were, as Rockman describes, were in a mutual dependence on each other. Rockman states that “obtaining the necessities of life presented working class households with a series of cash obligations that their wages could no consistency cover.” This statement speaks to the truth about the “Hard Work of Being Poor”. The idea that the working class are the people who struggle the most and yet are constantly needing to pay their small wages in order to survive. Even more disturbing is the fact that black families in Baltimore had to pay for the freedom of family members, leaving them  with even less money to survive on.

I wonder if the situation in Baltimore could be compared to today’s homeless crisis in NYC. Rockman talks about how the desperateness of the people in Baltimore led them to the streets and trouble with the police. This sounds all to familiar to the current situation in NYC where the homeless population is growing and many occupy the streets. Not only do the homeless of today not always have the needed resources, but are frequently harassed by the police.