(ThyBlackMan.com) What we are seeing in America today is something that Black people haven’t experienced in a very long time—citizenship with no workable Voting Rights Act in place. Immediately after the Supreme Court’s recent Louisiana v. Callais ruling, five southern states wasted little time in redrawing new congressional voting maps that would eventually wipe out Black-majority districts in their states. We can’t place all of the blame for the dilution of Black and Latino voting power through election manipulation at the feet of this one Supreme Court decision. Last July, President Trump ordered Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to redistrict his state to create an additional five Republican-leaning congressional districts.
The president intends to maintain political power and control by circumventing the will of voters by eliminating fair congressional districting through partisan and racial gerrymandering. To have this type of president make this type of order and then have a state governor carry it out is disturbing. As a result, we have a “redistricting arms race.” This is what happens when America elects a robber baron as president. A robber baron is a term used to describe powerful 19th-century American industrialists and financiers who amassed enormous wealth through unethical and controlling practices. Their key tactics included (exploiting workers), maintaining wealth by paying extremely low wages and providing poor working conditions, (monopolies) formed “trusts” to control entire industries, allowing illegal or aggressive means to dictate prices and eliminate competitors, (political corruption) influencing government officials through lobbying or outright bribery to secure favorable land grants and subsidies. Critics often focused on their greed and the unethical methods by which they created human suffering and extreme economic disparity between the very wealthy and the poor. In the late 19th century, the top 1% owned roughly 51% of property while the bottom 44% owned only 1.1%.
These robber barons included John D. Rockefeller (Standard Oil), Andrew Carnegie (Carnegie Steel), Cornelius Vanderbilt (Railroads and shipping), and J.P. Morgan (finance & banking). Oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, when asked by a reporter how much money he needed to finally have enough, said, “Just a bit more.” Rockefeller was America’s first billionaire and was forced by the government to dissolve his monopoly. Cornelius Vanderbilt was known for ruthlessly eliminating competition in transportation. Jay Gould was one of the worst robber barons. He was an American railroad magnate who founded the Gould business dynasty. Historians single out Jay Gould not because of his wealth, but because he repeatedly used deception, manipulation, and political corruption to extract wealth from others rather than create it through integrity.
Gould’s pattern was to rig markets, water stock, bribe officials, and crush labor, leaving investors and workers ruined while he walked away richer. Many Gilded Age tycoons were ruthless, but also associated themselves with major productive achievements or philanthropy. Gould, on the other hand, was notorious for enriching himself through schemes that even contemporaries called socially destructive. He was infamous for how he treated workers, reinforcing his image as morally callous. During labor conflicts in the 1880s, Gould was quoted as saying he could “hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” a line that captured how many Americans saw his willingness to set groups of workers against each other. In the Gilded Age, many industrialists were harsh employers, but Gould’s open contempt for labor and use of violence and division made him stand out. Even during his life, Gould “considered himself to be the most hated man in late-19th-century America,” and contemporary press, clergy, and politicians depicted him as the very embodiment of greed. In short, Gould is cited as one of the most unscrupulous and worst robber barons because of his large-scale and corrupt political influence, his willingness to destabilize the national economy for profit, and his aggressive, often brutal opposition to labor.
What we have today in the White House is a modern-day Jay Gould in President Donald Trump, who entered his second term in office using robber baron tactics to govern. The way observers saw Jay Gould deliberately run companies into the ground and then rebuild them in ways that benefited him is the same tactic Trump is doing with the federal government. The unfair advantage of congressional representation gained through unethical racial and political gerrymandering parallels the monopoly tactics of the 19th-century robber barons.
Robber barons never totally went away. We have them in modern tech moguls such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg. We simply never had one as president. Even King Charles III has noticed a different and alarming America under the current administration. Speaking before a rare joint meeting of Congress, he gave a subtle warning regarding the need to uphold democratic traditions, specifically highlighting the importance of checks and balances on executive power. It has been a while since Black America has experienced a Jay Gould-type robber baron as president, particularly one whose goal is to ruthlessly destroy Black political power and prosperity.
Written by David W. Marshall
Official website; https://davidwmarshallauthor.com/
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