In Europe for example, there were two individuals by the name of   David and Alexander Barclay, (brothers) who started Barclay’s bank, a bank that heavily invested in the slave trade. They extended credit lines to slave merchants.  Bank of England was no exception and so on and so forth. The truth is slavery was very lucrative, and we cannot fault banks for being involved in something lucrative, after all, it benefitted their bottom line, that’s like saying banks shouldn’t be involved in religion, church,  never mind that church is a very lucrative business.  Banks go where the money is. Everyone can see why banks can be hated by black people.  

As I already stated history is history, it can be very painful but what have we learned from it?  Well for starters we need to know that money starts from a bank and ends up in a bank, no matter how often it is passed around. therefore ownership of the bank is critical when it comes to creating capital. What banks do ( at least back in the day) is take deposits and then create loans from those deposits to fund businesses etc. Today ( at least the last time I checked, only 42 financial institutions remain for black people of which half of them are banks and the other half are credit unions. 

Let me tell you how important banking is Jumping back into history again, Not only did president Lincoln free slaves, he established a bank called Freedman Savings Bank to help freed black slaves to build some wealth and capital.   Did you know that Frederick Douglas was the director of the DC branch of this bank? he actually invested his own money in this bank. Though the bank was short-lived, he knew enough to know that the development of black wealth lies in banking, as it has for white wealth.  There was another bank that was started called True reformers bank and was founded by William Washington Brownstone,  a former slave and a union army officer, he also founded an organization called   Grand fountain united order of true reformers fraternal organization. These men knew how important banking was and still is and how it is critical in creating wealth.

We like to talk about Tulsa Oklahoma, but how wealth was made in Tulsa is NEVER talked about.  Our leaders like to keep the conversation of what “they” took from “us”.

 People like to talk about how many hands the dollar touches before it leaves the black community, but they forget one big thing, how does that dollar stay in the community?  if we don’t have our own banks, the dollar can circulate in the community a million times,  it will always end up in a white bank, remember money starts from a bank and ends up in a bank .if we put it in a white bank it still leaves the community. Which means it doesn’t help anyone in the community it came from. A good example is a church, most black churches put their money in white banks, it is the biggest form of wealth transfer the funny thing is that this happens every Sunday. 

As of now, we have a trillion dollars in spending power yet there are few banks, and the number keeps decreasing every year. Our leaders are still telling us to start businesses, without our own banks we cannot create capital, without capital we cannot engage in any economic activity like lending money to start-ups.

Most people in their neighborhoods don’t ask their politicians about banking in their area,  how do we create capital and wealth in that area, if there are no banks????? This is how much we are far removed from so-called investments and it has become like a catchphrase for us so we fall for every lie that anyone tells us.  If we have the basics of accounting and banking at our fingertips, we wouldn’t fall for “sweet” Promises.  I would like to end this post by looking at some interesting numbers. According to NCUA, 

There are 34 Hispanic American Banks holding $104 billion in Assets,  there are 104 Hispanic American Credit Unions holding $14 Billion in assets. 

There are 73 Asian American Banks holding $120 Billion in assets and 54 Asian American credit unions. There are 42 African American Financial Institutions, holding just a little over $5 Billion in Assets,  out of these 42 exactly half are credit unions, which means we have only 21 banks and 21 Credit unions. If we are serious about investing, these numbers should mean something to us.

   Let us pick a race other than the “white” race, in this case, the black race or the African-American race. Most black people are democrats, simply because of that widely held belief about the common man and poverty, so by default blacks already view themselves as poor. This is what the democratic party claims to stand for or do they????

     Most people, (black people) either don’t know the history or ignore history or don’t question the history or what they have been told, they just go along with what is heard., most black people don’t do research or empirical analysis on why these things became what they are. In history, most black people were republican simply because it was the party of emancipation, which most people conveniently forget today. Emancipation is directly tied to the end of slavery. I think the question is to ask what happened and how most blacks became Democrats in the first place.

     To understand this we must go back to the ’60s, we will go back further, but we will start there. It has everything to do with “struggle” class struggle, economic struggle, and if I may say so racial struggle. The War on Poverty was started in the ’60s in this endless war that was created by Lyndon B Johnson. Out of the war on poverty came the “ The Great Society”. The great society is a bunch of economic policies that were all federally funded of course, in the hopes of ending poverty. It created a lot of incentives, some of which ultimately destroyed the family structure. From that something I like to call the FREE money (stuff) Syndrome was created. The democratic party in the 60s became the party that gave out “freebies”. what most people are failing to understand is that Parties don’t matter, policies do, if someone is selling a party, they ultimately asking you to stop thinking and just go along to get along, which is wrong. Every president is always proud that they have solved a problem with people from both parties, yet we still cling to parties. Policies come from people, with an agenda, we know this, since we all have a personal agenda, when we make decisions. This is a very simple concept and I think most of people do miss that. I say all this to say that, with all this free “stuff” came with conditions which most people don’t care about. As long as they get free “stuff” well then the party is for the poor. The sad thing is that the democratic party wrote the blueprint of dependency. (along with some republicans I might add and this is just being fair)A drug dealer knows this very well, he/she has to create some kind of dependency to create a market of people who will always follow him/her. I don’t think most people have come to grasp the concept that no poverty program has made people rich. Poverty programs by their very design are to have a dependency “class”. One must be disciplined in life if they want to get somewhere, and all discipline is behavior modification, Sadly so is being undisciplined. Now we can slowly talk about culture. I have always defined culture as something that tells us what to do, a set of principles, we also forget that as individuals we have what I call personal culture, and that is what brings me to the fundamental philosophy of the republican party. The republican party believes in the self-made individual. The one who can stand on his/her own two feet and make something of themselves. This is why most black advancements were in the times when a lot of black people were republicans. Now it is almost laughable when a black person is a republican and they are called a lot of names, the sad thing there are racist on both sides, and black people, in general, don’t see policies anymore, they rather have their emotional attachment to a brand or a party.

  Now black people need to attach themselves to a party based on ideology and fundamental philosophy, then one must look at the republican party after everyone knows that the republican party was the party that freed the slaves, even though that wasn’t the reason for the proclamation. That was done in other interests, one of my main advice is no to look for “love” within an organization because, and organization would do what is best for its survival nothing else. Today it seems that Is what people look for. Let us go to the have a little history lesson just for this blog

  The democratic party was responsible for the formation of the Klu Klux Klan, (KKK). It was founded by a man named Nathan Bedford Forrest also a confederate general, speaking of the confederacy, also a man by the name of Oliver Howard, who was a republican and also a confederate general played a key role in establishing the university known as Howard University, an HBCU( Historical Black College and University). The democratic party also supported segregation throughout the south. The first black senator and congressman were sworn in by a republican named Calvin Coolidge. He stated “rights of blacks are just as sacred as any other citizen”  The democratic party has always defended slavery just to throw that out there. Just a few individuals who were republicans unknown to many, 

1. Ida B Wells also known as Ida B Wells-Barnett

2. Berry Gordy Jnr, ( Motown Records)

3. Jessie Owens

4. Frederick Douglas

5. Scott Turner 

 Just to name a few but this is about why one is a coon for being republican when some of the freedoms black people enjoy today came from the Republican Party. oh, the irony!! 

I don’t know how common this name is amongst black people even though I think it should be, an individual by the name of Roger B Taney, who was a Democrat who wrote the famous Dred Scott decision. Taney was chief justice at that time. He said black people could not sue for anything in the court of law because they were not citizens. One of the people on my list is Jessie Owens, for those who don’t know Jessie, he was an athlete who made Olympic history and yet wasn’t invited to the white house upon his return to the US, who was president then?, it was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, also known as FDR. FDR(A democrat) only invite white winners to the white house.

One begs to ask the question, How many mistakes can a political party make?? According to some researchers, this was a direct quote from President Lyndon Johns

“These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got.

something now they never had before, the political pull back to uppityness. Now we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference” LBJ

Side Note: Ida B Wells refused to give up her bus seat, 77 years before Rosa Park yet you don’t hear about this

 Another Democratic senator who not only believed in slavery but also thought it was a very good idea, was senator John Calhoun, bet you don’t hear the Democrats talk about him, do you??

There was also a famous senator by the name of Robert Byrd who again was a democrat and a mentor to our first black president, Mr. Barack Obama, also a mentor to Hillary Clinton. Oh, he never apologized for all the atrocities committed by the democratic party.  

There is a lot to write about this, at the end of it all, black people should go by policies and not align with any party. Black people have automatically voted democrat for too long and not even know why they are doing it. I hope anyone who reads this will at least agree to it that most policies of the democratic party were and still are racist.

Oh before I forget, President Donald Trump wanted to nominate Herman Cain to the Federal Reserve Board, but Herman Cain turned it down, for those who don’t know, Herman Cain was a presidential candidate and a republican for those who don’t know again, he was chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas and was a ballistic analyst for the US Department of the Navy. He may not know politics but he is a pretty smart guy don’t you think ?? First of all, he was going to nominate a black man to one of the most important positions in the country, how does a racist man do that when he doesn’t have to?

To finish this, has anyone heard of the “First Step ACT of 2018? under this act which was signed into law by President Trump, 3100 inmates will be free, I don’t need to tell you that most people who are locked up are of a particular race, can you get what race they are ? or before I forget, as much as black people talk about the unfairness of the music industry, one would think that they will at least say, even if we don’t like President Trump, he did something to support the music industry, he signed the Music Modernization ACT which was signed into law in 2018, for those who don’t know he ensures that songwriters are paid when their songs are played on streaming services. You can guess what was happening before that.

Everyone went mad that President Trump wanted a wall,   and we couldn’t get enough of that topic in the news, the problem with this is, either people have a very short memory or they are very oblivious to this or deal with politics based on emotions, Has anyone read the secure Fence ACT of 2006? Well in short President Obama and Senator Clinton among other democrats, wanted a wall too…… interesting isn’t it

Lastly, Trump called for more funding for HBCUs,  funny he is Republican, and he is white, I can understand why black people were Republican In the early days!