"During slavery, "Americans built a culture of speculation unique in its abandon," writes the historian Joshua Rothman...That culture would drive cotton production up to the Civil War, and it has been a defining characteristic of American capitalism ever since. It is the culture of acquiring wealth without work, growing at all costs and abusing the powerless. It is the culture that brought us the , the and the . It is the culture that has produced and undignified working conditions. If today America promotes a particular kind of low-road capitalism — a capitalism of poverty wages, and ; a winner-take-all capitalism of stunning disparities not only permitting but awarding financial rule-bending; a racist capitalism that ignores the fact that slavery didn’t just deny black freedom but built white fortunes, originating the black-white wealth gap that annually grows wider — one reason is that American capitalism was founded on the lowest road there is."
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"In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation", ' (August 14, 2019)
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Matthew Desmond
Matthew Desmond (born 1979 or 1980) is an American sociologist. He is the Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology at Princeton University, where he is also the principal investigator of the Eviction Lab. Desmond was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022. He was formerly the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University.
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