More than 11% of the world’s more than 2,000 billionaires have run for election or become politicians, according to a study highlighting the growing power and influence of the super-wealthy.
While billionaires have had mixed success at the ballot box in the U.S., billionaires around the world have a “strong track record” of winning elections and “lean to the Right ideologically,” said the study, which is by three professors at Northwestern University.
“Billionaire politicians are a shockingly common phenomenon,” the study said. “The concentration of massive wealth in the hands of a tiny elite has understandably caused many observers to worry that the ‘super-rich have super-sized political influence.’”
Basically anyone could come settle land (literally free real estate), that’s why they had to borrow a system of indentured servitude to produce. While white indentured servants were initially preferred, the Dutch trade routes and invention of the cotton gin turned in to the institution of chattel slavery of primarily Africans as we know it. Out of this period came the modern notion of “race” and conceptions of white-supremacy as a justification. Then you basically had a merchant economy in the north and an agricultural one in the south, and what was a moral concern for the north was the foundation of the economy in the south. Even after they lost Andrew Johnson basically gave all the planters back their seats in local governments.