View From a Height

From the Nobody Ever Learns Anything Department

If JP Morgan thinks this is going to satisfy anyone, they need to do a little more historical research:

JPMorgan Chase & Co. is the first company to acknowledge that two of its predecessor banks had specific links to the slave trade. The filing was meant to comply with a Chicago ordinance requiring such disclosures.

The bank, the nation's second largest, said in a statement Thursday that the two Louisiana banks had received thousands of slaves as collateral before the Civil War.

The New York-based bank also apologized for contributing to "a brutal and unjust institution" and said it was setting up a scholarship fund in Louisiana as a way to make amends.

...

The bank said that historical researchers had found that two now-defunct predecessor banks - Citizens Bank and Canal Bank, both based in Louisiana - served as banks to plantations from the 1830s until the Civil War.

"Collateral" for mortgages and other loans "included land, equipment and/or enslaved individuals," the statement said.

...

The two Louisiana banks merged in 1924 but failed in March 1933 amid the Depression. A federally chartered bank in May 1933 assumed some of the failed banks assets, and that institution - the National Bank of Commerce in New Orleans - was a precursor of Bank One Corp. Bank One was purchased last year by JPMorgan.

So let's get this straight. JP Morgan is claiming implicit moral responsibility for two failed banks who (presumably) stopped trading in slaves 68 years before they failed, and we acquired by a bank that later was acquired by a bank that was later acquired by JP Morgan Chase. If I've got my genealogy right, that's a cousin subsidiary precusor three times removed through marriage. By this logic, it should be sometime this year that we get an official statement from the Palace that Queen Elizabeth II has taken personal responsibility for some massacre perpetrated by William of Orange.

The worst part is that Morgan has managed to make the worst of a silly situation. They've implicitly claimed moral responsibility for a problem, and then put down money that wouldn't pay the paralegal fees for any claimant's case against them. They've accepted the bogus social science that links slavery to today's poverty, and the agitators they're trying to appease won't care, they'll just use it to hijack the next company.