Tuesday, September 24, 2013

YEAH, WALL STREETERS SUFFERED JUST LIKE CLAUDE NEAL

I'm sure you don't need me to tell you that this is outrageous:
AIG's CEO Robert Benmosche -- who came in to rescue the company after the 2008 financial crisis -- told the Wall Street Journal that the outrage over the bonuses promised to AIG's members was just as bad as when white supremacists in the American South used to lynch African Americans:
The uproar over bonuses "was intended to stir public anger, to get everybody out there with their pitchforks and their hangman nooses, and all that -- sort of like what we did in the Deep South [decades ago]. And I think it was just as bad and just as wrong."
Yeah, what happened to financial wheeler-dealers sure was "sort of like" what happened to Claude Neal of Greenwood, Florida, in October of 1934, after he was accused of murdering a white woman, wasn't it? From a contemporary account:
Neal was taken from the Brewton jail between one and two o'clock Friday morning, October 26. he was in the hands of the smaller lynching group composed of approximately 100 men from then until he was left in the road in front of the Cannidy home late that same night.

Neal was tortured for ten or twelve hours. The original mob that took Neal from jail directed "all of the niceties of a twentieth century lynching ... inflicted upon Neal." The word was passed all over Northeastern Florida and southeastern Alabama that there was to be a "lynching party to which all white people are invited."

A member of the lynching party described the lynching in all of its ghastliness, down tot he minutest detail:
After taking the nigger to the woods about four miles from Greenwood, they cut off his penis. He was made to eat it. They cut off his testicles and made him eat them and say he liked it....

Then they sliced his sides and stomach with knives and every now and then somebody would cut off a finger or toe. Red hot irons were used on the nigger to burn him from top to bottom.

From time to time during the torture a rope was tied around Neal's neck and he was pulled up over a limb and held there until he almost choked to death. Then he was let down and the torture began all over again. After several hours of this unspeakable torture, they decided just to kill him.
Neal's body was tied to a rope on the rear of an automobile and dragged over the highway to the Cannidy home. Here a mob estimated to number somewhere between 3000 and 7000 people from eleven southern states was excitedly waiting his arrival. When the car which was dragging Neal's body came in front of the Cannidy home, a man who was riding the rear bumper cut the rope.

A woman came out of the Cannidy house and drove a butcher knife into his heart. Then the crowd came by and some kicked him and some drove their cars over him.

Men, women, and children were numbered in the vast throng that came to witness the lynching. It is reported from reliable sources that the little children, some of them mere tots, who lived in the Greenwood neighborhood, waited with sharpened sticks for the return of Neal's body and that when it rolled in the dust on the road that awful night these little children drove their weapons deep into the flesh of the dead man.

The body, which by this time was horribly mutilated, was taken to Marianna, a distance of ten or eleven miles, where it was hung to a tree on the northeast corner of the courthouse square. Pictures were taken of the mutilated form and hundreds of photographs were sold for fifty cents each. Scores of citizens viewed the body as it hung in the square. The body was perfectly nude until the early morning when someone had the decency to hang a burlap sack over the middle of the body. The body was cut down about eight-thirty Saturday morning, October 27, 1934.

Fingers and toes from Neal's body have been exhibited as souvenirs in Marianna where one man offered to divide the finger which he had with a friend as "a special favor." Another man has one of the fingers preserved in alcohol.
That's just like what happened to your pals, isn't it, Mr. Benmosche?


(Benmosche quote via Memeorandum.)

11 comments:

Unsalted Sinner said...

Ah yes, but did someone criticize Neal's BONUSES, eh? Eh?

Victor said...

WTF is wrong with these "people?"

You know, as much as I hate these entitled rich MFers, I wouldn't wish this fate on even the worst of them.

Just a simple, quick, tumbrel ride, and then a few hacks with a rusty and dull guillotine.

Feeling like victims, should only be allowed for people who really were/are victims.

Not for people who didn't get the PR they wanted after they nearly burned the world's economy to the ground, and collected rather ample bonuses for their "hard" work.

They really are lucky, that we're not so desperate, that we have to resort to 'eating cake.'

BooMan said...

Some things change [slowly http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/09/24/2669641/video-released-of-florida-cop-running-over-man-with-his-car/].

Anonymous said...

@Victor

You just did what they did! I'm sure they didn't mean a literal lynching like what used to happen here. And I'm pretty damn sure you don't mean a literal guillotine like what used to happen either.

Which is why throwing a fit about this is silly. Because leave it to the people complaining he said it, to lob equally stupid statements back at them.

But as always, it's OK to do it when it is from our side, it's not OK to do it when someone else does.

This is why the beltway press can scream both sides at the top of their lungs, because go to any blog and you'll see amazing examples of it happen constantly.

Ten Bears said...

I have long been an advocate that they just jump. That canard about Banksters jumping out of high rises on Black Tuesday is just that: a canard. Today's Banksters may very well have something to worry about, as those Bankstets didn't jump, they were thrown.

History only repeats to those paying attention.

Examinator said...

Victor
My view is a little less blood thirsty but I'd force him to live in an ordinary suburb and to drive a 10 year old standard vehicle and make him sell every thing he owns and **personally** divide up the his 'products of crime' and hand the proportionate checks to all those who lost. Clearly it wouldn't be enough.But being abused by umpteen squillion of the victims might give him the message.
Also I'd garnishee part of all future earning to pay off the damages.
Like the Mikardo in Gilbert and Sullivan's musical.... make the punishment fit the crime. :-)

Luigi said...

The bankers are all pigs! Plain & simple.

Kevin Hayden said...

Ghastly to hear the detail from 1934. Yet the best response anyone could have written to that arrogant little pipsqueak rat offal, Benmosche.

Kudos, Steve. A well-earned rebuke, deftly done.

Philo Vaihinger said...

At American Renaissance you can find endless recitations of black on white crimes.

Are you the color negative of American Renaissance?

Steve M. said...

Thanks, Kevin.

Victor said...

Uhm...
Anyone remember the term, hyperbole?