Lyn Kuda, mid-20s, F, USA. Alias MerianMoriarty. Pencil artist, graphic designer, and freelance English-language copy-editor. FANGIRL.
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I’ve been working with the Awaiaulu newspaper typescription project (a volunteer-based online project to typescribe newspapers from 100+ years ago in an effort to help preserve examples of the Hawaiian language) for a week or so now. I don’t speak Hawaiian, but every once in a while, I come across an English-language page.
Do you know what they’re talking about on those English pages? An unfair class gap that allows for (and in fact makes use of) voting pluralism, money-lenders gouging the farmers and homesteaders, and large corporations complaining that their profits aren’t still rising.
Under such circumstances as these it is the duty and privilege of the government to step in and adopt such financial measures to relieve the stringency in the money market and assist the homesteader and the farmer to protect his home and his industry from the rapaciousness and usurous assessments of the uncontrolled capitalist. Every man should have equal chances with his securities to obtain that unusually necessary commodity—money—free from the indignities and caprice of the soulless money lender.
What then shall be done to ameliorate the situation here? The first and most preeminent necessity is to obtain more available capital. This would not be a necessity, had the millions of dollars which have been made here in sugar been retained for investment in this country. But our avaricious and unpatriotic sugar men have invested the bulk of their profits in foreign lands and left here a void of capital which is a serious handicap to the borrower, a draw back to all projected enterprises, and renders impossible the development of our natural resources. How shall we obtain capital and how shall it be applied.~from a February 1892 edition of the Ka Leo O Ka Lahui
That’s right, they’re complaining about foreign investment and interest gouging from corporations and big banking.
In a newspaper from 1892. In Hawaii, which was a Constitutional Monarchy at the time.
And in other political columns in the paper, they called for outlawing the use of contract-labor and slave-labor—because they were taking jobs from non-slave laborers. Outsourcing, anyone?
