The Outsourcing of Cruelty

Same as it ever was, only more so.

From The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson:

Money rarely changed hands between planter and sharecropper, as the entire system was built on credit. The sharecroppers owed the planters, the planters owed the merchants, the merchants owed the banks, and the banks were often beholden to some business concern in the North, where most of the real money was in the first place.