The New Form of Slavery in the U.S.
Human Overpopulation, Climate Change, Protection of the environment, massive species extinction, and the accumulation of wealth amongst a small segment of society are all the major global situations which will determine the future of our planetary life, and yet none of these significant situations are driving elections. Democracy and all other forms of government are now failing because no leaders can see the forest for the sake of the trees—or, if they can, have the power to really address these issues in any meaningful ways and stay elected or in power. This is the overriding reality of our times.
It may seem strange that at a time in which more and more Americans are slipping into economic regression and job instability that someone like Trump, the ultimate example of driving more and more of our country’s wealth into the hands of the 2-5% who own 90 percent of our wealth already—AND, are still not satisfied. This additional wealth cannot come from the poor—they have nothing left to give and so it must come from the middle class which will just push more of them into poverty. Trickle down economics has been proven a total failure every time it has been tried. Any reversal of wealth dispersal toward a more reasonable dispersal is not likely as long as the wealthy have control of all three branches of our government. In other countries with autocratic control of government the grip on protecting the wealthy is even more firm.
Our urban, suburban, and rural ghettoes have continued to grow in size, joblessness, with poor schools, poor health care, and personal safety. The latter have forced residents and children to stay confined inside and fearful of being hurt at school or on the streets. This is producing chronic stress syndrome for more and more children in their formative years. This means they have chronically high levels of stress hormones in their blood and this has negative impact on almost every body system and especially the central nervous system. Many of these effects can be permanent for a good percentage of victims. Then we ignorantly wonder why, as teenagers or adults they don’t act civilized or normal. To compound ignorance, it is then blamed on race when the fact is any ethnic group raised in such ghettos behave the same way.
The following is based on several premises. First, every government is responsible for all the communities within it’s jurisdiction. This notion, that less government is best is nothing more than a smoke screen to ensure the affluent can flourish while the poor are left on their own—at best, permanent welfare wards of the state. Another premise is that the benefit of the industrial revolution is that people need to work less hours a week and have more leisure time. This worked for centuries as work hours per week were reduced, working conditions were improved, child labor was restricted, and so on. Somehow when the work week reached 40 hrs per week it got stuck at that point. The next premise is that certain aspects of our economy cannot be left up to political chicanery. That means not only should social security rise with the cost of living, but so should minimum wage and taxes, and the money spent to educate students. The next premise is that for society to be ethical and prosperous for all citizens, and especially young people, citizens need to be guaranteed good schools, good teachers, the same amount of money available to educate all children, good health care, safe communities, job opportunities with livable wages, good pensions, and generous vacation time. Some countries do this today, but the United States does little of this, calling it socialism. It is no surprise that when polls are done to find which citizens are the happiest it is alway the countries which do the above that score the highest.
For decades the United States encouraged illegal immigrants because their slave wages enable many products and services to be inexpensive for legal citizens. These ’slaves’ tended to accumulate in our ghetto areas and given the current ’shithole’ nature of our current ghettoes many people blame these illegal immigrants. Of course it is only right that illegal immigration be stopped, but having encouraged this for decades it becomea unethical for those who have been law abiding citizens for decades to be deported. Of course the problem here, which is just a part of the bigger problem, is just who is going to do this ‘slave wage’ work if they are gone? The wealthy, through Trump as their pawn, are now coming up with an insidious policy which will do the ‘trick”. If minimum wage had gone up with the cost of living since 1955 it would be around $22 today. That’s a far cry from the $8 minimum wage in some areas of the country.
With all this in mind, all sorts of changes need be implemented so that we no longer have 42% of adults earning so little money that they don’t even qualify to pay federal taxes. Certainly that so many people in any society should be living in poverty, let alone in the richest country in the world, is a travesty. This title of richest country is currently very deceptive. What we really have is 2-5% of our citizens living well with 90% of our total wealth, while an increasingly larger portion of our society sinks to lower and lower levels of economic hardship. We score poorly on education, health issues, etc compared to other industrialized countries not because the wealthy are not doing exceptionally well in these categories, but because so many people are so deficient in these categories.
The mentality behind this musing is simple. As long as we cannot globally address the major issues listed at the beginning of this musing, all else is just inane distraction. If the human species cannot control itself from human activities which are detrimental to human prosperity in the future on this planet, then our Achilles Heels will precipitate another drastic evolutionary correction. Continued nationalism, religious battles, ethnic conflicts, class conflicts, and so on will be our downfall. It doesn’t do any good for everyone to say “well, none of these major problems can be corrected via global control, so why waste time on them?”
Let’s examine here the concept of global minimum wages. This not a new problem. One of Trump’s ‘shit holes’ (Haiti) found out the kind of vengeance lack of minimum wages can do to damage human existence. When one of the slaves in Haiti, on a sugar plantation, organized a slave revolt and won—defeating Spain, France, and England in order to eliminate slavery on the Island, the victory was rather hollow. The slave was Toussaint Louverture. His personal history is quite intriguing, but for here let’s just say he was well organized, manipulative to achieve his goals, and rather intelligent. He was not interested in killing the white planters or even getting rid of them as planters. After Toussaint was driven from power, his successors did kill all the white planters (many escaped out of the country).
Haiti, back in the days of Toussaint (today too), had no industry to speak of except sugar plantations. No working conditions anywhere were worse than the working conditions on these sugar plantations. Death from various diseases were rampant, the work was inhuman, only a small percentage of slaves were female, so family type relationships were nearly impossible, and on and on it goes. But once the slaves were freed and the government, now black, the question became “Now what?” Freedom became just another word for ‘nothing left to lose’. The slaves had no real skills, there were no other industries besides sugar plantations. So, in theory, each former slave from these large sugar plantations were free to grow their own sugar and sell it. Except it takes a huge amount of capital to have a large enough sugar plantation to be profitable. Sure, a black planter was free to pay workers a decent salary but then he would have to sell the sugar at a higher price. BUT, all the other countries which produced sugar still had slaves for the labor. Few of the freed blacks were about to return to the sugar plantations under the same hours and conditions as before. Most of the slaves just tried to grow coffee on a small amount of land and just grow enough food for subsistence. Most were poorly educated, couldn’t read or write, in poor health—in short as about as helpless to make a better life for themselves as could be. They were trapped as workers by the same principle which exists today:unless there are global minimum wages workers in most occupations are trapped. These former slaves were in the same position many American workers are in today. As long as there are people in other countries providing the same products or services at slave wages, then our workers making the same product or services cannot get decent ages.
This is why the Trump administration is vigorously pushing the principle that only those who have a job can receive any welfare.This essentially forces the poor in our rural, urban, or suburban ghettos to take a job at slave labor pay. Then after working the worst jobs long hours, they can then get a welfare subsidy so they can manage to survive, if having poor medical care, no land ownership, poor schools, a violent environment in which to live, no pensions, no livable wage, is really having any kind of life. So in deftly constructed cruelty we will chase out the illegal immigrants who served as our slave labor force, and they will be replaced by legal citizens forced to work as our slave labor force. And the bonus for these doers of evil is that they can boast that the number of minority citizens have record low unemployment rates. Then just to rub dirt into the wound our President will add—and “these are good paying jobs too”. Naturally, which is his specialty, there is not a grain of truth to this.
The actual reality is this: until our poorest (a number growing at an exponential rate) earn enough money to pay taxes and spend money in our buying market, there will be no prosperous society any more except for those at the very top. And it almost guarantees organized (via smart phones) eventual roving street riots in every community across our land with a population now becoming (again at an exponential rate) heavily armed with weapons of mass destruction, including automatic weapons, homemade bombs, sniper incidents, vehicles, infrastructure damage, and the list goes on. Terrorism is already becoming our new national sport—year round and almost daily.
Slavery in any form is wrong. Every citizen deserves a job at the level of their skills and health, a job that pays at least a livable wage and rises each year with the cost of living and has decent benefits and job stability if performed well. Only those who refuse such livable wage jobs should be denied welfare benefits. And those who work livable wage jobs will no longer need welfare and will buy things and this, from the bottom up, will stimulate our economy and make life better for everyone. Actually, whenever amassing wealth becomes an addictive/ compulsive behavior no contentment is possible. Addictions and compulsive behavior cannot, by definition, lead to contentment. Would anyone remotely consider Trump’s behavior one of a contented person? I don’t t think so, the poor guy suffers from 24 hr angry fits about just everyone and everything all the time. Those who live by the golden rule and have learned when enough is enough regarding money, sex, power, titles, and whatever, are the contented citizens. The nice thing about the Golden Rule, a universal ethical principle, is that those who give get as much contentment as those who receive.
It is a good thing God’s evolutionary process, controlled by God’s laws to govern the process, is an ongoing process on evolutionary time, not human time—and thus the mess the human species is now creating will get resolved, not by our species, but by the laws which govern the evolutionary process. The long term prognosis is great, the short term bleak. If this short term trend moves any faster maybe it will be time for me to check out early. The dead never have a damn thing to worry about, ever. And if, by some remote chance, there is Heaven, probably those who have lived by the golden rule, will be the first in.
