A
Anarchore
Guest
Time to kill the plantation owners.
http://www.new-enlightenment.com/new_slavery.htm
New Chattel Slavery: 27 million New Wage Slavery: 6.175 billion
Author
Background Material
Bibliography
Feedback
Today, most people suffer under globalistic slavery: either wage
slavery or physical, chattel slavery. There are currently more than 27
million people physically enslaved as chattel. 1 Approximately 95% of
the 6.4 billion persons now living suffer under wage slavery at one
time in their lives: 6.175 billion.
Note carefully your feelings when you read the word slavery, as
though it couldn't possibly be that people are literally slaves
today--slavery seems like an outmoded form of life from previous
centuries. Whatever we feel, slavery is very much a fact of life for
most people in the world today. A person is a slave if he has lost
control over his life and is dominated by someone or something--whether
he is aware of this or not. Wage slavery is the condition in which a
person must sell his or her labor-power, submitting to the authority of
an employer, in order to merely subsist.
The phrase "modern slavery" describes a number of conditions
involving control of a person against his or her will, enforced by
violence or other forms of coercion. Chattel slavery, the legal
ownership of a person, is now illegal in all countries but still widely
practiced. In a real sense, slaves--chattel or work--are people who
have no rights.
Wage Slavery
1.2 billion people (24 percent of the total world population) live
in "severe poverty."
Forty-six million citizens--30 percent more than in 1996--are
without health insurance.
While the sales of the Top 200 are the equivalent of 27.5 percent
of world economic activity, they employ only 0.78 percent of the
world's workforce.
Between 1983 and 1999, the profits of the Top 200 firms grew 362.4
percent, while the number of people they employ grew by only 14.4
percent.
A full 5 percent of the Top 200s' combined workforce is employed
by Wal-Mart, a company notorious for union-busting and widespread use
of part-time workers to avoid paying benefits. The discount retail
giant is the top private employer in the world, with 1,140,000 workers,
more than twice as many as No. 2, DaimlerChrysler, which employs
466,938.
U.S. corporations dominate the Top 200, with 82 slots (41 percent
of the total). Japanese firms are second, with only 41 slots.
Of the U.S. corporations on the list, 44 did not pay the full
standard 35 percent federal corporate tax rate during the period
1996-1998. Seven of the firms actually paid less than zero in federal
income taxes in 1998 (because of rebates). These include: Texaco,
Chevron, PepsiCo, Enron, Worldcom, McKesson and the world's biggest
corporation - General Motors.
Between 1983 and 1999, the share of total sales of the Top 200
made up by service sector corporations increased from 33.8 percent to
46.7 percent. Gains were particularly evident in financial services and
telecommunications sectors, in which most countries have pursued
deregulation.
globalissues.org
Chattel Slavery
"Slavery is not a horror safely consigned to the past; it continues to
exist throughout the world, even in developed countries like France and
the United States. Across the world slaves work and sweat and build and
suffer. Slaves in Pakistan may have made the shoes you are wearing and
the carpet you stand on. Slaves in the Caribbean may have put sugar in
your kitchen and toys in the hands of your children. In India they may
have sewn the shirt on your back and polished the ring on your finger.
They are paid nothing.
"Slaves touch your life indirectly as well. They made the bricks for
the factory that made the TV you watch. In Brazil slaves made the
charcoal that tempered the steel that made the springs in your car and
the blade on your lawn mower. Slaves grew the rice that fed the woman
that wove the lovely cloth you've put up as curtains. Your investment
portfolio and your mutual fund pension own stock in companies using
slave labor in the developing world. Slaves keep your costs low and
returns on your investments high.
"Slavery is a booming business and the number of slaves is increasing.
People get rich by using slaves. And when they've finished with their
slaves, they just throw these people away. This is the new slavery,
which focuses on big profits and cheap lives. It is not about owning
people in the traditional sense of the old slavery, but about
controlling them completely. People become completely disposable tools
for making money." 2
What is Wrong With This Picture?
Half the world — over three billion people — live on less than
two dollars a day.
The GDP (Gross Domestic Product) of the poorest 48 nations (i.e.
a quarter of the world’s countries) is less than the wealth of the
world’s three richest people combined.
A few hundred millionaires now own as much wealth as the world’s
poorest 2.5 billion people.
A Real Black Woman
All segments of the slave population--all races, genders, and
social classes--must now rise up and throw off this new slavery which
has us in its grip. For example, women make up 70% of the world's 1.5
billion people living in absolute poverty. How many of us have to die,
lose our jobs, become homeless, or suffer an impoverished life before
we wake up and overthrow this new slavery?
A Black Woman Who Is A Slave Herself and Who Enslaves Others
In Florida, Workers Cracked Slavery Ring
Immigrant Advocates Win Award
By Kari Lydersen
Special to The Washington Post, Thursday, 11/20/03
IMMOKALEE, Fla. -- Romeo Ramirez came here from Guatemala, via Mexico,
sneaking into the United States when he was 17 to pick tomatoes. Not
long after he got here, he joined the Coalition of Immokalee Workers,
an advocacy group working to improve the lives of thousands of migrant
workers in this swath of swampy South Florida.
Not long after joining the coalition, Ramirez went undercover at the
behest of federal prosecutors investigating some of the contractors who
supply migrant workers to farmers. The contractors sometimes beat the
workers and forced them to live and work at gunpoint. Last year, as a
result of testimony from Ramirez and two other workers, three of the
contractors near here were convicted in U.S. District Court on slavery
and extortion charges and sentenced to a total of 34 years in prison.
CIW's Lucas Benitez saved the bloodstained shirt of a worker he saw
beaten in 1996. He said slave-like conditions haven't gone away.
"I saw people being threatened, and I saw that they couldn't leave,"
Ramirez, 23, said in an interview, speaking in Spanish. "It was
injustice."
On Thursday, Ramirez and two other members of the workers rights
coalition, Lucas Benitez and Julia Gabriel, will receive the Robert F.
Kennedy Human Rights Award in Washington for their role in helping
expose five slavery rings. It is the first time since it was instituted
in 1984 that the award, which includes a $30,000 cash prize, has been
given to members of a U.S. organization. Representatives of the
foundation credit the three with helping free more than 1,000
farmworkers from slavery conditions. Smugglers sneaked the workers into
the United States, where they were turned over to contractors who put
them to work in fields, forcing them to live under armed guard.
Michael Riggs, human rights director of the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial
Center for Human Rights said the three workers were doing important
work that deserved attention. "They are all former migrant farmworkers,
and they're using pretty creative tactics to help other migrant workers
get out of those situations," he said. "They've helped put behind bars
some of the people who are responsible for these situations."
Immokalee is a town of about 14,000 that swells to 30,000 during the
fall and spring harvest seasons. It appears more like a town in Latin
America than the United States -- young Mayan boys from Guatemala bike
down the street wearing Che Guevara T-shirts and Nikes, and Haitian
women in bright skirts and head wraps amble by foreign money transfer
outlets and taco shops.
Every day well before dawn, hundreds of men and some women gather in
the parking lot behind the coalition office to file onto old school
buses that will take them to the fields. The Coalition of Immokalee
Workers has been around since 1995, and there are now about 2,500
workers who carry laminated CIW cards earned by attending at least two
of the coalition's weekly meetings. Members say that because of their
activism, gross human rights and wage violations against workers in the
area are now relatively rare.
"If the boss won't let a worker get a drink or stop for lunch, we show
them our coalition card, and they give us our rights, because they know
we will march if they don't," said Francisca Cortez, a woman from
Oaxaca, Mexico, who came here five years ago to work in the fields.
According to a 1998 Department of Labor study, farmworkers make an
average of $7,500 a year. Workers' advocates say wages have not risen
since then. And migrant workers such as those at Immokalee rarely have
any kind of health insurance or access to workers' compensation.
"People are still enslaved by low wages and unhealthy working
conditions," said Benitez, 27, an immigrant from Guerrero, Mexico. "The
root of these problems is the same as the root of slavery, the
desperation of these immigrants to make a living."
When we begin thinking about slavery, it becomes clear to us that
we live in a world of ideological fantasy, foisted on us by persons
who've seized public property and use it for their own personal gain.
"The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas,
i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the
same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means
of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time
over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally
speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production
are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal
expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant
material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships
which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its
dominance. The individuals composing the ruling class possess among
other things consciousness, and therefore think. Insofar, therefore, as
they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch,
it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among
other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate
the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their
ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch." 3
To overthrow these new forms of slavery, we must work hard to
understand just what has led to our enslavement and what kinds of
actions will be necessary to free ourselves from these insidious chains
of servitude.
We first need to understand the basics of our present economic
situation. Wealth, in the form of valued goods or services, is created
by the combination of three elements:
1. Raw material
2. Labor
3. The means of production: the capital, land, and/or equipment
necessary for labor to process a raw resource into a state of higher
value to society (e.g. wheat is the raw resource and a grind mill is
the means of production).
The Ugly Reality of Wage Slavery
Many people blithely assume that "wage slavery" is merely a
metaphor, at worst a rather benign situation in which an employee says:
"You be my slave for 40 hours per week and I'll give you enough money
to be semi-autonomous. Just be here Mon-Fri 9AM-5PM (and any time I
tell you to work overtime) ... do some fairly easy work and that's it.
Deal?"
You have probably endured the subjugation of a "boss" or
"director" or "committee," and you know that the coercion, even if
masked as "job description," "supervisor evaluation," or "company
directive" can be as repressive as if there were literal chains
fastened around your arms and feet. Most business enterprises use the
leadership style of "management by whim," oppressing the worker through
executive incompetence and subjective bias.
Under the "wage slave" system you don't receive the full
compensation for your work. By the very nature of the employer-employee
relationship, you get less compensation than you should, because the
employer takes excessive profits. Let's take a look at how this happens
by examining a very simple example of an exchange.
The raw material to produce a sack of ground wheat, let's say, costs
$1.00
The means of production costs $2.00
The owner of the means of production pays you $1.00 for your labor
The owner sells the sack of ground wheat for $8.00
Your labor has turned $1.00 dollar of wheat plus $2.00 in production
costs plus $1.00 for your labor, into a commodity which is sold for
$8.00. The profit is $4.00 or 100%. The owner of the means of
production makes 400% more in profit than you do, plus he owns and can
sell the means of production whenever he wants.
The ratio of average chief executive pay to worker pay was 431 to 1 in
2004, up from 301 to 1 in 2003.
The stark reality of "wage slavery" is that the owners of the
means of production (capitalists) are now taking the jobs of American
workers to chattel labor nations such as China, Mexico, and many
others. The owners want to pay even less for labor than they now are
and they want cheaper production costs as well. They don't care if the
workers in these other countries are in literal bondage to their
overseers, as in Asian sweatshops. And they certainly don't have any
concern if American workers become destitute and homeless.
According to the US Census Bureau, 35.9 million Americans live
below the poverty line, including 12.9 million children. As defined by
the government and updated for inflation using the Consumer Price
Index, the average poverty threshold for a family of four in 2004 was
$19, 307; for a family of three, $15,067; and for a family of two,
$12,334.
In 2005, ExxonMobil realized a profit of $36.13 billion, the largest
single profit in the history of corporate America. Shell reported
profits of $23 billion for 2005. British Petroleum (BP) revealed
full-year profits at $21.7 billion.
Exxon CEO Lee Raymond received more than $42 million in salary, stock,
and bonuses in 2005.
It is estimated that the total cost for the invasion and occupation of
Iraq will be $2.6 trillion.
A wage slave can't quit an oppressive job to find a less
slave-like job, because in our present society, almost all jobs involve
wage-slavery. So the options are obey and stay, die of starvation, or
become a vagrant, which is illegal. It should be noted that this
description of the present economic situation is not something you hear
on TV or radio or read in newspapers or magazines, not because it's
incorrect or misleading, but because "it's just the way things are" or
any such straightforward description is deemed "communistic" or
"socialistic."
In the first one hundred and fifty years of our history as a
nation, the vast majority of American people lived in a
community-oriented culture, on farms or in smal towns or cities working
as artisans and laborers. Our national identity was associated with
interdependence and cooperation--all for the common good. Women worked
with men, families traded labor and animals. In this culture of mutual
concern and mutual obligation, working class people took care of one
another. They shared common values and interests, completely different
from the values of a market-driven approach to life. According to this
common welfare approach to life, merchants and financiers would be
restricted to what the community decided about how resources are used.
The working class had put its democratic, interdependent ideals into
their state constitutions and in town and city charters when possible.
The "Free Market" Scam
Adam Smith Even from the beginning of our nation's history, the
wealthy class--shopkeepers, lawyers, bankers, speculators, commercial
farmers--had adopted a completely opposite way of life: every person
for himself. The world view of the wealthy class saw the community as a
system of exchange between producers and consumers, capitalists and
workers. The holy of holies for the merchant class was the "free
market" ideology, according to which each man pursues only his own
self-interest. According to this dogma, society is held together, not
on the basis of common welfare, but by the "invisible hand of the
market" implemented through impersonal contracts.
"Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of
property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against
the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have
none at all."
Adam Smith. (1776). Wealth of Nations
According to the view of the merchant class, the state is to be
controlled by elites or "better people" who decide what is best for the
"common people." Government's role is to protect the single human
capability of ownership. John Hancock All other capabilities--learning,
pursuit of happiness, freedom, human concern--are to be subordinated to
property. The state's only role is to assure that the impersonal market
system runs smoothly. This requires that the government use violent
force when it becomes necessary to protect personal property.
The delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention in
Philadelphia were selected by state legislatures--not by popular vote
of the people. The capitalist class was frightened by how much power
the working class had been able to muster in the separate colonies and
they could see from the Shays rebellion that the people were quite
capable of rebelling against the wealthy class when it seized their
hard-earned lands, crops, and animals.
Delegates to the Constitutional Convention were instructed that
their only job was to amend the Articles of Confederation and that any
proposed changes were to be approved by all the states before they were
adopted. A conspiratorial junta, led by Hamilton and Madison, had
already decided that they would scrap the Articles of Confederation and
write an entirely new constitution which would create a centralized
government controlled by the wealthy class. The Convention met entirely
in secret, and it would be fifty-three years before American citizens
were allowed to see the record of what had transpired in this coup
d'etat which enshrined mercantile capitalism as the imposed way of life
for Americans. Of the sixty-two delegates appointed to the Convention,
fifty-five showed up. At the Convention, no more than eleven states
were ever represented at one time. Of the fifty-five members of the
Convention; only thirty-nine signed the final draft.
The illegal Constitution these conspirators contrived:
Conspiratorial Constitutional Convention
was in effect an economic document, enshrining property as the
primary value
was anti-majoritarian, making sure that the "common people" could
no longer gain political power over the minority capitalist class
contained no checks against plutocratic (corporate) power
created the private control of government by the capitalist
class, including the creation of domestic and foreign policy
disallowed city or state assemblies to make decisions which the
federal government was to make
assured that effective political power was unavailable at the
local level
Knowing that the popular majority in all the states would oppose
this oligarchic document, the framers of the Constitution inserted the
provision that it would go into effect when ratified by only nine
states. The failure of the Constitution to disallow the seizure of
power was first proven when the Federalist Party and John Adams, as the
second U.S. president, took over all branches of the government and
instituted a reign of terror which was barely overthrown by Thomas
Jefferson and his party in 1800.
Modern Slavery
At present we are suffering from the seizure of all branches of
American government by a demonic cabal and its Bush puppet regime. Bush
II was put into power with the connivance of the criminal acts of his
brother Jeb in Florida and the coup d'etat perpetrated by the
reactionary Supreme Court appointing Bush president in 2000. Under the
cabal puppets such as Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II, America has
become an imperialistic, militaristic banana republic.
The ravages of wage slavery are becoming clear for all Americans
to see and feel. We either overthrow this new slavery or we will end up
chattel slaves to a new capitalist class of criminal thugs. To help us
re-establish our Constitutional freedoms, we must establish equitable
economic principles. We can begin by working for the realization of the
Second Bill of Rights as presented by President Franklin D. Roosevelt
in his State of the Union Address in January, 1944.
During his State of the Union Address, Roosevelt declared that the
nation had come to recognize, and should now implement, a second bill
of rights. Roosevelt did not argue for any change to the United States
Constitution; he believed that the second bill of rights should be
implemented politically, not by federal judges. Roosevelt's stated
justification was that the "political rights" granted by the
Constitution and the Bill of Rights had "proved inadequate to assure us
equality in the pursuit of happiness." Roosevelt's remedy was to create
an "economic bill of rights" which would guarantee:
"The right to a useful and remunerative job"
"The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing
and recreation"
"The right of every family to a decent home"
"The right to adequate medical care and opportunity to enjoy and
achieve good health"
"The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old
age, sickness, accident, and unemployment"
"The right to a good education"
Roosevelt stated that having these rights would guarantee American
security, and that America's place in the world depended upon how far
these and similar rights were carried into practice.
The Public Service Economy
Historically, federal, state, and local governments have managed
certain businesses and industries which the American public thought
best kept in public hands: prisons, schools, forests, parks, military
bases, retirement funds, utilities, etc. And American citizens have
also wanted their government to regulate certain businesses and
industries which the citizens felt could only be scrutinized by public
agencies, not privately-owned enterprises.
Beginning in the 1960s the demonic cabal's front
organizations--Cato, Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute
(AEI), Committee on the Present Danger, Free Congress Foundation,
Council for Inter-American Security, Council for National Policy,
etc.--began to raise a loud outcry that governmental regulatory
agencies had been "captured" by the industries under regulation. Of
course, the allegations were largely true--their political puppets had
made sure that the public regulatory agencies such as OSHA
(Occupational Safety and Health Administration), EPA (Environmental
Protection Agency), and EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission),
were either crippled or co-opted.
But many Americans, made indifferent and ignorant by the demonic
cabal's subversion of American education beginning in the early decades
of the twentieth century, can't see that the groups claiming to be
watching out for citizens' interests are actually fronts for the
American ruler group. The mind-robots eat up the catch slogans of: "get
the government off the backs of the people" and "consumer choice." So
they stand still when the elite's political puppets put through
legislation which creates deregulation and privatization of public
institutions.
The cabal's political puppets broke up some of their large
competitors, such as AT&T, IBM, savings and loan institutions, and
airlines, so the cartel could increase its holdings in the
telecommunication, computer, banking, and air travel industries. Then,
the cabal began its deregulatory experiments with the opening of access
to networks. Under this approach, the physical infrastructures of the
networks (such as airports, cables, pipes) remained regulated natural
monopolies, but access to these networks was opened so that the
remaining elements could be submitted to competition: airline traffic,
telecommunication services, gas and electricity production, etc.
Americans know that historically, the U.S. was created on the
principle that citizens own public land, highways, schools, ports,
airports, parks, the airwaves, government buildings and other assets.
Under the present criminal regime, public assets such as energy
production plants, water resources, prisons, and many others, have been
seized by members of the cabal under the guise of "privatization."
Americans must create a government that will serve as the protector of
the citizenry, and champion their cause when confronted with the
predatory greed of profit-motivated corporations and individuals.
Americans don't see anyone in the federal or state government doing
anything but assuring that the big corporations' profits skyrocket even
more. So Americans are beginning to inform themselves--primarily
through the Internet.
We must realize that our economic situation at present--a very few
obscenely rich people owning companies and corporations and having
illegally seized state and federal political power--is one which we can
and must change. Our current economic and political circumstances are
not written in stone; humans have lived under very different political
and economic conditions throughout our history. We must begin to
overthrow this present state of affairs where most of us suffer under
wage-slavery. The political system and the economic situation should be
directed toward the welfare of all Americans, not just a few. We can
bring about these changes; it is not impossible.
We must first make all Americans aware of our present plight and
then begin in all possible ways to overthrow the new slavery, producing
material changes leading to political freedom and economic equality of
opportunity.
Notes:
1 Personal property in the form of slaves or bondsmen
2 Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy,
1999
3 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology
References and Updates:
5/14/07: Brazil: Bush-Lula biofuel plans based on conditions
worse than slavery
5/13/07: Guest Worker Slavery
3/14/07: Slave labor conditions under US guestworker program
3/13/07: John Miller, "Slaves Among Us"
10/6/06: Zambian slavery uner Chinese tyranny
Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global
Economy, 1999
Anti-Slavery
Wage Slavery, UK
Global Issues
http://www.new-enlightenment.com/new_slavery.htm
New Chattel Slavery: 27 million New Wage Slavery: 6.175 billion
Author
Background Material
Bibliography
Feedback
Today, most people suffer under globalistic slavery: either wage
slavery or physical, chattel slavery. There are currently more than 27
million people physically enslaved as chattel. 1 Approximately 95% of
the 6.4 billion persons now living suffer under wage slavery at one
time in their lives: 6.175 billion.
Note carefully your feelings when you read the word slavery, as
though it couldn't possibly be that people are literally slaves
today--slavery seems like an outmoded form of life from previous
centuries. Whatever we feel, slavery is very much a fact of life for
most people in the world today. A person is a slave if he has lost
control over his life and is dominated by someone or something--whether
he is aware of this or not. Wage slavery is the condition in which a
person must sell his or her labor-power, submitting to the authority of
an employer, in order to merely subsist.
The phrase "modern slavery" describes a number of conditions
involving control of a person against his or her will, enforced by
violence or other forms of coercion. Chattel slavery, the legal
ownership of a person, is now illegal in all countries but still widely
practiced. In a real sense, slaves--chattel or work--are people who
have no rights.
Wage Slavery
1.2 billion people (24 percent of the total world population) live
in "severe poverty."
Forty-six million citizens--30 percent more than in 1996--are
without health insurance.
While the sales of the Top 200 are the equivalent of 27.5 percent
of world economic activity, they employ only 0.78 percent of the
world's workforce.
Between 1983 and 1999, the profits of the Top 200 firms grew 362.4
percent, while the number of people they employ grew by only 14.4
percent.
A full 5 percent of the Top 200s' combined workforce is employed
by Wal-Mart, a company notorious for union-busting and widespread use
of part-time workers to avoid paying benefits. The discount retail
giant is the top private employer in the world, with 1,140,000 workers,
more than twice as many as No. 2, DaimlerChrysler, which employs
466,938.
U.S. corporations dominate the Top 200, with 82 slots (41 percent
of the total). Japanese firms are second, with only 41 slots.
Of the U.S. corporations on the list, 44 did not pay the full
standard 35 percent federal corporate tax rate during the period
1996-1998. Seven of the firms actually paid less than zero in federal
income taxes in 1998 (because of rebates). These include: Texaco,
Chevron, PepsiCo, Enron, Worldcom, McKesson and the world's biggest
corporation - General Motors.
Between 1983 and 1999, the share of total sales of the Top 200
made up by service sector corporations increased from 33.8 percent to
46.7 percent. Gains were particularly evident in financial services and
telecommunications sectors, in which most countries have pursued
deregulation.
globalissues.org
Chattel Slavery
"Slavery is not a horror safely consigned to the past; it continues to
exist throughout the world, even in developed countries like France and
the United States. Across the world slaves work and sweat and build and
suffer. Slaves in Pakistan may have made the shoes you are wearing and
the carpet you stand on. Slaves in the Caribbean may have put sugar in
your kitchen and toys in the hands of your children. In India they may
have sewn the shirt on your back and polished the ring on your finger.
They are paid nothing.
"Slaves touch your life indirectly as well. They made the bricks for
the factory that made the TV you watch. In Brazil slaves made the
charcoal that tempered the steel that made the springs in your car and
the blade on your lawn mower. Slaves grew the rice that fed the woman
that wove the lovely cloth you've put up as curtains. Your investment
portfolio and your mutual fund pension own stock in companies using
slave labor in the developing world. Slaves keep your costs low and
returns on your investments high.
"Slavery is a booming business and the number of slaves is increasing.
People get rich by using slaves. And when they've finished with their
slaves, they just throw these people away. This is the new slavery,
which focuses on big profits and cheap lives. It is not about owning
people in the traditional sense of the old slavery, but about
controlling them completely. People become completely disposable tools
for making money." 2
What is Wrong With This Picture?
Half the world — over three billion people — live on less than
two dollars a day.
The GDP (Gross Domestic Product) of the poorest 48 nations (i.e.
a quarter of the world’s countries) is less than the wealth of the
world’s three richest people combined.
A few hundred millionaires now own as much wealth as the world’s
poorest 2.5 billion people.
A Real Black Woman
All segments of the slave population--all races, genders, and
social classes--must now rise up and throw off this new slavery which
has us in its grip. For example, women make up 70% of the world's 1.5
billion people living in absolute poverty. How many of us have to die,
lose our jobs, become homeless, or suffer an impoverished life before
we wake up and overthrow this new slavery?
A Black Woman Who Is A Slave Herself and Who Enslaves Others
In Florida, Workers Cracked Slavery Ring
Immigrant Advocates Win Award
By Kari Lydersen
Special to The Washington Post, Thursday, 11/20/03
IMMOKALEE, Fla. -- Romeo Ramirez came here from Guatemala, via Mexico,
sneaking into the United States when he was 17 to pick tomatoes. Not
long after he got here, he joined the Coalition of Immokalee Workers,
an advocacy group working to improve the lives of thousands of migrant
workers in this swath of swampy South Florida.
Not long after joining the coalition, Ramirez went undercover at the
behest of federal prosecutors investigating some of the contractors who
supply migrant workers to farmers. The contractors sometimes beat the
workers and forced them to live and work at gunpoint. Last year, as a
result of testimony from Ramirez and two other workers, three of the
contractors near here were convicted in U.S. District Court on slavery
and extortion charges and sentenced to a total of 34 years in prison.
CIW's Lucas Benitez saved the bloodstained shirt of a worker he saw
beaten in 1996. He said slave-like conditions haven't gone away.
"I saw people being threatened, and I saw that they couldn't leave,"
Ramirez, 23, said in an interview, speaking in Spanish. "It was
injustice."
On Thursday, Ramirez and two other members of the workers rights
coalition, Lucas Benitez and Julia Gabriel, will receive the Robert F.
Kennedy Human Rights Award in Washington for their role in helping
expose five slavery rings. It is the first time since it was instituted
in 1984 that the award, which includes a $30,000 cash prize, has been
given to members of a U.S. organization. Representatives of the
foundation credit the three with helping free more than 1,000
farmworkers from slavery conditions. Smugglers sneaked the workers into
the United States, where they were turned over to contractors who put
them to work in fields, forcing them to live under armed guard.
Michael Riggs, human rights director of the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial
Center for Human Rights said the three workers were doing important
work that deserved attention. "They are all former migrant farmworkers,
and they're using pretty creative tactics to help other migrant workers
get out of those situations," he said. "They've helped put behind bars
some of the people who are responsible for these situations."
Immokalee is a town of about 14,000 that swells to 30,000 during the
fall and spring harvest seasons. It appears more like a town in Latin
America than the United States -- young Mayan boys from Guatemala bike
down the street wearing Che Guevara T-shirts and Nikes, and Haitian
women in bright skirts and head wraps amble by foreign money transfer
outlets and taco shops.
Every day well before dawn, hundreds of men and some women gather in
the parking lot behind the coalition office to file onto old school
buses that will take them to the fields. The Coalition of Immokalee
Workers has been around since 1995, and there are now about 2,500
workers who carry laminated CIW cards earned by attending at least two
of the coalition's weekly meetings. Members say that because of their
activism, gross human rights and wage violations against workers in the
area are now relatively rare.
"If the boss won't let a worker get a drink or stop for lunch, we show
them our coalition card, and they give us our rights, because they know
we will march if they don't," said Francisca Cortez, a woman from
Oaxaca, Mexico, who came here five years ago to work in the fields.
According to a 1998 Department of Labor study, farmworkers make an
average of $7,500 a year. Workers' advocates say wages have not risen
since then. And migrant workers such as those at Immokalee rarely have
any kind of health insurance or access to workers' compensation.
"People are still enslaved by low wages and unhealthy working
conditions," said Benitez, 27, an immigrant from Guerrero, Mexico. "The
root of these problems is the same as the root of slavery, the
desperation of these immigrants to make a living."
When we begin thinking about slavery, it becomes clear to us that
we live in a world of ideological fantasy, foisted on us by persons
who've seized public property and use it for their own personal gain.
"The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas,
i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the
same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means
of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time
over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally
speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production
are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal
expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant
material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships
which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its
dominance. The individuals composing the ruling class possess among
other things consciousness, and therefore think. Insofar, therefore, as
they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch,
it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among
other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate
the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their
ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch." 3
To overthrow these new forms of slavery, we must work hard to
understand just what has led to our enslavement and what kinds of
actions will be necessary to free ourselves from these insidious chains
of servitude.
We first need to understand the basics of our present economic
situation. Wealth, in the form of valued goods or services, is created
by the combination of three elements:
1. Raw material
2. Labor
3. The means of production: the capital, land, and/or equipment
necessary for labor to process a raw resource into a state of higher
value to society (e.g. wheat is the raw resource and a grind mill is
the means of production).
The Ugly Reality of Wage Slavery
Many people blithely assume that "wage slavery" is merely a
metaphor, at worst a rather benign situation in which an employee says:
"You be my slave for 40 hours per week and I'll give you enough money
to be semi-autonomous. Just be here Mon-Fri 9AM-5PM (and any time I
tell you to work overtime) ... do some fairly easy work and that's it.
Deal?"
You have probably endured the subjugation of a "boss" or
"director" or "committee," and you know that the coercion, even if
masked as "job description," "supervisor evaluation," or "company
directive" can be as repressive as if there were literal chains
fastened around your arms and feet. Most business enterprises use the
leadership style of "management by whim," oppressing the worker through
executive incompetence and subjective bias.
Under the "wage slave" system you don't receive the full
compensation for your work. By the very nature of the employer-employee
relationship, you get less compensation than you should, because the
employer takes excessive profits. Let's take a look at how this happens
by examining a very simple example of an exchange.
The raw material to produce a sack of ground wheat, let's say, costs
$1.00
The means of production costs $2.00
The owner of the means of production pays you $1.00 for your labor
The owner sells the sack of ground wheat for $8.00
Your labor has turned $1.00 dollar of wheat plus $2.00 in production
costs plus $1.00 for your labor, into a commodity which is sold for
$8.00. The profit is $4.00 or 100%. The owner of the means of
production makes 400% more in profit than you do, plus he owns and can
sell the means of production whenever he wants.
The ratio of average chief executive pay to worker pay was 431 to 1 in
2004, up from 301 to 1 in 2003.
The stark reality of "wage slavery" is that the owners of the
means of production (capitalists) are now taking the jobs of American
workers to chattel labor nations such as China, Mexico, and many
others. The owners want to pay even less for labor than they now are
and they want cheaper production costs as well. They don't care if the
workers in these other countries are in literal bondage to their
overseers, as in Asian sweatshops. And they certainly don't have any
concern if American workers become destitute and homeless.
According to the US Census Bureau, 35.9 million Americans live
below the poverty line, including 12.9 million children. As defined by
the government and updated for inflation using the Consumer Price
Index, the average poverty threshold for a family of four in 2004 was
$19, 307; for a family of three, $15,067; and for a family of two,
$12,334.
In 2005, ExxonMobil realized a profit of $36.13 billion, the largest
single profit in the history of corporate America. Shell reported
profits of $23 billion for 2005. British Petroleum (BP) revealed
full-year profits at $21.7 billion.
Exxon CEO Lee Raymond received more than $42 million in salary, stock,
and bonuses in 2005.
It is estimated that the total cost for the invasion and occupation of
Iraq will be $2.6 trillion.
A wage slave can't quit an oppressive job to find a less
slave-like job, because in our present society, almost all jobs involve
wage-slavery. So the options are obey and stay, die of starvation, or
become a vagrant, which is illegal. It should be noted that this
description of the present economic situation is not something you hear
on TV or radio or read in newspapers or magazines, not because it's
incorrect or misleading, but because "it's just the way things are" or
any such straightforward description is deemed "communistic" or
"socialistic."
In the first one hundred and fifty years of our history as a
nation, the vast majority of American people lived in a
community-oriented culture, on farms or in smal towns or cities working
as artisans and laborers. Our national identity was associated with
interdependence and cooperation--all for the common good. Women worked
with men, families traded labor and animals. In this culture of mutual
concern and mutual obligation, working class people took care of one
another. They shared common values and interests, completely different
from the values of a market-driven approach to life. According to this
common welfare approach to life, merchants and financiers would be
restricted to what the community decided about how resources are used.
The working class had put its democratic, interdependent ideals into
their state constitutions and in town and city charters when possible.
The "Free Market" Scam
Adam Smith Even from the beginning of our nation's history, the
wealthy class--shopkeepers, lawyers, bankers, speculators, commercial
farmers--had adopted a completely opposite way of life: every person
for himself. The world view of the wealthy class saw the community as a
system of exchange between producers and consumers, capitalists and
workers. The holy of holies for the merchant class was the "free
market" ideology, according to which each man pursues only his own
self-interest. According to this dogma, society is held together, not
on the basis of common welfare, but by the "invisible hand of the
market" implemented through impersonal contracts.
"Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of
property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against
the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have
none at all."
Adam Smith. (1776). Wealth of Nations
According to the view of the merchant class, the state is to be
controlled by elites or "better people" who decide what is best for the
"common people." Government's role is to protect the single human
capability of ownership. John Hancock All other capabilities--learning,
pursuit of happiness, freedom, human concern--are to be subordinated to
property. The state's only role is to assure that the impersonal market
system runs smoothly. This requires that the government use violent
force when it becomes necessary to protect personal property.
The delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention in
Philadelphia were selected by state legislatures--not by popular vote
of the people. The capitalist class was frightened by how much power
the working class had been able to muster in the separate colonies and
they could see from the Shays rebellion that the people were quite
capable of rebelling against the wealthy class when it seized their
hard-earned lands, crops, and animals.
Delegates to the Constitutional Convention were instructed that
their only job was to amend the Articles of Confederation and that any
proposed changes were to be approved by all the states before they were
adopted. A conspiratorial junta, led by Hamilton and Madison, had
already decided that they would scrap the Articles of Confederation and
write an entirely new constitution which would create a centralized
government controlled by the wealthy class. The Convention met entirely
in secret, and it would be fifty-three years before American citizens
were allowed to see the record of what had transpired in this coup
d'etat which enshrined mercantile capitalism as the imposed way of life
for Americans. Of the sixty-two delegates appointed to the Convention,
fifty-five showed up. At the Convention, no more than eleven states
were ever represented at one time. Of the fifty-five members of the
Convention; only thirty-nine signed the final draft.
The illegal Constitution these conspirators contrived:
Conspiratorial Constitutional Convention
was in effect an economic document, enshrining property as the
primary value
was anti-majoritarian, making sure that the "common people" could
no longer gain political power over the minority capitalist class
contained no checks against plutocratic (corporate) power
created the private control of government by the capitalist
class, including the creation of domestic and foreign policy
disallowed city or state assemblies to make decisions which the
federal government was to make
assured that effective political power was unavailable at the
local level
Knowing that the popular majority in all the states would oppose
this oligarchic document, the framers of the Constitution inserted the
provision that it would go into effect when ratified by only nine
states. The failure of the Constitution to disallow the seizure of
power was first proven when the Federalist Party and John Adams, as the
second U.S. president, took over all branches of the government and
instituted a reign of terror which was barely overthrown by Thomas
Jefferson and his party in 1800.
Modern Slavery
At present we are suffering from the seizure of all branches of
American government by a demonic cabal and its Bush puppet regime. Bush
II was put into power with the connivance of the criminal acts of his
brother Jeb in Florida and the coup d'etat perpetrated by the
reactionary Supreme Court appointing Bush president in 2000. Under the
cabal puppets such as Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II, America has
become an imperialistic, militaristic banana republic.
The ravages of wage slavery are becoming clear for all Americans
to see and feel. We either overthrow this new slavery or we will end up
chattel slaves to a new capitalist class of criminal thugs. To help us
re-establish our Constitutional freedoms, we must establish equitable
economic principles. We can begin by working for the realization of the
Second Bill of Rights as presented by President Franklin D. Roosevelt
in his State of the Union Address in January, 1944.
During his State of the Union Address, Roosevelt declared that the
nation had come to recognize, and should now implement, a second bill
of rights. Roosevelt did not argue for any change to the United States
Constitution; he believed that the second bill of rights should be
implemented politically, not by federal judges. Roosevelt's stated
justification was that the "political rights" granted by the
Constitution and the Bill of Rights had "proved inadequate to assure us
equality in the pursuit of happiness." Roosevelt's remedy was to create
an "economic bill of rights" which would guarantee:
"The right to a useful and remunerative job"
"The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing
and recreation"
"The right of every family to a decent home"
"The right to adequate medical care and opportunity to enjoy and
achieve good health"
"The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old
age, sickness, accident, and unemployment"
"The right to a good education"
Roosevelt stated that having these rights would guarantee American
security, and that America's place in the world depended upon how far
these and similar rights were carried into practice.
The Public Service Economy
Historically, federal, state, and local governments have managed
certain businesses and industries which the American public thought
best kept in public hands: prisons, schools, forests, parks, military
bases, retirement funds, utilities, etc. And American citizens have
also wanted their government to regulate certain businesses and
industries which the citizens felt could only be scrutinized by public
agencies, not privately-owned enterprises.
Beginning in the 1960s the demonic cabal's front
organizations--Cato, Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute
(AEI), Committee on the Present Danger, Free Congress Foundation,
Council for Inter-American Security, Council for National Policy,
etc.--began to raise a loud outcry that governmental regulatory
agencies had been "captured" by the industries under regulation. Of
course, the allegations were largely true--their political puppets had
made sure that the public regulatory agencies such as OSHA
(Occupational Safety and Health Administration), EPA (Environmental
Protection Agency), and EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission),
were either crippled or co-opted.
But many Americans, made indifferent and ignorant by the demonic
cabal's subversion of American education beginning in the early decades
of the twentieth century, can't see that the groups claiming to be
watching out for citizens' interests are actually fronts for the
American ruler group. The mind-robots eat up the catch slogans of: "get
the government off the backs of the people" and "consumer choice." So
they stand still when the elite's political puppets put through
legislation which creates deregulation and privatization of public
institutions.
The cabal's political puppets broke up some of their large
competitors, such as AT&T, IBM, savings and loan institutions, and
airlines, so the cartel could increase its holdings in the
telecommunication, computer, banking, and air travel industries. Then,
the cabal began its deregulatory experiments with the opening of access
to networks. Under this approach, the physical infrastructures of the
networks (such as airports, cables, pipes) remained regulated natural
monopolies, but access to these networks was opened so that the
remaining elements could be submitted to competition: airline traffic,
telecommunication services, gas and electricity production, etc.
Americans know that historically, the U.S. was created on the
principle that citizens own public land, highways, schools, ports,
airports, parks, the airwaves, government buildings and other assets.
Under the present criminal regime, public assets such as energy
production plants, water resources, prisons, and many others, have been
seized by members of the cabal under the guise of "privatization."
Americans must create a government that will serve as the protector of
the citizenry, and champion their cause when confronted with the
predatory greed of profit-motivated corporations and individuals.
Americans don't see anyone in the federal or state government doing
anything but assuring that the big corporations' profits skyrocket even
more. So Americans are beginning to inform themselves--primarily
through the Internet.
We must realize that our economic situation at present--a very few
obscenely rich people owning companies and corporations and having
illegally seized state and federal political power--is one which we can
and must change. Our current economic and political circumstances are
not written in stone; humans have lived under very different political
and economic conditions throughout our history. We must begin to
overthrow this present state of affairs where most of us suffer under
wage-slavery. The political system and the economic situation should be
directed toward the welfare of all Americans, not just a few. We can
bring about these changes; it is not impossible.
We must first make all Americans aware of our present plight and
then begin in all possible ways to overthrow the new slavery, producing
material changes leading to political freedom and economic equality of
opportunity.
Notes:
1 Personal property in the form of slaves or bondsmen
2 Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy,
1999
3 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology
References and Updates:
5/14/07: Brazil: Bush-Lula biofuel plans based on conditions
worse than slavery
5/13/07: Guest Worker Slavery
3/14/07: Slave labor conditions under US guestworker program
3/13/07: John Miller, "Slaves Among Us"
10/6/06: Zambian slavery uner Chinese tyranny
Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global
Economy, 1999
Anti-Slavery
Wage Slavery, UK
Global Issues