The Modern Slavery
Slavery has been with us a very long time. Most of the world's institutions arise from its roots. It's fashions may change but until we break its chains we will never free humanity's full potential...
Conservatives do not conserve anything and liberals are not liberating anyone. The same with the left versus the right. Those labels exist to obfuscate and misdirect the real concerns of people. It is amazing how much overlap there is between conservatives, liberals, progressives, libertarians, authoritarians, and independents when the discussion is about needs and not policies or personalities. Most people everywhere are concerned about the same things - their health, happiness, and the well-being of themselves, their family, friends, and others. It is how those concerns are addressed that we start to see a dichotomy.
Some people believe that an authoritarian approach is necessary while others are more egalitarian in their solutions. The authoritarians see the world as a hierarchy of classes requiring rigid top-down control by strong leaders imposing their will whereas egalitarians take a more peer-to-peer approach. It runs so deep that I wonder if it is not built into our DNA. The flaw in the authoritarian approach is that it is so easy for cults of personality to arise and flourish promoting a leader's personal desires over that of the people governed. The flaw in the egalitarian approach is that a lack of focus can make it difficult to accomplish anything. The fact that authoritarians have won at the ballot box in recent years is only a testament to their loudness, zeal for bullying, and overriding obsequiousness. What's missing is a positive vision for all, integrity, and the wisdom, knowledge, and skill to actually realize that vision. Until humanity as a whole implements ways to address these fundamental differences we are doomed to repeat swinging back and forth endlessly.
As a country the US (and much of the world) has never been able to get past its addiction to wealth built on slavery. It is at the root of many of its most intractable problems. Today it has been euphamized with veneers of rationalizations such as "religious freedom," "illegals," "criminals" or "little people" but at its core it is just slavery - the involuntary forced ownership and labor of people for the gain of those who control their lives through fear and intimidation. Anyone who is controlled in an environment they cannot change or leave without threat of harm or worse is a slave to their masters whether they are on a southern plantation, in a modern prison, in a "holding facility," or a "wage slave" in an air conditioned tower. It is profoundly sick and this country makes a mockery of its founding documents and aspirations every day this continues.
Prisons, many of which are now for-profit private enterprises with exemptions from worker protection when using prisoners for labor due to the exception in the 13th amendment to the US Constitution which eliminated slavery "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted," have shifted from rehabilitation to punishment because it is better for their bottom line. There is more profit keeping prisoners than freeing them. They have found ways to use economic harm coupled with physical harm as mechanisms to enforce and maintain pools of slave labor while using their special status to circumvent otherwise outlawed practices. Authorities fill public consciousness with the imposition of punishment of those less fortunate as the cure for society's ills. All of this is accepted because of the insidious nature of it being acceptable to demote people from full human status to justify using them and then making it impossible for them to ever regain their full human status. Today it is just accepted practice. Denying the right to vote for life is part of that. The right to vote becomes a privilege allowed only to those who vote right.
The United States leads the world in producing prisoners. The United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population but it has almost a quarter of the world's prisoners. The United States has 2.3 million people behind bars whereas China, which is four times more populous than the United States, has 1.6 million people in prison. In the US today there are more black men in prison than were enslaved in 1850 and, just like slaves in 1850, prisoners are considered a class whose human rights and freedom are subject to the control of their masters. Institutional mechanisms are firmly in place to keep them in their place. Now asylum seekers and fleeing refugees have become new easy prey to expand their holdings and profits.
Today, if not forced into the prison system, we have legions of wage slaves stuck toiling away their entire lives creating vast profits for a small elite that dictate much of their lives but feel they no longer have to provide necessities like housing, education, or health care. The taxpayers, mostly wage slaves themselves, have to pay for those necessities on their own and never get to make enough to escape their captivity. It is why the banks and big businesses are bailed out with trillions of dollars but only tokens go to the wage earners that keep it all afloat. Human beings are merely a resource to be exploited at the least expense and then thrown away at the lowest cost. By design, the two headed ghoul comprised of insurance and drugs is only interested in extracting all the money it can from its captive clientèle of sick and dying people and then disposing of them as quickly as possible. Actually caring for their needs is a distant secondary. As is now so painfully obvious, tying a persons health care to their employment is at the heart of this a debacle. The solution is not to go back to what we had before but rather to move in a new direction, one focused on caring for the sick and dying rather than making profits from them.
This notion of "work" being the highest virtue and linking one's identity with one's job or "career" is only a recent phenomena in human history. For most of human history (and for thousands of years before) people did not have "jobs" nor were they "employees." It is only since the rise of oligarchs during the industrial revolution that "work" has taken its place as the supreme sacrament of a "working class". It has been so ingrained in our languages and cultures that it is difficult to even speak or write about any other way of being. Interestingly, the powerful and wealthy do not have jobs. Some may work hard - some very hard - at things they care about but they can quit any time they want and do something else, or nothing at all, without going hungry or losing the roof over their head. They are not part of the "work force." They are free.
If you are alone and isolated, you are a libertarian. You are free to do as you see fit and you enjoy and suffer your own consequences. When you have neighbors and everyone pitches in for the common good, then you become a socialist. When things necessary for the common good are in hand and people have sufficient abundance, free enterprise can create wealth and innovation to expand life's palette. With excess wealth, capitalism can then be used to advance endeavors that were not possible earlier, but there is a danger to capitalism that must be avoided if it is to be successfully used. People equate Capitalism with Free Enterprise when in fact they are anathema to each other. Capitalists are authoritarian monopolists. Unfettered, the capitalist uses expendable "workers" as a resource to establish monopolies for themselves erecting barriers for competitors and wiping out or buying up any that manage to survive. Today that is so pervasive and ubiquitous that we cannot see beyond it and measure all possibilities, visions, and accomplishments against its metrics.
A retired oil company executive years ago told me that "corporations want worker bees, not thinkers. Workers need to have sufficient knowledge, understanding, and skill to do their job but beyond that it becomes problematic. It is loyalty, not creativity, insight, or initiative, that is rewarded." Our education system is a well oiled machine whose product is to turn out those loyal worker bees, not functioning citizens, and we are now paying the price ten-fold as higher and higher percentages of our population are moved into their waiting positions or ultimately shuttled into the slavery of for-profit prison systems.
Most citizens are far worse off than they were even 20 years ago. There may be more jobs available now but they pay slave wages designed keep you busy just staying alive so you never get ahead - the company store all over again writ large - and it has been this way long enough now that people accept it as normal. The powerful elite of this world have honed this fantasy of economic success for far too long. It does not work and stands in the way of reaching the greatness of human potential.
James Madison warned: "A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."
Capitalist authoritarianism created the culture we have inherited. The US is now officially ruled by cult ideologues peddling hate and fear, elevating ignorance and stupidity of citizens over everything even when it flies in the face of facts. Violence and gangsterism instead of accomplishment, ideological fantasy over reality. A caricature even of the capitalist dream. Democracy reduced to Idiocracy.
The Democratic and Republican parties, like corporations and other artificial legal entities, are only powerful tools. How they are used is up to the people that control them. The Republican party has been, at different times, the anti-slavery party as well as the white supremacist party, the pro-war interventionist party as well as the isolationist party, the party of big business as well as the party of fiscal responsibility. The Democratic party at one time was a staunch defender of slavery and segregation and later the party that spearheaded civil rights. It was the party that brought us Social Security, Medicare, and pulled the country out of the Great Depression of the 1930's but solidified its transformation into what it is today - a party owned by special interests - when wildly popular progressive vice president Henry Wallace was drummed out by party bosses at the 1944 Democratic convention in Chicago in favor of Harry Truman who those bosses felt was more easily controlled. The vice presidency was of particular importance that year because of the failing health of President Roosevelt. A Gallup poll at the start of the convention showed Wallace with 65% of the delegates and Truman at 2%. Claude Pepper was seconds from reaching the podium to nominate Wallace when Samuel Jackson, the party chair, under strict orders from the party bosses suddenly adjourned the convention in spite of the overwhelming voice vote against adjournment. After a furious night of deals, bribes, and gifts Truman won the vote and became President the following April. Four months later he ordered the use of nuclear weapons against civilian targets and ultimately started the profitable policy of endless wars since followed by both parties that we are still paying dearly for today.
Today both parties are completely controlled by their big money donors who use their power to ensure the election of candidates who focus exclusively on their agenda while making sure no third party can compete. There are many parallels between today and the 1930's. Trump may have appealed to many desperate people looking for a savior but unfortunately he turned out to be a liar and an incompetent twit and was only interested in filling his pockets while implementing an authoritarian, bigoted, misogynist, racist regime all the while hoping to create a new axis power of dictators. The parties, if they to continue at all, must shed their control by wealthy entrenched elites and begin actually promoting real solutions for real people's urgent needs, just like the Democratic party did when it pulled the country out of its greatest economic depression by implementing a human-centered progressive agenda. That agenda ushered in the parties most successful time when, for the only time in this country's history, the party's candidate won four consecutive terms as President.
Powerful people are blinded by their power and wealth. They are physically addicted to it and it shapes their reality, actions, and what they care about. Economics is a fiction that only exists in people's minds, extinction is a reality that makes economics moot. Addressing climate change is perhaps the single most important thing that we as humans must accomplish right now, not just in the US but globally. The US Department of Defense considers climate change one of the greatest threats to national security today. We are facing an existential crisis the likes of which humanity has not faced since the Younger-Dryas event over 12,000 years ago when only a small handful of humans barely survived and we are all their offspring. It is the reason we have less genetic diversity than almost all other species on the planet yet we spend our energy fighting each other over the tiniest differences like tribes of ants fighting over a crumb under the table utterly oblivious of the feast on the table above or the foot about to squash us all. The threat we face now is far greater.
Our problem is the primacy that money has over our thinking. Even though you can't eat it, drink it, breathe it, or make anything out of it it has become the only thing that matters. Its only utility is to get other people to do things for you. It is a useful tool that has grown grotesque and now imposes a macabre thrall over human thought. It has been elevated above all like some spiritless god. Rather than lubricate achievement it now merely foils human possibilities. It has become more important than life itself. It has become an addiction that is never satisfied and, like most addictions, it makes you stupid and ultimately kills you. There may come a day when the last gasping, starving, and thirsty human is sprawled on an earth no longer able to support life surrounded by their now useless vast wealth yet unable to eat it, drink it, breathe it, burn it for heat, nor use it for shelter because they never learned how and no one is left to do it for them. Our choice is simple: to grow up, open our eyes, and deal with this now or we can wish the cockroaches better luck next time.
The United States is, right now, the wealthiest nation that has ever existed yet all we hear is how we have to cut back and how people have to sacrifice because we can't afford to help those in need or even maintain a standard of living enjoyed by previous generations. I don't see the Trumps, the Bidens, the Clintons, the Bushes, the Romneys, the Obamas, the Pelosis, the McConnells, or the billionaire business leaders cutting back. The problem is where the focus of government and the people who exert control over it put our vast resources. Of course, certain individuals profit immensely from this and want to keep people too busy just staying alive to think or do much about it. Greed is an addiction they are very skilled at maintaining and, like all addicts, they will do anything to get their next fix. Today this has now become so painfully obvious!
To put things into perspective, the taxpayer money spent on just one contract for just one military airplane, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, would have been enough to buy every homeless person in the US a $500,000 home and still have plenty of funds left over. Not that giving every homeless person a half a million dollar home would be such a good idea but it's something to think about when someone starts complaining that this country can't afford to take care of just the basic needs of its citizens so that they can have the "luxury" of enjoying life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
The country is in an apocalyptic fatal downward spiral. It is in the open now. We hear talk about "numbers" instead of real people's lives cut short. This is the new approach to cutting social security, food stamps, Medicare and Medicaid, and everything they have been trying to eliminate for decades all at once. Just kill off the elderly, the poor, the brown, black, disabled, and everyone that isn't working to make more wealth for the already wealthy and powerful. Force everyone else to work regardless of the risk - those that survive can live as long as they are productive and kill off the rest before they become an expense. When you plan and take a course of action that you know will result in the deaths of people so that you can get another fix to satisfy your addiction to power and wealth you are committing premeditated murder for personal gain. Any other addict would be charged and tried at least for capital murder. In this case it is also genocide since the victims are tens of thousands of working people and poor people and people of color and they not only refuse to do anything to prevent it but actively hasten it and promote it. It is the new slavery.
The economy can become vibrant again but first the rotten stuff needs to be cleared out. The Almighty God of Wealth must give way to more human values if we are to survive. We must make a commitment to people over profit, education in critical thinking and creativity over rote and obedience, laws that promote free enterprise rather than crony capitalism. Wealth balanced by human values. Healthcare and education, like police, fire, military, and other necessities that serve the common good, do not work for everyone when structured as capitalist endeavors. We must excise the power that special interests wield over government, our elected representatives, and the blinders they have pulled over all of us. There is more to life than buying particular brands of products and services. There is more to life than being a wage slave. The fact that we have strong-arm autocratic leaders imposing their rule is proof that the current systems do not serve their citizens. The fact that there are billionaires while millions of people starve is proof that the current system has failed.
Free democratic government has an obligation to ensure that ALL of its citizens not only have the knowledge and well-being they need to be functional and productive citizens but also have the tools they need to craft and maintain their democracy. The answer starts in education, not just with children but as a lifelong process for everyone - not just having facts and job skills but thinking, creative, and accomplishment skills. Not just a course of grades to finish but an open resource for all, all of the time. To be effective citizens it is also necessary to ensure that ALL people have access to health care. We must eliminate the poisons in our environment and foods that are stunting our lives and abilities to think. Sick and suffering citizens cannot focus on making good decisions. Health care and education must be divorced from profit making and political power and be everyone's right. People require good, diverse education resources, cognitive skills, and personal well-being to be effective empowered citizens. It is not only the job but the duty of the citizens of a democracy to put in place and maintain the systems and people to ensure the viability of their democracy. It is the job and duty of the elected government to ensure that its citizens have the resources, skills, and well-being to source their government effectively.
Only then will we be able to start seeing the possibilities so simply expressed long ago, "that all [people] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted..., deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."
I believe that it is important to not only identify but to put in perspective the breakdowns that we face. That takes work and just doesn't fit in a tweet. There are threads that tie those breakdowns together and those threads can help us choose the tools to better address them, for just pointing out a problem is only a first step. Incremental changes will not do the job, we need breakthroughs in our thinking and our ways of being to truly make a lasting difference. The ultimate question we must answer is "If life were perfect what would it look like?" Only when we start hammering out a common answer to that question together can we start the work to achieve it. Anything less is just a patch that merely covers up the problem.
There is a difference between breakthroughs and incremental development. Breakthroughs threaten entrenched interests while incremental development enriches them. What we take for innovation today are actually incremental improvements on established products lines. Breakthroughs are difficult for businesses as well as government because they destroy working profit and power centers and replace them with expense and uncertainty, yet that is the only way forward.
We live in two worlds. One is the world of experience and the other is a world of stories we create and believe in. Experience is ephemeral. It is the stories that persist and give meaning and purpose to what we do, how we live, what we remember, and what rules we create and who we obey. It is the story that gives continuity to our lives but also constrains what we believe is possible and even what we can experience. Our lives exist mostly in those stories. It's important to remember that the root word of "authority" is "author." An authority is nothing more than the person with the story that we've accepted as the REAL one to believe. There have been many authorities over time and many that have been important in keeping us alive and otherwise making a positive difference in our lives but if we look at them we find that many of them, even the successful ones, were often contradictory and all were eventually replaced with new authorities. It's just the way that works. No one has the final word for the universe is much more interesting than our words can express and all of its resources are there for every one of us in their entirety all of the time, not just a chosen few.
We have a lot of tools at our disposal to craft a better way of being. We only need to choose to do so. That may require giving up cherished ideas and notions to be able to build a new paradigm that may not need them. I'm reminded of the Phlogiston theory of heat and the notion that the Earth was the center of the universe around which everything revolved. Both ideas worked but were ultimately replaced by simpler ideas that worked better opening entirely new possibilities that could not have been imagined before. It was well within the technical capabilities of many ancient peoples to build phonographs, airplanes, and batteries. The only reason they didn't was that they didn't have and believe in a working story that allowed those possibilities. They couldn't see a way. What do we not see today? It takes breakthroughs to think new possibilities before they can ever be manifest.
The only real solution is an informed citizenry armed with well-honed critical thinking skills. A free investigative critical press amplifies those skills. Unfortunately, both are becoming scarce in our culture. All of our so-called "social media," like television before, reinforce the dumbing down and control of entire populations. They are designed for simple thoughts and they keep you locked in to their programs. A person only has so many things they can think about in a day and these systems, by design, use up that precious resource making sure it is mundane and controlled.
Being educated is more than reciting lists of facts or being able to exercise a rote skill. The real fault lies in a citizenry no longer being able to distinguish reality from entertainment contrived to pleasantly control while no longer seeing possibilities not explicitly place before them. Citizens have become smiling idiots who consider pushing a button to choose from a prepared menu of given choices the proud zenith of their civic activity. It is the dream of today's "smiley face" fascists who learned from the mistakes of their predecessors of the last century. It is the result of decades of a culture and an education system driven by a philosophy succinctly expressed in the Texas Republican Party Platform in 2012:
"We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills, critical thinking skills and similar programs that ... have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority." (2012 [TEXAS] STATE REPUBLICAN PARTY PLATFORM, page 12).
Schools, currently focused on job skills and passing tests, do not teach the thinking skills needed to govern ourselves. They punish questioning authority and straying too far from accepted ways. We punish failures instead of learning from them. Popular media teaches that violence is always the ultimate arbiter. Our governmental structures attract those who are drawn to power and they have found in divisiveness, ignorance, fear, and violence powerful tools to amass ever more power and wealth.
The single biggest difference we could make is to get ALL of the money out of politics. No lobbyists, fund raisers, donors, advertising, or secret deals. It will make being a politician far less inviting to the predators, opportunists, and parasites we have today. It will also force elected officials to actually accomplish what they promise and represent their constituents for a change. Anyone running for an office should be able to publicly list their principles, what they intend to accomplish, their plan on how they are going to do it, when it will be done, how much it will cost, and how they are going to pay for it. They should be elected on those promises and judged on their accomplishments. That would eliminate much of the cost of a campaign, especially in today's world with the Internet. All of that information should be equally available to everyone which will require a rethinking and restructuring of Internet access and control. Candidates should not be able to raise money or spend it individually. That would give a free press and citizens plenty of material to talk, debate, discuss, and think about at their own expense before elections. How well they accomplish their stated goals becomes their legacy. Everyone touched by an election must be able to vote in it. Any restrictions on who can vote make a lie of democracy. Maybe we would start making some better choices. Maybe we could change for the better.
All of which brings me to a quote that I recently heard by YouTube producer Hank Green: "You have no obligation to your former self. They are dumber than you, and they don't exist."
If the world were perfect what would it look like? Time to seriously start answering that question and making it real. What is your answer? The well-being of the government is a direct reflection of the well-being of its citizens.