Around a year back, Lin Taylor reported on a risk analytics company called Verisk Maplecroft, whose human rights research for a new global index found that approximately 60% of all nations on the Earth are currently susceptible to condoning slavery practices, whether being born into servitude or entrapped into debt bondage or abducted into sex trafficking. One noticeably absent detail which throws the index into question is the glaring omission that, despite being the uncontested pinnacle of Capitalism, one must dig to find the United States in the rankings. Realistically, America is the poster-child for Capitalism, which by design is inseparable from slavery.
Likewise, are America’s business interests and foreign policies the leading cause for refugees around the planet. There is not a war in progress, and likely hasn’t been one in decades, that the United States did not have its hands fisted into. Which cannot possibly be unrelated. It’s not news either, for anybody outside the American mainstream media’s influence. Insanely, slavery as a convenient solution to the ongoing refugee crises is a growing concern, and has already proven massive enough in scope for the Pope to expressly speak out against such a thing. As much as the United States prides itself on being taken as a Christian nation, since the Pope condemned the usage of immigrants or refugees as slave labor, domestic prisons are having to be sued by tens of thousands of immigrants and refugees in order to take the hint.
I think the Zerohedge, Breitbart and Infowars websites include themselves among the worst offenders for failure in reaching such obvious conclusions, in fact happily obsessing over the opposite. Browsing these portals one is led to believe that the majority of their contributors and commenters remain oblivious that migrants, immigrants and refugees are different groups of people; that America’s actions abroad directly lead to surges in refugees everywhere; that as a means of dealing with the influx of refugees are refugees, migrants and immigrants increasingly cornered into conditions of slavery; or that Capitalism does not exist without slavery.
As but one example, less than a year ago Roy Cordato attempted to offer a negative take on why raising minimum wage nationally was somehow evident of bias against the poor, without really acknowledging any actual threat. These helpless employers will always inevitably raise their prices and their masters the cost of living to compensate for the tiny dents made into their own profit margins. With no provocation was this verified by shareholders of the American Airlines company just this last month.
The idea that most employers too big to qualify as small business owners in fact could generally pay their workers 20 or 30 dollars per hour as a minimum wage, while still profiting more than all of their employees combined, would probably sound to the Zerohedge audience like a fictitious pipe-dream. And though they could, American employers do not pay for what workers are worth, period. They pay as little as they can get away with, and confusing the two is criminally insane. For that matter, if any business honestly warrants a subsidy or tax break it should only be the small business owners, and then society would find out mighty fast just who exactly among us desperately wants a nanny state.
Anybody and everybody fretting over migrants, immigrants or refugees taking jobs away from whatever locals should take a closer look at the conniving employers who seek out non-locals to illegally underpay, before entertaining any thought of making national borders into physical constructs.
The reality is that most small businesses are already pushed so far into skeleton crew territory, a result stemming more from the greed of their owners rather than any governmental regulation, that unless an applicant is genetically related to a current employee their chances of getting hired are nonexistent. The ones left standing generally have to over-compensate to keep their own jobs. Too many small employers yearn to be like the larger employers such as Macy’s, hhgregg, Kmart and Sears, who would rather remove thousands of jobs from the economy than risk not being as wealthy as they’d like or have grown accustomed to being treated. Even places as bleak as factories regularly receive many hundreds of applications for each job opening. If availability of skills is a real issue, then how can American exceptionalism possibly co-exist with the need to look elsewhere? The issue is not the competition for work, but those seeking to profit from the work of whoever the winner might be.
The argument could be made that people writing and endorsing articles like the one at Zerohedge must lead truly sheltered lives, living off of their parents or grandparents or seriously indebted to the legalized gambling that is the stock market. I think realistically, the truth more often is that it has become exceedingly uncool to give off any indication that one is struggling in this society. This amounts to systemic victim-shaming. If we cannot hire or fire one another then how can we be enemies to each other?
Nobody wants to be the party-pooper turd stopping up the toilet drain, even when every single one of us not born into wealth is shitting bricks from the stress of not being born into wealth.
It has been said that the definition of insanity is retrying the same thing and expecting different results (situational comedy viewerships, for example). Zerohedge, Breitbart and Infowars fervently convey that if economic systems, either free market Capitalism or something else, could merely be unchained, then the end would not be so near. How can such a mindset know this from experience, unless by already understanding what chains are for? Religion is irrefutable belief in an impossible thing despite all evidence to the contrary. The guys behind these webzines must be at least marginally insane, because Capitalism and the greedy slave-masters it breeds will always only go the one way, wherever they believe profits await. It magically pardons how brutally they crack their whips on the tired, the poor, the huddled masses to make it even remotely possible.
Unpaid internships, live-in positions and many salaried jobs now are little different from indentured servitude. As is the pursuit of a higher education. Reactionary webzines bent on perpetuating this status quo against any logic not conducive to their own pipe-dreams of someday becoming billionaires themselves, never seem quick to conduct employment surveys of college graduates who are waiting tables or bagging groceries. Soapboxes like Zerohedge and its ilk can suggest that occupation presents choices, but as long as survival literally depends on one’s ability to work, then such landscapes are categorically buried in definitive slavery. We’ve known Presidential candidates who publicly held no qualms with accusing social security of being a Ponzi scheme, yet if the funds are not going to those who pay into it, then where else would it end up?
Every single Republican platform and agenda, if you go back far enough at one time or another Conservatives stood in direct opposition to. Every single Democrat platform and agenda, if you go back far enough at one time or another Liberals stood in direct opposition to. There has never been a single ideology which either party has maintained seamlessly since their respective inceptions, with the two parties fully exchanging identities every 20 to 30 years. Nowadays the commonality is far more blatant. Any partisan difference is as hollow as the act of maintaining pretenses of upwards mobility in America while millions of people fleeing for their fucking lives are transformed by American economics into modern slaves.
And the people opposed to such a statement tend to prefer holding the whip to the whip not existing, a derangement which under no circumstances should earn praise. We don’t have to allow slaves or slave-owners. We can decide to be better, even if our leaders are too invested, too pussy-whipped, to make that call.