alternet | Historically, indentured servants had their food, health care,
housing, and clothing provided to them by their “employers.” Today’s new
serfs can hardly afford these basics of life, and when you add in
modern necessities like transportation, education and child-care, the
American labor landscape is looking more and more like old-fashioned
servitude.
Nonetheless, conservatives/corporatists in Congress and
state-houses across the nation are working hard to hold down minimum
wages. Missouri’s Republican legislature just made it illegal for St.
Louis to raise their minimum wage to $10/hour, throwing workers back
down to $7.70. More preemption laws like this are on the books or on their way.
At
the same time, these conservatives/corporatists are working to roll
back health care protections for Americans, roll back environmental
protections that keep us and our children from being poisoned, and even
roll back simple workplace, food and toy safety standards.
The only way these predators will be stopped is by massive political action leading to the rollback of Reaganism/neoliberalism.
And the conservatives/corporatists who largely own the Republican Party know it, which is why they’re purging voting lists, fighting to keep in place easily hacked voting machines, and throwing billions of dollars into think tanks, right-wing radio, TV, and online media.
If
they succeed, America will revert to a very old form of economy and
politics: the one described so well in Charles Dickens’ books when
Britain had "maximum wage laws" and “Poor Laws” to prevent a strong and politically active middle class from emerging.
Conservatives/corporatists know well that this type of neo-feudalism
is actually a very stable political and economic system, and one that’s
hard to challenge. China has put it into place in large part, and other
countries from Turkey to the Philippines to Brazil and Venezuela are
falling under the thrall of the merger of corporate and state power.
So many of our individual rights have been stripped from us, so much of America’s middle-class progress in the last century has been torn from us,
while conservatives wage a brutal and oppressive war on dissenters and
people of color under the rubrics of “security,” “tough on crime,” and
the "war on drugs.”
As a result, America has 5 percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, more than any other nation on earth, all while opiate epidemics are ravaging our nation. And what to do about it?
