slavery

Make Them Work - Citizens As "The Help"

Dave Johnson — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 09:52:06 -0400

Conservatives seem to think of America's citizens as "the help."

"Everyone knows Americans are lazy, shiftless, always looking for a way to shirk their responsibilities. People don't want to work so we have to make them work. And good dose of humiliation is good for the soul. If you let them have any dignity they might get uppity." That is what conservatives sound like when they talk about the long-term unemployed -- who, by the way, are out of work because of conservative policies.

For example, from Tuesday's WaPo, No extension of unemployment benefits in sight for the long-term jobless,

"Workers are less likely to look for work, or accept less-than-ideal jobs, as long as they are protected from the full consequences of being unemployed," said Michael D. Tanner, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. "That is not to say that anyone is getting rich off unemployment, or that unemployed people are lazy. But it is simple human nature that people are a little less motivated as long as a check is coming in."

That's right, you have to make them work, or they'll just sit around and wont be "productive." They wont face up to the "consequences" of unemployment. These parasites will just suck the blood out of the producers. You hear language like this all the time from conservatives. The unemployed are "lazy," or "on drugs" etc. They are not "productive." They are mooching off the rest of us.

This is all in sharp contrast to the noble rich, who are an entirely different species biologically and spiritually. They are the "wealth producers" who we must treat with kid gloves and certainly not ask them to pay for their use of infrastructure or government services lest they decide to stop working. They just want to keep working, and what they do is so important, so pure, so necessary to the sustenance of the rest of us that they must be coddled at all times lest we lose their golden-egg magic touch!

Maybe this kind of attitude towards their fellow citizens comes from the slaveholder roots of conservatism. According to Robin L. Einhorn, author of American Taxation, American Slavery,

...Americans are right to think that our antitax and antigovernment attitudes have deep historical roots. Our mistake is to dig for them in Boston. We should be digging in Virginia and South Carolina rather than in Massachusetts or Pennsylvania, because the origins of these attitudes have more to do with the history of American slavery than the history of American freedom. They have more to do with protections for entrenched wealth than with promises of opportunity, and more to do with the demands of privileged elites than with the strivings of the common man. Instead of reflecting a heritage that valued liberty over all other concerns, they are part of the poisonous legacy we have inherited from the slaveholders who forged much of our political tradition. [emphasis added]

As for this idea of low taxes, smaller government that we hear about so often, (and please read this, it is so important)

It might seem strange to trace our antitax and antigovernment ideas to slavery instead of to liberty and democracy. Isn't it obvious that a democratic society where "the people" make the basic political decisions will choose lower taxes and smaller governments? The short answer is no. In this democratic society, the people might decide to pool their resources to buy good roads, excellent schools, convenient courthouses, and an effective military establishment. But slaveholders had different priorities than other people—and special reasons to be afraid of taxes. Slaveholders had little need for transportation improvements (since their land was often already on good transportation links such as rivers) and hardly any interest in an educated workforce (it was illegal to teach slaves to read and write because slaveholders thought education would help African Americans seize their freedom). Slaveholders wanted the military, not least to promote the westward expansion of slavery, and they also wanted local police forces ("slave patrols") to protect them against rebellious slaves. They wanted all manner of government action to protect slavery, while they tended to dismiss everything else as wasteful government spending.

Compromises with the slave states became entrenched in our political system with consequences to this day,

Majorities voluntarily renounced the right to regulate their society by majority rule. Giving up the essence of democratic self-government, they celebrated the outcome as democracy. The consequences would outlive the slaveholders who played such a large role in establishing this attitude toward government and taxation. Long after slavery was gone, a regime forged around preferential treatment for the slaveholding elite came to favor very different elites—commercial and industrial elites who shared little with their slaveholding predecessors except a demand that majorities renounce their right to govern what ostensibly was a democratic society.

. . . Today, this brand of politics looks eerily familiar. We have experience with political parties that attack "elites" in order to rally voters behind policies that benefit elites. This is what the slaveholders did in early American history, and they did it very well. Expansions of slavery became expansions of "liberty," constitutional limitations on democratic self-government became defenses of "equal rights," and the power of slaveholding elites became the power of the "common man." In the topsy-turvy political world we have inherited from the age of slavery, the power of the majority to decide how to tax became the power of an alien "government" to oppress "the people."

Please go read it all.

It is time to take a fresh look at what it means to be a citizen in a country where We, the People are supposed to be in charge. This idea that we should force people into demeaning jobs with no minimum wage and make them work seems antithetical to democracy. A government of We, the People should be about taking care of each other, protecting and empowering each other and respecting each other. You are supposed to be the boss of you here. And we are supposed to be in charge.

Klaus Pfeiffer

Klaus Pfeiffer — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 01:06:42 -0400

Born in Piene, Germany in 1952.
Emigrated to Saint Louis Park, Minnesota in 1956.
Joined US Army in 1970.
Served in 1st Calvary Division in Phuc Vein, Vietnam.
TDY with 1st Marine Air Wing in Marble Mountain near Da Nang, Vietnam.
Served in 1st Aviation Division, US Army, at Dong Ba Thin, near Cam Ron Bay, Vietnam.
Honorably discharged in 1972 to Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Spent several years searching for happiness in every conceivable place. Wound up at the bottom of a self excavated trench with holes in my arms and a big one in my head.
Moved to California in 1978 to try and establish a relationship with my father who I had been at odds with most of my life.
Managed to find a job as a swordfish spotter on a commercial fishing vessel, the Volare. The beginning of what would become my "life of Riley."
After a rough start and an unwillingness to give up became good friends with dad and enjoyed a father son relationship the way it is supposed to be by the time he died in 1982.
Attended Mira Costa College in Oceanside on the GI bill. Received an AA degree in set design.
Began working construction as a laborer after college.
Learned how to snow ski at Big Bear Lake, which has proven to be a new lease on life ever since.
Attended welding school on the GI bill.
Attended Control Data School of Micro-Electronics courtesy of EDD of California. Graduated top of class.
Continued working in construction now as steel painter. Working at high elevations, in confined spaces, and frequent sand blasting.
Tried my hand at self employment after re-uniting with a college chum. Formed a set design and construction company called Get A Grip and prospered in the very limited market of San Diego. Involved in several hidden camera commercials for Tylonol. Involved in several shots for Times-Warner. Involved in several local Toyota commercials as well as many live event stages and studio sets. However my college chum had a cohort who became a major thorn in the flow of energy and thus business. After a confrontation I elected to resolve my interests in the venture and sadly said good bye.
Returned to construction as an apprentice operating engineer. Have been employed by most if not all the large construction engineering companies in San Diego. I have been employed operating trenchers, forklifts, loaders, rollers, bulldozers, scrapers, cranes, elevators, man lifts, and tractor trailer rigs. I have decked on several dredges as well as a tug boat.
Then the Great State of California changed the emission standards regarding off-road construction equipment in 2006 and the excavating and grading industry died overnight.
A picture of well planned political despotism has become ever increasingly clear. It has been years in the making, and its gradual and incremental deployment has all but hidden the insidious roots and purposes of the global elite and their extraordinary greed and avarice.

Myopic Selfishness of the Wealthy Leads to Constricting Economy

Gordon Johnson — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 16:06:21 -0400

The economic stance in favor today is to give breaks to the wealthy under the expectation that if they have more money, they are more likely to be in a position to invest to make our means of production bigger and better. What the stance is missing is that corporations do lots of marketing studies to figure out how much of what to produce. Guess what the marketing studies look at? *How much the rest of us have to spend!!*

Well if the wealthy have all the money, what is the level of production the corporations will gear up for? Instead of a cornucopia of great goods and services for many, it leads to production of extravagances and luxury goods no regular person would or could waste their money on. In essence, it is economic slavery as the rest of us scurry to try and cover our life costs with ever-shrinking wages.

How much profit does that leave the corporations? They myopically think they make as much profit on the big ticket items for the few as they would have on medium ticket items for us all.

Put (or leave) the money in the average person's pocket and something quite different unfolds. We, having more money, can afford more and better things so we all in fact have a better standard of living. Our spending would confirm (realigned) corporate choices to invest in improved production and to hire more people for more medium ticket items, and as more people are hired there is even more money flowing through the system, leading to even more and better goods and services.

The ironic thing is that an increasingly larger flow of medium ticket goods and services will actually end up producing much larger profits for the corporations, and a more stable economy and society to boot: we would have lower unemployment and poverty, higher tax revenue so lower deficit or even a return to surplus (given away by our short-sighted, selfish Republican "friends"), fewer foreclosed houses, maybe even longer lasting marriages. And if our economy is blossoming instead of shriveling, what does that do to the stature of the US in the eyes of the rest of the world? Perhaps even the terrorists would have to acquiesce that the US is good to its people in ways they claim we have not been.

The last 16 years confirm this. What happened to the economy under Clinton? Under Bush?

QED