246) Day 14 -- Reason #14 to revolt against Predatory Capitalism: Let's talk about Slavery in North America in the 21st century

I don’t imagine I have to try and convince you that slavery is bad.

That shit-stain on humanity’s past is something many of us can barely wrap our minds around. That people would OWN human beings??  Sell human beings at auctions to the highest bidder??  Treat them like property??  Do literally whatever they wanted to them??  Give them no rights, no freedom, work them to the bone, abuse them however and whenever they wanted??  And if the enslaved humans had children, their children would be owned too??  The fact that that happened, at all, let alone for centuries, to millions and millions and millions of people, SUPPORTED by normal society, by The Church, by the “God-fearing” leaders people were raised to look up to as pillars of their communities, is damn-near-impossible to understand.  

But slavery is at the very root of Western civilization.  The entire colonial “project” (read: catastrophe) was fuelled by slave labour.  The entire settling of “the New World” was inextricably dependent on slavery.  The entire gutting and theft of the African continent is a story of slavery.  Hell, even the so-called noble and brave story of Christopher Columbus, “in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue”, and all that shit, was about SLAVERY.  Adbucting and subjugating the indigenous people he met, who welcomed him initially with open arms as a fellow child of the Earth, was one of the first things he did.  Especially the girls. 

Pocahontas?  That heart-warming Disney love story you may have watched?  Is a total, evil, fucked-up-beyond-belief, lie.  Pocahontas didn’t fall in love with John Smith in some idyllic paradise romance moments.  She was KIDNAPPED and forced into sex slavery, before even becoming a teenager.  Her so-called “love story” is a story of horror and abuse, now white-washed into a colonial Disney tale of “True Love”.  

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So…thank God slavery ended, right?  Thank God humans came to their senses and courageous people stood up and said no and gave speeches and changed people’s minds about treating their fellow humans like property to be used at their whim.  Thank God the USA had a whole damn civil war about it, and “the good guys” won.

Right?

Except, oh fuck….slavery never really ended.  The cotton-plantation version of it that we’ve seen in movies, did end, sort of.  But what really happened to slavery is that it EVOLVED.  It metamorphosed into something that doesn’t sound like slavery any more, but still is.  It got “re-branded”.  

(And yes, that double entendre was intentional.)

Slavery became the Prison-Industrial Complex, in which prisoners are given “opportunities” to work for big corporations, slaughter houses, industrial farms, and the like, doing work that nobody wants to do, work that drives you mad over time with exhaustion, soul-crushing horror (try slaughtering animals all day, every day, and feel good about yourself afterwards), and ill health (who would want to work in cancer-causing, pesticide-sprayed industrial farms usually with no protection?), and even fighting forest fires and risking their lives to save the homes of the people who are part of the system that LITERALLY has turned the prisoners into slaves?  

Who would want to do those things?  

Answer:  nobody.

And, despite doing the shittiest of shit “jobs” our society can offer, they get paid less in a day than is the minimum wage for AN HOUR.  

And where do these prisoners come from?  Poverty.  Racial minorities in disproportionate numbers.  People who are arrested when young for bullshit like marijuana possession, minor theft, etc., and then become part of the prison system, and one things leads to another, and they are still there, years and even decades later.  

Prison isn’t about “rehabilitation” in North America.  Not for the most part.  It’s about punishment.  And, it’s about slave labour.

The prison-slave system contributes vast amounts of essentially “free” labour — in $$-terms but not in blood-sweat-and-suffering-and-broken-dreams-and-broken-lives terms — to our society.  And ESPECIALLY to the profits of the Big Corporations who own everything, control everything, and dictate much of our political system.

So no, slavery never went away.  It was just re-branded so it didn’t sound so horrible, and society mostly forgot about it.

* * * * *

Now contrast this to people with privilege, people with money, connections, people with almost-always-lighter skin tones.  The most appalling example I can think of currently being Donald Trump but there is no shortage of examples of executives and their “white collar crimes”, spending a blink of time in country-club prisons, and then going back to their cushy lives and investment portfolios.

Trump was CONVICTED of financial fraud.  Of sexual assault.  He evades taxes.  He keeps an empire of power going despite repeated, lifelong business failures by claiming bankruptcy, getting his debts mostly forgiven, and then just keeps trucking along.  Trump has broken so many of his contracts, has been sued so many times.  Has cheated on his wives, lied incessantly, literally caused mass death through his mismanagement and idiocy around COVID.  Has stolen boxes and boxes and boxes of “classified” government documents.  Has collaborated with dictators.  

And of course, committed literal treason, instigating a VIOLENT, cop-killing coup attempt against the US government.  Because he didn’t want to lose, even though ALL EVIDENCE (and this was investigated more than practically anything in history has been investigated), says that yep, he lost the election.  But his malignant-narcissism refuses to accept that, and so, he committed crimes, of the highest order, crimes that literally get people EXECUTED in many places throughout history.

Plus, tons of his former cronies from “the first time around” were convicted of a huge slew of crimes; many went to jail (until he pardoned them).  Trump sits at the very center of a network of literal criminals.

Etc.  We could talk about Trump’s crimes, from rape to treason, ’til the proverbial cows come home, and EVERYBODY KNOWS ABOUT THEM.  It’s not like they’re a secret.

And yet, most of the charges against him have been dropped because of politics, or because he paid people to drop their charges, money once again coming to his rescue.  

The Supreme Court (which he appointed his own judges to), has given him immunity to do virtually anything.  And even the FINAL VICTORY of the justice system against him, finally, finally convicting him on 34 criminal charges, means nothing.  Because he is now about to become President, and nothing he has done will stick or make any difference, except to the history books when people will read about this someday, and it’ll sound much like Hitler’s story we talked about yesterday.

I can imagine those future people.  “Wooooow….that’s fucking crazy.”  “People in the 2020s were fucking stupid.”  “How could they have been so blind?”  And they’ll shake their heads and wonder about how corrupt and moronic humanity can be.  Kind of like how we look at the Holocaust now.  Or how we look at the Church of the (cough cough…) past and its witch burnings, and child sex abuse, and denial of science, and torture practices and the Inquisition….  

* * * * *

So yes, the Black kid with some weed or who commits small-scale crimes out of desperation due to poverty, goes to jail, possibly for much of his life, and is put to work in slaughterhouses, factory farms, fighting wildfires, or whatever-the-hell the corporate Masters of this society want him to do.  And it’s called “opportunity”.

And Trump, born with a silver spoon in his mouth, goes to the fucking White House after raping people and committing treason against his own government. Given that he’s a convicted criminal, he’s no longer allowed to carry a gun. But he controls the United States military, including its nuclear arsenal…. How does that make any sense?

No wonder the corporate-owned Republicans and the right-wing voters who have been deluded by Fox “News” and the “dO yOuR oWn ReEsUrCh” influencers, don’t want “critical race theory” to be taught at school.  No wonder they ban books and censor the scholars who uncover systemic discrimination and teach students about it.  Because, “Freedom”, right?

No, because SLAVERY.

THIS is predatory capitalism. 

(And we haven’t even talked about the “third world” export processing zones and such that Naomi Klein told us all about when “sweatshops” were still a thing people cared about.  THAT will blow your mind.  But….that’s for another day….)