Race is Just a Symptom
Race has been thrust back into the news. We focus on it but part of its seeming lack of a solution is that it is a symptom of a much larger problem.
Our gutless bought and paid for Congressmen and Senators never suggested that maybe we didn’t need to pass laws against people brought here and given jobs by business. Many, particularly Republicans, suggested that maybe if we built a high wall, that would fix the problem and keep all those illegal aliens out.
Miraculously, no one really seriously suggested that maybe we should arrest jail and prosecute the CEO’s of Corporations despite the fact they recruited, brought in and hired immigrants to illegally and artificially depress Americans wages, evade tax laws, minimum wage, hour and work place safety laws all in the name of the biggest fraud of all Free Markets. and huge Corporate profits. They were breaking the law maybe forty million times a day and allowed to get away with it.
To add insult to injury, as some Americans lost jobs and or had wages cut, their tax dollars became a huge subsidy to the illegal employers who paid the workers a pittance for their labor and relied on our social safety net to pay for the housing and schooling and health care of the illegal workforce they brought in to reap obscene profit margins while Middle Class America collapsed financially.
Race as a bait and switch has been done at the beginning of the last century in the coal mines and factories of the East Coast. In fact you can go back to the founding of our nation and see Race or Ethnicity or religion or gender or other differences exploited as a means to keep Middle Class America divided against its own best interests and ready to be exploited for profit and out of Labor Unions.
There is a seamless line of exploitation all the way back to the founding of this nation where Race was used to keep people separated and exploitable. Just go back to 1676 Virginia where Nathaniel Bacon led an uprising of both White and Black slaves against the ruling rich planter aristocracy. At one time they had thrown Gov. Berkeley and his wealthy fellow planter’s out of Virginia.
The hegemony of wealth over justice was reestablished with the help of the Royal Navy. Another historically interesting side light of this small often over looked part of our history is that after this incident you began to have the first laws prohibiting Whites and Blacks from marrying, working together, and having contact with each other, Segregation by any other name.
Many rich land owners freed White indentured servants and put them in charge of the black workers. Wealthy Whites after Bacon’s Rebellion, started cultivating an idea of a White identity as a way of keeping White workers identifying with the Wealthy instead of seeing their common economic plight with Blacks Americans. To this day working class White America has far more in common with the Black community than with Rich Whites who caricature working America with Joe the Plumber’s and Sarah Palin. Hint, they are laughing behind all of Middle Class America’s backs with these two.
Race, Class, Ethnicity, Gender or any other dividing line aren’t the problem in and of themselves. They are the symptoms of an economic model that feeds on inequality and exploitation. Greed was one of the seven deadly sins in the Bible for a reason. Adam Smith be damned we almost have let it destroy our nation.
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