In 1991, the Afrocentric rapper Sister Souljah released a single and video, "The Final Solution: Slavery's Back in Effect," which portrayed an America of the near future in which slavery for black persons had indeed been reinstituted.
But what if slavery -- for persons of all colors -- never went away in the U.S., and what if it's more or less inevitable under our economic system? Daily Kos blogger "Vyan" pondered such questions in a Thursday post, wondering whether slavery might be the "default setting" of a free-market economy and asserting that capitalism benefits "the powerful" and harms "nearly everyone else":
Conservatives...say that the Affordable Care Act is a form of Slavery, that Social Security is a form of Slavery and that the Federal Debt is a form of Slavery...[L]ately I've begun thinking they may have a point. Not that their [sic] correct about the reasons, but they aren't absolutely wrong about the direction that we're all heading...
...We make financial choices to improve our own comfort and convenience, which in our ignorance and insouciance directly impact the living quality of people around the globe. And at home. Certainly we complain when a U.S. factory is shutdown only to be replaced with a far cheaper, and far less safe factory overseas. We rail at NAFTA and CAFTA, but do we truly see what it is that we are actually fighting?
A hundred years ago it was the Triangle Shirt Waist Fire...
[Recently it's been] the Upper Big Branch Mine explosion that killed 43 men in...West Virginia...
And then the Texas Furtilizer [sic] Plant Explosion...that injured over 100 people, and killed 15...
And the West Virginia Chemical Spill that exposed 300,000 people to a toxic solution...
All of these things, we're [sic] and are avoidable. All of them were on some level, the result of the constant drive to smash down costs, at the expense of the lives and safety not just of the workers on site, but of the surrounding communities. They are all merely symptoms of a much deeper rot, a much deeper structural flaw -- they are all the results of Capitalism without Conscience. (Italics in the original throughout.)
If we didn't have record breaking corporate profits at the same time as our wages stagnate, and those...like the Koch brothers who have more money than they'll every [sic] be able to count thanks to their DADDY's business are spending $Millions to make [sure] so many of the rest of us can't get healthcare, or can't get to the ballot box, then one might...argue that our current form of capitalism is working just fine. But it isn't...
...[I]t seems that raw naked greed has been allowing for the extraction of wealth by the powerful to the financial and physical detriment of nearly everyone else...for at least the last 4000 years...
