Where do all the homeless come from? At least part of the 30 million unemployed and disillusioned Americans between the ages of 20 and 64 would probably sooner be unemployed than work for a humiliating and disgraceful minimum wage, while the white collared elite drive the streets in their Rolls Royces having milked the economy of hundred of millions and even billions in a single year!!!
Despite this, on June 13 1989, George Bush hastily vetoed Congress's bill to raise the minimum wage from $3.35 to $4.55 over a three year period. {B24} Mrs. Dole, Bush's labor secretary, argued on behalf of the elite that doing so would result in 650,000 fewer jobs. This obviously implies that spoiled employers would sooner fire 650,000 employees than pay them a minimum wage of $4.55 per hour. To compensate for this, she is also trying to introduce a compulsory six-month "training period" during which the "new hire" would receive sub-minimum wage!! However, this would only provide incentive for employers to dismiss their minimum wage workers and use wherever possible the sub-minimum wage "new hires in training". Some employers would retire long before they kept a candidate longer than six months. {B25}
In future, semi-skilled and skilled factory work will be done
increasingly by robots, by cheaper labor abroad, or by importing
cheap labor from abroad. As long as corporate America continues
it's industrial expansion abroad while reducing it's industrial
base at home, unemployment will only get worse. With a shortage
of jobs, and an over-abundance of labor, employers will continue
to hire unorganized labor who are willing to work for substandard
wages. Should anyone wonder why so many youths have given up on
the system and turned to pushing drugs to survive?
No doubt the elite would wish to have all the new immigrants enrolled
immediately in sub-minimum wage training programs. Notch one up for the "Feudalists in pinstripes".
Incentive for corporate America to purchase American labor will
probably only resume again when the price of American labor drops
to the point that it competes favorably with the cost of the cheapest
foreign or imported labor.
In a similar way, the black to white ratios involved with unemployment figures reveal as much about the truth concerning our whitewashed reality. Only 44 of the 752 Federal judges are black. The number would be abysmally lower if Jimmy Carter had not nominated 37 of them himself. {B27} More importantly, blacks account for 11% of America's voters, but only one and a half percent of its elected officials are black. {B28}
Meanwhile, David Duke, the former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, who also dabbles in neo-Nazi white supremacy movements, not only ran in February 1989 as a Republican candidate in New Orleans, Louisiana; he won!! His goal now is to become a Louisiana senator. {B29}
But hey, it's not all doom and gloom. American blacks have definitely made progress over their counterparts in South Africa, whose lot seems to have remained on a par with that of English feudal serfs. Mind you, they are still confined to the servants' quarters, which are now called "homelands".
"Homelands", per se, don't exist in America, but many who live in the black ghettoes found in most American cities, would probably wish to hotly debate that issue. In any case, since the 50's, much of the discrimination practiced against the blacks has disappeared. Nevertheless, feudal slave tactics still persist within the United States, but are largely overlooked because the American psyche has been conditioned to acknowledge slavery only when it comes in black.
Industries in Texas and Southern California have been paying slave wages for decades to Mexicans who had entered the country illegally. The garment industry in Southern California was still thriving in the 1980's by running sweat shops which used this labor pool. These Mexicans have been completely at the mercy of their modern Feudal lords who could totally abuse them, fire them, or have them deported if they dared to protest about their wages or working conditions.
Everyone knew about the sweat shops but little was done about them, because all the right palms had been greased. Everyone was turning a blind eye until the 60 Minutes TV show brought their plight to the nation's awareness. The government was no longer able to turn a blind eye, so it provided the next best concession for the sweat shop owners, it offered conditional amnesty to the Mexicans who were already living in the States, so that the affected industries would not be put out of business by the sudden loss of its sizable work force.
Of course this meant that sweat shop owners would have to pay the newly legalized Mexicans the minimum wage, and it certainly defused the issue nationally, but it probably won't prevent them from hiring future illegal Mexicans at the old rates. In fact a few days after George Bush had returned the Republicans to office, legislation was passed to allow garment industry workers in the South West to work at home. This practice, which will throw open the slavery floodgates once more, had been outlawed for the last 40 years.
Ever since the serf gained the right to be called a free man,
the wealthiest 1 percent have been using the time to regain ground
initially lost. They seem more determined than ever to maintain
the old order. One way of doing this is to purposely maintain
a poorly educated work force.
The minority of white South Africans, who dominate, not only prevent the blacks from forming effective opposition groups, they keep them poorly educated and deny them the right to vote. As a result, South African unskilled labor has historically remained cheap. Capitalists in other countries have also gone out of their way to maintain an ignorant working class. For example, there was an understood, unwritten agreement among early American feudal lords, not to teach their black servants, (slaves) to read or write; in South Africa there have even been laws to enforce the policy. Nowadays, survey after survey exposes that American schools are graduating functional illiterates. Because the level of education is rising in many less developed countries, corporate America is finding that it can relocate even more sophisticated levels of non-military related industrialization into Second and Third World countries to take advantage of the world's remaining slave labor pools. Consequently the elite have less need of educating the American work force, and have stepped up their lobbying pressure to divert tax dollars away from education, and into other areas that benefit themselves more, namely Star Wars military spending, and corporate welfare. Unlike the defense budget, federal spending on education has been reduced from 9% in 1980, to 6% now. Mr. Bush intends to spend some $200 million less on education than did Mr. Reagan. {B30} After all, educated people expect a better standard of living, and will be vocal if denied their due. In short, they are not as easy to manage or to hoodwink.
Is it an accident that the American education system is graduating functional illiterates, and that much needed money for education is being diverted to benefit the super-rich? I think not.
Before the nation is forced to declare evening curfews (for youths
18 and under) in cities other than Washington DC, two
facts should be widely acknowledged. First that two-thirds of
U.S. prison inmates are high school dropouts, and secondly, that
it costs $5000 per year to send a child through public school,
and $14,000 a year to keep a prisoner in jail. {B31}