Category Archives: Wage Slavery

Former President, Donald Ramotar addressing the Rose Hall Martyrs commemorative ceremony

The opposition Peoples Progressive Party (PPP) on Sunday intensified its call for sugar industry workers to struggle against the closure or scaling down of several estates, saying the ailing Guyana Sugar Corporation (Guysuco) can be revived to supply refined sugar, ethanol, distilled rum and electricity.

Addressing about 300 persons at the Rose Hall Martyrs monument, former President, Donald Ramotar accused the David Granger-led administration of taking a political rather than an economic decision to close several estates and so the only response to that and other anti-working class measures is to embark on a struggle.

Comrades, there can be only one answer to this: We have to strugglethere is no shortcut and to struggle effectively you have to be organised, he said. He identified key ingredients to the struggle as better organised groups of the Guyana Agricultural and General Workers Union (GAWU), Peoples Progressive Party (PPP) and Progressive Youth Organisation (PYO).

You have to make sure that your union functions better. In the first instance, your GAWU groups have to be functioning at the maximum at this time in our country because we cannot fight without organisation.

You have to ensure that your political struggle is also geared because let us be clear on this matter- sugar is not just only an economic struggle. There is also a political struggle and you have to ensure that your PPP groups and your PYO groups are functioning properly so that you can carry on a fight to save this industry and it can be saved if we mount a fight, the former Guyanese leader said.

The veteran politician reasoned that the Guyana government suspended metered parking in Georgetown because the issue was becoming a political problem, rather than merely because ordinary people were being affected. They were not moved by the harm it was having on the economy. They were moved by self-preservation because they see that there was a political consequence to this. That is why political pressure has to be put on them and they must know that there is a political consequence to the action they are taking (in relation to the sugar industry), he said.

Ramotar, a former director of the State-owned Guyana Sugar Corporation (Guysuco) , said the industry began falling on hard times when the European Union (EU) imposed a 36 percent cut in sugar prices about 10 years ago but it could be resuscitated. He recommended that government and Guysuco build a sugar refinery to satisfy the Caribbeans 240,000 tonne annual demand for refined sugar, produce ethanol for a vehicular fuel mix, produce distilled rum to supply other Caribbean rum producing nations and install more co-generation plantsat the several other estates to sell electricity to the national grid.

He argued that the billions of dollars that have been disbursed to settle legal cases could have been given to Guysuco, a large debtor to the Guyana Revenue Authority and the National Insurance Scheme.

Former Minister of Culture, Dr. Frank Anthony earlier labeled the APNU+AFC government as despicable by scaling down the sugar industry and creating unemployment instead of jobs. Touching on the issue of severance pay, he said that is a legal entitlement that must be paid.

In a similar vein, Anthony called for struggle against a government has that has promised jobs while electioneering but is now putting people on the breadline. We got independence, and democracy was being trampled upon and sugar workers were always out there at the forefront of the struggle for the restoration of democracy and I am sure that the militancy and the vibrancy of sugar workers- that they will not give in and allow this government to trample upon their rights, said Anthony whose brainchild was the Rose Hall Martyrs Monument.

Dr. Frank Anthony addressing the gathering at the Rose Hall Martyrs monument.

He accused the Granger-led administration of increasing ministerial salaries and taxing the nation as a substitute for failing to attract investment. They are not a government that is putting money in your pocket. They are a government that is picking your pocket. That is what they are doing- creating hardship for the ordinary persons in this country and so in every sector there are people who are against them, said Anthony, the second highest vote-getter at the PPPs Congress held late last year.

Political and financial commentator, Ramon Gaskin warned that shrinking of the sugar industry would result in a loss of at least 10,000 jobs and the only response, he said, must be struggle. These people are stubborn and the only thing they understand is struggle, he said. He noted that Guysuco Chief Executive Officer, Errol Hanoman is being paid GYD$4 million monthly to head a slave-master company that is perpetrating wage slavery.

Gaskin, who had been harshly critical of much of the PPP administration, said Guysucos Chairman, Economics Professor Clive Thomas had said in Commission of Inquiry that the corporation would have produced GYD$13.2 billion profit from cogeneration, land sales and packaging in 2016. Thomas had estimated that Guysuco would have needed GYD$5 billion in subsidy for this year, but instead asked the National Assembly for GYD$9 billion.

PPP speakers blamed the governing A Partnership for National Unity+ Alliance For Change (APNU+AFC) for breaking its electoral promises by levying Value Added Tax (VAT) on essential food items, failing to provide increased paddy prices, and not delivering on a promised 20 percent salary and wage hike. Every single working class group has been losing benefits since this government came into office

Region Six Chairman, David Armogan on Sunday urged residents and workers of Rose Hall Estate to resist the closure of the estate because the economies of several areas will collapse.

Speaking at an event to mark the shooting death of several Rose Hall sugar workers by colonial police on March 13, 1913, Armogan said workers must mobilize and be in solidarity to protect their inheritance given to them by their foreparents.

He said they must come out in our numbers to peacefully tell the government not to close the estate. He warned that closure would result in the shutdown of New Amsterdam, Number 19 Village and other neighbouring area, depression and crime.

Armogan said land preparation and fertilization of fields have been halted at Rose Hall, a sign that that estate is being prepared for partial closure.

Government has aid it could no longer afford to continue operations of the loss-making and highly indebted Guyana Sugar Corporation in the same manner.

Indian Action Committee (IAC) activist, Evan Radhay Persaud recounted that on that fateful day, 56 persons were shot and 15 died, several in hospital.

Region Six (East Berbice-Corentyne) is controlled by the opposition Peoples Progressive Party whose supporters are mainly East Indo-Guyanese. The governing APNU+AFC coalition is dominated by the mainly Afro-Guyanese supported Peoples National Congress Reform (PNCR).

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PPP rallies supporters in sugar belt to struggle against closure of estates - Demerara Waves

Steve Cohen, Special to The Commercial Appeal 6:03 a.m. CT March 18, 2017

U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Memphis. (Stan Carroll/The Commercial Appeal)(Photo: Stan Carroll)

Last year, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump condescendingly said to African-Americans, You live in your poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs ... What the hell do you have to lose?

We now know the answer: A lot.

Changes at the Department of Justice (DOJ), alone, are alarming.Instead of serving its traditional role as guardian of civil rights, DOJ is in full retreat. It has reversed course on voting rights, abandoning opposition to a Texas voter-ID law in which a federal court found 600,000 registered voters did not have IDs necessary to vote.

Instead of protecting citizens from police who illegally discriminate against African-Americans, U.S. Atty. Gen. Jefferson Beauregard "Jeff"Sessions III has stated he does not favor the type of consent decrees used in Baltimore and Chicago to remediate conditions.

Sessions also hasrolled back former President Barack Obamas efforts to phase out private prisons.African-Americans not only make up a disproportionate share of the U.S. prison population, but appear more likely to be sent to private prisons, where the DOJ Inspector General has warned there are more security incidents than in public prisons.

Sessions has threatened to thwart the will of voters in states that have legalized marijuana. African-Americans are three times more likely than whites are to be arrested for marijuana, despite usage being virtually the same.

New Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos thinks Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) are the real pioneers when it comes to school choice. This is ignorant of segregation that necessitated the creation of HBCUs. DeVos has an education record that does not bode well for public schools, which have provided a path for African-Americans to achieve the American Dream.

The new HUD Secretary, Dr. Ben Carson, said within days of assuming office that slaves were immigrants, a comment that bewildered many, including the NAACP. The presidents recently released budget proposal cuts $6 billion from this agency that so many rely on.

The outlook for a minimum-wage increase under this administration is nil. President Trumps first pick to head the Department of Labor opposed a raise, despite there not having been one since 2009.

Thirty-five percent of African-American workers would benefit from a minimum-wage increase, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

Critical programs that help the most vulnerable such as Meals on Wheels, heating and energy assistance, and nutrition aid to women and children (WIC) would be drastically cut or eliminated in the Presidents budget.

In addition, the budget eliminates Community Development Block Grants and HOME programs that provide affordable housing for low-income residents. Legal Services Corporation, which helps those who cannot afford legal representation, and the Minority Business Development Agency, which helps promote minority-owned businesses, would be eliminated. Massive cuts to these vital programs would be devastating to Memphis.

While these cuts would have a disproportional impact on African-Americans, most cuts will affect all those who are economically disadvantaged and in need of government assistance.

Republicans are also rushing a health care plan that takes from low- and middle-income families and gives to the rich.

Twenty-four million more Americans would be uninsured by 2026 under this plan, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

Insurance costs for citizens over 50 years of age would increase dramatically, and financial assistance would be drastically cut for those in need. All while millionaires and billionaires receive massive tax breaks.

During Black History Month, Trump showed his ignorance of the African-American experience when he suggested Frederick Douglass was alive. His cabinet is on pace to have the fewest African-Americans of any administration in recent memory.

While some African-Americans have enjoyed prosperity and acceptance, it is undeniable that African-Americans still suffer from vestiges of slavery and Jim Crow. Discrimination and institutional racism have held so many back and left many in need of government relief.

Over the last half century, much of Americas progress has been measured by how it has dealt with its original sin of slavery. Civil rights, voting rights, advances in health care, public education, social justice and ladders of opportunity to enter the middle class have been markers by which we have judged presidential administrations. Sadly, this administration is failing on all counts.

Democratic U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen of Memphis represents Tennessees Ninth Congressional District.

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Cohen: Trump budget hurts African-Americans - The Commercial Appeal

Irish Americans were slaves once too or so a historically inaccurate and dangerously misleading internet meme would have you believe.

The meme comes in many varieties but the basic formula is this: old photos, paintings and engravings from all over the world are combined with text suggesting they are historic images of forgotten Irish slaves.

The myth underlying the meme holds that the Irish not Africans were the first American slaves. It rests on the idea that 17th century American indentured servitude was essentially an extension of the transatlantic slave trade.

Popular among racists, white supremacists, neo-Nazis, white nationalists and neo-confederate groups, the Irish slave trope is often accompanied by statements to the effect of, Our ancestors suffered and we got over it, why cant you? According to Liam Hogan a librarian and scholar who has tracked the myth references to these Irish slaves are used to derail conversations about racism and inequity.

The principle aim of this propaganda, which aligns with that of the international far-right, is to empty the history of the transatlantic slave trade of its racial element, says Hogan.

The meme has become increasingly visible since 2013. Its trajectory has paralleled the rise of Black Lives Matter and has even used that movements language with graphics, t-shirts and Facebook groups that proclaim, Irish Lives Matter.

In a six-part series on Medium, Hogan deconstructs the images and claims that have fueled the meme. That picture of Irish slave children? Thats actually a photo of young coal mine workers in Pennsylvania in 1911. The one of the Irish man being beaten to death in front of a crowd in the 1800s? Thats really a black man tied to a whipping post and being tortured in the 1920s.

While there is a growing awareness that these arguments are based on misinformation, the fiction is now seen by many as fact thanks to a strange web of mutually reinforcing lies. The lies have also taken on a life beyond the internet.

At a Confederate flag rally in Mississippi in July 2015 one protester told a reporter, There were more white Irish slaves then there were blacks. And the Irish slaves were treated a lot worse than the black slaves.

Those who traffic in this lie minimize and ignore the realities that made slavery distinct from other forms of servitude in the British colonies. African slaves were considered property; Irish indentured servants were not. And though they faced inhumane working conditions, Irish indentured servants could typically decide if they wanted to enter into their labor contracts. Unlike the Africans forced to come to the US as slaves, the servitude of Irish people in the US did not span their entire lifetimes, and did not bind their children to a life of servitude.

The Irish-as-slaves meme has a curious anatomy that Hogan has traced back to self-published books, family genealogy blogs and white supremacist news sites. He attributes much of the misinformation behind the meme to an article published by the Centre for Research on Globalization, a Canadian-based organization that touts its focus on education and humanitarianism. Hogan says that their frequently referenced 2008 article, The Irish Slave Trade The Forgotten White Slaves, has an outsized impact but does not contain a single historically accurate claim or sentence.

Even so, the article has been cited by mainstream news sites like Scientific American, Irish Examiner and Irish Central. In response, more than 80 scholars and supporters have signed an open letter debunking the Global Research article and asking the media to stop their practice of uncritically citing it and related sources. Scientific American responded by heavily revising their story on the topic and the Irish Examiner removed theirs altogether. But Irish Central has made no such revisions and did not respond to a request to comment for this story.

The editor of Global Research, Michel Chossudovsky, defends their decision to keep the story on their website. He wrote in an email that it was, originally published by OpEd News, we do not necessarily endorse it, we have also published critiques of that article by several historians with a view to promoting debate.

Shortly after he replied to PRIs questions, the article was updated with a lengthy editorial note and links to the articles that promote debate on the basis of long-since discredited claims.

The Global Research article is illustrated by the cover of a book, White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britains White Slaves in America, which was published by NYU Press in 2008. The books cover, dramatically illustrated with two white fists bound by rope manacles, often appears alongside articles that perpetuate the Irish slave myth.

The authors of the book are British filmmakers Don Jordan and Michael Walsh, who argue that slavery is more a feeling than a system. Slavery, they claim, is not defined by time but by the experience of the subject.

Scholars discredit this assessment. In a review in The Historian, Dr. Dixie Ray Haggard says the book uses sound primary sources to draw conclusions that are plagued by fatal flaws. The most egregious, he writes, is that it deliberately conflates indentured servitude with slavery. ...Rather than explore the complexity of labor and social relations in colonial America and increase our understanding of these institutions, these authors chose to oversimplify and confuse.

Still, the book was reviewed favorably in mainstream news outlets including The New York Times, Publishers Weekly and The New York Review of Books. Co-author Walsh qualified his claims in an interview with NPR that Were not saying the Whites ever suffered quite as much as the worst treated Blacks. Yet the book helped popularize the idea that Irish indentured servants had it just as bad, if not worse, than African slaves.

This Irish slave narrative is the latest in a long history of Irish Americans affirming their own group identity at the expense of black people. In his book, How the Irish Became White, Noel Ignatiev shows how in 19th century America, when racial identities had as much to do with national origin as skin color, Irish immigrants strove to be socially classed as white. In order to achieve this status and the privileges that came with it, they routinely and deliberately differentiated themselves from black people by at times violently forcing them into an even lower ranking in the American social order.

They sought to minimize the horrors of slavery then too. Irish workers in antebellum America self-identified as wage slaves, claiming they had it far worse than actual slaves because they werent entitled to benefits like the material comfort and the assurance of work they said slaves enjoyed.

Decades later in 1921, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote that Irish anti-blackness has been expressed so continuously and emphatically that there can be no doubt of the hostility of a large proportion of Irish Americans toward Negroes.

Now, as the Irish slave myth festers online and beyond, there is no visibly Irish American movement to answer it. There is no Irish American equivalent to Asians for Black Lives. Irish Americans participate in movements for the rights of African Americans, but they do not announce their heritage as loudly as do proponents of the Irish slave myth.

Leaders within the Catholic church, which has historically served as the moral compass for many Irish Americans, are beginning to grapple with this legacy of anti-blackness. Dr. Kevin Considine, professor of theology at Calumet College of St. Joseph, called for direct responses to implicit, insidious racism in an essay for US Catholic last summer.

Do black lives matter to white Catholics? If so, we need to do more than say the right words, he wrote.

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The curious origins of the 'Irish slaves' myth | Public Radio ... - PRI

A migrant worker carries a pole at a World Cup construction site in the Qatari capital Doha. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

Life for a migrant worker under Qatars kafala sponsorship system means living under your employers total control over every aspect of your existence from opening a bank account to changing jobs, and even being allowed to leave the country.

This corrupt system starts with recruitment under false pretences in their home countries and entraps them once they set foot in Qatar. Talking to workers in the squalid labour camps has brought home to me how these proud young men, who have left home to build a future, are deprived of dignity and treated in the most inhumane way. Worse, in the years that Ive been visiting the camps, nothing has changed.

Hundreds of these workers succumb every year to the appalling living and working conditions, returning to their home countries in coffins, their deaths callously written off as the price of progress.

The worlds richest country is spending 400m a week on the huge infrastructure programme for 2022, but paying the workers who are making it happen as little as 8 a day. There is no minimum wage, no unions are allowed and even basic protections at work are lacking for most.

Winning the World Cup bid could have been a catalyst for change in Qatar, but it has not been yet. Certainly, nothing has improved for the families of the 13 workers who died in a company labour camp fire last June, or for the 500 workers who lost all their possessions in two more labour camp fires this year. They were offered only $50 in compensation and had to rely on charity for food, clothes and bedding.

Qatars PR machine is still unable to hide the truth. Its government told the UNs International Labour Organisation this month that the exit permit regime for migrant workers has been repealed a blatant lie.

Workers still have to get their employers permission to change jobs and even to leave the country. Appeals to a government committee are being refused at a rate of five a day. Workers learn by text message if they can leave the country or not, and many have been waiting for a month for a decision. The fate of French footballer Zahir Belounis, who was trapped in Qatar for 19 months by his clubs owners after a wage dispute, can befall any one of the nearly 2 million migrant workers there, at any time.

At the ILO, worker and employer delegates are keeping up the pressure on Qatar. Indeed, some multinational construction companies seeking improvement want to negotiate with the global construction union Building and Woodworkers International. But the government wont allow even that.

Right now, countries need to stand up at the ILO and elsewhere to Qatars financial muscle and oppose its use of modern slavery. Those that dont will be held to account.

The Qatari government has repeatedly failed to keep its pledge to reform in the years since it was awarded the World Cup. Each time I have spoken to government representatives, promises are made but usually the same promises they made the last time we spoke.

Fifa, too, has a heavy burden of responsibility, by not making real reform a requirement for hosting its most prestigious and profitable event. Players and fans do care if the tournament is delivered on the basis of slavery, exploitation and death.

Fifa and other global sports bodies, such as the International Olympic Committee, are making human rights a requirement in future bids for major events but, right now, Qatars migrant workers urgently need real backing from footballs ultimate authority, as it strives to revive its battered reputation.

Sharan Burrow is general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation

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We must all stand up to the world's richest nation and oppose its use ... - The Guardian

Irish Americans were slaves once too or so a historically inaccurate and dangerously misleading internet meme would have you believe.

The meme comes in many varieties but the basic formula is this: old photos, paintings and engravings from all over the world are combined with text suggesting they are historic images of forgotten Irish slaves.

The myth underlying the meme holds that the Irish not Africans were the first American slaves. It rests on the idea that 17th century American indentured servitude was essentially an extension of the transatlantic slave trade.

Popular among racists, white supremacists, neo-Nazis, white nationalists and neo-confederate groups, the Irish slave trope is often accompanied by statements to the effect of, Our ancestors suffered and we got over it, why cant you? According to Liam Hogan a librarian and scholar who has tracked the myth references to these Irish slaves are used to derail conversations about racism and inequity.

The principle aim of this propaganda, which aligns with that of the international far-right, is to empty the history of the transatlantic slave trade of its racial element, says Hogan.

The meme has become increasingly visible since 2013. Its trajectory has paralleled the rise of Black Lives Matter and has even used that movements language with graphics, t-shirts and Facebook groups that proclaim, Irish Lives Matter.

In a six-part series on Medium, Hogan deconstructs the images and claims that have fueled the meme. That picture of Irish slave children? Thats actually a photo of young coal mine workers in Pennsylvania in 1911. The one of the Irish man being beaten to death in front of a crowd in the 1800s? Thats really a black man tied to a whipping post and being tortured in the 1920s.

While there is a growing awareness that these arguments are based on misinformation, the fiction is now seen by many as fact thanks to a strange web of mutually reinforcing lies. The lies have also taken on a life beyond the internet.

At a Confederate flag rally in Mississippi in July 2015 one protester told a reporter, There were more white Irish slaves then there were blacks. And the Irish slaves were treated a lot worse than the black slaves.

Those who traffic in this lie minimize and ignore the realities that made slavery distinct from other forms of servitude in the British colonies. African slaves were considered property; Irish indentured servants were not. And though they faced inhumane working conditions, Irish indentured servants could typically decide if they wanted to enter into their labor contracts. Unlike the Africans forced to come to the US as slaves, the servitude of Irish people in the US did not span their entire lifetimes, and did not bind their children to a life of servitude.

The Irish-as-slaves meme has a curious anatomy that Hogan has traced back to self-published books, family genealogy blogs and white supremacist news sites. He attributes much of the misinformation behind the meme to an article published by the Centre for Research on Globalization, a Canadian-based organization that touts its focus on education and humanitarianism. Hogan says that their frequently referenced 2008 article, The Irish Slave Trade The Forgotten White Slaves, has an outsized impact but does not contain a single historically accurate claim or sentence.

Even so, the article has been cited by mainstream news sites like Scientific American, Irish Examiner and Irish Central. In response, more than 80 scholars and supporters have signed an open letter debunking the Global Research article and asking the media to stop their practice of uncritically citing it and related sources. Scientific American responded by heavily revising their story on the topic and the Irish Examiner removed theirs altogether. But Irish Central has made no such revisions and did not respond to a request to comment for this story.

The editor of Global Research, Michel Chossudovsky, defends their decision to keep the story on their website. He wrote in an email that it was, originally published by OpEd News, we do not necessarily endorse it, we have also published critiques of that article by several historians with a view to promoting debate.

Shortly after he replied to PRIs questions, the article was updated with a lengthy editorial note and links to the articles that promote debate on the basis of long-since discredited claims.

The Global Research article is illustrated by the cover of a book, White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britains White Slaves in America, which was published by NYU Press in 2008. The books cover, dramatically illustrated with two white fists bound by rope manacles, often appears alongside articles that perpetuate the Irish slave myth.

The authors of the book are British filmmakers Don Jordan and Michael Walsh, who argue that slavery is more a feeling than a system. Slavery, they claim, is not defined by time but by the experience of the subject.

Scholars discredit this assessment. In a review in The Historian, Dr. Dixie Ray Haggard says the book uses sound primary sources to draw conclusions that are plagued by fatal flaws. The most egregious, he writes, is that it deliberately conflates indentured servitude with slavery. ...Rather than explore the complexity of labor and social relations in colonial America and increase our understanding of these institutions, these authors chose to oversimplify and confuse.

Still, the book was reviewed favorably in mainstream news outlets including The New York Times, Publishers Weekly and The New York Review of Books. Co-author Walsh qualified his claims in an interview with NPR that Were not saying the Whites ever suffered quite as much as the worst treated Blacks. Yet the book helped popularize the idea that Irish indentured servants had it just as bad, if not worse, than African slaves.

This Irish slave narrative is the latest in a long history of Irish Americans affirming their own group identity at the expense of black people. In his book, How the Irish Became White, Noel Ignatiev shows how in 19th century America, when racial identities had as much to do with national origin as skin color, Irish immigrants strove to be socially classed as white. In order to achieve this status and the privileges that came with it, they routinely and deliberately differentiated themselves from black people by at times violently forcing them into an even lower ranking in the American social order.

They sought to minimize the horrors of slavery then too. Irish workers in antebellum America self-identified as wage slaves, claiming they had it far worse than actual slaves because they werent entitled to benefits like the material comfort and the assurance of work they said slaves enjoyed.

Decades later in 1921, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote that Irish anti-blackness has been expressed so continuously and emphatically that there can be no doubt of the hostility of a large proportion of Irish Americans toward Negroes.

Now, as the Irish slave myth festers online and beyond, there is no visibly Irish American movement to answer it. There is no Irish American equivalent to Asians for Black Lives. Irish Americans participate in movements for the rights of African Americans, but they do not announce their heritage as loudly as do proponents of the Irish slave myth.

Leaders within the Catholic church, which has historically served as the moral compass for many Irish Americans, are beginning to grapple with this legacy of anti-blackness. Dr. Kevin Considine, professor of theology at Calumet College of St. Joseph, called for direct responses to implicit, insidious racism in an essay for US Catholic last summer.

Do black lives matter to white Catholics? If so, we need to do more than say the right words, he wrote.

From PRI's The World 2016 PRI

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The curious origins of the 'Irish slaves' myth - KERA News

In the summer of 1835, a band of 400 unemployed semiskilled men in Washington, D.C., known as the Mechanics, roamed the streets, drinking heavily and looking for someone to blame for their misfortunes.

Their plight was exacerbated by the nominally free work performed by slaves and free blacks. The Mechanics were agitated at the sight of black men going to work every day, doing jobs that they felt were rightfully theirs. Rather than blame slave owners or the institution of slavery itself, the Mechanics blamed the slaves, and went on a two-week rampage, destroying African-American schools, churches and restaurants. Only when they burned a brothel did greater Washington decide they were carrying things too far.

Labor issues are always complex, and even labor and wage theory advanced by the best minds can, in practice, turn out to be flawed. But as we push more immigrants out the door, a few matters are worthy of consideration.

Those who agitate for a higher minimum wage should actually be pleased. Reducing the supply of labor will drive up the cost of work, meaning that wages at the lower end of the scale will go up. Conversely, opponents of raising the minimum wage who support deportation are at cross purposes. Apparently, the obvious still needs to be stated: You cant suppress wages and the labor force simultaneously.

Perhaps youve noticed that some of the loudest voices for deportation have now grown silent as it occurs to them that they will need to financially compete for workers. If they can get workers at all.

We have long complained that immigrants are taking jobs from native American workers. Now, well get to see if thats true or not. It stands to reason that at some wage point, American workers will agree to harvest lettuce and pick chickens. But that didnt happen in the post-war South, where certain work, such as hoeing cotton, was branded as slave work and more than a few poor whites thought it better to go hungry than to labor in the furrows where black feet had trod.

This meant that those in need of labor had to get creative. Sheriffs arrested black men under the slightest pretext, or no pretext, and threw them in jail where they were effectively sold out to corporations and forced to work the fields, mines or foundries. This form of what Douglas Blackmon of the Wall Street Journal called neoslavery endured for 80 years after the war.

It remains to be seen what will happen when todays industries face the inevitable shortage of bottom-rung labor. Those who wish to see an end to the welfare state might argue that able-bodied people now on the dole would have a choice: do the work or lose your benefits.

This is an understandable position. Unemployment benefits should not be so high that they discourage a person from getting a job; but withholding benefits altogether and forcing a person to accept wages that do not pay for food, shelter and clothing is a form of slavery unto its own.

And it has yet to be worked out how populations of unemployed can be moved hundreds or thousands of miles to where the work is.

No matter what, we will see the effects of deportation in the prices of some of our most basic products, such as produce and poultry, and in the cost of our most basic services, such as landscaping and roofing. For years, business has covered its eyes and ears when hiring its a two-way unholy dance, as immigrants here illegally get work and companies receive artificially cheap labor. If carried out as advertised, President Trumps deportation plan will put a serious crimp in this practice.

It is possible to have fewer Latinos in this country, if that is the goal. But it means the price we pay for many items will go up. And, paradoxically, it will cost us a pretty penny in tax money for the privilege of paying a higher price for these goods and services. Forget the wall deportation alone is not an inexpensive proposition.

And finally, notice that the Social Security Administration receives $12 billion annually in contributions from undocumented immigrants and their employers, money that will go to retired Americans, not to the immigrants who paid into the fund.

Frankly, undocumented immigration sounds like a very good deal for Americans and, at best, a tenuous proposition for the immigrants. So, if the champions of deportation really want to promote racial purity, they should be honest with the American public and just say so. Because from an economic standpoint, the arguments just dont hold up.

Originally posted here:

Who would replace immigrant workers? | Tim Rowland ... - Herald-Mail Media

Subscribers dont usually get the last word when it comes to the Opinion page, but after Danny Morrison called me out in his most recent column for schooling him on his you-can-be-both-pro-choice-and-pro-life stance, I requested and received equal time to rebut his rebuttal of my rebuttal.

As with his first column, Mr. Morrisons more recent commentary on abortion and how he does/doesnt support it was a dizzying discourse that addressed everything from voter suppression and wage gap myths to how men are basically a big tribe of troglodytes. Everything except the question I actually put before him.

The question he so vigorously ignored centered on his contradictory belief that, though he is personally opposed to abortion, an act he considers shameful, the practice still deserves his enthusiastic support. So I asked him what it is he personally finds abhorrent about abortion. No comment.

Instead, he went with the assumption I must be a Christian conservative who is patently ignorant of American history, the law, womens rights, and the uterus-challenged, a dopey phrase that supports another of his arguments that men shouldnt be chiming in about abortion and other women-related subjects they apparently find incomprehensible.

His reference to some people interjecting religion into the abortion debate was curious as it was not I but he who made a faith-based argument. While I share with people of many faiths the belief that human beings are created in Gods image, and therefore are of inestimable worth, I rarely make faith-based arguments because they carry little weight with abortion supporters, who tend to dismiss them out of hand.

I prefer instead to appeal to the god they do revere the god of science, who routinely demonstrates through the miracle of ultrasound that from the moment of conception the unborn are wholly human. Its a reality that even the most ardent abortion supporters no longer deny because to do so is to deny science.

To establish his creds as an informed supporter of womens rights, Mr. Morrison lauded womens multigenerational fight for equality dating back to the days when suffragettes like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton campaigned for equal economic and political opportunities. You know what these early champions didnt support? Abortion.

The weekly newspaper Anthony founded and ran with Stanton, The Revolution, refused to carry ads for abortifacients and published articles from feminist leaders denouncing abortion as evil. Another feminist pioneer, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to become a medical doctor in the United States, was passionate in her opposition to the cruelty of abortion, of which she once wrote, the gross perversion and destruction of motherhood by the abortionist filled me with indignation.

Thankfully, the early pioneers of womens rights believed equal rights extended to all women even those not yet born.

Finally, why any advocate for choice would bring up slavery and the Holocaust in a debate about abortion is beyond me, but Mr. Morrison did so, ostensibly to make some point about the legalities of those reprehensible practices. Still, placing those human rights violations on the same shelf as abortion is appropriate. Like abortion, each was legal in its day and each succeeded for a time because in the eyes of the courts Jews and slaves were not recognized as persons. Even so, can any of us imagine being personally opposed to slavery, but unwilling to impose that view on someone else? Cant you just hear the pro-slavery slogan of the day? Dont believe in slavery? Dont own one.

Sorry, Mr. Morrison. Your pro-life-is-pro-choice mantra may be convenient, but for the unborn lives you say you value, that line youre trying to straddle is so fine as not to exist at all.

Marylee Shrider is executive director of Right to Life of Kern County.

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Community Voice: Straddling a line so fine it's nonexistent - The Bakersfield Californian

Parents often hope their children will carry on their traditions, walk the righteous paths they have trod, and uphold the ideals they held dear.

Soone must wonder thatwhen it comes to the Kennedy family, is it shocking that Ted Kennedys son, Connecticut State Senator Ted Kennedy, Jr. should take the family traditions of collectivism and thievery to their next logical steps -- all the way to literal grave robbing?

Fresh into his first term, Edward, His Royal Duke of Kennedy, has proposed SB 750, a bill that would mandate all citizens in the state be put on the Organ Donor list, keeping them fresh for harvest upon death unless they first take the initiative and demand they be taken off.

In essence, thescion of one of the greatest proponents of wage slavery in U.S. history is now saying that the government also owns the literal flesh, blood, bone, and sinews of every person in the state, and, like Doctor Frankenstein (who turned 199 years old on March 10), the bodies can be torn apart with the assumption that one has givenhis or her permission.

Said Dr. Kennestein:

There are people right now who are sitting at home, waiting for a phone call for a possible donor, and meanwhile were burying hundreds of people every day with perfectly good organs who could have donated those organs.

Thats right, Doctor. And just like aborted fetuses used for fetal stem cell harvests -- they never gave you their permission to cut them up for parts.

As noble as heir Kennedys intentions are, his is yet another case of the consequentialist mindset, which embraces the idea that the ends justify the means, and disregards the subjective intentions and valuations of the individual. Thus, force is applied by such thinking, force that now mandates that for the greater good, all citizens must act to defend their religious beliefs or personal preferences from the acquisitive hands of the state.

But perhaps ironically, Kennedy's own fatherco-sponsored a law in the U.S. Senate that forbids people from willingly selling their own organs. Since the law, known as the National Organ Transplant Act (co-sponsored by Kennedy, Al Gore and Orrin Hatch) was passed in 1984, hundreds of thousands of people have died waiting for donors, while arguablythousands would have been willing to donate if they or their families could have profited. As grisly as some might feel this harsh fact is, these are real outcomes of an unconstitutional law.

So while Mr. Kennedy bemoans the dearth of organs to save lives, he never mentions the role his own dad played in destroying the chances of thousands, perhaps tens or even hundreds of thousands, to live longer and better. Instead, he introduces a bill that perfectly befits a Kennedy: one of coercion, state control, and literal cannibalism for parts backed by the power of government.

Like the Son of Frankenstein, the Kennedy tradition continues. To Ted, Jr., people are the property of the state, there to be used for the greater good."

The hypocrisy appears to be genetic, as well, and its doubtful that any form of scientific intervention can stop it. It's unlikely that, in the future, mankind will invent a technology to transplant integrity.

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Ted Kennedy Jr. Proposes a State Bill That Would MANDATE Organ Harvesting - MRCTV (blog)

All of a sudden, much is being written on the pursuit of happiness, of 6 hour working days, of three and four days of work each week instead of the constancy of indenture and the trauma of wage slavery. Years ago, when I was the general manager of the Murdoch University Student Guild I went for all sorts of changes in workplace conditions only to be advised by the union, the NTEU (National Tertiary Education Union), to slow down, to not give away too much too soon. I did not slow down. I pushed through 17 changes to our Enterprise Bargaining Agreement. Happiness is everything, it is wellbeing and the dawn of all our meanings.

When I took on the management of this particular student guild, and the management of five of its commercial operations, it was a key concern facing the risk of insolvency. I inherited six industrial disputes and a sinking ship. But we turned it all around. We became one of the nations strongest guilds financially and politically. I was appalled at the low level of remuneration of many of my colleagues, most of them long-serving. Some were without tertiary qualifications and this was an argument used against them but I recognised equivalency of learning and skills acquired in the workplace over time. I did the position translations and increased everyones remuneration. My colleagues were stunned, the NTEU was stunned. We should not wait for the right side of history to loom in order to do what it is right. My sense of urgency and in putting people first led to high-morale. I also reduced the 40 hour week to a 37.5 hour working week but remuneration remained equal to a 40 hour week. I was unsuccessful in pushing for a 35 hour week after failing to secure the original goal of 30 hours a week. The 6 hours a day was scoffed at by the NTEU and by the student guild board members.

Society needs to be about people and subsequently the people will deliver the economy we should have, not one that some want for the majority. We must always remember that all structures are people. We are always working with one another.

The pursuit of happiness is imperative and just like the 1968 Paris workers rights protests argued for shorter working weeks, for three and four working days in a week, for balanced lives, for the right to be happy and free, these rights to our natural freedoms should remain inalienable.

If social justice and human rights are to continue unfolding then happiness, universal happiness has to be at the forefront. The shortest possible working weeks should be the deal. The assurance of work and financial security to everyone equality should be the reality of our generations. Life needs to be balanced to allow for what we were born into the inherent to be happy, free, to enjoy community, family and experiences other than work. In the contemporary maladies of this workplace driven world the above has been sidelined. We have been screwed over by unnatural imposts, where all our doings and expectations are maddeningly work-related and we compete with each other to achieve them; career, the climbing of the ladder, accolades. It is all theatre but one of unhappiness. A theatre of misery. We are taught about a world order that is dog-eat-dog, that we will make enemies in the workplace, that jealousy is a driver and that it can be ambitions fuel.

Human beings have become the most miserable species on the planet.

Art is the only outlet that may run a counter-narrative, where the outburst of unhappiness in the work-mad world, one of servitude to drudgery is disconnecting us from happiness. The revolution that is needed is becoming less likely as institutional and structural power imbalances are relentlessly shored up.

Disaster capitalism exploits dictatorially humanity. It is so bent on profit for the few that it leaves behind even more humanity in even direr circumstance. Capitalism is the maker of abject poverty and billions live utterly dirt-poor.

In this disaster capitalism, some nations do better than others. Some nations try to balance work and freedoms, to factor in the right to some relief and the hope for some happiness. Norway has amassed $885bn (727bn) to look after its ageing population rather than the elderly scrimp by in hovels in the last decades of life. In the face of the excesses that is capitalism this effort by Norway is noble. Norway nationalised some of its industries, and instead of an individual owning a resource company and the bulk of the revenue Norway does.

Australians are being asked to work more years in order to provide relief to an ailing economy. In this, the economy is not about the people. Australia does not own the resource companies that benefit from the oil and gas they drill, pump, barrel. A few individuals benefit from this obnoxious notoriety. Today a pension averages about $20,000 a year and it is tough going for pensioners. It is poverty. In twenty years the pension will be worth the equivalent of $70 a week comparatively in todays value dirt-poor lives. Unless Australians have a home paid off by the time they retire and have $1 million in superannuation they will do it poor. With the passing of each year less Australians will be on track to achieve this feat.

It is an indictment of Australias social policies that it does not have the sovereign wealth funds of nations such as Norway. If Australia refuses to nationalise industries and own its resources then there will come the time that Australia will be poor despite this today as seemingly unimaginable.

Australia needs to save for tomorrow. But not at the expense of peoples right to happiness and freedom. Australias only hope is to nationalise industries and resources and reduce work hours so that there is work for everyone. Let us spread the love and be that better society.

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The pursuit of happiness - The Stringer

The collapsed remains of the Rana Plaza garment factory in near Dhaka, Bangladesh, June 30, 2013. The police in Bangladesh filed formal murder charges June 1, 2015, against 41 people accused of involvement in the 2013 collapse of a building that housed several clothing factories, leaving more than 1,100 people dead in the worst disaster in garment industry history. (Photo: Khaled Hasan / The New York Times)

What do imperialism and colonialism look like today? John Smith's Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century argues that core capitalist nations are no longer reliant on military force and direct political control of other countries. Instead, they maintain a financial grip on the Southern Hemisphere in particular, exploiting labor in these countries to increase their own profits. Order this book from Truthout by clicking here!

The "have" nations increase profits for their corporations at the expense of grievously underpaid workers in developed nations. The developed nations call this globalization, John Smith argues in his book Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: Globalization, Super-Exploitation, and Capitalism's Final Crisis. In this interview with Truthout, Smith discusses his contention that globalization is just neocolonialism by another name.

Mark Karlin: Why did you choose to begin your book with the collapse of Rana Plaza in 2013, which killed more than one thousand exploited garment workers in Bangladesh?

John Smith: Three reasons. First, the Rana Plaza disaster -- a heinous crime, not an accident -- aroused the sympathy and solidarity of hundreds of millions of people around the world, and reminded us all of just how intimately connected we are to the women and men who make our T-shirts, trousers and underwear. It epitomized the dangerous, exploitative and oppressive conditions endured by hundreds of millions of workers in low-wage countries whose labor provides firms in imperialist countries with much of their raw materials and intermediate inputs and working people with so many of our consumer goods. I wanted to bring these legions of low-wage workers "into the room" from the very beginning; to confront readers with the fact of our mutual interdependence and also with facts about the great differences in wages, living conditions and life chances that we are aware of but too often choose to ignore.

This brings me to the second reason. Fidel Castro, the greatest revolutionary of our times, explained Cuba's unparalleled international solidarity as repayment of its debt to humanity. We who live in imperialist countries have an enormous debt of solidarity to our sisters and brothers in nations that have been and are being ransacked by our governments and transnational corporations! There can be no talk of socialism or progress of any sort until we acknowledge this debt and begin to repay it! We need to redefine -- or better, rediscover -- the real meaning of socialism: the transitional stage of society between capitalism and communism in which all forms of oppression and discrimination which violate the equality and unity of working people are progressively and consciously overcome. It is indisputable that the greatest violation of this equality and greatest obstacle to our unity arises from the division of the world between a handful of oppressor nations and the rest; working people in imperialist nations must seize political power and wrest control of the means of production in order to heal this mutilating division. This is what informed my decision to begin Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century with the Rana Plaza disaster.

Finally, Rana Plaza and Bangladesh's garment industry is an extremely useful case study which exemplifies features shared with other low-wage manufactures-exporting nations. These include the centrality of ultra-low wages, the predilection of employers for female labor, and the growing preference of firms based in imperialist countries for arm's-length relations with their low-wage suppliers, as opposed to foreign direct investment. Furthermore, analysis of Bangladesh's garment industry poses a series of questions and paradoxes which mainstream economics cannot resolve and which Marxist economists have barely begun to tackle. Chief amongst them is the mainstream doctrine that wages reflect productivity, and that if Bangladeshi wages are so low it means the productivity of its workers are correspondingly low -- but how can this be true when they work so intensely and for such long hours? Another is this: what is the relation between the global shift of production to low-wage countries and the global economic crisis, still in its early stages? This question is absent from mainstream and most Marxist accounts of the crisis, rendering them, in my opinion, completely redundant. The study of the Rana Plaza disaster and of Bangladesh's garment industry therefore generates a list of issues and paradoxes which provide the themes for each subsequent chapter, and so serves to organize the whole of the rest of the book.

John Smith. (Photo: Monthly Review Press)

How has uber-capitalism, asserted globally by developed nations, replaced the need to control colony nations through direct political power?

Uber-capitalism signifies the supremacy of the law of value, which now rules uber alles. In other words, markets -- in particular, capital markets and the capitalists who wield their social power through these markets-- rule the world to a greater extent than ever before. This doesn't mean there's nothing else under the sun -- pre-capitalist communal societies and subsistence economies still survive in parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America, as do the post-capitalist economic relations manifested in the welfare states in imperialist democracies (a major concession won by workers in those countries, financed to a large extent by the proceeds of super-exploitation in low-wage nations), the post-capitalist economic relations in Cuba defended by the revolutionary power of its working people and the remnants of China's socialist revolution which have yet to be reversed by this country's ongoing transition to capitalism. However, as capitalist social relations have extended their grip on the oppressed nations of the global South, and as the transition back to capitalism of the former socialist countries gathers pace, so these remaining redoubts of non-capitalism have shrunk, and today exist in highly antagonistic contradiction to rampant "market forces," a euphemism for capitalist power.

The social power of capital is enforced through the so-called rule of law, which exalts the sanctity of private property and negates the sanctity of human life. Any people that dares to defy laws protecting capitalist property, e.g. by defaulting on debts or by expropriating assets, is subject to the most severe economic penalties, and, if that is not sufficient, is threatened with subversion, terrorism and invasion. The transition from colonialism of yesteryear to the neocolonialism of today is analogous to the transition from slavery to wage-slavery, and merely signifies that capitalism has largely dispensed with archaic, precapitalist forms of domination and exploitation, while taking great care to preserve its monopoly of military force for use in cases of revolutionary challenge to its rule.

What is the "GDP illusion?"

GDP -- gross domestic product -- measures the monetary value of all the goods and services produced for sale within a national economy. It is often criticized for what it excludes -- goods and services that aren't produced for sale, such as those produced by domestic labor and those provided for free by the state; and so-called "externalities," i.e. the social and environmental costs which don't appear in the accounts of private firms, such as pollution, damage to workers health, etc. However, it has never, to the best of my knowledge, been criticized for what it includes. The problem can be illustrated by considering the mark-up on a T-shirt made in Bangladesh and consumed in the US. Leaving aside, for simplicity's sake, the cost of transport and of the raw materials used up in production, up to $19 of the $20 final sale price will appear in the GDP of the US, the country where this commodity is consumed, while the GDP of Bangladesh will be expanded by just $1, made up of the factory-owner's profits, taxes levied by the state, and a few cents paid to the workers who actually made the T-shirt. The $19 mark-up can be broken down into the "value-added" by wholesalers and retailers and by the advertisers, owners of commercial property, etc. who provide services to them. This strongly suggests that much, most or all of the value-added that is captured by US wholesalers and retailers was actually generated in Bangladesh, not in the US.

GDP is simply the aggregate of all of the value-added of all the firms in a national economy. Taxes, and the government services financed by these taxes, are accounted for by assuming that the value of these services is exactly equal to the taxes used to pay for them -- and so GDP can therefore be calculated by summing firms' income before the deduction of taxes.

What is critical, therefore, is the nature of so-called "value-added." For an individual firm, this is obtained by subtracting the cost of inputs from the monetary value of its output. At this point, mainstream economic theory and standard accounting practice makes a crucial and wholly arbitrary assumption: a firm's value-added is identical to the new value created by the production process within that firm and does not include any value generated elsewhere and captured by that firm in circulation, i.e. in markets, where titles to value are circulated but none is generated. This conflation of the value generated in the production of a commodity and the price received for it is the basis of the ruling economic doctrine in all its forms. On the other hand, recognition that the value generated in production and the value captured in the marketplace are two entirely different quantities which bear no necessary relationship to each other is the starting point of Marxist value theory, one implication of which is that activities, such as advertising, security services and banking produce no value whatsoever and are instead overhead costs, forms of social consumption of values generated in productive sectors of the economy -- much of which have been relocated to low-wage countries like Bangladesh.

This, then, is what I call the GDP illusion, whereby the value generated by low-wage labor in poor countries appears to be generated domestically in rich countries. In this way, the parasitic and exploitative relationship between imperialist countries and low-wage countries is veiled by supposedly objective raw economic data, considered as such even by many Marxist and other radical critics of the system who should know better.

How do you define "global labor arbitrage"?

This term was popularized in the early 2000s by Stephen Roach, a senior economist at Morgan Stanley, who described global labor arbitrage as the replacement of "high-wage workers here with like-quality, low-wage workers abroad," adding that "extract[ing] product from relatively low-wage workers in the developing world has become an increasingly urgent survival tactic for companies in the developed economies." Yet this only offers a superficial description of the phenomenon, while the mainstream theory that Roach subscribes to does not adequately explain it. Before I give my definition of global labor arbitrage, I should first explain its meaning in terms of the mainstream economic theory. Simply, it means moving production to where labor costs are lowest. "Labor costs" doesn't just refer to wages -- from the capitalist's point of view, what matters as well as the cost of labor (i.e., the wage) is the monetary value of the goods or services produced by this labor -- in other words, unit labor cost, defined as the cost of the labor required to produce an extra unit of output. According to mainstream theory, efficient, unimpeded markets equate workers' wages with their "marginal product," i.e. their contribution to total output, and from this two important consequences flow. First, workers are not exploited -- they receive in wages no more and no less than they contribute. Second, free markets equalize unit labor costs between industries and countries -- if wages are higher for some workers, it means they are more productive.

So, if, in the real world, (unit) labor costs are actually lower in some countries than in others, it means that workers in those countries receive wages which are lower than their marginal product -- in other words, even according to mainstream economic theory, they are being exploited. And, secondly, it means that the functioning of the labor market is impeded by extra-economic factors that depress wages, namely restrictions on the free movement of labor across borders. In mainstream economic theory, "arbitrage" means profiting from market imperfections that result in the same commodity fetching a different price in one place than in another. No other market suffers from imperfections on anything like the same scale as those encountered by the sellers of living labor, creating enormous opportunities for corporations to profit at their expense.

While none of this can be disputed by mainstream economists, the norm is to obfuscate these issues for what might be called public relations reasons, and it is to his credit that Stephen Roach spoke so plainly. But the mainstream explanation is inadequate, for several reasons. First, workers don't just replace their wages; their unpaid labor is the source of all of the capitalists' profits, and also pays for economic activities that do not add to social wealth, such as advertising, security, finance, etc. In other words, the exploitation of living labor is fundamental to capitalism and does not depend on market imperfections. Second, suppression of the free movement of labor cannot be regarded as an incidental, exogenous factor; instead, we need a concept that recognizes this to be an intrinsic part of contemporary global capitalism. And the same goes for the compulsion mentioned by Stephen Roach that has obliged capitalists in imperialist countries, on pain of extinction, to shift production to low-wage countries.

My definition of so-called global labor arbitrage is, therefore, that the division of the world between a handful of oppressor nations and a great number of oppressed nations, "the essence of imperialism," as Lenin said, is now an intrinsic property of the capital/labor relation and is manifested in the racially- and nationally-stratified global workforce; and that the super-exploitation this makes possible is a central factor countering the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, postponing the eruption of systemic crisis until the first decade of the 21st century.

What is the relationship between imperialism as currently practiced and mass migration?

Decolonization has emancipated the national bourgeoisies of the oppressed nations, giving them a place for their snouts in the trough, but the working peoples of the oppressed nations, whose hard-fought struggles achieved decolonization, still await their day of liberation. The division of the world between a handful of oppressor nations and a great majority of oppressed nations is today manifested in the racial and national hierarchy that constitutes the global working class; maintaining these divisions plays an absolutely central political as well as economic role in capitalism's continued survival. Violent suppression of free movement of labor across national borders, especially those between imperialist and low-wage nations, is a key factor producing and perpetuating wide international wage differentials; these in turn propel both the migration of production processes to low-wage countries and the migration of low-wage workers to imperialist countries, which are therefore two sides of the same coin.

How is gender discrimination built into the capitalist workforce?

Capitalists utilize all forms of division and disunity amongst working people in order to reap super-profits from doubly-oppressed layers and to bear down on the wages of all workers. Since hunger for cheap labor is the main force driving the global shift of production, it's no surprise this is manifested in a preference for the cheapest labor in those countries, namely that of women (and children); and as Bangladesh illustrates, this is no less true of countries where patriarchal culture has hitherto excluded women from life and labor outside the home. Conferring the status of wageworkers and breadwinners on young women and concentrating them in large numbers in factories tends to transform their social status and self-image, never more so than when fighting street battles with baton-wielding cops and company goons. To temper the subversive consequences of their greed, capitalist politicians crank up promotion of obscurantist, patriarchal ideologies, aimed at impeding the growth of militant class consciousness among these doubly-oppressed layers of the working class, performing a similar function to the promotion of sexiest celebrity culture and the cosmetics and fashion industries in other parts of the world.

More generally, the wealth gap between men and women is much greater than the income gap, reflecting the cumulative results of centuries and millennia of patriarchal class society. Patriarchy, like imperialism, predated capitalism and was a condition for its rise. Frederick Engels explained, in Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, that women's oppression originated in the transition from primitive communism to class society, when a layer of the male population used their superior physical strength and aggression to seize possession of the social surplus and live at the expense of the rest of society. To pass accumulated wealth down the male line, they seized control of women's fertility, resulting in what Engels called the "world-historic downfall of the female sex." This implies that social revolution, opening the door to the abolition of class division, is a prerequisite for uprooting women's oppression, which can only be accomplished by building a society that places human beings and children at its center, in place of profit and private wealth accumulation.

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Globalization Is Just a Contemporary Word for Financial Colonialism - Truth-Out