Almost Slavery

I have written many times about the widening gap between the rich and the poor. I’ve also mentioned that my students don’t see that there is anything wrong with this ever-widening gap. The rich have earned the money and my students believe, erroneously I think, that the poor have an equal chance to earn the money. I recently ran across an article that proves my students at least partially wrong. Of the 250 richest billionaires in America, 44% inherited their money. That means that almost one half of the people who are outrageously rich did not become rich because they earned it. Still, what is so wrong about being so rich?

The following words explain, in part, what is wrong with having so much money in the hands of just a few people. “The whole process of production....has been brought almost entirely under the power of a few, so that a very few rich and exceedingly rich men have laid a yoke of almost slavery on the unnumbered masses of non-owning workers.”

I show a movie, “The Global Assembly Line” to my students every year. The movie shows how workers in other countries are treated as slaves: they are made to work long hours for very little pay. But it is worse than slavery. Overseas factories employ primarily women between the ages of 16 and 25. After 25 the young women are discarded in favor of younger women. Sometimes they are fired because they are almost blind from staring into a microscope eight hours a day. Some of these women quit because they have been working in factories that have almost no pollution controlling devices and their lungs are badly damaged.

These workers own nothing. These workers will never be able to amass the kind of wealth that a relatively few people have amassed--and again, there is nothing wrong with having lots of money--if it were not for the fact that the money can and does buy work -- and the work is often slave work -- the exploitation of the poor & needy.

The great English essayist, Samuel Johnson said long ago “A decent provision for the poor is a true test of Civilization.” Of course some rich people provide money for the poor -- give money to charity -- but most rich people get richer by puting their money into factories that use the labor of the poor to make even more money.

What can we do? What should we do? There is no simple solution. No matter what we do, there will be factories that exploit workers, but to go back to the original quotation, “production is now controlled by a very few, very rich people.” Let me remind you of a statistic I gave you in a previous talk: the 225 richest people in the world have as much money as one half the people in the world--or as much money as 3 billion people.

That’s obscene. We must tax the rich. We must redistribute some of that wealth. That’s too much money in the hands of just a few people--and they impose the yoke of slavery on the non-owning masses.

 

Copyright © 2004   Henry Morgenstein

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