Civil War History - Secession and PoliticsWas it Slavery, or was it States Rights? Perhaps it was the election of Lincoln? What were the real reasons for Southern Secession and what were the political issues in this time of war? Find your answers here in the Secession and Politics Disussion.
Hey, 5Fish! What's your take on the Wage Slavery of Employment today?
We do get to pick our plantations (or rather, they pick us!)
these days, but while the beatings have ended, physically, the physically-demanding need to work three jobs to raise kids is very like the sweat shoppes of olde!
And employment today being worse than slavery with regard to the fact it pays NO WHERE NEAR WHAT ANYONE IS ACTUALLY WORTH... nor do most jobs provide any sort of benefits below a certain level...
What class of SLAVE, high or low, on the old Grecian scale, would you put the American Wage Slaves of today?
Beowulf
Beowulf,
Do you consider yourself a slave?
Unionblue
__________________ "The American people and the Government at Washington may refuse to recognize it for a time but the inexorable logic of events will force it upon them in the end; that the war now being waged in this land is a war for and against slavery." Frederick Douglass
"Loyalty to our ancestors does not include loyalty to their mistakes." George Santayana
Great story JohnTaylor told. Fugitive slave is hauled before one of the federal commissioners. The Commissioner questions the runaway. Were you whipped? No. Were you starved? No. Did you have adequate shelter? Yes. Were you overworked? Not really. "Well then," concluded the commissioner, "it seems you ran from a very comfortable situation."
"If you're interested, your honor," replied the prisoner, "I believe the position is still open."
And employment today being worse than slavery with regard to the fact it pays NO WHERE NEAR WHAT ANYONE IS ACTUALLY WORTH... nor do most jobs provide any sort of benefits below a certain level...
One might gather that one's actual worth is what one figures it is. Don't know about y'all, but I never met a person who was willing to give me what I thought I was worth. Gotta be thousands out there who can do what I can. That's not going to get me what I think I'm worth.
Sounds liberal to me.
ole
__________________ I never knew a man who wished to be himself a slave. Consider if you know any good thing that no man desires for himself. A. Lincoln
One might gather that one's actual worth is what one figures it is. Don't know about y'all, but I never met a person who was willing to give me what I thought I was worth. Gotta be thousands out there who can do what I can. That's not going to get me what I think I'm worth.
Sounds liberal to me.
ole
Actually, I always thought I was overpaid. It was sobering when I started working and realized that if I needed an attorney, I couldn't afford myself.
I know there are a lot of people I can think of who I think are overpaid, but then some of them would be overpaid if they were paid a dollar.
__________________ "There must be more historians of the Civil War than there were generals figthing in it... Of the two groups, the historians are the more belligerent." David Donald, Lincoln Reconsidered (1961)
WE THE PEOPLE start out to form a peace treaty between a bunch of states... and somehow end up as SKID ROW's old album proclaimed, SLAVE(S) TO THE GRIND.
In other words, somehow BIG BUSINESS managed to get one up on us, and now we work at its pleasure, rather than it working for us...
So now, I live in a world where policemen, firemen, and teachers are paid nothing, and yet sports figures and rock stars can buy their way through and out of anything.
And I am a wage slave. So, yes, I do see that being the case. There is no political party who speaks for me with a snowball's chance of getting on a ballot, let alone getting elected to anything, so that's sort of like not being allowed to vote... (for whom and what I want!). Of course, we can always hope that Huckabee can take Silver in '08, but I am not holding my breath... (They'd probably get to fighting over the Confederate flag and make a bigger spectacle than those other two!)
My culture is besmirched by claims of Racism, and this hostility follows the Southerners wherever they go. Hollywood has us filed under LIVING DEAD in the genre section, so seeing a hero Southerner is like seeing a Great White Shark as a Protagonist...
I see JOHN ADAMS everywhere as this robust looking frontiersman, and yet no film about THOMAS on anywhere
near that level... or ever!
All I hear about is how strange and redundant Evangelical Southerner is as a term, as though we are the DELIVERANCE party...
And of course the obligatory yankee worship, and how much better off we all are... (and is it my imagination, or is that rascal on the five note getting BIGGER?)
Like we needed to see that more clearly, while JEFFERSON and his lowly two-note is simply forgotten... all the while the PENNY, which has less value than the materials which make it up, continues to thrive...
Enslavement? Cultural enslavement, yeah...
Beowulf
Oh, and still no one reads the post topic, as written, nor responds to it.... So I end up hijacking my own post!
Unionblue: Beowulf, Do you consider yourself a slave?
(Nine paragraphs later...)
Beowulf: Enslavement? Cultural enslavement, yeah...
Meaning what?
Unionblue
__________________ "The American people and the Government at Washington may refuse to recognize it for a time but the inexorable logic of events will force it upon them in the end; that the war now being waged in this land is a war for and against slavery." Frederick Douglass
"Loyalty to our ancestors does not include loyalty to their mistakes." George Santayana
"Wage Slavery" is not slavery of pre 1863, any who claim it is proves woeful ignorance on the matter.
"Wage Slavery" is a misnomer. In the US today, if you don't like your boss you can quit. No one can stop you. Your employer cannot beat or whip you on a whim. Your boss has no right to take your wife or children away from you or to simply take your wife. The idea that the modern average joe is somehow a slave is pure dishonest rhetoric. Anyone who has actually bothered to study American slavery would never be able to make such a comparison w/ a straight face.
"You work at Sonic, Wal Mart, IBM etc so you're a wage slave!" Ummm, no. You can quit, you're boss cannot tell you how to live where to live or opt to sell you to another employer and if he were to whip or beat an employee... he wouldn't be the boss for very long.
So Beouwulf, what was a teacher, fireman, policeman paid in the CS in comparison to say an actor, plantation owner or politician?
You claim to be a wage slave... can you quit next Friday if your employer makes a pass at your wife? Actually you probably wouldn't need to quit you could probably get the git fired. If you're told you will have to move to a different location in the company in say... Minneapolis can you say no? You are free to make of your life whatever you want of it. The sky is the limit. Only in the US can one of the richest men in the country have been a college drop out. He wasn't rich to start w/, he made his money the US way by working his tail off. More than a few very succesful and wealthy comapnies were started w/ a little blood sweat and tears by men who started from nothing.
I've been all over this country, seen all kinds of hospitality. I suspect your bad experiances have more to do w/ you than being from the south.
__________________ Few take the trouble to understand or to view the American scene with perspective. And we Americans love to find ourselves guilty of something. However, it is never I who am guilty, but those other Americans, the past or present government or the other political party. Americans almost never find other countries guilty. It is always ourselves or our fancied influence in other countries. Louis L'amour
"Wage Slavery" is not slavery of pre 1863, any who claim it is proves woeful ignorance on the matter.
"Wage Slavery" is a misnomer. In the US today, if you don't like your boss you can quit. No one can stop you. Your employer cannot beat or whip you on a whim. Your boss has no right to take your wife or children away from you or to simply take your wife. The idea that the modern average joe is somehow a slave is pure dishonest rhetoric. Anyone who has actually bothered to study American slavery would never be able to make such a comparison w/ a straight face.
"You work at Sonic, Wal Mart, IBM etc so you're a wage slave!" Ummm, no. You can quit, you're boss cannot tell you how to live where to live or opt to sell you to another employer and if he were to whip or beat an employee... he wouldn't be the boss for very long.
So Beouwulf, what was a teacher, fireman, policeman paid in the CS in comparison to say an actor, plantation owner or politician?
You claim to be a wage slave... can you quit next Friday if your employer makes a pass at your wife? Actually you probably wouldn't need to quit you could probably get the git fired. If you're told you will have to move to a different location in the company in say... Minneapolis can you say no? You are free to make of your life whatever you want of it. The sky is the limit. Only in the US can one of the richest men in the country have been a college drop out. He wasn't rich to start w/, he made his money the US way by working his tail off. More than a few very succesful and wealthy comapnies were started w/ a little blood sweat and tears by men who started from nothing.
I've been all over this country, seen all kinds of hospitality. I suspect your bad experiances have more to do w/ you than being from the south.
I first heard the term Wage Slave in reference to yankee treatment of freed white men in the North before the war.
They did whip them. They did beat them. They did other things.
About the only thing such an employee who leaves the employer gets is, well, his 'freedom'. He is now free to look for other servitude elsewhere, and the first thing he gets to talk about is... why did you leave? (The Un-asked
Bit is, of course... "What do you think will be any different here?").
I was a wage slave, once. I am now self-employed, and
would have it no other way. (I 'escaped' from my masters!) They thought I would get hungry and come back to the plantation; they were wrong.
I have actually worked at several places who paid for your 'schooling' and where you signed on to work so many years to pay them back for that... or else you had to buy 'yourself' back out of servitude in a lump sum!
I am just appalled that, as friends of mine who stayed tell me, things just only get worse. RIGHT TO WORK states.
The need for Unions... You know the score...
So, yeah, I see the similarities!
Beowulf
And you are right about one other thing. It is not the South who has such problems; it is the Southerners working for Transplants!
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