The American Wealth Machine

Last week I watched. “Slavery By Another Name” on PBS. I was ashamed and sickened by those stories. The history of the early years after the Civil War are unknown to most white Americans. Thanks to the civil rights movement of the 60s, I was familiar with the Jim Crow laws that ruled Black life in the South for most of the 20th century. But I had no idea that Blacks were essentially enslaved again right after Reconstruction. That they rebuilt the South and fueled the growth of both Southern and Northern industry. Without them, the South might never have recovered or built the industrial engines that anchored their economy.

While this documentary enlightened me about Black history, recent media reports, opened up broader questions about the creation of American wealth. In particular, a story on tomato workers, one about Apple’s manufacturing of my beloved iPads, and a podcast featuring Mike Daisey on “This American Life,” exposed the truth that our long history of exploitation in the service of the American economic engine continues. It is hard not to conclude that an unarticulated American core value is that we the people will tolerate worker abuse and outright slavery if it yields a higher standard of living or cheap gadgets.

We are proud to be the wealthiest country on earth. We have the best of everything and the most liberty. Or so we say. We believe that we got that way from the hard work of individuals, few restrictions on economic expansion, exceptional inventiveness, and a Free Market. As a result, Americans have been rewarded with unprecedented wealth.

Here’s the truth: key pieces of our economy depended on slavery, near-slavery, and the systematic exploitation of human and environmental capital. In the South, African American enslavement was critical to success. Chinese Americans were instrumental in opening up the West. Most recently, Mexicans (who we won’t even allow to become Americans), are exploited everywhere. Our economic well-being is predicated on cheap labor. Corporate greed was only briefly mitigated by the labor movement. As American labor got more expensive and the capacity to exploit without restraint became more difficult, American corporations went global. Today the abuse of Chinese labor is in the headlines. One of the richest corporations on earth, Apple, which was founded by a counter-culture kind of guy, created great wealth by outsourcing manufacturing to unregulated Chinese factory barons. Out of sight, out of mind.

The Occupy movement has exposed Americans to the discrepancies between rules for the 1% and the rules that govern the rest of us. But it hasn’t challenged the fundamental and unstated belief that it is OK to exploit anyone who is lower on the economic food chain in order to preserve your own place in the hierarchy. Without addressing the abuses of Free Market Capitalism (a la Milton Friedman), we will perpetuate an inherently unequal and immoral system. With the modern labor movement decimated by right-wing labor-busting tactics and internal corruption, no one protects workers. Worker abuses, whether in China or Florida, are human rights abuses. For all our talk about religion in this country, we feel little moral outrage about the treatment of those who farm for us, slaughter our animals, cook our meals, or build our phones. Tellingly, almost all of these people are people of color.

There is a ray of hope. There was this news yesterday about Foxconn which was likely in response to Apple’s move to address labor abuses. However, pressure on Apple and other tech companies must continue, given the attempt at a premature whitewash by the president of the “labor” organization investigating abuse. Addressing abuse here at home is harder, especially in a dismal economy. Labor -- whether in manufacturing, computing, agriculture or meat-packing -- is held hostage to the fear of deportation. For the middle class, the jobs get deported. For the working poor, they get deported.

We no longer lock people in cages, refuse to feed them, work them literally to death, and then dump them in unmarked graves. Every one of us should honor the men and women who died because we looked the other way while white Southerners enslaved a whole people, TWICE. But abuse, more subtle and often invisible, continues in our name. It’s past time for an American Spring.