"Unequal Protection": The People's Masters

[Donnachaidh]

http://truthout.org/unequal-protection-peoples-masters/1304366817

Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of the smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society.

This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights. — Albert Einstein, Monthly Review, May 1949<1>

Fast on the heels of the passage and then Supreme Court interpretations of the Fourteenth Amendment, a new type of feudalism emerged in America with the Industrial Revolution; it included women, people of color, and first-generation immigrants. The explosion of factories in the East and the Midwest was so great and so rapid that millions of workers emigrated from Europe to the United States, many of them arriving deeply in debt and indentured to their new employers.

My wife, Louise, and I once bought a truckload of slate from a local quarry to pave an area in front of our home in Vermont. The quarry owner who delivered the stone told us, “This is from a huge pile of seconds that were mined over 150 years ago by indentured Welshmen.” Looking into the history of the quarry industry in New England, I discovered that the incredibly difficult and often deadly job of quarryman was filled for more than a hundred years almost exclusively by indentured men freshly arrived from Wales, Scotland, and Ireland.

More at the link --