The New Slavery

In an article by Harold Meyerson of the American Prospect entitled "How the American South Drives the Low-Wage Economy" , he describes in great detail how the U.S. South is the low wage center of America.  He explains that while the North was developing banking, finance, and factories the South was a quasi-feudal outlier with a sprinkling of banks and rails and virtually no factories at all. The South's economy was based totally on slave labor that generated "unprecedented profits for manufacturers and bankers who lived hundreds or thousands of miles from the Mississippi Delta." 

In addition Meyerson goes on to explain how some industrial areas of China are experiencing such wage growth that they are catching up to the wage levels of Mississippi. He even cites a study that U.S. manufacturing is experiencing some growth due to the South's low wages, lack of unionism, and the South's aversion minimum wage standards. One driving force behind this phenomena is "the DNA of white Southern elites, whose primary impulse has always been to keep African Americans down. To those elites, the prospect of biracial unions threatening not just their profits but the legitimacy of their social order. To counter the biracial Southern populist movement that emerged in the 1890s, those elites created Jim Crow laws that legitimated and promoted white racism and it was largely by manipulating that racism that they were able to thwart almost all the Southern organizing campaigns that unions have waged since the 1930s."

So the question arises: when are Southern whites going to wake-up and realize that they have been puns in a scam created by the rich greedy elites to enrich themselves by using racism. When are they going to stop electing trolls of the elite who maintain the "new slavery", promote anti-unionism, voter suppression, poor infrastructure, poor public schools, substandard healthcare, and the poor standard of living. Are Southern whites ever going to realize that they have been used or are they going to hang on to the racism, their bogus "Southern Pride", their Confederate Flag, and self- imposed economic oppression? After 150 years, you would think they would figure it out, wouldn't you?