The Thirteenth Amendment
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
- Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution
By Gregg Wall (2-5-2022)
Where are America’s great abolitionists? And why have they forsaken us?
The questions are not rhetorical, but an acknowledgement that all Americans are enslaved at birth, in the service of national debt that has largely been accumulated making the rich catastrophically wealthy. Some place the national debt at $30 trillion, with every newborn American facing, presently, approximately $90,000 in debt hanging over their head the second they exit the womb.
The libertarian US economy means Americans are enslaved, indentured, cast into involuntary servitude in ways too numerous to count; but rest assured, by the end of this piece, we will enumerate some of the most egregious examples.
First, what is slavery? Contemporary definitions include, but are not limited to: Forced labor, Bonded labor (more traditionally, called indentured servitude, that is labor to repay a debt), Child labor, Descent-based slavery, Trafficking, and Early and forced marriage.
The Thirteenth Amendment also refers to involuntary servitude… labor demanded under contract or peonage, generally, to repay a debt. And here, indentured servitude would fit the bill.
As America has little or no safety net, Americans are often forced to work in deplorable conditions, often at pay dictated – not by market forces, or via a living wage established by the government – but by monopolies and monopsony. Moreover, globalization and technology means that an employer can shift jobs overseas the moment a monopolist feels labor is getting out of line or threatens to unionize. Technology has reached a point, where jobs often can be easily automated. The Washington Post placed the number of Americans working for less than $15 an hour at 39 million.
Somewhere between 33% and 40% of American workers are employed in the gig economy, which is only expected to grow. That is to say, doing jobs with substandard pay and that are rife with wage theft. And what is the foundation of the gig economy… the idea, basically, is to give employers control over employees, but then turn around and say they are contract labor, so employers can escape all manner of employee benefits, taxes, and scrutiny.
And the outcome for the worker, who are paid a nonliving wage or engaged in gig work? Often substandard living conditions, and greater and greater amounts of personal debt – on top of the aforementioned national debt – that compels them to keep grinding it out, in indentured servitude. In short, workers cannot escape the debt and taxes that surround them, which has an impact on their mental and physical health and their family life. (Moreover, the US government uses the national debt to extract taxes from everyday Americans, at rates the wealthiest can’t be bothered to pay, if they pay anything; and then the government uses the same debt to enforce punitive austerity upon the American people.)
And with the consolidation of the US economy, into cartels and monopolies (thank you Private Equity & Wall Street), many workers simply do not have choices, particularly in regards who they work for.
So we can see that tens of millions of Americans are enslaved by a system that is entirely rigged against them. And our U.S. Congress? They could afford greater worker protections and in fact, Dems have won office on promises to expand worker protections, like: a living wage, a child tax credit, and a Medicare for All health care option. But our day traders in the Congress, once ensconced in power, have little appetite to curtail the profits associated with increasing their donors’ and big business interests’ greatest cost, employee wages.
And so the cycle repeats and the number of Americans indentured, enslaved, by a failed libertarian economic model grows and expands.
But the fun doesn’t stop there. Americans are not only indentured by the Federal government, that they have little or no say in, but they are indentured by the concentration of wealth. We’ve all read the statistics, the wealthiest ten percent of Americans own more wealth than the bottom half of Americans. That wealth seeks a home, and that home is usually in businesses and opportunities that prey upon and indenture Americans even further. Rather than compete, create jobs, start up a business, capital in America, as often as not, engages in rent seeking behavior and the easiest means of rent extraction is in debt and debt service fees.
Payday lenders serve the underbanked with usury.
For-profit medical care means indentured workers often forego critical medical care and medicine they need, so as mitigate or prevent going deeper into debt. Which makes for an unsafe labor force and ever rising medical bankruptcies, as workers often wait until it's too late to seek treatment.
Student debt… in the land of the enslaved, home of the indentured… has climbed to 1.7 trillion dollars and counting. So that rather than encourage education, the cornerstone of any healthy democracy, America has created yet another stop sign or barrier to entry (which precludes Americans from escaping what has become a caste system in the land of systemic racism).
Commercial financial interests, private equity & investors – fueled by the Federal Reserve’s easy money policies – have piled into residential housing. In yet, the latest move to jack up rents and remove the American dream, home ownership, out of the grasp of tens of millions of Americans. Homelessness and evictions are on the rise.
In today’s headlines, inflation is often written about… but what is inflation? Given record profits, inflation is little more than rent seeking by America’s monopolies and utilities in the form of consumer price gouging. Just one more way, for those in power, to keep workers indentured, on the precipice of household disaster, and easily enslaved.
And what does all this do to American children? The US ranks near the bottom of advanced nations in child wellness, per UNICEFF. Shockers, Scandinavian countries, w/ healthy mixed economies and social safety nets, ranked at the top of child wellbeing. Per the Washington Post: Of 41 nations ranked on child poverty, the United States was fourth from the bottom.
Meanwhile, the ten wealthiest billionaires (almost all Americans) saw their wealth double during the pandemic, in a US economy and by a government that is entirely rigged in their favor. And aside from a plutocratic tax code, and a juiced stock market, the next biggest way to increase one’s wealth is to exploit business’ largest expense, labor.
It’s no exaggeration to say that tens of millions of Americans are indentured and therefore, enslaved, in violation of the Thirteenth Amendment. And this piece just scratches the surface on the numerous ways Americans are caught in debt traps, that all but ensure their lives, their children’s lives, are made a living hell with little or no way out.
So that increasingly, what it means to be ‘free’ in America means to be indentured and enslaved.
It’s time, long past time, for the abolition of slavery, and the creation of an economy and a government that works for all Americans, not merely those holding the reins of power. For just as the economy can be financially engineered to exponentially increase the wealth of a privileged few, the US economy can also be engineered to work for all Americans.
There is no social justice without economic justice. And as POTUS Kennedy said, Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free. And to take that a step further, economic & social freedoms are indivisible, and when one American is impoverished, all Americans are impoverished... a shadow of their lesser selves & a diminishment of America's potential greatness.
And so the questions arise again: Where are America’s great abolitionists? Where are our congresswomen and congressmen? Where is the president, and what of his unfulfilled promises to the American people?
Copyright JM Hamilton Publishing 2022
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