wage slavery

“And I will come near to you to judgment; and I will be a swift witness against the sorcerers, and against the adulterers, and against false swearers, and against those that oppress the hireling in his wages, the widow, and the fatherless, and that turn aside the stranger from his right, and fear not me, saith the LORD of hosts” (Malachi 3.5).

In his powerful book, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, Edward E. Baptist writes,
 
“For seventy years, southern and northern economic and political elites—and many average white citizens—had cooperated to extract profit and power from the forced movement and exploitation of enslaved people’s bodies and minds. Always, the proslavery forces had made the rest of the United States choose between profitable expansion of the slave country or economic slowdown.”
 
Unfortunately, economic and political elites are still at it.

Today, the price we pay for economic expansion, so they say, is what some critics refer to as “wage slavery.” Now, there are those who have theorized that anytime a man or woman agrees to work for a wage, they have entered a form of slavery. I am not so extreme. However, in today’s economic environment, many corporations, with a nod of the head and wink of an eye by politicians of all stripes, have suppressed common wages and kept the minimum wage so wickedly low as to, essentially, have created indentured servants. In addition, employers have, again with politicians’ blessing, stripped away benefits such as health care and pensions. And while all of this is happening, company profits go up, already rich stock holders get richer, and CEO’s salaries and bonuses go through the roof.

Really? You can’t cut just a tad, a trifling mite into your grotesquely gigantic financial portfolio to give that skilled technician who installs your customers’ cable service a measly little raise so he or she is making $15 dollars an hour rather than $10 or $12? You know, the one you demand six 10-12 hour days’ labor a week; the one who gets no paid vacation (while you sail on your yacht during one of your 20 weeks a year vacation); the one you take from his or her family so that their children see them 15 minutes a day? By how many hundreds could we multiply this one example?

Great “Family Values” you have there.

You are pathetic. Cro-Magnon.

Your behavior is ungodly. It is anti-Christ.

“It be sin unto you.”[1]

You are, not doubt, simply acting the part of “disciple.” Following the “Satanic Verses” written by one such as the false prophet, Milton Friedman, who “holds that a corporation that acts responsibly toward the community in which it does its business is shirking its only duty: to maximize its short-term stock valuation.”[2]

Of course, your guilt is, perhaps, nothing compared to others; you know, those who claim to know better; who claim grace and inspiration and discernment through the Holy Spirit; those who call themselves Christian.

O, how many so-called Christians, with the Bible sitting at their fingertips shouting at them to do otherwise, actively condone and support such immoral behavior or, by their silence, assent to the ungodly oppression of the poor!

It is mind-boggling. The entire unseemly gaggle—corporatists, politicians, and “Christians”—are united in their commitment to shamefully set at naught the commandments of a just God, and reject his attempt to assist “deviant us” in the formation of a just society.

“This is a rebellious people, lying children,
      children that will not hear the law of the LORD:
Which say to the seers,
      ‘See not;’
and to the prophets,
      ‘prophesy not unto us right things,
speak unto us smooth things,
      prophesy deceits:
Get you out of the way,
      turn aside out of the path,
            cause the Holy One of Israel to cease from before us.’”[3]
 
Where is the Christian prophetic voice? Obsessed and diverted by gay marriage and all other genitalia related matters, they have forgotten or ignored or denied that “the love of money is the root of all evil.”[4] This one passage captures the message that is at the heart of so much of the Old Testament prophets.
​
But, alas, the watchmen have not, or will not blow the trump. Rather,
 
“…The shepherds of Israel… do feed themselves! Should not the shepherds feed the flocks?
Ye eat the fat, and ye clothe you with the wool, ye kill them that are fed: but ye feed not the flock. The diseased have ye not strengthened, neither have ye healed that which was sick, neither have ye bound up that which was broken, neither have ye brought again that which was driven away, neither have ye sought that which was lost; but with force and with cruelty have ye ruled them. And they were scattered, because there is no shepherd: and they became meat to all the beasts of the field, when they were scattered. My sheep wandered through all the mountains, and upon every high hill: yea, my flock was scattered upon all the face of the earth, and none did search or seek after them.”[5]
 
Too many Christian shepherds have been taken in by the sorcery of wealth; heeded the siren call of the wealthy “wizards that peep, and that mutter.”
 
“But, should not a people seek unto their God?
 
To the law and to the testimony:
      if they speak not according to this word,
            it is because there is no light in them.”[6]
 
Be warned, those wizards of wealth and those false prophets who oppress are not to be trusted.
 
“Their throat is an open sepulcher; with their tongues they have used deceit; the poison of asps is under their lips… destruction and misery are in their ways.”[7]


[1] Deuteronomy 24.15

[2] See, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government, Mike Lofgren, chapter 7.

[3] Isaiah 30.9-11

[4] 1 Timothy 6.10

[5] Ezekiel 34.2-6

[6] See Isaiah 8.19-20

[7] Romans 3.13 & 16

Thou shalt not oppress an hired servant that is poor and needy, whether he be of thy brethren, or of thy strangers that are in thy land within thy gates: at his day thou shalt give him his hire, neither shall the sun go down upon it; for he is poor, and setteth his heart upon it: lest he cry against thee unto the Lord, and it be sin unto thee” (Deuteronomy 24.14-15).