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Old Posted May 1, 2012, 7:06 PM
Dr Nevergold Dr Nevergold is offline
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Join Date: Jun 2000
Location: Winnipeg
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^The immigration issue cannot be overlooked. Europe isn't home to masses of immigrants (at the same level) coming in to be exploited for their cheap labor (and subsequently, as stated before, abuses of human dignity).

Immigrants have been injecting energy into the American economy long before any other nation had the phenomenon. Europe has been growing with immigration, but again not the same way.

Immigration has untold roots to the economic expansion in America throughout history.

Something else that has been an untold story is how many cities in America, largely southern cities, were able to achieve mass success without paying proper wages. If you study the history of Memphis, it has went from one of the cleanest cities in America to a rather grungy place in parts in the post-civil rights era. Why? Memphis city officials could discriminate and segregate its black communities out of the city, and hire them for sanitization jobs and pay them nearly nothing. While slave labor was made illegal after the civil war (and they were used as free labor to clean city streets before), the conditions really didn't get that much better as they were forced to be paid sub-standard wages, a huge savings to the city, for cleaning it up and keeping it up.

Few European cities have had this recent phenomenon. Could you imagine running a city budget on much of the labor force being non-union, disposable upon any reason, and paying them virtually no benefits with minimal wages? This was the truth in many American cities right into the 1970's, recent history by any stretch of the imagination.

We're only 40 years removed from that era in American history, and we question why so many parts of America are so strongly anti-union, anti-worker? The history of America has been to exploit labor and pump up the economy on that exploitation, with the social stratification that comes of it. People want to know why we're so unequal in incomes, well there is a starting vantage point.

MLK wasn't just marching for racial equality, it was a labor movement. He was marching for sanitization worker rights when he got shot.

And the same thing applies in Eastern Kentucky. Anyone seen first hand the dire poverty and the abuses of mine workers? It is no different from what happened in the streets of Memphis. Again, this issue is a class and economic issue, not a race issue entirely. In today's modern era, we need to address economic injustice across all lines.
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