Broken families. Broken hearts. Used up lives. Violated human rights. Human trafficking. Slavery. When the focus of our society isn’t people and human values, this happens.
When all the shots are called by those who control money and want more money, we get a society of two parts: rich parasites and poor drudges. So, if you are one of those who resents immigrants, feeling as if they are taking your jobs, lowering your wages, or changing your local culture, take a look at their stories. Are they any better off than you? Do they have much agency in their rotten lives? Can you understand their suffering? Would many who came from poor countries not be a lot happier if they could have afforded to stay home with their families and their own culture? You probably have not known many of them like I have, grown folks getting drunk in a bar and crying like babies when their home country’s music was played, missing their friends and families, their roots, wondering why they were living. Still, this report about human trafficking from the Philippines may open your eyes a little bit:
(Note: if the video linked above gets deleted, you may search the Internet for the title: “Empire Files: Buying a Slave – The Hidden World of US/Philippines Trafficking”)
By the way, if you consider our immigrants a problem for our country, you might want to test your beliefs against this article debunking common immigration myths. It bears out my own considerable experience with our immigrant community.
An interesting quote from the video: “If you want immigrants to return to their countries, just create jobs in their countries.” But, of course, as long as their countries, like ours, are caught in the stranglehold of capitalism, whose goal it always is to accumulate more capital on top of existing capital (making money from money for those who have a lot), jobs are more often destroyed or withheld than created in order to cut out as many wage earners as possible and thus increase the “owner’s” profits. Markets create jobs. Capitalism, more often than not, kills them.
Socialism, on the other hand, even the seriously flawed central-bureaucracy version of it which spread through places like the Soviet Union and China in the last century, has actually proven itself much, much, better at creating jobs and financial stability than capitalism. Odd, right? The exact opposite of the propaganda you and I grew up with, isn’t it? Still, when I talked to a former Soviet Union citizen, he told me exactly that. He said that back in the socialist days, nobody suffered existential fears linked to financial insecurity. Only when his country joined the western world, did this frightful new element enter their lives. Since we are on the topic, socialism is actually far more democratic than capitalism (another thing we have been lied to about). While it’s true that the Soviet model of government was undemocratic, this wasn’t socialism’s fault. Rather, it was the fault of single-party communist revolutions which made school. The guiding principle of socialism is that our world, including our places of work, belong to all of us and therefore our workplaces should be run by us rather than us being ruled and exploited by inconsiderate and selfish CEOs, absentee shareholders, or billionaire “owners,” who raid our paychecks to accumulate insane wealth and then use some of this loot to corrupt any democracy in government, so they can maintain and expand their dominance. Thus, capitalism encourages and provides a vehicle for reckless greed which gladly includes human trafficking and slavery when possible, while socialism fundamentally opposes this. It’s worthwhile to look into various forms of socialism (particularly those which aren’t as faulty in their conception as the ones tried as national systems in the last century), especially when capitalism is so soundly failing us these days. I have already published some glimpses and plan to do more of it. So, do keep reading this blog. You may come across more surprises.
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