A Corporate Thanksgiving

As reported in the NYTimes corporate profits for the last fiscal quarter were the highest (before factoring in inflation) in U.S. history. While America's workers see their future crumble under the weight of joblessness and debt, the lords of Wall Street can hardly contain their glee. As the WSJ coyly describes it: the record bonuses being lavished on managers demonstrate Wall Street's "knack for finding a way to churn out profits and prop up pay levels despite uneasy markets, mounting regulation and mistrust by many Americans."

In the past when we spoke of two Americas the discussion centered on race and its intersection with poverty. No more. America's chickens or should I say turkeys have finally come home to roost. Having worked tirelessly since the end of post Civil War Reconstruction to keep black, white and brown labor at each others' throats our scions of Wall Street are callously setting about destroying what remains of the country's middle-class. We are evolving towards a system where the corporation replaces the old plantation: the haves get to govern as barons and the slaves are forever the have-nots.

Roasting the Middle Class Goose

The top 1 percent has been able to see their incomes rise almost twenty-fold over the past thirty years by playing each class of worker against the other, all with the encouragement of our own government. As a result we have the unconscionable spectacle of U.S. banks using taxpayer money to pay themselves massive bonuses while laying off American workers to hire temporary foreign replacements on the cheap.

"An investigation by the Associated Press revealed that major U.S. banks brought in foreign workers for high paying jobs while laying off American workers at the same time. The investigation revealed that a dozen banks requested visas for 21,800 foreign workers over a six-year span."--

(Now picture 21,800 mortgages sliced and diced and parceled out into Collateral Debt Obligations going belly-up. That's what our grifter class declares as smart money.)

As for those good blue collar jobs, thanks to his manipulated failure to make common cause with the black brown and red, the pale working stiff is getting the same shaft his "white trash' ancestors did when their wages were kept meager because of slavery.

In her excellent book "The New Jim Crow" Michelle Alexander explains how thanks to the policies of the government elite African Americans have been systematically kept apart and economically weak. She describes how the so-called 'War on Drugs' replaced the insidious control of race segregation. But the benefit of mass incarceration of the dark-skinned working poor goes even further towards enriching the investor class.

"The private contracting of prisoners for work fosters incentives to lock people up. Prisons depend on this income. Corporate stockholders who make money off prisoners' work lobby for longer sentences, in order to expand their workforce. The system feeds itself," says a study by the Progressive Labor Party, which accuses the prison industry of being "an imitation of Nazi Germany with respect to forced slave labor and concentration camps."

The prison industry complex is one of the fastest-growing industries in the United States and its investors are on Wall Street. "This multimillion-dollar industry has its own trade exhibitions, conventions, websites, and mail-order/Internet catalogs. It also has direct advertising campaigns, architecture companies, construction companies, investment houses on Wall Street, plumbing supply companies, food supply companies, armed security, and padded cells in a large variety of colors."

As the writer sums up in El Diario-La Prensa: the rich have a lot to be thankful for. Thanks to prison labor, the United States is once again an attractive location for investment in work designed for Third World labor. Now we know why Wall Street is so content to sell out the country and give us the bird.