Modern Slavery

Has anyone else on this site realized that people today are still slaves. Slavery has just been dressed up in a different way. Some people work just to pay back enough money to survive. They don't end up with anything in the end for their own use. How is that any better than working on a farm and getting fed and given a place to live for free. Thats what it comes down to in today's world. You work all day to get enough money to pay to most likely the same guy who you work for and also owns your apartment complex. what is really disturbing is that people have pretty much shutup about the issue and noone wants to do anything about it.

Yeah, and forget the fact that most people don't know how to budget themselves, or rely on credit cards to buy everything, or make irresponsible decisions that will effect them for the rest of their lives.

But, then again, it is so much easier to blame the government than take responsibility for ones own stupidity.

it's a perpetual cycle that lasts generations

A slave is property and can be hunted down should they go look for greener pastures. They are not given the opportunity to better themselves or their lot in life and are left with no choice but to accept what their master gives them.

I can get up every single day and if I don't like the situation, I can toss my stuff in my car and drive the heck away. I can go to school to learn more, and increasing my education will increase my salary. Heck, If you just take a few short months and learn to be an EMT your pay will jump substantially.

Slavery means you have no choices, the decisions are made by your master.

If you live in the USA you can improve yourself and your lot in life. You just need to do it.

You think this is slavery here? Go to the Sudan where families are still auctioned off and split up as chattel. It just might open your eyes.

These are just my thoughts on it.

wupy

[edit on 6-7-2006 by mrwupy]

What you dont understand is that you're made to think as long as you make enough money you're fine. It is not always about money, about 98 percent of the whole country does teh same routine every single day for most likely the rest of their lives since they get out of high school or college. the only difference is they give you a piece of paper and say you can spend this. usually its also the same guy selling you groceries that owns your apartment complex and also where you work so if thats not slavery i dont know what is

The rich get richer and the poor get poorer..

Originally posted by cmdrkeenkid
Yeah, and forget the fact that most people don't know how to budget themselves, or rely on credit cards to buy everything, or make irresponsible decisions that will effect them for the rest of their lives.

But, then again, it is so much easier to blame the government than take responsibility for ones own stupidity.

Agreed.

In the UK, loans total a trillion pounds

This is a tricky issue, which isn’t always as black and white as we might lovingly imagine it to be. There are a number of factors which contribute to deepening or lessening one’s financial bondage and these include factors which are within our scope of control and factors over which we have limited or no control at all. Within most Western societies, it is true that opportunities exist to improve your lot in life. These opportunities largely revolve around education and initiative, but I have seen too much to count these as the sole factors involved. Other factors can and do play important roles in shaping our perspectives regarding financial freedom and in determining what opportunities present themselves that we might take advantage of to improve our financial comfort. Some of these factors are obvious and some less so. I shall examine a few of these factors through the somewhat limited lens of my own personal experiences and observations.

Education

Access to a decent education is obviously a critical factor when it comes to freeing oneself from the shackles of debt and poverty. A good education, whilst worthy purely in and of itself, is advantageous in this regard due to the fact that a good education can often land you a good job that pays a good salary. I have seen this myself, having observed a number of my friends work diligently through school and university to be offered jobs which pay well initially and very well over time. However, it is important to observe that obtaining a good education and walking into a stable, lasting and well-paying job is not as easy an exercise as it is often made out to be.

Firstly, it is a sad truth that not every child has access to a decent education, as much as we would like this to be the case. Having taught high school myself for three years, I feel I can capably state that the amount of funding a school receives, combined with extraneous factors such as parents financial situations, devoted teachers, home life and issues of demographics can all play a part in shaping the extent to which a child’s education benefits them in the long run. Too often I have seen extremely gifted students whose genius and dedication go to waste due to factors beyond their control. I grew up in a tiny farm town in the bush here in Australia and saw too many kids pulled out of school by parents who either placed no value on education or who simply could not afford to invest as much time, effort and money into their child’s education as they would have liked. I have seen the lives and potential of brilliant kids crumble because their parent died, or because of more malevolent factors such as child abuse. I have seen promising students denied the benefits of a thorough education due to apathetic teachers, or due to racism, or sexism, or homophobia, all of which affect kids far more than we might think.

The point here is that, whilst it’s tempting to proclaim that “all you need to succeed is an education”, this is most definitely not the case in reality. Whilst a good education can serve to lift people from the shadows of financial ruin and bondage, obtaining one, or effectively utilising one, is not always as simple as we would hope.

Attitude

When I talk about attitude, I do not simply mean “get up and go”. Attitude in this sense encompasses a number of issues, including how you perceive your financial standing personally, which is in turn affected by issues such as what values you were raised with and what observations you made from your parents own financial situation and their dealings with it. Before I was a teacher, I worked for one of those dodgy “pay-day advance” money lending institutions (worst. job. ever.) and saw, on a daily basis, a plethora of people who couldn’t afford to make ends meet. One day, one of our regulars brought in her daughter. She explained to me that it was her daughter’s 18th birthday and that she wanted to sign her daughter up for the pay-day advance system. As a present. Now, how might that poor girl’s understanding of financial workings differ from someone whose parents instilled a more responsible sense of financial security? When that girl finds herself in financial difficulty (as inevitably happens to us all), she is going to come to the conclusion that the best way to deal with those difficulties is to apply for a loan of a few hundred dollars at crippling interest rates. This kind of thinking only serves to deepen the girl’s woes in the long term, as she finds herself plunged into a spiral of debt from which recovery is virtually impossible. So, then, is this attitude towards financial matters entirely the fault of the girl? Of her mother?

When I first took that job (as a means of getting off unemployment, ironically enough) I had a very black and white outlook on my customers. They were, in my own mind, people either too lazy or too stupid to find viable financial solutions. After a while, however, I realised that things were not as clear cut as I had assumed. A factory laid off dozens of workers, men and women who had worked hard, with families to feed and mortgages to pay. Many of them found their way to me, as a last resort. The banks, they explained, had turned them down. In their minds, they had no other options. They had to feed their families, even if that meant placing themselves into a situation which they were fully aware was a vicious cycle of debt. These days, I am far less judgemental when I see people out of work or people who can perceive no alternative to debt, no way out of their hole. Because sometimes life intervenes and when that happens a previously stable job and a decent education might simply not be enough.

Wants Versus Needs

Of course, that is not to say that greed and foolishness does not play a part in entrenching people in a cycle of debt. As The Director wisely pointed out, loans and borrowing are at staggering levels. The same is true in my beloved Australia. More and more people find themselves living off their credit cards, or struggling to meet repayments for things they really don’t need, but merely want. Take me, for example. I really, really, really, really (no, really) want a 50” Panasonic plasma HDTV. I really want one. I’ve done my research and know exactly which one I want, how much I should expect to pay and what accessories I will need to derive the most from it. Now, this little treasure would, in total (including HD set-top box, HDMI cable, surge protector and extended warranty) cost me a little in excess of $6000 AU. Do I have $6000? Yes, but only just, and that only as a result of fervent saving and the denial of lesser treasures. Do I want this set up? Yes (I really do). Do I need it, though? No, of course not. Nobody needs a 50” TV, even if it will render a 1080p signal (sigh). I just want it. But, as much as I would like to, I’m not going to blow my savings on what is essentially a luxury item. My old 68cm TV works fine, but even if it were to blow up entirely, I am still objective enough to know that, whilst I could pay for my dream TV, I couldn’t really afford it. A lot of people seem to lack such objectivity and, indeed, I am myself a victim of wants, with my new Xbox 360 (which would look so nice on that HDTV … sigh) which is entertaining indeed, but not exactly essential to my survival.

We as consumers in a Western market are assailed on all sides by advertising, which promises us that the procurement of things will make our lives better, make us more beautiful, more sexy, more energetic. It can be hard to resist. In a way, most of us seem hard-wired to value the immediate thrill, forsaking long-term security in favour of having what we want right away. We hate to wait for our toys, and with credit cards and interest-free finance and rental agreements, we don’t have to.

CONT'D

These things blind us to the consequences of over-spending, enticing us with promises of the here and now. And we are usually foolish enough to allow ourselves to be led. “It’s only $6000 – I’ll pay it off over 18 months interest free”. It isn’t until some time has passed that we realise that the things we thought we desperately needed were simply things we really wanted. It is only then that we realise that we should have listened to the eternal wisdom of the Rolling Stones: “You can’t always get what you want. But if you try, sometimes, you might find, you get what you need”.

To Close

There is far more to this issue than my sad little posts can hope to encompass. What I have listed here are merely the surface thoughts of an issue far greater than my poor mind can hope to contend with on this freezing Monday night. I’d like to echo the always wise words of mrwupy, though, in declaring that what we might consider slavery is anything but. Real slavery still exists, in a very real sense. We might sometimes benefit from taking a step back and appreciating what we have, in the face of all those who have nothing. Now, what’s showing on TV? Damn tiny standard definition picture …

I tend to agree with the OP on this.

If you are working for someone else and you are paid "wages" "tips" or "compensation"
on your W-2 then you are essentially a slave to your employer.

Then there is the self induced slavery of debt you incur attempting to have a few of the finer things in life, but most people end up spending everything they've worked for paying for long term nursing home care, so there is very little left to leave your family.

The only way to break the cycle is to work for yourself, but the cost of education keeps the majority
in check training them to be good little worker bees for the upper class.

At least some people see my point. What I'm saying is that it's almost impossible for you to free yourself because you don't make enough to cover everything you need to pay for and also have some left over for yourself.
The big reason this problem is so big is that noone will rise up to say anything or when someone does they call them "un american" because they don't like American system.

Originally posted by mrwupy
If you live in the USA you can improve yourself and your lot in life. You just need to do it.

Yeah and you cant improve your life in anyother country on the world, only the good old U.S of A. All othe countries are third world! Were they still are picking cotten and rice off the fields.


Dude you need to get out of your country.


Also are we not jsut discussing marxist theory here? In capitalism we sell our manpower for a wage, in this we can own and gain "capital" and the more "capital" you have the more you can gain. This it to motivate the worker. The question is, in todays late-capitalistic society is the ability to gain a satisfying capital just a illusion? What happens is a the few rich raise their standards of living above the masses. This then causes the masses to want to reach that level of living, by the time the masses do reach this level, the few rich have then raisied their level of living even more than befor, and then again the masses try to reach this level, and by the time they do......i think you get the pattern.

In this aspect the masses are never satisfied, and they are always working harder and longer to try to reach the next level of living, when they do they raise the bar again. So it seems that the working class/masses are jsut running a endless race, while we propel the rich into even higher standards of living.

The question is, will the masses someday realize this and then refuse to consume?
If everyone stopped chasing "the green" the rich would be poor. Also i dont believe marx wanted a violent revolution, by my knowledge lenin added this into the marxist theory. It would be amusing if we through a "economic revolution" shop owners saw that the value of the national currency as worthless, and that communties started producing their own currency. In this sense, the people who do own large amounts of hard cash and credit, would be broke. Yes the whole national ecnomy would shut down, but then we could build over again.
I guess its just a dream of mine for all the rich in the world, to suddenly become the poor.

If you don't leave a large inheritence to your children THEN you were a slave to the Gov't or an addiction, or a lifestyle.
Slaves needed permission to hunt & fish------so do you via license
Slaves need permission to leave the plantation------so do you via passport.
Slaves can't own property except for trinkets which could be siezed anytime-------------You think you own things but stop paying property tax, registration, & income tax and you'll see where you actually stand in the eyes of the law.
CITIZEN is Roman for SLAVE, look it up in any old version of Blacks Law.
The gov't can take your children away at anytime they want.
You are a slave. You were just indoctrinated to believe different from public school.

Slavery through the economy, the freedom of choice is but an illusion to keep the population happy, the population thinks that they have a say in everything but the truth is they don't. It is like the matrix, the ones in control stay in control, everyone else works for them in one way or another, most do so unknowingly.

The people will become poorer and poorer and be indept most of the time, even should one become rich, they still serve the system that is used by the ones in control. There is almost no way to get out of the system, like the matrix.

The NWO will bring global economy to the world and in a way control it.