Michael Moore takes on capitalism while I take on the myths of labor

October 3, 2009

Re: My thoughts on Michael Moore's "Capitalism: A love story" & understanding of labor

My Dad & I went to see Michael Moore's political satire movie, "Capitalism: A love story", earlier today (Saturday, October 3, 2009). I thought it was a good movie that sent the message that the poor and middle class are getting screwed by Wall Street/Capitol Hill.

Companies not only make obscene profits, but also, they find ways to cash in on their workers. Moore pointed out that many wealthy corporations profit off of the early deaths of their workers through life insurance policies that do not go to the families of the deceased. Health insurance companies deny coverage to working people to keep their profit margins up. When companies lose money, the government bails them out without regard for the law and fiscal accountability.

The following are my thoughts on labor.

Jonathan Melle's understanding of Labor in America:

Rooted in many hundreds of years of law, labor has never been a means to private property. Rather, labor is really only an established custom from times long ago before legal contracts. From a historical perspective, there was no such thing as a working class prior to the Industrial Revolution. Poor people were servants to the wealthy aristocracy or landed gentry. In the South, white property owners used black slaves as free labor. When immigrants came to the U.S. during and after the Industrial Revolution, the factory owners placed them in great numbers in substandard housing units, used bells and whistles to socialize them into factory workers, and regulated them through low wages. The Industrial Revolution immigrants and their offspring were taught the false myth that work or labor granted them property. The poor families knew nothing of legal contracts and entitlement to property and were lead to create families of working class people through multiple generations to come. Their children were pulled from school around the sixth to ninth grade and put into factories to help with the family's bills. They were indoctrinated with the affirmation of labor to earn their keep. Social reforms and socially just people in power worked to change the system to pull families out of poverty and into a middle or professional class of citizens. This worked from the late-1930's to the mid-1970's, but the pendulum started to swing back to regulating people into the socially engineered working class. When the industrial factories began shuttering their doors and moving to foreign lands, the regulation of the working class transformed into the underclass, which is a demographic of poor people who will never have any social mobility or will never have the ability to achieve the American Dream of a middle class life. As the underclass proliferates, America is becoming desolate with a record number of foreclosed homes, uninsured healthcare patients, and disadvantaged families. The regulated people are being stripped of all of their entitlements from quality public education, to affordable healthcare insurance, to their living wages and pensions. The legal contracts that entitle working people to property and wealth are being taken away by both the government and corporations.

Labor has never been a means to property or wealth under our legal system of contract law and entitlements. The myth of the American work ethic was made up by the Industrial Revolution who put the poor and immigrant populations into a newly formed group called the working class. As this was all invented in the mid-19th century by wealthy factory owners, there was no legal protections under the law for labor. The legal protections to entitlements to a living wage, affordable healthcare, quality public education, pensions, and the like, were passed as reform measures as the labor population grew, formed unions and demanded equity from their work. These legal protections were never placed on the law, but attached to labor to be taken away over time.

The fact is that the main ways to wealth throughout the many hundreds of years of legal contracts have been family marriages and education. By this, I mean wealthy families who married other wealthy families to grow their estates, and Ivy League colleges like Harvard and Yale. For example, Bill Weld was born with an $80 million trust fund, his family derived from Edmund Weld arriving in America via the Mayflower, and he married Susan Roosevelt (now divorced) after graduating from Harvard University. Governor Weld represents a wealthy person who married another wealthy person and went to an elite educational institution with a building named "Weld Hall".

When are we as Americans going to stop the propaganda about labor? When are we going to teach the poor and middle class that corporations via the government are their to regulate us into socially invented classes that will ensure that we are controlled and indoctrinated by a system that does not protect our legal interests? When are we going to learn that the means to property or wealth is through legal contracts that entitle us to families, education, healthcare insurance, living wages and pensions? When are we going to demand that the legal system of contract law entitles us to our basic human needs as citizens and stop believing the myths of labor that were all made up during and after the Industrial Revolution?

Sincerely,
Jonathan A. Melle