Slavery in the US

An issue so far not openly addressed in this “Partial Shutdown” situation is that those who have been deemed to be “essential,” are now working without pay, even though we all believe that they will eventually receive their overdue backpay. I really do not know the law that says that these people must work without being paid within a reasonable time period of their work, but my basic view of this is that people being forced to work without being paid in a clearly established time period are slaves. And this is the status of those US federal workers now being forced to work without pay. They are slaves.

A ludicrous effort by Trump to minimize the damage of his idiotic partial shutdown has been his sporadic efforts to deal with consequences of his worthless shutdown. So, we have rich cronies of his who have found themselves inconvenienced for hunting in US natural preserves. Trump has ordered that the federal employees who oversee this particular matter must show up for work to make sure that this handful of wealthy Trump cronies can hunt in US natural preserves, without pay. These federal employees must be slaves to these spoiled brat pals of Trump.

We must recognize what is going on here, although nobody prior to me now has called it for what it is, this is slavery. Trump has been ordering all sorts of fed employees to show up and perform their duties without pay as an accumulating pile of interests get to him complaining about not getting their government services.

Of course, slavery leads to shirking, unless Massa wields a whip, which I think is not seriously there, so we have already seen lines at LaGuardia airport as TSA employees call in “sick.” Everyday this condition of slavery persists, the calling in sick of the slaves will increase.

We adopted an amendment 154 years ago that abolished slavery in the United States of America. It is about time this amendment was enforced.

Barkley Rosser