Salon: The “original sin” of the Southern political class is cheap, powerless labor

[HiPointDem]

8. what?

Northernomics is the high-road strategy of building a flourishing national economy by means of government-business cooperation and government investment in R&D, infrastructure and education.

bull.

1. Northern industry was built on the profits of slave labor. Slaves were used in the North to clear land, harvest crops, run the sugar business, etc. Northerners were the slave catchers and traders, the cotton brokers, and the financiers. They outlawed slavery in the North once they'd made a bundle and were moving into industry, but lots of Northerners were 'invested' in, or *owned* the slave labor sugar plantations of the Caribbean or profited off Southern slavery in various ways.

2. Northern industry was built on slave-like labor, e.g.:



The conditions that children worked under during the Industrial Revolution were morbid. They had long and inflexible work hours. According to many studies, these hours ranged from 14 hours a day or 70 hours per week. The child laborers worked in environments that were unhealthy and dangerous to their physical well being. Many lost limbs, were killed in gas explosions; crushed under machines; and burned. The workers developed lung cancer from poisonous fumes. When their work or machines were not harming them, their supervisors and overseers harmed them. They were beaten, and when they tried to escape from the factories, they were shackled.

https://www.mtholyoke.edu/~hicks22a/classweb/Childlabor/WebsiteChildlabor/History.html

3. Even today, the first-world profits of the "North" relies on slave-like labor both at home and overseas.

4. Scratch any big capitalist dynasty of the present day & you will find the exploitation of slave labor lurking somewhere in the family history.

"Behind every great fortune is a crime."