The Party of Slavery. By Eric Smith

I find it amusing and not in a good way, whenever I hear these Republicans refer to Obamacare and other social programs designed to help the most needy and most vulnerable as slavery. I find it annoyingly amusing because by being staunchly opposed to raising the minimum wage, for being anti Union, and opposing all efforts to eliminate pay inequality based on gender, it has firmly established itself as being the Party of Slavery. Why, because when people are unable to earn a living wage to meet their basic needs of earning enough money to pay for housing, food, clothing, healthcare, utilities, and even commuting to and from work, they are in effect working for nothing which is the very essence of slavery itself.

Yet unlike the slaves of America's bitter past, these modern slaves who work two and three jobs and yet earn so little that even though they are working these multiple jobs and these back breaking hours & are yet unable to earn enough to meet even their most basic needs to such an extent that they need some form of public assistance in order to survive, are in effect not only working for free; they are actually paying to work. The money they are receiving from public assistance is in effect money they are spending so as to be able to hold onto their jobs.

The people who work at such places as Walmart and the fast food establishments are in effect not only working for free; they are in many ways paying for the privilege of actually working. This is a new kind of slavery; the likes of which not even this country has even seen for never have I heard of a situation where the slave actually pays to work as a slave but that is exactly how this is playing out here in this country.

The Republican Party, of all parties, has managed to do the hitherto unthinkable; it has created a society where people not only in effect work for free; they pay to work. It is slavery of a different name and every last one of us, whether we are Republican or not, should be ashamed for this state of affairs is a national disgrace.

Thus the raising of the minimum wage and the eliminating of pay inequality is not only sound public & fiscal policy; it is a moral necessity for slavery in whatever its form, and whatever it is called, is the essence of evil. By fighting to maintain the current state of affairs, the Republican Party, this Party of Slavery, is committing a crime against humanity itself. It is waging an illegal, unjust, and immoral war against the poorest, the weakest, and most vulnerable among us and any failure on anyone's part to speak out against this depraved indifference to basic decency and common fairness, is to make that person complicit in this, the crime of all crimes; the crime that will define our era and a crime which will forever drape the Republican Party, the Party of Slavery, in the Satanic Cloth of Infamy for all future times.