We still keep slaves.
This excerpt from the book is the chapter on Slaves in history and today. It is accurate and disturbing, but vitally important to know and understand—or nothing will change. It follows chapters on Bullies and Parasites, people who take because they can, using power, law and manipulation.
It is followed by more hopeful chapters on democracy, mutual care (the Golden Rule), true servant leadership, and how to wisely correct the sorry mess we are in.
Dive into this chapter, read it through to the end, even if it makes you squirm, and then get a copy of the whole book for yourself.
We can change our future. Together.
Slaves
Slaves have their work, health, hopes, future and lives taken by bullies and parasites.
Slavery is the exploitation of some for the benefit of others. Slaves are not just those in literal chains, but all who are held captive by social and economic systems that ruthlessly underpay, undervalue and exploit them.
Our notions about slaves are woefully small and short-sighted. It is far more extensive than we imagine.
It is vital that we see and understand the thievery, predations, harm and murder of bullies and parasites, and we have begun to do just that. But it is equally necessary to understand their victims—the slaves.
Slaves are those whose work, health, hopes, future, days and lives are taken from them by bullies and parasites. The labor of such slaves subsidizes the wealthy and powerful, who reap what they have not sown, and who credit themselves for the produce of the oppressed.
Slaves are those trapped within a system that forces labor with little reward for them, to produce large rewards for others. The labels might be changed from “master and slave” to “employer and employee,” but if some live high off of the poorly compensated labor of others, it is still slavery—the exploitation of some for the benefit of others.
Upper Class
These others who benefit most are nearly always in the “upper” class, the most powerful and wealthy, and often see themselves as our “betters,” an old-fashioned word for the condescension that often accompanies wealth or success.
This disdain is not true of all, of course. I’ve known kind, compassionate people who relentlessly dedicated their wealth and time to helping others and to healing the world.
And I’ve known others who lived largely for fame or conquest.
Even among the wealthy and powerful, there is a common “looking down” at each other. Those with inherited wealth are “high-born” and disparage the nouveau riche, the “commoners” who got wealthy with hard work, invention, good luck or theft. The newly rich speak of the old suits and trust babies. They compare fortunes and talk down about each other—and especially about the “middle class” and those below.
Middle Class
Here’s an uncomfortable truth: If we are living in the “middle class,” lodged in-between the wealthy and powerful above, and the “working poor” and poverty-stricken below, we are also captives in a system that holds us in place and feeds upward.
We subsidize those above us. We are subsidized by those below. We’ll see this ever more plainly as we go—and we won’t like it. We may have more freedom of movement than those further down the ladder, but that should not make us comfortable with a power structure that it is unjust to others: if not intentional, we are still structurally benefitted. Even if we’re partly shielded from its harshest effects, a future controlled by bullies and parasites puts us all in chains.
You inherit what your parents had. Yes, we all know the exceptions— those who rose through hard work, luck, timing, a great idea, and/or good circumstances (“the right place at the right time”). But they’re famous because they’re rare.
The norm, the unexceptional reality, is this: If your parents were wealthy, you likely inherited wealth and opportunity. If they were middle-class, you likely are too. If they were working poor or poverty-stricken, odds are that’s where you remain. Systemic forces (education, policy, redlining, etc.) help maintain class stagnation. It’s not economic gravity but enforced caste structure.
This must no longer be inevitable. It is profoundly unfair. And it harms all of us, as we will see in the pages ahead.
Slaves in History
When I began this research, I knew virtually nothing about slaves or slavery, apart from some biblical narratives, and that it was a sorry part of American, British and African history. I understood it as a tragic part of the past, with consequences still echoing nearly 200 years after Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation. But that slavery, horrific as it was (and is), is only one chapter in a much-larger history—one far more ancient, vast and brutal than I had imagined. Cruelty, murder and enslavement spans millennia and the world. And it continues today.
If you have a moral center, you will hate what follows. Humanity’s cruelty toward its own is rooted deep. And to see it clearly, we must explore examples from history—not to shock, but to build the vision and strength needed to fight it in our own time. It is far more universal, and celebrated, than we could imagine. American history is only the tip of the iceberg. The earlier examples of Alexander, Genghis and Ranavalona are only fragments of the vast expanse—and defense—of slavery. I won’t try to reveal the history in full. Thousands of pages would still fall short. But you’ll find extended sources and examples at BPS.online. What follows is meant to help us recognize slavery where it still exists—often hidden in plain sight—and brace ourselves to change it.
Your ancestors were slaves. That can be said with confidence. Throughout history and in all parts of the world, slavery was common, legal and “normal” in virtually every culture. Authors over centuries mention it in passing with no more outrage than they’d show for the weather. You have ancestors who were owned.
And you also have ancestors who owned or profited from slaves.
Some were bullies—those who victimized other human beings, stole their lives and work, bought and sold them like equipment. They had little regard for the care or living conditions of their slaves, often treating them worse than tools or livestock.
Others were parasites—those who profited from the system without owning slaves directly. They benefited from stolen labor, defended the bullies and shielded the system that fed them. Because they were enriched by the bullies’ stealing, harm, murders and power, they turned a blind eye to the suffering of the slaves.
Bullies, parasites and slaves. Each of us have all of these in our past. Knowing our ancestors played all three roles—slave, bully, parasite—may, I hope, cultivate greater humility and solidarity, instead of shame.
What Color Are Slaves?
In the West, our typical mental image is of “white” people owning “colored” people, because that was the recent pattern in our history. Slavery has never been confined to one race. The grim truth is that throughout history and even now, people have enslaved others of all colors—sometimes those who looked foreign or different, sometimes those who looked just like them. Slavery is not inherently racial—even if modern systems often are. Race is just a convenient excuse, rather than an actual cause.
Whatever color you are, whatever ethnic backgrounds you have, in previous generations your ancestors were both owned and owners. Your ancestors were bullies, and parasites, and slaves. As were mine.
We must really see this, as it persists to this day, and we’ve grown blind to it. We can stop it. But nothing will change with ignorance or denial. We must look. To broaden our perspective, we’ll expose examples of slavery across history and the world—starting in the so-called “Western World.”
Slavery Is Normal and Noted Only in Passing
Marcus Aurelius (121–180 c.e.), one of Rome’s most respected emperors, wrote Meditations. Still studied today, it is required reading, especially in diplomacy and leadership training. Aurelius is widely respected as a gifted Stoic philosopher, and his insights into leadership and humility are highly regarded. The Stoics believe virtue leads to happiness, and the foundations of it are Courage, Temperance, Justice and Wisdom. Worthy ideals. Yet one of his most telling pieces of advice was: “Don’t surround yourself with beautiful slaves.”
Though he was counseling leaders against arrogance and ostentation, he reveals how normal slavery was. One group of people owning others was a common, unremarkable attitude throughout history. His advice reflected this assumed reality: Slavery is the natural order of things. He was hardly alone. Some 500 years earlier, Aristotle—Alexander’s teacher—wrote of slaves:
Those who are as different [from others] as the soul from the body or man from beast—and they are in this state if their work is the use of the body, and if this is the best that can come from them—are slaves by nature. For them it is better to be ruled… (Politics, 1254b16–21)
Aristotle here says some people by nature are only competent to be used for physical labor and therefore must be ruled by us. We regard them as beasts of burden, not equals. They look like us—roughly the same kind of body—but we are superior to them. They are lesser creatures, and it is right and proper for them to serve us, and for us to keep them in their roles. It is the natural order of things for them to be slaves and us to be masters. We are high-born. They are below us.
The slavery Aristotle defended had already been an essential part of the Greek life and economy for hundreds of years, in the mines, on the farms and in the homes. Virtually every “free man” owned at least two other human beings. Large landholders could own a thousand. When Aristotle died, he left 14 slaves in his will—just another line item of property.
Slavery in the Bible
There are numerous passages in the Bible that address slaves and slavery, though a fuller discussion must wait for another time. One especially telling example comes from one of the New Testament’s shortest books, Philemon, which has been used both to defend and oppose slavery, and which offers a striking glimpse into life in the first century.
Paul’s letter to Philemon (in Colossae, modern-day Turkey) concerns a runaway slave, Onesimus, who traveled 800 miles to find Paul and seek safety and freedom with him. Paul sends Onesimus back, but also offers to pay for anything Onesimus may have stolen or damaged. After all, as Philemon’s “property,” his escape was theft of himself and thus “wrong.” Paul, seeking to free Onesimus from slavery and reconcile him to Philemon, offers to pay any cost or debt, and asks that Onesimus be received “no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a dear brother.”
This was an extraordinary initiative, to be sure, but I cite it here to illustrate again how unextraordinary slavery was. Sadly, in our world today, it is still common—just under new labels and with new excuses.
Slaves Who Rebel Must Die. Spartacus Didn’t Know His Place.
There were moments of resistance throughout history, but most slaves had no power to resist their overlords. They were expected to “know their place” and do as told—or face whipping, beating, starvation, or even death. Some were incentivized to obey: slightly better living conditions, a bit of independence, even promotion to oversee other slaves. These tactics are still in use today, just under different names.
Spartacus (103–71 b.c.e.) didn’t know his place. He was a slave and a gladiator in the Roman Republic. Gladiators were arena combatants (think modern boxing, wrestling or mixed martial arts) who fought each other for crowds’ entertainment. They often were to fight to the death. Wealthy promoters owned gladiators.
Unlike most slaves, Spartacus had weapons and knew how to use them. He chose to free himself, organizing a rebellion with 70 fellow gladiators that swelled to include 70,000 slaves and supporters.
Of course, this declaration of freedom was met with the state’s power to crush the rebels. Slave ownership was legal, “just” and normal. These slaves were breaking the law, stealing “property” (themselves), disrupting the peaceful culture, threatening the social order. How dare they?
The Roman military crushed the revolt. Spartacus was killed in battle, and six thousand slaves—who didn’t know their place—were publicly crucified as a warning to others.
Slaves, Gold and Genocide
One of the most horrific and revealing accounts of cruelty and slavery is in a lengthy account written by a Spanish friar, appealing to Spain’s Prince Phillip to end the butchery and enslavement of the native peoples of “the Indies”—today’s Haiti, Dominican Republic, Cuba, Peru, Florida and the many other islands and territories nearby. It ended in bitter irony.
Christopher Columbus had organized an expedition, funded by the Spanish Crown, hoping to find a sea route to India. India was prized for its spices and other goods, and the overland route from Europe was slow and costly. Columbus instead “discovered” the land and people of the Caribbean. Thinking he’d succeeded in reaching India, he called it the “West Indies.”
Ownership of the “New World” was divided between Portugal and Spain by Pope Alexander VI in his 1493 decree Inter Caetera, later formalized in the Treaty of Tordesillas. The division drew an imaginary line from the Arctic to the Antarctic poles, granting Spain and Portugal dominion over all lands west and east of it, respectively. As the Pope declared: “Out of our own sole largess and certain knowledge and out of the fullness of our apostolic power, by the authority of Almighty God … we make, appoint, and depute you and your said heirs and successors lords of them with full and free power, authority, and jurisdiction of every kind.” That is, the Church granted divine authority to colonize and exploit. Religious justification was deeply baked-in to the culture and world view of Europe, and the consequences of the exploitation persist there to our day.
This papal decree is why Spanish and Portuguese remain the dominant languages in nearly every country south of the United States. And with unrestricted power, granted by the Church, the conquests began.
They found gold. And what followed was a feeding frenzy of invasions by Spain and Portugal, the murder of millions of native inhabitants, and the enslavement of those who survived to work and die in the mines. The conquistadors—led by hidalgos, Spanish and Portuguese nobles—enforced their rule through soldiers. The gold mined by native slaves was shipped to Europe to enrich and adorn the wealthy and powerful.
The riches of the Indies had captured Europe’s imagination. Nobles and commoners alike rushed to join the expeditions, lured by dreams of wealth. Bartolomé de las Casas joined one of the Spanish expeditions, hoping to make his own fortune. But once there, he had a religious conversion and became a Roman Catholic friar—essentially a working monk, dedicated to helping the poor and needy. What he saw so horrified him that he wrote a detailed account of the genocide and slavery, then returned to Spain to plead with the Crown to end it. Still believing in the divine right of kings, he saw the monarchy as the godly source of justice.
His A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies revealed unimaginable cruelties committed island by island, territory by territory, with specifics and numbers of deaths and atrocities. Here is just one excerpt of what he wrote, but illustrative of the entire content:
The Spaniards by their barbarous and execrable Actions have absolutely depopulated Ten [native] Kingdoms … which now lie waste and desolate, and are absolutely ruined. … We dare boldly affirm … above Twelve Millions (computing Men, Women, and Children) have undeservedly perished. … Now the ultimate end and scope that incited the Spaniards to endeavor the Extirpation and Desolation of this People, was Gold only… I speak of things which I was an Eye Witness of, without the least fallacy.
De las Casas worked tirelessly for years to make the Spanish Crown, and all of Europe, aware of the cruelties and slavery inflicted on the local populations by the bullies and parasites of Spain and Portugal. Europe’s horror was so great that the Crown ultimately forbade the practices—though they didn’t actually stop. Spain then loudly claimed it had been defamed—a classic bully tactic: portraying itself as the victim.
Worse, in a bitter but unsurprising irony—because the genocide had so depopulated the territories, and enslaving the surviving locals was now technically illegal—the Crown approved a new practice: importing new slaves from Africa to toil and die in the mines, sending gold to Europe. To the wealthy. To the bullies and parasites.
The descendants of those African slaves, and the indigenous people, and the colonizers who enslaved them both, still live throughout these territories. Many of the countries and cities still bear the names—and languages—of Spain and Portugal.
But… They Didn’t Introduce It
The enslaving and murder of the indigenous people groups of the “New World” was a horror and a capital crime of staggering proportions. The Europeans decimated the territories they invaded, and the people they used were innocent victims. But many of them were already enslaved before the conquistadors arrived.
Before Columbus “discovered” the Americas, there were extensive human populations. The continent was home to millions—thousands of tribes and civilizations throughout what we call South, Central and North America. Social organization ranged from family-style cultures to loose-knit cooperating neighboring tribes, to democracies, to large autocratic kingdoms and vast empires.
Slavery was common among the Mayan and Aztec empires—two cultures widely known today—but it also existed throughout the Americas. Long before Spain and Portugal invaded, the region had its own bullies and parasites: indigenous peoples who enslaved one another across rival tribes and empires. Europe didn’t introduce slavery—but they industrialized it, making it more brutal and far-reaching.
Slavery In and From Africa
Recall the earlier quote from the King of Bonny (now Nigeria), in rejecting the British attempt to end the slave trade, who said the British “can never stop a trade ordained by God himself.” He was evidencing a common practice throughout Africa—as it was also common throughout the world—of people enslaving their own families and their neighbors. They sold children to pay off debts. They captured men, women and children in conflicts with other tribes or villages. They sacrificed their own, and captives, to appease the gods or ensure a good crop. And they sold any and all of these to slave traders within their own continent, and from foreign sea-going powers like Spain, Portugal, France and Britain.
To be achingly clear: International slave-traders didn’t raid inland or capture indigenous people all by themselves. They typically bought captives from local rulers and middlemen who had done the capturing—often profiting from the sale of their own kin or neighboring tribes. The logistics made it cheaper and safer to outsource the violence.
It was a supply chain: from captor to distributor to sales force to purchaser to end-user—just like any commodity today. Notably, the suppliers kept and used some of their own product: Indigenous people enslaved other indigenous people. People were just tools—and stored like tools, in the shed.
It was a global reality. On every continent, slavery was business as usual. When Britain moved to end the trade, the effort was mocked as naïve and impractical. Why dismantle something that was working so well?
And slavery like this still persists—we don’t witness it personally, any more than the nobles in Europe witnessed the exploitation of the Native peoples on the other side of the world. Colonial expansion then is paralleled by economic parasitism today. We benefit because others, out of sight, are oppressed and exploited, here and abroad.
In the United States
Some Native American tribes—long before the mass colonization by Europeans—also practiced slavery, enslaving war captives. That doesn’t excuse the brutal treatment, dispossession and murder Native peoples later suffered at the hands of colonizers. The actual history is ugly.
“Thanksgiving” conjures images of pilgrims and Indians peacefully dining together—and there was some truth to that. But the far greater story was a sustained and massive wave of immigration from Europe that resulted in the steady seizure of Indigenous land, and the forced displacement or slaughter of its inhabitants. Slavery wasn’t the primary tool in this conquest; rather than being captured for labor, Native people were more often driven away or killed outright. By bullies.
There was slavery—but mostly of Africans, imported by British and other European slave traders. Slavery supported European farming, business and wealth-building, beginning during the Colonial Era (British, French, Spanish, Portuguese) and continuing after the War of Independence.
We unfortunately tend to associate American slavery with the South—plantations, auctions, enslaved Black families laboring under white masters—but it was embedded in the very fabric of the country, long before the official founding (i.e., while still a colony of Britain), and it was largely regarded much as Marcus Aurelius or Aristotle regarded it: a normative and unexceptional reality. Good business.
Most slave owners throughout history, including in early America, were actually oblivious to or willfully ignorant of the evil they were doing. It was rationalized, promoted, celebrated as the natural, God-ordained order of things. It helped grease the wheels of the human enterprise, subsidizing the wealthy, and helping even average free families. Why question what worked?
George Washington owned 124 slaves. Late in life, he grew uneasy with the practice, increasingly realizing its inhumanity and trying to find a “legal” solution (it was complicated). In his will he ultimately freed all of them after his and his wife’s deaths. Thomas Jefferson owned some 600 slaves and fathered children by at least one, Sally Hemings.
It was common among the founders. We may recoil at this, or try to ignore, minimize or deny it, but it was real. And it was wrong.
In 1807, Britain outlawed the slave trade—but not slavery itself. That was the beginning of a realization that exploiting one group of humans to support the power, wealth and comfort of another is unjust. But that recognition must extend further—to include not just the obvious slaveries of history, but also the ones still hiding in plain sight.
Slavery was, and is, and is to come.
The Coal Mines of Appalachia
In 1947, Merle Travis wrote a song that struck a chord deep in the American working class. “Sixteen Tons” became a classic, especially after Tennessee Ernie Ford performed it on national television in 1956. It became his trademark:
Some people say a man is made outta mud
A poor man’s made outta muscle and blood
Muscle and blood and skin and bones
A mind that’s a-weak and a back that’s strong
You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter, don’t you call me, ‘cause I can’t go
I owe my soul to the company store.
The Appalachian Mountains stretch from Virginia to Alabama. Here’s just one illustrative sample of slavery hidden in plain sight from one region of this mountain chain: the Scotch-Irish immigrants in West Virginia. They are “white people” from Scotland, Ireland and elsewhere who fled their home countries due to poverty and oppression. The hills and “hollers” (hollows, valleys) of West Virginia reminded them of home, and they settled in. It was a hard-scrabble life, but they made it work with farming, hunting, and crafts like weaving, pottery and furniture-making.
Then came the mines. Coal, the fuel of the railroads and industry, powered the country’s westward expansion, so mining companies moved in and began digging. They hired locals to work the mines and built “company towns” to house the workers and their families. Miners were paid in company scrip—money valid only at the company store, the sole place in town to buy food, clothing, medicine, etc. The mining company also owned the homes and charged rent. If a miner’s wages weren’t enough to support his family—which was often—he went into debt to the store. Over time, workers became trapped in a closed system where every dollar earned circled right back to the company. When a miner died—common due to the dangerous working conditions (think accidents and black-lung disease)—his wife had seven days to marry another miner, or she and the children were evicted.
No one could afford to live on the salaries paid, so all the workers were in debt, had no savings or way to save, and what little they had was in company scrip anyway—which was worthless anywhere else.
Reread the song’s lyrics. Recall what Aristotle said about slaves—people who exist only to be ruled. That’s how the miners were seen: weak-minded, able-bodied, useful only for muscle and bones. Tools. They lived in company-owned shacks and died from accidents and black-lung. Slaves, kept without pity in chains made of debt, in wretched living conditions, whose lives subsidized the mine-owners’ fortunes and powered the growth of the nation.
Eventually, unions began to organize. Their goal was to break the chains: better conditions, safer mines, and wages above destitution and servitude. But like Spartacus, the workers “didn’t know their place.” Their rebellion—such as the Battle of Blair Mountain—was violently crushed by company thugs and deputized “law” enforcement. Miners were murdered for their rebellion, for demanding freedom.
When we think of slavery in the United States, usually the only image that comes to mind are brown-skinned people kidnapped from Africa to work on Southern plantations. But white European immigrants were also brutalized—exploited, discarded, beaten or killed if they objected.
Slave owners don’t much care what color their slaves are, and slavery takes many guises. It isn’t an anomaly or rare exception. It’s an awful, common reality. It’s still right here, hiding in plain sight—even where you live.
Let me be clear: This book isn’t attempting a thorough catalog of every form of slavery, everywhere, across all time. I’ll provide links where you can explore that more deeply under Slavery in Sources. But my continuing point is that real slavery has existed, and exists today, in many forms and many places, and it is wrong. Morally wrong. And it’s our responsibility to see it, name it, and change it. And we can.
Even so, we’re not done yet:
Trafficking of “Domestic Servants”
America is hailed as “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” a beacon of hope around the world for those fleeing poverty and oppression—just like early immigrants once did. They long for exactly the same thing: to escape from their awful circumstances and find opportunity, a fresh start, a new life.
But the bitter irony is this: Many of today’s loudest opponents of immigration are themselves the descendants of immigrants who once sought—and received—the very same chance. Now that they’re secure, they fight to keep others out. “We’ve got ours, and we’re not sharing!”
Hopeful people fleeing poverty and oppression are exploited by the latest incarnation of slave traders: human traffickers. These parasites—the same ones who managed the slave trade—use boats, trucks and forced marches to move people across borders and into bondage. They move them from poor regions to wealthy buyers, in America and in nearly every other modern economy.
Their victims end up working in homes, on farms, in landscaping and factories. Some are forced into prostitution or crime—the brutal outcomes of having no other choice.
We’ve changed the labels. We get all huffy about “them” coming here—like we once did—and we either kick them out, or we turn around and use them anyway. The ones we let stay are used to subsidize our comfortable lifestyles.
It doesn’t matter if you dislike this description. It is true.
To be clear, I’m not denigrating the jobs they do. I’ve done many of them myself. They’re hard work and long hours. And the workers are typically paid well below minimum wage—off the books, in cash—and threatened with deportation if they dare complain. How is this not slavery?
And how do our rights to be here outweigh theirs? Because we got here first? Ask any Native American tribe about that idea. We’ve grown blind to the privileges of conquest and landownership.
If we are to enforce a standard of “legal” versus “illegal” immigration, it must rest on a moral foundation—not fear or self-interest. It must not be wielded as a bludgeon to keep others out. Yes, we need a thoughtful, compassionate approach to those fleeing oppression—alongside real protections from violent criminals. But blanket condemnation, hard borders and redlining the country don’t meet any moral standard. We each need to examine ourselves and our motives in this. And ask, is this how I would wish to be treated, if I had fled poverty or oppression and come to this country for help and a new beginning?
Perhaps we need to begin remembering the Golden Rule, and apply it.
Hidden Slaves Today – Retail Slavery
Bullies steal openly, because their power protects them. Parasites steal in hiding. But both are thieves—and often much worse.
We’ve seen slavery in plain sight: from Africans dragged across oceans to voluntary immigrants held captive by debt and thugs. But there are still others—slaves hidden from view, though their bondage is no less real.
Let’s expose them now with a simple, iconic example, and the deceit that keeps it hidden. Think of it like that first spot of toxic mold you see on a wall. Soon you begin to see another. And another. And then you realize: It’s everywhere.
Consider a modern retail clerk. Adjust the math as rates change—I show my work, sources and methods at BPS.online right HERE. The ratios will likely hold. They should horrify even the most callous person. The example that follows is actually relatively moderate, and not atypical. More extreme instances exist, but they’re so outrageous that citing them here would create disbelief. You can hunt them down on your own—once you’ve seen this real-life example.
A major grocery chain in our middle-class neighborhood operates across many states. Its workers include supervisors, stockers, cleaners, cashiers and service clerks (baggers, cart wranglers). Clerks—usually the lowest-paid—make minimum wage even with a union and are capped at under 30 hours per week so the company can legally avoid providing health insurance (which averages about $6000 per year per person).
At the time of this writing, this grocery chain pays clerks about $17,000 per year at our state’s unusually high minimum wage: $15 per hour.
That’s more double the federal rate of $7.25 (still used in most states). But let’s stick with $15 per hour for our example.
The CEO of the same company makes $14.5 million annually in total compensation. He also receives a pension, paid vacation and excellent health insurance, of course. But let’s consider just his income:
Economists assume the average year has 222 workdays (365 minus weekends, holidays and vacation). The average workday is eight hours.
Let’s use these simple assumptions to calculate his hourly pay:
$14.5 million divided by 222 days is over $65,000 per day—more than most people earn in a year.
$65,000 divided by 8 hours is just over $8000 per hour.
Let’s be very plain:
- The Master (CEO) makes $8000 per hour.
- The Slave (clerk) makes $15 per hour.
Annually, the CEO makes 853 times what the clerk does. This is wrong.
In one day, the CEO makes nearly four times what the clerk makes in an entire year. This is wrong.
The CEO has excellent healthcare, both to prevent disease and treat it when it occurs. The clerk gets no healthcare. This is wrong.
The CEO has paid vacation, paid education and training benefits, paid travel for conferences and retreats, lavish working conditions and personal assistance. The clerk has none of these. This is wrong.
The Master can buy a really nice home with a few days of income. The Slave can afford a room in an apartment, with not enough left over for food, clothing, transportation and healthcare. This is wrong.
Here’s the severe truth: We’ve rebranded “master and slave” as “employer and employee,” with slogans about working hard to get ahead. We celebrate the rare few whose talent, luck and hard work helped them rise up—as we should!—but for the countless working poor, it’s still masters and slaves, disguised by masterful propaganda.
This is wrong. It is slavery by any moral standard.
Those who most benefit from this modern slavery might start to accuse this analysis as “Marxism,” “socialism,” “communism,” “entitlement,” “welfare,” “nanny-state,” “laziness,” “sour grapes” and heaven knows what else. That’s the rhetoric of fear and misdirection. It is propaganda that is meant to frighten us about any challenge to the social order.
Somehow the rich getting richer is a good thing, and the rest of us “benefit” from some sort of “trickle down” of wealth from those above us. The idea that the poor need more than table scraps is mischaracterized as “redistribution of wealth”—as if the poor are lazy parasites trying to rob the deserving rich. It is a lie that turns victims into villains—to keep us from seeing the truth of the profound injustice of today’s hoarding of life-giving resources.
It is wrong.
We Subsidize Them
Any economic, corporate or legal system that holds you in your place, makes you a slave by underpaying you, while wealth flows upward. Robbed once, you’ve been mugged. But if bullies and parasites regularly take from you—your time, work, health and more—you are their slave. It is that simple.
There will be justifications, excuses, grand theories, misdirections, even laws to their benefit. As there are petty thieves and nation-stealers, so slavery ranges: from underpaid wage slaves to those in literal chains, beaten, broken and trapped by threat of death. All are slaves. Their lives, work, days, dignity, health, hopes and families—stolen.
While those in visible chains deserve our full efforts, focusing only on them blinds us to other, less-visible forms of slavery. Publicly decrying only on the worst cases helps the system hide the others.
Unless we deeply grasp the full extent of the ways and range of slavery—and the bullies and parasites who feed off us—we all will remain their literal slaves. We are the foundation and source of their wealth.
We subsidize them. They’re our masters. This is reality, not hyperbole. It’s time we realized this ugly fact and began to claim our lives and freedom.
The thieves will laugh at this claim. Or lie, distract or hide what they’ve taken. The very last thing they’ll do—bully or parasite—is let you take it back. But you don’t need their permission.
We’ll see how to take it back, and we will take it back. Not by bloody revolution, or by using their cruelty as our tool. We don’t need their permission. But don’t jump ahead. First let’s first fully grasp our reality:
We are slaves. Until we see the full, methodical evil of it—and its disguises—we’ll be unable to stop it. We’ll keep subsidizing the wealth and power of bullies and parasites.
To be clear, it’s not about which job you hold or where you are. I grew up in a working-class neighborhood; we didn’t have much money. I’ve worked since I was a kid, and I’ve had many kinds of jobs over the decades: picking trash, cleaning offices, shoveling snow, cutting grass, factory work, delivering newspapers, selling vacuums door-to-door, construction, mailman, retail clerk, musician, writer, engineer, city-services analyst, senior vice-president and CEO of national and international companies, and lastly pastor of a small, multi-ethnic church.
I’ve often joked that I’ve tried to pack as many lifetimes as I could into one. But one of the insights this has provided is of the fundamental equivalence of honest work, no matter what the job entails. The CEO of a major corporation is not more worthy than the clerk five levels down in the organization, nor the person who cleans the offices.
What About Pay Differential?
Rewarding higher levels of skill or responsibility isn’t wrong, economically or ethically. It encourages excellence, education and accountability. What about the creative, dedicated entrepreneur, who strives and succeeds above and beyond the norm, and reaps the reward of that effort? All good things.
But is it right—morally or economically—that one person makes $15 per hour… and another $8000 per hour… in the same company, in the same country? Is it right that some are stuck in poverty and ill health while others live in luxury?
Stuck in Poverty? I Don’t Believe It.
Let’s take a brief detour to consider the legal and social quicksand of those stuck in poverty. If we’ve never been up close to it, the indignities and inescapable shackles may be hard to see or even believe.
This is a true and unexceptional example. The name and place are changed to protect the innocent.
Pat is 33. She’s only ever lived in a room of someone else’s apartment. She’s finished high school, but family hardships stopped her from going further. Like countless retail clerks, she’s limited to part-time hours—no medical insurance, and not enough income to save anything at all. She has no bank account—and no idea how they work. Her employer pays her with a weekly debit gift card—a common method for low-wage workers.
One day Pat was arrested and jailed after a loud argument—on a false complaint. The charges were eventually dismissed, months later, but the consequences were severe. Her bail was $1000—not high for most of us. But she had no money, and no friends or family with that kind of money. It might as well have been a million. That’s how the legal system traps the poor.
So she missed work without explanation—and lost her job.
With no income, she lost her sublet.
She had no lawyer. And no family member to get her one.
She was now caught in a months-long legal process, with no way out—even though the arrest should never have happened.
Unlike many of us who’ve watched legal dramas on TV, Pat didn’t know that a lawyer could be appointed for her by the court—so she never asked. None was given.
Like so many, Pat was a hostage to poverty: poor, broke and now in jail. She didn’t know what to do at all. No way out.
I heard about the arrest and went to visit. I went to a bank, got $1000 cash, and bailed her out. My little congregation put up the money for an attorney—a major effort for us. After many weeks of hearings, motions and expenses, all of the charges were dropped.
Pat was “free”—but broke, jobless and homeless. Dejected, lost, confused. Despite our best efforts, she ended up on the street, homeless. There, her wallet—and ID—was lost or stolen—common for the homeless.
She tried to find work, but without ID, she couldn’t get hired. She was given a lift to the Secretary of State’s office for a new ID—but they required identification to get one! They told her to bring a certified birth certificate and utility bills in her name.
She had no money to pay for the certificate, no way to get to the hospital, and no ID to prove she was the one legally requesting it.
She’d never had utility bills—she’d only ever rented a room in someone else’s apartment. And even though the Secretary of State could easily pull up her old ID record, with her photo, and issue a new ID, they would not do it without proper ID and utility bills.
She considered joining the Navy. It would be a good way to escape her circumstances. At a recruiting office, she scored so high on the entrance exam that they were very interested in having her enlist immediately.
But she had no ID. And she was on prescribed medications for some psychological conditions—but the Navy doesn’t accept anyone on any such medicines, even those legitimately prescribed.
A local shelter had the same medication ban. She was turned away.
She spent many nights on the street. Now she’s in another shelter that was willing to take her in and might help her rebuild. We hope.
She has been so beaten down by this whole process—as have been some of us who have tried all along to help her—that she is now depressed, angry, hopeless and lacking the will to try again. She is stuck by despair—and by circumstances, regulations and social structures that seem to have no means of escape.
I don’t share this story to ask for help. I share it because most people can’t imagine how desperate life is when you’re trapped in poverty. Working class, middle class, upper class—we have friends, family, bank accounts, knowledge and options. We can usually find a way out.
But from within our protective shells, we can’t fathom how hard it is—or how few exits there are—for someone stuck in poverty. We can’t imagine how miserable it is. We can’t see it. And we don’t believe it.
An average person from a middle-class family and culture may take an entry-level minimum wage job, attend college or trade school and move on to a steady career, with solid income, housing, savings, investments.
If they don’t like the minimum-wage job they have, they can usually find another, and medical insurance is provided through the family or even the Affordable Care Act. They live with family or friends and navigate the basics of society, jobs and banking. Though it may be hard at times, fundamentally they are in a relatively safe place, protected by family and friends—and it all basically works.
For someone like Pat, it could not be more different. Even without the arrest, it just doesn’t work. Without family or friends, there’s no support network. No job options. No income to afford even a small apartment.
She ends up on the street not because she’s lazy and irresponsible, but because society offers her no way out of her trap. She’s stuck. Our society works for those already protected—even with challenges. But it fails for those at the bottom.
I’ve discovered that those of us who have never been stuck in poverty simply cannot believe how despairing, difficult, ugly and entangling it truly is. Even if you mean well—does this ugliness seem real to you yet?
For those stuck at the bottom, options are simply shut off.
There is no exit. No job without ID. No ID without ID. No job.
You may think this is simply a bizarre exception, but it’s reality for millions of American citizens—and for many immigrants, legal or not.
And even when these marginalized folks manage to get a job, the very-low pay—without healthcare—means no savings, no education, no escape. They are stuck, shackled. Slaves by any other name.
More than 10% of our population—some 37 million people—live in poverty. Many suffer and die there, trapped by circumstance.
It’s easy to think people just need to try harder and things will improve. But you and I need an awakening—to leave our insulated safety and see the inescapable misery, suffering and death that traps so many.
I don’t mean to be harsh, but when I write elsewhere about
“neighbors who care for others just as they themselves desire to be cared for: in food, clothing, housing, healthcare, education and safety, and in the thriving community that results from that mutual care”
… this can’t just be a lifestyle tweak for the well-off. If we fail to care for those truly stuck, we endanger everyone’s future—including our own children’s. But if we ensure these things for everyone, our own futures become more abundant and assured. It really is simple.
So, to ask the difficult question again:
Is it morally and economically right that one person makes $15 per hour and the other $8000 per hour, in the same company, in the same country? That some remain in poverty and ill health while others live in luxury?
No. It is wrong. If in our wildest imaginings we think this is a good thing—somehow an essential part of the success of an economic system like capitalism—then propaganda works. We have accepted slavery as a “higher good” that supports—subsidizes—the bullies.
If mutual care sounds wild-eyed, radical, Marxist, socialist or communist—then propaganda works. That’s how the lie survives.
It is perfectly right and just to criticize and oppose oppressive “communist” regimes anywhere in the world. Of course. They are led by bullies and parasites, and their people are slaves to the regimes and subsidize their masters. All true.
But it is also true that our “free-enterprise capitalist democracy” has the same problem: Some rise by holding others down. Our system keeps some held down, subsidizing those above them. Some are stuck in poverty and are powerless to escape it.
These conditions will not be easy to change. It is a powerful and extensive system in which we are all caught up. But we will remain chained if we accept the chains as moral or necessary. They are neither.
Only when we see the slavery, and the lies that sustain it—as wrenching as the discovery may be—can we begin to break the chains.
And the problem isn’t capitalism itself. It’s the bullies and parasites who manipulate, twist and exploit any system. It is their thefts, and their defenders, the propagandists.
We need to subject their lies to rigorous analysis. And not be tricked into thinking mutual care is some kind of communist conspiracy.
Are we that gullible?
Additional excerpts from the book can be found by clicking HERE.
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