The American Slave Market Undercutting Minimum Wages

Trick Phrase of the Day: Slavery Loophole

[Because Digging a Hole Only Makes a Grave]

These children in the picture above are real American Slaves, not convicts, rented out in 1903, 38 years after the Civil War ended. Twenty Five percent of black Americans boys under 17 in this southeast region stretching from Charleston to the New Mexico border worked the land and had few schools to attend after 12, so were likely arrested for delinquency. Juvenile Prisoners were valuable free laborers, enriching state coffers and cotton farmers, or in the case of the field behind them, corn. Now, American slavery has grown up and enslaved black men are enriching corporations.

Some brave Americans are trying right now to close the ‘slavery loophole.’ And when I say some, I mean very, very few. But right now, the progress has been mind-numbingly slow. You think a nation — let alone the world’s leading democracy — plagued with slavery would want to quickly get rid of this stain. But you’d be wrong. The biggest barrier, next to the whites who deliberately put it there, is language.

The creation of powerful metaphoric phrases, meant to be innocuous sounding to downplay the horror imbedded in them, are a chief barricade. The media — amplifying these phrases from government reports, political think-tanks, or scholars, or creating them — conduct the most powerful role of intensification through repetition. One such great metaphor is the “loophole.” It names the thing that is exactly the opposite of what it is: a deliberate construct of law used by the powerful.

Oops, I fell into a loophole, say the rich. Tax loopholes appear to be mistakes, something the ultrarich can “get away with” because of some mistake a legislature made by accident. Most of them seem to be big enough to drive a fleet of superyachts and private jets through to protect the rich from taxes. Somehow, the…