| Excuse me? Have you worked in a factory lately? Where owners with their dark, reinforced-concrete shells cut every corner imaginable in safety and wage laws because they know cheap labor is always plentiful and equally dispoable? Have you tried to live on minimum wage in a railroad flat or a dumbell tenement or government project that's being squeezed by absentee landlords who are living in some countryside whose water table is used up and whose tree cover from landslides are gone because quick-money tract housing developers on government subsidies showed how to extend beyond zoning laws; houses that, while under a code of safety (one that allows federal backing on mortgage payments, which doesn't happen in most city neighborhoods - it's called redlining), have down payments and "slow-growth" movements to ensure themselves unreachable by the working poor - not to mention the added costs of maintaining a car? Have you noticed how at risk you are from economic forces beyond your control - how the "international" bottom-rate architecture and the federally-subsidized highway system allow businesses to leave your locale as easily as the tax-paying rich? How companies like Walmart and Verizon can flout labor laws because an oil-backed government's tax-break recession leaves hordes of scab workers to ensure a complete and abject lack of job security and livable wages? Do you know that the hourly-wage labor pool can be referred to 'independent contractors' and thus be exempt from minimum wage laws and health insurance, itself a racket from unregulated drug firms charging "what the market will bear"? Greed is self-evident. Why can't you see it?
. . . whenever any government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its powers in such forms as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. |