The south had many men who were rich in personality, other than slaves, and it was this type, rather than the slaveholding planter as such, which was represented in the Convention that framed the Constitution

He ob- serves that one of the advantages of the extensive introduction of machinery will be “the employment of per-sons who would otherwise be idle, and in many cases, a burthen on the community, either from bias of temper, habit, infirmity of body, or some other cause, indisposing or disqualifying them for the toils of the country.

the capitalist traders realize that it is in their interests to transform themselves into capitalist manufacturers, and then industrialists, and to devote their capital to the acquisition of buildings, machinery and equip­ment, raw materials, and labor force-with all of which they will produce commodities for su

Weavers could not repeat it before weaving some more cloth. On the other hand, the owners of capital can always put their money back into circulation and repeat their operations as often and as quickly as possible: buying to sell, starting with money to acquire more money, which thus enables them to increase their capital

small-scale commodity production. Both peasant and artisan were selling in order to buyand the movement of the exchange coul

What you have determines what you get” and “What youhave determines what you have to do to get what you get.” “What you have” refersto the kind of property you have at your disposal. Do you own the means ofproduction, either in the form of, say, a factory, or enough equity in productiveproperty that you can live o of the returns? If so, congratulations — you’re acapitalist. If, on the other hand, you don’t own productive property, and in order tomake money to buy the necessities of life (food, shelter, etc.), you have to sell yourlabor to someone who does, too bad for you — like most everyone else, you’re aworker. What you have determines what you get.

common logics of action and common interests

In the 2016primary, Hillary Clinton sought to undermine Sanders’s claim to represent the leftof the party by attacking him for supposedly ignoring issues of race and genderoppression. As she put it in one infamous sound bite

You are a member of the owning class when your income is very largeand comes mostly from the labor of other people, that is, when others workfor you, either in a company you own, or by creating the wealth that allowsyour investments to give you a handsome return. The secret to great wealth isnot to work hard but to have others work hard for you. This explains whyworkers who spend their lives toiling in factories or offices retire with rela-tively little if any funds to speak of, while the owners can amass considerablefortunes

Small businesses are just so many squirrels dancing among the elephants. Everyyear over thirty thousand of them get trampled and go out of business

he very rich families and individuals who com-pose theowning classlive mostly off investments, which include stocks, bonds,rents, mineral royalties, and other property income. Their employees live mostlyoff wages, salaries, and fees.

Opinion polls are only part of the picture. There is the whole history ofdemocratic struggle that continues to this day and remains largely untaughtin the schools and unreported in the media. It is expressed in mass demons-trations, strikes, boycotts, and civil disobedience—targeting such things aspoverty, unemployment, unsafe nuclear reactors, nuclear missile sites, andU.S. wars abroad. There have been mass mobilizations in support of legalizedabortion, women’s rights, gay and lesbian rights, and environmental protec-tions. There have been organized housing takeovers for the homeless, protestsagainst police brutality, and noncompliance with draft registration

25 percent of Americans say banks are honest and trustworthy.

abortion should be a decision made by a woman and her doctor, andthat racial minorities should be given fair treatment in employment

Further along the spectrum is the political left—the progressives, socia-lists, Marxists, and others. They want to replace or substantially modify thecorporate capitalist system with a system of public ownership, in whichmany of the large corporations are nationalized and smaller businessesare under cooperative ownership. Some progressives will settle for asocialdemocracy, the kind of political economy that exists in Sweden, Denmark,Norway, Finland, and other western European nations, with strong labor un-ions, good work conditions, and firm controls on business to safeguard thepublic interest. They argue that untrammeled free-market capitalism has nogoal other than the accumulation of capital by the privileged few, at everyoneelse’s expense. A democratically responsive social democracy, say the progres-sives, has an important role to play in protecting the environment, advancingeducation, providing jobs for everyone able to work, sufficient aid to thedisabled, along with occupational safety, secure retirement, and affordablemedical care and housing

Conservative politicians talk about“upholding values,”but they make noeffort to root out corruption in the business world or protect the environmentor lend support to working families. For all their verbal promotion of hetero-sexual family values and traditional morality, numerous conservative leadershave been caught in adulterous affairs or homosexual liaisons

They are not against strong governmentmeasures to restrict dissent, suppress protests, keep us under surveillance, andregulate our private lives and personal morals, as with anti-abortion laws andbans on gay marriage. They generally support harsher police methods, moresevere prison sentences, and more vigorous use of the death penalty. Theywant government to require prayers in our schools, subsidize religious educa-tion, and bring God into public life.

They want to cut hu-man services to lower-income groups, but they vigorously support all sorts ofgovernment subsidies and bailouts for large corporate enterprises

hey assure us that privatecharity can take care of needy and hungry people, and that there is no needfor government handouts.

Conservatives are usually thought of as people who want to preservethe privileges and traditional practices of the upper strata.

insularity

he conserva-tive keystone to individual rights is the enjoyment of property rights, espe-cially the right to make a profit off other people’s labor and enjoy theprivileged conditions of a favored class

What is called the political right consistsofconservatives, corporate elites, and many other affluent persons who advo-cate free-market capitalism and defend big business as the mainstay of thegood society.Free-market capitalismis essentially the unregulated laissez-faire variety in which private-profit investments have priority over almost allother social considerations.

Merck, one of Big Pharma’s largest profit makers, is facing tens of billionsof dollars in liabilities for marketing potentially deadly medicine whileconcealing the health risks from consumers.

Goldman Sachswas a big seller of mortgage-backed securities at theheight of the real estate bubble. When the economic crash came in2008–2009, Goldman Sachs received $10 billion in taxpayer bailoutmoney, then promptly paid out $6.5 billion in bonuses.

America’s wealthiest individuals to commit tax evasion by shelteringmore than $14 billion in assets

despotism

observed that Phil-lips’s strategy largely depended upon creating and maintaining a racially polarized political environment. “Full racial polarization is an essential ingredient of Phillip’s political pragmatism.

surrepti-tiously

While New Deal programs were rife with discrimination in their administration, they at least included blacks within the pool of benefi ciaries

Race had become, yet again, a powerful wedge, breaking up what had been a solid liberal coalition based on economic interests of the poor and the work-ing and lower-middle classes

law and order has broken down in this country,” and the majority blamed “Negroes who start riots” and “Communists.

Gallup Pol

“There is something mighty wrong when a candidate for the highest offi ce bemoans violence in the streets but votes against the War on Poverty

He argued in The Emerging Republican Majority, published in 1969, that Nixon’s successful presidential election campaign could point the way toward long-term political realignment and the building of a new Republican majority, if Republicans continued to campaign primar-ily on the basis of racial issues, using coded antiblack rhetoric.53 He argued that Southern white Democrats had become so angered and alienated by the Democratic Party’s support for civil rights reforms, such as desegrega-tion and busing, that those voters could be easily persuaded to switch parties if those racial resentments could be maintained.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s philosophy of civil disobedience was a leading cause of crime

indignant

Miscegenation

Civil Rights Act of 1964 formally dismantled the Jim Crow system of dis-crimination in public accommodations, employment, voting, education, and federally fi nanced activities.

On June 12, 1963, President Kennedy announced that he would deliver

Erwin succeeded in obtaining the support of 101 out of 128 members of Congress from the eleven original Confederate states.

Brown v. Board of Education

“home rule”

The Supreme Court seemed to agree. In 1944, in Smith v. Allwright, the Supreme Court ended the use of the all-white primary election; and in 1946, the Court ruled that state laws requiring segregation on interstate buses were unconstitutional. Two years later, the Court voided any real estate agreements that racially discriminated against purchasers, and in 1949 the Court ruled that Texas’s segregated law school for blacks was inherently un-equal and inferior in every respect to its law school for whites

American Creed

beginning of the end of Jim Crow.

Jim Crow

Politicians competed with each other by proposing and passing ever more stringent, oppressive, and downright ridic-ulous legislation (such as laws specifi cally prohibiting blacks and whites from playing chess together)

ostracism

decimate a multiracial alliance of poor peopl

nearly all those in the poorest neighborhoods) can expect to serve time in prison.9 Similar rates of incarceration can be found in black communities across America.These stark racial disparities cannot be explained by rates of drug crime. Studies show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates.10 If there are signifi cant differences in the surveys to be found, they frequently suggest that whites, particularly white youth, are more likely to engage in drug crime than people of color.11 That is not what one would guess, however, when entering our nation’s prisons and jails, which are over-fl owing with black and brown drug offenders. In some states, black men have been admitted to prison on drug charges at rates twenty to fi fty times greater than those of white men.12 And in major cities wracked by the drug war, as many as 80 percent of young African American men now have crimi-nal records and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives.13 These young men are part of a growing undercaste, perma-nently locked up and locked out of mainstream society.It may be surprising to some that drug crime was declining, not rising, when a drug war was declared. From a historical perspective, however, the lack of correlation between crime and punishment is nothing new. Sociologists have frequently observed that governments use punishment primarily as a tool of social control, and thus the extent or severity of punishment is often unrelated to actual crime patterns. Michael Tonry explains in Thinking About Crime: “Governments decide how much punishment they want, and these decisions are in no simple way related to crime rates.”14 This fact, he points out, can be seen most clearly by putting crime and punishment in comparative perspective. Although crime rates in the United States have not been markedly higher than those of other Western countries, the rate of incarceration has soared in the United States while it has remained stable or declined in other countries. Between 1960 and 1990, for example, offi cial crime rates in Finland, Germany, and the United States were close to identical. Yet the U.S. incarceration rate quadrupled, the Finnish rate fell by 60 percent, and the German rate was stable in that period.15 De-spite similar crime rates, each government chose to impose different levels of punishment.

In some states, black men have been admitted to prison on drug charges at rates twenty to fi fty times greater than those of white men.

In some states, black men have been admitted to prison on drug charges at rates twenty to fi fty times greater than those of white men

Studies show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates

The racial dimension of mass incarceration is its most striking feature. No other country in the world imprisons so many of its racial or ethnic minori-ties. The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid.

The United States now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, dwarfi ng the rates of nearly every developed country, even surpassing those in highly repressive regimes like Russia, China, and Iran. In Germany, 93 people are in prison for every 100,000 adults and children. In the United States, the rate is roughly eight times that, or 750 per 100,000.

During this same time pe-riod, however, a war was declared, causing arrests and convictions for drug offenses to skyrocket, especially among people of color

The CIA admit-ted in 1998 that guerilla armies it actively supported in Nicaragua were smuggling illegal drugs into the United States—drugs that were making their way onto the streets of inner-city black neighborhoods in the form of crack cocaine.

The State of Black America,

Occasionally, in the course of my work, someone would make a remark suggesting that perhaps the War on Drugs is a racist conspiracy to put blacks back in their place.

the mistaken belief that most drug dealers are black or brown.

From the outset, stories circulated on the street that crack and other drugs were being brought into black neighborhoods by the CIA

The timing of the crack crisis helped to fuel conspiracy theories and gen-eral speculation in poor black communities that the War on Drugs was part of a genocidal plan by the government to destroy black people in the United States. From the outset, stories circulated on the street that crack and other drugs were being brought into black neighborhoods by the CIA.

A few years after the drug war was declared, crack began to spread rapidly in the poor black neighborhoods of Los Angeles and later emerged in cities across the country.2