Conservative Southern Values Revived: How a Brutal Strain of American Aristocrats Have Come to Rule

[malthaussen]

27. The problem I have with such simplifications

... is that they dodge the issue of Yankee industrialists, whose attitude toward their workers was, if anything, rather worse than the attitude of the Southern slaveowner toward his slaves. As has been pointed out time and again, whatever may be said against the slaveowner, at the least he had marginal interest in the physical wellbeing of his property, which the industrialist did not have to worry about, unskilled labor being easily replaced.

For every good Yankee aristocrat infused with noblesse oblige, how many Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, and Carnegies were there? Sure, Carnegie was a great philanthropist, and supported education, but he still treated both rivals and his own workers like something scraped off the bottom of his shoe. Read about the people who built the railroads sometime. Predominantly just the kind of aristocrat this article wants us to believe are the good guys, they were experts at the kind of corporate piracy in which Bain Capital engages. They smashed the competition, ran companies with no regard for the welfare of the worker or the customer, and pocketed obscene profits at the expense of the public, later salving their tender consciences with some philanthropic work. Their predominant difference from plantation owners was that they were able to amass much larger fortunes and personal power.

Focusing on "elites" also ignores the common people, who are the recipients of whatever it is the "big" people are trickling down this year. Fortunately, a couple of posters upthread have reminded us of how things look from the bottom up. I'll only add this: whenever I hear Mr Obama or anyone else promoting increased dependence on coal as an energy source because it will "create jobs," I want to grab them by their pencil-necks, shake them, and scream in their faces "Do you want your children to work in the coal mines, sucker?"

-- Mal