Creating Serfs

Because the one thing authoritarians of the corporate, religious and warmongering variety all hate and fear it's an educated, organized and democratically powerful population that can't be intimidated.

Susie Madrak at Crooks and Liars:

For a very long time, I've said that whenever the Republicans do something even crazier than usual, it usually makes sense if you look at it through the lens of their ultimate agenda: Cheap, disposable labor. Why do you suppose ALEC is pushing these "pro-life" laws in all these states when they're funded by soulless, self-interested corporations? Because they love babies? Hell, no. It's to keep workers poor, too poor to make waves. Too afraid to speak up. Nice, docile, humble workers with so many kids, they're terrified to lose whatever job they're lucky enough to get.

It's gotten so bad, the Koch brothers feel free to run an ad claiming that eliminating the minimum wage - allowing the bosses to pay as little as the most desperate are willing to accept - will create jobs for all.

Yep, at 10 cents an hour.

Digby:

I don't know if you know this, but before we had subsidies like the minimum wage or health and safety regulations there were no poor people. You remember those good old days, right?

Seven Dials, in central London, was synonymous with poverty and crime, a black hole to most Londoners.

And hey, we'd still be better off than the poorest countries in Africa, amirite?

*This seems relevant: "Although he deems low-wage workers part of a “culture of dependency” on the government, Koch Industries is on the receiving end of oil subsidies, government contracts, and bailouts."

Jaaahb createrz.

They are systematically destroying the very concept of a full-time job.

Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

While there may be cases where temporary workers make sense, this industry not only needs to be heavily regulated (which it is not), but most of these situations should be illegal and employers should have to hire full-time workers. BMW does not need temporary workers to staff the majority of its position in a car manufacturing plant. Those should be full-time workers. The majority of workers in a processing plant that a constant business with Wal-Mart should be full-time workers. There is simply no good reason the exploitation of poor people through temporary labor should exist. That most of this exploitative labor system targets at African-Americans and Latinos reinforces the structural racism flowing through American society.

As Grabell shows, while unions haven’t done much for temp workers, the law basically prevents them from doing so anyway. Temp agencies openly operate as union-busting institutions while untrained temp workers with no real rights on the job die at the workplace in easily preventable accidents. As we recreate the Gilded Age, it’s again going to take workers standing up for themselves in the face of great danger to their livelihoods (and possibly their lives) to eventually force corporate America to stop exploiting them. I’m not looking forward to another half-century of horrid labor struggles like the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but that’s realistically what we are facing. The American dream is dead for many Americans. The middle class is dead as well, although we are loathe to admit it. With each passing day, we move back to the Gilded Age, a terrible time in American history and in the American future.

 I think we're to the point that as a society and a planet we would be better off if corporations were outlawed.