The Debt Peonage the GOP Has Planned for You

Maybe this explains why we continue to subsidize with billions of dollars every year a country that is actively arming and supporting terrorists who kill American soldiers: Pakistan sets the standard for debt peonage.

From The Nation:

Why would desperately poor flood victims fight to stay in a dust-choked tent camp on the outskirts of a violent mega-city rather than go back to their homes?

The answer lies in the horrible exploitation and humiliation that is everyday life for most people in rural Pakistan. In Sindh, the traditional landlords are called zamindars and their tenant farmers are haris. Since independence and partition, in 1947, various Pakistani leaders have attempted land reform, but little has ever been achieved. And so, today the zamindars still own vast tracks of land on which their serflike haris live and work.

“We don’t want to go back because the landlord will double our debt,” says Hassan Khoso. “We want the government to give us land.” He goes on, “Some poor tenant farmers ran off in the first week of the flood, before the water could even reach their district.” Such was their desire to flee. Khoso, who’s from near Jacobabad, owed 50,000 rupees (about $560) last year but fears the debt will be 100,000 if he returns. He lost a rice crop worth 30,000 rupees, two water buffalo and two goats. He says that landlords have been coming to the camp urging the haris to return. Khoso and others say that is part of what keeps them close to the city. Along with work, there is access to hospitals and the promise—at least the promise—of education for their children.

As at the camp on the western edge of Karachi, these people have formed a camp committee. To make their demands heard they marched to the local press club and held a sit-in. And how are such calls for reform and development being met by officials? Dead silence.

The floods inundated an area the size of England, destroyed almost 5 million acres of crops, killed about 1,750 people and left 10 million homeless. Rebuilding is expected to take three to five years. Despite the scale of the damage, the discourse around reconstruction involves very little if any public discussion of how things can be improved; ideas like social justice, land reform, climate adaptation or climate justice are missing. Local left parties are marginalized and hounded by landlord thugs.

The reason for this is simple: landlords have too much power. They control the sale of seed and fertilizer, set the prices of crops, rig local elections, imprison in private jails those who oppose them, use village schools to stable their cattle and generally have their own way regarding the people. Their influence on the government is pervasive at all levels. There has been no pressure for change coming from the US government—which has given Pakistan $18 billion in assistance and payments since 2002. Nor has any come from the international NGOs and the UN—both of which run large aid and development programs here. When I interviewed a spokeswoman for the UN World Food Program, so diligently did she tiptoe around the sensibilities of the Pakistani government that she refused even to use the word “corruption.” Oxfam, on the other hand, has launched an investigation into “financial irregularities” within its own flood-relief work.

And so, the haris are bereft of allies or champions. If they want justice they’ll have to get it on their own. But in flood-ravaged Sindh the zamindars have a different plan—they want their haris back. At the camp on the outskirts of Karachi one landlord from Baluchistan came with five armed guards, threatening to take away several brothers from a family named Bux. All the brothers were in debt to the landlord; he threatened to lock them in his private jail if they did not return and start working. But the camp rallied and faced him down.

All through the Indus flood zone I heard similar stories—landless haris in urban camps preferring to become day laborers rather than return to debt peonage in the districts and landlords complaining that relief aid was keeping the haris away from their obligations. Standing on an earthen levee along a canal in the village of Arazi in the Dadu district of northern Sindh, a stout landlord named Kahari Bhutto exclaimed, “The farmworkers—their homes were wiped out, and they are gone. I don’t know where they are. Landowners themselves are having to do the work!”

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To be clear: although displacement is an escape from debt, it has also meant impoverishment. Khairam Hatar, an older, educated and rather distinguished-looking widow, explained, “I do embroidering here in Dadu town. Before, I had a sewing machine and was able to make money on my own. But I lost that during the flood.” Her sporadic income is a fraction of what it was when she was self-employed in Baluchistan.

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Again, the roots of this problem go back to the power of the rural elites. The zamindars systematically crush those who oppose them, preventing the creation of good governance and a literate population because it would undermine their power.

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When I ask Ali why there is no peasant movement, he tells me, “The haris are too drowned in their own problems, getting food. Politics here runs on money, and we don’t have any.”

Sindh did have a powerful peasant movement in the past, but repression, corruption and the rise of religious movements with fake solutions to the real problems have worn it down to a few sectarian rump organizations.

Read the whole thing.

Sound familiar? Change a few details and it's Detroit and the Mississippi Delta and Eastern Kentucky.

Massive unemployment, widespread foreclosures, gaping income disparity, eliminated social safety net, education only for the wealthy and permanent war - this is a recipe for a feudal economy in which the vast majority of people work as indigent serfs for parasitic lords.

That's what the GOP is working to create right here at home. And thanks to spineless, Wall-Street-cocksucking dems, they are damn close to succeeding.