America, Land of Lords and Peasants : The middle, working class is enslaved, with not the sop of left-wing sympathy.

Here are some of the big stories the press has missed over the past decade: Between 1965 and 1985, slavery was successfully reintroduced into the United States. In 1960, one college graduate with a C average could earn enough to buy a house with three bedrooms, garage, basement and attic; raise four kids and own a 2-year-old Chevy. Today it takes two childless wage slaves to afford the rent on a one-bedroom apartment. The upper classes have succeeded in enslaving the middle and lower classes. Job and working conditions are terrible, with the basic freedoms to speak, to assemble and to be free from unreasonable search denied working people.

America is the world’s leading candidate for land reform. Most of the land in the United States was acquired by theft. This is why the basic rule is that nobody can take your land so long as you stole it fair and square. To commence land reform, the tens of millions of acres the railroads stole should be repossessed because the owners have violated the terms under which they acquired them.

The “taking” issue is really a “giving” problem. Much noise is generated by the radical right over the government’s propensity to take private property for the public domain without “fair” compensation. This masks the real problem, which is of course the giving problem, wherein windfall land-value increases are created by government actions--roads, sewer lines, light rail, rezoning and so on. The people should share the incidental fruits of public investment. There is a third dimension to this issue: the revolutionary idea that people who own land should put something back for the value they withdraw. We could finance the cost of takings by taxing the windfalls from givings.

Corporate planning and systems analysis are utter failures. Virtually nothing of worth to the country has come out of corporate planning. It merely serves as a tool to increase concentration, commodification or domestication. Of course people should think ahead and have dreams and be logical and systematic, but things that have been worthwhile to humans have been produced organically, through incremental development and inspiration.

The Nation is not a left-wing magazine. There is barely any left-wing press in the United States. If there were, it would be dealing with problems such as the above. The two political parties are just two arms of the business party; the press and media are its creatures, too. There was more left-wing analysis in a single issue of Mad Magazine in the mid-1950s than in the combined output of all left-wing publications in this country in 1993.

Our society refuses to disgorge engrossers. The central problem of our time was a central one for medieval theologians: how to control the lust for self-enrichment. From the Middle Ages to the Reformation, the unpardonable sin was of the speculator or middleman who snatched private gain by the exploitation of public necessities. The term for such people was engrosser-- literally, one who buys up a market wholesale to monopolize higher prices. This crime was considered grounds for excommunication by the Catholic Church, and the remedy for such activity was “disgorgement.” It was also a civil crime for which the third repeat offense was “pillory and ruin.” The first laws against engrossment were passed around 1025 and the last were not repealed until 1844.

For almost 800 years, the economic behavior that creates the problems that environmentalists now so politely oppose were generally considered illegal and, even more important, sinful. But now religious institutions that once monitored engrossers have disappeared as a force for social equity, and the two-party system has devolved into a single Chamber of Commerce party. While environmentalists thinly fill the vacuum, serious and organized opposition to engrossers has mysteriously disappeared without public notice.

Today we seem to be on our way back to a lord-peasant social structure, which would be more tolerable if the upper classes followed the ground rules for such societies. But today’s upper classes, while eager to assert traditional medieval rights of lords (such as that the upper class holds all the assets and peasants must not encroach on those above them) shrink from the lord’s traditional obligations: Peasants are a lord’s responsibility in sickness and old age--you can’t work a peasant till he drops--and the basic rule of medieval societies: Lords must not despoil peasants.