Josie (6 years old), Bertha (6 years old) and Sophie (10 years old) worked regularly at the Maggioni Canning Company. Work began at 4 AM and the three would make from $9 to $15 a week. Sophie would do six pots of oyster a day and her mother who also worked with her said "She don't go to school. Works all the time."
Through such photos, Lewis Hine documented the harsh working conditions borne by thousands of children, who were sent to work soon after they could walk, and were paid based on how many buckets of oysters they shucked daily.
He covered around 50,000 miles a year, photographing children from Chicago to Florida working in coal mines and factories.
These photos helped to raise an outcry against child labor and made the American public become widely aware of the scope of the problem. This resulted in the establishment of organizations such as the National Child Labor Committee, in 1904, which led the fight against child labor.
@SrRochardBunson
And don't forget there are Republicans TODAY who think "Child Labor" should be made legal again, actually arguing "it BENEFITS poor families having that extra income."
Of course, none of them considers for a microsecond how "not being in school" or "lower grades b/c a child is too tired to learn" condemns these same families into a cycle of poverty. 🤬
@MugsysRapSheet @SrRochardBunson
So many Republican policies can be seen through the lense of deliberate immiseration.
Keeping the poor as poor.
Thwarting social mobility.
Keeping people in their place.
Social stratification.
Class hierarchies.
Gender & racial isolationism.
Religious control.
Eroding the institutions that made the American middle class.
Homes. Public Education. College. Steady jobs. Living wages. Unions. Literacy. Public health. Libraries. Functional government. Voting.
@MugsysRapSheet @SrRochardBunson
Oil industry billionaires are funding Republicans to conduct hostage negotiations over the debt ceiling.
The same billionaires frying the planet.
@Npars01 @MugsysRapSheet @SrRochardBunson Because they think they'll have air conditioning after the apocalypse.
No, really.
Their brains are so fried by money, they think they will remain rich even if civilization collapses. If they ever understood that civilization is what makes them rich, that understanding is long gone. They believe they'll still own stuff when the fallout settles.
It's like thinking gravity doesn't apply to you because you have a private plane.
@jwcph @Npars01 @MugsysRapSheet @SrRochardBunson
And they're mostly US-style Libertarians, with rugged self-sufficiency. They'll build their own yachts, cars, personal jets, and holiday resorts!
@Npars01 @ScottSoCal @jwcph @MugsysRapSheet @SrRochardBunson @AbandonedAmerica Late-stage capitalism becomes like the last hour of a game of Monopoly, with one person cackling and collecting rents while everyone else screams in important fury until finally some hero (usually a young person) just overturns the board and scatters the pieces.
Or it's exactly as FDR said: it's not enough for everyone to get a Square (ie, fair) Deal, as his uncle Teddy wanted. At some point one person has all the good cards, and it's time to reshuffle the deck and have a New Deal to allow everyone to start from scratch.
That's what revolutions are.
@ScottSoCal @jwcph @MugsysRapSheet @SrRochardBunson
More likely they'll have estates quietly crumbling into ruins
All over Europe & the UK, hikers come across abandoned castles and huge homes, built at great expense off the rents from feudal-era tenant farmers. Crumbling heaps
@AbandonedAmerica photographs similar edifices in America
These McMansions are kept up because they're a wasteful extravagance, even for them. A money pit
That's what's wrong with the hoarding of wealth, it stagnates