Health care fixed, Democrats now take on slavery

We are all familiar with the concept of parallel universes, each of us having doppelgängers on other Earth-like planets. Imagine a place that was faced with the problem of slavery, as was the United States in the nineteenth century, but that rather than Abraham Lincoln and the pre-corporate Republicans, Barack Obama and the Democrats of 2010 confronted that problem.

Washington (AP) President Obama, with House and Senate Majority Leaders Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid at his side, today signed legislation that he called “a landmark end to slavery in the United States.” The president posed for photographs with other congressional leaders, who had earlier been photographed triumphantly walking down the steps of the Capitol Building.

The legislation was long and hard-fought, and is scheduled to go into effect in four years. Those states that want to immediately free slaves are prohibited from doing so for seven years. President Obama called slave owners “perhaps our most misunderstood citizens, patriotic and proud of their heritage. Not one of them likes slavery – not one. Each is bound by market conditions to own them. This bill at last sets them free.”

The bill creates a new class of citizen, the “unpaid employee,” and mandates that all Americans employ such citizens by 2014. The classification was hard-fought. Abolitionists faced entrenched opposition, some even being arrested after demanding of Senator Max Baucus (D-Mars), head of the Senate Slavery Committee, that he allow the negro freedom system to be considered with other options.

“Negro freedom is off the table,” said Baucus.

With Republicans threatening to filibuster if certain marginal Democrats got their wish that Negroes simply be set free, President Obama stayed out of the fight. His mother was a slave and was beaten to death by her owner, a deed he often mentioned during the presidential campaign. The candidate Obama said in campaign addresses that he favored freedom in general for Negroes, but changed course after election, saying that he had never embraced the idea of total emancipation. “I never said the words ‘Negro freedom’ during the campaign”, he said.

Both Democratic and Republican legislators enjoyed financial support from the slave-owning industry, and Obama met with slave owners repeatedly throughout the debate. Many in the Democratic Party favored the “free state option,” where Negroes who managed to make their way to non-slavery states would be allowed to stay there as free citizens. Under a compromise brokered by Sen Baucus, those slaves would be allowed to stay in free states, but only if employed as unpaid citizens. States harboring unpaid citizens would be required to pay plantations for lost labor.

But Obama apparently struck an agreement in secret meetings months ago that such an option was not “politically feasible,” and dropped the demand in exchange for a plantation industry promise not to run a “Jermain and Shashawn” – type ad campaign against the legislation. (The legendary ads are credited with having stopped abolitionist legisation in the early 1990’s.*) As before, those states that harbor fugitive slaves will be required to return them to their plantations, but under their new “unpaid citizen” status.

Democrats throughout the country are celebrating the landmark victory. Political blogs have widely praised the legislation as a sense of achievement settles in. Many wanted to see Negroes set free, but in the end realized that it would create competition in the job market. “It’s not really in the best interest of Negroes to be thrown into the competitive job market”, said Markos Moulitsas, proprietor of the widely read Daily Kos blog. He said that Representative Dennis Kucinich, who fought hard for freedom for Negroes until yielding to pressure at the end, “needs a primary opponent.” Presidential adviser Rahm Emmanuel, himself a slave owner, called abolitionist senators and representatives “retarded” and “niggers in whiteface.”

Others hailed the legislation as landmark, and claimed that whatever defects contained in the bill could be “fixed later.” Dissenters, who claim that that the legislation actually strengthens slave owners, were cautioned to “not let the perfect interfere with the good.” Slave-owning Democratic Senator Evan Bayh of Illinois reminded Democrats in an email circulated to state central committees that “80 per cent is better than nothing.”

As querulous Democrats slowly began to assimilate and internalize the legislation, there was a sense of relief that the fight was finally over, and that they could move on to solving other problems. Said John Firehammer, a real person who is a Democratic spokesman in Montana, “at last we can move on. Slavery is fixed. Now we need to concern ourselves with child labor.”