Mexicans wash half of all the dishes in Chicago. Despite making up only about a quarter of the population. Sounds mean-spirited or like the premise to some kind of metaphysical, high-premise comedy. But it's a fact: according to a report in the May/June 2007 issue of the Chicago Reporter, approximately half of all the dishwashing jobs in Chicago are held by Mexicans. I don't like that. It reminds me of something. When one job type is so dominated by one race... it has a whiff of the plantation, doesn't it?

That whiff becomes a stench when the conditions of low-wage workers — let's not bother with that phrase, "the poor," which has become so politicized — are looked at generally, especially in Chicago.

A capitalist economy will always require a low-wage productive class — an "unskilled" non-professional class. But the way the rich have consciously protected not only their wealth, but also their obscene profit margins, and strangled social mobility through their viral infiltration of the political and legal system, is akin to soft oligarchy, something like the slave systems of the Roman Republic.

It filters down. And you wonder — when did it happen like this, that immigrants, rather than simply starting at the bottom and working up, as they have done since the beginning of the American experiment, were illegalized, made into veritable unpersons available to be exploited by the lowest bidder?

I wouldn't consider it a coincidence that as the American Civil Rights movement that began to emancipate blacks from the Jim Crow system that kept them in quasi-slavery, the crackdown on Mexican immigration began, and human beings were slowly transformed by the entrenched classes into glorified livestock: "Operation Wetback," a program of hunting down and deporting Mexican immigrants who had streamed across a loose border, created a culture of fear of authority among low-skill Mexican workers. Although President Eisenhower's ostensible aim with "Operation Wetback" was to end the stream of cheap illegal labor on which ranchers and farmers were growing dependent, it resulted in an even better situation for them: there was now a citizenship Gestapo that made workers even more insecure and dependent on their employer.

Break it down.

When most lower and lower-middle class kids graduate from college, they can expect to face at least $20,000 in debt, just from tuition. Does our government take steps to protect the next generation from a debt that, doubtless, limits their productivity and siphons needed dollars out of communities and into massive financial institutions? No, of course not; they pass "comprehensive bankruptcy reform," and men like Joseph Biden (D-DE) take serious measures to protect the usury industry. Credit card companies are free to aggressively market to college students, saddling them with further, throttling debt (an average of $4,000) at astronomical interest rates. Even as, by the way, wages for college graduates declined by approximately 3 percent since 2000.

Blacks are incarcerated at a rate between eight and 10 times that of the general population; being an ex-offender or in the "correctional" system (like on parole) makes it much more difficult to land a job, much less one that pays decently, and actually being in prison makes it impossible. Not to mention time spent in prison is time not getting on-the-job experience or an education. And employment is often a condition of parole. The "correctional" system creates a class of millions of additional "dependent" laborers. It also helps that more than one million African-Americans don't have the right to vote because of a felony conviction.

Women, disproportionately entrusted with America's children — single parent households are rapidly overtaking dual parent households — can rarely risk losing a job. They also have a unique likelihood of falling into health care debt, due in part to the high costs of gynecological and obstetrical care.

Hey! Speaking of health care, the American system of employer-provided health care is one that puts an unfair burden on business, especially big businesses who often have to compete with other large corporations by incrementally increasing profit margins. You'd think they'd be first in line to reform this system — except, of course, they don't really mind providing health insurance, since it keeps their employees in line, and it's not that expensive, anyway, since health insurance providers rarely actually provide any health care. Most companies now have to have a "benefits coordinator" whose job it is just to explain health care benefits: what's covered (barely anything) and what's not (pretty much everything), and how even if something is covered, you're going to have to pay for most of it ("co-pays") and you only will get covered for a certain flat sum of it per year ("Oh, your cancer already cost you $15,000 this year? That's all you get.")

The dependence on the boss, the constant, paralyzing fear of the economic death sentence, serves that wealthiest 1 percent, the ownership class that weep for themselves and their estate taxes. We have to work ever harder to make sure we please the bosses; because we're illegal immigrants, or because we've been shepherded into jail cells, or because we've been dragged down into debt, or because we're women.

No man owns any other. We're all created equal, we say. We invade foreign nations to teach them that everybody is free. What a neat trick our local oligarchs have pulled, enslaving the American worker without calling it slavery.