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Caste matters : California Assembly passes anti-caste Bill, soon to make it official state law
(www.thenewsminute.com)
this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
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Your passion is admirable.
In the USA these same issues manifest in our enormous prison system. The imprisoned minorities are facing the same bias and direct oppression.
The illusion of equality and justice in the USA is only amongst those that have not directly experienced it. The cost of any serious court case in the USA will cost upwards of $100,000, due to how the system works and the reliance on academically credentialed (opinion mercenaries or so called) expert witnesses. If you do not have the funds in reserve, there is no chance of you winning a court case.
Housing in the USA is completely unaffordable for the average person to have ownership. All of our consumer markets are monopolies where the price of goods are artificially 3-4 times what they would cost in true free market capitalism. All of the consumer and labor protections mechanisms in the USA have been defunded or made legally inaccessible for the average person. Wages have completely stagnated for the average skill worker over the last 40 years while housing has increased 6-10 fold in the same period, mostly due to foreign investors that are allowed to complete with buyers in the domestic housing market.
We are also constantly pushed to buy products and services by subscription with corporations working very hard to monopolize markets for these goods and services. This has eroded ownership and property rights to the extreme. The only difference between a citizen and a serf is the right of ownership. The lower class of the USA is under a new age of corporate dominated feudalism. This is direct and blatant theft from a group of people with no effective voice. The antiquated two party political system in the USA suppresses true democracy. The system is funded by super rich and corporate anonymous donors. Ordinary people have no effective voice in the USA. Corruption at the highest level of the legislature, the supreme court, is common knowledge and a meme at this point.
Social services for the elderly and disabled are totally inadequate and provide less than the minimum wage. The suicide rate amongst the poor is large. All the school shootings and violence in the USA are because of the hopeless pressure individuals and families are under. It is disenfranchisement of people in general. It isn't just class. Class has mobility. In the USA, mobility is an illusion. This illusion is subtly hidden in a way that makes it impossible to target and fix. If you do not already have funds to exploit in the USA, you will never have the chance at social mobility. Every aspect of this is institutionalized. In this place, there is nothing more expensive than being poor. Everything you need will exploit you. Every product you can afford will break prematurely, every vital service will employ every means possible to exploit you with manipulation and hidden fees.
These issues are everywhere in the USA, but there is no group or caste to fight against. We despise the billionaires, but the issue is far more perverse than these 750 parasites, it is systemic. Caste sucks. I get it, but we are fighting mostly the same problems. I'm just facing a far less obvious opponent.
I appreciate you putting it all here. and yes, we're all fighting similar problems.
India's oppressed castes have borne the brunt of caste oppression in silence for thousands of years (I'm not even exaggerating), because Indian civilization denied them a voice and normalised caste oppression. Caste has now become an obvious opponent, because oppressed castes speak about the caste atrocities and humiliations they suffer, risking violence if they need to. And because Dr. Babaaheb Ambedkar took steps to shine light on its barbarity.
The good people at Castewatch UK have explained it better than me when they say :
While ‘race’ is a way of classifying people into groups based on physical traits, ‘caste’ is a system of social stratification, where groups are assigned a way of life defined primarily by occupation. Caste has no distinguishable physical feature and members of the same ‘race’ group may be of several different caste groups. In Britain for example, Dalits have progressed economically and do not follow their traditional occupations of cleaning toilets and skinning dead animals, but they encounter caste-based discrimination in social interactions. Unlike race discrimination, caste discrimination is intra-racial and is practised among those of the same nationality, ethnic origin and/or cultural background.