In the above article that I found in the Ethnics Newswatch, I found that in Chicago businesses are taking advantage of the poor by telling them that they can have a loan as long as they put down their assets, such as a car, for collateral when taking out a loan for even less than 1000 dollars. The situation has come to the point where the businesses are making people pay interest because of hidden fees that could amount to three times the amount of the loan they took out (Shanita Bigelow). This is outrageous and can be paralleled with the situations that many indentured servants came across when they were trying to pay off their debt but the people who were in charge of them kept changing the conditions of the agreement between them… thus resulted Bacon’s Rebellion (TAKAKI). Now, this day and age, a rebellion would not be likely because our government isn’t nearly as volatile as it was back in the beginings of the Colonies, so help to those in situation like this is tough because legislation needs to take place which is a very slow process.
Refering back to the article, i’d like to address the fact that ministries within Chicago are taking a stand for changes in these financial situations because the people who are poor don’t have the time or the energy or the funds to do so. The Ministries are acting as a more down to earth representative of the lower class in the Chicago areas that are being affected. The ministers sit in on meetings with financial advisors that the State Senator Kimberly Lightford has assembled and the minister actually give feedback and possible solutions to work the problem out (Shanita Bigelow). This kind of proactive approach towards helping the the poor is something that was missing in 1676 when Bacon’s Rebellion occured. Had the more powerful plantation owners been a little more compassionate towards the indentured servants and not be greedy for more money, then this rebellion could have been avoided. But in the end, the lower class became fed up enough to do something about it. With the way that we have our system of governement, law enforcement, and National Guard, it would be very hard for somebody to start and follow through with a rebellion on the Illinois State Governemnt to change the unfair laws or put new laws in place. The unstability and clear near-dictatorship of the governement in Virginia threw the servants over the edge.
The way the Virginia government got away with this is because the key persons in leadership positions were wealthy plantation owners who only cared about making more money and keeping the indentured servants in their use to harvest the tobacco that England so dearly loved. The land owners should have thought ahead like what Thomas Jefferson said about how if they arn’t careful, then the indentured blacks could become the majority of the colonies, which the land owner didn’t want because they wanted to maintain the “purity” of the colonies from England. But, inevitably, greed for more money from a business with very little wage expenses inticed the land owners which lead to the largest rebellion of any American Colony before the American Revolution (Takaki).