Progress?

I just finished reading Island beneath the Sea by Isabel Allende, the Chilean writer transplanted to the States. She delves into the slave/plantation history of Haiti, Cuba, a little bit, and New Orleans in the late 1700s and very early 1800s. Her research feels thorough.
While fiction, it is a wonderful exploration of the experiences of African, European and mixed-race people to their condition and fate. People who oppose slavery in this time are considered flaky, subversive or both. Dominant culture people who consider Africans people, with rights, are few and far between, traitors to their race, allegedly.
Yet plantation owners take African concubines and father mix race children, whom they love and seek to protect and support. The mind bending/denial needed to manage opposing thinking is spelled out in understated ways. Beautiful writing, and a powerful depiction of the role of women in resisting horrendous abuse.
But all this ended a century and a half ago, right? The modern reader can't help compare then with now, and I suspect that was part of Allende's purpose. A letter writer in this week's Toronto Star, commenting on a David Olive column about CEOs rationalizing their greed and incompetence, quotes John Kenneth Galbraith: "The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness." Wealthy plantation owners exploiting shackled and terrorized Africans two centuries ago, today's powerful corporate leaders exploiting a vulnerable and insecure labour force in the 21st century--obviously there are crucial differences, but there are some disturbing similarities, too. 
Haiti remains as evidence of profound race and class hatred, a damaged society that defied revolutionary, imperial France and paid a staggering price because the liberators were black, not white. A de-industrialized Ontario, and north-east North America is evidence of big capital released from any kind of responsibility to the workers who make (or made) the wealth. We are prepared to put up billions to keep big auto from jumping ship, and watch with sinking hearts as offshore buyers shut down steel plants and grind miners into the dirt to strip their contracts.
Time for everyday Ontarians to band together to rebuild the social contract. Time for a new normal. Time for the NDP.