“HB 211 is a debt trap. It creates a population of people who are, by definition, unable to pay. And then converts that inability into a labor obligation,” Michael Ryan, a finance expert and founder of MichaelRyanMoney.com, told Newsweek. “The ‘streets to success’ framing is deliberate misdirection. No legitimate treatment program requires the patient to work off their bill under threat of incarceration."
I’m morbidly fascinated by how carefully this article avoids using the obvious term. But slavery. It’s slavery. It is a bill that would literally, legally, enslave a population (of predominantly Black men, fucking surprise) for the “crime” of being poor.
media is owned by the boots
I can’t find the new article now, but a few years back I remember a prison warden in Louisiana grousing about the possibility that pot would become legal saying, “We don’t want that, marijuana offenders are the best workers. They’re not violent, don’t cause trouble and do good work.”
That’s just slavery with extra steps. But we already have for profit prison work camps. So I guess it’s just a different flavor of slavery. Oh, and the ice “holding facilities” and “detention centers” because due process is only for white americans, aparently. They might start making them do labor also. You know, digging ditches and standing naked in front of them with a bulleye chest. That sort of thing. What happened to the whole world fighting against the one bad country?
Just an ugly reminder that slavery wasn’t actually outlawed in the US.
nah, prisoners aren’t slaves. they get paid… 15c an hour…
Except they literally are slaves as enshrined in our very own constitution.
I guess you missed the joke
I guess you failed your Detect Sarcasm check.
We’re all allowed to piggy back snarky comments off each other. Idk why people think I was explicitly disagreeing with the other comment. It is also a good comment.
thier prisons arnt filling up like they are used to, so they turn to the homeless.
Why do journalists mince words? If you are “coerced into unpaid labour” you are enslaved
The media are owned and controlled by the ruling class - the same class of people who also own and control for-profit prisons, and also own and control elected politicians through lobbying.
As I always say, under capitalism, democracy means the power of the state is auctioned off to the highest bidder.
How does capitalism inevitably lead to fascism?
Basically, the issue with capitalism is that the more wealth you have, the easier it is for you to make more money. And since money can be used to buy goods, services and influence, there is always a way to use money to gain more political and social power. With that political and social power, you can push society and the legal system in the direction you want to go. So you can use your wealth to gain power, and then you can use your power to change laws and society so that you can make even more wealth and power. It’s a positive feedback loop.
Obviously, though, if the billionaires and ruling class are accumulating more and more of our society’s wealth, that inevitably means that there’s less for everyone else to go around - therefore, working class people feel poorer and poorer. Meanwhile, the economy is going absolutely great for rich people, so inflation continues to go up - everything gets more expensive, but wages don’t increase. The wealthy just keep more and more of the wealth for themselves. To accumulate more and more wealth, they change the laws so that they can avoid paying taxes, so public services collapse. Politicians are lobbied to ensure that public funds are diverted away from where it is most needed - housing, healthcare, transportation, infrastructure - and instead into industries where their class interests most benefit from it, such as weapons manufacturing and extractive industries such as fossil fuels and mining.
The working class are bound to notice that their lives are getting shittier and shittier, and if that situation is left unchecked, the working class would realize that the ruling class are fucking them over, rise up, and overthrow their rulers. Obviously, the ruling class need to do something about this, but there’s no solution that the ruling class can offer. They’re causing all of the problems, to fix them they’d have to give up some of their wealth and power - and that’s not something they’re going to do. So they need to find someone else to blame the problems we have in society on. Unfortunately, though, no matter who they blame the problems on, and no matter what they do to “fix” it, the issue will continue to persist, because the material conditions underlying the issues are, very intentionally, never addressed.
So, the conundrum returns: The ruling class said that minority A caused all of the problems, minority A is persecuted and oppressed, but society doesn’t actually get any better. Either the problem wasn’t minority A, or minority A just hasn’t been oppressed enough yet. So the ruling class can either escalate the oppression, or they can shift the focus to another minority group. The division continues to escalate in terms of how vitriolic and extreme it is, and it also continues to divide the working class into smaller and smaller groups.
To get the working class to buy into this hateful message, they need to take advantage of our worst instincts, and one of those instincts is the in-group bias. The majority are manipulated into being suspicious, then intolerant, then hateful, then violent, then genocidal, towards whatever the targeted minority of the day is. Anything that can be used to divide the working class - sexuality, nationality, immigration status, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender identity, age, all of these will be used as wedges to keep the working class split apart and not working together, because they know that if the working class actually unite against them, they are completely and truly fucked.
That’s exactly how fascism manifests. It’s because it’s possible for people to accumulate power through wealth. This is why capitalism must be abolished. If we do not abolish capitalism, fascism will always return. It’s just a matter of time.
But can't capitalism can be reformed?
While, of course, some laws to reform capitalism can be passed, and would definitely alleviate the worst harm caused, over the long term, capitalism cannot be reformed.
Any attempts to reform, democratize or socialize capitalism may yield short term improvements to quality of life of the working class, but if capitalism is not abolished, it will always reassert itself, and capitalism inevitably leads towards fascism.
The New Deal prevented the US from sliding into fascism in the 20th century, so that’s ultimately a good thing, but it did not go far enough, and that’s why we have the resurgence of fascism in the 21st century America.
Yeah sorry that was a rhetorical question
My bad, I’m autistic and struggle to tell sometimes! Sorry for preaching to the converted :p
If it makes you feel any better, quite certain I am too. Unfortunately for me I spent 35 years pretending to be normal without knowing and I’m really fuckin tired now
Don’t open the spoiler tags or you run into a wall of text.
Capitalism is a very complicated machine with many moving parts, so explaining how society changes as a function of capitalism in a written medium requires quite a lot of words, but just for you, I’ll try to summarize:
- The more money you have, the easier it is to make yet more money.
- Money = Power.
- Power corrupts.
- Those with power want to keep it.
- Best way to keep power is to avoid blame for your bad behavior.
- Best way to avoid blame for bad things is to attribute it to someone else.
- People have an innate bias against those different from them.
- Result: The ruling class (the most wealthy and powerful people) blame minorities for the problems in society instead of accepting the blame themselves, because they don’t want to give up any of their wealth or power, and they use various tools including the media to shape the popular zeitgeist and lobbying to keep politicians on their side.
Okay, so circuit 1 is an ever increasing circle of money > power > corruption > more money
Circuit 2 is powered by the first and grows with it: corruption > abuse > afraid to lose power > need to hide actions > scapegoating minorities + media capture > more corruption
The end result is a corrupted society ruled by a few insanely rich sickos.
God damn, I hope they don’t all get together on an island somewhere to discuss their disgusting conspiracy while snacking on children or something or we will be in REAL trouble
Because the media is not on our side and is actively trying to make this reality. The more they sane wash it, the better.
Because they’ll get fired if they don’t.
Yay!
Feudalism!
Slavery 2.0
Yeah, I guess you’re correct.
Not much new abt it though, I’d say still slavery 1.0
No this is still just capitalism. This was standard practice until the 1930s in the US and UK.
Among the many things that is failed to be taught in US schools is how much of the early colonial populations were the impoverished/mentally ill/unhoused of England that basically got exiled for pretty crimes in order to be shipped out and populate the colonies, or were offered passage in the hope of a better life but at a cost they could never payoff because the structure favored perpetual indentured servitude. It never goes away, they just figure out new ways to rig the system whenever one form of it becomes too difficult to maintain. The masses get the illusion of progress or change, but it’s the same game updated to match the sensibilities of the era.
Kinda weird that it’s literally illegal there to take a little mid afternoon nap out in public, by the edge of a lake or under the shade in a nice park, etc.
Odd people.
The word is evil. Evil people
Freedom baby
Unpaid labor?
You mean slavery?
No you don’t understand, they are paid in room and board, therefore they are earning a “living wage”. Suck it libs!
/s
If we’re going backwards in history, then I guess the next move is to count each one as only 3/5ths of a person.
Which sounds like a perfectly republican idea for “reducing” the prison population numbers.
Why count them at all?
To get more congressional seats, of course
and to have an other to continually focus the tribal hatred on.
I had “bring back slavery” on my bingo card. I just need ‘nuclear holocaust’ to win now. 🤞
Bring back?
My random internet person, we enshrined it in our goddamn constitution. It never went away, we legalized it and constitutionally protected it in such a way that ensures it will never go away until the document on which it is written is burned along with the institution that created it.
There’s never going to be anything 2/3 of states agree on enough to change the constitution for again. Divisive politics and complicit media make sure of that.
That’s when we all win.
Kind of unrelated but I’m working on crossword and I could really use some help. Does anyone know a word for compulsory unpaid labor? Seven letters. Starts with an “S.”
Sitting Sitcoms Science Service
So slavery
Jim Crow with a fresh coat of paint.
always has been
No, that’s employment, this has to be something new, then.
Oh workhouses are back? Greaaaat
“Are there no prisons?” asked Scrooge.
“Plenty of prisons,” said the gentleman.“And the Union workhouses?” demanded Scrooge. “Are they still in operation?”
“They are. Still,” returned the gentleman, “I wish I could say they were not.”
“Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
Who would have thought we would be living in a techno Dickens world. Just without the neon.
“This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.”
Louisiana is fast tracking classic American slavery
Maybe we can uno-reverso this shit, and end up with a bunch of MAGA people picking fruit for free?
Enslave the slavers? No thanks. They must be hanged and fed to the crows. Which is what they should have done with every slave owner or confederate general back then.
I…look, I understand the sentiment. I just can’t sign up for “they have to die” when there are other options that don’t involve the taking of lives.
I guess the golden age wasn’t great enough?
Hey, I called it!
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/19594178
They’re just gonna revert back to the ‘no one wants to work’ mantra untill we just literally put our incarcerated prisoners to work in the fields, going full circle all the way back to slavery.
Combine that with the Grants Pass decision literally criminalizing homelesness, and yep, somehow, slavery returned!
Oh boy do I just sure love being right about things like this…
holy shit this country is literally evil
We already use a lot of incarcerated labor in “invisible” jobs. Whole industries rely on incarcerated labor.
Completely correct… that’s… the model.
The fun little carve out in the 13th Ammendment that enables this to all work.
So that model is now going to expand.
My next guess would be: All the people who did PPP fraud, maxed out BNPL loans and then just refused to acknowledge collections, untill they miss a court date and end up with a default judgement by a court.
Literal debt slaves.
And then also everybody getting shaken out of Section 8, lotta them will end up homeless, ie are defacto criminals when a cop notices them or a karen instructs a cop to notice them.
I agree with everything you wrote except the PPP fraud. IIRC that was all forgiven under Biden, and all the real perpetrators were businesses. They’re absolutely coming for Section 8 people and those on food stamps before the new rules kicked most off, next.
No no no, the Trump admin has been and still is absolutely cracking down on that… its so common that youtubers are making compilations of tiktokkers who very obviously abused it, and are now going to prison.
Yeah, definitely a whole bunch of actual businesses did PPP fraud… but they tend to have enough money to at least hire a lawyer/accountant, if not bribe Trump in some way.
The other half of that was people … just making up businesses (llcs) out of nothing, on the spot, that do nothing… or, don’t even actually exist. Or, they registered their PPP loans using friends/family’s personal or business information.
… And fairly often, they video’d the entire thing, and the proceeds of it, on tiktok.
What goes along better with the image of kicking deadbeat scammers and leeches to the curb than going after boisterous idiots who publicized their own crimes in hd video?
oh, wow. I was completely unaware of that aspect of it. I will research that now. Thank you for correcting me.
Bell Riots when? We are long overdue
There is a little thing I heard about some in the US doing tomorrow, May Day Strike. Sure it is one day, but it’s a start. Not from US but to show some solidarity I will not be using (within reason as I can’t not use windows at work) any US tech tomorrow, no Youtube, no streaming on youtube, not even going to play any steam games, lucky for me this platform is not a US thing so will be here.
Your gov’t is trying to bring on the riots, any riots, to cancel elections. Remember it is harder to control 20 groups of 1000 people than 1 group of 20000 people
The Vagrancy Act of 1866, passed by the General Assembly on January 15, 1866, forced into employment, for a term of up to three months, any person who appeared to be unemployed or homeless. If so-called vagrants ran away and were recaptured, they would be forced to work for no compensation while wearing balls and chains. More formally known as the Act Providing for the Punishment of Vagrants, the law came shortly after the American Civil War (1861–1865), when hundreds of thousands of African Americans, many of them just freed from slavery, wandered in search of work and displaced family members.
