“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.
So slavery
Jim Crow with a fresh coat of paint.
No, that’s employment, this has to be something new, then.
Y’all are so unbelievably mad over there.
Cruel*
You mean the current prison system in the South, but expanded so that anyone without the ability to pay rent is a criminal? Yes, but call it slavery 3.0. The guys doing 20 years on chain gangs for pot possession would be slavery 2.0, which started basically as soon as OG slavery was made illegal. It’s never gone away. Rebranded.
It’s not a hard concept guys, slavery it’s bad
So we should arm the homeless then.
I am going to say it that they have a right to self defense against tyranny as much as much some toothless Trump supporter.
“indentured servitude”, which is what this is, is slavery; especially when the costs are forced upon you. This was a common method of immigrating to the USA back in the, like, 1800s; but that debt was taken by willing people who had the option to walk away.
And the crime is sleeping. Jesus fucking Christ USAmerica has gone from a prison state to a torture state.
Every chance they get, they prove they are NAZIs
No need to look to Europe here. This is the black codes.
this is 18th century english shit
We’re one potato famine away from losing half our Irish population.
That’s going to be a lot of people considering half of America calls themself “Irish”
Some fits that.
All of it in context is what the Nazis did:
First the immigrants,
Then, the homeless.
Next, will be the disabled. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-trump-administrations-war-on-disability/
After that will be the LGBT community.
This is apart from all of the other action LA that follow including destroying the country and it’s institutions after purging the military and creating his own storm troopers
Louisiana: how can we make slavery even slaverier?
Doesn’t the US have more and more failed states?
Louisiana is already the actual worst in a lot of metrics.
Mississippi manages to consistently undercut the rest of the nation, with states like South Dakota, West Virginia, and Alaska running tight behind.
But a lot of that is relative. You can live in a big rich blue state - like New Jersey or California - and still be confined to a miserable ghetto or desolate rural backwater by the racist policies of the ostensibly liberal state leadership. States love to concentrate wealth inside certain high profile urban and wealthy suburban enclaves, then gate these locations off with high rents and transit costs.
What you have in the Gulf Coast is this policy split between states. So Florida and Texas aggregate enormous amounts of wealth. Then they outsource the dirties and most miserable aspects of the shipping/refining industry to the middle states - Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi. By contrast, you’ve got cities like Vernon in California and Eugene-Springfield in Oregon and Akron in Ohio that do this kind of dumping in-house.
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.
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.
Ah, back to 17hundreds UK, which their forebears escaped from.
Nah the pilgrims were their own brand of shit leaving multiple places they were perfectly welcome (including the UK itself) and allowed to practice their religion but kept leaving anyway because they weren’t allowed to enforce their beliefs on others. This is the US going back to how it was founded.
More like peeling of the layers they tried to hide from everyone else
Four bears have escaped 1700s UK?
Where are they now?
One of them just lost its job at the Parks department
One became a wiccan and now lives in Portland selling homemade incense and aura crystals
Povertycrime
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.
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
