@dandailey
The powers-that-be are brilliant, all-powerful manipulators. They’re masters of propaganda. They’re relentless and adept in the practice of gradualism. They are patient on a multigenerational scale of time. They’ve been carrying out their malevolent plan for 235 years.
And they’ve taken in all of us.
Unless you were raised in a family with dynastic wealth and power and already know the drill, the only difference between us is that each of us wakes up at a different time.
At its most basic, slavery is a system under which people are treated as property and forced to work to enrich others.
Slavery has been a remarkably persistent economic institution. It predates written history and has existed in many cultures. Slavery has existed under many guises to perpetuate its social acceptability. If you doubt slavery exists in our own society, just consider some of the following expressions which are a part of everyday conversation: wage-slave, credit-slave, sex-slave, mind-slave, time-slave, etc; a slave to fashion, a slave to cocaine, a slave to ego, etc.; "his mother was his abject slave." Consider some synonyms for “slave”: serf, peon, thrall, chattel, vassal, villein, captive, bondsman, bondservant, bondsmaid, bondwoman. A person in slave-like bondage is typically portrayed as a victim of tyranny; a drudge, toiler, menial, worker, consumer.
The number of slaves today is higher than at any point in history. Estimates of the number of slaves worldwide range from 12 million to 27 million, though I’ve read that an estimated 40 million people in India alone (most of them "untouchables") are bonded workers who work in slave-like conditions to pay off debts.Debt slavery is, in fact, the most common form of slavery today and is imposed on the poor by lenders, sometimes for generations. Human trafficking is another major form of slavery, primarily for prostituting women and children in the world’s sex industries. Forced labor is another major form of slavery, especially in America.
Slavery morphs as readily as a virus, and if you want to get a frightening view of what the future may have in store for all of us, you need look no further than our nation’s prison-industrial complex.
On August 1st an article by Mike Elk and Bob Sloan, “The Hidden History of ALEC and Prison Labor,” appeared in The Nation. It should scare the hell out of you, especially if you are the owner of a manufacturing business. The prison-industrial complex is competing against you with prison slave labor. If you are a manufacturing worker, or even a public employee, the prison-industrial complex is working to undercut your security, too—especially if you are a member of a union.
To quote the story’s authors: Although a wide variety of goods have long been produced by state and federal prisoners for the US government—license plates are the classic example, with more recent contracts including everything from guided missile parts to the solar panels powering government buildings—prison labor for the private sector was legally barred for years, to avoid unfair competition with private companies. But this has changed thanks to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), its Prison Industries Act, and a little-known federal program known as PIE (the Prison Industries Enhancement Certification Program). While much has been written about prison labor in the past several years, these forces, which have driven its expansion, remain largely unknown. Somewhat more familiar is ALEC’s instrumental role in the explosion of the US prison population in the past few decades. ALEC helped pioneer some of the toughest sentencing laws on the books today, like mandatory minimums for non-violent drug offenders, “three strikes” laws, and “truth in sentencing” laws.
(Read the whole article at: http://www.thenation.com/article/162478/hidden-history-alec-and-prison-labor. It is chock-full of names and details you will find interesting.)
That mass incarceration would create a huge captive workforce was anticipated long before the US prison population reached today’s peak of 2.3 million prisoners. This realization occurred at a time when the concept of “rehabilitation” was still considered part of the mission of prisons.
First created by Congress in 1979, the PIE program was designed “to encourage states and units of local government to establish employment opportunities for prisoners that approximate private sector work opportunities,” according to PRIDE’s website. The benefits to big corporations were clear—a “readily available workforce” for the private sector and “a cost-effective way to occupy a portion of the ever-growing offender/inmate population” for prison officials.
Many of the largest and most powerful corporations have a stake in the expansion of the prison labor market today. The following are some of the companies who reportedly have used or are currently using US prison slave labor: A&I Manufacturing, Allstate, AT&T Wireless, Best Western Hotels, Boeing, Burger King, Chatleff Controls, Chevron, Compaq, C.M.T. Blues, Dell Computers, Eddie Bauer, Elliott Bay, Hawaiian Tropical Products, Hewlett-Packard, Honda, Honeywell, IBM, Imperial Palace Hotel, Intel, J.C. Penney, K-Mart, Konica, Kwalu, Inc., Lockhart Technologies Louisiana Pacific, Lucent Technologies, Macy’s, McDonalds, MicroJet, Microsoft, Motorola, Nike, Nordstrom, Nortel, Northern Telecom, Omega Pacific, Parke-Davis, Pierre Cardin, Planet Hollywood, Redwood Outdoors, Revlon, Shearson Lehman, Target, Texas Instruments, 3Com, Union Bay, United Vision Group, Upjohn, Victoria’s Secret, Washington Marketing Group, Wilson Sporting Goods.
Prison labor has already started to undercut the business of corporations that don’t use it. In Florida, PRIDE has become one of the largest printing corporations in the state, its cheap labor having a significant impact upon smaller local printers. This scenario is playing out in states across the country.
According to a 2010 report from NCIA, as of last summer there were "thirty jurisdictions with active [PIE] operations." These included Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, and twelve more. Four more states are now looking to get involved as well: Kentucky, Michigan and Pennsylvania have introduced legislation and New Hampshire is in the process of applying for PIE certification.
Several states are also looking to replace public sector workers with prison labor. For example, in Wisconsin where Governor Walker’s recent assault on unions and collective bargaining opened the door to the use of prisoners in public sector jobs, inmates are now doing landscaping, painting, and other maintenance work in Racine.
In the eyes of a corporation, inmate labor is a viable strategy in the quest for profits. By exploiting the prison labor pool, companies have their pick of workers who are cheap, obedient, and easily controlled. Companies do not need to provide benefits like health insurance or sick days; at the same time they pay little to no wages. They don’t need to worry about unions or demands for vacation time or raises. Inmate workers are full-time and never late or absent because of family problems.Over the last 30 years, at least 37 states have enacted laws permitting the use of convict labor by private enterprise, with an average pay of $0.93 to $4.73 per day. In 1997, according to Prison Legal News, Boeing subcontractor MicroJet had prisoners cutting airplane components, paying $7 an hour for work that paid union wages of $30 on the outside.
Federal prisoners receive slightly more generous wages that range from $0.23 to $1.25 per hour, and are employed by Unicor, a wholly-owned government corporation established by Congress in 1934. Its principal customer is the Department of Defense, from which Unicor derives approximately 53 percent of its sales. Some 21,836 inmates work in Unicor programs.
Following the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig that polluted the Gulf of Mexico for generations to come, BP elected to hire Louisiana prison inmates to clean up its mess. Coastal residents whose livelihoods had been destroyed by BP’s negligence and were desperate for work, were outraged by BP’s use of free prison labor.
The nation’s prison industry—prison labor programs producing goods or services sold to other government agencies or to the private sector—now employs more people than any Fortune 500 company (besides General Motors), and generates about $2.4 billion annually.
Noah Zatz of UCLA law school estimates: “Well over 600,000, and probably close to a million, inmates are working full-time in jails and prisons throughout the United States. Perhaps some of them built your desk chair: office furniture, especially in state universities and the federal government, is a major prison labor product. Inmates also take hotel reservations at corporate call centers, make body armor for the US military, and manufacture prison chic fashion accessories, in addition to the iconic task of stamping license plates.”
Meanwhile, the use of private prisons and privately contracted inmate labor has created a system that incentivizes longer sentencing for more and more so-called “crimes.” For example, there has been a disturbing reemergence of the debtors’ prison. According to the Wall Street Journal more than a third of all US states now allow borrowers who can’t or won’t pay their debts to be jailed. The WSJ found that judges signed off on more than 5,000 such warrants since the start of 2010 in just nine counties. Any act that can be criminalized in the era of private prisons and inmate labor will almost certainly end in jail time, further swelling the ranks of the captive workforce.
I am not the only observer who sees that slavery in America survived the so-called emancipation of the slaves. Jaron Browne, an organizer with People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER), also says the exploitation of prison labor in America is rooted in slavery. The abolition of slavery, he says, dealt a devastating economic blow to the South following the loss of free labor after the Civil War. Therefore, in the late 19th century an extensive prison system was created in the South in order to maintain the racial and economic mechanisms of slavery.
Browne illustrates this transformation of blacks from slaves to inmates at Louisiana’s famous Angola Prison: In 1880, this 8000-acre family plantation was purchased by the state of Louisiana and converted into a prison. Slave quarters became cell units. Now expanded to 18,000 acres, the Angola plantation is tilled by prisoners working the land—a chilling picture of modern day chattel slavery.
The abolition of slavery quickly gave rise to the Black Codes and to Convict Leasing, he said, which together perpetuated African-American servitude by exploiting a loophole in the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution, which reads: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Incarceration rates create a measurable picture: In 2002 Whites were incarcerated at a rate of 353 per 100,000, while blacks were incarcerated at a rate of 2,470 per 100,000. When you look at only men, white males were locked up at a rate of 649 per 100,000, while the rate for blacks was 4,810 per 100,000. Numbers like these don’t lie.
Many who argue in favor of prison labor claim it is a useful tool for rehabilitation and preparation for post-jail employment. But this is a mostly-bogus assertion. It is only true in cases where prisoners are exposed to meaningful employment, where they learn new skills, not the labor-intensive, menial and often dangerous work they are being tasked to do.
There were many high-sounding justifications for chattel slavery before 1865, too. But then as now, those arguments came from plantation owners and others who benefitted from forced labor.It bears mentioning that we are creating a slave labor system in America that is in many ways identical to that created by Himmler’s SS during National Socialist rule. Contrary to the postwar mythology that obscures their true purpose, the so-called “extermination camps” were in actuality parts of a prison-industrial complex based on the economic benefits of slavery.
Then (as perhaps now or soon?) they became the death camps of legend when the whole evil system broke down.
۞
Groove of the Day
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