We are Deplorables-Hedges

[Thailandnotes]

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/...ables_20161120

"It's the economy stupid"

"I appreciate the cheap underwear, but I'd rather have a job."

"The liberal class has no hope of defeating the rise of American fascism until it unites with the dispossessed white working class. It has no hope of being an effective force in politics until it articulates a viable socialism. Corporate capitalism cannot be regulated, reformed or corrected."

[Mega]

Re: We are Deplorables-Hedges

After a week or so of "De-nile" the neo-libs (neo-cons in drag) have split into 2 camps:-

A:- Yes we got it wrong by not explaing the message to you
B:- You just Nasty/racist tinfoil hat wearing scum!

Camp "B" will just fade away in the coming months, although they still trying to get Trump to say sorry everytime some half-wit spray paints Nazi signs on the back of a dis-used dugout......

Camp "A" will start to set out their stall, leaders will be Liz Warren & Michael Moore......they spend YEARS telling everyone in GREAT detail what the "Plan" is......fully convinced that once the dumb masses "Understand" they be on board for the BIG WIN!.........then shock when they suss that people DON'T WANT THEM Or Their "Great Plan".................at which point they go back to Camp "B".

The biggest problem for them is the MSM has sussed that they losing money BIG time & most of them are going to DIE. The "Market" is no longer with Neo-libs, they need to quickly suss the new market & sell to it.....................in short the Neo-Lib/Neo-com global-lies-ation NWO is OVER>

Mike

[Thailandnotes]

Re: We are Deplorables-Hedges

Actually, after you read Hedges, you will see it's all about C.

[LazyBoy]

Re: We are Deplorables-Hedges

Hedges is "C", but where's the Democratic Party? I worry about the leadership not getting it and going "A": "Oh, we just didn't explain our vision well enough."

[vt]

Re: We are Deplorables-Hedges

What is ignored is that part of the problem is the demographic slowdown in the west. The good news is that this reverses in 2020 for perhaps the next 20 years.

The problem is that there is no such thing as a "viable" socialism. It has failed everywhere it's been tried. The only way for progress is free. competitive markets without any cronyism. Don't forget socialism can have cronyism too. This is what this election was about; taking the power away from special interest groups to get the working man and woman back to work.

Nothing will change unless we can get the economy to grow again. EJ is right, we need to greatly reduce FIRE and get the productive economy to replace most of it,

[touchring]

Re: We are Deplorables-Hedges

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/...ables_20161120

"It's the economy stupid"

"I appreciate the cheap underwear, but I'd rather have a job."

"The liberal class has no hope of defeating the rise of American fascism until it unites with the dispossessed white working class. It has no hope of being an effective force in politics until it articulates a viable socialism. Corporate capitalism cannot be regulated, reformed or corrected."

You do know that it is too expensive to manufacture underwear in even Thailand, they are now made in places like Cambodia and Bangladesh, where garment factory wages are $80 a month or less.

[LazyBoy]

Re: We are Deplorables-Hedges

You do know that it is too expensive to manufacture underwear in even Thailand, they are now made in places like Cambodia and Bangladesh, where garment factory wages are $80 a month or less.

Something just clicked for me.

Prison labor! That's how we'll bring back manufacturing to the US!

[shiny!]

Re: We are Deplorables-Hedges

Something just clicked for me.

Prison labor! That's how we'll bring back manufacturing to the US!

Egads, you're right!

This is from 2014. Some details might have changed since then:

13 Mainstream Corporations Benefiting from the Prison Industrial Complex
By Ricky Riley -
October 10, 2014

Prison labor in the United States is referred to as insourcing. Under the Work Opportunity Tax Credit (WOTC), employers receive a tax credit of $2,400 for every work-release inmate they employ as a reward for hiring “risky target groups.”

The workers are not only cheap labor, but they are considered easier to control. They also tend to be African-American males. Companies are free to avoid providing benefits like health insurance or sick days. They also don’t need to worry about unions, demands for vacation time, raises or family issues.

According to the Left Business Observer, “the federal prison industry produces 100 percent of all military helmets, war supplies and other equipment. The workers supply 98 percent of the entire market for equipment assembly services; 93 percent of paints and paintbrushes; 92 percent of stove assembly; 46 percent of body armor; 36 percent of home appliances; 30 percent of headphones/microphones/speakers; and 21 percent of office furniture. Airplane parts, medical supplies and much more: prisoners are even raising seeing-eye dogs for blind people.”

With all of that productivity, the inmates make about 90 cents to $4 a day.

Here are some of the biggest corporations to use such practices, but there are hundreds more:

The article goes on to list the following:

Whole Foods
McDonalds
Wendy's
Walmart
Starbucks
Sprint (call centers)
Verizon (telecommunications services)
Victoria's Secret
Fidelity Investments
J.C. Penny
Kmart
American Airlines
Avis

[shiny!]

Re: We are Deplorables-Hedges

Here's a better article:

How Prison Labor is the New American Slavery and Most of Us Unknowingly Support it
June 13, 2016 at 11:58 pm

If you buy products or services from any of the 50 companies listed below (and you likely do), you are supporting modern American slavery.

American slavery was technically abolished in 1865, but a loophole in the 13th Amendment has allowed it to continue “as a punishment for crimes” well into the 21st century. Not surprisingly, corporations have lobbied for a broader and broader definition of “crime” in the last 150 years. As a result, there are more (mostly dark-skinned) people performing mandatory, essentially unpaid, hard labor in America today than there were in 1830.

With 5 percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of the world’s prison population, the United States has the largest incarcerated population in the world. No other society in history has imprisoned more of its own citizens. There are half a million more prisoners in the U.S. than in China, which has five times our population. Approximately 1 in 100 adults in America were incarcerated in 2014. Out of an adult population of 245 million that year, there were 2.4 million people in prison, jail or some form of detention center.

The vast majority – 86 percent – of prisoners have been locked up for non-violent, victimless crimes, many of them drug-related.

Big Business is making big bucks off of prison labor.

While prison labor helps produce goods and services for almost every big business in America, here are a few examples from an article that highlights the epidemic:

Whole Foods – You ever wonder how Whole Foods can afford to keep their prices so low (sarcasm)? Whole Foods’ coffee, chocolate and bananas might be “fair trade,” but the corporation has been offsetting the “high wages” paid to third-world producers with not-so-fair-wages here in America.

The corporation, famous for it’s animal welfare rating system, apparently was not as concerned about the welfare of the human “animals” working for them in Colorado prisons until April of this year.

You know that $12-a-pound tilapia you thought you were buying from “sustainable, American family farms?” It was raised by prisoners in Colorado, who were paid as little as 74 cents a day. And that fancy goat cheese? The goats were raised and milked by prisoners too.

McDonald’s – The world’s most successful fast food franchise purchases a plethora of goods manufactured in prisons, including plastic cutlery, containers, and uniforms. The inmates who sew McDonald’s uniforms make even less money by the hour than the people who wear them.

Wal-Mart – Although their company policy clearly states that “forced or prison labor will not be tolerated by Wal-Mart,” basically every item in their store has been supplied by third-party prison labor factories. Wal-Mart purchases its produce from prison farms, where laborers are often subjected to long hours in the blazing heat without adequate food or water.

Victoria’s Secret – Female inmates in South Carolina sew undergarments and casual-wear for the pricey lingerie company. In the late 1990’s, two prisoners were placed in solitary confinement for telling journalists that they were hired to replace “Made in Honduras” garment tags with “Made in USA” tags.

AT&T – In 1993, the massive phone company laid off thousands of telephone operators—all union members—in order to increase their profits. Even though AT&T’s company policy regarding prison labor reads eerily like Wal-Mart’s, they have consistently used inmates to work in their call centers since ’93, barely paying them $2 a day.

BP (British Petroleum) – When BP spilled 4.2 million barrels of oil into the Gulf coast, the company sent a workforce of almost exclusively African-American inmates to clean up the toxic spill while community members, many of whom were out-of-work fisherman, struggled to make ends meet. BP’s decision to use prisoners instead of hiring displaced workers outraged the Gulf community, but the oil company did nothing to reconcile the situation.

The full list of companies implicated in exploiting prison labor includes:

Bank of America
Bayer
Cargill
Caterpillar
Chevron
Chrysler
Costco
John Deere
Eli Lilly and Company
Exxon Mobil
GlaxoSmithKline
Johnson and Johnson
K-Mart
Koch Industries
McDonald’s
Merck
Microsoft
Motorola
Nintendo
Pfizer
Procter & Gamble
Pepsi
ConAgra Foods
Shell
Starbucks
UPS
Verizon
WalMart
Wendy’s

While not all prisoners are “forced” to work, most “opt” to because life would be even more miserable if they didn’t, as they have to purchase pretty much everything above the barest necessities (and sometimes those too) with their hard-earned pennies. Some of them have legal fines to pay off and families to support on the outside. Often they come out more indebted than when they went in.

In places like Texas, however, prison work is mandatory and unpaid – the literal definition of slave labor.

According the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, prisoners start their day with a 3:30 a.m. wake-up call and are served breakfast at 4:30 a.m. All prisoners who are physically able are required to report to their work assignments by 6 a.m.

“Offenders are not paid for their work, but they can earn privileges as a result of good work habits,” the website says.

Most prisoners work in prison support jobs, like cooking, cleaning, laundry, and maintenance, but about 2,500 of them work in the Texas prison system’s own “agribusiness department,” where they factory-farm 10,000 beef cattle, 20,000 pigs and a quarter million egg-laying hens. The prisoners also produce 74 million pounds of livestock feed per year, 300,000 cases of canned vegetables, and enough cotton to clothe themselves (and presumably others). They also work at meat packaging plants, where they process 14 million pounds of beef and 10 million pounds of pork per year.

While one of the department’s stated goals is to reduce operational costs by having prisoners produce their own food, the prison system admittedly earns revenue from “sales of surplus agricultural production.”

Prisoners who refuse to work – again, unpaid – are placed in solitary confinement. When asked if Texas prisons still employ “chain gangs” in the FAQ section, the department responds:

“No, Texas does not use chain gangs. However, offenders working outside the perimeter fence are supervised by armed correctional officers on horseback.”

Similar “prison farms” exist in Arizona, Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio and other states, where prisoners are forced to work in agriculture, logging, quarrying and mining. Wikipedia says while the agricultural goods produced on prison farms is generally used to feed prisoners and other wards of the state (orphanages and asylums) they are also sold for profit.

In addition to being forced to labor directly for the profit of the government, inmates may be “farmed out” to private enterprises, through the practice of convict leasing, to work on private agricultural lands or related industries (fishing, lumbering, etc.). The party purchasing their labor from the government generally does so at a steep discount from the cost of free labor.

Corporations do not want to end the War on Drugs, but it isn't only drug laws providing physical bodies for slave labor. There are so many laws on the books now, none of us can get through our lives without being unintended criminals.

[jk]

Re: We are Deplorables-Hedges

[QUOTE=vt;308085

The problem is that there is no such thing as a "viable" socialism. It has failed everywhere it's been tried.
[/QUOTE]
a lot of western european countries - e.g. denmark - are doing ok, and they all would be doing better if not for the foolish step of creating the euro. their lives are healthier than the u.s., they are happier, and they have less inequality. certainly they do not practice socialism, per se, but a more social variant of western capitalism.