Thousands could be coerced into "unpaid labor" in Louisiana under new bill | HB 211 would make sleeping outdoors in public illegal and force unhoused people to "choose" between prisons and workhouses
1mon 18d ago by lemmy.blahaj.zone/u/stabby_cicada in aboringdystopia from www.newsweek.com
“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.
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
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.
Can't the North attempt to secede like the Dixies did, but for the opposite reason?
No. Lincoln and his supreme court (he appointed no less than five justices) wrecked that and set the dangerous precedent that no part of the US can unilaterally secede. The south attempted to secede for a bad reason, but this also preempts any part of the US doing it for a good reason in the future.
So as much as we might like to, say, get a huge saw and just chop Florida off and leave it to float away, the other states as well as congress must agree in order to do so.
Of course.
But i was talking about "extra-legal" ways to do so. Possibly with a little military help from Canada and/or EU?
please-god-let-this-happen-because-it-would-be-so-fucking-funny.png
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.
No, that's employment, this has to be something new, then.
always has been
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.
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.
"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.
Hey look, it’s our future when we can no longer afford to live. They’ll make us into slaves.
https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/vagrancy-act-of-1866/
It's like we're doing Reconstruction, but in reverse 😀
We can call it Redestruction!
Dereconstruction.
Or destruction for short, but that loses some of the meaning, maybe.
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.
If this passes, I'm going to organize a mass camp out on the LA congressional lawn. This is slavery, and history has shown that slavery can only be defeated by direct action. We camp until we'd be obligated to work, and then go on strike.
I don't believe you but kudos if you really do this.
You're welcome to help me organize this. Send me a dm and we'll start planning.
Sorry, I'm chock full of shit to do but good luck if you're actually going to try and do something for the good of everyone.
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
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.
Louisiana: how can we make slavery even slaverier?
Y'all are so unbelievably mad over there.
Cruel*
Every chance they get, they prove they are NAZIs
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
No need to look to Europe here. This is the black codes.
It's not a hard concept guys, slavery it's bad
This worked very well during the Irish famine
I imagine this is mainly being pushed by the people of Baton Rouge and New Orleans. There's a bridge near the French Quarter where hundreds of homeless people congregate. People wouldn't mind, but the panhandling and open crack use looks bad in a city dependent of tourism.
The most interesting aspect of this area-in my opinion-is the army of 10 year olds selling crack on their bicycles. They keep it under their tongue and swallow it if they are robbed or stopped by a police officer.
...this is one of the least offensive aspects of this community. Between the lack of education and widespread acceptance of statutory rape, it's hard to understand how people could live like this. People from up north don't understand how bad it is. Forcefully removing these kids from their parents is probably the only way to break the cycle of abuse.
I live in New Orleans. I pass by those homeless encampments all the time. They are largely separated from populated areas. No one I know cares that they are there.
This bill was written by a Republican from two towns over. That's who cares. New Orleans is the target of state Republican policies over and over. We are a den of sin filled with people of color, never mind that we fund just about everything in this otherwise miserable state
Their location is strategically near the projects/French Quarter. The crack comes from the projects and the money comes from the French Quarter. The problem is "contained", but that is because the police use questionable techniques to keep the homeless away from upper and middle class neighborhoods.
Honestly, the homeless people might be better off if they were arrested for loitering. When I was stuck in that homeless shelter, the police planted baking soda on me. "The distribution of false narcotics." I ended up pleading guilty just to get out of jail.
Ohh looky not enough prisons now, remind me, who pays for those?
I could see this coming back. Five bucks to sleep on a clothesline, and avoid the workhouse. Looks like a growth business model
UberHang
With surge pricing, we can keep piling debt onto the slaves.
Given the history of the image, I prefer HangUber
Yes this is obviously slavery.
What kind of work are they expecting people to do though?
Most menial tasks are performed by machines now.
Well since ICE rounded up all those "illegals" they will replace them with the homeless. Of course a large majority of homeless are mentally ill. Doubt they can accurately replace migrant workers.
But this shit needs to be torn down and anyone who votes yes on this bill removed from society.
Those undocumented migrants weren't screwing lids on tubes of toothpaste though. A lot of farm work uses specialised gear and skilled teams zoom along rows planting or picking.
It would cost more and take more time and produce a less desirable outcome to force slaves to do it.
I feel like we are moving towards a sci-fi story where AI enslaves humanity. But instead their is an elite class of trillionares and politicians above the AI.
AI does the thinking for free. Unpaid slaves do the physical work that machines can't do or costs too much to do. All that equals 100% profit and control.
Can you give me some examples of that physical work?
Im sure there are things, but most things I think of can be done very efficiently by a machine with a skilled operator for less than it would cost to force unpaid labourers to do.
Sure, I work with printers and suppliers a lot. A vast majority of what they do requires "temp workers" usually low paid people or even disabled adults with down syndrome to do a part of the process that would be much more costly to retool a machine to do or too expensive to build something that does it. Like folding and filling perfume boxes of various sizes, shapes.
Also the same kind of labor was used to pack over a million bags of various items because making a machine grab or move a changing inventory is just too expensive and having a machine that does one thing than never do it again is wasteful.
Really it's a balance between what costs more people or designing and/or resetting a machine for the job. A lot of times bringing in a group of low-paid people for a few months is much much less than a machine. People have more flexible parts.
there are a bunch of scifis like htis. dredd, mad max maybe, 4400 is a interesting one, the elite/affluent live in thier pristine cities while outside of it is basically a madmax, ghetto the people tried to change this by abducting people in the past to the future and give superpowers and then send them back, but the rich elite found out and started to infilitrate in the past by sending one of thier owns into the past to stop it, by possessing people through nanotech (transferring conscieness to the possessed person_.
Machines cost expensive forms of energy and need to be fixed and maintained. Humans cost almost nothing to keep alive and are in large supply. When humans "break" you just replace them with new ones. Slavery is very efficient for capital production.
Farming and sewing. Both involve manual laborers that's unpleasant and not yet able to be automated. There's also some assembly work that amounts to loading and unloading things in machines or inspecting things that come out of machines. Then you've also got a lot of building of more complicated machines like cars.
There's more I'm sure, but that's a lot of the stuff I can think of as an industrial engineer.
Oh also unpleasant service labor like call center work and content moderation. And don't discount pointless labor. Or labor that could be automated, but it's cheaper to pay prisoners to do it since the state subsidizes their care.
this is likely one of thier tactics to truncate,shunt homeless people to blue states to burden them financially. because they have use other methods to bus homeless to places like california, nyc.
Every time I hear something about Louisiana, it sounds like a progressively shitty place to visit and an even worse place to live.
its the 2nd FLORIDA. prone to flooding, and have alligators likely has meth as well.
Florida II: Mosquito Infested Boogaloo
Bingo. I made a huge "learning lesson"...
So fiscally irresponsible is the path they are choosing? Giving people housing will be so much cheaper than paying for slave facilities to run indefinitely. Though I suppose if you're personally financially vested in corporate activities that require slave labor, it makes sense.
Slavery making a bigger comeback. It never really left.
I see that Christianity is getting back to its roots.
Povertycrime
Next step, create a whole lot more homeless.
They already do this with teachers lol. Most work 2-3 hours unpaid every day. And no, they pay themselves over the summer and breaks because their check is stipend, they don't get "free money m" on breaks and summer.
Oh boy, is it time for Harper's Ferry 2.0?
The bill allows defendants to avoid incarceration by entering a 12‑month “treatment program.” However, people enrolled in those programs could be required to pay for all or part of their costs. If they are unable to pay, the bill authorizes courts to mandate unpaid labor to offset the costs.
Ok, so if they can't pay for this "program" they can perform labor to make up the difference. But do they work for the "program" they owe money to? Is there a third party that will pay the balance and then they labor for them?
Meanwhile, the Republicans can't figure out why everyone hates them and why a lot of people cheer whenever someone takes a shot at the PedoPrez.
The American citizen's version of H1B.
Slavery.
Ah, slavery of the 21st century awesome.
Rise the prices of homes so people canyt pay.
Now they are forced to work for free.
Flawless!
Then the third choice would default to a last chance power drive of political violence.
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 unconstitutional. Slavery Is outlawed. Unless you’re a prisoner. So what they need to do is not give them a choice. Put them in prison, then you can make them do as much unpaid work as you want
Looks like they are bringing slavery back. When do we guillotine these despots? This is pure evil.
Wow, this is exactly what the British used to do back in the day. Absolutely barbaric.
media is owned by the boots
Are there no prisons?" asked Scrooge.