That’s the sound of the men working on the chain gang That’s the sound of the men working on the chain gang All day long they work so hard Till the sun is goin’ down Working on the highways and byways And wearing, wearing a frown
This crap predates MAGA by a long long time - after all, as somebody else pointed out, the 13th Ammendment of the US constitution explicitly allows slavery for those convicted of crimes.
Obviously MAGA is going to abuse the shit out of this, but this kind of infrastructure for Fascism has long been in place and was already used even before MAGA was a twinkling in the eyes of whatever Koch Brother’s Funded Think Tank employee who came up with it.
angband@lemmy.world 1 week ago
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 1 week ago
Valid, the 13th Amendment is an abomination, but it was mostly used as a rationalization to suppress wages in prison workshops, and exempt them from minimum wage. It was never intended to be the foundation for establishing a new system for our entire nation’s entire economy.
But we are approaching a labor crossroads in this country, and while MOST American workers haven’t been paying much attention to the upcoming revolutions in AI and Robotics, Sociopathic Oligarchs and the Corporations have been laser-focused on it for a few decades, and their objectives are finally at hand.
As if replacing much of their workforce with tireless tools like AI and Robotics wasn’t wonderful enough for their profits, now MAGA is dangling a shiny bauble that only the most psychopathic of Ferengi Oligarchs could dare to dream about - a return to literal slavery, a nearly free labor pool of workers who can be treated in any way. No worries about rights, benefits, safety, regulations, etc. Imagine how much more profitable they could be?
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
And how is that in any way form or shape a good thing?
That shit is just Indentured Servitude with extra steps.
It seems to me (not at American) that the intention to exploit people who have no other choice was there from the start. Create a structure were you can get cheap/free labor of people who have been deemed by others to be LABEL (in this case, a felon) and deprived of their freedom and you always end up with more and more people being given LABEL and deprived of their freedom so that the can be used as cheap/free labor.
The United States has long been the nation in the World with the highest percentage of people in prison.
The well was poisoned from the very start.
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 1 week ago
I’m not saying that it is, I even called it an abomination, I’m just saying that the use of it in the past was limited to people who wouldn’t get much sympathy from society at large, rightly or wrongly.
And I am further saying that one of MAGA’s primary characteristics is finding loopholes in otherwise benign laws and policies, and they have identified 13A as one that ripe for serious exploitation. They simply can’t resist abusing every opportunity that comes their way. Slavery comes with the added advantage of being very lucrative, and Trump REALLY can’t resist that.
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
IMHO, the almost idolatry of the Constitution in the US meant that a what’s essentially a Prototype of Modern Democracy kept getting used without a systemic update for too long and was essentially relying on everybody being a gentleman to work.
Personally the whole part were the Political Pillar being in charge of nominating the top of the Judicial Pillar - the Supreme Court Judges - even though in Democracy those Pillars are supposed to be independent, always felt like a major weakness in the face of Authoritarian encroaching, as did the First Past The Post voting system.
That’s the point I’m trying to make: the flaws in the American system are systemic, making it more easy from autoritarians (not just Trump’s Fascists but also the Oligarchy that stands behind both the Republicans and the Democrats) to control it.
The main difference with the Fascists is how brazen then are in doing so, which the other bunch would be far more discrete (hence which the Prison population in the US was already so large under the “other” political party of the US Duopoly system).