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Politics : Dutch Central Bank Sale Announcement Imminent? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: sea_urchin who wrote (20291)	2/26/2004 8:30:33 PM
From: Raymond Duray	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 81878

Searle, This scam is horrible. It is akin to slavery, and in view of the ridiculous and perverse nature of incarceration in the U.S. (unquestionably a form of racism), this is simply part of a system of exploitation. This critic has it right, as far as he goes: Critics assail the idea of retaining American jobs in prisons as a flagrant violation of minimum wage laws and an affront to free workers. "Obviously, it doesn't do anything for the labor market here," said University of Oregon political science professor Gordon Lafer, author of a study on prison labor. "It's like bringing little islands of the Third World right here to the heartland of America," he said. "You get the same total control of the work force, the same low wages, and it does nothing for the inmates." But I come at this from the same perspective of the labor organizers who orginally help write the laws that prevented this sort of exploitation of prison-slave-labor for the past 70 years. It was the unions who stopped the practice of prison labor competing against the open market, and for a damn good reason. Because this practice has the unfortunate effect of lowering wages across the entire economy, and is part of the "race to the bottom" that unbridled capitalism is so guilty of. This bizarre and mutant form of capitalism is not about "raising all boats". This type of capitalism is about ugly exploitation. The sort that was ended in the U.S. when the slaves were emancipated during our bloody civil war. The prison-industrial complex has been allowed to get too powerful. The perversion of our society is becoming all to obvious in many ways. Even to the extent that the prison guard union is the only one that the new Governor of California has caved in to on wage demands.