Starker on 10/11/2020 at 21:20
Oxford Political Review did an early postmortem of the election where they discussed the underperformance of Demcorats and the overperformance of Republicans:
[video=youtube;r5BCDm6RmGo]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5BCDm6RmGo[/video]
demagogue on 10/11/2020 at 23:54
We're at this stage where some government agencies -- the State Dept., Dept. of Justice, some Senators -- are actually pandering to Trump's fraudulent-vote fantasy. Here's a good article on what that means in the big picture.
Quote Posted by Slate
(
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/11/trump-coup-threat-republican-minority-rule.html) The Real Threat of Trump's Ridiculous Coup Attempt
With news that Mitch McConnell has decided to embrace Donald Trump's use of patently frivolous litigation to deny the results of the 2020 election, and that Attorney General William Barr has authorized the Justice Department to lend a hand by issuing a bizarre memo giving federal prosecutors approval to pursue “vote tabulation irregularities”—violating the Justice Department's own long-standing practice of waiting until states certify their election results—we find ourselves trapped inside the same Möbius strip that has confounded us since 2016. On the one hand, this is all just a tantrum, a giant roll-around-on-the-floor-in-the-Pop-Tarts-aisle baby-fit by the world's oldest living captive of Piaget's first stage of cognitive development. And at the same time, when that tantrum involves the firing of the secretary of defense (via Twitter), threats of future firings that expose the national security apparatus to genuine instability and risk, and concerted and purposeful GOP attacks on the legitimacy of voting and the very concept of respecting election results, it is hard to dismiss it as mere empty theater. After a weekend of thinking we might be free of this, it turns out that the feeling that we're teetering on an existential brink is not yet gone.
So here we go again. It's either a creeping authoritarian coup, or just a really annoying sequel to a horror movie that seems never to end. We're either experiencing something really profoundly worrisome, or this is just the coddling of a narcissist who just needs a cozy offramp. My own impulse, as it has been for the past four years, is to contend that both can be true at once. Like Will Bunch, I find myself in the camp of yes/and fretters, who can rationally acknowledge that Mitch McConnell is riling up the base for a runoff in Georgia, and that Trump himself is engaged in little more than grifting the night away, and also that watching the putative machinery of democracy turned again toward the horrific spectacle of delegitimizing democracy itself is pretty freaking chilling.
It's true and has always been true that Trump and his whims and moods and ego are a distraction. But one thing it's always distracted us from is the irreparable damage he has done to norms. Some of those norms—your adult kids and business do not profit off the office of the presidency; you don't use the White House to stage campaign events—are Trump-specific, and they will either end with him or could be legislatively corrected in time. But some of those norms have nothing to do with this president's cravenness, his tantrums, and his disregard for the rule of law. Norms around what U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement can lawfully do, what the Justice Department can now attempt, and how truth can be distorted and upended—those are not just Trump norms. They are power norms, and the reason the past few days have felt so menacing is that the power norm now being fanatically embraced by Mitch McConnell, two sitting senators from Georgia, and several prestigious law firms, is that Republicans can maintain minority rule by getting a court to agree to throwing out legally cast ballots. Donald Trump and Lindsey Graham have said as much out loud: Republicans cannot win if every vote is to be tabulated. They know that, and they are trying to win anyway. And all this is despite the cumulative advantages conferred upon the GOP by partisan gerrymandering, redistricting, the Electoral College, and the structure of the Senate. So the notion that the GOP, alongside Donald Trump, has now either tacitly or expressly adopted the position that they get to decide who wins despite what the votes say is ghastly, whether they are doing so for their own transactional reasons or not.
Starker on 11/11/2020 at 01:12
No movement like this would be complete without a stab in the back myth.
heywood on 11/11/2020 at 01:13
Quote Posted by Nameless Voice
That's what I'm referring to.
It explicitly has provisions to allow slavery of anyone who has been convicted of a crime.
A reason why a huge amount of the manufacturing in the USA is made by prison slave labour, and another reason why such a large percentage of the USA's population (and especially the black population) is in jail.
I have mixed feelings on penal labor. I generally support community service because it keeps people out of prison. It can also reduce government agency costs for things like road and park maintenance and supports charities and other non-profits. Prison labor is a harder sell, but it has good and bad points. It can be a positive thing in some circumstances, but it's also exploited. One significant positive is that keeping inmates busy helps keep them from causing trouble, and working benefits their mental health vs. hours spent idle in a prison cell. It can also provide vocational training, although that point is often oversold. And it provides a way for them to pay back debts while they are in prison. We can argue about wages. I think they are too small, but in prisons where there are more inmates who want to work than there are prison jobs, there's not enough demand to push them up.
At the federal level, I think UNICOR is probably a net positive. They primarily make products for the federal government. There are always complaints from businesses who want to make money selling the same goods to federal government, military uniforms for example, but I don't have a lot of sympathy for them. If you want to make money off the taxpayers, offer something of greater value. If we weren't buying uniforms and helmets made by federal inmates, we could be buying them from Vietnam or Bangladesh. I've also not seen any evidence that federal sentencing is influenced by UNICOR, which already has a much greater labor pool than it can use. In fact, working for UNICOR is something of a privilege in federal prisons. Note that you have to
volunteer. It employs around 10% of eligible federal inmates, and there are ~25k inmates who are on a waiting list to get UNICOR jobs.
Things are not so clear at the state level. There's 50 states and every one of them is different and I can't keep track of them all. Here's a perspective on my state:
(
https://www.nhpr.org/post/part-3-idle-mind#stream/0)
And here's a perspective on Arizona, which is one of the more exploitative states. It's one of the states practicing a modern-day, watered down version of "convict leasing," which IMHO is a corrupt practice where certain well connected privately owned businesses get to profit from inmate labor:
(
https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/2019/08/31/prison-labor-modern-day-slavery-inmates-deserve-fair-wage/2153005001/)
Any use of prisoner labor to support private industry is wrong in my opinion. This is where I have a problem with prison labor. UNICOR and various state-level systems can't employ all eligible and willing inmates, and want to bring more of the inmate population into the workforce, but there's only so much they can produce for government consumption. So they've started trying to market themselves to private industry. It's a worrying practice because of (1) unfair competition, and (2) it creates an incentive for businesses who profit from it to lobby government to keep the prison population up. I also don't support punitive labor which serves no productive purpose.
But if you're going to argue that any work requirement for prisoners is wrong, then I have a hard disagreement with you. Prisoners are inherently slaves, whether they work or not. If they can be productive members of society during their incarceration, earn money, pay off debts, learn skills, keep themselves occupied, that's a positive.
I also disagree with your assertion that a "huge amount of the manufacturing in the USA is made by prison slave labour". About 0.7% of the population is incarcerated at any given point, which is very high, but only a small fraction of prisoners are in manufacturing. I saw a number here of 63k, while the total workforce is 160M, so 0.04%:
(
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/a-recipe-for-disaster-american-prison-factories-becoming-incubators-for-coronavirus/2020/04/21/071062d2-83f3-11ea-ae26-989cfce1c7c7_story.html)
Finally, the reason why the US prison population has swelled in this century is that sentencing practices (mandatory and discretionary) became more more strongly punitive in the mid-late 1990s in response to the rise in violent crime and drug epidemics we went through in the late 1980s and early 1990s. That pendulum is finally swinging back the other way. It had little to do with prison labor because there's not nearly enough work to go around. So I think the real problem we have is the legacy of the drug war of the 80s and 90s. In particular, we have tons of inmates serving life sentences due to "three strikes" rules which were designed to be a deterrent but failed to really deter drug crime.
Tocky on 11/11/2020 at 02:17
Quote Posted by demagogue
We're at this stage where some government agencies -- the State Dept., Dept. of Justice, some Senators -- are actually pandering to Trump's fraudulent-vote fantasy. .
All while Hannity and ilk are whipping up a nice froth of hatred from his base who will never let it go. I would say they don't know the extent of what they are doing in destroying faith in democracy but I think they do. They feel that if they can just encourage enough loss of faith in those who voted in the majority but had the election taken from them then perhaps they can get them to not vote at all and they can remain in power longer. I tend to think they underestimate the disenfranchised. The capitol will burn. Many state capitols will burn. The boogaloo boys will get their wish. I don't think it's going to be the happy shoot liberals time they envision though.
I'm having a Mandella moment. Didn't Ben Carson die of Covid already? Who was that?
Nameless Voice on 11/11/2020 at 02:18
heywood: That's a lot of points and I don't think I'm quite qualified to answer them all properly, as I'm not
that well-versed in the details of US history.
So I'll just say a few quick points:
Firstly, I was pointing out that slavery is explicitly protected - in certain circumstances - in the constitution of the USA.
Second, even if you think that some crimes are bad enough to warrant having the perpetrators do forced labour, there's still the question of: are all the laws that can put people in prison just?
For example, it used to be illegal to be gay in the UK. That was an official law that could be used to arrest people, and by following that logic, it would be perfectly acceptable for gay people to be slaves. (I know I'm mixing two very different countries' laws here, but I think the example still stands.)
A similar argument could be made for Uyghurs in China. It's not
quite the same thing, but I don't think it would be too far of a stretch to say that they consider being an Uyghur as a crime, and so they see nothing wrong with enslaving those people to do their manufacturing for them.
As for the swelling of the USA's prison population, they have been intentionally incarcerating black people for centuries. Read up on "convict leasing" and "Black Codes" laws. After the civil war, a lot of southern states specifically brought in new vagrancy laws to arrest freed slaves and then force them to work on plantations.
Here's a short excerpt from an article on Wikipedia (not the best source, but I'm sure you can find better ones if it bothers you) :
Quote:
(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Codes_(United_States)) Black Codes restricted black people's right to own property, conduct business, buy and lease land, and move freely through public spaces.[49] A central element of the Black Codes were vagrancy laws. States criminalized men who were out of work, or who were not working at a job whites recognized. Failure to pay a certain tax, or to comply with other laws, could also be construed as vagrancy.
Nine Southern states updated their vagrancy laws in 1865-1866. Of these, eight allowed convict leasing (a system in which state prison hired out convicts for labour) and five allowed prisoner labour for public works projects. This created a system that established incentives to arrest black men, as convicts were supplied to local governments and planters as free workers. The planters or other supervisors were responsible for their board and food, and black convicts were kept in miserable conditions. As Douglas Blackmon wrote, it was "slavery by another name". Because of their reliance on convict leasing, Southern states did not build any prisons until the late 19th century.
Tocky on 11/11/2020 at 02:21
Ah hell, that was Caine.
demagogue on 11/11/2020 at 02:35
Quote Posted by Tocky
I'm having a Mandella moment. Didn't Ben Carson die of Covid already? Who was that?
That was Herman Caine, the Pizza chain CEO and GOP presidential candidate contender in 2012.
Evidently I was reading too much up on him; hell of a ninja post, but yes, Caine.
