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Something about North Korea being naturally more mountainous then South Korea making only 17% of North Korea useable for agriculture. Something about America bombing North Korean farmland.
Something about the partition of Palestine resulting in most of the useable agricultural land being given to Israel. Something about the targeting of Gaza’s farmland in air strikes and the bulldozing of crop fields by Israel.
Something about the Palestine flag hanging in the hallway of my North Korean primary school.
I don’t want for Palestine what North Korea has, sanctioned into the ground and demonised by the entire “international community” but I see parallels in our presents and pasts, and it gives me hope.
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lilithism1848 · 10 months
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defleftist · 6 months
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The only appropriate way to spend St. Patrick’s Day is to continue to stand up against the occupation and oppression of all people around the world. 🇵🇸🇮🇪
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FCC strikes a blow against prison profiteering
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TOMORROW NIGHT (July 20), I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.
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Here's a tip for policymakers hoping to improve the lives of the most Americans with the least effort: help prisoners.
After all, America is the most prolific imprisoner of its own people of any country in world history. We lock up more people than Stalin, than Mao, more than Botha, de Klerk or any other Apartheid-era South African president. And it's not just America's vast army of the incarcerated who are afflicted by our passion for imprisonment: their families and friends suffer, too.
That familial suffering isn't merely the constant pain of life without a loved one, either. America's prison profiteers treat prisoners' families as ATMs who can be made to pay and pay and pay.
This may seem like a losing strategy. After all, prison sentences are strongly correlated with poverty, and even if your family wasn't desperate before the state kidnapped one of its number and locked them behind bars, that loved one's legal defense and the loss of their income is a reliable predictor of downward social mobility.
Decent people don't view poor people as a source of riches. But for a certain kind of depraved sadist, the poor are an irresistible target. Sure, poor people don't have much money, but what they lack even more is protection under the law ("conservativism consists of the principle that there is an in-group whom the law protects but does not bind, and an out-group whom the law binds but does not protect" -Wilhoit). You can enjoy total impunity as you torment poor people, make them so miserable and afraid for their lives and safety that they will find some money, somewhere, and give it to you.
Mexican cartels understand this. They do a brisk trade in kidnapping asylum seekers whom the US has illegally forced to wait in Mexico to have their claims processed. The families of refugees – either in their home countries or in the USA – are typically badly off but they understand that Mexico will not lift a finger to protect a kidnapped refugee, and so when the kidnappers threaten the most grisly tortures as a means of extracting ransom, those desperate family members do whatever it takes to scrape up the blood-money.
What's more, the families of asylum seekers are not much better off than their kidnapped loved ones when it comes to seeking official protection. Family members who stayed behind in human rights hellholes like Bukele's El Salvador can't get their government to lodge official complaints with the Mexican ambassador, and family members who made it to the USA are in no position to get their Congressjerk to intercede with ICE or the Mexican consulate. This gives Mexico's crime syndicates total latitude to kidnap, torture, and grow rich by targeting the poorest, most desperate people in the world.
The private contractors that supply services to America's prisons are basically Mexican refugee-kidnappers with pretensions and shares listed on the NYSE. After decades of consolidation, the prison contracting sector has shrunk to two gigantic companies: Securus and Viapath (formerly Global Tellink). These private-equity backed behemoths dominate their sector, and have diversified, providing all kinds of services, from prison cafeteria meals to commissary, the prison stores where prisoners can buy food and other items.
If you're following closely, this is one of those places where the hair on the back of your neck starts to rise. These companies make money when prisoners buy food from the commissary, and they're also in charge of the quality of the food in the mess hall. If the food in the mess hall is adequate and nutritious, there's no reason to buy food from the commissary.
This is what economists call a "moral hazard." You can think of it as the reason that prison ramen costs 300% more than ramen in the free world:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/20/captive-market/#locked-in
(Not just ramen: in America's sweltering prisons, an 8" fan costs $40, and the price of water went up in Texas prisons by 50% during last summer's heatwave.)
It's actually worse than that: if you get sick from eating bad prison food, the same company that poisoned you gets paid to operate the infirmary where you're treated:
https://theappeal.org/massachusetts-prisons-wellpath-dentures-teeth/
Now, the scam of abusing prisoners to extract desperate pennies from their families is hardly new. There's written records of this stretching back to the middle ages. Nor is this pattern a unique one: making an unavoidable situation as miserable as possible and then upcharging people who have the ability to pay to get free of the torture is basically how the airlines work. Making coach as miserable as possible isn't merely about shaving pennies by shaving inches off your legroom: it's a way to "incentivize" anyone who can afford it to pay for an upgrade to business-class. The worse coach is, the more people you can convince to dip into their savings or fight with their boss to move classes. The torments visited upon everyone else in coach are economically valuable to the airlines: their groans and miseries translate directly into windfall profits, by convincing better-off passengers to pay not to have the same thing done to them.
Of course, with rare exceptions (flying to get an organ transplant, say) plane tickets are typically discretionary. Housing, on the other hand, is a human right and a prerequisite for human thriving. The worse things are for tenants, the more debt and privation people will endure to become home-owners, so it follows that making renters worse off makes homeowners richer:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/
For Securus and Viapath, the path to profitability is to lobby for mandatory, long prison sentences and then make things inside the prison as miserable as possible. Any prisoner whose family can find the funds can escape the worst of it, and all the prisoners who can't afford it serve the economically important function of showing the prisoners whose families can afford it how bad things will be if they don't pay.
If you're thinking that prisoners might pay Securus, Viapath and their competitors out of their own prison earnings, forget it. These companies have decided that the can make more by pocketing the difference between the vast sums paid by third parties for prisoners' labor and the pennies the prisoners get from their work. Remember, the 13th Amendment specifically allows for the enslavement of incarcerated people! Six states ban paying prisoners at all. North Carolina caps prisoners' wages at one dollar per day. The national average prison wage is $0.52/hour. Prisoners' labor produces $11b/year in goods and services:
https://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2024/0324bowman.html
Forced labor and extortion are a long and dishonorable tradition in incarceration, but this century saw the introduction of a novel, exciting way of extracting wealth from prisoners and their families. It started when private telcos took over prison telephones and raised the price of a prison phone call. These phone companies found willing collaborators in local jail and prison systems: all they had to do was offer to split the take with the jailers.
With the advent of the internet, things got far worse. Digitalization meant that prisons could replace the library, adult educations, commissary accounts, letter-mail, parcels, in-person visits and phone calls with a single tablet. These cheaply made tablets were offered for free to prisoners, who lost access to everything from their kids' handmade birthday cards to in-person visits with those kids.
In their place, prisoners' families had to pay huge premiums to have their letters scanned so that prisoners could pay (again) to view those scans on their tablets. Instead of in-person visits, prisoners families had to pay $3-10/minute for a janky, postage-stamp sized video. Perversely, jails and prisons replaced their in-person visitation rooms with rooms filled with shitty tablets where family members could sit and videoconference with their incarcerated loved ones who were just a few feet away:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/14/minnesota-nice/#shitty-technology-adoption-curve
Capitalists hate capitalism. The capital classes are on a relentless search for markets with captive customers and no competitors. The prison-tech industry was catnip for private equity funds, who bought and "rolled" up prison contractors, concentrating the sector into a duopoly of debt-laden companies whose ability to pay off their leveraged buyouts was contingent on their ability to terrorize prisoners' families into paying for their overpriced, low-quality products and services.
One particularly awful consequence of these rollups was the way that prisoners could lose access to their data when their prison's service-provider was merged with a rival. When that happened, the IT systems would be consolidated, with the frequent outcome that all prisoners' data was lost. Imagine working for two weeks to pay for a song or a book, or a scan of your child's handmade Father's Day card, only to have the file deleted in an IT merger. Now imagine that you're stuck inside for another 20 years.
This is a subject I've followed off and on for years. It's such a perfect bit of end-stage capitalist cruelty, combining mass incarceration with monopolies. Even if you're not imprisoned, this story is haunting, because on the one hand, America keeps thinking of new reasons to put more people behind bars, and on the other hand, every technological nightmare we dream up for prisoners eventually works its way out to the rest of us in a process I call the "shitty technology adoption curve." As William Gibson says, "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed" – but the future sure pools up thick and dystopian around America's prisoners:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware
My background interest in the subject got sharper a few years ago when I started working on The Bezzle, my 2023 high-tech crime thriller about prison-tech grifters:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle
One of the things that was on my mind when I got to work on that book was the 2017 court-case that killed the FCC's rules limit interstate prison-call gouging. The FCC could have won that case, but Trump's FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, dropped it:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/06/prisoners-lose-again-as-court-wipes-out-inmate-calling-price-caps/
With that bad precedent on the books, the only hope prisoners had for relief from the FCC was for Congress to enact legislation specifically granting the agency the power to regulate prison telephony. Incredibly, Congress did just that, with Biden signing the "Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act" in early 2023:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/1541/text
With the new law in place, it fell to the FCC use those newfound powers. Compared to agencies like the FTC and the NLRB, Biden's FCC has been relatively weak, thanks in large part to the Biden administration's refusal to defend its FCC nomination for Gigi Sohn, a brilliant and accomplished telecoms expert. You can tell that Sohn would have been a brilliant FCC commissioner because of the way that America's telco monopolists and their allies in the senate (mostly Republicans, but some Democrats, too) went on an all-out offensive against her, using the fact that she is gay to smear her and ultimately defeat her nomination:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/19/culture-war-bullshit-stole-your-broadband/
But even without Sohn, the FCC has managed to do something genuinely great for America's army of the imprisoned. This week, the FCC voted in price-caps on prison calls, so that call rates will drop from $11.35 for 15 minutes to just $0.90. Both interstate and intrastate calls will be capped at $0.06-0.12/minute, with a phased rollout starting in January:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/07/fcc-closes-final-loopholes-that-keep-prison-phone-prices-exorbitantly-high/
It's hard to imagine a policy that will get more bang for a regulator's buck than this one. Not only does this represent a huge savings for prisoners and their families, those savings are even larger in proportion to their desperate, meager finances.
It shows you how important a competent, qualified regulator is. When it comes to political differences between Republicans and Democrats, regulatory competence is a grossly underrated trait. Trump's FCC Chair Ajit Pai handed out tens of billions of dollars in public money to monopoly carriers to improve telephone networks in underserved areas, but did so without first making accurate maps to tell him where the carriers should invest. As a result, that money was devoured by executive bonuses and publicly financed dividends and millions of Americans entered the pandemic lockdowns with broadband that couldn't support work-from-home or Zoom school. When Biden's FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel took over, one of her first official acts was to commission a national study and survey of broadband quality. Republicans howled in outrage:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/10/digital-redlining/#stop-confusing-the-issue-with-relevant-facts
The telecoms sector has been a rent-seeking, monopolizing monster since the days of Samuel Morse:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/18/the-bell-system/#were-the-phone-company-we-dont-have-to-care
Combine telecoms and prisons, and you get a kind of supermonster, the meth-gator of American neofeudalism:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tennessee-police-warn-locals-not-flush-drugs-fear-meth-gators-n1030291
The sector is dirty beyond words, and it corrupts everything it touches – bribing prison officials to throw out all the books in the prison library and replace them with DRM-locked, high-priced ebooks that prisoners must toil for weeks to afford, and that vanish from their devices whenever a prison-tech company merges with a rival:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/02/captive-customers/#guillotine-watch
The Biden presidency has been fatally marred by the president's avid support of genocide, and nothing will change that. But for millions of Americans, the Biden administration's policies on telecoms, monopoly, and corporate crime have been a source of profound, lasting improvements.
It's not just presidents who can make this difference. Millions of America's prisoners are rotting in state and county jails, and as California has shown, state governments have broad latitude to kick out prison profiteers:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/08/captive-audience/#good-at-their-jobs
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Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/19/martha-wright-reed/#capitalists-hate-capitalism
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chaiaurchaandni · 11 months
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it is imp to remember that this is not about religion and the ethnic cleansing of artsakh proves this. all oppressive regimes are connected regardless of religion and that is why azerbaijan and israel have good relations. another example is saudi arabia having good relations with america and israel while also killing other muslims in yemen.
interestingly, like israel, saudi also uses religion to gain credibility (recently got holy mosque imam to give statement condemning boycotts and encouraging muslims to not be involved in the situation in palestine) and recruit muslim supporters from all over the world, while simultaneously killing/imprisoning muslim critics of the kingdom.
similarly, israel sells itself as a safe haven for jews and convinces jews around the world to migrate to israel while also simultaneously criminalizing antizionist jews all over the world, even suggesting that theyre not 'real jews' (reminiscent of takfirism which is a core part of saudi wahabi ideology) [ fun fact: the house of saud came into power in arabia with help from the british, just like the zionists in palestine! ]
oppressive regimes are directly connected and mirror each other in several ways. this is why liberation and resistance movements need to unite and work together across the world
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troythecatfish · 2 months
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Project 2025 is terrifying. But when the history books talk about this period, they will point to July 1, 2024, as the beginning of the Fascist Era in the United States.
That's the day SCOTUS ruled on the perfectly-named Trump v. United States, in which the Court said the president could not be prosecuted for crimes committed in office.
In the 11 days since, Biden and the Democrats have taken absolutely no action. That's because they are not an antifascist party. They will capitulate and capitulate until fascism is complete.
The media are playing this down as something that only applies to Trump. As something not especially dangerous. As something normal.
Protest, strikes, even "rioting" (a slur for direct action) are not failures of democracy, they are integral to it. The system has failed and will not replace itself. The People still have the power to make real, substantive change and create a society that is not just not-fascist but actively antifascist. And anticolonialist, antiracist, antisexist, genuinely democratic, and free.
Voting for Democrats AT BEST delays the inevitable furthering of fascism for a short while, and AT WORST actually accelerates fascism by empowering capitulators. Want to vote Biden? Fine, waste an hour of your time.
If you want to actually fight fascism, YOU HAVE TO FIGHT.
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anarchywoofwoof · 10 months
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whenever someone wants to start blabbering about how damaging shoplifting and theft is to a business, particularly a place like Walmart, Target or nearly any big box retail establishment, be sure to look up the company's annual revenue.
and when you start playing out the numbers, it gets absolutely fucking absurd real fast.
for example, let's use Walmart.
the CEO of Walmart - Doug McMillon - his net worth is $280 million.
this is a person who made $24.1 million in fiscal 2023 alone.
that's about 933x the median salary of a Walmart employee.
let's have some more fun with numbers, shall we?
if you used only the ceo's salary of $24.1 million per year here's what you could buy in (men's) clothes from Walmart!
300,000 Hanes Men's ComfortSoft Crewneck T-Shirt - Pack Of 5 ($20)
500,000 Athletic Works Men's Crew Socks - Pack of 12 ($11)
250,000 George Men's Cotton Stretch Regular Leg Boxer Briefs - Pack of 6 ($20)
250,000 George Regular Fit Jeans - 1 pair ($13)
250,000 George Men's 38mm Single Loop Casual Belt - 1 belt ($7)
150,000 Athletic Works Men's Banded Jogger Slip-on - 1 pair ($15)
and he would still have $350,000 left over!
mind you - this is only the CEO!
Walmart CFO (Chief Financial Officer) John David Rainey made $39,725,601 during the same time period.
Walmart Chief Technology and Development Officer Suresh Kumar made $16,107,812 during the same time period.
Sam's Club President & CEO Kathryn McLay made $11,934,475 during the same time period.
Walmart President & CEO of Walmart International Judith McKenna made $13,526,160 during the same time period.
collectively, Walmart's Executive Staff was compensated to the tune of $120,900,000 during fiscal 2023.
so you know those numbers up there? all of those clothes that you can now commonly find locked behind glass at your local Walmart that you could buy with the CEO's annual salary?
multiply those figures by five, and now you have what you could buy with ONE YEAR of all of the Walmart executives' pay combined.
that's enough to give everyone in the City of Chicago, IL two free t-shirts.
the name of the game is greed. this is one corporation - albeit a huge one. and just one single solitary fiscal year of earnings.
extrapolate this across 5-10 years. could you imagine the untold number of lives we could change if these executives agreed to forego their insane salaries for a short period of time? it would almost certainly not cause them any undue struggle because of the sheer amount of wealth and resources they have.
it'll never happen, but don't let anyone convince you that it has to be this way. we are being gaslit by people with more money than we will ever see in many lifetimes so that they can live a life of luxury unseen by 90% of the population. stop letting them pull the wool over your eyes and call it what it is: pure, unadulterated greed.
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nightlyforrest · 2 months
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Fuck this disgusting faschistic genocidal wankfest
no child, man or woman derserves whats happening in gaza rn. Aside from the revolting freaks perpotrating it. Because when you bring the slaughter to their doorstep they try to play the victim, or the saviour whichever gets their dick harder as if they aren't brutalising thousands every single day. Fuck capitalism, fuck zionism, fuck war, FUCK POLITITIANS. FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA, PALESTINE WILL BE FREE
EXTERMINATE THE RICH BEFORE THEY LAY EGGS
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gryficowa · 2 months
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Capitalism has no mercy…
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"bath beach towel 3D Palestine and beach flag (XCF-5Z) • Price, Opinions • Beach towels"
Simply business Poles (Because Allegro is a website often used by Poles)
Maybe the proboscis memes are dead in Poland, but Polishness still holds up too well
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But seriously, capitalism is fucked up
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nando161mando · 1 year
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We are living in a police state
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workersolidarity · 1 year
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Literally, your "democratic" government would rather fuck up the entire world with Imperialism than to have Americans realize their government can do more for them.
And THAT is why Actually-Existing Socialist countries cannot be allowed to survive and prosper.
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slavicafire · 1 year
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notre dame burning was so beautiful I wish we could have been normal about it (enjoy it) instead of embarrasingly stupid (in uproar to waste milions in various currencies and susceptible to state propaganda)
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Greedflation, but for prisoners
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I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TOMORROW (Apr 21) in TORINO, then Marin County (Apr 27), Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!
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Today in "Capitalists Hate Capitalism" news: The Appeal has published the first-ever survey of national prison commissary prices, revealing just how badly the prison profiteer system gouges American's all-time, world-record-beating prison population:
https://theappeal.org/locked-in-priced-out-how-much-prison-commissary-prices/
Like every aspect of the prison contracting system, prison commissaries – the stores where prisoners are able to buy food, sundries, toiletries and other items – are dominated by private equity funds that have bought out all the smaller players. Private equity deals always involve gigantic amounts of debt (typically, the first thing PE companies do after acquiring a company is to borrow heavily against it and then pay themselves a hefty dividend).
The need to service this debt drives PE companies to cut quality, squeeze suppliers, and raise prices. That's why PE loves to buy up the kinds of businesses you must spend your money at: dialysis clinics, long-term care facilities, funeral homes, and prison services.
Prisoners, after all, are a literal captive market. Unlike capitalist ventures, which involve the risk that a customer will take their business elsewhere, prison commissary providers have the most airtight of monopolies over prisoners' shopping.
Not that prisoners have a lot of money to spend. The 13th Amendment specifically allows for the enslavement of convicted criminals, and so even though many prisoners are subject to forced labor, they aren't necessarily paid for it:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/02/captive-customers/#guillotine-watch
Six states ban paying prisoners anything. North Carolina caps prisoners' pay at one dollar per day. Nationally, prisoners earn $0.52/hour, while producing $11b/year in goods and services:
https://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2024/0324bowman.html
So there's a double cruelty to prison commissary price-gouging. Prisoners earn far less than any other kind of worker, and they pay vastly inflated prices for the necessities of life. There's also a triple cruelty: prisoners' families – deprived of an incarcerated breadwinner's earnings – are called upon to make up the difference for jacked up commissary prices out of their own strained finances.
So what does prison profiteering look like, in dollars and sense? Here's the first-of-its-kind database tracking the costs of food, hygiene items and religious items in 46 states:
https://theappeal.org/commissary-database/
Prisoners rely heavily on commissaries for food. Prisons serve spoiled, inedible food, and often there isn't enough to go around – prisoners who rely on the food provided by their institutions literally starve. This is worst in prisons where private equity funds have taken over the cafeteria, which is inevitable accompanied by swingeing cuts to food quality and portions:
https://theappeal.org/prison-food-virginia-fluvanna-correctional-center/
So you have one private equity fund starving prisoners, and another that's gouging them on food. Or sometimes it's the same company. Keefe Group, owned by HIG Capital, provides commissaries to prisons whose cafeterias are managed by other HIG Capital portfolio companies like Trinity Services Group. HIG also owns the prison health-care company Wellpath – so if they give you food poisoning, they get paid twice.
Wellpath delivers "grossly inadequate healthcare":
https://theappeal.org/massachusetts-prisons-wellpath-dentures-teeth/
And Trinity serves "meager portions of inedible food":
https://theappeal.org/clayton-county-jail-sheriff-election/
When prison commissaries gouge on food, no part of the inventory is spared, even the cheapest items. In Florida, a packet of ramen costs $1.06, 300% more inside the prison than it does at the Target down the street:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24444312-fl_doc_combined_commissary_lists#document/p6/a2444049
America's prisoners aren't just hungry, they're also hot. The climate emergency is sending temperatures in America's largely un-air-conditioned prisons soaring to dangerous levels. Commissaries capitalize on this, too: an 8" fan costs $40 in Delaware's Sussex Correctional Institution. In Georgia, that fan goes for $32 (but prisoners are not paid for their labor in Georgia pens). And in scorching Texas, the commissary raised the price of water by 50% last summer:
https://www.tpr.org/criminal-justice/2023-07-20/texas-charges-prisoners-50-more-for-water-for-as-heat-wave-continues
Toiletries are also sold at prices that would make an airport gift-shop blush. Need denture adhesive? That's $12.28 in an Idaho pen, triple the retail price. 15% of America's prisoners are over 55. The Keefe Group – sister company to the "grossly inadequate" healthcare company Wellpath – operates that commissary. In Oregon, the commissary charges a 200% markup on hearing-aid batteries. Vermont charges a 500% markup on reading glasses. Imagine spending decades in prison: toothless, blind, and deaf.
Then there's the religious items. Bibles and Christmas cards are surprisingly reasonable, but a Qaran will run you $26 in Vermont, where a Bible is a mere $4.55. Kufi caps – which cost $3 or less in the free world – go for $12 in Indiana prisons. A Virginia prisoner needs to work for 8 hours to earn enough to buy a commissary Ramadan card (you can buy a Christmas card after three hours' labor).
Prison price-gougers are finally facing a comeuppance. California's new BASIC Act caps prison commissary markups at 35% (California commissaries used to charge 63-200% markups):
https://theappeal.org/price-gouging-in-california-prisons-newsom-signature/
Last year, Nevada banned any markup on hygiene items:
https://www.leg.state.nv.us/App/NELIS/REL/82nd2023/Bill/10425/Overview
And prison tech monopolist Securus has been driven to the brink of bankruptcy, thanks to the activism of Worth Rises and its coalition partners:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/08/money-talks/
When someone tells you who they are, believe them the first time. Prisons show us how businesses would treat us if they could get away with it.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/20/captive-market/#locked-in
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defleftist · 8 months
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I could be normal or I could go on long rants about why the police and the entire police system are evil and corrupt in a manner that scares normies. Guess which one I am?
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covenofthearticulate · 8 months
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tonight i'm thinking about the fact that Louis stayed in San Francisco after the interview like my guy was in SF through the 80s. he's seen some shit.
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