Edwin Rios, - Reader Supported News / The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan:
The United States has the largest incarceration gulag system of any nation in the world. More Americans are in this system than any country on earth.
Total
2,418,352
Federal and state prisons
1,518,559
Local jails
785,556
Juvenile facilities (2007)
86,927
It represents a 500% increase over the past 40 years, and costs taxpayers billions of dollars each year. There are rural communities where prisons have been built specifically to help a community's economy and, as a result, warehousing their fellow humans becomes the main employment opportunity for that community. What few seem to realize is that this evil system also, in reality, has become a form of continuing American slavery. Here is some information on that.
A prisoner. Credit: Peter Macdiarmid / Getty
For more than two decades imprisoned in California, Samual Brown worked more than a dozen different jobs and was transferred between penitentiaries throughout the state – earning less than a dollar per hour. At the beginning of the pandemic, he worked as a healthcare facility worker tasked with disinfecting areas where inmates with Covid had been held. He wanted to quit his job – he had asthma and risked his life – but was told he “had no choice”. By the time Brown was released in December 2021, he had paid just $3,000 of the more than $37,000 in restitution he owed the state.
“That is tied directly into the same type of practices from slavery,” Brown, who is co-founder of the Anti-Violence Safety and Accountability Project, says. “That’s the same practice, the same energy, the same spirit that you see in this prison setting. A person can be on one plantation, and then they’ll be moved to another plantation, and you’ll never see the people who you […]
Cara McGoogan, National Reporter - The Washington Post
Stephan:
Louisiana, on the basis of its factual social outcome data, I think, has to be seen as an anti-democratic racist failed state. If it were not part of the United States, on the basis of that factual data, it would be considered a third-world country. And it provides a very specific example of racist prison slavery that pervades the American gulag.
Inmates Jonathan Archille, left, and Brodarius Washington, work for no pay at the cafe in the state Capitol building in Baton Rouge on Nov 4, 2022. Credit: Emily Kask / The Washington Post
BATON ROUGE, LOUISIANA — Breakfast at Louisiana’s state Capitol includes fresh coffee, cookies and egg sandwiches — made and served in part by incarcerated people working for no pay.
“They force us to work,” said Jonathan Archille, 29, who is among more than a dozen current and formerly incarcerated people in Louisiana who told The Washington Post they have felt like enslaved people in the state’s prison system.
Archille said prison staff had even used that term against him. “You’re a slave — that’s what they tell us,” he said. A spokesman for the Louisiana Department of Public Safety & Corrections, Ken Pastorick, said it “does not tolerate” such language and is looking into the allegation.
In the 2022 midterm elections, voters in four states approved changes to their constitutions to remove language enabling involuntary servitude as a punishment for crime — part of a […]
A state-by-state analysis of factual data leaves absolutely no question that abortion bans result in harm to the health of women who live in those states. Here are the facts. And yet the christofascist community, including women who are part of that movement, doesn't care.
Women in states with abortion bans are nearly three times more likely to die during pregnancy, childbirth or soon after giving birth, according to a report from the Gender Equity Policy Institute shared first with Axios.
The report authors wrote that “people in banned and restrictive states have worse outcomes than their counterparts in supportive states,” adding that anti-abortion states “are less likely to enact policies, like paid parental leave, which have been shown to improve outcomes for new parents and babies.”
These conditions, the report says are “more precarious” for the six in 10 women (59%) live in states that “ban or restrict abortion care and other reproductive health care.”
Details: The Gender Equity Policy Institute divided states into three groups — supportive of abortion access, restrictive and banned — and compared data on reproductive health outcomes between 2015 and 2021.
The thing about the Republicans is that whatever they are charging their opponents with when you check it is what they themselves are doing. The overwhelming majority of fact-based stories about election irregularities are the work not of Democrats, but of Republicans. Here is the latest example of this.
Women voting Credit: Raw Story
In the political world, Iowa is known for its early position in the Presidential primary election season, but now the state is making political news for a very much different reason.
Kim Phuong Taylor was arrested for trying to help her husband Jeremy Taylor win the Republican primary in 2020 for the Fourth Congressional District in Iowa. Taylor was trying to beat Steve King, a far right-wing incumbent congressman notorious for spouting racist rhetoric.
The indictment alleges that Phuong Taylor, born in Vietnam, used her ties to Iowa’s Vietnamese community in Woodbury County to go home-to-home to collect absentee ballots from people who were not home. Then she allegedly completed those ballots herself, filling in Jeremy Taylor’s name for the residents who did not know the votes were cast in their name and did not consent to voting for Taylor.
Here is some good news that makes me, personally, very happy. We have treated the other beings on our planet so badly that it was lovely to get this report.
Eagle with a fish in its talons. Credit: Jongsun Lee
Dear EarthTalk: The Endangered Species Act has been around for five decades. How successful has it been in protecting and restoring threatened and endangered species? – A.J. Munson, Bern, North Carolina
The Endangered Species Act (ESA) has been successful in preventing the extinction of hundreds of wildlife species and in promoting the recovery of thousands more since its inception in 1973.
According to the Center of Biological Diversity, a leading nonprofit with the simple mission of “saving life on Earth,” the ESA has protected more than 1,600 species in the U.S., preventing the extinction of 99 percent of the species listed under it.
