Stephan:   The American Gulag is essentially the new American slavery, and once again it is mostly a story of greedy White people exploiting and profiting from the misery of mostly Black and Brown people. Are some of them killers, rapists, and generally loathsome people? Of course, but we have five per cent of the world's population yet 25% of the world's prisoners live and work in the prison slums of the United States. So on the basis of the evidence we have to conclude either that Americans as a people are disproportionately violent degenerates, or that something else is going on, since no other country on earth has this percentage of prison slaves. With the privatization of prisons, I think one thing has become very clear: these powerless people of color are really nothing but valves used to tap into the public treasury to siphon off public money for their masters. As if that were not morally repugnant enough when one looks at the conditions in some American prisons it is hard to see how a person with any moral sense at all could be involved with this operation; it is one of our greatest shames and there is almost no public discourse about this. It has gotten so bad that people are willing to starve to death rather than abide.