We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Friday, April 20, 2012

Creating a Prison-Corporate Complex

Click here to access article by Steve Fraser and Joshua Freeman from TomDispatch. (You may want to skip the introduction by scrolling down to the article.)

The infamous 19th century use of convict labor, consisting mostly of African Americans, to provide pliable low cost labor to corporations has made a reappearance in our 21st century. This is an excellent report on both the earlier history and what is happening today.
Rarely can you find workers so pliable, easy to control, stripped of political rights, and subject to martial discipline at the first sign of recalcitrance -- unless, that is, you traveled back to the nineteenth century when convict labor was commonplace nationwide.  Indeed, a sentence of “confinement at hard labor” was then the essence of the American penal system.  More than that, it was one vital way the United States became a modern industrial capitalist economy -- at a moment, eerily like our own, when the mechanisms of capital accumulation were in crisis.
An excellent film on the 19th century use of African American convict labor was recently broadcast by PBS: entitled, "Slavery by Another Name". The DVD can be purchased here.