The New Jim Crow – Virtual Slavery – Republicans Bring Back Chain Gangs to Replace Paid Labor and Illegal Immigrants

Post Civil War Much of the South Was Rebuilt By Prison Labor Slavery

Chain Gangs were once a fixture in the South. Used as a slavery replacement strategy, prisoners – almost exclusively black, were used for everything from rebuilding the City of Atlanta after the Civil War to picking cotton, and laying railroad tracks.

The Prison Slavery System is making a big comeback, with major corporations – and in states which have driven out their “illegal immigrants”, now need Prison labor to pick the crops.

With black unemployment hovering at 16.5%, and teen unemployment hovering at 50% – in conservative America, if you are black – you have to go to jail to get a job.

Wisconsin Republicans aren’t that ambitious…yet.

Prison inmates replace unionized workers in Racine, Wisconsin

 

Prison inmates have replaced union workers in Racine County, Wisconsin, thanks to the changes to the states collective bargaining laws that went into effect at the end of June.

The Journal Times reported prison inmates will now be able to do tasks such as landscaping, painting, and shoveling sidewalks in the winter that were previously performed by unionized employees.

Inmates are not required to do any work for the county, but can receive time off their sentence if they do. Racine County Executive Jim Ladwig said the use of prison labor would not result in any public works staff reductions.

“We’re gonna have them do landscaping at county buildings, have them pick up trash on the roads,” he told local Fox News 6. “So we can use some of the county personnel to do difficult tasks, such as putting in a parking lot at the park.”

Republican Gov. Scott Walker signed a non-fiscal version of his budget plan into law in March that stripped nearly all collective bargaining rights from Wisconsin public workers, giving officials the power to make many changes affecting workers without formal negotiations.

 

Why Bin Lauden Won the War

It has become obvious to members of the intelligentsia what has been obvious to some of us for a very long time…

Bin Lauden, and Al Quada have won the “War of Terrorism”.

It started with the entirely unnecessary and illegitimate invasion of Iraq, and has gone steadily downhill since then.

The objective of international terrorism to to fool larger enemies into giving up their freedom, and into becoming frozen by fear. We had an entire presidential administration under the Bushit which used that fear to shred our Constitution and Laws. Today’s Republican Party, serving as little more than Faux New’s sock puppet, and the Tea Party’s legitimacy – revels in promoting fear for political gain. When you see the Tea Bagger clowns marching down our streets to protest the building of a Muslim Religious Center near the site of the WTC Buildings…

If you haven’t figured it our yet – Bin Lauden won.

Back during the bad old days of the Bushit Administration I argued that the best response to the downing of the 110 Story WTC Buildings…

Was to build 200 story buildings on the same spot.

But the chicken littles won that argument…

Just like Bin Lauden has won the war.

Ted Koppel hits one out of the park with this one – finally pointing out what should have been obvious.

Ted Koppel: Nine years after 9/11, let’s stop fulfilling bin Laden’s goals

The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, succeeded far beyond anything Osama bin Laden could possibly have envisioned. This is not just because they resulted in nearly 3,000 deaths, nor only because they struck at the heart of American financial and military power. Those outcomes were only the bait; it would remain for the United States to spring the trap.

The goal of any organized terrorist attack is to goad a vastly more powerful enemy into an excessive response. And over the past nine years, the United States has blundered into the 9/11 snare with one overreaction after another. Bin Laden deserves to be the object of our hostility, national anguish and contempt, and he deserves to be taken seriously as a canny tactician. But much of what he has achieved we have done, and continue to do, to ourselves. Bin Laden does not deserve that we, even inadvertently, fulfill so many of his unimagined dreams.

It did not have to be this way. The Bush administration’s initial response was just about right. The calibrated combination of CIA operatives, special forces and air power broke the Taliban in Afghanistan and sent bin Laden and the remnants of al-Qaeda scurrying across the border into Pakistan. The American reaction was quick, powerful and effective — a clear warning to any organization contemplating another terrorist attack against the United States. This is the point at which President George W. Bush should have declared “mission accomplished,” with the caveat that unspecified U.S. agencies and branches of the military would continue the hunt for al-Qaeda’s leader. The world would have understood, and most Americans would probably have been satisfied.

1 in 5 Black Men Marry Interracially Today

While black-black Marriage still makes up 75% of all marriages involving black folks, the numbers are changing rapidly.

What the report doesn’t say is if the number of black women marrying men of other races is increasing, of by how much. At this rate in 20 years or so, the concept of a “black” community in the United States will disappear outside of the “encapsulated” urban communities. Indeed, “blackness” is slowly migrating from a racial definition to an “ethnic” definition.

I would like to see statistics on the education and socio-economic level of black folks who are marrying outside of their own racial group. What I would bet is this is dominated by a high percentage of working class blue collar and educated, professionals.

Black Women See Fewer Black Men at the Altar

A new study shows that more and more black men are marrying women of other races. In fact, more than 1 in 5 black men who wed (22 percent) married a nonblack woman in 2008. This compares with about 9 percent of black women, and represents a significant increase for black men — from 15.7 percent in 2000 and 7.9 percent in 1980.

Sociologists said the rate of black men marrying women of other races further reduces the already-shrunken pool of potential partners for black women seeking a black husband.

“When you add in the prison population,” said Prof. Steven Ruggles, director of the Minnesota Population Center, “it pretty well explains the extraordinarily low marriage rates of black women.”

Among all married African-Americans in 2008, 13 percent of men and 6 percent of women had a nonblack spouse. This compares with nearly half of American-born Asians choosing non-Asian spouses.

“The continuing imbalance in the rates for black men and black women could be making it even harder for black women to find a husband,” said Prof. Andrew J. Cherlin, director of the population center at Johns Hopkins University.

The study, to be released Friday by the Pew Research Center, found that intermarriage among Asian, black, Hispanic and white people now accounts for a record 1 in 6 new marriages in the United States. Tellingly, blacks and whites remain the least-common variety of interracial pairing. Still, black-white unions make up 1 in 60 new marriages today, compared with fewer than 1 in 1,000 back when Barack Obama’s parents wed a half-century ago.

While the increased rate of intermarriage reflects demographic changes in the American population — a more diverse pool of available spouses — as well as changing social mores, they may presage a redefinition of America’s evolving concepts of race and ethnicity.

“The lines dividing these groups are getting blurrier and blurrier,” said Jeffrey S. Passel, an author of the Pew analysis.

For instance, of the 2.7 million American children with a black parent, about 10 percent also have one nonblack parent today. Because many mixed-race African- Americans still choose to identify as being black — as Mr. Obama did when he filled out the 2010 census — the number of multiracial African-Americans could actually be higher…

The Pew analysis found that among newly married couples, 14.6 percent were mixed in 2008, compared with 11.2 percent in 2000 and 8.3 percent in 1990. (Among all people currently married, 8 percent of marriages were mixed in 2008, compared with 6.8 percent in 2000 and 4.5 percent in 1990.)

Of all 3.8 million adults who married in 2008, 31 percent of Asians, 26 percent of Hispanic people, 16 percent of blacks and 9 percent of whites married a person whose race or ethnicity was different from their own. Those were all record highs.

Dr, Boyce Watkins – Gates Full of It!

Watkins lights into Gates with this piece. I agree with Watkins that Gates has missed the key issues relative to slavery and Reparations, and fallen for the white supremacist line which is oft quoted as an excuse.

Henry Louis Gates lets US off the hook in ‘slavery blame game’

Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. recently wrote an interesting piece for the New York Times called, “Ending the Slavery Blame Game.” In the piece, Gates effectively argues that the fight for reparations is convoluted and somewhat mitigated by the fact that African elites participated in the slave trade. While describing complex business deals made between some African leadership and the Europeans who brought Africans to the New World, it almost appears as though Gates is saying that this disturbing relationship somehow undermines the right of African-Americans to hold our government accountable for its involvement in crimes committed against our people.

At very least, I am under the assumption that by “ending the slavery blame game,” Gates is arguing that we should stop blaming the United States government and white America for the rape, murder, castration, lynching and beating of our ancestors.

Sorry Dr. Gates, but I must respectfully (or perhaps not so respectfully) disagree. If a young girl is sold into prostitution by her own parents, the pimp must still pay for the suffering he caused the young woman. He can’t simply say, “Her parents made a deal with me, so you should stop the blame game.”

In other words, the United States, as a broad and powerful industrial entity, benefited from slavery to the tune of several trillion dollars. Much of this wealth was passed down from one white man to another, and was always out of the grasp of the black men, women and children who gave their lives on American soil in order to earn it. As a result, the median net worth of the African-American family is roughly one-tenth that of white American families and we have consistently higher unemployment due to our inability to create jobs, since white Americans own most businesses.

Henry Louis Gates – On Slavery and Reparations

Think Professor Gates misses a half a dozen points here in this article, including the issues of generational slavery and Jim Crow being the actual driving issues behind much of the Reparations discussion…

So I believe Gates is wrong here on a number of points. After a snippet from the Gates piece, I will include a response by Boyce Watkins response, which isn’t very dissimilar to my reaction, except for the personal shot at Gates’ ego…

Ending the Slavery Blame-Game

THANKS to an unlikely confluence of history and genetics — the fact that he is African-American and president — Barack Obama has a unique opportunity to reshape the debate over one of the most contentious issues of America’s racial legacy: reparations, the idea that the descendants of American slaves should receive compensation for their ancestors’ unpaid labor and bondage.

There are many thorny issues to resolve before we can arrive at a judicious (if symbolic) gesture to match such a sustained, heinous crime. Perhaps the most vexing is how to parcel out blame to those directly involved in the capture and sale of human beings for immense economic gain.

While we are all familiar with the role played by the United States and the European colonial powers like Britain, France, Holland, Portugal and Spain, there is very little discussion of the role Africans themselves played. And that role, it turns out, was a considerable one, especially for the slave-trading kingdoms of western and central Africa. These included the Akan of the kingdom of Asante in what is now Ghana, the Fon of Dahomey (now Benin), the Mbundu of Ndongo in modern Angola and the Kongo of today’s Congo, among several others.

Ending Modern Slavery – Not Only In the Rest of the World

This video discusses the existence of, and the methodology to end modern slavery as well as the economics.

Estimates vary on the number of people being held in slavery in the Untied States.

Modern Slavery

In textbooks across the country, students are still taught that slavery in the US ended with the adoption of the 13th Amendment in 1865.

But the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) knows better, and its Modern-Day Slavery Museum is traveling throughout Florida to drive that point home–that slavery persists in the agriculture fields of the state right up through this very day.

The Village Voice recently described the significance of the museum this way: “Though it’s unlikely to compete for crowds with Disneyworld, the Modern-Day Slavery Museum may be Florida’s most important new attraction.”

How Corruption Destroyed America

Corruption threatens “soul and fabric” of U.S.: FBI

BOCA RATON, Florida (Reuters) – Corruption, whether in the form of crooked officials, financial fraudsters or even philandering sports stars, is tearing at the fabric of U.S. society and is the country’s No. 1 criminal threat, a senior FBI agent said on Tuesday.

Corruption destroying the country

Addressing businessmen in Florida, where financial fraud cases jumped by 42 percent in the last year, FBI Miami Division Special Agent in Charge John Gillies said failures in personal ethics and integrity sowed the initial poisonous seeds of corruption in a society.

Gillies said transgressions by high-profile public servants and even perceived social role models, like top golfer Tiger Woods, currently embroiled in allegations that he had extramarital affairs, sent the signal to young Americans that cheating and stealing were acceptable.

“Where do our children learn this? They see us, their elected officials, their sports stars, they see how they act and they figure, ‘well it’s OK,’” he said, citing the case of Woods, whose early morning car accident in Florida last month triggered a storm of media questioning of his clean-living reputation.