Getting Paid 93 Cents a Day in America? Corporations Bring Back the 19th Century
http://www.alternet.org/rights/155061/getting_paid_93_cents_a_day_in_america_corporations_bring_back_the_19th_century/
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Sweatshop labor is back with a vengeance. It can be found across broad stretches of the American economy and around the world. Penitentiaries have become a niche market for such work. The privatization of prisons in recent years has meant the creation of a small army of workers too coerced and right-less to complain.
Prisoners, whose ranks increasingly consist of those for whom the legitimate economy has found no use, now make up a virtual brigade within the reserve army of the unemployed whose ranks have ballooned along with the U.S. incarceration rate. The Corrections Corporation of America and G4S (formerly Wackenhut), two prison privatizers, sell inmate labor at subminimum wages to Fortune 500 corporations like Chevron, Bank of America, AT&T, and IBM.
These companies can, in most states, lease factories in prisons or prisoners to work on the outside. All told, nearly a million prisoners are now making office furniture, working in call centers, fabricating body armor, taking hotel reservations, working in slaughterhouses, or manufacturing textiles, shoes, and clothing, while getting paid somewhere between 93 cents and $4.73 per day.
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.
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RON PAUL 2012!
Pay no attention to the fact that this is happening swiftly right now thanks to complicity between Republicans and corporate neoDemocrats currently in office.
Fuck RON PAUL! 
It's happening, our government is helping, and it's disturbing as hell.
Yes, the one percent will lower our wages the way GE is doing, but the stage is being set to make billions on slave labor by imprisoning more and more Americans:
Money is the incentive. Money is the incentive. Money is the incentive. The explosive financial growth of the for-profit prison industry makes more and more sense when you realize it is/will be the source of dirt cheap slave labor stripped of the right to resist:
LOOK AT THIS: Financial growth of the private prison industry.
And the stage is being set for it to grow. Our government is building a police state: more prosecution of low-level crimes, militarized and dehumanizing police forces, and a growing list of possible reasons to send people to prison:
Obama administration cracks down on marijuana
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002431492
Obama administration pushes for drug testing in the workplace
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=581317
USA's new massive spy center to collect phone/email data on every American
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002451455
New legislation will make it legal for government, corporations to monitor all online communication deemed threatening to national security (vague wording)
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002527898
Obama administration argues for strip searches for all at Supreme Court; prevails
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002521527
Obama's proposed 2013 budget includes huge increases in prison funding
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=430756
