U.S. Using Slave Labor on a Massive Scale: What, You Don’t Believe It? Read On..

It was on the top of page one of the Sunday New York Times May 25^th, so why the skepticism? No, the Times didn’t use words like “slave,” “slavery,” “slave labor,” but that is what it described. The Times is an inveterate user of euphemisms to sugar-coat the crimes of the system that it is in large part a mouthpiece for. So let’s take a look at the article. [1]

The headline reads, “Using Jailed Migrants As a Pool of Cheap Labor.” Very, very, very cheap, in fact. So cheap as to be no different from slavery. But you have to figure that out for yourself. Which is easy to do, if you just read the subhead: “Detainees Resist a U.S. Program That Puts Them to Work for $1 a Day or Less.” Note the sugar-coated euphemism for prisoner, “detainee.” A “detainee” is someone held for a brief time. But starting with its use as a euphemism for the permanent prisoners in the U.S. military gulag at Guantanamo Bay (on occupied Cuban territory) the word has been perverted in an Orwellian way so it no longer denotes a temporary holding of a person, but actual imprisonment. The U.S. government and propaganda system don’t want to admit they have untried and unconvicted prisoners, I guess, so they pretend their captivity is brief and temporary by misusing the word “detainee.” [2]

According to the Times, in county jails no money at all is paid. Instead the prisoners are “paid” with candy bars and soda. Like the way you would “pay” a donkey or an ox. But those are the lucky ones. Some prisoners in the awful county jails of the U.S. work “free,” says the article. So no qualification at all is necessary for the word, “slave.” A word the Times assiduously avoids.

There are tens of thousands of these slave laborers, captured non-citizens in the clutches of the U.S. government (and its partners in oppression, county jails which are run by local sheriffs’ departments, and private companies in the prison business) held every year in involuntary servitude. The Federal government pays the sheriffs and private prison corporations to “house” (imprison) the bulk of the “detainees” (prisoners). The Times says there were 60,000 slave laborers in this particular slave labor “program” last year.

Now. these aren’t convicts. Of course there’s also a massive system of slavery in American prisons for citizens. This story is about “illegal immigrants,” “civil detainees” the Times calls them, swept up in the massive Obama roundup that has been going on for five and a half years now (2 million captured and counting), who are awaiting adjudication of their fate by immigration courts. According to the Times, “roughly half” of those who appear in court “are ultimately permitted to stay” in the U.S. (But not all go to court. Some “agree” to be deported to get it over with, to escape their imprisonment and separation from their families who they cannot support while imprisoned.) And that statement by the times doesn’t strike me as accurate. Most immigration prisoners have no attorneys to represent them, for one thing. [3]

One case the article highlights was a chef, forced to cook for a dollar a day, who was in the U.S. legally but was imprisoned for 19 months as a slave anyway! Seems his work visa was canceled because of a “clerical error.” 19 months imprisoned as a slave laborer because of a clerical error. That’s the kind of story that Americans would cluck their tongues at if it happened in a “backward” country like India.

The cook, interestingly, is from Guatemala, a country turned into a fascist hellhole by the U.S. coup in 1954 ordered by Eisenhower, that destroyed democracy in that country and has been a terror state ever since. For Guatemalans, there is no freedom in the “Free World.” It’s the terrible economic and political conditions in their homelands, mainly Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador, that drive these immigrants to the U.S.

Both the U.S. Government and private “contractors” that now run prisons use immigrant slave labor. In some private prisons, the victims have organized resistance by refusing to work and by hunger strikes. Their corporate oppressors have responded by throwing them into solitary, which is not only a vicious punishment and attempt to break their spirits, but cuts them off from those outside trying to draw attention to the plight of the slaves. [4] (Democracy Now! reported this before the NY Times did. The Times rarely breaks news, by the way. Sometimes they refuse to report news for years and years, as in the case of 30,000 Argentines murdered by the military junta there.)

The U.S. government and media love to carry on and on about how oppressive adversary countries are. And those countries certainly are in some cases (but not others, like Venezuela and Ecuador, which are demonized because of the social and economic policies adopted by popular leaders there). But the U.S. is actually a very repressive country itself. Quick Quiz: what nation has the world’s largest prisoner population? Why, it’s the Land of Freedom, the USA. The closest competitor is CHINA, with over FOUR TIMES the population of the U.S. Well, that’s one objective measure of oppressiveness. Four percent of the world’s population, with 25% of the world’s prisoners. Amazing. And one out of nine of state prisoners are doing life, a third of those without the possibility of parole. (Most prisoners are prisoners of one of the 50 states, not Federal prisoners, which number roughly 10% of total inmates.) The U.S. has thousands of prisoners doing life for non-violent “offenses,” typically “drugs” (outlawed inebriants).

The U.S. is a country where people have been sentenced to life in prison for, among other trivial crimes: shoplifting a pair of socks; shoplifting a t-shirt; stealing a slice of pizza. (All three cases, and numerous similar ones, occurred in “liberal” California under that state’s draconian “three strikes” law, mandating a sentence of life for a third criminal conviction. Under that law, the most common “crime” resulting in a life sentence has been marijuana possession. What, the U.S. is a repressive country? What kind of anti-American propaganda is that? And California isn’t the only state with such a law. In many states, words considered “hate speech” or “terroristic threats” can land one in jail for a decade, for example.)

Actually there are many ways in which, viewed objectively, the U.S. is one of the most repressive countries on earth. The massive size of the prison population. The percentage of the adult population imprisoned. The draconian penalties under its laws- and many of the laws themselves being unjust. Selective prosecution of the “lower” classes and of political dissidents. Massive surveillance of the population. Total lack of personal privacy. Institutionalized use of torture, not just by the CIA and military, but of civil prisoners, including solitary confinement for years and even decades. Routine use of police perjury and fabricated evidence to convict people of crimes. Murder of journalists, both overseas and inside the U.S. (Danny Casolaro, Michael Hastings, and possibly Gary Webb, to name some killed stateside.)

But not to worry. After quadrupling its prison population in the last few decades, part of the media (including the NY Times) are informing us that the “trend” of “increasing incarceration” is reversing, or about to reverse, or is set to reverse, or is being “rethought.” I feel better already. Of course, the millions of people branded felons can barely get a job, are legally barred from many professions, cannot vote in many states, cannot live in public housing (so they can’t rejoin their families in many cases), cannot get public benefits like food stamps, or student loans, and on and on with a lengthy list of lifetime punishments. Whatever. They can always curl up into big balls and just die, I guess.

Maybe this awful system of power is what needs to die.

1] The online version is “Using Jailed Migrants as a Pool of Cheap Labor,” posted a day earlier, May 24, and is mostly the same as the print version.

2] Other sugar-coating euphemisms in this vein are “detention facility” for prison, “corrections” for punishment, and of course the notorious “enhanced interrogation techniques” for torture, sometimes rendered with a whiff of disapproval as “harsh interrogation techniques,” a term that still shields the torturers from the proper moral opprobrium that is due.

[3] Just to be clear, the word “court” is a bit misleading. These are not independent judicial forums. The “judges” are actually administrators. You can guess which side usually wins. Hell, in actual Federal courts, the government wins over 90 of cases it tries. Similarly in state courts, prosecutors win at a similar rate. The “courts” are actually part of the Department of “Justice.” That is, the prosecutors and the “judges” are part of the same organization.

The so-called Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) is an office of the United States Department of “Justice” and is responsible for adjudicating immigration cases. EOIR oversees immigration “courts” in the United States through the Office of the Chief Immigration “Judge,” a “Justice” Department employee. Additionally, the Board of Immigration Appeals, which hears appeals from immigration “courts,” is part of EOIR. The establishment then pretends that this gigantic sham constitutes a fair and impartial judicial process. In fact it’s just an administrative process by the prosecutorial arm of the U.S. Government, the Do”J.”

The chief function of EOIR is to conduct removal proceedings, which are administrative proceedings to determine the “removability” (euphemism for deportation) of individuals in the United States. Removal proceedings are conducted in immigration “courts.” As of 2008, there were fifty-two immigration “courts” throughout the U.S.

[4] While the slaves aren’t doing so well, the corporations and their shareholders are holding up ok. The stock of “Corrections [sic] Corporation of America” has risen in from $3 a share to $30 over the past decade, a tenfold increase, or a 900% rise. Investing in repression is a smart investment!