Stars exist in a tug of war between the nuclear fires within that make them expand and the gravitational forces that make them contract. If they are massive enough, when the fires go out, the star collapses into a black hole, a dwarf, or some other super-dense object.
Capitalism works so long as a civilization keeps a grasp on the idea of a duty to the dignity of human beings who deserve to be treated as human beings, whatever their utility to the economy may be. When a civilization abandons that (as we are doing, led by apostate conservative Christians), there is nothing to stop the gravitational forces of selfishness concentrated in the hands of an oligarchic state from regarding human beings as nothing but slaves whose sole purpose is to cram ever more money and power into the hands of the rich. For demented capitalism, the optimal arrangement is maximum production at minimum cost. Slavery is as minimal as cost can get. And as long as consumers don’t give a shit about the enslaved portion of the population (and the hyper-rich always have more slaves to pull from the pool when the old ones die from exhaustion), there is nothing to stop it.
That conviction of the mystical dignity of the human person is not, contrary to popular opinion, something that is self-evident. For most of human history, slavery was regarded as natural and normal. Aristotle thought some people are simply natural slaves. It was the room temperature state of affairs among humans for 300,000 years. What wore away slavery (and it took centuries to do it), was the subversive mystical belief that human beings were made in the image and likeness of God and beloved by the Son of God who died for them and that there was neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female in Christ Jesus. We still draw on that purely mystical belief today because it is the fate of successful revolutions to be taken for granted.
But as Nietzsche understood, when you jettison the mystical framework of Christianity, you are an “English flathead” if you think its purely mystical moral assumptions will just automatically go on forever. The Nazis rejected the Christian view of human dignity and equality and reclassified those humans they wanted to enslave or exterminate as subhuman. Apostate MAGA Christians are now in the process of doing the same thing as a new (yet not new) species of antichrist arises again. Slavery is its calling card. But it has a much more radical agenda in addition to that. And its goals are as totalizing as God’s. Jesus offers himself to the human race as Apex Prey and urges us to eat his body and drink his blood. The Kingdom of Hell means to eat all the world.
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15 Responses
Exactly what are the products which the dentention centers produce? If they are ‘profitable’ then they must have some product to sell. What is it?
Why are you asking? Are you attempting to prove that they do not exist? What is your rhetorical goal for your fake question? Spit it out. Say what you are getting at.
The product is human lives, pure and simple. There are many, many billions of dollars of profit in locking people up.
It justifies unlimited budgets for federal agencies like ICE but it’s also a way to kick back mountains of money to politically connected contractors. We have something close to 60,000 people in these gulags now. There is big money in building these facilities, staffing them, running them. Even though food and medical care are usually bottom of the barrel, the government pays top dollar for all of it, usually in no-bid or otherwise rigged contracts. I knew of a sheriff many years ago who was able to pocket something like $400,000 a year in addition to his salary because he was allocated a certain amount to feed his prisoners each year and he found a way to do it on the cheap. The ICE gulags will probably ultimately hold many hundreds of thousands of people, so the math adds up.
They’re working on hiring 10,000 new ICE agents. That’s easily $100 million just to equip them with the very basics and training. That’s before we get to the armored vehicles and other military gear they load up on.
And as even MAGA is beginning to realize that we face economic catastrophe without immigrant labor, you can bet the rent that they will come up with ways to use them as slave labor. Many of those who got arrested while doing agricultural jobs will probably end up back at their old employers but in irons and working for a dollar a day.
That’s how slavery continued for a century or so after it was banned at the end of the Civil War. The old plantation owners could no longer call it slavery of course, but if you ran it all through the criminal justice system…problem solved.
Since MAGA is clearly willing to ignore all laws and norms and has proven themselves willing to ship people to countries other than their country of origin, it would be a simple matter to simply sell them into contract slavery. This regime would think nothing of doing that. If it allowed them to degrade and humiliate immigrants and make them money, that’s the MAGA version of heaven.
Government expenditures are expenses, not profit.
Sure, some people involved make a living. Every prison has guards who have to be paid. But to me as a taxpayer these are costs. They are like the bills for military hardware. How is any of this a profit?
@David Davies:
In the US, private detention centers and prisons are operated by entities which are not part of the federal, state or local government.
Their principle of operation is that they enter into a contract with the government to provide facilities for a set number of inmates at a wholesale price for the contract regardless of the number of inmates.
When the government renews contracts, it goes to the lowest bidder. The benefit to the government is that it receives the lowest possible cost per inmate with no need to run facilities themselves.
Sounds like a win-win. In reality, the private enterprise running the prison is interested in maximum return on investment. Since the low price at which facilities are provided does not offset the cost of running the prison, they subcontract the prisoners to do paid labor. That labor brings in revenue to the prison, offsetting the cost and bringing in a huge profit. Punching license plates and running a laundry service within the prison walls is the archetypal example of inmate labor, but they’re also employed out of prison as cleaners or to do other menial jobs.
It used to be that prisoners were not paid at all.
Then prisons set aside part of the wages to an account that the inmate would receive after serving the sentence, but this was abused when a lot of that money was garnished and the former inmate had no real recourse but to accept the scraps.
Later, it was realized that inmates could be better kept in check if they received part of their wages as they earned them and could spend them in a shop within the prison.
This sounds like a good system, except that prisoners receive a pittance, 2-3% of the wages that were paid out to the prison and the shop charges huge markups. This caused a scandal when inmates in a women’s prison were interviewed that the best they could earn in a month was $4 or so, and a single pack of cheapest menstrual pads was $5. A single pack of 10 pads that would be too few to last for the 5-7 days required.
The government ostensibly have an incentive to keep prison population low (because it indicates low crime).
However, in reality, this led to accusations of excessive spending on running prisons and lobbyists successfully urged the government to transfer running prisons to private enterprises. In the beginning, the subcontracted costs were lower than when ran by the government, but then they crept up, as is typical when a monopoly or an oligopoly provides services to the government and both supply and demand are inelastic.
When costs crept up, governments were again accused of excessive spending on prisons, so they had no choice but to massively increase incarceration rates by penalizing ever pettier crimes with prison time. This gave them an excuse for paying for facilities for so many inmates.
For-profit prisons have an incentive to either keep prison population low (then the contract would cover the running costs) or to keep them as high as possible so they have a large labor pool.
Thus, even though low crime is overall more desirable, leading to low incarceration rates, it’s a very unstable equilibrium, and every example gravitates to increased incarceration rates.
Mark, you usually provide links to articles or videos you use as sources in your posts. I couldn’t find one for the passage about ICE detention facilities in the beginning of this post. I’d like to learn more. Please share the source details and/or link. Thanks!
To a degree, our economy and society was already evolving to having an underclass, comprised of illegal aliens, who did our dirty work, like working in slaughterhouses and other nasty jobs, and had no rights. If they tried to obtain higher wages or better working conditions they could be deported. They existed in a modern form of serfdom.
MAGA has accelerated this. The illegal aliens now live in fear of being swept up and either deported or farmed out to some “correctional enterprise” where essentially they are enslaved.
Curiously, MAGA likes this. So called “Christians” have no problem with immigrants being treated like animals. The so-called “Religious Right” in the US has morphed into a perversion of Christianity. They have no problem treating immigrants, gays and others like animals, and accuse those who actually try to live the Gospel by treating the vulnerable as brothers of being non Christian. MAGA Christianity is a perversion of Christianity.
“Capitalism works so long as a civilization keeps a grasp on the idea of a duty to the dignity of human beings who deserve to be treated as human beings, whatever their utility to the economy may be.”
Reading that, two questions immediatley leaped to mind:
1. As long as “civilization keeps a grasp on the idea of a duty to the dignity of human beings who deserve to be treated as human beings, whatever their utility to the economy may be,” won’t most -isms work? Large swaths of Feudalism worked pretty well at times, even for the peasants (contrary to what you see in movies).
2. Exactly what do you mean by “Capitalism.” I’m not being facetious. But whenever I discuss this with friends and family, I quickly discover that no two people really think it means the same thing. I have found that most people think “capitalism” and mean “a free market economy.” But a “free market economy” could be attributed to other economic systems beyond capitalism. And the linguistic nerd immediately would then ask, “What do you mean by ‘free’ exactly when you talk about a ‘free market economy.’ “
When I see the word ‘Capitalism’ I began to think about opening a copy of Das Kapital 🙂 – Well, no, actually I don’t think I could even read the work. But I cringe when I hear the idea of a free market described as ‘Capitalism.’
I think the most common description of capitalism is a system that allows accumulation of wealth. This means right to property, protection from robbery, etc.
Marx defines capitalists as people who (unjustly) control the means of production.
Controlling the means of production is not automatically a bad thing, as long as those in control are benevolent enough to guarantee worker protections.
There were benevolent capitalists who provided their workers with free housing that was often a significant upgrade from their earlier lodging. Those who argue against bring forward the fact that they themselves lived in mansions and did not provide the same life quality to workers.
Feudalism is essentially capitalism, but with two important distinctions:
1. No industrialization, so wealth is directly tied to land area.
2. Money does not grant access to the ruling class except in rare instances when nobility could be directly bought (or by intermarriage into nobility).
And yes, there were landlords who were fair and generous to their subjects. But often their children would revert everything after inheriting the estate, influenced by others around them or by their education (a lot of time, speech and ink was wasted protecting the “correct” order of creation, fawning to the privileged class).
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/OiAIZesjbuA
So, A Guy, our expenditures for aircraft carriers and bombers are done for profit? Just because private entities are involved in doing the bidding of the government? The money isn’t expended because those in charge of the government tell us that there is a pressing need for their projects?
I want the government to stop the insane spending. Hiring a contractor to perform a government job (incarceration of criminals) doesn’t seem to me to be the way to decrease spending. It isn’t a high tech job, like building military hardware. And we taxpayers don’t benefit financially, so how can any prison system, public or private, be considered a profit center for us.
Oh, my sweet summer child, you’re missing the point entirely. You seem to be under the impression that if something is run on contract by the government, it should benefit the society, or at least the government. And if it’s described as a profit center, it should benefit the common good.
But it’s not a profit center for *you*, for the *society* or for the *government*! Not at all. It’s a profit center for the enterprises running those prisons. They’re the ones profiting from this arrangement and they’re the ones who have some of the best lobbyists out there who ensure that this system continues unabated. Lawmakers are cheap. They will present private prisons as beneficial to the society even when it’s clear that the downsides far outweigh any benefits there are.
This is the classic example of predatory capitalism: privatize income, socialize cost. Companies running prisons don’t bear the brunt of their effect on society. They don’t care that the system mass produces criminals, that it breaks up families, that there is no opportunity for rehabilitation of criminals in prisons. All they care about is the constant influx of free labor.
And I used to believe that it’s the best solution. The idea was being exported in the 1990s to countries in the former Soviet bloc and I used to agree with it completely and even advocated for that. You know how the argument went? Get the former GULAG labor camps running again and put prisoners there. They don’t have any way to escape, it’s cheaper that way, they will earn money for the state and they will rehabilitate through that labor much better than through any rehabilitation programs in nice and comfy prisons. As a bonus, hire the same guards that used to run the camps, and they can go all out with their sadism to put the fear of God into prisoners.
It didn’t even cross my mind how disgusting the whole idea was and how it completely mocked the memory of all the Polish prisoners put in those camps in the days of the Soviet enslavement.
Thing is, I was a teenager and I didn’t know better. And I lapped it up because these ideas were spread by individuals formerly from the anti-communist opposition. They had no problems collaborating with their former oppressors as long as the benefits flowed to *them*.
I don’t know about this.
I feel like the rejection of slavery by a Post-Christian society is not only possible, but necessary. To be clear, when I’m talking about “Post-Christian” in this context, I’m not talking about a society that is in opposition to Christianity, but about one that does not rely on it exclusively for its moral foundation. I have in mind something like the European social democracies that have become increasingly non-religious over time, yet still embrace a vision of government derived from the Catholic Social Teaching they inherited from their Christian forebearers.
You also can’t forget that the support for slavery is deeply embedded within the DNA of Christianity. Sure, you could argue that the inevitable end result is its abolition, but there is no way it can get to that point before going through its approval and endorsement first. That is why every time you get groups that want to do a “Christian Resurgence” and “go back to the fundamentals”, they end up dipping their toes in slavery apologia. The same thing goes with misogyny, racism and bigotry.
I would say that this is less applicable to the Catholic Church because they have the Magisterium, which provides them with a more enduring historical memory and establishes a baseline that is not as susceptible to the whims of those who want to turn back the clock, so to speak. However, if I’m being honest, I expect that Catholics who want to support slavery will just try to find loopholes and engage in pedantry in order to argue that slavery is not actually slavery or that it doesn’t count for some reason or another.
Overall, I think that an ethos grounded in “we’ve seen where that other path leads to, so we’ll take a pass on relitigating that whole slavery thing” can be as effective, if not more so, than one that is grounded on pure mysticism that can vanish overnight along with religious belief.
But at the end of the day, people will engage in motivated reasoning to have their way either way. I just don’t think that Christianity is anywhere close to being a magic bullet against slavery, so the dividing lines are not as clear-cut as having a Christian vs a non-Christian or a post-Christian society.
A Guy.
All in favor of getting rid of private prisons and returning the job to the state. Incarceration of criminals is necessary for the safety of the public, so it is an appropriate expense. It is not a thing we do for ‘profit’.
Now the question of who is a criminal and how long they should be removed from society is a completely different matter.