Being A Member Of The Elite May Be A Drag-- But Being A Slave Is Much Worse

You know the old refrain, "I work like a slave?" Don't use it anymore. There really are still slaves, actual slaves-- like the ones who built the pyramids, like the ones who built America...

Last week, the Boston Globe published a provocative essay by Jeff Jacoby, Slavery Then And Now. Jacoby bemoans the lack of awareness that slavery exists today.

“Slavery did not end with abolition in the 19th century,” observes Anti-Slavery International , which was founded in 1839 as the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, and is the world’s oldest abolitionist organization. Around the world today, tens of millions of men, women, and children are enslaved in different ways. About 25 million are trapped in forced labor, which is defined as “any work or service which people are forced to do against their will, under threat of punishment.” At least 8 million more people, especially in South Asia, are locked into debt bondage — a system of indentured servitude, in which they slave for little or no pay in order to reduce a debt.

“Often entire families have to work to pay off the debt taken by one of its members,” the anti-slavery society explains. “Sometimes, the debt can be passed down the generations and children can be held in debt bondage because of a loan their parents had taken decades ago.”





In a short film , Anti-Slavery International documents the awful, aching reality of brickmaking bonded laborers in India. Work in the kilns typically begins at midnight or 1 am, and entire families labor together for as much as 14 hours daily. Children account for about one fifth of the bonded-labor workforce. Most never get to attend school; many suffer ill health. “One of my sons is 14 years old, another is 9, and a third is 7,” one young mother says. “The children have to work at any cost-- what would they eat if they didn’t work?”

Chattel slavery hasn’t vanished from the world either. Across much of Africa, babies to this day are born into bondage and grow up as property owned by slaveholding families.

People born into descent-based slavery face a lifetime of exploitation and are treated as property by their so-called “masters.” They work without pay, herding animals, working in the fields or in their masters’ homes. They can be inherited, sold or given away as gifts or wedding presents. Women and girls typically face sexual abuse and rape, and often have to bear their masters’ children. In turn, their children will also be owned by their masters. 

According to the Boston-based American Anti-Slavery Group, the only black chattel slaves in the world now are found in Muslim north and central Africa. More than 500,000 African slaves (by some estimates, more than 850,000) “are still bought, owned, sold, and traded by Arab and black Muslim masters in five African countries”-- Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Nigeria, and Sudan.

...One-tenth of North Korea’s population is held in absolute bondage, the highest percentage of enslaved people of any nation on earth. More than 2.6 million people live under slavery in East Asia’s notorious hermit kingdom, according to the 2018 Global Slavery Index , and the vast majority of them are forced to work by the government. The sheer evil brutality of North Korea’s slave-labor complexes is monstrous. They are hellholes where starving children are beaten to death for snatching a few kernels of corn, where three generations of families are enslaved together, and where relatives of escapees are tortured unspeakably.

Slavery in the 21st century also takes the forms of human trafficking, forced marriage, and domestic servitude. All told, more than 40 million victims are believed to be enslaved in the modern world. By all means, take the time to learn more about how slavery began in America four centuries ago. It was a terrible chapter in our history, and in some ways its effects are with us yet. But don’t get so caught up in studying slavery that no longer exists that you have no time to notice slavery that is still all too real. The scourge of slavery has yet to be wiped out. Human beings are shackled in the house of bondage yet, still groaning in their slavery and crying for help. 

Daniel Markovits is a Yale Law professor and author of The Meritocracy Trap. In his 2015 Yale Law commencement speech on the "Rat Race" he pointed out that "Elite lawyers’ real incomes have roughly tripled in the past half-century, which is more than ten times the rate of income growth experienced by the median American. Moreover, this explosion in elite lawyers’ incomes is not an eccentric or even isolated phenomenon. Instead, it fits into a wider pattern of rising elite labor incomes across our economy. You probably know that the share of total national income going to the top 1 percent of earners has roughly doubled in the past three decades. But its perhaps less familiar that fully four-fifths of that increase comes from rising wages paid to elite labor. And it may be more surprising still to learn that the top 1 percent of earners, and indeed even the top one-tenth of 1 percent, today owe fully four-fifths of their total incomes to labor. That is unprecedented in all of human history: American meritocracy has created a state of affairs in which the richest person out of every thousand overwhelmingly works for a living."

Elite lawyers’ incomes-- including when diluted by sabbaticals from private-public service-- will place you comfortably above the economic dividing line that comprehensively separates the rich from the rest in an increasingly unequal America. Perhaps most critically, your lawyerly skills will finance training your children-- through private schools and myriad other enrichments-- to thrive in the hyper-competition that you have yourselves, in effect, just won. This, then is where things stand. We have become a profession and a society constituted by meritocracy. Massively intensified and massively competitive elite training meets massively inflated economic and social rewards for elite work. You, in virtue of sitting here today, belong to the elite-- to the new, superordinate working class. This structure, whatever its virtues, also imposes enormous costs. Most obviously, it is a catastrophe for our broader society-- for the many (the nearly 99 percent) who are excluded from the increasingly narrow elite. There is an irony here. Brewster and others embraced meritocracy self-consciously in order to defeat hereditary privilege, … but although it was once the engine of American social mobility, meritocracy today blocks equality of opportunity. The student bodies at elite colleges once again skew massively towards wealth.

At Harvard College and here at Yale Law School, two places where students have skillfully and bravely compiled data that their universities suppress, as many students come from households in the top 1 percent as from the entire bottom half of the distribution. These facts will shock, as they are designed to do, but a moment’s clear reflection should render them unsurprising and even inevitable. The excess educational investment over and above what middle-class families can provide that children born into a typical one-percenter household receive is equivalent, economically, to a traditional inheritance of between $5 [million] and $10 million per child. Exceptional cases always exist-- as some of you sitting here prove-- but in general, children from poor or even middle-class households cannot possibly compete-- when they apply to places like Yale-- with people who have imbibed this massive, sustained, planned, and practiced investment, from birth or even in the womb. And workers with ordinary training cannot possibly compete-- in the labor market-- with super-skilled workers possessed of the remarkable training that places like Yale Law School provide. American meritocracy has thus become precisely what it was invented to combat, a mechanism for the dynastic transmission of wealth and privilege across generations. Meritocracy now constitutes a modern-day aristocracy of a kind, purpose-built for a world in which the greatest source of wealth is not land or factories but human capital, the free labor of skilled workers.

The social and economic caste order in which we are now embedded-- including through our celebrations today-- demands that you comprehend yourselves on instrumental terms. Your own talent, training, and skills-- your self-same persons-- today constitute your greatest assets, the overwhelmingly dominant source of your wealth and prestige. To promote your eliteness-- to secure your caste, you must ruthlessly manage your training and labor.

Markovits' speech on the "rat race"-- the meritocracy-- is different from slavery, of course. Right? Yesterday The Atlantic published an essay on thriving in the hyper-competition that he wrote, How Life Became an Endless, Terrible Competition. His Yale students are, he wrote, "overwhelmingly, products of professional parents and high-class universities. I pass on to them the advantages that my own teachers bestowed on me. They, and I, owe our prosperity and our caste to meritocracy. Two decades ago, when I started writing about economic inequality, meritocracy seemed more likely a cure than a cause. Meritocracy’s early advocates championed social mobility. In the 1960s, for instance, Yale President Kingman Brewster brought meritocratic admissions to the university with the express aim of breaking a hereditary elite. Alumni had long believed that their sons had a birthright to follow them to Yale; now prospective students would gain admission based on achievement rather than breeding. Meritocracy-- for a time-- replaced complacent insiders with talented and hardworking outsiders."

Today’s meritocrats still claim to get ahead through talent and effort, using means open to anyone. In practice, however, meritocracy now excludes everyone outside of a narrow elite. Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent. Legacy preferences, nepotism, and outright fraud continue to give rich applicants corrupt advantages. But the dominant causes of this skew toward wealth can be traced to meritocracy. On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000. Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median. Meanwhile, the top banks and law firms, along with other high-paying employers, recruit almost exclusively from a few elite colleges.

Hardworking outsiders no longer enjoy genuine opportunity. According to one study, only one out of every 100 children born into the poorest fifth of households, and fewer than one out of every 50 children born into the middle fifth, will join the top 5 percent. Absolute economic mobility is also declining-- the odds that a middle-class child will outearn his parents have fallen by more than half since mid-century-- and the drop is greater among the middle class than among the poor. Meritocracy frames this exclusion as a failure to measure up, adding a moral insult to economic injury.

Public anger over economic inequality frequently targets meritocratic institutions. Nearly three-fifths of Republicans believe that colleges and universities are bad for America, according to the Pew Research Center. The intense and widespread fury generated by the college-admissions scandal early this year tapped into a deep and broad well of resentment. This anger is warranted but also distorting. Outrage at nepotism and other disgraceful forms of elite advantage-taking implicitly valorizes meritocratic ideals. Yet meritocracy itself is the bigger problem, and it is crippling the American dream. Meritocracy has created a competition that, even when everyone plays by the rules, only the rich can win.

But what, exactly, have the rich won? Even meritocracy’s beneficiaries now suffer on account of its demands. It ensnares the rich just as surely as it excludes the rest, as those who manage to claw their way to the top must work with crushing intensity, ruthlessly exploiting their expensive education in order to extract a return.

No one should weep for the wealthy. But the harms that meritocracy imposes on them are both real and important. Diagnosing how meritocracy hurts elites kindles hope for a cure. We are accustomed to thinking that reducing inequality requires burdening the rich. But because meritocratic inequality does not in fact serve anyone well, escaping meritocracy’s trap would benefit virtually everyone.

Hierarchy by Nancy Ohanian

Elite parents push their babies onto the elite path immediately and these kids start feeling the "meritocratic pressures" from early childhood, starting in elite kindergartens. Markovits wrote that "epidemiologists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have warned of schoolwork-induced sleep deprivation. Wealthy students show higher rates of drug and alcohol abuse than poor students do. They also suffer depression and anxiety at rates as much as triple those of their age peers throughout the country. A recent study of a Silicon Valley high school found that 54 percent of students displayed moderate to severe symptoms of depression and 80 percent displayed moderate to severe symptoms of anxiety."

The contest intensifies when meritocrats enter the workplace, where elite opportunity is exceeded only by the competitive effort required to grasp it. A person whose wealth and status depend on her human capital simply cannot afford to consult her own interests or passions in choosing her job. Instead, she must approach work as an opportunity to extract value from her human capital, especially if she wants an income sufficient to buy her children the type of schooling that secured her own eliteness. She must devote herself to a narrowly restricted class of high-paying jobs, concentrated in finance, management, law, and medicine. Whereas aristocrats once considered themselves a leisure class, meritocrats work with unprecedented intensity.

In 1962, when many elite lawyers earned roughly a third of what they do today, the American Bar Association could confidently declare, “There are … approximately 1,300 fee-earning hours per year” available to the normal lawyer. In 2000, by contrast, a major law firm pronounced with equal confidence that a quota of 2,400 billable hours, “if properly managed,” was “not unreasonable,” which is a euphemism for “necessary for having a hope of making partner.” Because not all the hours a lawyer works are billable, billing 2,400 hours could easily require working from 8 a.m. until 8 p.m. six days a week, every week of the year, without vacation or sick days. In finance, “bankers’ hours”-- originally named for the 10-to-3 business day fixed by banks from the 19th century through the mid-20th century and later used to refer more generally to any light work-- have given way to the ironically named “banker 9-to-5,” which begins at 9 a.m. on one day and runs through 5 a.m. on the next. Elite managers were once “organization men,” cocooned by lifelong employment in a corporate hierarchy that rewarded seniority above performance. Today, the higher a person climbs on the org chart, the harder she is expected to work. Amazon’s “leadership principles” call for managers to have “relentlessly high standards” and to “deliver results.” The company tells managers that when they “hit the wall” at work, the only solution is to “climb the wall.”

Americans who work more than 60 hours a week report that they would, on average, prefer 25 fewer weekly hours. They say this because work subjects them to a “time famine” that, a 2006 study found, interferes with their capacity to have strong relationships with their spouse and children, to maintain their home, and even to have a satisfying sex life. A respondent to a recent Harvard Business School survey of executives proudly insisted, “The 10 minutes that I give my kids at night is one million times greater than spending that 10 minutes at work.” Ten minutes!

The capacity to bear these hours gracefully, or at least grimly, has become a criterion for meritocratic success. A top executive at a major firm, interviewed by the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild for her book The Time Bind, observed that aspiring managers who have demonstrated their skills and dedication face a “final elimination”: “Some people flame out, get weird because they work all the time … The people at the top are very smart, work like crazy, and don’t flame out. They’re still able to maintain a good mental set, and keep their family life together. They win the race.”

A person who extracts income and status from his own human capital places himself, quite literally, at the disposal of others-- he uses himself up. Elite students desperately fear failure and crave the conventional markers of success, even as they see through and publicly deride mere “gold stars” and “shiny things.” Elite workers, for their part, find it harder and harder to pursue genuine passions or gain meaning through their work. Meritocracy traps entire generations inside demeaning fears and inauthentic ambitions: always hungry but never finding, or even knowing, the right food.

...[I]gnoring how oppressive meritocracy is for the rich is a mistake. The rich now dominate society not idly but effortfully. The familiar arguments that once defeated aristocratic inequality do not apply to an economic system based on rewarding effort and skill. The relentless work of the hundred-hour-a-week banker inoculates her against charges of unearned advantage. Better, then, to convince the rich that all their work isn’t actually paying off.

They may need less convincing than you might think. As the meritocracy trap closes in around elites, the rich themselves are turning against the prevailing system. Plaintive calls for work/life balance ring ever louder. Roughly two-thirds of elite workers say that they would decline a promotion if the new job demanded yet more of their energy. When he was the dean of Stanford Law School, Larry Kramer warned graduates that lawyers at top firms are caught in a seemingly endless cycle: Higher salaries require more billable hours to support them, and longer hours require yet higher salaries to justify them. Whose interests, he lamented, does this system serve? Does anyone really want it?

Escaping the meritocracy trap will not be easy. Elites naturally resist policies that threaten to undermine their advantages. But it is simply not possible to get rich off your own human capital without exploiting yourself and impoverishing your inner life, and meritocrats who hope to have their cake and eat it too deceive themselves. Building a society in which a good education and good jobs are available to a broader swath of people-- so that reaching the very highest rungs of the ladder is simply less important-- is the only way to ease the strains that now drive the elite to cling to their status.

How can that be done? For one thing, education-- whose benefits are concentrated in the extravagantly trained children of rich parents-- must become open and inclusive. Private schools and universities should lose their tax-exempt status unless at least half of their students come from families in the bottom two-thirds of the income distribution. And public subsidies should encourage schools to meet this requirement by expanding enrollment.

A parallel policy agenda must reform work, by favoring goods and services produced by workers who do not have elaborate training or fancy degrees. For example, the health-care system should emphasize public health, preventive care, and other measures that can be overseen primarily by nurse practitioners, rather than high-tech treatments that require specialist doctors. The legal system should deploy “legal technicians”-- not all of whom would need to have a J.D.-- to manage routine matters, such as real-estate transactions, simple wills, and even uncontested divorces. In finance, regulations that limit exotic financial engineering and favor small local and regional banks can shift jobs to mid-skilled workers. And management should embrace practices that distribute control beyond the C-suite, to empower everyone else in the firm.

The main obstacle to overcoming meritocratic inequality is not technical but political. Today’s conditions induce discontent and widespread pessimism, verging on despair. In his book Oligarchy, the political scientist Jeffrey A. Winters surveys eras in human history from the classical period to the 20th century, and documents what becomes of societies that concentrate income and wealth in a narrow elite. In almost every instance, the dismantling of such inequality has been accompanied by societal collapse, such as military defeat (as in the Roman empire) or revolution (as in France and Russia).

Nevertheless, there are grounds for hope. History does present one clear-cut case of an orderly recovery from concentrated inequality: In the 1920s and ’30s, the U.S. answered the Great Depression by adopting the New Deal framework that would eventually build the mid-century middle class. Crucially, government redistribution was not the primary engine of this process. The broadly shared prosperity that this regime established came, mostly, from an economy and a labor market that promoted economic equality over hierarchy-- by dramatically expanding access to education, as under the GI Bill, and then placing mid-skilled, middle-class workers at the center of production.

An updated version of these arrangements remains available today; a renewed expansion of education and a renewed emphasis on middle-class jobs can reinforce each other. The elite can reclaim its leisure in exchange for a reduction of income and status that it can easily afford. At the same time, the middle class can regain its income and status and reclaim the center of American life.

Rebuilding a democratic economic order will be difficult. But the benefits that economic democracy brings-- to everyone-- justify the effort. And the violent collapse that will likely follow from doing nothing leaves us with no good alternative but to try.

Connect the dots

Very Rich Slavers Have Been Paying Off Trump And Congressional Conservatives For The Right To Use Slavery In The U.S. Again

In the video above, you can see our friends at Cuéntame calling out corrupt hypocrite Debbie Wasserman Schultz for her scandalous role in the prison-for-profit system. Cuéntame wanted to know why Wasserman Schultz, then head of the DNC was "siding with the Corrections Corporation of America and not her constituents in Southwest Ranches? 99% of her constituents DO NOT want a new for-profit immigrant detention center!" Although CCA "donates" their bribe money primarily to right-wing Republicans like Steve Womack (AR), Kevin McCarthy (CA), John Culberson (TX) and Marsha Blackburn (TN), Wasserman Schultz is one of the few Democrats taking payoffs from them as well. This past June, the organization In The Public Interest issued a report-- An examination of private financing for correctional and immigration detention facilities-- that examined the finances behind Trump's ramping up of the criminalization of immigration. The Department of Homeland Security had been instructed to "accelerate resource capacity." The report shows how private prison corporations CoreCivic and GEO Group are primed to provide additional immigration detention space by privately financing new facility construction, a new business frontier-- privately financing new facilities through "public-private partnerships." Providing financing to governments has become a central growth strategy as both companies became Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) in 2013, requiring them to have significant real estate holdings.  REIT status allows the corporations to avoid corporate-level taxation. GEO Group received almost $44 million in tax benefits in 2017.

While governments have traditionally used municipal bonds to finance the construction of correctional facilities, there is evidence that the two major private prison companies, CoreCivic (formerly Corrections Corporation of America, or CCA) and GEO Group, are actively pushing governments to consider the use of private financing to build new facilities, and that governments are increasingly interested in the idea. This focus on building new prison and immigration detention facilities with private financing (known as “public-private partnerships”) represents a critical shift in these companies’ business model.

In the last few years, the private prison companies have given hundreds of thousands of dollars to Trump, Republicans and the Republican wing of the Democratic Partty-- the New Dems and Blue Dogs-- in exchange for their support. Last cycle, of the dozen members of the House who took the biggest bribes from the GEO Group, 7 were defeated and 4 more had their closest brushes with defeat ever and are likely to lose their seats in 2020:

• Carlos Curbelo (R-FL)- LOST
• Henry Cuellar (Blue Dog-TX)- no opponent/needs a primary
• Scott Tipton (R-CO)- squeaked by with 51.5%
• Mike Bishop (R-MI)- LOST
• Steve Russell (R-OK)- LOST
• Michael McCaul (R-TX)- squeaked by with 51.1%
• Steve Knight (R-CA)- LOST
• Will Hurd (R-TX)- squeaked by with 49.2%
• John Culberson (R-TX)- LOST
• Don Bacon (R-NE)- squeaked by with 51.0%
• Rod Blum (R-IA)- LOST
• Barbara Comstock (R-VA)- LOST

Russell, for example, was defeated in one of the 3 reddest districts that flipped last month-- with a PVI of R+10. One of the Democrats running against him during primary season, Tom Guild, told us at the time that "Public-private partnerships between elected officials creating 'demand' for additional detention facilities and private owners of such incarceration factories looking for a big pay day constitute old fashioned pay-for-play corruption. Steve Russell (R-OK) taking huge campaign gratuities from the private detention facilities industry earns him an honorary membership in the DC Swamp and is not a notable man bites dog storyline. Russell and Trump are two peas in a pod sharing the characteristics of avarice and greed while swimming in a putrid smelling self-dealing cesspool. It’s no wonder that Americans who currently approve of Congress' performance are limited to close friends and family members of those serving in Congress." With no help from the DCCC whatsoever, Russell's constituents gave him his walking papers on November 6.

Mike Siegel came close enough to defeating private prison ally Michael McCaul to make it near certain he will run again. Last cycle he told us that "McCaul is responsible for some of the worst atrocities of the Trump Administration. As Homeland Security Chair, he has been an architect of the Travel Ban, a proponent of the Border Wall, and a defender of Family Separation. Not only are his actions immoral, but his acceptance of campaign contributions from the private prison industry-- and his advocacy to demand full occupancy of detention centers-- is downright corrupt. I am confident that the voters of the Texas 10th will not look kindly on his actions." Siegel nearly beat him-- again, with ZERO help from the DCCC-- and is likely to win the seat in 2020.

Private prison corporations and their executives also put mammoth amounts of cash into directed PACs-- $170,000 into Trump Victory, $50,000 into another Trump front group-- Rebuilding America Now and then $50,000 each to Republican Super PACs and Dark Money committees like Win In 2016, NRSC Targeted State Victory Committee and the Florida First Project and $25,000 each to House Majority 2016, Conservative Congress Now!, NRCC, Growing A Sustainable Future, and the Florida Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee. They also ponied up big bucks for several shady groups like Kevin McCarthy's Victory Fund, various GOP building funds (over $100,000), and $10,000 each for John Culberson's PAC, Rick Scott's PAC, Henry Cuellar's PAC. Paul Ryan's PAC and, hold your nose, the DCCC. Among the biggest recipients from this pot of sewer money were some of Congress' most notoriously corrupt members:

• Henry Cuellar (Blue Dog, TX)- $10,000
• John Culberson (R-TX)- $10,000
• John Carter (R-TX)- $10,000
• Scott Taylor (R-VA)- $6,000
• Ron DeSantis (R-FL)- $5,000
• Matt Gaetz (R-FL)- $5,000
• Tom Graves (R-GA)- $5,000
• winning well-connected candidate Greg Pence (R-IN)- $5,000
• Robert Aderholt (R-AL)- $3,500
• Vicente Gonzalez (Blue Dog-TX)- $2,500
• Ben Ray Lujan (D-NM)- $2,500

Yesterday, writing for the Daily Beast, Spencer Ackerman and Adam Rawnsley, emphasizing that "detention for migrants is big business-- reported that $800 Million in Taxpayer Money Went to Private Prisons Where Migrants Work for Pennies. It's a very lucrative business model. "These are dangerous times for undocumented immigrants," they wrote. "ICE has been super-charged by the Trump administration. And ICE’s empowerment has been lucrative for the companies that both cage and employ immigrants... A Daily Beast investigation found that in 2018 alone, for-profit immigration detention was a nearly $1 billion industry underwritten by taxpayers and beset by problems that include suicide, minimal oversight, and what immigration advocates say uncomfortably resembles slave labor."

Being in the U.S. illegally is a misdemeanor offense, and immigration detention is technically a civil matter, not a criminal process. But the reality looks much different. The Daily Beast reported last month that as of Oct. 20, ICE was detaining an average of 44,631 people every day, an all-time high. Now ICE has told the Daily Beast that its latest detention numbers are even higher: 44,892 people as of Dec. 8. Its budget request for the current fiscal year anticipates detaining 52,000 people daily.

Expanding the number of immigrants rounded up into jails isn’t just policy; it’s big business... [T]he private prisons giant GEO Group, expects its earnings to grow to $2.3 billion this year. Like other private prison companies, it made large donations to President Trump’s campaign and inaugural.

Pinning down the size and scope of the immigration prison industry is obscured by government secrecy. But the Daily Beast combed through ICE budget submissions and other public records to compile as comprehensive a list as possible of what for-profit prisons charge taxpayers to lock up a growing population, and how many people those facilities detain on average. The result: For 19 privately owned or operated detention centers for which the Daily Beast could find recent pricing data, ICE paid an estimated $807 million in fiscal year 2018.

Those 19 prisons hold 18,000 people-- meaning that for-profit prisons currently lock up about 41 percent of the 44,000 people detained by ICE. But that’s not a comprehensive total, and the true figures are likely significantly higher. The National Immigrant Justice Center estimated that for November 2017, roughly 71 percent of immigrant detainees, then a smaller total figure, were held in 33 privately operated jails like the Joe Corley detention center in Texas... In response to the Daily Beast’s queries, ICE said it could not provide a full breakdown of contractor-operated immigration prisons.

“Ensuring there are sufficient beds available to meet the current demand for detention space is crucial to the success of ICE’s overall mission. Accordingly, the agency is continually reviewing its detention requirements and exploring options that will afford ICE the operational flexibility needed to house the full range of detainees in the agency’s custody,” said ICE spokesperson Danielle Bennett.

But Mary Small of the Detention Watch Network says the public still lacks “incredibly basic information about immigration detention and how private prison companies are profiting from it.”

“Even though billions of taxpayer dollars are being obligated to private prison companies, the contracts between them and the federal government aren't publicly available, so we don't know how much these companies are being paid, how many people they're holding or how long their contracts last,” Small said. “This culture of secrecy-- bolstered by revolving door politics and political contributions-- have paved the way for a rapid and reckless expansion of the detention system.”

GEO Group, which owns the Corley center, is just one example. It held a daily average of 973 people in the previous fiscal year at Corley. Beyond Corley, it detained roughly 11,000 immigrants at 17 prisons. The 10 GEO Group facilities the Daily Beast could find pricing data for charged an average of about $101 per prisoner per day, compared to ICE’s overall projected $121.90 average daily rate for adult beds in fiscal year 2018. But the Government Accountability Office warned in April that ICE consistently lowballs its detention costs through dubious accounting.

While for-profit immigration detention by no means began on Trump’s watch, the Trump administration has been very good for the corporation. In November, GEO Group reported that it expects to earn $2.3 billion this year, including immigration detention revenues-- an increase of nearly 1.8 percent from the $2.26 billion it reported in 2017 and up 5.5 percent from the $2.18 billion it earned in 2016... That same year, GEO gave $281,360 to Trump’s campaign.

In 2004, GEO Group spent $120,000 on federal lobbying. By 2016, it was spending $1.2 million. Fellow private prisons giant CoreCivic spent nearly $10 million between 2008 and 2014 just to lobby the House appropriations subcommittee that controls immigration-detention funding. Together, according to the Migration Policy Institute, the two corporations dished out a combined half-million dollars to Trump’s inauguration committee.

In essence, immigration advocates say, the detention corporations pay Trump and his congressional allies, whose enthusiasm for treating immigration as a crime ensures delivery of a growing population of captives to companies that pay them far below a minimum wage.

ICE’s internal detention standards set pay for “voluntary” immigrant labor at only “at least $1.00 (USD) per day.” (“The negative impact of confinement shall be reduced through decreased idleness, improved morale and fewer disciplinary incidents,” ICE contends, even though immigration detention is supposed to be administrative, not punitive.)

Lawsuits over the past few years present an alarming accumulation of accounts that labor within the private prisons is less “voluntary” than the corporations insist. A class-action lawsuit against GEO Group, initially by nine detainees in Colorado, claims that tens of thousands of immigrants have been forced to work for their $1 daily wage. A different lawsuit against a GEO Group facility in California claims “systematic and unlawful wage theft, unjust enrichment, and forced labor,” including a scheme in which the corporation requires work to “buy the basic necessities-- including food, water, and hygiene products-- that GEO refuses to provide for them.” Washington State sued GEO Group in 2017 for paying its detainees $1 a day-- or sometimes in what the complaint calls “snack food”-- rather than the $11/hour state minimum wage. GEO Group has vigorously contested the suits, though not always successfully.

“To the extent that the industry is in the business of expanding the system so they can make more money off holding more immigrants that can be confined, and doing everything possible to profit off of it by labor processes like getting detainees to work and paying them a dollar a day, there is very little distinction you can draw between slave labor and what they’re doing,” said Emily Ryo, an associate professor at the University of California’s Gould School of Law.

   The differences between for-profit immigration prisons and public immigration prisons are substantial, according to recent research by Ryo and colleagues based on data from fiscal year 2015. Even though for-profit companies operate only an estimated 10 percent of ICE detention facilities, both Ryo and the National Immigrant Justice Center found that more than two-thirds of all detainees have been held at least once at a privately run prison. Those for-profit prisons “consistently and substantially” hold immigrants longer than public ones—about 87 days on average for people ultimately granted relief, versus 33.3 days in public prisons.

Fifteen of the 179 detainees who died in ICE custody between October 2003 and February 2018 were held at a single private immigration detention center, run by CoreCivic in Arizona, according to the Migration Policy Institute. At another privately run immigration detention jail, GEO Group’s Adelanto ICE Processing Center in California, there have been seven suicide attempts between December 2016 and October 2017, and at least one success. A September DHS inspector general’s report showed photographs of bedsheets hanging as improvised nooses inside Adelanto cells. A detainee told inspectors, “I’ve seen a few attempted suicides using braided sheets by the vents and then the guards laugh at them and call them ‘suicide failures’ once they are back from medical.” Another detainee death classified as a suicide occurred at CoreCivic’s Stewart Detention Facility in July 2018, also using a bedsheet noose.

And ICE turns what its own watchdog warns is a blind eye to detention conditions. It even contracts out substantial amounts of oversight over its detention centers. A June report by the DHS inspector general found that the inspections contractor, Nakamoto, uses practices that “are not consistently thorough,” and its inspections don’t “fully examine actual conditions or identify all compliance deficiencies.” While ICE’s additional in-house inspectors are more thorough-- they found 475 deficiencies at the same 29 detention sites where Nakamoto found only 209-- the inspector general found those inspections “too infrequent to ensure the facilities implement all corrections.” The result, the inspector general says, is that ICE doesn’t “ensure adequate oversight or systemic improvements in detention conditions.”

GEO and CoreCivic looked carefully at non-incumbents to support in 2018. They screened candidates carefully, looking for the most corrupt and most likely to look the other way even though their business model is based on slavery. And which non-incumbents-- who won their races-- did they find who met their draconian criteria? GEO:

• Rick Scott (R-FL)
• Josh Hawley (R-MO)
• Greg Pence (R-IN)
• Ross Spano (R-FL)
• Dwight Evans (D-PA)

And here's the list of the top non-incumbent recipients of CoreCivic bribes for the cycle-- only the candidates who won their races:

• Mitt Romney (R-UT)
• Marsha Blackburn (R-TN)
• Greg Pence (R-IN)
• Mike Braun (R-IN)
• Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-IN)
• Josh Hawley (R-MO)

Don't get the idea that they only gave to corrupt Republicans. The biggest recipients of their sewer money among Democrats were conservatives Henry Cuellar (TX) and Claire McCaskill (MO). GEO gave significant money to 3 crooked conservative Democrats: Henry Cuellar (TX), Vicente Gonzalez (TX) and Ben Ray Lujan (NM). I hope you've noted that Mike Pence's bro-- just elected to Congress in Indiana-- takes a lot of money from every pot that comes from the slavery lobby. But slavery was ok in the Buy-Bull the Pences worship, wasn't it?

Greg and Mike-- good with slavery... as long as they get their cut

Slavery In 2017 Exists In North Africa... Are Republican Party Policies Heading Us Back Towards That Institution Cherished By The Rich And Powerful?

Roland and I were wandering around south-central Mali a few years ago, taking it in, meeting the folks. Alan Grayson had recommended Bandiagara and Sangha as a couple of off-the-beaten-track places east of Mopti and north of the border with Burkina Faso. In one of those towns Roland found a goat and its kid. The mother goat was freaking out because they were separating her from the kid and it looked like she knew the kid was headed for the stew pot. Roland bought the kid and we walked around with it for a few days before giving it to the mother goat's owner-- along with some Impeach Cheney caps, t-shirts and assorted foodstuffs and ephemera to seal an agreement that they wouldn't eat the kid. They seemed like honorable people and I bet the kid is still thriving-- unless the rebels ate him. We never bought a slave to free him though.

After our adventures in Dogon country, we headed north to legendary Timbuktu. We had seen slaves before, in Mali and in southern Morocco beyond the Atlas. It's even worse in Mauritania, which we've avoided. But as we headed north into Tuareg country we realized that the dark-skinned people were slaves of the more Arab-looking Tuaregs. We were at a river crossing one day and it was a noisy, lively place with music and everyone babbling away and little children running around playing. Suddenly the place turned deadly quiet and the only thing you could hear were the birds screaming. The women and children had all disappeared in a second. The place looked like a ghost town with a few surly men selling their goods to no one. And just as suddenly a pick-up truck rolled up to the ferry landing. It was filled with Tuaregs, heavily armed, menacing-looking Tuaregs. Later in the trip, up in the deep Sahara north of Timbuktu, we got to know some Tuaregs and did some bartering with them. There were slaves in their encampment and it was very creepy but they were-- and this is weird to write-- nice to us and polite enough.

So we weren't surprised when CNN reported that there are slaves-- migrants on their way from deep Africa to Europe-- being bought and sold in Libya. I don't expect much from the Trump Regime but France is taking the matter up to the UN. President Emmanuel Macron, terming the practice "a crime against humanity," requested an urgent meeting of the UN Security Council to discuss this treatment of migrants in Libya.

The UN in Libya is "dismayed and sickened by the recent video" and is actively pursuing the matter with the Libyan authorities to set up transparent monitoring mechanisms that safeguard migrants against horrific human rights abuses, said Ghassan Salame, Special Representative of the Secretary-General and Head of the United Nations Support Mission in Libya.

...Secretary-General António Guterres urged the international community to unite on the issue and called on all countries to adopt the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime and its protocol on human trafficking.

"I abhor these appalling acts and call upon all competent authorities to investigate these activities without delay and to bring the perpetrators to justice," Guterres said. "I have asked the relevant United Nations actors to actively pursue this matter."

Reuters reported that on Friday Pope Francis "excoriated politicians who foment fear of migrants, saying they were sowing violence and racism, and urged them to 'practise the virtue of prudence' to help them integrate. Pope Francis: "Those who, for what may be political reasons, foment fear of migrants instead of building peace are sowing violence, racial discrimination and xenophobia, which are matters of great worry for all those concerned about the safety of every human being." I hope no one accuses me of cultural appropriation for writing about it and condemning it. What's more un-PC, slavery or cultural appropriation? Who can keep up? Watch the CNN report:

The Republican Party's Unspeakable Pig-Sty Of Terrible Ideas

John Calhoun came from a southern colonial family that opposed the federal constitution. He was elected to Congress from South Carolina in 1810 and immediately joined the ranks of the most hawkish, pro-war elements and he was instrumental in dragging the U.S. into the War of 1812. He was named Secretary of War-- the 5th choice-- by James Monroe in 1817. In 1824 he ran for president but found no support but was chosen vice president to John Quincy Adams by the Electoral College. in 1828 he betrayed Adams and ran as vice president on Andrew Jackson' ticket, which won.

What Calhoun is most famous for is his nullification doctrine, which he created as a way of countering what he considered central government tyranny. He saw himself a great defender of minority rights-- minorities being the wealthy white slave-owners. His doctrine, of course, was the philosophical undermining of secession. When he talked about using even the most extreme measures to protect "liberty and sovereignty," he was only talking about the liberty and sovereignty of the very wealthy. in 1832 Jackson sent naval warships to Charleston over nullification and threatened to hang Calhoun, who resigned as vice president as was selected by the South Carolina legislature to be a senator. He quit the Senate in 1843 to run for president in 1844 but found no support and quit the race before started. He was selected by the state legislature as senator again and served in that position until he died in 1850, basically Congress' most outspoken advocate of slavery and of secession over slavery.

This week, in his fascinating Guardian review of Nancy MacLean’s new book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, George Monbiot brings Calhoun's villainy to the fore again. He writes about how MacLean accidentally stumbled upon the literary legacy of obscure right-wing nut, James McGill Buchanan-- largely a creation of the Koch brothers-- soon after he died. She discovered that Buchanan and the Kochs had been working on a secret plan for suppressing democracy on behalf of the very rich. That plan now dominates the Republican Party and is reshaping politics.

Buchanan was strongly influenced by both the neoliberalism of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, and the property supremacism of John C Calhoun, who argued in the first half of the 19th century that freedom consists of the absolute right to use your property (including your slaves) however you may wish; any institution that impinges on this right is an agent of oppression, exploiting men of property on behalf of the undeserving masses.

James Buchanan brought these influences together to create what he called public choice theory. He argued that a society could not be considered free unless every citizen has the right to veto its decisions. What he meant by this was that no one should be taxed against their will. But the rich were being exploited by people who use their votes to demand money that others have earned, through involuntary taxes to support public spending and welfare. Allowing workers to form trade unions and imposing graduated income taxes were forms of “differential or discriminatory legislation” against the owners of capital.

Any clash between “freedom” (allowing the rich to do as they wish) and democracy should be resolved in favour of freedom. In his book The Limits of Liberty, he noted that “despotism may be the only organisational alternative to the political structure that we observe.” Despotism in defence of freedom.

His prescription was a “constitutional revolution”: creating irrevocable restraints to limit democratic choice. Sponsored throughout his working life by wealthy foundations, billionaires and corporations, he developed a theoretical account of what this constitutional revolution would look like, and a strategy for implementing it.

He explained how attempts to desegregate schooling in the American south could be frustrated by setting up a network of state-sponsored private schools. It was he who first proposed privatising universities, and imposing full tuition fees on students: his original purpose was to crush student activism. He urged privatisation of social security and many other functions of the state. He sought to break the links between people and government, and demolish trust in public institutions. He aimed, in short, to save capitalism from democracy.

In 1980, he was able to put the programme into action. He was invited to Chile, where he helped the Pinochet dictatorship write a new constitution, which, partly through the clever devices Buchanan proposed, has proved impossible to reverse entirely. Amid the torture and killings, he advised the government to extend programmes of privatisation, austerity, monetary restraint, deregulation and the destruction of trade unions: a package that helped trigger economic collapse in 1982.

None of this troubled the Swedish Academy, which through his devotee at Stockholm University Assar Lindbeck in 1986 awarded James Buchanan the Nobel memorial prize for economics. It is one of several decisions that have turned this prize toxic.

But his power really began to be felt when Koch, currently the seventh richest man in the US, decided that Buchanan held the key to the transformation he sought. Koch saw even such ideologues as Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan as “sellouts,” as they sought to improve the efficiency of government rather than destroy it altogether. But Buchanan took it all the way.

MacLean says that Charles Koch poured millions into Buchanan’s work at George Mason University, whose law and economics departments look as much like corporate-funded thinktanks as they do academic faculties. He employed the economist to select the revolutionary “cadre” that would implement his programme (Murray Rothbard, at the Cato Institute that Koch founded, had urged the billionaire to study Lenin’s techniques and apply them to the libertarian cause). Between them, they began to develop a programme for changing the rules.

The papers Nancy MacLean discovered show that Buchanan saw stealth as crucial. He told his collaborators that “conspiratorial secrecy is at all times essential.” Instead of revealing their ultimate destination, they would proceed by incremental steps. For example, in seeking to destroy the social security system, they would claim to be saving it, arguing that it would fail without a series of radical “reforms.” (The same argument is used by those attacking the NHS). Gradually they would build a “counter-intelligentsia,” allied to a “vast network of political power” that would become the new establishment.

Through the network of thinktanks that Koch and other billionaires have sponsored, through their transformation of the Republican party, and the hundreds of millions they have poured into state congressional and judicial races, through the mass colonisation of Trump’s administration by members of this network and lethally effective campaigns against everything from public health to action on climate change, it would be fair to say that Buchanan’s vision is maturing in the US.

...In one respect, Buchanan was right: there is an inherent conflict between what he called “economic freedom” and political liberty. Complete freedom for billionaires means poverty, insecurity, pollution and collapsing public services for everyone else. Because we will not vote for this, it can be delivered only through deception and authoritarian control. The choice we face is between unfettered capitalism and democracy. You cannot have both.

Buchanan’s programme is a prescription for totalitarian capitalism. And his disciples have only begun to implement it. But at least, thanks to MacLean’s discoveries, we can now apprehend the agenda. One of the first rules of politics is, know your enemy. We’re getting there.

Will Trump's Claim That Frederick Douglass "Is Being Recognized More And More" Inspire His Followers To Read Douglass' Work?

Frederick Douglass was born in Maryland on February 20th-- my birthday too, but 1818-- and a slave. He taught himself to read and write-- writing later that "knowledge is the pathway from slavery to freedom." He escaped from Maryland at the age of 20 and went immediately to New York and then to New Bedford, Massachusetts. He became a preacher, a powerful orator and one of the country's foremost abolitionists. He became a national figure in 1845 with the publication of his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, a best seller. It's worth noting that he was also a crusader for women's right and for equality for immigrants... so decidedly not an identity politics kind of guy.

Long before Señor Trumpanzee suggested naming Douglass the the National Security Council, he gave a fiery speech in Rochester, N.Y., "The Meaning of July 4th for the Negro," on Independence Day, 1852. It was inspiring but certainly not celebratory. Listen to James Earl Jones read it on the YouTube above.

July 4th, he noted, wasn't a day of independence for American blacks, still largely held as slaves. Nor was it a real day of independence for women, non-wealthy whites, Native Americans or anyone other than rich white males. He asked "Why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? And am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?" His response still shakes the conscience and consciousness (of those who have conscience and some level of consciousness beyond the primitive).

Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold, that a nation's sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish, that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation's jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that, the dumb might eloquently speak, and the "lame man leap as an hart."

But such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common.ÑThe rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrevocable ruin! I can to-day take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people!

"By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? If I forget thee, 0 Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth."

Fellow-citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, "may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!" To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then, fellow-citizens, is American slavery. I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the slave's point of view. Standing there identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery-the great sin and shame of America! "I will not equivocate; I will not excuse"; I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be right and just.

But I fancy I hear some one of my audience say, "It is just in this circumstance that you and your brother abolitionists fail to make a favorable impression on the public mind. Would you argue more, an denounce less; would you persuade more, and rebuke less; your cause would be much more likely to succeed." But, I submit, where all is plain there is nothing to be argued. What point in the anti-slavery creed would you have me argue? On what branch of the subject do the people of this country need light? Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? That point is conceded already. Nobody doubts it. The slaveholders themselves acknowledge it in the enactment of laws for their government. They acknowledge it when they punish disobedience on the part of the slave. There are seventy-two crimes in the State of Virginia which, if committed by a black man (no matter how ignorant he be), subject him to the punishment of death; while only two of the same crimes will subject a white man to the like punishment. What is this but the acknowledgment that the slave is a moral, intellectual, and responsible being? The manhood of the slave is conceded. It is admitted in the fact that Southern statute books are covered with enactments forbidding, under severe fines and penalties, the teaching of the slave to read or to write. When you can point to any such laws in reference to the beasts of the field, then I may consent to argue the manhood of the slave. When the dogs in your streets, when the fowls of the air, when the cattle on your hills, when the fish of the sea, and the reptiles that crawl, shall be unable to distinguish the slave from a brute, then will I argue with you that the slave is a man!

For the present, it is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the Negro race. Is it not astonishing that, while we are ploughing, planting, and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing bridges, building ships, working in metals of brass, iron, copper, silver and gold; that, while we are reading, writing and ciphering, acting as clerks, merchants and secretaries, having among us lawyers, doctors, ministers, poets, authors, editors, orators and teachers; that, while we are engaged in all manner of enterprises common to other men, digging gold in California, capturing the whale in the Pacific, feeding sheep and cattle on the hill-side, living, moving, acting, thinking, planning, living in families as husbands, wives and children, and, above all, confessing and worshipping the Christian's God, and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave, we are called upon to prove that we are men!

Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty? that he is the rightful owner of his own body? You have already declared it. Must I argue the wrongfulness of slavery? Is that a question for Republicans? Is it to be settled by the rules of logic and argumentation, as a matter beset with great difficulty, involving a doubtful application of the principle of justice, hard to be understood? How should I look to-day, in the presence of Americans, dividing, and subdividing a discourse, to show that men have a natural right to freedom? speaking of it relatively and positively, negatively and affirmatively. To do so, would be to make myself ridiculous, and to offer an insult to your understanding. There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.

What, am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to burn their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters? Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood, and stained with pollution, is wrong? No! I will not. I have better employment for my time and strength than such arguments would imply.

What, then, remains to be argued? Is it that slavery is not divine; that God did not establish it; that our doctors of divinity are mistaken? There is blasphemy in the thought. That which is inhuman, cannot be divine! Who can reason on such a proposition? They that can, may; I cannot. The time for such argument is passed.

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation's ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival...

...Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented, of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery. "The arm of the Lord is not shortened," and the doom of slavery is certain. I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. While drawing encouragement from "the Declaration of Independence," the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age. Nations do not now stand in the same relation to each other that they did ages ago. No nation can now shut itself up from the surrounding world and trot round in the same old path of its fathers without interference. The time was when such could be done. Long established customs of hurtful character could formerly fence themselves in, and do their evil work with social impunity. Knowledge was then confined and enjoyed by the privileged few, and the multitude walked on in mental darkness. But a change has now come over the affairs of mankind. Walled cities and empires have become unfashionable. The arm of commerce has borne away the gates of the strong city. Intelligence is penetrating the darkest corners of the globe. It makes its pathway over and under the sea, as well as on the earth. Wind, steam, and lightning are its chartered agents. Oceans no longer divide, but link nations together. From Boston to London is now a holiday excursion. Space is comparatively annihilated. -- Thoughts expressed on one side of the Atlantic are distinctly heard on the other.

L.A. Doesn't Allow Slavery-- Indentured Servants, Though... An Entirely Different Matter

I woke up this morning and my e-mail box was filled with messages about this report, Rigged by Brett Murphy for USA Today. I had missed it when it ran a few days ago but. My correspondents were insistent it is a must-read. And it is. It’s worth reading in full— though probably not on a full stomach. Murphy started off with the story of an immigrant trucker, Samuel Talavera Jr., virtually a modern day American slave. Or does being paid make you not a slave… even if the pay is 67 cents a week? One driver told Murphy that “We are not human. We are machines for making money for these people.” Talavera’s truck, which he was leasing-to-buy from the company he worked for, broke down in October, 2013.

When Talavera could not afford repairs, the company fired him and seized the truck-- along with $78,000 he had paid towards owning it.

Talavera was a modern-day indentured servant. And there are hundreds, likely thousands more, still on the road, hauling containers for trucking companies that move goods for America’s most beloved retailers, from Costco to Target to Home Depot.

These port truckers-- many of them poor immigrants who speak little English-- are responsible for moving almost half of the nation’s container imports out of Los Angeles’ ports. They don't deliver goods to stores. Instead they drive them short distances to warehouses and rail yards, one small step on their journey to a store near you.

A yearlong investigation by the USA Today Network found that port trucking companies in southern California have spent the past decade forcing drivers to finance their own trucks by taking on debt they could not afford. Companies then used that debt as leverage to extract forced labor and trap drivers in jobs that left them destitute.

If a driver quit, the company seized his truck and kept everything he had paid towards owning it.

If drivers missed payments, or if they got sick or became too exhausted to go on, their companies fired them and kept everything. Then they turned around and leased the trucks to someone else.

Drivers who manage to hang on to their jobs sometimes end up owing money to their employers— essentially working for free. Reporters identified seven different companies that have told their employees they owe money at week’s end.

The USA Today Network pieced together accounts from more than 300 drivers, listened to hundreds of hours of sworn labor dispute testimony and reviewed contracts that have never been seen by the public.

Using the contracts, submitted as evidence in labor complaints, and shipping manifests, reporters matched the trucking companies with the most labor violations to dozens of retail brands, including Target, Hewlett-Packard, Home Depot, Hasbro, J.Crew, UPS, Goodyear, Costco, Ralph Lauren and more.

Among the findings:

• Trucking companies force drivers to work against their will-- up to 20 hours a day-- by threatening to take their trucks and keep the money they paid toward buying them. Bosses create a culture of fear by firing drivers, suspending them without pay or reassigning them the lowest-paying routes.
• To keep drivers working, managers at a few companies have physically barred them from going home. More than once, Marvin Figueroa returned from a full day’s work to find the gate to the parking lot locked and a manager ordering drivers back to work. “That was how they forced me to continue working,” he testified in a 2015 labor case. Truckers at two other companies have made similar claims.
• Employers charge not just for truck leases but for a host of other expenses, including hundreds of dollars a month for insurance and diesel fuel. Some charge truckers a parking fee to use the company lot. One company, Fargo Trucking, charged $2 per week for the office toilet paper and other supplies.
• Drivers at many companies say they had no choice but to break federal safety laws that limit truckers to 11 hours on the road each day. Drivers at Pacific 9 Transportation testified that their managers dispatched truckers up to 20 hours a day, then wouldn’t pay them until drivers falsified inspection reports that track hours. Hundreds of California port truckers have gotten into accidents, leading to more than 20 fatalities from 2013 to 2015, according to the USA Today Network's analysis of federal crash and port trade data.
• Many drivers thought they were paying into their truck like a mortgage. Instead, when they lost their job, they discovered they also lost their truck, along with everything they’d paid toward it. Eddy Gonzalez took seven days off to care for his dying mother and then bury her. When he came back, his company fired him and kept the truck. For two years, Ho Lee was charged more than $1,600 a month for a truck lease. When he got ill and missed a week of work, he lost the truck and everything he’d paid.
• Retailers could refuse to allow companies with labor violations to truck their goods. Instead they’ve let shipping and logistics contractors hire the lowest bidder, while lobbying on behalf of trucking companies in Sacramento and Washington D.C. Walmart, Target and dozens of other Fortune 500 companies have paid lobbyists up to $12.6 million to fight bills that would have held companies liable or given drivers a minimum wage and other protections that most U.S. workers already enjoy.

This isn’t a case of a few bad trucking companies accused of mistreating a handful of workers.

Since 2010, at least 1,150 port truck drivers have filed claims in civil court or with the California Department of Industrial Relations’ enforcement arm, known as the labor commission.

Judges have sided with drivers in more than 97% of the cases heard, ruling time after time that port truckers in California can’t legally be classified as independent contractors. Instead, they are employees who, by law, must be paid minimum wage and can’t be charged for the equipment they use at work.

The rulings stop there. They do not address specific allegations of abuse by drivers, including whether trucking companies physically barred them from leaving work or ordered them to work past federal fatigue limits.

But allegations like those have been made in sworn testimony in hundreds of the cases, virtually all of which ended with trucking companies ordered to repay drivers for truck expenses and lost wages. The USA Today Network found that at least 140 trucking companies have been accused by at least one driver of shorting them of fair pay or using threats to squeeze them to work longer hours.

Prominent civil rights leader Julian Bond once called California port truckers the new black tenant farmers of the post-Civil War South. Sharecroppers from that era rented farmland to make their living and regularly fell into debt to their landlords. Widespread predatory practices made it nearly impossible for the farmers to climb out.

Through lease contracts, California’s port truckers face the same kinds of challenges in ways that experts say rarely happen in the U.S. today.

“I don’t know of anything even remotely like this,” said Stanford Law School Professor William Gould, former chairman of the National Labor Relations Board and one of the nation’s top labor experts.

“You’re working to get yourself out of the debt. You just don’t see anything like that.”

…Some company owners said their lease-to-own programs were a favor to truckers who might otherwise have been out of work. And there are drivers who make it through the contract to own their trucks, something that’s grown more common with time and a rebounding economy. Drivers who can't make a living aren't working hard enough, many company executives say.

“Our owner very generously went out and purchased a fleet of clean trucks,” said Marc Koenig, a vice president at Performance Team, which has lost cases to 21 drivers at the California labor commission. “That’s what really frustrated our owner. He really reached out and helped these guys.”

…California’s port truckers make it possible for the Walmarts and Amazons of the world to function. Even so, most of the two dozen retail companies contacted by the USA Today Network declined to comment, some saying they had never heard of the rash of labor violations at their primary ports of entry.

Only Goodyear said it took immediate action. Spokesperson Keith Price said in a statement that the tire giant dropped Pacific 9 in 2015, “within two weeks” of California labor commission decisions in favor of dozens of drivers.

The few others that issued statements said it was not their responsibility to police the shipping industry. Retailers don't directly hire the truckers who move their goods at the pier. They generally hire large shipping or logistics firms that line up trucking companies through a maze of subcontractors.

…For decades, short-haul truckers at the nation’s ports relied on cheap clunkers to move goods to nearby warehouses and rail yards.

With little up-front investment, drivers-- most of them independent contractors who owned their own trucks-- could make a decent living squeezing the last miles from dilapidated big rigs that weren’t suited for the open road.

In October 2008, that changed dramatically in southern California, home of the nation’s busiest ports, Los Angeles and Long Beach. State officials, fed up with deadly diesel fumes from 16,000 outdated trucks, ordered the entire fleet replaced with new, cleaner rigs.

Suddenly, this obscure but critical collection of trucking companies faced a $2.5 billion crossroads unlike anything experienced at other U.S. ports.

Instead of digging into their own pockets to undo the environmental mess they helped create, the companies found a way to push the cost onto individual drivers, who are paid by the number and kinds of containers they move, not by the hour.

There are 800 companies regularly operating at the LA ports. Almost all of them turned to some form of a lease-to-own model, some without thinking through the consequences, said industry consultant and lobbyist Alex Cherin.

“Flying by the seat of their pants and making it up as they went along,” he said of the scramble to find trucks for drivers. “Ultimately what they were trying to do was survive in a business with very thin margins.”

Truckers at dozens of companies describe the same basic scene. They were handed a lease-to-own contract by their employer and given a choice: Sign immediately or be fired. Many drivers who spoke little English said managers gave them no time to seek legal advice or even an interpreter to read the contract.

It was "take it or leave it," according to Fidel Vasquez, a driver for Total Transportation who said he couldn’t read the contract because it was in English.

Jose Juan Rodriguez owned his own truck and drove primarily for Morgan Southern, where two dozen drivers have filed claims for back pay at the California labor commission and civil court. Like many drivers, Rodriguez said he didn’t understand what he was signing, but felt he had no choice.

His wife has stage three breast cancer and his adult son has severe brain damage requiring frequent doctor visits.

“Where do I sign?” Rodriguez recalled asking right away. “The only thing I had to worry about is work, because I have a family.”

The contracts work like sub-leases. Knowing drivers could not qualify for their own loans or leases, trucking companies arranged to finance their fleets. Then they had drivers sign up for individual trucks.

Drivers gave their old trucks-- many of which they owned outright-- to their company as a down payment. And just like that they were up to $100,000 in debt to their own employer. The same guys would have had a tough time qualifying for a Hyundai days earlier.

As far back as August 2008, a trucking finance firm warned Port of Long Beach board members that 40% of drivers were likely to default on truck leases. But no one stopped the deals, which place almost all of the financial risk onto the workers.

Drivers' names were not on the truck titles. And many contracts effectively barred drivers from using their truck to work for other companies.

The companies also retained the power to decide how much work to give their drivers. They decide who gets the easiest and most lucrative routes-- and who gets to work at all.

That leaves drivers in constant fear of upsetting managers, who can fire them for any reason, or simply stop sending them business, a process some call “starving” them out of the truck.

On a five-year lease, drivers could pay in for four years and 11 months. If they got sick, fell behind on the lease or were fired in the last month, they could lose everything--as if they had never paid a dime.

“The truck was never his,” one California labor commission hearing officer noted in a March, 2014 ruling. “And he has nothing to show for all the time and money he spent.”

…Drivers who signed up for leases watched their take-home pay plummet and often had no choice but to work longer hours.

After emigrating from Nicaragua in 1992, Samuel Talavera Jr. drove a truck at the Los Angeles harbor and made an honest living. Since 9/11, all truckers working at ports of entry must be legal residents.

Talavera bought his wife, Reyna, a house and took his daughters to Disneyland.

But everything changed in late 2010, when he went into the QTS warehouse and his boss told him he needed to trade in his truck and sign a lease-purchase contract.

For the next four years, he worked mind-numbing hours to pay the bills.

To save commuting time, he slept in his truck at work. To avoid bathroom breaks, he kept an empty two-liter bottle by his side. He became a ghost to his family.

Still, he had to drain his savings to survive.

A stack of weekly paychecks he keeps in a drawer at home shows his worst weeks. He grossed $1,970 on June 3, 2011, but it all went back to QTS. After the lease and other truck expenses, he took home $33.

On February 10, 2012, he took home $112 after expenses.

The next week, he made 67 cents.

Reyna got two office cleaning jobs and a third taking care of the elderly to try to make ends meet. Even so, when her father died, she couldn’t afford to fly home for the funeral.

Talavera was working so much, she said. “We didn’t understand why there was hardly any money left over.”

Through interviews and court records, reporters catalogued more than 120 drivers who say they regularly worked past exhaustion, 12 to 20 hours straight behind the wheel.

Federal law prohibits commercial truckers from driving more than 11 hours at a time, and they can’t work at all after 14 hours, until they have had 10 hours of rest. Government studies show that for every hour past 11 that someone drives, the chances of crashing increase exponentially.

Many drivers feel they have no choice but to take that risk.

On bad weeks-- when Flores hits traffic or gets assigned a low-paying delivery-- he says he takes home $300 or less for 100 hours of work. That translates into $3 an hour, less than a third of what he could make washing dishes at California’s minimum wage.

Drivers could quit and find new work. But many, like Flores, say they’ve stayed on hoping things would improve. Then they realized if they quit, they would lose thousands paid toward their truck. “They’re captive,” Teamsters’ international vice president Fred Potter said.

Truck payments can cut so deep into wages that drivers actually owe their employer come Friday.

“Working for free,” one driver called it in a court statement.

Paychecks read instead like weekly invoices: Faustino Denova, negative $9.64. Germen Merino, negative $92.50. Jose Covarrubias, negative $280.

For some truckers, the debt stacked up week after week, until they borrowed against their house or from friends, used their savings to pay it off or until their company fired them.

“The company didn't care whether I took a gallon of milk to my home or not,” one driver testified in a civil court case. “The company would take everything.”

Enough weeks like that put truckers into a hole they can’t escape.

Like many drivers, Talavera and his wife fell behind on their mortgage, and then stopped paying it altogether. They filed for bankruptcy to save their home.

In ways that happen in virtually no other workplace in America, port trucking companies in Southern California wield enormous power over their workers.

Through interviews and a review of sworn statements, the USA Today Network identified more than 100 drivers who reported threats and retaliation. Managers punish drivers most often for turning down the lowest-paying routes, missing work or refusing to work past federal hour limits.

At least 24 companies have fired drivers outright under those circumstances, according to interviews and a review of court, NLRB and California labor commission records. In each case, the driver lost his truck and what he’d paid into it.

Arcadio Amaya said he refused to work 15 hours straight one night at Pacgran Inc. and was fired the next day. He lost $26,400 he had paid toward a truck.

Armando Logamo, a former driver at RPM Harbor Services, said he saw other drivers bribing dispatchers for better-paying assignments, so he told his supervisor. The next week, Logamo was fired. He lost the truck, along with all the payments he had put into it.

“They fired me because I was one of the ones that was speaking up,” he said. “It was pretty devastating because I was with them for two plus years.”

Eddy Gonzalez once missed a day when he was called to court to testify as a witness. As punishment, he said his boss at Seacon Logix didn't let him work the next day.

Then, a few months later, he missed a week to bury his dead mother. When Gonzalez came back, he said, his boss cleaned out his truck and fired him on the spot while he pleaded to keep his job.

“He just took the keys and left,” Gonzalez testified in court.

On Monday, Nanette Barragan, a freshman congresswoman whose district isn’t far from L.A.’s port was with the Teamsters to stand with them in solidarity on this issue. This morning she told me that her cousin is a truck driver. “I know first hand how hard our truck drivers work to make ends meet. Some of them don't even make minimum wage; this is unjust. I stand with our working families who deserve a fair and just wage."

Kia Hamadanchy is running for the Orange County congressional seat held by absentee congresswoman and Trump/Ryan rubberstamp Mimi Walters. Moments ago told us that "What's happening to these truckers is absolutely unconscionable and should have no place in any industry in this country. Companies shouldn't be allowed to trap their workers in these kinds of arrangements and situations like these are a big part of why I'm running for Congress and what I'd fight for once I get there." And the other excellent progressive running for the CA-45 seat is Katie Porter, who had the same reaction as Kia. She told us that "This is another example of how crushing, exploitive debt reveberates through people's lives and makes it almost impossible for many families to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. You should be able to work in this country to get yourself out of debt, but our financial and legal system has created an almost permanent class of debtors. Its why in Congress, I'll work to end credit checks for hiring and end employment discrimination based off consumer financial history."