Of the US Prison System and Slavery

pathforger (56)in #politics • 7 years ago (edited)

A recent post by @lukestokes has given me much pause and cause to think.

I would strongly suggest that you read his post first as Luke has quite a way of expressing his thoughts - and I shall be focusing upon my reaction and related perspective.

When I first began reading his post I thought it was going to be a simple stance against violence in competition.

It did start out that way.

And then it evolved.

As did my 'comment' to his post... which turned into this post (and this I foresee a couple more).

My nose did wrinkle at the outline of what humanity considered entertainment in the (somewhat) past, but then he made a point that sent my brow arching upwards.

Connecting the Prison System with Slavery

He suggested that a close enough look at the prison industrial complex (presumably within the US) would reveal that slavery is alive and well.

This is something that 3rd party information that I looked into for an old article about how the war on drugs is a scam would support. I'd also recommend that you give it a look as it goes into more than I get into here - with a different focus.

Source

Over 2.15 million people are presently within the U.S. prison system.

With that population you could replace the population of the Republic of Macedonia... or alternatively the populations of the 42 least populated countries in the World.

Does this sound absurd to you? It should - because it is true.

The so-called "war on drugs" is primarily responsible for multiplying inmate populations 8-fold since the early 70s. Either people got a whole lot evil or the laws by which they got measured and shafted did. Conservatively a million forsaken lives (and several million fragmented or shattered families) versus one self-important system of law. Which might be at fault?

Source

But I have spoken of prison systems and slavery is all about exploiting humans with no rights for one's own personal gain.

Oh - wait. This actually does happen within the prison system also. Corporations smack their lips in delight as they take advantage of state-permitted privatizede-prison mechanisms by which they employ inmates at cheaper-than-otherwise-legal rates.

One might think that this is no big deal. "They are criminals, after all, and should be made to work for their living", you might cry.

And yet - besides again harking back to pointing out that a big portion of the inmate population is made up of people who have lost their freedoms and their rights for simple non-violent drug-crimes (and other relatively frivolous crimes like vandalism/street art), even if you didn't particularly care about all this (or consistent ethics for that matter), your ears 'would' likely twitch at the news that while they are doing jobs assigned to them, other persons on welfare are denied the option of signing up fo that same job... because...

...big corporations exploiting inmates is so much cheaper than employing the unemployed... and they don't pay for the "accomodation"... Taxpayers do.

Source

In short, this is my nod to @lukestokes on that point.

I plan on revisiting his interesting post to provide my angle on the rest of it.

If you found this post interesting and would like to share this with your friends then a resteem couldn't hurt.

Yes I do hold a rather pessimistic outlook and interpretation of what I perceive as going on - not exclusively within the US - but with all the accurate information within this post alone (not including source-diving), can one truly shrug it off as 'fine'? :c/

It is my hope to raise a little awareness - and while I likely would have addressed it some day, @lukestokes' post definitely triggered me to move that date forward. :cP

If you 'didn't' like this then feel free to share your views in comments. A civil conversation can go a long way.

Sincerely,

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#freedom #conspiracy #slavery #government

7 years ago in #politics by pathforger (56)

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baah (61) 7 years ago (edited)

We found, for example, that on June 30, 1864, the members of Congress acting as the Board of Directors of a private, mostly foreign-owned corporation doing business as “The United States of America, Incorporated” changed the meaning of “state”, “State” and “United States” to mean “District of Columbia Municipal Corporation”. Like the 1862 change of the meaning of the word “person” to mean “corporation” cited in our affidavit, these special coded meanings of words render a drastically different picture of the world around us.
It turns out that your “personal bank account” is actually a “corporate bank account”. The “Colorado State Court” is actually the “Colorado District of Columbia Municipal Corporation Court”.
If you are shocked to learn these facts, you are not alone. So are millions of other Americans. These changes were made 150 years ago and tucked away in reams of boring meeting minutes and legalistic gobbledygook meant to be applied only to the internal workings of a private governmental services corporation and its employees. There was no public announcement, just as there was no public announcement or explanation when Congress created “municipal citizenship” known as “US citizenship” in 1868. Properly, technically, even to this day, this form of “citizenship” applies only to those
born in the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, and other Insular States, so there was no real reason to educate the general public about the topic. As Congress was secretively using the labor and the private property assets of these “citizens” as collateral backing the corporate debts of “The United States of America, Inc.” there was plenty of reason to obscure this development. At the end of the Civil War it would have been very unpopular to reveal that they were simply changing gears from private sector slave ownership to public sector slave ownership.
You may be surprised to learn that slavery was not abolished by the Thirteenth or any other Amendment to any constitution then or now. Instead, slavery was redefined as the punishment meted out to criminals. Look it up and read it for yourselves. It remains perfectly legal to enslave criminals, and it was left to Congress to define who the criminals were, because Congress was given plenary power over the District of Columbia and its citizenry by the original Constitution of the Republic and could do whatever it liked within the District and the Washington, DC Municipalities.
A child picking dandelions on the sidewalk could be arbitrarily defined as a criminal and enslaved for life by the renegade Congress functioning as the government of the District of Columbia and as the Board of Directors for the District of Columbia Municipal Corporation, but for starters, Congress simply defined “US citizens” as debt slaves under the 14th Amendment of their corporation’s articles and by-laws----which they deceptively named the “Constitution of the United States of America”.
The actual Constitution was and still is called “The Constitution for the united States of America”, but most people untrained in the Law and trusting what they believed to be their government didn’t notice the difference between “The Constitution for the united States of America” and the “Constitution of the United States of America”.

From Article 98 "Dear Federal Agents" by Justice amiably called "Judge" Anna,
http://annavonreitz.com/

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pathforger (56) 7 years ago (edited)

This comment adds a lot to take in but thank you for taking the time to include it @baah.

Curiosity compels me to ask. Might you be able to link the source? :c)

As unlikely as it may seem - the above text, while expanding my awareness of the workings of the political/legal mechanisms concerned, represent a 'living-down-to-my-expectations' - since I have already suspected similar to be so.

The question that arises is "What is to be done about it?".

To expand this further - "In the face of a malign faction with absolute advantage in terms of control of the means of leverage are concerned - what 'can' be done?"

Thank you again for the informative comment!

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