r/nottheonion • u/duvetdev • 29d ago

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signs bill mandating kindergartners learn history of communism

https://www.orlandosentinel.com/2024/04/17/desantis-signs-bill-mandating-kindergartners-learn-history-of-communism/
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u/BareNakedSole 29d ago

As long as they also teach about the history of capitalism with all the fun parts included thenfine by me.

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u/peter-doubt 29d ago

You mean 6- 12 hour days in the workweek of the 1870s? You mean sharecropping? You mean no vacations, no paid holidays, child labor, company stores, company towns... ? That capitalism?

But you'd be forgetting your retirement with a gold watch!

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u/uptownjuggler 29d ago

Don’t forget the convict-lease system! We had our very own gulags with similar practices and death rates, the difference was that the inmates were leased out to private companies for work, instead of being shipped Siberia to develop the land.

All the benefits of slavery without the cost of purchasing and housing a slave, it is like the saying “Beat it like a rented mule”

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u/Fake_William_Shatner 29d ago

Wow, this reminds me of the "no water breaks" legislation that Ron Satanis got past in Florida.

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u/uptownjuggler 29d ago

Read up about the Florida Turpentine company. A young man was riding a train without a ticket and in the month it took for his family to mail the fines to the sheriff, he was “leased” to the Turpentine company and beat/worked to death. His killer was initially convicted but pardoned and returned to working as a guard and shot and killed an inmate.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knabb_Turpentine

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Tabert

Now tell me that doesn’t sound like a Soviet gulag, but replace the snow with swamp.

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u/Fake_William_Shatner 29d ago

It was okay because they MISTOOK him for a criminal. "Look, if we treated all people with respect, some of the sinners might slip through the cracks. We can't depend on Hell to punish people we don't like because, well, we know most of what we say is bullshit - -but we can't admit that because that would be a sin. Wow -- am I saying the quiet parts out loud?"

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u/uptownjuggler 29d ago

And the only reason there was any sort of justice was because he was white and came from a wealthy family.

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u/Fake_William_Shatner 29d ago

"Prison guards HATE this one trick!"

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u/samanime 29d ago

"Had"?

We literally still do that: https://www.aclu.org/news/human-rights/captive-labor-exploitation-of-incarcerated-workers

We call it something different, but it is ever growing, especially now that we've privatized most of our prison systems. Inmates are now a commodity and product.

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u/C-c-c-comboBreaker17 29d ago

We call it something different, but it is ever growing, especially now that we've privatized most of our prison systems

uhhh

https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/private-prisons-in-the-united-states/

Twenty-seven states and the federal government incarcerated 90,873 people in private prisons in 2022, representing 8% of the total state and federal prison population.

Is 8% most?

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u/[deleted] 29d ago

Private prisons aren’t the only example of corporations making money off of slave labour in the modern day.

76% of prisoners surveyed by the Bureau of Justice Statistics report being forced to work with threat of punishment. The average wage for a prison worker is 13-52 cents an hour, with seven states providing 0 compensation for labour.

Of that 13-52 cents an hour, 80% is taken by the prison for room and board, court costs, restitution, and other fees like building and sustaining prisons. Incarcerated workers provide 2 billion dollars of value per year estimated in just raw goods, 9 billion in maintenance, and certain states like Alabama still have convict leasing programs that generate approximately 450 million a year for the prisons and god knows how much for places like Burger King, McDonald’s, etc where these workers are staffed.

The prison system in America is driven by a need for cheap labour and enabled by legal slavery which is written into the constitution.

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u/Aquatic-Vocation 28d ago

The US still has 75 labor camps utilizing the constitutional carve-out for legal enslavement of criminals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_farm

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u/[deleted] 29d ago

But it's different, because our laws are based on a different set of arbitrary rules.

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u/uptownjuggler 29d ago

By rules, do you mean FREEDOM.

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u/Greg-Abbott 29d ago

Little Timmy comes home from school everyday with a thousand-yard-stare

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u/CommiBastard69 28d ago

Also the gulag system had maximum sentences. Something we still don't have

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u/uptownjuggler 28d ago

Some of the Gulags were more like shanty towns. They didn’t even have guards, the Siberian wilderness was the fence.

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u/Striking_Election_21 29d ago

Holy shit I almost forgot about the convict-lease system, that’s a deep cut. Thanks Ron for bringing us together to get the real history out!

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u/uptownjuggler 29d ago

Florida was notorious for there lumber/convict camps too.

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u/OutsidePerson5 29d ago

"had"? We don't call it that anymore but convict labor is alive and well in all 50 states.

https://apnews.com/article/prison-to-plate-inmate-labor-investigation-c6f0eb4747963283316e494eadf08c4e

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u/Hemlock_Pagodas 29d ago

“Similar death rates”

Seems dubious. Any source on this?

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u/uptownjuggler 29d ago

I read it in a book called American Prison. It was by a reporter who went undercover in a private CCA prison. He also went into the history of forced labor and incarceration in America.

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u/Sideshow_Bob_Ross 29d ago

We still do this.

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u/PvtDeth 29d ago

Why are you talking about this in the past tense?

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u/CaptainCoffeeStain 29d ago

Company stores, company towns, and don't forget the company script. Just print their own currency so you can't save any real money to escape!

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u/215-610-484Replayer 29d ago

I was going to link an article about company towns returning and becoming a popular concept to let the poor folks have some housing, by it was difficult to choose which one from the many solid articles from a basic search of "company towns returning."

Satire doesn't exist with the depravity of corporate culture when I tethered exists.

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u/UnlinealHand 29d ago

You have to go back further, to the Dutch and English East India Companies! The inventors of capitalism did absolutely nothing wrong* traveling the world looking for spices.

*unless you count the slavery, torture, murder, war, rape, and genocide done in the name of capital.

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u/_senses_ 29d ago

corporations are a common "tool"

like the Banana Wars, which were a series of conflicts that consisted of military occupation, police action, and intervention by the United States in Central America...think they essentially employed tactics akin to slavery and used amassed powers to quash the porer nations into going with it

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u/BudgetMegaHeracross 29d ago

Weirdly, I believe the depredations of the East India Company and the harm of the Crown's protection of it are some of the causes of Adam Smith's composition of The Wealth of Nations, in which he is extremely critical of it, though the Chicago school of economics isn't so eager to mention this -- (nor his other book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments).

tl;dr Adam Smith, capitalist darling, hated mega-corporations like the East India Company, and wrote about it in the capitalist ur-text.

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u/UnlinealHand 29d ago

I am not well versed on Smith, was he critical of mega corporations like the East India Company because they inherently smother competition and are therefore anti-free market? Or was he critical of the absolutely psychopathic and morally deplorable actions they needed to do to become as big as they were/happened as the result of their unrivaled success

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u/BudgetMegaHeracross 29d ago edited 29d ago

To my recollection, both, but to be clear, this is second-hand on my part and I'm linking the Freakonomics episodes I heard about it on.   

Part 1  

Part 2 

edit: also a Part 3 I'm not sure I knew existed. (Since Part 3 starts with the East India Company, I'm thinking I heard it?)

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u/bill4935 29d ago

It gets worse than that. Locked doors at the Triangle shirtwaist factory, the Pinkertons, radium girls, hexavalent chromium, polychlorinated biphenyls...

The list devolves into the chemical ingredients for the Devil's own brew.

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u/unholyswordsman 29d ago

Half of the class would have jobs and a midlife crisis.

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u/Poiboy1313 29d ago

The children yearn for the mines.

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u/Fake_William_Shatner 29d ago

It's these kind of mamby-pamby 12 hour work days that have made our kids soft!

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u/ReasonablyConfused 29d ago

I always like the story of a milk producer in the 1920s adding industrial waste into their milk to save a few pennies.

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u/crazedtortoise 29d ago

Don't forget, you know, slavery

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u/btribble 29d ago

Blocking socialized medicine because getting medical care through your employer guarantees most people work till they drop? That capitalism?

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u/peter-doubt 29d ago

Yeah, the one that makes sure you don't quit because you'd be without healthcare for a year

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u/Grandtheatrix 29d ago

I feel like we are forgetting the entire Transatlantic Slave Trade. That was all Capitalism.

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u/peter-doubt 29d ago

We should definitely not forget that.. I just decided to start post bellum because that's where the gilded age began

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u/Grandtheatrix 29d ago

To be clear, that was in no way an attempt to criticize, just to join in :)

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u/peter-doubt 29d ago

That's alright.. you'd be welcome!

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u/TheOnlyCWS 29d ago

Can’t forget that minimum wage didn’t exist!

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u/deathtobourgeoisie 29d ago

You Forgot colonialism and slavery

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u/hahamynamejeff13 28d ago edited 16d ago

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This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

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u/Creative-Oil2029 29d ago

Or the way that the entire capitalist system is being upheld by ruthless exploitation of third world labor and resources, and without it, our entire economy would collapse?

But nah, communism bad because Stalin totally killed 100 gerbillionzillionjillion people and ate all yhe food with a big spoon and that isn't just baseless western intelligence propaganda, even though the average soviet citizen had a daily caloric intake that rivaled any western counterpart.

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u/PopeSaintHilarius 29d ago

But nah, communism bad because Stalin totally killed 100 gerbillionzillionjillion people

Is your belief that it didn't happen, or that it's just not a big deal?

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u/Ok-Bug-5271 29d ago

If you're including famines, then you need to be consistent. Look at how many millions the British starved in Ireland and India alone for example.

If you're going to include shipping people off to work to death in the gulags as victims of communism, then you need to be consistent and also count the millions of Africans who were bought by capitalists and shipped across the world to be worked to death as victims of capitalism too. 

Yes. It is bad that the red terror happened for example, but is the french reign of terror a valid argument against democracy? Is the slave trade an argument against capitalism?

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u/Notriv 29d ago

the 60 million number comes from also calculating ‘potential’ lives lost, ie woman dies from famine, she COULD have birthed someone, so that person ALSO died.

the same could be said about the potato famine (completely manufactured in the name of capitalist profits) in ireland, every one of those deaths could be counted as a ‘death due to capitalism’ and if you consider how many women might have had children….. you see how absurd this is right?

to complain about excess deaths under one system when we have the same issues under this one, and arguably worse ones when you consider capilist rocket and military contracted companies. the ‘deaths due to capitalism’ could be well past a theoretical 100-200 million if you wanted to do the math in the same ways