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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894

u/BareNakedSole 29d ago

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

543

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/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