America Is A Terrible Country

[Kim]

This is why I said to burn them down.

[Professor Smarmiarty]

Prisons are usually made of concrete and things which are hard to burn. You'd need some explosives or something probably. And you gotta get the prisoners out first.
It's a good principle though. Just got to hammer out the logistics.

My plan is I'm going to steal all the dictionaries and replace the word "criminal" with "go-getter" and I think that will solve 90% of the problem.

[Kim]

while you're at it replace the word rich with hitlerking

[Locke cole]

"I would order dessert, but my entree was just too hitlerking."

[Professor Smarmiarty]

I'm going to replace money with cancerpaper because it gives you cancer.

[Osterbaum]

Basically everything gives you cancer.

[Jagos]

Originally Posted by Bells

How much does it cost to the taxpayer per month to sustain a federal or state non-profitable prison on the current structure? How much it would cost if you took out the for-profit inmates and inject them into the federal system?

It costs a shit ton to have a for profit prison. And there's a requirement that these prisons maintain 90% capacity. So the incentive is to put in as many people as possible. Guess who happens to be the majority of people in prison? Yeah...

Find out those numbers and you'll learn why For-Profit is seen as a positive thing in some states.

No it isn't. Those prisons cost more than education in practically every state. It's literally an attempt to lock up everyone that isn't rich enough to be on the outside.

You wanna make them work their cost? Where will you set the line that defines them as working slaves for the government? How about civil rights and human rights? How can you uphold the costs of a non-profit system that si better than the current one without putting more money out of your pocket for it? And if you are Ok with paying more to have a better system... how are you going to convince the other millions of people on your country that don't like to pay more taxes?

They are literally slaves in these institutions. We have 2.2 million felons because of the drug war. We create an environment to keep them locked up and put away to work on whatever the government has them do. Solitary is torture used in prisons. A strong incentive to deprive people of the right to vote is installed in such a plutocratic state. The prisoners make ~.44 an hour. And when they get out, they are never allowed to work for their communities again. The government will not help you if you are a felon. No public housing, no public education, and no way to get out of a lifetime of indentured servitude. The servitude comes from being a parolee who has to pay for their own jailor to check up on them.

That's a system you want to support?

You wanna impose those extra taxes only on really rich people? Watch the economy and job growth take a nose dive...

Not true. Link and Link

"no for-profit prisons" sounds Altruistic as fuck.. but the practicality will be put in question within seconds after the idea gets mentioned.

If you want to know what the CCIA is doing, just look here. We are literally controlled in these facilities by a corporation. And the results are horrendous. Link, Link, and Link.

"For profit" prisons runs counter to the state taking care of individuals and ensuring their safety. They have less staff, less experience, and smaller places to maximize profit. I wouldn't be surprised of we started calling these places a modern Auschwitz.

You say every prison, but not every city has the structure to prepare and invest in those professionals. Just there you already have about 30 other serious problems with Logistics and local education priorities, funding and structure.

No, the problem is the incentive for people to screw over people for money. If the prisons are run by the state, it's a far better alternative than one run by a private market. That should be the lesson here. A state prison can ensure the safety of individuals far more than these prisons that pursue maximum profit.

No it's not... it's just an easy caricature to make. So very very easy... i know quite a few here like to think of anybody "in power" (whatever the fuck that means...) as a member of the league of doom, but that's just a Fogged Delusion... Not to got the other way around, because there ARE in fact evil people in power who want to subdue those weaker and easy to prey on.... but to think that those with Autority can just snap their fingers and make it happen sounds like you are getting your facts about the world more from movies than from any other source.

The government does one of two things: It listens to everyone or the richest among us. What you're seeing is the slow descent of America into fascism which started with Reagan. The culprit here is a ton... Corporations controlling the lives of people and using them as capital is a VERY bad notion that is what is currently happening. But the government isn't powerless. It's just listening to the rich here, nothing less. Could Obama do something in a position of power? Indeed. Will he? No. That should be evident. His political ideology allows for certain reforms of the system but he doesn't see the system as a problem. Unless a lot of people made a stink about issues, expect those in power to maintain the status quo until otherwise noted.

Talk about conjecture....

Actually, I agree that the system (capitalism) has lead to this eventual inequality. Capitalism itself is an unstable economic system that has lead to great booms and busts.

Same thing with Capitalism, i can find tons of examples of shitty companies running slave factories or even worst, big companies hiring slave factories overseas to work for them... but on the overall view, for a serious company, a really big player in the capitalist world, there is nothing better than a well trained, well payed employee doing his job and refusing offers from competitors... and as much as you might desire to consider that every rich guy on the US (or the world) has a secret clubhouse where they meet to scheme and plan everything together.... that's just not real. It's the same flavor of nut you see on 9/11 conspiracies and Fox News.

If you really want to look at it, look into Marxism and how it came out as a critique of capitalism. Out of the 300 year history of capitalism and laissez-faire markets, it is not a system that allows for egalitarian democracy. It creates tensions between workers and employers. While there are better alternatives, my point is merely that your idea that pulling out a sliver of history to say it was a great system is not factually accurate. Every president in recent modern history has had downturns that affect everyday people who, through no fault of their own, lost their jobs from employers(masters) while the workers (slaves) gain nothing from their productivity and have to lose their skills and labor to find another employer. Can you honestly point to a good time in US history that didn't have one economic downturn attached to it?

Capitalists like to make money. Any industrialist will tell you that it's ten times easier to make money by paying people the necessary for them to be happy than to keep holding them down forever on TRUE slavery... and by the way... if you even consider calling up some bullshit like "modern slavery" or "walmart employes slaves" or whatever the hell thing like that... don't bother. Slavery is one thing and one thing only... it's terrible, it actually still exists in many places in the world and it's not "making just barely enough"... it's WAY worst than that.

Bells, you do not understand that minimum wage laws here in the US are not a living wage.

The reforms you want in the system were tried and the system was reformed since 1932 when FDR was elected. We tried reforming the system... And in 1946, the conservatives in this country stopped all that progress cold. They limited the power of the president. They passed anti union laws such as Taft-Hartley. And then, they made sure that workers were just a little better than serfs by ensuring they got a paycheck instead of working for the clothes on their back.

But now, people have new ways to go into indentured servitude and that's a problem. I go to a "for profit" school to get a degree for a job that won't be there when I graduate because no one is hiring. Do you understand what that means? I might as well begin my own company and pave my own way instead of relying on a public debt that will not be paid.

Shitty jobs are not Slavery, they are shitty jobs on shitty companies. Be in for profit prisons or out of them. Even comparing that to people who actually suffer real slavery in the world is insensitive and quite frankly repulsive.

BS, Bells. They are. Working at McDonalds for 20 years with no wage increases while your boss makes millions is an example of a shitty job and a plutocratic state. You might have a very real notion that most Americans are rich but that's not accurate at all. The Six Walton heirs make more than the bottom 40% of Americans and are looking into making more. They have a monopoly on Wal-marts and retail which gives them a lot of power as capitalists. So much so that they can't afford to give their own people healthcare, which is then subsidized by the taxpayer anyway? That's the problem that I have with capitalism.

To say Capitalism is a revenge scheme to create slaves in prison is as warped as anyone can get from making opinions without educating themselves...

Bells, I agree with you most times, but you are dead wrong about the system. I'll merely say that the most powerful word in the English language is "incentive". Capitalism incentivizes a small group of people to exploit the masses to their own individual profit.

Whether you look into the reforms of prison, the capitalist gaming industry as shown by Activision and EA versus Valve, or how the rich control our Congress and buy the laws through lobbying, the entire system is rigged against those that don't have the money to access markets.

So hire better people to run your country. Whose fault is that? No matter how much money gets injected in the system, money is not mind control. And the small tactics to keep away certain groups of voters are largely noneffective to the end game. You simply cannot pull a scheme that big these days and make it successful in countries like the US.

Are you serious? Do you not know about our electoral college and our first past the post which prevents third parties from being viable in elections? Historically, here's why we can't really have viable candidates:

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When we change our electoral system, it's a start. When we eliminate capitalism for a better alternative, then we've won.

[Osterbaum]

I didn't even read Bells' post before. Seriously Bells, I'm making a tremendous effort here not to get all hostile and name calling about your obvious ignorance of what goes on in the world, but fucking hell like millions of people keep on dying from starvation while up to half of the food produced is thrown away, capitalist run western goverments wage wars to secure their own interests of profit and support brutal governments elsewhere just because they provide us with what we need. Meanwhile people have no control what so ever on the ecconomic sphere of society anywhere in the world, something which voting some other (rich white) guy into office isn't going to fucking fix. Political (and other) dissidents are marginalized, hunted down and silenced one way or another EVERYWHERE in the world. The wealth gap keeps on widening, fucking fascism is on the rise again in countries such as Greece, the latest global economic crisis shows no real signs of halting any time soon and those responsable get a slap on the wrist while the rest of us foot the bill.

Things aren't going well for an overwhelming majority of the population in the world. And yet, no change is in sight because once you're in control of a system it's a lot easier to keep people believing in your way of doing things rather than look for any altenatives. Ideological hegemony is difficult as fuck to overthrow, much more difficult than the overthrow of any one government. And it's not a conspiracy. It's the way the system is biased to work.

So hire better people to run your country. Whose fault is that? No matter how much money gets injected in the system, money is not mind control. And the small tactics to keep away certain groups of voters are largely noneffective to the end game. You simply cannot pull a scheme that big these days and make it successful in countries like the US.

Yeah because my vote certainly counts as much as billions of dollars. This shit is fucking insulting; so instead of being victims of a global elite interested in maintaining a system that befits them just well, we just voted the wrong rich white men into power! Man, aren't we all just fucking dumb assholes for doing that. Should've voted for someone else, or run for a representative position myself! It's not a god damn scheme! It's the way the system functions, and it is allowed to keep functioning as such because it's easier for those in power to keep that power than it is for the rest of us to take it.

[Kim]

The moral of this story is never, ever read Bells' posts.

[Magus]

Well this is the country whose government (which I mean, let's keep that in mind, it's the government doing this) purposefully giving people in Guatemala syphilis.

Whenever people balk at UN oversight of various aspects of this country I'm baffled. We clearly need some kind of shadow New World Order Illuminati government to keep us from doing horrible shit. Or just, like, actual enforcement of international laws, willingly carried out by ourselves. But I mean, when a known war criminal gets to regularly and freely appear on television and spew his right-wing rhetoric, clearly we need help.

As for Kony, we already got Gerard Butler on the case, or his real-world non-union equivalent, anyway.