Date: Tue Jan 30, 1996 1:23 am CST
From: gathering
EMS: INTERNET / MCI ID: 376-5414
MBX: gathering@cygnus.com
TO: * David Beiter / MCI ID: 635-1762
Subject: Fwd: American Gulgags (fwd)
jerry garcia decals made in slave labour camps?
yup, free labourers don't have money to spend, but, the
guards and infrastructure to maintain such does, and they
are mostly white male heads of households. could it be a
racialist thang?
(Better Living Thru Better Living)
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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 29 Jan 96 03:07 EST
From: PawlRevere@aol.com
To: news@aen.org
Cc: caji@pobox.com
Subject: Fwd: American Gulgags
AEN News
from Michael Williams
---------------------
Forwarded message:
From: 100705.1252@compuserve.com (Michael Williams)
To: PawlRevere@aol.com (PawlRevere)
Date: 96-01-24 12:47:49 EST
Subject: The American Gulag
Despite America's rising crime and the frequency of felons
released only to commit other crimes, there is a seamy
underbelly to our justice system. Namely, that people are
profiting from others being incarcerated. The more that are
incarcerated, the greater the profits. And this is not the
first time in history such a situation has arisen...
It is building an American Gulag, one that threatens to
assume the mantle of The New Evil Empire.
The conception of an American Gulag did not start with
Stalin. It harks back to the Nazi era. Aside from its assault
on humanity, the idea of slave labor always has been a blunder.
It will be viewed as no less a blunder when the American Gulag
finally emerges from its nightmare -- if it ever emerges. For
now, it must be stated that our historical memories are short,
indeed.
THE GULAG
By the time Josef Stalin took command of the U.S.S.R., the
inner circles knew communism to be a failure. Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn related this intelligence in volume two of his
Gulag Archipeligo. He also explained that Stalin closeted
himself for several days with a Turkish businessman named
Naftaly A. Frenkel, an old friend. Frenkel reasoned, as do
most businessmen, that values and profits are predatory, always
achieved at the expense of others. He told Stalin that in
order for Communism to succeed, it would be necessary to get
free labor. This conclusion achieved, the two then proceeded
to construct their syllogism.
Frenkel pointed out that not just any labor would do.
This free labor had to know how to do things -- and thus the
judgement was made to draw up a list of engineers. "Now," said
Frenkel, "arrest every seventh one!" These workers would bring
their own energy into the system. And the system would harvest
this energy, giving all those who confessed to choreographed
crimes only thin cabbage soup and minimal support for life.
Most would be dead in a year or two.
This free labor built and staffed the Gulag. As the Gulag
expanded, coal, minerals, gold -- especially gold -- and timber
met the raw materials requirements of what the pundits called
"the future now."
There was a problem with this business equation. It did
not answer the requirements of economics. Because free labor
was used, raw materials failed to generate the base income that
could -- via the multiplier -- hoist up the national income.
As a consequence, the Soviet economy always operated without an
adequate social surplus, or a proper profit for the system.
Cheap labor in fact sounded the death knell for communism
that far back. It was only a decade or two before the Stalin
era that Henry Ford reasoned, "If we do not raise the
industrial wage to 50 cents an hour, the worker will never be
able to own a Model T car." Accordingly, Ford took the lead in
raising the American industrial wage to 50 cents an hour.
Others accepted this reasoning and joined the effort. On this
basis the United States built the biggest steel industry, the
biggest auto industry, the biggest just-about-everything.
There were depressions called panics, and then there came that
engineered depression of the 1930's, which was crafted by
business people who wanted the disparity required by free
trade. There were also periods of structural balance. These
were created by stabilization measures, by raw material prices
in line with wages and capital costs, and by an understanding
that free labor was a delusion of maximum dimension because the
absence of income short-circuits the exchange equation.
Today, half the world is coming apart because the act of
production is not creating and distributing the credits needed
for consumption. It took over seven decades for Stalin's
economic error to undo communism. And yet the United States is
following Frenkel's advice in its own dumb way.
Blunders and folly are the stuff history is made of, and
there are enough of both to bend over almost anyone except for
the tragedy involved. A case in point.
Just 50 years ago, millions of human beings were mined for
everything from their gold wedding rings to their human flesh,
which was turned into lamp shades, after their bodies were
worked to death by a slave labor system that grew up in the
middle of the greatest civilization in the history of the human
race -- in Western Europe. How this happened will never really
be understood until we come to grips with why it is happening
again today, right here in America.
Auschwitz was a private prison. Like many Nazi
concentration camps, it began as a detention center for
prisoners of war and political opponents of the Nazi regime.
As the number of prisoners began to grow exponentially, the
camps were turned into slave labor operations, modeled on
Quaker, American Friends Service Committee-run work camps in
pre-war germany, whose philosophy was that hard work is the
best rehabilitation.
The official Nazi policy for Auschwitz and other camps,
enunciated by Fritz Saukel, who was hanged at Nurenberg as the
head of the Nazi slave labor program, was "All the inmates must
be fed, sheltered, and treated in such a way as to exploit them
to the highest possible extent, at the lowest conceivable
degree of expenditure." If this sounds like the Contract with
America, well that's the way it is.
Beginning July 6, 1940, I.G. Farben Company, the world's
largest chemical company, set up a giant factory near the
Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. Prison labor produced
artificial rubber and oil from coal to supply Hitler's war
machine with tires and motor fuel. Two and a half million
laborers died or were killed at Auschwitz.
But I.G. Farben wasn't just a German company. In 1925,
I.G. Farben was merged with Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company
of New Jersey. The DuPont company also adopted numerous cartel
arrangements with the main partners.
As documented in great detail in The Unauthorized
Biography of George Bush, it was George Bush's father and the
Barrimans who helped the Nazis' rise to power. These same
interests, which are tightly allied with the British Crown, are
behind the so-called Conservative Revolution in America today.
Today, the United States leads the world -- or at least
those parts of the world that keep reliable statistics -- in
the rate at which it incarcerates its citizens. The
accompanying graph, from 1992, shows that the United States has
a higher rate of incarceration per 100,000 population than even
South Africa before the end of apartheid.
In June 1994, the U.S. prison population broke through the
one million mark. Today, nearly one and quarter million people
are in our prisons and jails. You can see that the rate has
basically grown by 6 to 8% a year since 1980, with the two
biggest growth years being 1980-81 -- Ronald Regan's first year
in office -- and 1988-89 -- George Bush's first year in office.
The racial victims are black in the American Gulag. And
it borders, if does not reach, genocide.
THE RATIONALES
As icing on the cake, and to provide a rationale for free
labor, the death penalty became re-established, perhaps not so
much to punish killers, but to get people use to the iron-hard
clout of the judiciary.
A 1993 report by the House Judiciary Committee's
Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights lists 48 known
cases in which innocent people were sentenced to death since
1973 -- and escaped execution. Those were the ones that we
found out about before it was too late.
Dr. Death -- Jack Kevorkian -- has proposed that death row
inmates donate their organs for transplants as part of the
newest form of recycling to hit post-industrial America. The
death house, however, is mere window dressing for the real
purpose of this new Gulag.
MODEL FACTORY
The model private prison or "factory within walls" -- as
Supreme Court head Justice Earl Warren called them in 1972,
after he visited Communist China and learned how it was done --
is Federal Prison Industries, Inc., better known by its trade
name, Unicor.
There are 46 U.S. locations where Unicor operates its 97
factories, employing over 15,000 inmates. This is a for-profit
corporation run by the Department of Justice, with $405 million
annual income. inmates earn minimum wage, but their average
net income, after deducting room, board, clothing, victim
restitution, family support, and fines, is $1 per hour.
Established in 1934 by an act of Congress, which already
aped the Nazi model, Unicor today produces metal products,
clothing, and textile products, graphics and services,
electronics, plastics, and optics. It produces every stick of
furniture used by the government. If it weren't for prison
labor, Newt Gingrich wouldn't have a chair to sit on!
Private prison companies, from 1983-1994 represent one of
the biggest growth industries in America. The growth curve for
the American Gulag looks remarkably like the graph for the
growth of derivatives, and not without reason.
There are nearly 50,000 private prison beds in America as
of June 1994, most of them in Texas. In Virginia, Governor
Allen has proposed to build 10,000 new prison beds through
private companies. They're used by state and Federal
governments. The advantage is clear: Private companies don't
have to pay their guards union wages, they don't have to offer
pensions, and they can cut whatever corners they like on the
prisoners. They can also build prisons in localities where the
population opposes them as long as there is no zoning ordinance
against it.
PRIVATE PRISONS
Financing for the private prisons is coming from the top
levels of Wall Street: Goldman Sachs, Prudential Insurance,
Smith Barney, Shearson Lehman and Merrill Lynch are among those
competing to underwrite prison construction with private tax-
exempt bonds. Some of the big defense contractors, including
Westinghouse, are also entering the prison business.
The way inmates are typically handled in private prisons
is not what the average American might expect. They are
degraded and often forced to undergo intense brainwashing
sessions which are designed to pacify and detoxify the inmates
and make them suitable for labor.
In addition to private companies which profit from
building prisons and running them for the state or county --
charging per diem for each prisoner they keep -- there is a
booming business inside state prisons akin to what Unicor is
for federal prisons. Here you see some examples of what is
being produced in privately-run industries inside state
prisons.
California -- logos for Jerry Garcia band and Lexus autos.
Hawaii -- Macadamia nuts; Spaulding golf balls.
Maryland -- Modular houses, processed hot dogs.
New Mexico -- Hotel chain reservations.
Oregon -- Designer blue jeans called "Prison Blues."
South Carolina -- Electronic cables.
Utah -- AT&T telemarketing. This was stopped by the
Communications Workers of America union in 1993.
Washington -- Eddie Bauer garments (for all you yuppies).
Thirty states have legalized privately-run industries in
their prisons. In most cases, the inmates are paid minimum
wage simply because the labor unions haven't yet been totally
smashed. Like Unicor, however, the average net income to the
prisoner is a dollar an hour.
This, of course, is still significantly higher than the
ten cents an hour that prison maintenance workers routinely
earn. As a result, like the house servants under Southern
slavery, those who can get a job working in private industry
are considered the lucky ones.
THE STING
Now lets turn to the legislation that has created this
potential American Auschwitz.
A look at the effect of the so-called War on Drugs
conducted by the Regan and Bush administrations, and their
counterparts in the various states, reveals that between 1980
and 1992, convictions for drug offenses grew from near zero to
100,000 per year. Drug-related convictions now account for
more than 30% of all incarcerations, and, for the most part,
affect only the low-level street peddlers and users. With
mandatory sentencing laws, the rate of incarceration zoomed
from 1980, when only 19 out of 1,000 drug convictions actually
resulted in incarceration, to 1992, when the rate shot up to
104 per 1,000.
Despite this, the drug plague continues to grow. Maybe
that's because the institutions that profit from the drug trade
are the same ones that finance the prison-building industry.
It's also undeniably true that incarceration breeds crime, and
large-scale incarceration, as we have in America today, breeds
large-scale crime.
The newest prison-stuffing legislation is called "three
strikes and you're out." Since the baseball teams are on
strike, are Americans amusing themselves by imprisoning their
fellow citizens? As of December 31, 1994, Three Strikes
legislation had been enacted in 14 states and was pending in
seven. And these are the most populous states. Under this
legislation, anyone convicted of three violent felonies (two in
Georgia -- Gingrich's home state) goes to prison for life.
And, finally, here are the key provisions of the Taking
Back Our Streets Act of 1995, the criminal justice part of the
Contract with America. This list, with some exceptions, is
what was passed by Congress.
1. No parole; mandatory, lengthier sentences (actually
these were passed at a federal level in the 1980s by an earlier
crowd of conservative revolutionaries). They are listed here
because the Contract with America wants them extended to state
law.
2. Increased funds for prison building will be made
available only to those states which eliminate parole and cut
amenities for prisoners.
3. It will no longer be unconstitutional to overcrowd
prisons. Prisoners may only sue on the grounds that
overcrowding violates their Constitutional rights.
4. The Effective Death Penalty bill drastically limits
habeas corpus appeals (Art. I, sect. 9 of the U.S.
Constitution) and reduces jury discretion in giving the death
penalty.
5. The Exclusionary Rule, which precludes illegally
obtained evidence from being introduced at trial, will be
eliminated.
6. Felons will be forced to make full restitution to
victims, despite their personal circumstances.
The Gingrich/Gramm/Armey consortium has taken out a
Contract on America that will guarantee a ready source of
profit and slave labor for their pals on Wall Street. The only
thing that is needed now, to make this potential Auschwitz into
the real thing, is what led to it the last time -- a global
financial collapse and a population tolerant of fascism. Judge
for yourself how far we are from that.
That the above could be unfolding without a totally
corrupt judiciary is a delusion of the simple minded. As View
from the Country, in this issue, explains, there is no Bill of
Rights, and very little Constitution. The "despotic branch"
has the nation functioning under a new type of judicial
tyranny. This erosion of the great society could still be
stopped -- if Congress has the sand to act.
Joe Stalin tried to rescue a failing economy with free
labor. Now the United States is trying to rescue a failing
economy with cheap labor -- either dollar an hour prison labor
or equally cheap foreign labor. Before this blunder is laid to
rest, there will be sorrow no tears can symbolize.
===
This report was prepared by Charles Walters. Additional
material was provided by Fred Huenefeld and Mary Anne Wertz.
END-ARTICLE
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