Leather & Late

Image Description.

Text reads "This is Smaug, the dragon from the Hobbit. Smaug famously stole a mountain full of gold. So full that he sleeps buried under gold. We're talking literally tons and tons of gold by weight.

Forbes tracks Smaug as the second wealthiest fictional character. He had been first, but the price of gold took a tumble more his vast, overwhelming fortune is only worth $51,400,00 0,000.00. Or $51.4 billion.

That means EVEN THOUGH he has an ENTIRE MOUNTAIN full of almost nothing but solid gold , Smaug would be ranked at the FIFTEENTH wealthiest American.

Fourteen Americans have more money than a gold-hoarding dragon.

Please consider that next time you say deca-billionaores deserve their wealth and shouldn't pay their employees livable wages.

Image below of Smaug covered in gold. All you can see is his eye.

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So she picked one shirt and one pair of trousers, carefully, methodically ripped every third stitch out of every seam, and then hung them back up together so that he would be likely to pick them at the same time. This took her a couple hours, so by the time she was done, the anger had worn down. She came out, she and my father had a talk that ended in apologies, after which they were tired and went to bed. My mother swears up and down that she meant to warn my father about the sabotaged clothes in the morning, but he wore a different uniform set and they were both still feeling a little raw, so she didn’t want to bring up the fight again. She decided to tell him that night instead.

And then she forgot.

Anyway, about four days later, my father apparently came home roughly an hour after he left for work, his clothes slowly, gently shredding off his body, the most bewildered expression on his face. “Paula,” he said, his voice mildly shell-shocked. “Paula, my clothes are broken.”

Other fun facts about prison labor corporations:

-Federal and state-run prisons usually pay their slaves minimum wage; some states, however, like Colorado, pay $2/hour.

-Private prisons pay $.17-.50/hour. The highest paying private prison is in Tennessee, which pays $.50/hour for “highly-skilled labor.”

-You think that hasn’t affected wages in the US? You think that hasn’t removed manufacturing jobs from the economy?

-Companies that contract with private prisons for their slave labor include: IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Wireless, Texas Instrument, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Lucent Technologies, 3Com, Intel, Northern Telecom, TWA, Nordstrom’s, Revlon, Macy’s, Pierre Cardin, Target Stores. Many, many products that say “Made in USA” were made in prison.

-Private prisons often have quotas with the states, wherein the states contractually guarantee that they will provide a certain number of prisoners to fill the beds of a private prison, and if they don’t then they owe the private prison millions of dollars. I’m not making this up. It happened in Colorado after they legalized weed.

-States have a financial incentive to lock up their citizens.

-All of the above corporations have a financial incentive to see citizens get locked up.

-This is why Jeff Sessions is going after weed. The prison industrial complex needs slaves.

-To the shock of absolutely no one, private prisons have even more disparate racial demographics than federal/state prisons.

-Where do you think they send undocumented immigrants who have been rounded up? That’s right, private prisons. That’s why so many of them are in the South. So they take immigrants who are earning some kind of comparable wage and paying income tax to the government, and put them in prison where the wages are absurdly depressed and the prison pays virtually nothing in taxes.

-Oh yeah: private prisons pay virtually nothing in taxes. Because they technically manage real estate (prison as housing), they get all sorts of tax breaks and subsidies.

Tl;dr the prison industrial complex removes jobs from the economy, depresses wages, cheats the tax system, and ENSLAVES PEOPLE, usually people of color.

Sources:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-prison-industry-in-the-united-states-big-business-or-a-new-form-of-slavery/8289

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/09/private-prisons-occupancy-quota-cca-crime

http://mfgtalkradio.com/s7-e15-manufacturing-jobs-lost-prison-slave-labor/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/19/private-prison-quotas_n_3953483.html?1379606057

http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/03/13/289000532/why-for-profit-prisons-house-more-inmates-of-color

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/02/27/immi-f27.html

Thank you for that.

Illuin Earwarmer by K.A.M.E. Crochet