aureus

wal-mart: pedestrian, boring, you can do better. 2/10

target: a slightly better crying experience than wal-mart. the scent is strangely comforting, the lights however are too bright and make for a slightly unpleasant cry. there is however oftentimes a starbucks and a mini pizza hut inside for you to drown your sorrows in. 6/10, points for optimal post-cry atmosphere

an apple store: absolutely not. people cry in the apple store all the time because they cant afford the latest rose gold bullshit apple’s put out. overdone and cliche. 1/10

publix: points lost for the sterile and inhospitable environment but if you cry in a publix a gator WILL smell your tears and come to eat you. being eaten by a gator is in fact slightly preferable to crying in a publix. 6/10 for the gator

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

“For too long Pol Pot and his gang have been an iconic horror show  in the west, stripped of the reasons why. And this extraordinary film, it has  to be said, adds little to the why. When Pol Pot died in his bed a few years  ago, I was asked by a features editor to write about him. I said I would, but  that the role of “civilized” governments in bringing him to power, sustaining  his movement and rejuvenating it was a critical component. He wasn’t interested.

The genocide in Cambodia did not begin on April 17 1975, “Year  Zero.” It began more than five years earlier when American bombers killed  an estimated 600,000 Cambodians. Phosphorous and cluster bombs, napalm and dump  bombs that left vast craters were dropped on a neutral country of peasant people  and straw huts. In one six-month period in 1973, more tons of American bombs  were dropped on Cambodia than were dropped on Japan during the second world  war: the equivalent of five Hiroshimas.

The regime of Richard Nixon and Henry  Kissinger did this, secretly and illegally. Unclassified CIA files leave little doubt that the bombing was  the catalyst for Pol Pot’s fanatics, who, before the inferno, had only minority  support. Now, a stricken people rallied to them. In Panh’s film, a torturer  refers to the bombing as his reason for joining “the maquis”: the Khmer Rouge. 

“When I was young there were beatniks. Hippies. Punks. Gangsters. Now you’re a hacktivist. Which I would probably be if I was 20. Shuttin’ down MasterCard. But there’s no look to that lifestyle! Besides just wearing a bad outfit with bad posture. Has WikiLeaks caused a look? No! I’m mad about that. If your kid comes out of the bedroom and says he just shut down the government, it seems to me he should at least have an outfit for that.”