#slave labor

Russia is using North Koreans for what amounts to slave labor.

It's yet another sign of Putin's weakness. He has to pay for slaves and ammo from a 4th rate power which starves its citizens to produce nukes.

Moscow has repeatedly turned to Pyongyang to help it fight the war, using its missiles, artillery shells and its soldiers. Now, with many of Russia's men either killed or tied up fighting - or having fled the country - South Korean intelligence officials have told the BBC that Moscow is increasingly relying on North Korean labourers. We interviewed six North Korean workers who have fled Russia since the start of the war, along with government officials, researchers and those helping to rescue the labourers. They detailed how the men are subjected to "abysmal" working conditions, and how the North Korean authorities are tightening their control over the workers to stop them escaping. One of the workers, Jin, told the BBC that when he landed in Russia's Far East, he was chaperoned from the airport to a construction site by a North Korean security agent, who ordered him not to talk to anyone or look at anything. "The outside world is our enemy," the agent told him. He was put straight to work building high-rise apartment blocks for more than 18 hours a day, he said.

The working conditions for the North Koreans make the gulag sound pleasant.

"Some people would leave their post to sleep in the day, or fall asleep standing up, but the supervisors would find them and beat them. It was truly like we were dying," said another of the workers, Chan. "The conditions are truly abysmal," said Kang Dong-wan, a professor at South Korea's Dong-A University who has travelled to Russia multiple times to interview North Korean labourers. "The workers are exposed to very dangerous situations. At night the lights are turned out and they work in the dark, with little safety equipment." The escapees told us that the workers are confined to their construction sites day and night, where they are watched by agents from North Korea's state security department. They sleep in dirty, overcrowded shipping containers, infested with bugs, or on the floor of unfinished apartment blocks, with tarps pulled over the door frames to try to keep out the cold. One labourer, Nam, said he once fell four metres off his building site and "smashed up" his face, leaving him unable to work. Even then his supervisors would not let him leave the site to visit a hospital.

North Korea has been communist since 1945. Russia was communist under the Soviet Union and Bolshevik Russia from 1917 to 1991. Communist propagandists routinely depicted communist countries as a paradise for workers. They more closely resembled forced labor camps where party bosses lived far better than the "proletariat".

The government of the workers' paradise treats its own people like shit.

These overseas construction jobs are highly coveted in North Korea as they promise to pay better than the work at home. Most workers go hoping to escape poverty and be able to buy a house for their family or start a business when they return. Only the most trusted men are selected after being rigorously vetted, and they must leave their families behind. But the bulk of their earnings is sent straight to the North Korean state as "loyalty fees". The remaining fraction – usually between $100-200 (£74-£149) a month - is marked down on a ledger. The workers only receive this money when they return home – a recent tactic, experts say, to stop them running away.

Putin has successfully brainwashed Trump into thinking that Russia is an economic and military equivalent of the United States. This wasn't true even during the Cold War. Most obviously, Putin's "3-day special operation" in Ukraine is now into Day 1,266.

Russia is a weak country with failing infrastructure which causes raw sewage to flow through the streets.

Source

Mark Hamill‬ :: @markhamillofficial.bsky.social‬

My attempt to distract from the harsh reality of what's happening to our country.

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

July 5, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Jul 06, 2025

Yesterday afternoon, President Donald J. Trump signed the nearly 1,000-page budget reconciliation bill Republicans passed last week. Trump had demanded Congress pass the measure by July 4, and Republicans rammed it through despite the bill’s deep unpopularity and Congress’s lack of debate on it. When House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) presented Trump with the speaker’s gavel during the signing event, the symbolism of the gift was a little too on the nose.

“Today we are laying a key cornerstone of America's new golden age,” Speaker Johnson said at the signing. The new law is the capstone to the dramatic changes MAGA Republicans have made to the U.S. government in the last six months.

The measure makes the 2017 Trump tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, which were due to expire at the end of this year, permanent. At the bill’s signing, Trump harked back to the idea Republicans have embraced since 1980, claiming that tax cuts spark economic growth. He said: “After this kicks in, our country is going to be a rocket ship economically.”

In fact, tax cuts since 1981 have not driven growth, and a study by the nonpartisan Penn Wharton Budget Model of the University of Pennsylvania projects that the measure will decrease national productivity, known as gross domestic product (GDP), by 0.3% in ten years and drop the average wage by 0.4% in the same time frame.

From 1981 to 2021, tax cuts moved more than $50 trillion from the bottom 90% to the top 1%, and Penn Wharton projects the top 10% of households will receive about 80% of the total value of this law, too. Those in the top 20% of earners can expect to see nearly $13,000 a year from the bill, while those in the bottom 20% of households will lose about $885 in 2030 as the pieces of the law take effect.

Past tax cuts have also driven budget deficits and increases in the national debt, and like them, this law will increase the deficit by about $3.4 trillion over the next ten years, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. The CBO also projects that interest payments on that debt will cost more than $1 trillion a year.

Sam Goldfarb and Justin Lahart of the Wall Street Journal noted on Thursday that economists, investors and politicians are sounding the alarm that the U.S. is “bingeing on debt” when there is no national emergency like a pandemic or a war to require taking on such debt. The measure will raise the nation’s debt ceiling by $5 trillion.

The Republican reliance on tax cuts to increase economic growth has inspired them to cut public programs since 1981. The Republicans’ new law continues the cuts begun as soon as Trump took office, cutting $890 billion from Medicaid over the next ten years, and about $230 billion out of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that provides food assistance for low-income Americans. It cuts tax credits for wind and solar power while promoting fossil fuels.

At the White House on Friday, Trump said: “I just want you to know, if you see anything negative put out by Democrats, it’s all a con job.” He claimed the new law is the “most popular bill ever signed.”

But it is clear administration officials are well aware that polls showed Americans disapproving of the measure more than approving by the huge gap of around 20 points. They are now trying to sell the law to voters. Notably, the previously nonpartisan Social Security Administration sent an email to Social Security recipients yesterday claiming the bill “eliminates federal income taxes on Social Security benefits for most beneficiaries, providing relief to individuals and couples.” Except the law does not actually eliminate federal income taxes on Social Security benefits. Instead, it gives a temporary tax deduction of up to $6,000 for individuals older than 65 with annual incomes less than $75,000, or $12,000 for married couples with incomes less than $150,000.

What the law does do, though, is pour $170.7 billion into immigration enforcement—more than the military budgets of all but fifteen countries. The law provides $51.6 billion to build a wall on the border, more than three times what Trump spent on the wall in his first term. It provides $45 billion for detention facilities for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an increase of 265% in ICE’s annual detention budget. It provides $29.9 billion for ICE enforcement, a threefold increase in ICE’s annual budget.

According to Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council, the law gives ICE more funding than the Federal Bureau of Investigations; Drug Enforcement Administration; Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives; U.S. Marshals Service; and Bureau of Prisons combined. In fact, Reichlin-Melnick told Democracy Now!, the law will make ICE the largest federal law enforcement agency “in the history of the nation.”

And now, with the MAGA Republican political realignment in place, we wait to see whether it delivers the golden age Trump and his MAGA loyalists promise.

The early signs are not auspicious.

Within hours of Trump’s signing the bill into law, Gun Owners of America and a number of other pro-gun organizations filed a lawsuit claiming the measure makes the 1934 National Firearms Act (NFA) unconstitutional. That law regulated machine guns and short-barrel guns by imposing a tax on them and making owners register their weapons. The Supreme Court upheld that law as a tax law. The budget reconciliation bill ended those taxes and thus, the plaintiffs claim, the constitutional justification for the law.

In a press release, Gun Owners of America said its “team in Washington had been working behind the scenes with Congress since the November 2024 election to fully repeal the NFA,” and that the new law had teed up their lawsuit against the registry it called “an unconstitutional relic.”

Scholars of authoritarianism are sounding the alarm over the new law. Timothy Snyder warned that the extensive concentration camps that Trump has called for and the new measure will fund will be tempting sites for slave labor. Undocumented immigrants make up 4% to 5% of the total U.S. workforce. In agriculture, food processing, and construction, they make up between 15% and 20% of the workforce.

Comparing the detention camps to similar programs in other countries, Snyder warns that incarcerated workers will likely be offered to employers on special terms, a concept Trump appears to have embraced with his suggestion that the administration will figure out how to put workers back in the fields and businesses by putting them under the authority of those hiring them. Trump has called the idea “owner responsibility.”

“[T]hey’re going to be largely responsible for these people,” Trump said. This echoes the system legislators set up in the U.S. South during Reconstruction thanks to the fact the Thirteenth Amendment permits enslavement “as punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” That system permitted employers to pay the fines of incarcerated individuals and then to own their labor until those debts were paid. While we know that system from the chain gangs of that era, in fact employers in many different sectors used—and abused—such workers.

Today, according to the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute, of the 1.2 million people incarcerated in state and federal prisons, nearly 800,000 are prison laborers, working in the facility itself or in government-run businesses or services like call centers or firefighting. About 3% work for private-sector employers, where they earn very low pay.

Snyder urges Americans to be aware that the law paves the way to establish this system.

Harvard sociologist Theda Skocpol identified “massive militarization of ICE” as “the real heart of this law.” She notes that American scholars have thought the federal system in the U.S., in which state and local governments control the police powers, bought the U.S. some protection against a police state.

But, Skocpol says, officials in the Trump administration “have figured out a devilishly clever workaround. Immigration is an area where a U.S. President can exercise virtually unchecked legal coercive power, especially if backed by a Supreme Court majority and corrupted Department of Justice. Now Congress has given ICE unprecedented resources—much of this windfall to be used for graft with private contractors Trump patronizes, but lots of to hire street agents willing to mask themselves and do whatever they are told against residents and fellow American citizens. [Administration officials] are not interested only in rounding up undocumented immigrants,” she wrote to Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo. “They will step up using ICE and DOJ enforcements…to harass Democrats [and] citizen critics, and subvert future elections if they can.”

At an event in Des Moines, Iowa, on Thursday, Trump complained that Democrats had not supported the budget reconciliation bill. Less than three weeks after a gunman murdered a Democratic Minnesota lawmaker and her husband, and shot another legislator and his wife, Trump said Democrats had opposed the measure only “because they hate Trump. But I hate them, too. You know that? I really do, I hate them. I cannot stand them, because I really believe they hate our country.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN