“HB 211 is a debt trap. It creates a population of people who are, by definition, unable to pay. And then converts that inability into a labor obligation,” Michael Ryan, a finance expert and founder of MichaelRyanMoney.com, told Newsweek. “The ‘streets to success’ framing is deliberate misdirection. No legitimate treatment program requires the patient to work off their bill under threat of incarceration."
I’m morbidly fascinated by how carefully this article avoids using the obvious term. But slavery. It’s slavery. It is a bill that would literally, legally, enslave a population (of predominantly Black men, fucking surprise) for the “crime” of being poor.
So slavery
Jim Crow with a fresh coat of paint.
No, that’s employment, this has to be something new, then.
Povertycrime
So we should arm the homeless then.
Every chance they get, they prove they are NAZIs
this is 18th century english shit
We’re one potato famine away from losing half our Irish population.
You mean the current prison system in the South, but expanded so that anyone without the ability to pay rent is a criminal? Yes, but call it slavery 3.0. The guys doing 20 years on chain gangs for pot possession would be slavery 2.0, which started basically as soon as OG slavery was made illegal. It’s never gone away. Rebranded.
Louisiana: how can we make slavery even slaverier?
“indentured servitude”, which is what this is, is slavery; especially when the costs are forced upon you. This was a common method of immigrating to the USA back in the, like, 1800s; but that debt was taken by willing people who had the option to walk away.
And the crime is sleeping. Jesus fucking Christ USAmerica has gone from a prison state to a torture state.
Doesn’t the US have more and more failed states?
Louisiana is already the actual worst in a lot of metrics.
Mississippi manages to consistently undercut the rest of the nation, with states like South Dakota, West Virginia, and Alaska running tight behind.
But a lot of that is relative. You can live in a big rich blue state - like New Jersey or California - and still be confined to a miserable ghetto or desolate rural backwater by the racist policies of the ostensibly liberal state leadership. States love to concentrate wealth inside certain high profile urban and wealthy suburban enclaves, then gate these locations off with high rents and transit costs.
What you have in the Gulf Coast is this policy split between states. So Florida and Texas aggregate enormous amounts of wealth. Then they outsource the dirties and most miserable aspects of the shipping/refining industry to the middle states - Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi. By contrast, you’ve got cities like Vernon in California and Eugene-Springfield in Oregon and Akron in Ohio that do this kind of dumping in-house.
They already do this with teachers lol. Most work 2-3 hours unpaid every day. And no, they pay themselves over the summer and breaks because their check is stipend, they don’t get “free money m” on breaks and summer.
I could see this coming back. Five bucks to sleep on a clothesline, and avoid the workhouse. Looks like a growth business model
UberHang
With surge pricing, we can keep piling debt onto the slaves.
Then the third choice would default to a last chance power drive of political violence.
Ah, back to 17hundreds UK, which their forebears escaped from.
Nah the pilgrims were their own brand of shit leaving multiple places they were perfectly welcome (including the UK itself) and allowed to practice their religion but kept leaving anyway because they weren’t allowed to enforce their beliefs on others. This is the US going back to how it was founded.
More like peeling of the layers they tried to hide from everyone else
Four bears have escaped 1700s UK?
Where are they now?
One of them just lost its job at the Parks department
this is likely one of thier tactics to truncate,shunt homeless people to blue states to burden them financially. because they have use other methods to bus homeless to places like california, nyc.
The Vagrancy Act of 1866, passed by the General Assembly on January 15, 1866, forced into employment, for a term of up to three months, any person who appeared to be unemployed or homeless. If so-called vagrants ran away and were recaptured, they would be forced to work for no compensation while wearing balls and chains. More formally known as the Act Providing for the Punishment of Vagrants, the law came shortly after the American Civil War (1861–1865), when hundreds of thousands of African Americans, many of them just freed from slavery, wandered in search of work and displaced family members.
Unpaid labor?
You mean slavery?
No you don’t understand, they are paid in room and board, therefore they are earning a “living wage”. Suck it libs!
/s
If we’re going backwards in history, then I guess the next move is to count each one as only 3/5ths of a person.
Which sounds like a perfectly republican idea for “reducing” the prison population numbers.
Why count them at all?
To get more congressional seats, of course
and to have an other to continually focus the tribal hatred on.
