crickets
crickets's JournalThis is insane.
It is cruel and unusual punishment. What about all of the money inmates generate while behind bars?
Inmates in work programs save multiple states untold millions in wages that would otherwise have to be paid by hiring from the civilian job market.
US prison workers produce $11bn worth of goods and services a year for pittance
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/15/us-prison-workers-low-wages-exploited
No paywall: https://archive.ph/HcWOS
Nearly two-thirds of all prisoners in the US, which imprisons more of its population than any other country in the world, have jobs in state and federal prisons. That figure amounts to roughly 800,000 people, researchers estimated in the report, which is based on extensive public records requests, questionnaires and interviews with incarcerated workers.
ACLU researchers say the findings outlined in Wednesday’s report raise concerns about the systemic exploitation of prisoners, who are compelled to work sometimes difficult and dangerous jobs without basic labor protections and little or no training while making close to nothing. [snip]
Public officials have acknowledged that the work of these unpaid and poorly compensated incarcerated laborers is crucial: “There’s no way we can take care of our facilities, our roads, our ditches, if we didn’t have inmate labor,” Warren Yeager, a former Gulf county, Florida, commissioner said to the Florida Times-Union.
Arizona Can't Function Without Forced Labor, Is That Bad?
https://www.wonkette.com/arizona-can-t-function-without-forced-labor-says-corrections-director
Giving testimony on Thursday before the state Legislature's Joint Legislative Budget Committee about "a Request For Proposal for a contract to run the Florence West prison," Arizona Department of Corrections Director David Shinn explained that many Arizona communities would "collapse" without prison labor. [snip]
According to the ACLU, "charging misdemeanors as felonies, throwing thousands of people behind bars instead of offering drug treatment or diversion services, and abusing prosecutorial power to secure guilty pleas are just some of the tactics used that have led to Arizona’s exceedingly high rate of incarceration."
These things are all connected. They have to pay the private prisons, they have to fill the private prisons, they have to provide slave labor and in order to do that, they have to send a lot of people to prison for a very long time. The first private prisons started in Texas in 1985 and prison populations have since skyrocketed. That's not a coincidence.
[graph showing the rise in incarceration rates from 1925 to 2000]
Thanks for the correction & link, Chellee.
The NRSC’s chairman, Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, has already taken heat from fellow Republicans for running ads featuring him on camera and releasing his own policy agenda that became a Democratic punching bag — leading to jokes that “NRSC” stood for “National Rick Scott Committee” in a bid to fuel his own presumed presidential ambitions.
It's a pit of vipers across the aisle, and they all deserve one another.
Scathing truths here.
I love that LA Times has got a list, and they're taking each little twerp to task, one at a time. They also do a good job of going through the reasons why paying for a college education has changed a great deal since the bellyachers were working toward their degrees. It's well done.
No paywall: https://archive.ph/SZkyL
Wow. How openly vile. (eta)
https://mobile.twitter.com/GiuliusTabernus/status/1562859152002523138Replying to @RepJimBanks
Not a person I usually quote, but...
[image: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." - Dwight D. Eisenhower]
1:47 PM · Aug 25, 2022
Eisenhower "Cross of Iron" speech:
https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/dwighteisenhowercrossofiron.htm
I'd forgotten about that T-shirt. I love that!
The bank bailout still burns. "Too big to fail."
...and too big to prosecute. The litany of excuses surrounding the entire debacle is still infuriating.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/05/22/student-loan-borrowers/
No paywall: https://archive.ph/tU3SQ
This is the most frightening and infuriating betrayal of all.
Aside from the theft itself, of course.
tfg had to have help to smuggle out documents this classified, a lot of help, and some of it had to come from security willing to turn a blind eye. Not only that, tfg had to have people knowledgeable enough to choose and find the types of documents he wanted.
This isn't about hiding a folder or two in your pants to walk out the door. Dozens of boxes of national security secrets walked out of "secure" spaces. It took time. It took organization. It took complicity at all levels to pull this off.
Who are the people who helped him do it? Why are they not being discussed as well? They are every bit the nightmare security risk that he is, and some of them are still on the job.
Thank you for posting a link to that clip.
It spurred me to find and watch the interview on YouTube. One of the points 60 Minutes made is that far from having done measurable harm to national security, Reality Winner may have saved our elections in 2018.
The contrast between the vilification and punishment she endured and the slap on the wrist David Patraeus received for passing SCI documents is stunning. The entire interview is well worth a watch.
Timing with the Musk issue is incidental. Zasko was fired for trying to do his job.
WaPo no paywall: https://archive.ph/9SW3p
I highly doubt that a recipient of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Exceptional Public Service Award gives two rotten figs about Elon Musk. WaPo does Zatko as well as the security concerns surrounding Twitter a grave disservice by discussing Musk so early in the article. It's also unfortunate that WaPo quotes spokespersons from Twitter downplaying Zatko's claims before actually explaining the depth and breadth of the problems.
https://www.democraticunderground.com/10142959820
The LBN thread links to a better article from CNN Business.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/23/tech/twitter-whistleblower-peiter-zatko-security/index.html
Thanks to ragemage for pointing out who Peiter Zatko is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peiter_Zatko
Implications that Zatko was somehow technically unqualified for the job (allegations "riddled with inaccuracies" ) are spurious and to be expected from a company on the back foot due to the whistleblower account. If a reader started the WaPo article from "Overall, Zatko wrote in a February analysis for the company attached as an exhibit to the SEC complaint..." and then went back to read the article intro, a much different impression might emerge.
Thank you for pointing this out.
After seeing more about his background, it's obvious Twitter fired Zatko for trying to do his job. Good on him for blowing the whistle. This should be a big wake-up call for DOJ/regulators (what regulation is to be had) since Twitter likely is not the worst of the bunch when it comes to privacy, data security, and bot control. (Looking at you, Facebook.) Some of his descriptions of Twitter's outdated infrastructure and data management policies are horrifying, not to mention the national security issues with foreign spies.
Shading the employee might work on someone with less stellar qualifications and work history, but in this case it seems laughable. Surely a man who has worked for DARPA is well able to understand FTC regulations. Rather than making Zatko look bad, the claim that he lacked "understanding of Twitter's FTC obligations" instead translates as, "Obligations? We don't need no stinking obligations."
Twitter is due for a come to Jesus moment. Thanks to Zatko, maybe they'll get it.
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