Call It What It Is: Twenty-First Century Slavery

When it comes to the US, it’s never been a case of history repeating itself. And the reason for that? It doesn’t need to repeat itself because it never actually went away in the first place. Never is that truer than slavery. Don’t kid yourself into believing that the civil war actually changed a damn thing. It did not. Yes, it was bloody and yes it was macabre. But ultimately, it changed nothing. Slavery is still with us. It just uses different means and methods to do its sickening bidding. And the most glaring example of that? The American penal system.

Despite supposedly being a guardian of human rights, the US is actually a major violator of the same. The US likes to pride itself on being “number one” in so many things. Well, when it comes to locking people up, the country has the highest incarceration rate in the world (bow your heads in shame China and Iran). By the end of the last decade, the US had over 2.18 million people behind bars, with millions of others on parole or probation. Now these are numbers to make your eyes bulge, right? Well get this. The incarceration rate for women increased some 750% from 1980 to 2107. Yep, that’ll be the land of the free on full display right there.

There is good corporate vulture greed reasoning for this. The overwhelming number of incarcerated individuals are forced to work for pennies a day. A handful of states actually don’t even pay pennies – they get the work done for free. In doing so, they generate billions of dollars-worth of wealth every year performing the likes of fast-food prep, crop picking, clothes production, manufacturing and even customer service calls…Not only are they paid a pittance, but they are exposed to additional risk and exploitation as they are not in any way trained.

Whichever way you look at this, this is slavery. As of 2022, New York state makes over $40,000.00 per year from inmate free labor. Those behind bars, often wrongly sentenced to be there, are sitting ducks to have their basic human rights violated. And this is exactly why “stop and frisk” NYC mayor Eric Adams was put into office. Not only is he willing to keep this filthy neo-slavery business running, he positively salivates at the idea of it. Adams and his Gestapo foot-soldiers are sworn to keep feeding the machine with fresh supplies of incarcerated bodies – more often than not Black males.

It costs an eye-watering $550,000.00 to keep every inmate in the country imprisoned. Multiple that by 2.18 million and you get an obscene amount of money spent on enslaving a significant number of Americans.

Some of this misery can be partly traced back to the exception clause of the 13th Amendment. That stipulated the abolishment of slavery, but for those convicted of crimes. But we can’t just pin this contemporary travesty on a constitutional amendment. One also has to consider how factors have changed over time, current context and, God forbid, plain common sense. The penal system of the US is an abomination based on the centuries old practice of human slavery. The Democrats, let alone the GOP, are in full out hunting mode for more Black bodies to lock up for the approval of their 1% billionaire masters. Adams is at it in NYC and other wannabe Black Adams are doing the same across the rest of the country.

We have so much respect for vice president Harris, but with every day that passes and that she has to turn a blind eye to all of this, sadly, we are starting to think that she is making a fool of herself. Ma’am, the Confederacy is alive and kicking and so is slavery. Biden and the dinosaur DNC are never, never, going to stop this sickening madness. They have more in common with the right-wing nut-jobs of the GOP then they ever will have with you.

Let’s face it. This is social engineering permeating government up to the highest of levels. There is collusion with racist CEOs across the nation to ensure that Black men are never hired. That is then combined with Adams’ style aggressive policing of inner cities across the country, all the while pursuing $40k bounties on the heads of Black men they wanted incarcerated.

We’re not even remotely wrong here. How could we be? So, let’s call this for what it is – twenty-first century slave labor.