Prison Labor: A Right-wing Jobs Program for America

[G_j]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/07/20-1

Published on Wednesday, July 20, 2011 by Creators.com

Prison Labor: A Right-wing Jobs Program for America
by Jim Hightower

Here's the core economic problem we're facing today: Unemployment and underemployment are rampant and entrenched throughout America, stifling any hope for real recovery and threatening the very survival of the essential middle class that holds our society together.

The solution? Our ideologically pure, laissez-fairyland leaders in Washington and various state capitals, along with corporate funded think tank geniuses and Wall Street gurus, are pushing a massive jobs program across America. Great, just what we need! Uh ... no. Unfortunately, theirs is not a program to create jobs, but a coordinated effort to add to America's jobless hordes by eliminating hundreds of thousands of public-service jobs. If ignorance is bliss, they must be ecstatic!

They're wallowing in the ecstatic right-wing mythology that prosperity will magically arise if only government budgets can be gutted, mainly by eliminating public employees. Yet, by going on a firing rampage that is targeting everyone from school librarians to NASA engineers, these political and economic elites are shoving the entire U.S. economy back into the Great Recession, or worse.

This is because people who are out of work do not tend to be — how shall I put this? — "robust consumers." Since consumer spending accounts for about 70 percent of our country's economic growth (and, in so doing, creates America's jobs), the dogma of deliberately destroying the purchasing power of middle-class wage earners is disastrous. It's like trying to cure a headache by chopping off your head.

..more..

[Scuba]

1. See Senator Ron "Sunspot" Johnson, T-Wisconsin. n/t

[Newest Reality]

2. Ah, so it is becoming clear

that the Rethugs do have a major jobs program in store for us. We were waiting and now it has been unveiled.

It won't be long until every state starts putting Americans back to work. Of course, now we know that having a job and being payed are not necessarily connected.

In order to increase the income of the Private Prison State, more and more laws with increasingly draconian sentences will be required along with judges who are willing to throw the book at scofflaws like sock and beer thieves. Entrapment will also be required. While we are at it, let's not provide free legal counsel to impoverished defendants anymore so that they can start running-up a tab that, if not payed, will earn them more time -- even overtime -- on their new job(s).

This is corporatism/Fascism waxing in an "in your face" way. We and our children are walking into a very sticky spiderweb and the spider is ready to paralyze us and wrap us in its authoritarian filaments in order to suck-out anything we have left.

There is no liberty/freedom to be found there, or in the repetitive facade of lip service to obsolete ideals.