setfabulazerstomaximumcaptain:
Prison Labor Exposed: From Starbucks to Microsoft - A sampling of what US prisoners make & for whom
May 21, 2013Tens of thousands of US inmates are paid from pennies to minimum wage—minus fines and victim compensation—for everything from grunt work to firefighting to specialized labor.
The breaded chicken patty your child bites into at school may have been made by a worker earning twenty cents an hour, not in a faraway country, but by a member of an invisible American workforce: prisoners. At the UnionCorrectional Facility, a maximum security prison in Florida, inmates from a nearby lower-security prison manufacture tons of processed beef, chicken and pork for Prison Rehabilitative Industries and Diversified Enterprises (PRIDE), a privately held non-profit corporation that operates the state’s forty-one work programs. In addition to processed food, PRIDE’s website reveals an array of products for sale through contracts with private companies, from eyeglasses to office furniture, to be shipped from a distribution center in Florida to businesses across the US. PRIDE boasts that its work programs are “designed to provide vocational training, to improve prison security, to reduce the cost of state government, and to promote the rehabilitation of the state inmates.”
And Each month, California inmates process more than 680,000 pounds of beef, 400,000 pounds of chicken products, 450,000 gallons of milk, 280,000 loaves of bread, and 2.9 million eggs (from 160,000 inmate-raised hens).Starbucks subcontractor Signature Packaging Solutions has hired Washington prisoners to package holiday coffees (as well as Nintendo Game Boys). Confronted by a reporter in 2001, a Starbucks rep called the setup “entirely consistent with our mission statement.”
Texas inmates produce brooms and brushes, bedding and mattresses, toilets, sinks, showers, and bullwhips.
In Texas, prisoners make officers’ duty belts, handcuff cases, and prison-cell accessories. California convicts make gun containers, creepers (to peek under vehicles), and human-silhouette targets.
A stitch in time: California inmates sew their own garb. In the 1990s, subcontractor Third Generation hired 35 female South Carolina inmates to sew lingerie and leisure wear for Victoria’s Secret and JCPenney. In 1997, a California prison put two men in solitary for telling journalists they were ordered to replace “Made in Honduras” labels on garments with “Made in the usa.”
Open wide: At California’s prison dental laboratory, inmates produce a complete prosthesis selection, including custom trays, try-ins, bite blocks, and dentures.
Constructive criticism: Prisoners in for burglary, battery, drug and gun charges, and escape helped build a Wal-Mart distribution center in Wisconsin in 2005, until community uproar halted the program. (Company policy says, “Forced or prison labor will not be tolerated by Wal-Mart.”)
On call: Its inmate call centers are the “best kept secret in outsourcing,” Unicor boasts. In 1994, a contractor for gop congressional hopeful Jack Metcalf hired Washington state prisoners to call and remind voters he was pro-death penalty. Metcalf, who prevailed, said he never knew.
Federal Prison Industries, a.k.a. Unicor, says that in addition to soldiers’ uniforms, bedding, shoes, helmets, and flak vests, inmates have “produced missile cables (including those used on the Patriot missiles during the Gulf War)” and “wiring harnesses for jets and tanks.” In 1997, according to Prison Legal News, Boeing subcontractor MicroJet had prisoners cutting airplane components, paying $7 an hour for work that paid union wages of $30 on the outside.
AND THIS
IS WHY
THE WAR ON DRUGS
AND REAGAN
CAN FUCKING BURN FOREVER
FOR FUCKING EVER
the world n capitalism n all systems of oppression need to burn…
(via small-black-flowers)
Official MAM statement
We would like to remind everyone that MAM does not support violence or aggression towards property or people. Violence will only set us back.
Please be clear this movement is non-violent. We want the world to hear us. We must behave like adults not stoop to the level of violence.
Our Marches are family events. We will have children, elderly, and disabled people present. Violence of any kind will not be acceptable.
Please be warned that often times Monsanto themselves will send in their own plants to try and incite or instigate aggression. Do not be fooled. They are trying to destroy our unity.
With that said, Please do not bring violence or abusive comments to our March or to our Event pages. Your comments will be deleted and if it continues you will be banned.
We encourage all organizers of the individual events to share this message.
Please be warned if you are an instigator you will not be tolerated at our march and we our organizers will ask you to stop or leave. If you continue we ourselves will politely and calmly ask a Police officer to remove you.
We encourage all organizers to be open and talk with your local police and make clear to them that these events are family events and we will cooperate and work with them to remove anyone who incites aggression.
Please understand, we are not trying to be authoritarian but that we have a responsibility to create a peaceful event for our children, parents, grandparents and all attending.
Remember the world will be watching and we have an example to set. Violence would be seized upon by the media and Monsanto. They would use this as propaganda to discredit the movement and label us as eco-terrorists. This is not a joke we are standing up against one of the most powerful corporations that ever existed.
This is why we reiterate no violence of any kind will be tolerated. We know most of you know this but for the few who did not you do now. For the instigators you are not welcome and we stand firm united in NON-Violence.
While we will be speaking up against the politicians and the corporations we will not condone any comments or threats of aggression towards them. We will expose their crimes and demand justice and change of policy. We do not by any means condone any type of vigilantism . Our mission is to raise awareness, expose, and legally stop Monsanto, and their cronies, crimes against humanity. We would like to see GMOs Labeled and/or banned until they can without a doubt be proven safe. So far we have seen the opposite. GMOs are not safe. Monsanto is an unethical unmoral corporation and they have been committing crimes against humanity for decades.
This event is a platform to bring us together in Unity. From here we can work together to create a powerful base of grass roots activism . We encourage all to network together and continue to work towards supporting ballot initiatives that are in place to label GMOs or Ban them, and create initiatives that have not yet been created. Continue working together to expose politicians that serve Monsanto and promote politicians that stand with the people. We encourage all to create mailing lists and or FB groups where you can continue working together after the march and until we have reached our goals. You may want to bring an ipad and have everyone who is interest type in their emails so you have a ready digital email list to bring people together for future efforts. This event has created powerful momentum and its in our best interest to brainstorm Ideas on how we can keep the ball rolling.This shit is dangerous!
I will be posting this on other forums to demonstrate how some of your rhetoric is intensely exclusive to those of us who do not adhere to pacifist principles. Also, if you are going to issue declarations try to refrain from using ageist language such as “We must behave like adults not stoop to the level of violence” equating self defense or communities that are ridden with violence to childlike behavior or juvenile angst which only enables and justifies the use of state violence against us. One wonders what you mean by ‘bringing violent language’ to your event page. Does my questioning or challenging of the ‘tactical parameters’ you’ve outlined here amount to ‘violent language’? Insinuating that your tactic of applying to the media and to set an ‘example’ is what one does when we are not ‘joking’ is also very disrespectful of those who employ diverse tactics that are not strictly nonviolent, and are at times, directly more effective. Yet they are targeted, arrested, incarcerated and murdered. I assure you those who do take direct risks, and are then subsequently labeled eco terrorists, are not joking.
All luck to you people. As long as your goals are within the confines of constructed legality, you will not be effective. you may achieve some awareness, appeal to some false status quo mass, gain some meaningless legislation, but the fundamental problems and systemic subordination will be left unaddressed. In all effect this is a very poorly written statement (clearly you were not being cognizent of more marginalized or less privileged perspectives) that very clearly aligns itself with the dominant police and mainstream narrative. Safety is not an excuse, considering it is the predominant excuse used by the state to ensure control and fascism.
The only reason you feel empowered to say these things about your event is because you have a permit, which gives you control over the space with the backing of the city. If you engage in this narrative, at the expense of people who take more direct tactics, you should be aware that you are complicit in police terrorism against militants and you are no better. I will be sure not to be anywhere near your event, so feel free not to fearmonger about people who don’t abide to your ideology anymore than you already have. I think you should define what you mean by ‘instigate’, considering you are threatening people with police violence which will be noted and spread.
So you are aware this part “Please be warned if you are an instigator you will not be tolerated at our march and we our organizers will ask you to stop or leave. If you continue we ourselves will politely and calmly ask a Police officer to remove you. We encourage all organizers to be open and talk with your local police and make clear to them that these events are family events and we will cooperate and work with them to remove anyone who incites aggression.” very clearly illustrates that fascism is well on the rise with the mass complicit support of so called social justice advocates. State terrorism will be fought, it is not a matter of IF. it is a matter of WHEN.
also this is some heterosexist, patriarchal bullshit. fuck mass marches..
How the US turned three pacifists into ‘multiple felony saboteurs’
May 20, 2013In just ten months, the United States managed to transform an 82 year-old Catholic nun and two pacifists from non-violent anti-nuclear peace protesters accused of misdemeanor trespassing into federal felons convicted of violent crimes of terrorism. Now in jail awaiting sentencing for their acts at an Oak Ridge, TN nuclear weapons production facility, their story should chill every person concerned about dissent in the US.
Here is how it happened.
In the early morning hours of Saturday June 28, 2012, long-time peace activists Sr. Megan Rice, 82, Greg Boertje-Obed, 57, and Michael Walli, 63, cut through the chain link fence surrounding the Oak Ridge Y-12 nuclear weapons production facility and trespassed onto the property. Y-12, called the Fort Knox of the nuclear weapons industry, stores hundreds of metric tons of highly enriched uranium and works on every single one of the thousands of nuclear weapons maintained by the U.S.
Describing themselves as the Transform Now Plowshares, the three came as non-violent protestors to symbolically disarm the weapons. They carried bibles, written statements, peace banners, spray paint, flower, candles, small baby bottles of blood, bread, hammers with biblical verses on them and wire cutters. Their intent was to follow the words of Isaiah 2:4: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”
Sr. Megan Rice has been a Catholic sister of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus for over sixty years. Greg Boertje-Obed, a married carpenter who has a college age daughter, is an Army veteran and lives at a Catholic Worker house in Duluth Minnesota. Michael Walli, a two-term Vietnam veteran turned peacemaker, lives at the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker house in Washington DC.
In the dark, the three activists cut through a boundary fence which had signs stating “No Trespassing.” The signs indicate that unauthorized entry, a misdemeanor, is punishable by up to 1 year in prison and a $100,000 fine.
No security arrived to confront them.
So the three climbed up a hill through heavy brush, crossed a road, and kept going until they saw the Highly Enriched Uranium Materials Facility (HEUMF) surrounded by three fences, lit up by blazing lights.
Still no security.
So they cut through the three fences, hung up their peace banners, and spray-painted peace slogans on the HEUMF. Still no security arrived. They began praying and sang songs like “Down by the Riverside” and “Peace is Flowing Like a River.”
When security finally arrived at about 4:30 am, the three surrendered peacefully, were arrested, and jailed.
The next Monday July 30, Rice, Boertje-Obed, and Walli were arraigned and charged with federal trespassing, a misdemeanor charge which carries a penalty of up to one year in jail. Frank Munger, an award-winning journalist with the Knoxville News Sentinel, was the first to publicly wonder, “If unarmed protesters dressed in dark clothing could reach the plant’s core during the cover of dark, it raised questions about the plant’s security against more menacing intruders.”
On Wednesday August 1, all nuclear operations at Y-12 were ordered to be put on hold in order for the plant to focus on security. The “security stand-down” was ordered by security contractor in charge of Y-12, B&W Y-12 (a joint venture of the Babcock and Wilcox Company and Bechtel National Inc.) and supported by the National Nuclear Security Administration.
On Thursday August 2, Rice, Boertje-Obed, and Walli appeared in court for a pretrial bail hearing. The government asked that all three be detained. One prosecutor called them a potential “danger to the community” and asked that all three be kept in jail until their trial. The US Magistrate allowed them to be released.
Sr. Megan Rice walked out of the jail and promptly admitted to gathered media that the three had indeed gone onto the property and taken action in protest of nuclear weapons. “But we had to — we were doing it because we had to reveal the truth of the criminality which is there, that’s our obligation,” Rice said. She also challenged the entire nuclear weapons industry: “We have the power, and the love, and the strength and the courage to end it and transform the whole project, for which has been expended more than 7.2 trillion dollars,” she said “The truth will heal us and heal our planet, heal our diseases, which result from the disharmony of our planet caused by the worst weapons in the history of mankind, which should not exist. For this we give our lives — for the truth about the terrible existence of these weapons.”
not really feeling anything good today, and this makes me angry too.. they broke in and then just hung out… and then got arrested.. pacifist white bullshit.
Riots in Husby, Stockholm, this night.
A couple of cars were set on fire and people resisted the cops, who lost control over the area when groups of protesters decided that enough is enough. The riots are probably the result of police violence and political and systematic racism, which columninated last week when the cops shot a 69-year old man to death in an apartment in Husby. Protests against police violence took place just days after the shooting.
Of course, the police say the’ve got no idea why people rioted yesterday.
Or, as an activist from the group Megafonen said today: “Who do you call when it’s the police who’s attacking?”
yaah, youths fighting back against police in sweden.
this makes me feel fairly more depressed, but don’t really know that much about tumblr ownership history anyway.. but a billion dollars for .. what? the control of people’s blogging abilities?
(Source: marissamayr, via robotson)
One of the best mom moments in TV history. I wish more parents knew how important it is to validate their children’s feelings.
(Source: forgofamilyforgofriends, via neoliberalismkills)
Anti-capitalist protesters are taking inspiration from Mexican revolutionaries ahead of the G8 summit
May 17, 2013No one can accuse the anti-capitalist protesters planning to disrupt the runup to next month’s G8 meeting in Northern Ireland of not being thoroughly up to date. The online call has gone out for a carnival against capitalism – curiously illustrated by a century-old photo of Mexican revolutionaries in sombreros, sitting on horseback – in London on 11 June. It’s some way away from Fermanagh where the world leaders will actually be gathering, but that isn’t going to stop them: a map pointing out “the dens of the rich” in central London has helpfully been published to assist the anti-capitalist activists in finding their way around the capital. It includes Buckingham Palace, Fortnum & Mason, “supermarket of the ruling class”, Mahiki, “cocktail bar of the feral rich” and the headquarters of Vogue magazine on the map for telling women how to look and act.
(via thepeoplesrecord)
When then-14-year-old Gina Celaya killed the man who tried to rape her, the state of Arizona sentenced her to life in prison.
Today — after twenty years in prison, and almost as many years of legal battles fought from state courts up to the federal court of appeals — Gina is finally free.
That’s the American “justice system” for you. Serving up injustice to poor people, people of color, and women, since 1776 … She has served more years in jail than the number of years she had been on this Earth at the time of her supposed “crime.”
Meanwhile, actual murderers and rapists walk around freely if they wear a police badge or serve in the U.S. military.There are no words for how much I fucking hate this country.
There is no justice system.
I hope no one ever interferes with her life again.
and this is the fucked up patriarchal, colonial, racist, capitalist structures of oppression I want to smash
(via anarchistpeopleofcolor)
Assata Ain’t No Terrorist. She’s the One Who Fought Terrorists (via blackcyborgs)
To be completely honest there’s nothing wrong with being a cop killer. In fact, it’s something to be celebrated.
Torre David is an unfinished skyscraper in the heart of Caracas’ former central business district. 45 floors high it’s the third tallest building in Venezuela. For some reasons the tower has been under construction for over 21 years, and it is unlikely that the building will ever be finished. Nevertheless, the uncompleted tower gives house to over 750 families that squatted the building since 2007 and made it into a huge vertical informal community. The self-organized ‘vertical slum’ that arose is a one-of-a kind urban phenomenon that shines a very interesting light on urban development and its social aspects. Urban Think Tank has written an amazing book about Torre David, one of the world’s largest vertical informal Communities.
(Source: lifecyclecollective, via danceforthatanarchy)
(Source: treebeard-the-anarchist)
One time I got booked to speak on this great public access TV show in Eugene, OR. called Cascadia Alive. The show’s motto was “It isn’t just entertainment, it’s evidence!” and a diverse crew of rabble rousers had been associated with the project from its very start. After we filmed that night I ended up at a bar with some of the show’s small crew and their friends. One guy who ended up sitting at our table started talking about dams, and I recognized some of his ideas from an article I’d read in Earth First! Journal. That was the first, and only time, I ever met Derrick Jensen.
Over time I read some of his books and the interviews he conducted with various movement figures. I especially appreciated “Strangely Like War,” the book he wrote with George Draffan about the global history of deforestation. Some of his other writings felt less solid, but I found valuable ideas in many of them anyway, and when I went to prison I thought I’d enjoy carrying on a correspondence with him.
I was right.
One of my support team members wrote to Derrick and asked if he would like to exchange some letters with me. I have to say that he really came through despite our many differences. I am a vegan, an anarchist, and an animal liberationist, Derrick is not, but even so he took the time to send me books and long, handwritten letters. His support meant a lot to me, and even though we had plenty of arguments my feeling was “our movement is not a cult, it is okay to think differently and disagree at times.”
The problem? Over time Derrick started making weirder and weirder claims about having the telepathic ability to communicate with plants and animals. He talked about feeding his own feces to dogs, having sex with trees, and about his qualifications to lead a movement to destroy civilization based only on his history as an author. He set himself up as an anti-establishment guru who at once wants to destroy the system, but who is also allowed to work with law enforcement when it benefits him. His online tirades became less and less logical and more arrogant as time went on. Now days his personality is so tinged with messiah complex that I can’t hardly believe he is the same person I once exchanged letters with.
There has been an explosion of commentary on the internet about his increasingly odd politics and beliefs in the last few years, and about the transphobia of Deep Green Resistance (an authoritarian Marxist organization he co-founded) in the last few days. Much of it calls for him to disappear from the movement, but personally I’d like to see him do something better: come back home to being the Derrick he once was!
We are all human, we all fuck up, and sometimes we fuck up badly, but this rarely means we are irredeemable. Derrick is a good author, a humorous and intense public speaker, and someone who was capable of making the most unlikely of people consider the most radical ideas. There was a time when he contributed greatly to the dialogue about colonization, industrialism, sexual abuse, the human destruction of wilderness, and many other topics that demand serious consideration and revolutionary action. Now days, well, he mostly seems to be a punchline at best, or a pied piper for bigots in activists clothing at worst. My hope is that he will pull out of his nosedive before it is too late, apologize for that brief period when he went off the rails a bit, and go back to doing what he does best. Barring that, transphobia is not something that our movement can tolerate, and it may become necessary for good people everywhere to show DGR, and Derrick by extension, the extent to which they are not welcome in our struggle.
Here’s to hoping my old pen pal makes the right decision.
this is what happens when one person is seen as a leader.. beware pf tje ego, it can make you go crazy.
