The 1880’s
reconstruction era was the first time in our history that
America had seen a large surplus of non-white labor.
In the
1870’s many former slaves were integrated into the labor force,
but white backlash in the 1880’s and 1890’s led to a permanent
underclass through nearly a century of “separate but equal.”
For very
different reasons, there was a similar surplus of white labor in
the early 1930’s.
Regardless
of race, capitalism runs in cycles: It’s called “the business
cycle.” There are uptimes when there are jobs for everybody, the
labor market is tight, and pay rises.
Then there
are downtimes when the economy has a surplus of workers, falling
wages, and a high level of unemployment.
We saw
this cycle during the boom-and-bust of the roaring 20’s and the
stock market crash and Great Depression of the 1930’s. After the
crash, nearly a third of American workers couldn’t find a job,
and the numbers were even worse in minority communities.
Our
economy couldn’t put them to work, because capitalism failed.
So what do
you do with all of those extra workers who can’t find a job?
In the
1920’s and 1930’s, that very question was the subject of a clear
and open disagreement between Democrats and Republicans.
Herbert
Hoover and the Republicans believed that when capitalism fails
and you have high unemployment, you do nothing. You wait for the
“free market” to magically fix things, and for capitalism to
right the ship.
FDR and
the Democrats believed that the Republican’s benign indifference
was the completely wrong approach. Instead, FDR said that it’s
the responsibility of government to put people back to work
during times of high unemployment.
He enacted
his New Deal. He put Americans back to work planting trees and
forests, building schools, and improving the nation’s
infrastructure. Twelve million Americans who’d been unemployed
for years went back to work, and capitalism was rebooted in
America.
For much
of the 20th century, Hoover’s and FDR’s approaches
represented the two sides of the debate about what to do with
surplus workers.
Up until
1980, Republicans said you waited for the market to absorb the
surplus of workers, while Democrats said you proactively used
the powers of government to put Americans back to work.
But then
Ronald Reagan came to Washington, and everything changed.
When
Reagan stepped foot in the White House, he said the job of the
government was not just to ignore a surplus of workers, but to
figure out ways to make a buck off of them. Reagan lived by the
notion that profit was king. If America’s businesspeople always
and only did whatever made them the most money, that would
magically cure all ills with supply-side fairy dust.
He
fundamentally changed the way that we deal with surplus workers.
Instead of ignoring them, or having the government put them to
work, there was now a third option.
Make a
profit off of them.
There are
a variety of ways capitalists make a profit off of poor and
unemployed people, from payday lenders, to “rent to own”
furniture stores, to the most radical of them all: Turn them
into prisoners.
That
latter is the most radical, and has turned out to be the most
profitable for America’s capitalists.
It’s
almost elegant in its simplicity.
Turn
unemployed Americans into criminals. Track them, punish them for
any crime possible, take away their rights and throw them into
for-profit prisons.
Once
thrown inside a for-profit prison, an inmate needs food,
housing, healthcare and other services. This means huge profits
for capitalists. They’re raking in tens of thousands of dollars
per prisoner per year – hundreds of percent more than Roosevelt
paid to simply put them back to work.
And
turning unemployed Americans into very profitable prisoners is a
booming business.
From the
beginning of America until 1980, the incarceration rate in
America remained fairly steady. While Nixon declaring his war on
drugs in 1971 did slightly increase incarceration in the United
States, the increase was nothing drastic.
But then
Reagan came to Washington, and his buddies realized they could
make a buck off of unemployed Americans.
The
nation’s incarceration rate took off like a rocket.
Thanks to
Reagan elevating profit to a religion, between 1980 and 2009,
the state and federal prison population in the U.S. increased by
over 700 percent.
Since the
for-profit prison industry started aggressively buying
Congressmen 15 years ago, the number of people thrown into
for-profit prisons has exploded.
And
Americans sitting in jail make a very exploitable, very
profitable, slave-like labor force.
According
to the Prison Policy Initiative, the minimum wage for a prisoner
who works in the UNICOR program, the federal government’s prison
industries program, is 23 cents an hour. The maximum UNICOR
wage is $1.15 an hour.
Across all
state prisons, the average minimum wage for prisoners for
non-industrial work is 93 cents per hour.
And some
states, like Georgia and Texas, are completely upfront about
their slave-labor camps. They pay absolutely nothing to
prisoners.
Because
the Reagan Revolution changed America’s value system, we stopped
asking, “What’s the best way to deal with surplus workers?”
Instead,
we started asking, “How can we make the most money off surplus
workers?”
The
logical answer was a return to slavery, and it has been embraced
by capitalists with a vengeance.
And that
is insane brutality.
