ICE is Not the Gestapo

YouTube personality Ashley the Baroness, notes that the behavior of ICE is far more analogous to something sits firmly within American culture and history, the antebellum fugitive slave patrols, which kidnapped black people off the street, demanded paperwork, harassed local law enforcement, were incredibly corrupt, etc.  

Sound familiar? 

H/T Pharyngula.

Well, This is Revolting

In Alabama, jailed inmates are being forced to work at fast food franchises.

I do understand that the 13th amendment has a carve-out for, "Punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted," but renting out prisoners to fast food joints, a purely private endeavor is truly awful.

It might be a good idea for federal authorities to do a complete audit of the finances and of the behavior of the Alabama Department of Corrections.

I can say with almost complete certainty that if they are doing this, then there is other shady sh%$ going on:

“Walk into a McDonald’s in Alabama, and the worker flipping your McDouble could be an incarcerated person,” warns a recent video from the digital news outlet More Perfect Union.

The idea that an inmate in the custody of the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) might be working the kitchen at a fast-food restaurant is shocking, even to seasoned observers of the fast-food industry and the American prison system. Yet as two lawsuits filed in federal court in the last year attest, the practice is so pervasive that it’s become a reliable source of income for the state.

According to the first suit, filed by the legal nonprofit Justice Catalyst on behalf of inmates last September, ADOC transports dozens of incarcerated people per day to jobs at government agencies and private businesses around Alabama, including KFC, Wendy’s, and McDonald’s franchises. ADOC also delivers inmates to meatpacking plants run by companies like Koch Foods and Gemstone Foods. At each of their jobsites, inmates do the same work as any employee, sometimes for twelve hours or more per day. From 2018 until the suit was filed last September, one McDonald’s franchisee alone put an estimated 122 ADOC inmates to work in its restaurants.

………

As both suits allege, inmates who refuse to work on a given day can face consequences, including revocation of privileges (like time on the phone with family members), stints in solitary confinement, lengthening of sentences, or transfer to one of Alabama’s medium- or high-security prisons — some of the most violent prisons in the country. 

………

In their suits, CCR and Justice Catalyst cite a 2022 amendment in the Alabama constitution that prohibits slavery or involuntary servitude in all circumstances. This standard goes beyond the Thirteenth Amendment of the US Constitution, which permits slavery “as punishment for a crime.” An Alabama judge recently dismissed CCR’s suit on jurisdictional grounds, though Jessica Vosburgh, a Birmingham-based lawyer for the organization, told Jacobin it is currently weighing options for an appeal. The Justice Catalyst case is ongoing. In the meantime, Vosburgh says, ADOC continues to transport workers to private businesses around the state, including fast-food restaurants, just as before.

The FBI and the DoJ should be on the ADOC like white on rice, and when corruption is found, these guys need to be prosecuted to the fullest extant of the law, and then sent to those prisons that they used to run, the maximum security ones.

Major Right Wing Butt-Hurt Ensues

In 2021, the Congress commissioned the Commission on the Naming of Items of the Department of Defense that Commemorate the Confederate States of America or Any Person Who Served Voluntarily with the Confederate States of America, better known as the, "Naming Commission," to find all assets and names with the Confederate treason, and select names for removal.

By all accounts, they did a pretty good job, and one of their recommendations was to remove the Confederate memorial from Arlington National Cemetery.

The pro-treason, pro-segregation, pro-racism wing of the Congressional Republicans (Spoiler, that is all of them) are whinging mightily over this, as is Klan wannabe Virginia Governor Glenn Younkin:

A Confederate memorial is to be removed from Arlington National Cemetery in northern Virginia in the coming days, part of the push to remove symbols that commemorate the Confederacy from military-related facilities, a cemetery official said Saturday.

The decision ignores a recent demand from more than 40 Republican congressmen that the Pentagon suspend efforts to dismantle and remove the monument from Arlington cemetery.

Safety fencing has been installed around the memorial, and officials anticipate completing the removal by Dec. 22, the Arlington National Cemetery said in an email. During the removal, the surrounding landscape, graves and headstones will be protected, the Arlington National Cemetery said.

Among other things, this means that the pedestal will remain, because removing that would involve a lot of digging. 

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin disagrees with the decision and plans to move the monument to the New Market Battlefield State Historical Park in the Shenandoah Valley, Youngkin spokeswoman Macaulay Porter said.

Here is a better suggestion:  Melt the mother-f%$#er down, and cast it into a statue of William Tecumseh Sherman, Or Ulysses S. Grant, Or Abraham Lincoln.  (I'd suggest James Longstreet, who enthusiastically embraced the Union and emancipation after the civil war, but he's a Confederate, so no.)

No, I am not going to suggest that we recast the bronze into a statue of the poet Sappho of Lesbos, or Oscar Wilde, or Osh-Tisch (Finds them and kills them), because their memories should not be reduced to a crude troll.  (Also, no living people.  We should not erect monuments to people for at least a decade after their death)

As to why this memorial is problematic?

………

Some of the figures also on the statue include a Black woman depicted as “Mammy” holding what is said to be the child of a white officer, and an enslaved man following his owner to war.

Yeah, kind of problematic.

It should also be noted that the cemetery was created on Robert E. Lee's estate as a "Screw You" to the traitor.

Remove the statue, and transfer it to the National Museum of African American History and Culture and allow them to choose the best way to dispose of this item.