Rising Hegemon
For example:
Here's what was reported shortly thereafter, but not even "dared" to be considered in relationship to rioting:
The increase in unemployment appears to have been most concentrated among the young, with unemployment among 18 to 24-year-olds increasing to 18% in Q2, from 17.7% in Q1
That's well more than double the unemployment rate in the UK as a whole (but not as high as the rate in this country USA! USA! USA!).
But like a good modern 'Villagers' everywhere the problem immediately became 'young people are not taught about respect or coddled' and other fascistic-sounding nonsense, leading to this:
The tough sentencing in the aftermath of the riots has led to outbreaks of unrest in prisons across the country, as new research for The Independent on Sunday reveals that the courts' approach to riot-related offences has piled millions of pounds on to the bill for running overcrowded prisons.
Ah yes, as ever the solution to government and societal problems is not to look for causes or ways to correct them, it is to SPEND MORE MONEY ON THE JAILS! (but not as much as this country USA! USA! USA!)
FREEDOM!!!
[cross-posted at Firedoglake]
5 comments:
not only do we have unemployment due to shipping jobs overseas, but it's also exacerbated by prison slave labor.
AMY GOODMAN: "The Hidden History of ALEC and Prison Labor" is our next segment. Lisa Graves, of the Center for Media and Democracy, in New Orleans. I wanted to turn now to the article I just referenced, which begins: "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."
Mike Elk is our next guest. He’s a contributing editor to The Nation magazine and has done this exposé with Bob Sloan in The Nation.
[...]
MIKE ELK: So, one of the—by far, one of the most perverse effects that ALEC has had on American society is the dramatic increase in the amount of prisoners incarcerated in this country. In 1980, there were only a half a million people incarcerated in this country. Now that number has quadrupled to nearly 2.4 million. One out of every 100 American adults is in prison, the majority of them for nonviolent drug offenses. You know, the United States has four percent of the world’s population, but yet we have 25 percent of the world’s prisoners in this country. And a big part of the reason for that is ALEC. Starting in the 1980s, ALEC, with the sponsorship of, you know, the Corrections Corporation of America—
AMY GOODMAN: And let me just remind people, ALEC is the American Legislative Exchange Council.
MIKE ELK: Yeah, ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, started passing bills in individual states to privatize prisons. So now, state—there’s prison companies that could make money by keeping people in prisons. So then ALEC—what they did after that was they got states to pass tougher drug laws, tougher laws that would put prisoners away for a long time. In fact, one of the first bills introduced in 1995, by then-Wisconsin State Representative Scott Walker, was an ALEC bill, where he cited ALEC statistics, and he was an ALEC member, where he drew his inspiration. So they put a mass amount of people in jail, and then they created a situation where they could exploit that.
And now what we’re seeing is the incredible rise of prison labor, where you have prisoners making as much as 20 cents an hour, making everything from the electronic components in guided missiles, that are being used in Libya, to breaded chicken patties that your children are eating at school, to, in fact, maybe even these office chairs we’re sitting in now. We have over 100,000 prisoners employed, working for private corporations. And before the 1990s and ALEC, this did not occur in this country.
saw someone mention atrios pointing to bbc's m.o.
the set up: first ask interviewee for an explanation, then accuse them of endorsing the riots. lather, rinse, repeat.
as if that wasn't bad enough, i didn't hear this part described however of bbc accusing those being questioned of being rioters themselves in the past.
going out of their way to antagonize the poor...it's a wonder bbc hq didn't get burned down.
researchers point to a nearly century long pattern of riots predictably following austerity measures.
bet it goes back further than that.
can we blame the baby boomers?
can we blame the baby boomers?
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