A Boring Dystopia

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Thousands could be coerced into "unpaid labor" in Louisiana under new bill | HB 211 would make sleeping outdoors in public illegal and force unhoused people to "choose" between prisons and workhouses (www.newsweek.com)

submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by stabby_cicada@lemmy.blahaj.zone to c/aboringdystopia@lemmy.world

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“HB 211 is a debt trap. It creates a population of people who are, by definition, unable to pay. And then converts that inability into a labor obligation,” Michael Ryan, a finance expert and founder of MichaelRyanMoney.com, told Newsweek. “The ‘streets to success’ framing is deliberate misdirection. No legitimate treatment program requires the patient to work off their bill under threat of incarceration."

I'm morbidly fascinated by how carefully this article avoids using the obvious term. But slavery. It's slavery. It is a bill that would literally, legally, enslave a population (of predominantly Black men, fucking surprise) for the "crime" of being poor.

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[–] Etterra@discuss.online 10 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Louisiana is already the actual worst in a lot of metrics.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 4 points 3 hours ago

Mississippi manages to consistently undercut the rest of the nation, with states like South Dakota, West Virginia, and Alaska running tight behind.

But a lot of that is relative. You can live in a big rich blue state - like New Jersey or California - and still be confined to a miserable ghetto or desolate rural backwater by the racist policies of the ostensibly liberal state leadership. States love to concentrate wealth inside certain high profile urban and wealthy suburban enclaves, then gate these locations off with high rents and transit costs.

What you have in the Gulf Coast is this policy split between states. So Florida and Texas aggregate enormous amounts of wealth. Then they outsource the dirties and most miserable aspects of the shipping/refining industry to the middle states - Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi. By contrast, you've got cities like Vernon in California and Eugene-Springfield in Oregon and Akron in Ohio that do this kind of dumping in-house.