this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2026
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A Boring Dystopia

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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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[–] leagman1@feddit.org 9 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Y'all are so unbelievably mad over there.

[–] Lemminary@lemmy.world 7 points 3 hours ago
[–] Redvenom@retrolemmy.com 8 points 4 hours ago

It's not a hard concept guys, slavery it's bad

[–] billwashere@lemmy.world 23 points 8 hours ago (1 children)
[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 6 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Jim Crow with a fresh coat of paint.

[–] Butterphinger@lemmy.zip 4 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago)

No, that's employment, this has to be something new, then.

[–] Bluedragon012@lemmy.world 13 points 8 hours ago

So we should arm the homeless then.

[–] Yuccagnocchiyaki@lemmy.world 9 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

Every chance they get, they prove they are NAZIs

[–] homura1650@lemmy.world 3 points 2 hours ago

No need to look to Europe here. This is the black codes.

[–] AntiOutsideAktion@lemmy.ml 9 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (2 children)

this is 18th century english shit

[–] Yuccagnocchiyaki@lemmy.world 1 points 3 hours ago

Some fits that.

All of it in context is what the Nazis did:

First the immigrants,

Then, the homeless.

Next, will be the disabled. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-trump-administrations-war-on-disability/

After that will be the LGBT community.

This is apart from all of the other action LA that follow including destroying the country and it's institutions after purging the military and creating his own storm troopers

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 3 points 7 hours ago

We're one potato famine away from losing half our Irish population.

[–] OrteilGenou@lemmy.world 21 points 10 hours ago

You mean the current prison system in the South, but expanded so that anyone without the ability to pay rent is a criminal? Yes, but call it slavery 3.0. The guys doing 20 years on chain gangs for pot possession would be slavery 2.0, which started basically as soon as OG slavery was made illegal. It's never gone away. Rebranded.

[–] deadymouse@lemmy.world 4 points 7 hours ago

Povertycrime

[–] Etterra@discuss.online 12 points 10 hours ago

Louisiana: how can we make slavery even slaverier?

[–] KelvarCherry@piefed.blahaj.zone 21 points 12 hours ago

"indentured servitude", which is what this is, is slavery; especially when the costs are forced upon you. This was a common method of immigrating to the USA back in the, like, 1800s; but that debt was taken by willing people who had the option to walk away.

And the crime is sleeping. Jesus fucking Christ USAmerica has gone from a prison state to a torture state.

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 12 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (1 children)

Doesn't the US have more and more failed states?

[–] Etterra@discuss.online 11 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 4 points 7 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.

[–] Gonzako@lemmy.world 7 points 11 hours ago (1 children)
[–] OrteilGenou@lemmy.world 5 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

I could see this coming back. Five bucks to sleep on a clothesline, and avoid the workhouse. Looks like a growth business model

[–] Gonzako@lemmy.world 3 points 10 hours ago (1 children)
[–] ShaggySnacks@lemmy.myserv.one 2 points 8 hours ago

With surge pricing, we can keep piling debt onto the slaves.

[–] Tiral@lemmy.zip 4 points 10 hours ago

They already do this with teachers lol. Most work 2-3 hours unpaid every day. And no, they pay themselves over the summer and breaks because their check is stipend, they don't get "free money m" on breaks and summer.

[–] Treczoks@lemmy.world 12 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

Ah, back to 17hundreds UK, which their forebears escaped from.

[–] CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world 12 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Nah the pilgrims were their own brand of shit leaving multiple places they were perfectly welcome (including the UK itself) and allowed to practice their religion but kept leaving anyway because they weren't allowed to enforce their beliefs on others. This is the US going back to how it was founded.

[–] Napster153@lemmy.world 2 points 11 hours ago

More like peeling of the layers they tried to hide from everyone else

[–] ADTJ@feddit.uk 2 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Four bears have escaped 1700s UK?

Where are they now?

[–] OrteilGenou@lemmy.world 2 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

One of them just lost its job at the Parks department

[–] MintyFresh@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago

One became a wiccan and now lives in Portland selling homemade incense and aura crystals

[–] melsaskca@lemmy.ca 2 points 10 hours ago

Then the third choice would default to a last chance power drive of political violence.

[–] Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 6 points 15 hours ago

this is likely one of thier tactics to truncate,shunt homeless people to blue states to burden them financially. because they have use other methods to bus homeless to places like california, nyc.

[–] certified_expert@lemmy.world 22 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago)

Back to 1866?

The Vagrancy Act of 1866, passed by the General Assembly on January 15, 1866, forced into employment, for a term of up to three months, any person who appeared to be unemployed or homeless. If so-called vagrants ran away and were recaptured, they would be forced to work for no compensation while wearing balls and chains. More formally known as the Act Providing for the Punishment of Vagrants, the law came shortly after the American Civil War (1861–1865), when hundreds of thousands of African Americans, many of them just freed from slavery, wandered in search of work and displaced family members.

[–] A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world 40 points 1 day ago (5 children)

Unpaid labor?

You mean slavery?

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