The Free

The Origins of Prison Slavery

The USA has by far the highest Incarceration Rate in the whole world with 2,121,000 prisoners. World Prison Brief.^[1]

The Origins of Prison Slavery

How Southern whites found replacements for their emancipated slaves in the prison system.

The link between prison labor and slavery is not merely rhetorical. At the end of the Civil War, the 13^thamendment abolished slavery “except as a punishment for a crime.”

The origins of prison slavery in the American South.

This opened the door for more than a century of forced labor that was in many ways identical to, and in some ways worse than, slavery. Follow this link to excerpt from , American Prison: A Reporter’s Undercover Journey Into the Business of Punishment.

Proof of US Racist Slave Regime..Wikipedia..

Ethnicity

2010. Inmates in adult facilities, by race and ethnicity. Jails, and state and federal prisons.^[72]
Race, ethnicity	% of US population	% of U.S. incarcerated population	National incarceration rate (per 100,000 of all ages)
White (non-Hispanic)	64	39	450 per 100,000
Hispanic	16	19	831 per 100,000
Black	13	40	2,306 per 100,000

The 2015 US prison population by race, ethnicity, and gender. Does not include jails.^[73]

The Civil War Didn’t End Slavery After All

According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) in 2018 Black males accounted for 34% of the total male prison population, white males 29%, and Hispanic males 24%.

White females comprised 47% of the prison population in comparison to Black females who accounted for 18% of the female population. The imprisonment rate for Black females (88 per 100,000 Black female residents) was 1.8 times as high as for white females (49 per 100,000 white female residents).

The imprisonment rate for Black males (2,272 per 100,000 Black male residents) was 5.8 times as high as for white males (392 per 100,000 white male residents).

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On Facebook Banning Anarchist And Antifascist Pages and The Digital Censorship To Come

CrimethInc.@crimethinc·1hThe real issue is not the suppression a few hundred Facebook pages. Facebook has always been complicit in state surveillance. The real issue is that this is a step in a larger strategy. They are shutting down our communications so the state can attack us. #NoAnarchistBan

note:

The Facebook account, linked to https://thefreeonline.wordpress.com which promotes a free anarchist novel and shares relevant stories, was DISABLED by Facebook in May 2020. No explanations.

Now finally they invited it back, but WITHOUT THE 3500 FRIENDS. You can still tell the truth on Facebook.. So long as nobody hears you.

Now they have banned It’s Going Down and CrimethInc. (@crimethinc) · Twitter which are two of the very few brilliant sources of solidarity, imagination and hope for humanity.

Unless they are reinstated, WITH their followers we at TheFreeOnline and surely thousands more, will leave Farcebook forever

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On Facebook Banning Anarchist And Antifascist Pages

by It’s Going Down and CrimethInc

On August 19, 2020 Facebook deleted a variety of far-Right militia and Qanon accounts along with anarchist and antifascist pages, including It’s Going Down and CrimethInc. The following is a joint statement in response.

Continue reading “On Facebook Banning Anarchist And Antifascist Pages and The Digital Censorship To Come”

On Facebook Banning Anarchist And Antifascist Pages; The Censorship Arrives

note:

The Facebook account, linked to https://thefreeonline.wordpress.com which promotes a free anarchist novel and shares relevant stories, was DISABLED by Facebook in May 2020. No explanations.

Now finally they invited it back, but WITHOUT THE 3500 FRIENDS. You can still tell the truth on Facebook.. So long as nobody hears you.

Now they have banned It’s Going Down and CrimethInc. (@crimethinc) · Twitter which are two of the very few brilliant sources of solidarity, imagination and hope for humanity.

Unless they are reinstated, WITH their followers we at TheFreeOnline and surely thousands more, will leave Farcebook forever

**********************************************

loveandrage

by It’s Going Down and CrimethInc

Facebook has taken down multiple Facebook pages they believe to be connected with crimethinc.com and itsgoingdown.org, among other anarchist and anti-fascist publishing projects, officially on the pretext that they “support violence.” This has nothing to do with stopping violence and everything to do with cracking down on social movements and everyday people getting organized in their communities.

Facebook has always promoted itself as seeking to assist people in creating networks to meet their needs. Facebook representatives proudly touted their role in the Egyptian uprising. Their decision to ban social movement organizations shows that they are eager to play a role in ensuring that the only forms of activism that…

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Violent Hysteria against the few Spanish Squats: the great Montage of the Populist Right

The parties and the media have united to promote a violent hysteria against the few squatters. Just a few criminal incidents are enough to blame everyone, while 700,000 evictions, 3.5 million vacant homes and impossibly high rents are ignored.

The Shocking Facts from the article below

Occupied dwellings without a contract represent 0.34% of the total. And the number of supposedly conflictive occupations, about 8,500, is absolutely ridiculous given the more than 700,000 families evicted.
Most of that 0.34% of occupied houses belongs to banks, vulture funds and large companies.
The number of empty houses according to the latest census is 3.5 million, a third of the uninhabited houses in all of Europe. What is surprising is that the number of occupations has not skyrocketed.
In fact, vultures and professional politicians tend to coincide in the same power circles: Aznar, Aguirre, Pujol or Zaplana … they are all surnames that abound in the boards of directors of vulture funds.fondos buitre.
Why are they preying on that minority of squatters with no alternative instead of addressing the problem of vulture funds or the 165 evictions a day, which are now, above all, due to non-payment of rent.
Real estate profits have tripled, laws have been changed to attract vulture funds and tenants’ rights have been taken away. 65% of evictions have been carried out by rescued banksbancos
Public housing barely reaches 2% of the total stock, light years away from the European average (15%).

Squatters: the great montage of the populist right

by Jaime Palomera / Diana Virgós 05/26/2019
by . agora.ctxt.es.shared with thanks. Added illustrations

It is increasingly common, especially during the electoral campaign: rallies arrive and reactionary populism takes out old ghosts for a walk to divert attention from the causes of our problems. To hide their lack of proposals and even defend occurrences that, under normal circumstances, would be inadmissible.

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‘Tell the People That the Struggle Must Go On’: whole Communities Evicted in Brazil and Sth Africa

Tell the People That the Struggle Must Go On: The Thirty-Fourth Newsletter (2020)

20 August 2020 — by Tricontinental, shared with thanks.,

Thami Mnyele (South Africa), untitled, pen and ink, Gaborone, Botswana, 1984.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Young children marvel at an obvious contradiction in capitalist societies: why do we have shops filled with food, and yet see hungry people on the streets? It is a question of enormous significance; but in time the question dissipates into the fog of moral ambivalence, as various explanations are used to obfuscate the clarity of the youthful mind.

The most bewildering explanation is that hungry people cannot eat because they have no money, and somehow this absence of money – the most mystical of all human creations – is enough reason to let people starve. Since there is ample food to eat, and since a lot of people do not have enough money to buy food, the food must be protected from the hungry people.

Violent attacks on shack dwellers continue in South Africa ...

To that end, we – as human beings – allow for the creation of a police force and for the use of violence to defend food against the hungry. In one of his earliest journalistic reports, Karl Marx wrote of the violence used against the peasants of the Rhineland who collected fallen wood to feed their fires.

The peasants, Marx wrote, know the punishment – including death – but they simply do not know the crime. For what reason are they being beaten and killed? The collection of wood that has fallen on the forest floor cannot be seen as an act of criminality, nor can the basic human need for hungry people to forage for food.

Continue reading “‘Tell the People That the Struggle Must Go On’: whole Communities Evicted in Brazil and Sth Africa”