If you ever have the misfortune to do business with Suburban Propane, double-check the price before you order. Suburban's listed prices are subject to "a safety practices and training fee, a tank rental fee, a transportation fuel surcharge, a restocking fee, a tank pickup fee, a minimum monthly purchase requirement fee, a system leak test fee, a reconnect fee, a will call fee, a forklift minimum delivery fee, a diagnostic fee...
The private equity fund that takes over your assisted living facility is eager to charge you a $12 blood-pressure fee, a $50 injection fee, and a $315 monthly inhaler fee:
The prison where they lock up your kid, uncle, parent or pal has also discovered junk-fees, cutting off in-person visits, mail and parcels in favor of services delivered on tablets with multi-thousand-percent margins:
Today in Labor History May 21, 1894: The French authorities executed anarchist Emile Henry by guillotine. His final words were, “Courage, comrades! Long live Anarchy!” Henry grew up in a family of radicals. His father had been a supporter of the Paris Commune. As a result, his family was exiled to Spain, where Henry was born. However, his father contracted mercury poisoning from his factory job there and died when Henry was ten. After this, the family moved back to France. Henry’s older brother, also an anarchist, helped him make connections with other French revolutionaries. In 1892, Henry set a time bomb at the offices of the Carmaux Mining Company, which killed five cops. In February, 1894, he set off a bomb at the Café Terminus, killing one person and wounding twenty. The authorities arrested him for this crime and sentenced him to death by guillotine.
Today in "Capitalists Hate Capitalism" news: The Appeal has published the first-ever survey of national prison commissary prices, revealing just how badly the prison profiteer system gouges American's all-time, world-record-beating prison population:
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Not that prisoners have a lot of money to spend. The 13th Amendment specifically allows for the enslavement of convicted criminals, and so even though many prisoners are subject to forced labor, they aren't necessarily paid for it:
Six states ban paying prisoners anything. North Carolina caps prisoners' pay at one dollar per day. Nationally, prisoners earn $0.52/hour, while producing $11b/year in goods and services:
Audre Lorde counsels us: "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House," MLK said "the law cannot make a man love me, but it can restrain him from lynching me." Somewhere between replacing the system and using the system lies a pragmatic - if easily derailed - course.
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The scheme I fictionalize in The Bezzle is very real. Prison-tech monopolists like Securus and Viapath bribe prison officials to abolish calls, in-person visits, mail and parcels, then they supply prisoners with "free" tablets where they pay hugely inflated rates to receive mail, speak to their families, and access ebooks, distance education and other electronic media:
This story about prison tech/tablet providers bribing sheriffs nationwide to stop in-person visits, making big $$ from tablets, has been on my mind since Alec K and Civil Rights Corps broke it last week.
Beware of geeks bearing gifts. When prison-tech companies started offering "free" tablets to America's vast army of prisoners, it set off alarm-bells for prison reform advocates - but not for the law-enforcement agencies that manage the great American carceral enterprise.
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