georgephillip
Diamond Member
I've heard Michelle speak on Pacifica Radio, and she points out some uncomfortable truths about the Land of the Free:"As a result of these trends, black men younger than 35 without a high school degree are now more likely in America to be imprisoned than employed in the labor market.
These disproportionate impacts extend to their children: As of 2009, 62 percent of black children under 17, whose parents had not completed high school, have had a parent in prison. The same was true for 17 percent of Hispanic children and 15 percent of white children (with similarly educated parents)."
The Land of the Free has more black men under 35 without a HS diploma in prison than in the workforce.
This has been building up over the last 40 years when millions of middle class jobs in the US were outsourced.
Jobs or Jails?
The meteoric, costly and unprecedented rise of incarceration in America
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gln1JwDUI64]Michelle Alexander, author of "The New Jim Crow" - 2013 George E. Kent Lecture - YouTube[/ame]
"In the book Alexander deals primarily with the issue of the current mass levels of incarceration in the United States (with 5% of the world's population, the U.S. incarcerates 25% of the world's prisoners)[8] and what she perceives as societal repression of African-American men and, to a lesser degree, Latino men.
"She discusses the social consequences of various policies for people of color, as well as for the US population as a whole.[9]
"According to Alexander, the majority of young black men in large American cities are 'warehoused in prisons,' their labor no longer needed in the globalized economy."
Chomsky's made a similar point about capitalism being unable to produce enough good jobs for all who need one.
The New Jim Crow - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia