It’s more expensive to incarcerate someone for sleeping in public than it is to house them. It’s more expensive to incarcerate someone for shoplifting than it is to feed them.
The suffering is the point.
My dad used to say that it was more of an incentive to get the masses to actually work instead of just subsisting and bringing the general level of the economy down to the point that it can’t support UBI anymore.
I don’t see how anyone can worry about that when we look at how people behaved during the pandemic. Lots of people around the world were paid their normal wages and not allowed to work, and yes, Netflix was used a lot more, but labor intensive hobbies absolutely exploded. People aren’t happy just doing nothing all the time.
Yeah, seriously... Humans love to work. We just don't like being told what to do and pressured to do it on someone else's time frame
Motivation is surprisingly easy to come by when you reap the full benefits of your labor.
But if you can get them into the private prison system the shareholders can make money at least! /s
This is the main problem when it comes to politicians not caring that incarceration costs more than helping people.
An entire industry is built on profiting from legally-permissible slavery, and the only way to achieve growth is to either extract more value from the prisoners or the number of prisoners. The former isn't an option since prison work isn't mandatory, so that means growth is only achievable by imprisoning more people.
To make that happen, the prison-industrial complex uses lobbyists to encourage more "tough on crime" laws and harsher sentencing.
It really isn't a surprise that the whole idea of rehabilitation scares the politicians getting kickbacks from a private prison industry that thrives on recividivism and driving people to do things that get themselves incarcerated. They don't give a rat's ass that it costs the taxpayer more money when the alternative means that their own livelihood will be negatively affected.
And that's precisely why we need more elected progressive politicians. The career politicians we have right now don't care about their constituents, they only care about themselves and by extension their corporate masters.
Agreed.
Also, they're not scared. They can still kill his candidacy, and if they can't, there are plenty of ways to blunt his power. Further, as we saw after Ross Perot got 19% of the vote in 1992, they can throw up institutional hurdles making it impossible for progressive candidates to have a shot at these offices in the future.
Most of all, though, it's hard for me to get excited about this after watching Obama rule as a conservative when he sold us 'hope and change'.
In fairness, I'm pretty sure the vast majority of people favoring the incarceration are not aware of it being more expensive. They only see the dichotomy of punishing the crime vs. allowing the crime.
Traitor lunatics don’t care. They say stuff like “deport every last one of them illegals even if it costs a trillion dollars”. But I think you’re right that most people have been manipulated into thinking there isn’t even an alternative to harsh enforcement.
The purpose of a system is what it does.
It's to scare people into staying in work no matter how shitty it is because of the suffering.
It's why bankruptcy is so devastating for normal people but rarely for the rich (just look at Trump).
Being rich isn't a total amount lf money, its a differential between you and the majority, its the lack of laws that actually apply to you (drugs are the perfect example), its the lifestyle you can have compared to other people.
It's empathy being replaced by selfishness
This dude sounds like he should be president and not just mayor of NYC.
Which is not going to happen, and not only because he’s not born a US citizen.
Poverty is a failure of the state.
Poverty is a function of the state. Not a failure of it.
Poverty is the implied threat that keeps people falling in line with the authority of the state to protect the economic interests of the owning class which control it.
People need to learn to govern themselves and their own communities to begin the process of taking authority away from this exploitative system and those who control it.
Immediately after his primary win, Ogle and Mace were both sending emails to the DOJ and publishing them suggesting "denaturalization and deportation." They want to remove naturalized citizens. It's clear intimidation and disgusting.
For a group of people that claim they hate socialism as much as they do, the GOP seems awfully fond of receiving very big cheques from the government.
Because they're commies
I’m Canadian and if you watch the parliament channel you will hear politicians debating everything from paper straws to logging contracts to fishing laws. Everything except housing, food costs and wages. It’s like they go out of their way to avoid the issues we actually are in dire need of
IT'S AFRAID
Edit: shit someone beat me to it
"but I just got into politics for the networking so I could build my own wealth! Why should I have to care about the poors?! How am I supposed to deal with my ~~owners~~ donors now!?"
The only people politicians "service" are their donors.
Do not let this single tweet provide you comfort that has no basis in reality. The rich and powerful are not scared of a tweet, but they are very happy you feel comforted and so placated by it.
If many thousand tweets get many thousand people on the streets to stay until a coherently developed and articulated program of change is enforced upon them, then they might might start to feel some fear.
Edit - the issue is that for the above to happen, many people have to be prepared to get hurt, thrown in jail, if not shot. I hate to say it but I actually don't doubt that American christo-fascists have a Tiananmen Square in them.
They're scared that Mumdani beat their candidate in a huge upset.
Literally a day later there was a billionaire offering 100M (and promising to arrange 300M) for a candidate that can beat our boy. They got Cuomo to come back for the main race after he just conceded to split the vote. The media can't seem to stop reminding us he's Muslim, maga lunatics are talking about denaturalizing him, and sometimes they keep trying the socialist or naive angles that just bounce off his charisma. They even sprung his old rap videos on CNN on him during an interview
All this in days after a primary. They're panicking
They're terrified, because progressives are beating money in elections
The rich and powerful dont give a shit about any of our issues. They live on a whole other level. Now if you stop buying things that may get some fear in them.
asdf
The Democratic Party is touching cloth about his victory in the primaries because of his views on Israel. Chuck "my job is to keep the left pro-Israel" Schumer and other puppets don't know how to handle it.
Edit: and the party's reaction to it is really fucking weird. He is running for mayor of NYC, a role that isn't involved with foreign policy.
I don't really see it that way, I see Mamdani being welcomed with open arms. He was part of the party before and he still is, now.
Mamdani is being welcomed by more junior politicians. A lot of senior politicians are freaked out by him for various reasons.
Boy have you not been paying attention.
Who is scared all of the sudden? What makes you think so?
I would be genuinely envious of your bubble of blissful ignorance if the fact that you were on Lemmy didn’t strongly imply bad faith.
Can you point out where politicians are afraid? They managed a coup, lie all the time, pardon themselves, inside trade, ..... Why would they NOW be scared all of the sudden?
It's a bunch of copium from desperate people grasping at straws of hope. Dude didn't even win the mayoral race yet. Just the candidacy.
Nobody asked
Edit: I mean literally nobody asked her opinion and she went on a rant saying that republicans are always right. Watch the video people, c'mon.
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