from Ignite! #2:
One in every 32 people in the States is currently, or has been, in the prison industry at some point in their lives. You hear the signs ringing constantly “land of the free”, and yet the States have the highest incarceration rate in the world. The reason for this is because most of these (privately owned) prisons make a tremendous amount of money off of what is more or less slave labor that is coerced on the inmates. These people, regardless of what they are put into prison for, work for between .60 to .80 cents per day. In buying so many of the things that we currently do, we are contributing daily to modern slave labor; and if you think that shopping at a supposedly ‘green’ store like Whole Foods is an exception to the rule, think again.
Before we delve into this particular instance of the use of slave labor in a store like Whole Foods, I would like to touch a bit on this current idea of green capitalism. We shop at a store like whole foods, and try to convince ourselves that from this we are somehow doing our small part to better the world, when in all actuality, Whole Foods is no better than any other store. Yeah, yeah, you compost, but you also throw away just as much rubbish as King Soopers does in a month. Not only that, but Whole Foods still transports, aids in the making of, and sells all sorts of goods wrapped in cellophane and plastic. Recycle all you want, but keep in mind the fallacy of recycling when using fossil fuels to do so. Not to mention, when using fossil fuel to melt down plastics in order to re-use them, we are releasing all of those toxins into the air. There is no good corporate grocery store; and the fact that they market themselves as being better is just a clear example of what corporations are now using to guilt us into trying to clean up their mess and keep them in power. This is not helping the world. Slightly better, at this point, isn’t going to help shit.
Whole Foods, along with not being any better in waste disposal than any other grocery store, launched an effort to try and source ‘local’ foods, have been buying their tilapia from privately owned prisons. In Colorado, these fish are raised through Colorado Correctional Industries. The reason Whole Foods gets the tilapia exclusively through this company is because they are the only company in the US that meets the arbitrary ‘quality standards’ of Whole Foods. It’s no coincidence that modern day corporate slavery (prisoners employed as workers receiving sub-standard wages and working conditions) has become a staple in our society. The slave workers earn roughly 60 cents per day, and there are currently 95 inmates that work for CCI raising Tilapia. Whole Foods sells over 100,000 lbs of Tilapia per year, and it sells for about 9.99/lb. Which means that they could easily afford to actually pay people to raise this fish, but would rather have their ‘high standards’ met by slave labor in corporate encampments. These people (inmates) would likely never be hired directly by Whole Foods on ‘the outside’, because once you have a ‘criminal’ record, you are not considered by Whole Foods ‘high standards’ either. It is obvious that this industry, a constitutionally protected form of slavery, is setting up a situation where it is desirable for industry to have as many prisoners as possible. This would guarantee cheap work indefinitely, and maximize profits for the corporations that benefit from this cheap labor.
This system has been set up with the use of slave labor, since its inception; when they wrote ‘free’ in the constitution; they were talking about rich, white male bodied, slave ‘owning’ people. When they wrote free, they meant stealing from whomever is already there and keeping for yourself. When they wrote free, they meant entrapment to corporate greed. This entire society has always run on slave labor and still does; daily, they incarcerate people and use them as slaves to make money off of this prison industry. If you think that we have abolished slavery in the states, you are terribly misinformed, and hopes are that this has helped wake you up, at least to a small degree, to the truth hidden beneath this green industry scare propaganda that they’ve been feeding people.
Ignite! 