Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detains more than 100,000 people annually. That translates to 20,000 detainees held on any given day in the roughly 200 immigrant detention facilities overseen by ICE. More than 80% are held in facilities run by private prison companies, and about 60% by GEO Group and CoreCivic

On Jan. 2, 2018, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights wrote Congress, imploring it to investigate suspected labor abuse at immigrant detention centers. The independent, bipartisan federal agency cited detainee complaints of being pressured to clean and maintain facilities for $1 a day — a pay rate that allows private prisons to hold down their costs and boost their profits.

“The commission is concerned with the added pressure to coerce detainees to perform necessary labor in order to maximize profits,” it warned.

Four years later, Congress has yet to hold the hearing. And the $1‑a-day pay persists, which has enabled some prison companies to save tens of millions a year over what they would otherwise have to pay outside workers.

“Nothing has changed,” says Andrew Free, an Atlanta-based civil rights lawyer ​“Forced labor is still going on throughout the [immigrant detention] system. There’s been no federal decision to stop it.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren in 2019, said, ​“Washington works hand-in-hand with private prison companies, who spend millions on lobbyists, campaign contributions and revolving-door hires — all to turn our criminal and immigration policies into ones that prioritize making them rich instead of keeping us safe.”

 In 2019 and 2020 GEO and CoreCivic spent about $3 million and $3.4 million, respectively, on lobbying, and another $212,700 and $159,500 on campaign contributions via their PACs — 88% to Republicans .

Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard, a California Democrat and chair of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security, unsuccessfully pushed for a detainee pay hike. ​“These people are washing floors, cleaning toilets, for $1 a day,” she says. ​“That’s ridiculous. I’d like to see anyone [who opposes a pay hike] work for $1 a day.”

A Democratic proposal to increase detainee pay died when it failed to have enough support to be included in a massive fiscal 2022 spending bill.

 A federal jury found the GEO Group, a private prison company, in violation of the state of Washington’s minimum wage law. GEO appealed. It contends detainees are volunteers, not employees entitled to minimum wage protection. The trial heard evidence that detainees ​“volunteer” to work under pressure, as they have no other means to earn money. Other lawsuits accuse prison companies of threatening detainees with solitary confinement.

At an immigrant detention center in Lumpkin, Georgia, Wilhen Hill Barrientos, a plaintiff in a suit against another private prison testified it gave him an ​“impossible choice: either work for a few cents an hour, or live without basics things like soap, shampoo, deodorant and food” and be unable to afford to call his family back home in Guatemala. he was made to work eight to nine-hour shifts in the kitchen, seven days a week. He stated that guards twice threatened him with solitary confinement because they thought he and others were planning a work stoppage.

The 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1865 after the Civil War, banned slavery and involuntary servitude — except as a punishment for conviction of a crime. Immigrant detainees — who include asylum seekers, undocumented immigrants and documented immigrants whose status is under review — are not held on criminal charges. Instead, they are in civil detention where they wait weeks, months or even years for a federal court to decide if they can stay in the United States or will be deported. Many lawmakers don’t seem to see or recognize the distinction between criminal conviction and civil detention.

Heidi Altman, policy director for the National Immigrant Justice Center, which supports ending immigration detention, says, ​“Members of Congress who say they stand with immigrant communities should be yelling and screaming … to ensure that in the next [federal] spending bill, not one taxpayer dollar goes toward enriching private prison companies. But instead, we’re hearing a lot of silence.”

​“What’s going on is obvious,” says Paul Light, a political science professor at New York University. ​“Those benefiting from the alleged forced labor make campaign contributions. Those working in the substandard conditions don’t have any political clout.

GEO Group CEO George Zoley wrote that if detainee pay was increased to the prevailing local wage, it would cost his company as much as $38 million annually. 

GEO and CoreCivic use of detainee labor rather than hire outside help has succeeded to together save $265 million since 2018, at an average of more than $66 million a year. Those figures are likely conservative. In a 2015 Georgetown Immigration Law Journal paper, Professor Stevens calculated that in 2012, the two companies’ labor-cost savings totaled between $63 million and $149 million.

That’s money lost to the local host communities — money that would have been used to hire and pay janitors, cooks, dishwashers, barbers, beauticians, painters, plumbers, librarians, clerks and other non-security posts. Those jobs would generally be under mandate to pay the federal contractor minimum wage, which in 2018 was $10.35 an hour, plus $4.48 in benefits. It is now $15 an hour (raised in January by a Biden executive order), plus another $4.60 an hour in benefits.

While Congress and private prison companies have declined to raise detainees’ pay floor, annual appropriations from ICE to GEO and CoreCivic have soared more than 500% — from $101 million in 2018 to $626 million in 2022 — for a five-year total of nearly $2.5 billion. 

Andrea Carcamo is the policy director at Freedom for Immigrants, an advocacy group devoted to eliminating immigration detention. ​“Private prison companies operate under the incentive to maximize their profit, and as such, it’s not surprising they cut corners at the expense of dehumanizing people in detention.”

[The blog would also add it highlights the hypocrisy of those American politicians who condemn China’s forced labor of Uighurs but permit the forced labor of migrants]  

Raising a $1-a-Day Wage Seems Like a No-Brainer. Not to Congress. – In These Times

Disputes over state laws that manipulate ballot access have become endemic in American politics. 

Laws like the one adopted in Texas in 2021 restrict election policies, such as allowing drive-through voting or mailing out absentee ballots automatically, that are thought to give Democrats a slight advantage—and Democrats are overwhelmingly the party of the voters of color who were systematically excluded from Texas politics for generations through a series of creative and invidious devices, including such bizarre measures as a private, whites-only Democratic primary developed to avoid desegregation laws. 

In closely fought North Carolina, 2 percent of Black voters were registered as Republicans in 2020, and the Republican Party has engineered large majorities in the state legislature through expert gerrymandering and voting laws that a federal court in 2016 described as “laser-targeted” at the Black vote.

The number of unauthorized immigrants in the United States is between 10 and 12 million and they are deprived of the vote. But even the 12 million who are legal but non-citizen immigrants cannot vote. 

State laws disenfranchises 5 million people with felony convictions, and deny the ballot to one out of every sixteen Black citizens of voting age. That figure was recently more than one in seven Black voters in seven states. 

 “We’re seeing this global emergency play out and it’s getting worse more quickly than was predicted… things are gonna get a lot worse…and the survival of our civilization is at stake.”- Al Gore, who was vice-president to Bill Clinton between 1993 and 2001.

 The health of all people is being sacrificed to Big Pharma profits.

In advance of the 12th Ministerial of the World Trade Organization (WTO), which took place in June, the UNAIDS Executive Director Winnie Byanyima appealed that the world would face a grim future if patent waivers did not take place. 

Byanyima said, “In a pandemic, sharing technology is life or death, and we are choosing death.” 

The WTO blocked almost all possibilities of providing cheap vaccines, antiviral drugs and diagnostics to the world. 

After two years of the WTO “postponing” the India-South Africa proposal for a waiver on patents for COVID-19 vaccines and medicines, the EU, the US and the UK ensured that no worthwhile patent waiver measure was passed. Big Pharma profits once again trumped the lives and health of the people.

In vaccine manufacture, it is not the formula of the vaccine that matters but rather manufacturing it at an industrial scale and ensuring the production process of replicates complex large molecules accurately. This know-how is guarded not under patents but under trade secrets. It is possible to duplicate these trade secrets or secure them by giving somebody who knows the process the job. But this opens companies that try to do this to costly legal action. And there is also the threat of unilateral sanctions by the United States, the EU and the UK.

The upshot is that Big Pharma companies will continue to make huge profits at the expense of people’s lives, even if this leads to new SARS-CoV-2 variants emerging and causes the continuation of the pandemic.  We have the vaccine production capacity to immunize the entire global population, thus saving countless lives and reducing the possibility of new, dangerous variants emerging. But doing so is not in the interest of Big Pharma, for whom profits matter far more than human lives.

Why is immunizing the global population important? Simply put, the more people that SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) infects, the more the chance of new variants emerging. There is a misguided belief among some people that the more the virus mutates, the more benign it is likely to become. This used to be a common opinion among a section of the medical community. However, today evolutionary biologists hold that there is no evidence that viruses mutate to become more benign. The longer we live with a pandemic that continues to infect around half a million to a million people every day, the more we are dicing with the possibility of a new variant emerging that can be as transmissible as omicron and can also lead to larger case fatalities than we have seen before. 

 Pfizer’s profits roughly doubled in 2021 from 2020, with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine contributing to a significant part of those profits. If Pfizer were a country, its earnings of $81 billion last year would have placed it ahead of the GDP of countries such as Ethiopia, Ghana and Kenya.

Why don’t countries that have the capacity to manufacture advanced vaccines—India, China, Russia and South Africa—come together to offer technology and supplies to the rest of the world? Why don’t countries collaborate with Cuba, a potential biological powerhouse, to produce vaccines locally? Cuba has already developed five such vaccines, two of which are already under large-scale production.

The answer lies with the “rules-based international order” and intellectual property laws.

How the World Trade Organization chose profits over vaccinating Earth’s population against COVID-19 – Alternet.org

 Poorer people are much more likely to die from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) than wealthier patients due to damp housing and low pay, researchers have found. The research, carried out by Asthma + Lung UK and published in BMJ Open Respiratory Research, builds on previous findings that poorer people with COPD are five times more likely to die than the wealthiest people with the condition.

A survey of nearly 6,000 people living with COPD, one of Britain’s most common lung conditions, found that structural inequalities had a significant bearing on whether a patient would survive. Symptoms include breathlessness, a constant cough, wheezing and coughing up phlegm. An estimated 30,000 people die from COPD each year in the UK.

Of the nearly 4,000 people who suffered two or more acute attacks a year, such as breathlessness or severe coughing, 55% earned less than £20,000 a year and 13% lived in a cold, damp house.

More than 1.3 million people in the UK are affected by COPD, a group of lung conditions that include emphysema and chronic bronchitis, but many more are believed to have the disease without knowing.

Research in 2020 found that the mortality rate between the richest and poorest patients with COPD has grown in the past 11 years. The poorest 10% of patients are now five times more likely to die with the condition than the wealthiest, compared with four times more likely in 2009/11.

Prof Nick Hopkinson, medical director of Asthma + Lung UK, said: “One of the impacts of inequality is that it affects some of the most vulnerable people in society and it increases the risk of dying from lung disease. COPD is one of the biggest health problems in the UK and one of the biggest causes of hospital admissions so failure to deal with this is causing big problems for the health and social care system.”

The research found that of those who experienced two or more COPD exacerbations a year, 62% were more likely to smoke and 53% were more likely to have experienced occupational exposure to dust, fumes and chemicals.

Asthma + Lung UK said just 25% of people with COPD receive proper care. It urged patients to get a self-management plan, access to pulmonary rehab, help to stop smoking, a flu and pneumonia jab and support managing other conditions.

Low pay and damp housing driving UK lung disease deaths, study finds | UK news | The Guardian

 Hungary’s far-right prime minister, Viktor Orbán, has lashed out against the “mixing” of European and non-European races, in a speech that immediately drew outrage from opposition parties and European politicians.

“We [Hungarians] are not a mixed race … and we do not want to become a mixed race,” said Orbán. He added that countries where European and non-Europeans mingle were “no longer nations”.

Orban sympathises with the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which claims there is a plot to dilute the white populations of the US and European countries through immigration. He said it was “an ideological trick of the internationalist left to say the European population is already mixed race”. He named demographics, migration and gender as the main battlefields of the future.

Next month, he is due to travel to Dallas, Texas, where he will address CPAC, a large gathering of American conservatives. Earlier this year, CPAC hosted a special session of the conference in Budapest.

Viktor Orbán sparks outrage with attack on ‘race mixing’ in Europe | Hungary | The Guardian

At no time since the Second World War has the talk of war, the fear of war, and the imminent probability of another global war, so weighed so heavily upon the minds of men and women.

War fever and nationalist hysteria are ugly, not just for itself but also for where it springs from. With the Russian invasion of Ukraine, once again the world is in balance despite all the past assurances that capitalism could solve the problem of war with a little more good intention and a few more skilful diplomats. However, capitalism is a social system which by its nature prohibits co-operation; free access to its wealth goes against its basic principles. It is a system in which the means of production and distribution are monopolised by a minority and used to produce articles for sale on a market with a view to profit. In order to make profit those articles have to be marketed in competition with those of rivals. It is this competition that leads to war in the modern world: in the last resort capitalism’s trade struggles to acquire or defend markets, territories rich in minerals and other resources and exploitable populations—and the trading routes to connect these—lead to armed conflict.

Although these disputes are the sole concern of rival groups of capitalists, they need to persuade the other class in society, the working class, to actually participate and convince them to sacrifice themselves. For the people who fight in them, the wars of capitalism are a futile shedding of much blood. There is a greater task awaiting fellow workers: the abolition of capitalism and its replacement by a socialist society, in which the means of life will be the property of all. Socialism will be a cooperative society in which everyone will stand equally and there will be free access to the world’s wealth. It will be a constructive society, not one based on destructive power.

Workers are not to be told that the Russian invasion is a quarrel over markets and trade-routes, and strategi alliances fought out in the interests of the capitalists. They will be told anything but that—the humbug, the lies the media, the Tory and Labour leaders where the sincere and the insincere join together to persuade the workers that it is war to preserve peace, democracy and the independence of Ukraine.

The independence of Ukraine is a lie and a myth. For years the meaning of the word has been foreign to Ukrainian capitalists and workers. For years Ukrainian capitalists have been in the pockets of the EU capitalists. The ruling class of Ukraine is propped up by fascists. The war represents a quarrel between the capitalists of Europe over the wealth they own and want to own. The working-class interests are not at stake. The Socialist Party will play no part in obscuring the issue in this quarrel between the capitalists of Europe.  A basic understanding of capitalism would indicate that the only freedom workers ever fight for in wars is the freedom of their national, capitalists to do exactly as they wish to make a profit.

All these economic and geo–strategic interests are the interests of competing groups of capitalists and of the states under their control. Working people have no stake in the game. Should matters come to war they have nothing to gain and everything to lose. As socialists, we ask working people on both sides of the conflict to reflect upon this and act accordingly.

The members of the Socialist Party are unique in opposing all war – not just certain types of war or certain situations. This is based on a recognition that the interests of the working women and men who usually make up the cannon-fodder and collateral damage of war can never be aligned with states and governments. We oppose the monopoly that the global owning class have over ownership of the Earth’s productive resources that are the usual spoils of armed conflict.

The way things are organised is neither natural nor inevitable, but created by people. People have a wealth of skill, intelligence, creativity and wisdom. We could be devising ways of using and distributing the earth’s vast resources so that no one starves or lives in abject poverty, making socially useful things that people need — a society which is life-affirming in all its aspects. when enough of us want it we will be able to combine those two remarkable human capacities, the emotional and the rational, in order to take things into our own hands and run our own society, our own world, in the interest of all people. Only then will peace be possible.

 The Low Pay Commission says the “taboo” around reporting abuses is a major barrier to enforcing the legal minimum pay.

 A heatwave in northern Greenland melted nearly six billion tonnes of ice in just three days 

Greenland lost enough ice over three days to put West Virginia under a foot of water (yahoo.com)

“The northern melt this past week is not normal…” Ted Scambos, a University of Colorado scientist with the National Snow and Ice Data Center, told CNN.

 China’s population has slowed significantly and is expected to start to shrink ahead of 2025, the state-backed Global Times reported, citing Yang Wenzhuang, head of population and family affairs at the National Health Commission.

Birth data released late on Sunday showed that the number of new births in 2021 was the lowest in decades in several provinces. The number of births in central Hunan province fell below 500,000 for the first time in nearly 60 years.

China is battling to reverse a rapid shrinkage in natural population growth as many young people opt not to have children due to factors including the high cost and work pressure. A change in China’s laws last year to allow women to have three children has not helped, with many women saying the change comes too late and they have insufficient job security and gender equality.

China’s population expected to start to shrink before 2025 | Reuters