Slavery never left it just got rebranded.
The Thirteenth Amendment needs to be amended.
Per Wikipedia: The Thirteenth Amendment (Amendment XIII) to the United States Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime. The amendment was passed by the Senate on April 8, 1864, by the House of Representatives on January 31, 1865, and ratified by the required 27 of the then 36 states on December 6, 1865, and proclaimed on December 18, 1865. It was the first of the three Reconstruction Amendments adopted following the American Civil War.
According to the article, some of the companies who sell products that are made with slave labor include:
I have previously read that basically every Fortune 500 company has divisions that profit off of prison labor.
Guess I won’t be eating food any more
Now is a very good time to become a subsistence farmer.
Good thing I don’t already need to spend all my time working
Because that’s totally something most people have access to and can do.
Gonna start substinence farming inside my apartment deep in the concrete jungle of the inner city, yup.
The world has changed deeply since the era where that was a way out of this. The majority of US citizens literally do not have access to arable land.
Honestly, as an old tyme closet grower, with about $300-400 in led lighting and a closet or small area that you could put a blackout grow enclosure, you could work 2-4 hydroponic buckets and get a shit load of tomatoes, and probably a few other fruit/vegetable strains.
$300-400 buys me enough groceries for a half year. A few tomatoes don’t give me enough calories to survive even close to a half year. And don’t even get me started on the electricity cost of attempting this in Germany.
It’s not an option for everyone
Fuck sake, $300 buys me enough groceries for around two months if I’m lucky
sounds of audible American despair
Lol idk what he’s doing to survive on $300-400 for half a year, I doubt Germany is that cheap. If I cook a decent meal once per day and just get some sandwich material for breakfast, that’s still gonna add up to like $200 a month for me. Unfortunately I’m lazy so I sometimes get frozen pizzas, or just some protein and frozen fries to throw in the air fryer. That already puts one day around $10 without any extras. This is in Estonia, not the cheapest European country these days, but also far from the most expensive. I do see a lot of people saying you should be able to eat on €40 (~$50) a week , or €60 for a whole family, but I literally don’t see how that’s possible unless meal prepping something with bulk ingredients.
Now if you cook potatoes and/or pasta and/or rice without any sauce, condiments, protein, etc… You could probably go half a year on $300-400. But you WILL hate yourself at the end of week 1 and also be severely lacking protein lol
Should have added /s.
let’s not coddle the media illiterate
Sometimes it isn’t even media literacy. I’ve known several nuero divergent people over the years who can have a hard time understanding sarcasm in person unless the person being sarcastic is really over doing it. They have no chance differentiating sarcastic and serious if it’s written.
Indoor vertical farming is quite efficient.
Get a tent and a light, there’s no need for attitude because you can’t think up already available solutions.
The power requirements are astronomical, let alone the initial investment and upkeep.
My yard is 80’ x 200’. I might be able to feed my wife and I off that, no more. We’d be near starving, and likely would in the years it would take to work it out anything more than corn or potatoes. I have 2.5 acres of swamp in NW Florida. Can’t grow shit there.
There’s a swamp down the road. I’d struggle to bring home a meaningful amount of fish. The creek that pours of it runs behind our house. About zero fish. I’d burn more calories trying to catch one than I’d gain.
Sometimes I could shoot a deer! But, as with the fish, when everyone’s hungry, nothing with fur would be left after a month.
SOURCE: Been growing plants for 35 years.
I’ve read a few accounts of people who’ve attempted to become completely self-sufficient. Even those with lots of land who spend all their time farming/fishing/hunting find that it’s pretty much impossible these days. If you did achieve self-sufficiency at some point, you’d likely only be one failed crop from starving most of the time.
you’d likely only be one failed crop from starving most of the time.
Which is basically synonymous with subsistence farming, absent community or govt support. Lots of commenters who have obviously never needed to grow food to survive. Trust me, it is deeply unglamorous and insecure and always has been.
It’s just part of living in a corporate hellscape.
Thanks, I hate it
I’m gonna need something a bit more specific than Costco, Sam’s Club, Kroger, Walmart, and Target. Are you saying ALL products in those stores are from slave labor? Most? Some? A few obscure items?
I don’t really have any other options for groceries where I live.
That’s a good question for OP
For a lot of people the most radical thing they can do is tear up their lawn and grow a garden.
And I’d honestly love to have the necessary time and energy in order to do that.
Once a nation built on slavery, always a nation built on slavery.
“Made in USA” = prison labour.
Slavery was never made fully illegal in the US. And if you vaguely define some crimes like “loitering” you can easily arrest people you disagree with.
Willie Ingram picked everything from cotton to okra during his 51 years in the state penitentiary, better known as Angola.
During his time in the fields, he was overseen by armed guards on horseback and recalled seeing men, working with little or no water, passing out in triple-digit heat. Some days, he said, workers would throw their tools in the air to protest, despite knowing the potential consequences.
“They’d come, maybe four in the truck, shields over their face, billy clubs, and they’d beat you right there in the field. They beat you, handcuff you and beat you again,” said Ingram, who received a life sentence after pleading guilty to a crime he said he didn’t commit. He was told he would serve 10 ½ years and avoid a possible death penalty, but it wasn’t until 2021 that a sympathetic judge finally released him. He was 73.
This is horrifying in all regards
He was told he would serve 10 ½ years and avoid a possible death penalty, but it wasn’t until 2021 that a sympathetic judge finally released him. He was 73.
note: he was released because he wasn’t usable as a prison laborer anymore. he was released because the prison couldn’t make money off him anymore. he was released so he has to look for his own shelter.
It was horrible to do to people that you claim to be ‘rehabilitating’. Now it’s going to be done to whatever marginalized group is next in the list, and provided no actual challenge or resistance, that list will grow to include people in trade unions, educated professionals, entertainers, free thinkers, any type of dissenter, oh and they’ve already dog whistled their plan to ‘punish’ people who donated to the Harris campaign.
Meanwhile the Trump administration is dismantling agencies that track and fight child/human trafficking. It’s not by coincidence. The goal is that we all are essentially assets of the federal government that can be bought, sold, and/or stripped of citizenship if it becomes useful to the regime.
It’s basically slavery. I’m willing to bet that most of these people working were black too.
13th amendment
The Thirteenth Amendment only restricts private ownership of people. It also has a carveout specifically related to the punishment for a crime.
I don’t understand how this is so prevalent. Can a prisoner refuse, or just stand there without working? It’s not like the twenty cents an hour or whatever they get is going to make their time much better. Or if their sentences get reduced for arbitrary menial work, that seems like a robbery of justice to victims. Is working in a sweatshop sort of deal so much better than reading books in a prison cell?
Slavery is even explicitly allowed as punishment.
Had to find a way to keep the racists happy with the exception to the 13th amendment.
Well, it’s not explicitly there for racists. Punishing crime with labor has a long history, both in and outside the US.
The most common kind in the US is community service as used for a minor punishment in place of incarceration.
It’s by no means good, but the worst examples tend to disproportionately color the perceived level of injustice to it.
In Canada, large companies that make or sell goods have to submit an S-211 modern slavery report. Here’s the 2025 version from Costco: https://scalca.blob.core.windows.net/2025/Costco_Wholesale_Canada_Ltd_2025_gp5j65.pdf
The catalogue: https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/rsrcs/lbrr/ctlg/index-en.aspx?l=7
The US is a prison nation.
If we have a civil war, that can change. I can’t think of better recruits for soldiery and domestic, than those who have been wronged by the opposing force. It is a silver lining to the deterioration of the USA, if this evil can be dispelled for good.
Most of the US hates their neighbor/s, hence the strong anti-immigration push. That’s beside the ingrained racism.
If a civil war breaks out, it’ll be every man for himself or a loyalty pact based on color, origin, religion or geography like Afghanistan or Myanmar.
There won’t be a “us vs them”, it’ll be “us vs all of the others”.
But fantacizing about gravy seals is what ya’ll do best.
Between “freeing” the slaves, only to aggressively rebrand them as criminals (eg, guilty of (verb) while black), and the wage slavery many of these companies are happy to engage in, everything has been pretty well cooked for a while.
If they brand you as a criminal and force you into a position of working as a slave, then your food, accommodations, and everything is provided for you. This is “classic” slavery where the slave owns nothing and the slaver provides everything, controlling what is, or isn’t allowed, provided, acceptable, etc.
If they don’t (or can’t) brand you as a criminal, unless you’re from a rich family, you end up as a wage slave, where you make just enough to scrape by, often sharing accommodations with others to afford the landlord’s rent, never owning property of your own or building any level of wealth through property ownership… You don’t make enough to have a vehicle worth anything, nor anything else of any significant value. You’re “free” to choose your slaver, and they let you pick which landlord you pay homage to… The main difference here is that you get to “pick” your oppressors, and now instead of the slaver providing everything for you (food, clothing, accommodation), you have to figure that out for yourself.
The difference is honestly quite small IMO. And when you look at it objectively, you find that a large majority of people are still in slavery in some form or another.
Look around you and realize that “middle class” is pretty much no longer a thing. You’re either poor and a wage slave, very poor and/or criminal and a literal slave, or you have enough money to be “independently wealthy” being a landlord or one of the slavers.
They’ve built a system that can only sustain most people at a level of poverty that affords then no ability to escape from that poverty, while the owners and shareholders, landlords, and bosses of the world, sit on their asses and collect the fruits of our labor.
Fuck the prison system.
And compared to the slaves in xinjang, this is different and acceptable, right?
Nah, both are terrible
someone: china bad
.ml user: shocked_pikachu.jpg
I don’t particularly disagree with the ethics of prison labor tbh. Do you? I think the issue here is implementation not the fact that prison labor == slavery. Americans have private prisons which are fundamentally unethical making labor discussion kinda moot.
It’s more complex than just “prison labour isn’t that bad.”
I agree that prisoners should have jobs, opportunities to train for new vocations, something to be proud of accomplishing when they’re locked away.
But that’s not why they work. They work to make the prison more money, and in a profit driven prison system, it disincentivises rehabilitation because recidivism ensures a hefty circulating population of re-offenders.
In a system that saves money and stays competitive by using their prison labour as slave labour for pennies, there is no onus for that same system to try to help its prisoners not reoffend.
hidden workforcehidden slaveryFTFY
hidden in plain sight slavery
FTFY
