Clearly most people don't consider forced labor slavery in a prison environment. At least not in California or any of the other states that allow it.

I voted against it because I think they are plenty of prisoners that want to work, so we don't need to be forcing people, but I also understand how people could just consider it a part of the punishment too. I mean, you take away so many rights of a person when you imprison them. What makes this facet special? Is it because we used the magic word slavery and so people suddenly feel guilty because of America's past?

The prisons themselves litreally didn't care enough to even argue against it, which should tell you how little this actually impacts their workforce. My understanding was that people were just getting upset at having to do wildfire related work when things started getting dangerous after they reaped all the rewards and training for that job.

It's like being a firefighter for the pay, chili, and comradery, then balking when you are told to go fight a fire. Your average person could do that and probably be fired on the spot. Prisoners don't get to make that decision.

I've voted blue for decades, just so I can say I did the right thing: harm reduction.

This nation's last, last, last chance to improve its course would have been to soundly reject the supply side, trickle down Reaganomics grift, but when they lied that YOU could be one of the rich ones one day, Americans giggled like schoolgirls and the former party of labor went full neoliberal to take the larger corporate bribes unions just couldn't match. That is when any hope for the US to become the benevolent nation it never was but claimed to want to be died.

Citizens United was just a victory lap for the capitalists to piss on its decomposing corpse.

Anyone who wants to claim this country was over a couple of Tuesdays ago, hasn't been paying attention.

And it wasn't the Neonazi scum that killed it either, they just see opportunity in the cultural vacuum and chaos. Twas unchecked capitalist greed that killed the beast.

This was a result of election night that is underreported, but hugely telling and frustrating.

All this noise about California being liberal, progressive, and the resistance to Trump. But they kept slavery in prison legal. And I think the people who are predicting prison "labor" will be used to replace migrant labor if mass deportation does happen have it right. And California had a chance to make that impossible and decided not to.

Wasn't the ballot initiative also deliberately confusing? I remember seeing something about it and reading it myself and going "what the fuck is the answer for no slavery?"

This is why we need a "New California Republic", with rangers to protect the population, just don't listen those anti-mutties bigots...

They also still have the death penalty.

And all because 1950s McCarthyism incepted America with a seed that may eventually destroy it long after the USSR’s dissolution

The only thing that pissed me off more than Trump winning, was seeing how many good Props failed, and bad ones passed.

I'm glad we made LGBT marriage part of our constitution, but jesus christ the voting base here is NIMBYs, NeoLibs, and Conservatives.

Always enjoy your posts, ozma.

California is the USA in a bottle. You got progressive cities, conservative suburbs, rural areas and industrial hotspots, poor folks as well as the obscenely rich. Ronald Reagan was Governor in California for 8 years before becoming the blueprint of conservative candidates for the presidency.