Of course the US does have the massive illegal immigrant pool of cheap criminalised labour which are maintained in similar or greater insecurity, so perhaps its native poor are simply surplus to requirements. Or too surly? Whereas the Australian poor are relatively compliant? That wouldn't surprise me at all, there is an element of that in the American culture which I have always admired.
That American populist culture again? The one that Wotjek is repulsed by. Nothing you can do with people who don't know their place and refuse to learn, except lock them up. Which might be the reason the US has more people in jail than anywhere else, it just has more people than anywhere else who don't know or won't accept their place.
Could be wrong, could just be that the American ruling class is even stupider than I thought. But that would be hard, I already thought they were the stupidest ruling class in the world. I mean, George Bush, they picked him for a leadership role!! The talent pool has got to be *REAL* shallow, right?
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas
At 5:08 PM -0700 9/8/09, Gar Lipow wrote:
>I think you are confusing a feature with a bug. U.S. welfare benefits
>are even more inadequate than Australian ones, and are double taxed in
>the same way. But the difference is that working under the table
>often does not lead to arrest. Both employer and employee have reason
>not to expose this. But criminalizing other things, like giving away
>food, actually leads to putting large amounts of people in jail. It
>does not look to me like putting poor people in jail is a primary
>result of the Australian method, that it results in keeping them
>scared and working for low wages but does not put large numbers of
>them into actual prisons. On the other hand the U.S. approach is a
>small part of a general policy that results in us having the world's
>largest per capita prison population. (I will add that our drug policy
>puts more people in jail than our anti-homeless policy, but the things
>Ehrenreich writes about are not trivial.)