News bits: Doing business in Alabama; Biden impeachment vote; Biden responds; Democracy status update

Law and Crime reports about how Alabama treats some or most of its prisoners:

Alabama made $450 million annually from ‘convict leasing,’ forcing 

Black prisoners to work at fast-food chains: Lawsuit

A group of current and former Alabama prisoners filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday saying that they were forced into “a modern-day form of slavery” by working at fast-food chains for next to nothing.

The complaint, which seeks class-action certification, alleged that the prisoners “have been entrapped in a system of ‘convict leasing’ in which incarcerated people are forced to work, often for little or no money,” all while Alabama and its corporate partners reap millions in profits.

Inmates, according to the complaint, “live in a constant danger of being murdered, stabbed, or raped that is so profound that the federal government has sued Alabama for inflicting cruel and unusual punishment, and if they refuse to work, the State punishes them even more.”  

The 129-page complaint alleges it is “no accident” that the people “caught in a labor-trafficking scheme” are Black, comparing it to “like individuals who were enslaved and forced to work Alabama’s cotton fields, and those forced to participate in the sharecropping and convict leasing schemes that followed the end of the Civil War.”

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Reuters reports:

The U.S. House of Representatives voted on Wednesday to formally authorize its ongoing impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, as Republicans unite behind the effort even though they have yet to find evidence of wrongdoing by the Democrat.

The Republican-controlled chamber voted 221-212 along party lines to approve the probe, which is examining whether Biden improperly benefited from his 53-year-old son Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings, hours after the younger Biden refused a call to testify behind closed doors. 

“The House has now spoken, and I think pretty loudly, pretty clearly with every single Republican voting in favor of moving into this official impeachment inquiry phase of our constitutional duty to do oversight,” said Republican Representative Jim Jordan.

One can expect that this could be the new normal. If one party controls the House, a president of the other party will at least be investigated for impeachable offenses and maybe impeached, even without evidence. DJT probably has successfully rendered impeachments by the House mere exercises in partisan political theater. That helps DJT sanitize his rotten legacy by claiming that neither a House impeachment investigation or an actual impeachment vote signifies anything significant.

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The Huffpo reports:

Joe Biden Calls Republicans Time-Wasting 

Liars After Impeachment Vote

“I wake up every day focused on the issues facing the American people — real issues that impact their lives, and the strength and security of our country and the world,” the president said in a statement. “Unfortunately, House Republicans are not joining me. Instead of doing anything to help make Americans’ lives better, they are focused on attacking me with lies.”

That’s a refreshing little blast from Joe. I didn’t know he had it in him to speak blunt truth to the mendacious, corrupt, radicalized, dictatorship-loving GOP. IMHO, he needs to do that a heck of a lot more often. That morally rotted party is so target rich that a person can throw darts at it blindfolded and hit something meaningful.

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A NYT opinion by Charles Blow comments on worldwide democracy:

America’s Thirst for Authoritarianism

Around the world, authoritarianism is ascendant and democracy is in decline.

A 2022 report from the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance found that “over the past six years, the number of countries moving toward authoritarianism is more than double the number moving toward democracy” and that nearly half of the 173 countries assessed were “experiencing declines” in at least one metric of democracy.

The United States wasn’t impervious to this trend. The report found that America was “moderately backsliding” on its democracy.

But I fear that we’re now on the precipice of fully turning away from democracy and toward a full embrace of authoritarianism. The country seems thirsty for it; many Americans appear to be inviting it.

Confidence in many of our major institutions — including schools, big business, the news media — is at or near its lowest point in the past half-century, in part because of the Donald Trump-led right-wing project to depress it [In large part IMO]. Indeed, according to a July Gallup report, Republicans’ confidence in 10 of the 16 institutions measured was lower than Democrats’. Three institutions in which Republicans’ confidence exceeded Democrats’ were the Supreme Court, organized religion and the police.

And as people lose faith in these institutions — many being central to maintaining the social contract that democracies offer — they can lose faith in democracy itself. People then lose their fear of a candidate like Trump — who tried to overturn the previous presidential election and recently said that if he’s elected next time, he won’t be a dictator, “except for Day 1” — when they believe democracy is already broken.