
Hundreds of mostly young, Black men stood up to their chests in cold water, digging the valuable phosphates from under the soil for the Edisto Phosphate Company, which leased the land from the state. Some of the prisoners were actually children of the land’s former owners, incarcerated and removing the topsoil of their parents’ own land in order to mine the precious mineral beneath. (Emphasis added for this posting.)

Today's commune was crowded with people who were given this visit as a sop to accommodate their anger and frustration. They are being displaced from their paddies to make the land available for cement quarrying. Many are breaking stones all day for pennies instead of raising rice, etc. It is now one of the poorest communes in the country.
Tam spoke to a woman who had walked 15 km and arrived at 6 am and wasn't getting an appointment. Her son left the district to get a job (which he hasn't -- he is probably living in an alley somewhere.) She moved to the mountain where she really doesn't know how to make a living. The district health officer said they are seeing profound health and nutrition issues as a result.
He also said many people have moved to the mountains and are trying every crop available. But they don't really know about raising crops in this unfamiliar environment. They are trying whatever they can, but in order to buy rice, which is, after all the only real food. This year the experiment with potatoes failed and the government had to distribute rice.


Now the cement industry of Viet Nam is privately owned but subordinate to the "Socialist" government which has decided that the rich limestone resources of the country are now a greater asset than one commune's rice, especially since Viet Nam is the world's second largest rice exporter. So all these people can be dispossessed in the name of a larger "socialist" good.
South Carolina, on its face, looks like a totally different story. An explicitly racist regime dispossessed Black landowners to deny them any home, security or power. The convict lease system ensured a continuing supply of low-cost labor to white "planters" and industrialists alike.
So if the circumstances appear different, why are the outcomes identical? I will just say -- again -- that we have to stop looking at "allies" and "enemies", "left" and "right", and start by assessing effects on regular people.
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