According to the Rev. Jack Zylman of Birmingham, the New York Times and possibly other news organizations ran a story today about the state of Colorado's plan to use prisoners in place of immigrants, legal and otherwise, to work the farms. This on the day Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, to pay homage to this state's infamous Civil Rights history.

Colorado's is to pay "the absurd wages of 60 cents an hour," Zylman says. "We had this in the South during Segregation. We called it the Convict Lease System."

Alabama finally abolished a similar system in 1928, the last state to end the practice.

"It was unjust, cruel, profiteering and a way to return to the 'good ole days' of slavery," Zylman says. "The system was inherently corrupt and corrupted the justice system."

When Tennessee Coal and Iron and other mining operations needed workers, police in Birmingham and Jefferson County would arrest poor black and white men, convict them of drunkenness, vagrancy and other petty crimes and send them off to the mines and fields - just as Colorado plans.

"The use of forced labor will corrupt the entire system, with police and courts providing a plentiful workforce and the rancher/plantation owners getting rich," Zylman says. "We must not allow this reversion to forced labor."

He is calling for a nationwide boycott on Colorado agriculture. "One way or another we will end it," he said.

But if Colorado can bring the convict lease sytem back, any state can. What's next? Debtor's prison?

Come on Democrats, fight...