I was sent a link to an article (h/t to my brother Frank) that absolutely floored me. I shouldn’t be surprised as I have lately been ruminating over the corporate takeover of America. But this is so blatantly obvious it is shocking. For those of you who followed my previous articles on Arizona Draconia Part 1 and Part 2, I asked the rhetorical question, “What DID prompt the Draconian measures enacted by the Arizona governor and legislature?”Laura Sullivan, investigative reporter for NPR has given me the answer and it is horrifying. Ms Sullivan has done a thorough job of tracking this story and doing all the background research HERE.
Glen Nichols, city manager of Benson, AZ gives an account of being visited last year by a couple of guys from the private prison industry.
‘Nichols said. "He's a great big huge guy and I equated him to a car salesman."
What he was selling was a prison for women and children who were illegal immigrants.
"They talk [about] how positive this was going to be for the community," Nichols said, "the amount of money that we would realize from each prisoner on a daily rate."’
To his credit, Nichols turned them down but that didn’t curb the enthusiasm of state legislators, including Sen. Russell Pearce (R-Mesa) who was instrumental in drafting Arizona’s immigration legislation.
All of this was orchestrated by a shadowy group called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) whose members include state legislators and powerful corporations like Reynolds American, Exxon and the NRA. This group is also responsible for bringing together Sen. Pearce and Corrections Corporation of America last December in a Washington, DC hotel.While Sen. Pearce is in “deny, deny, deny” mode, there is mounting evidence that “Thirty of the 36 co-sponsors received donations over the next six months, from prison lobbyists or prison companies — Corrections Corporation of America, Management and Training Corporation and The Geo Group.”
Part 2 of Ms Sullivan’s article is an indepth follow up on ALEC and how it operates.
This is so reminiscent of actions taken by tyrannical regimes through the ages which always resulted in tragic consequences. It is scary and depressing.
Welcome to Corporate Amerika!
I thought it fitting to end this post by paraphrasing George Santayana, a Spanish born AMERICAN author:
“Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it.”
I'm disgusted but not shocked. The privatization of prisons has created a for profit industry in the housing of prisoners. To maximize profit, it is essential to increase the prison population. The goal of rehabilitation has been removed from the aspirations of the prison system.
ReplyDeleteThere is no incentive to rehabilitate as recidivism increases the profits of the prison system. If the state's prisons are overcrowded, it just means that the private prison systems can pick up the slack and in doing so, increase their profit margin.
The privatization of the prison system has impacted the entire philophy of the role of prisons for the worse.
And of course it's part of an overall philosophy of creating or returning to a system where everything is private and for profit: armies, the police and fire departments, water and if they could get away with it, air.
ReplyDeleteAvarice is understandable, corruption is understandable, but the eagerness to return to serfdom isn't. That's unless we take notice of the multi-billion dollar delusion industry and its amazing effectiveness. Essentially, history and the truth itself have been privatized by these privateers.
Rocky,
ReplyDeleteExcellent work again. As William Blake wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, "Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion." As always, absolute believers in any system (capitalism, in this case) lead us towards some dystopian nightmare in which, as O'Brien from 1984 says, there's nothing to be seen except "a boot stomping on a human face forever."