Please sir, can I have some more?

Pecunia non olet said Vaspasian, or so they say. Money doesn't stink, or so you'd think when looking at the way Florida governor Rick Scott laps it up like a cat with spilt milk. Showing up Monday at a  Boca Raton, Florida home of GEO Group CEO George Zoley for his $10,000 a plate fundraiser ( another $3K if you want to come to the reception) would suggest that Scott can't  smell dirty money, as Zoley's company is in the business of running private prisons -- some say the worst in the country -- that squeeze the life and health out of prisoners as well as exposing the guards to unnecessary danger.

Of course it may be that Scott smells it all too well and, like a culture, is attracted to the smell of graft and corruption and human suffering. You'll recall his involvement with the largest Medicare fraud ever exposed. You may not recall that Zoley gave Mr. Scott $20,000 to add to the $800,000 of taxpayer money to pimp up the governor's mansion. Yes, it was a drop in the bucket compared to the great flood of lobbyist money soaked up by the Governor, but Scott is not one to forget his obligations to contributors.


No money doesn't care who owns it and it doesn't stink even though the people and deeds connected to it may reek. The dollars saved by understaffing prisons and serving substandard, sometimes maggot infested food to prisoners adult and juvenile affirm his credentials with his party and particularly because so many of the inmates rotting and starving and being beaten in GEO prisons are immigrants. Last year a group of protesters  chained themselves to the doors of the GEO Group corporate headquarters in Palm Beach in protest over  GEO's "pivotal role in promoting discriminatory laws that target people of color,

immigrants, youth, transgender individuals, and the poor."   There have been hunger strikes.  There have been investigations looking into accusations that inmates were being served rotten food and suffering from food poisoning at the Broward  County, Florida facility. There were also allegations of sexual assault among detainees and reports of several suicide attempts says the Broward/Palm Beach NewTimes blog.  Did I mention that Scott is a Republican?

But we can't accuse old snake eyes of total blindness to appearances.  After all Zoley was a second choice after it became known that the original host, real estate mogul James Batmasian, was convicted of tax evasion in 2008. Batmasian, who spent eight months in federal prison and completed a two-year supervised release program, also had his legal license suspended in Florida. That stinks, even if his money doesn't.   It stinks almost as much as his rather dishonest and scurrilous accusations made against his likely opponent, Charley Crist, but to his supporters it doesn't matter any more than facts do. Rick Scott saved us money by abusing prisoners and a penny saved is a penny you can spend on yourself.  And besides, prisoners can't vote.

Respect your elders - we vote

One of the things that annoys me the most about living in the most crimson county in a red state is the presumption by the inmates that you couldn't possibly be anything else but one of them.  The lack of inhibition allowing them to launch into some vicious right-wing verbal assault, packed like a fat kid's lunchbox with unhealthy swill gives me no end of grief, but of course there are times when it backfires on them.

Republican Governor Rick Scott had one of those precious moments the other day, naturally assuming that a group of retired folks in nearby Boca Raton would, like a juke box, play his song when he pushed the right buttons. Wrong. The expression on his face tells it all.

Scott, who is filling my TV screen every evening with scurrilous lies and sleazy half truths about his Democratic opponent, blaming him for the recession, but worse, blaming him for not hating Obama and everything he's done enough -- Scott who oversaw what was at the time the largest medicare fraud in history, expected the doddering old folks to respond Republican-style to his questions about just how much they hated Medicare and The Affordable Care Act.

What he found was a satisfied group with few complaints, says the Sun Sentinel.  Some actually praised "Obamacare."  One woman, some years younger than I responded that if young people don't have insurance the rest of us will have to pay their bills and if there really were cuts necessary under the ACA to provide equal care for others, as Scott claims it would, ( he lies) then people like her weren't going to fight to keep every last benefit because "it isn't the United States of senior citizens."

Another older fellow said if there really were cuts to Medicare, he hadn't seen them and that's of course because the cuts aren't to the beneficiaries but to service providers.  Perhaps people with some time to read noticed that the "cuts" were actually Medicare cost-savings passed by a Republican Congress.


Other people confirmed that they had seen no cuts, that they were satisfied.  Others affirmed that contrary to Scott's claims no doctors were quitting.  We get used to the image of everybody over 65 as feeble, barely rational and uninformed.  That's as wrong as Scott's (did I mention that he ripped off Medicare for billions?) similar presumption that they aren't only drooling morons but Republican stooges.  Is that redundant?

Did Scott's condescension and presumptions irritate his audience as much as his corruption and apparent dishonesty?  Who knows?  Stealing so much money from Medicare that he can become a governor through paid TV lies about Medicare, makes me glad I wasn't there at the Volen Center in Boca Raton to comment.  I'm old enough, of course, but sorry to bust the stereotype, I'm more likely found in other venues like gun ranges, waterfront dives and Biker bars where we've seen too damned many liars and con men like Rick Scott and remember him all too well to be fooled again.

State-Sanctioned Child Abuse in the Rotten State of Florida

“The head of Florida's juvenile justice department defended her agency's oversight of private prison contractors before a state Senate panel on Wednesday amid allegations of violence and mistreatment inside the nation's third-largest juvenile corrections system.”

Having tracked this story for months, the self-serving statements, denials, and cover-ups of Wansley Walters, Secretary of Florida’s Division of Juvenile Justice, offends me to the core.  The story begins with one James F. Slattery, the CEO of Youth Services International, a private, profit-driven prison enterprise that has run afoul of authorities in Florida, New York, Maryland, Nevada and Texas.  Here are the facts in a nutshell, Private Prison Empire Rises Despite Record Of Juvenile Abuse and Lax Oversight Enables Systemic Abuse At Private Youth Prisons:

• Over 40,000 boys and girls in 16 states have been incarcerated in Slattery’s prisons, boot camps, and detention centers;
• An 18-year old inmate in one of Slattery’s boot camps came down with pneumonia and pleaded to see a doctor.  Accused of faking it, the teen was forced to do pushups in his own vomit until he died - after nine days of medical neglect.
• A boy was forced to give oral sex to a male guard on three different occasions.  First reported on March 2010, a Pembroke Pines police officer noted six months later: “This is the third time this victim has alleged sexual abuse.”
• Slattery’s company failed to disclose reports of beatings, broken noses and broken bones, extreme negligence, slapping and choking, unsanitary food (such as maggots in undercooked chicken served bloody and raw), and outright assaults against teen inmates;
• Slattery’s company had the highest rate of sexual assault in Florida and the highest rate in the nation;
• Slattery hires inexperienced and untrained personnel who are paid wages below the poverty level;
• Monitors from the state found that Slattery’s prisons were holding youth past their scheduled release dates in an effort to generate more revenue — a serious violation of Florida law and Slattery’s contract with the state;
• Slattery exploits lax oversight, pulls out of contracts BEFORE the state investigates alleged abuses, and leans on powerful allies within the government to keep contracts and hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue flowing;
• Slattery has donated more than $276,000 to the Florida State Republican Party and paid more than $400,000 to state politicians, including Senate President Harry Haridopolos, an avid supporter of private prisons, who received $15,000.

A 2010 lawsuit from the Southern Poverty Law Center referred to one of Slattery’s prisons as a “frightening and violent place” where: “Children are choked and slammed head first into concrete walls, their arms and fingers bent back and twisted to inflict pain for infractions as minor as failing to follow an order to stand up,” the lawsuit states. Slattery settled the lawsuit in 2011; the terms remain confidential.

“It’s everything that’s wrong with politics rolled up in a package,” said Evan Jenne, a former Florida state representative who toured one of Slattery’s facilities after public defenders raised concerns. “You’re talking about society failing children. It’s politically motivated, and it’s money-motivated.”

Florida has an especially notorious record of incarcerating youth under hellish conditions dating back to the turn of the century.  In the early 1980s, lawyers with the ACLU investigated reports of horrendous conditions and mistreatment inside three “training schools” for juvenile delinquents. One institution on the Florida panhandle, The Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, had gained a reputation for extreme brutality: Forensic anthropologists from the University of South Florida have identified an estimated 50 unmarked graves on the grounds of the closed facility.

In December 2011, the state closed Dozier, citing budget cuts.  On January 4, 2012, Florida Governor Rick Scott issued this reply to the United States Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, stating:

“We respectfully, but firmly disagree with the unsupported suggestion that the issues identified … are systemic throughout the DJJ.  The issues investigated by your office were confined to the closed facility, and do not constitute a sufficient, sound or fair basis for concluding that an entire state agency and its employees are failing to properly administer the juvenile justice system in Florida.

This officious denial from the felonious Governor Rick Scott mirrors the bogus claim of Wansley Walters, who states:  "We are looking at every level of our system to make it a system that will be healthy for the children that we serve," she said.

If these abuses and self-serving denials - past, present, and ongoing - offend you, wait for Part Two of this post:  State-Sanctioned Slave Labor in the Rotten State of Florida.