Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Privatization Nightmare: 5 Public Services That Should Never Be Handed Over to Greedy Corporations | Economy | AlterNet

Privatization Nightmare: 5 Public Services That Should Never Be Handed Over to Greedy Corporations | Economy | AlterNet

Five Privatization Nightmares

Here are five nightmares resulting from privatization:

  1. Privatized Prisons

Think through the implications of a privatized prison system: if people go to prison it means more profit for the big for-profit prison corporations. This puts corporations, with all of their influence over the government, in the position of wanting more of us sentenced to long terms in jail so they can make more money! Even worse, there is an added corporate benefit: cheap prison labor.

Of course, the result you would expect from these incentives is exactly what has been happening.

For example, you may have heard about the "Kids for Cash" scandal in which Pennsylvania judges pleaded guilty to sentencing kids to privatized detention centers in exchange for payoffs from the profit-making companies that ran the centers. First the judges arranged for public detention centers to be defunded. Then they started sentencing a disproportionate number of kids to private detention centers in exchange for bribes.

The profit incentive to put more and more of us in prison is not just an isolated local problem. This year The Nation looked into prison privatization, in The Hidden History of ALEC and Prison Labor. They found that the notorious, Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), in an effort that is sponsored by the big for-profit prison corporations and companies that benefit from the cheap labor this provides, is helping to pass laws to put more and more of us in jail. According to The Nation,

    … prison labor for the private sector was legally barred for years, to avoid unfair competition with private companies. But this has changed thanks to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) .... [and their] instrumental role in the explosion of the US prison population in the past few decades. ALEC helped pioneer some of the toughest sentencing laws on the books today, like mandatory minimums for non-violent drug offenders, “three strikes” laws, and “truth in sentencing” laws.

    ALEC has also worked to pass state laws to create private for-profit prisons, a boon to two of its major corporate sponsors: Corrections Corporation of America and Geo Group (formerly Wackenhut Corrections), the largest private prison firms in the country. An In These Times investigation last summer revealed that ALEC arranged secret meetings between Arizona’s state legislators and CCA to draft what became SB 1070, Arizona’s notorious immigration law, to keep CCA prisons flush with immigrant detainees. ALEC has proven expertly capable of devising endless ways to help private corporations benefit from the country’s massive prison population.

[. . .] Much of ALEC’s proposed labor legislation, implemented state by state is allowing replacement of public workers with prisoners. Read More Here | AlterNet

Robert Reich: "The REAL Public Nuisance" - YouTube

Robert Reich: "The REAL Public Nuisance" - YouTube

Howard Zinn Tribute Video by The People Speak

Occupy San Diego
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgoWZWRAL8w
www.youtube.com
A tribute to the late great historian, activist and teacher Howard Zinn. Featuring interviews with Zinn, Matt Damon, Josh Brolin, Kerry Washington, Viggo Mor...

Kalle Lasn and Micah White, the Creators of Occupy Wall Street : The New Yorker

Kalle Lasn and Micah White, the Creators of Occupy Wall Street : The New Yorker

The Political Scene

Pre-Occupied

The origins and future of Occupy Wall Street.

by November 28, 2011

A demonstrator from Occupy Wall Street is arrested in lower Manhattan on November 17th. Photograph by Ashley Gilbertson.

A demonstrator from Occupy Wall Street is arrested in lower Manhattan on November 17th. Photograph by Ashley Gilbertson.

Kalle Lasn spends most nights shuffling clippings into a binder of plastic sleeves, each of which represents one page of an issue of Adbusters, a bimonthly magazine that he founded and edits. It is a tactile process, like making a collage, and occasionally Lasn will run a page with his own looped cursive scrawl on it. From this absorbing work, Lasn acquired the habit of avoiding the news after dark. So it was not until the morning of Tuesday, November 15th, that he learned that hundreds of police officers had massed in lower Manhattan at 1 A.M. and cleared the camp at Zuccotti Park. If anyone could claim responsibility for the Zuccotti situation, it was Lasn: Adbusters had come up with the idea of an encampment, the date the initial occupation would start, and the name of the protest—Occupy Wall Street. Now the epicenter of the movement had been raided. Lasn began thinking of reasons that this might be a good thing.

Lasn is sixty-nine years old and lives with his wife on a five-acre farm outside Vancouver. He has thinning white hair and the small eyes of a bulldog. In a lilting voice, he speaks of “a dark age coming for humanity” and of “killing capitalism,” alternating gusts of passion with gentle laughter. He has learned not to let premonitions of apocalypse spoil his good mood. Read More Here | The New Yorker

Buy Nothing Day + Buy Nothing Christmas #OCCUPYXMAS | Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters

Buy Nothing Day + Buy Nothing Christmas #OCCUPYXMAS | Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters

You’ve been sleeping on the streets for two months pleading peacefully for a new spirit in economics. And just as your camps are raided, your eyes pepper sprayed and your head’s knocked in, another group of people are preparing to camp-out. Only these people aren’t here to support occupy Wall Street, they’re here to secure their spot in line for a Black Friday bargain at Super Target and Macy’s. See Full Post Here | Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters

"MoveOn and Rebuild the Dream are fundamentally different from the Occupy Movement

"MoveOn and Rebuild the Dream are fundamentally different from the Occupy Movement. MoveOn/Rebuild the Dream is a top-down organization that functions to bring people into the Democrat party. MoveOn has a history of using progressive language and latching on wherever progressive momentum is being created and using it for their own agenda….We will not allow MoveOn/Rebuild the Dream to co-opt the Occupy Movement. So we say to MoveOn and Rebuild the Dream, “Back off and stop using the language of the Occupy Movement.” If you would like to encourage your membership to attend Occupy Movement actions, you are welcome. However, you have no place creating an Occupy Newspaper, holding Occupy houseparties or claiming actions organized by the Occupy Movement as your own." Margaret Flowers MD
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