Are private prisons slipping

On April 24, thinkprogress.org published an article by Annie-Rose Strasser about private prisons. She writes that three investment groups are divesting from the huge private prison corporations CCA and GEO. In all, the divestment comes to $60,000,000. That is not immense, in view of the fact that together the two corporations earn more than three billion dollars each year on their private prisons. But it is very significant.

According to the ACLU, the private prison industry grew about 1,600 percent  between 1990 and 2009. But last year, CCA lost four prison contracts with states.

Writer Strasser quotes Carl Takei, private prison expert of the ACLU's National Prison Project:

"To the extent that investment firms are committing themselves publicly to divestment, that is a very important step. To the extent that investment firms are deciding that private prisons are a bad investment, that’s even more important... We’ve started to turn the corner on mass incarceration and if that’s something that makes private prisons a bad investment, that’s important." Takei added that if investment firms chose to divest for ethical reasons, it is “an important first step,” but that “the financial reasons justification would be huge.”

Strasser ends with these words:

"Studies have found that private prisons spend millions on lobbying to send more people to jail for longer periods of time. The facilities are often rife with abuse and neglect, too; accusations against the companies range from wrongful death to bad sanitation and even forcing a woman to give birth in a toilet. They do no favors for states that support them, either; Idaho was one of the places that ended its contract with CCA after the company handed over a $1 million settlement for falsifying staff hours and leaving mandatory monitoring spots unattended."

Bill Moyers interviews Paul Krugman

Here are some excerpts from the interview:

MOYERS: Welcome....  (It is) still possible for a single book to shake the foundations, rattle clichés, upend dogma, unnerve ideologues, and arm everyday people with the knowledge they need to fight back against the predatory powers that have robbed them of their birthright as citizens. This is such a book: Capital in the Twenty-First Century, by the French economist Thomas Piketty... Here’s one of its extraordinary insights: we are heading into a future dominated by inherited wealth as capital concentrates in fewer and fewer hands, giving the very rich ever greater power over politics, government, and society. “Patrimonial capitalism” is the name for it, and it has potentially terrifying consequences for democracy. For those who work for a living, the level of inequality in the US, writes Piketty, is “probably higher than in any other society, at any time in the past, anywhere in the world.” Over three decades, between 1977 and 2007, 60 percent of our national income went to the richest 1 percent of Americans. No wonder this is the one book the one percent doesn't want the other 99 percent to read... As you know, I'm no economist, but I found this book, as I said in the opening, just very readable and suddenly there would be this moment of epiphany.

KRUGMAN: Yeah, it's a real "eureka" book... The world in fact has moved on a long way in the last 25 years and not in a direction you're going to like because we are seeing not only great disparities in income and wealth, but we're seeing them get entrenched. We're seeing them become inequalities that will be transferred across generations. We are becoming very much the kind of society we imagine we're nothing like.

MOYERS: Here’s Piketty’s main point: capital tends to produce real returns of 4 to 5 percent, and economic growth is much slower. What's the practical result of that?

KRUGMAN: What that means is that if you have a large fortune, or a family has a large fortune, they can -- the inheritors of that large fortune -- can live very, very well. They can live an extraordinary standard of living and still put a large fraction of the income from that fortune aside and the fortune will grow faster than the economy. So the big dynastic fortunes tend to take an ever-growing share of total, national wealth. So once you-- when you have a situation where the returns on capital are pretty high and the growth rate of the economy is not that high, you have a situation in which not only can people live well off inherited wealth, but they can actually pass on to the next generation even more, an even a higher share... Teddy Roosevelt could’ve told you and did -- that when you have a few people who are so wealthy that they can effectively buy the political system, the political system is going to tend to serve their interests. And that is going to reinforce this shift of income and wealth towards the top.

MOYERS: Do you agree with him that we are drifting toward oligarchy?

KRUGMAN: Oh yeah... I don't see that there's any question of it. If you look at ..what we know already, and we're learning more, but what we know already about the concentration of income, of wealth, you can see that it is growing... So right now, and this is where Piketty has interesting things to say... looking forward, (he's) telling us that the story is already changing. And it's going to change more. So we are going probably, unless something gets better, we're going to look back nostalgically on the early 21st century when you could still at least have the pretense that the wealthy actually earned their wealth. And, you know, by the year 2030, it'll all be inherited. 

MOYERS: And at the same time, we can't even manage to pay workers a minimum wage of $10.10. ... Piketty makes the point, that the very size of inherited fortunes today is so great that it practically makes them invisible. Quote "Wealth is so concentrated that a large segment of society is virtually unaware of its existence."

KRUGMAN: Sure. If you have conversations with people...who are not economists, they have no idea what real wealth means in America. They think that having a million dollars makes you wealthy. They think that-- or having a salary of several hundred thousand dollars makes you wealthy. And while it's certainly true...the sheer size of those big fortunes is so far outside our normal experience that it does become invisible. You're never going to meet these people. You're never going to have any sense of what it is that they control. And most people I think have no idea just how far the commanding heights are from you and me...

MOYERS: Well why is, as you said, redistribution such a noxious word in our political system?

KRUGMAN: I think mostly it's just because there's a very effective apparatus of TV and print media and think tanks and so on who hammer against any suggestion of redistribution. It's just, they've managed to convince a lot of people that it is somehow un-American. Which actually, if you look at American history, that's not all true. But...look, we have to admit, race is always lurking under almost everything in American life. And redistribution in the minds of a lot of people means taking money from people like me and giving it to people who don't look like me...

MOYERS: But given the dysfunction of Congress, given the fact that the Supreme Court has in effect decided to enable corporations and their rich to consolidate their hold on our political system, do you have any hope of the kind of change that both Piketty and you would advocate?

KRUGMAN: I think you don't give up hope on these things. We have-- look at the American political tradition. Look...one of the interesting things that Piketty says is that serious progressive taxation of high incomes and great wealth is an American invention... 

MOYERS: You wrote something the other day that's hard to forget. You said, "We live in such an ugliness in America right now."

KRUGMAN: Yeah. This is one of the things that puzzles me actually about my own country, which is it's one thing to have disparities of income and wealth and to have differing views about what we should be doing about it. But there's a level of harshness in our debates mostly coming from the people who are actually doing very well. So, you know, we've had a parade of billionaires whining about being-- you know, the incredible injustice that people are actually criticizing them. And then comparing anyone who criticizes them to the Nazis. You know...this is very strange. And it's kind of scary...

MOYERS: The evidence keeps mounting. Just this past Tuesday...the AFL-CIO reported that last year the chief executive officers of 350 top American corporations were paid 331 times more money than the average US worker. Those executives made an average of $11.7 million compared to the average worker who earned $35,239... (And) economist Robert Reich reminded us that in addition to getting the largest percent of total national income in nearly a century, many in the one percent are paying a lower federal tax rate than a lot of people in the middle-class. You will, no doubt, remember that an obliging Congress, of both parties, allows high rollers of finance the privilege of carried interest, a tax rate below that of their secretaries and clerks. And at state and local levels, while the poorest 20 percent of Americans pay an average tax rate of over 11 percent, the richest one percent of the country pays half that rate. Now, neither nature nor nature’s God drew up our tax codes. That’s the work of legislators, politicians, and it’s one way they have, as Chief Justice John Roberts might put it, of expressing gratitude to their donors. Oh, Mr. Adelson, we so appreciate your generosity that we cut your estate taxes so you can give $8 billion as a tax-free payment to your heirs, even though down the road the public will have to put up $2.8 billion to compensate for the loss in tax revenues. All of which makes truly repugnant the argument, heard so often from courtiers of the rich, that inequality doesn’t matter. Of course it matters. Inequality is what has turned Washington into a protection racket for the one percent. It buys all those goodies from government: tax breaks, tax havens, allowing corporations and the rich to park their money in a no-tax zone, loopholes, favors like carried interest, and on, and on, and on.... Sad, that it’s come to this. The drift toward oligarchy that Thomas Piketty describes in his formidable book has become a mad dash, and it will overrun us, and overwhelm us, unless we stop it.

**********

For the entire interview, go to <BillMoyers.com>

Now THIS is progress

When professor Mohammed Dajani of the Palestinian Al-Quds University took 27 of his students along with Israeli students to visit Auschwitz in March, he came home to find himself called a traitor by some of his associates. They said he and his students had "acted in their personal capacity and were not representatives of the university."

Dajani responded with these words on April 10 via Facebook:

"My response to all this tirade is that my duty as a teacher is to teach, to have my students explore the unexplored, to open new horizons for my students, to guide my students out of the cave of perceptions and misperceptions to see the facts and the reality on the ground, to break the walls of silence, to demolish the fences of taboos, to swim against the tide in search of truth... I will go to Ramallah, I will go to the university, I will put my photos of the visit on Facebook, and I do not regret for one second what I did. As a matter of fact, I will do it again if given the opportunity. I will not hide, I will not deny. I will not be silent. I will not remain a bystander even if the victims of the suffering I show empathy for are my perpetrators and my occupiers. The aim is not to get any one's approval but to do the right thing."

The program is called "Hearts Of Flesh, Not Stone," from the Book of the Prophet Ezequiel (36:26):  “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.” 

The border today, in a nutshell

Yesterday I wrote that I would post a summary of our present immigration situation. The best summary that I have seen recently is the homily given by Pope Francis advisor Cardinal Sean O'Malley during a Mass concelebrated with seven fellow bishops right up against the border fence in Nogales, Arizona, on April 1. Here are some excerpts from that homily:

"...As a nation of immigrants we should feel a sense of identification with other immigrant groups seeking to enter our country.

"The United States is a nation of immigrants. Only the indigenous Native Americans are not from somewhere else. So the word of God reminds us today that our God wants justice for the orphan and the widow and our God loves the foreigners, the aliens... The hard work and sacrifices of so many immigrant peoples is the secret of the success of this country. Despite the xenophobic ranting of a segment of the population, our immigrant population contributes mightily to the economy and well being of the United States.

"Here in the desert of Arizona, we come to mourn the countless immigrants who risk their lives at the hands of the coyotes and the forces of nature to come to the United States. Every year 400 bodies are found here at the border, bodies of men, women and children seeking to enter the United States. Those are only the bodies that are found. As the border crossings become more difficult, people take greater risks and more are perishing.

"Last year about 25,000 children, mostly from Central America, arrived in the US, unaccompanied by an adult. Tens of thousands of families are separated in the midst of migration patterns. More than 10 million undocumented immigrants are exposed to exploitation and lack access to basic human services, and are living in constant fear. They contribute to our economy by their hard work, often by contributing billions of dollars each year to the social security fund and to Medicare programs that will never benefit them...

"We have presently over 30,000 detainees, most of whom have no criminal connections. The cost of these detentions is about $2 billion a year.

"The system is broken and is causing untold suffering and...waste of resources, human and material.

"We find in those prisoners, neighbors, fellow human beings who are separated from their families and communities. The sheer volume of the cases has led to many due process violations and arbitrary detentions...

"But America at its best is not the bigotry and xenophobia of the "Know Nothings", but the generous welcome of the New Colossus, that mighty woman with a Torah, the Statue of Liberty, the Mother of Exiles who proclaims to the world: 'Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp,' cries she with silent lips, 'Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me; I lift my lamp beside the golden door.' (Emma Lazarus) We must be vigilant that that lamp continues to burn brightly."

Well, I'm back

I started posting here way back in December of 2004. My last post was on January 18, 2013. Since then, I have concentrated on Twitter -- <@relford> -- where I have posted over 8,800 tweets since June of 2009. I will continue tweeting for sure, but it is time to once again go beyond 140 characters.

So here goes.

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With almost 47 years of ministry and activism here in the Arizona-Sonora borderlands, it seems fitting for me to begin with an update on the ongoing double tragedy here. 

Every day families are torn apart by deportations, the majority of them due to minor offenses or something like a burned out tail light. (Astounding to a lot of us, two million deportations have now been carried out under the aegis of President Obama.)

The second tragedy is even worse. Migrants continue to die in our vast desert. In the federal fiscal year that ended on September 30, 2012, 179 bodies of migrants were found just here in the Tucson Sector of the border. The next year,182 bodies. The weather is only now heating up (in the high 80s this week), but 36 more bodies have already been recovered since last October 1. 

Since 1999, over 3,000 bodies of migrants have been brought to the Medical Examiner's "coolers" here in Tucson, Since 1994, over 6,000 bodies have been found along the whole 2,000 mile border.

Tomorrow I will post what I consider an excellent summary of this whole borderlands catastrophe.