Two more signs that this country is f*cked
This first one I simply don't know what to do with.
And let's not forget the undeniable benefits to slavery.
Arizona Department of Corrections director David Shinn said Arizona communities would “collapse” without cheap prison labor, during testimony before the Joint Legislative Budget Committee Thursday...
Sen. David Gowan asked Shinn about the nature of the work the prisoners do at the Florence West prison. In Arizona, all people in state prisons are forced to work 40 hours a week with exceptions for prisoners with health care conditions and other conflicting programming schedules. Some prisoners earn just 10 cents an hour for their work.“Yes. The department does more than just incarcerate folks,” Shinn replied. “There are services that this department provides to city, county, local jurisdictions, that simply can't be quantified at a rate that most jurisdictions could ever afford. If you were to remove these folks from that equation, things would collapse in many of your counties, for your constituents.”
Defending the choice to keep state and private prisons open despite dwindling populations, Shinn told the legislators “while it doesn't necessarily serve the department in the best interest to have these places open, we have to do it to support Arizona.”
“Without the ability to have these folks at far flung places like Apache, like Globe, like Fort Grant, even like Florence West, communities wouldn't have access to these resources or services, and literally would have to spend more to be able to provide that to their constituents,” Shinn said.
Yes, that is true. Without slavery things would get more expensive.
I can't argue with that. And let's not forget that you can save at both ends.
Years of “grossly inadequate” healthcare for Arizona prisoners represent a violation of the inmates’ constitutional rights and will require outside help to remedy, a federal judge ruled late last week.
U.S. District Judge Roslyn Silver issued the decision June 30 in light of “an unusually large amount of evidence” against the state’s Department of Corrections.
The department has delivered all correctional health services via private contractors since 2012, with Centurion of Arizona winning a roughly $216 million-per-year contract to cover services since July 1, 2019, according to court documents.
The department had recently finalized a new five-year, $280 million-per-year contract with correctional healthcare provider NaphCare, according to Arizona Republic, although that arrangement could now be in jeopardy with the court’s ruling that a “qualified expert” be appointed by Aug. 15 to craft an injunction addressing the constitutional violations.
Even the non-private prisons have been privatized to an extent.
And now for a bonus round concerning the wonders of private prisons. Specifically, they are instruments of social justice.
The contents of CoreCivic’s audit pointed to mostly superficial contributions to diversity and equity. The report, conducted by Moore & Van Allen, a North Carolina-based law firm, offered some room for improvement but largely applauded the private prison giant for its “genuine” commitment to diversity principles, including by raising cultural awareness with a mural of Martin Luther King Jr. at one of its Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers in Arizona. The report also praised CoreCivic for its philanthropy and business practices that have “benefitted communities of color.”In an accompanying report on the company’s diversity, equity, and inclusion — known as DEI — CoreCivic touted its ranks of nonwhite prison guards, diversity on its board of directors, and diverse ranks of wardens, as well as its partnership with a Black-led, pro-business trade group.
Those supposed strides elicited eye rolls among its critics. “They put children’s murals on the wall while incarcerating infants. That doesn’t mean they have positive impacts for children,” said Bob Libal, a longtime watchdog of the private prison industry, referencing the company’s Taylor, Texas-based ICE detention center.
Comments
Substitute 'slaves' for prisoners
Didn’t the southern states once think that their economy would collapse without the slaves that worked their plantations and once the slaves were freed that’s when ‘renting' convicts became acceptable because they didn’t have to be paid or fed properly?
Bull! Our very own VP Kamala Harris once defied the court to free prisoners because they were needed to fight California wildfires for pennies an hour. A recent story said that prisoners now make $.11 per hour whilst companies are making record profits! That’s the only reason why they have to use them. It’s not like any skills they learn are going to help them once released. For profit prisons cost much more than state run ones do because the private prisons insist on a certain occupancy rate and states get charged even if they are empty. And oh goody a mural of MLK will make all the incarcerated blacks much happier! They should have done that long ago!
Wrong day to read this happy claptrap crap!
Was Humpty Dumpty pushed?
I wrote a great diary about this
Although the it's still on the GOS.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2009/8/12/765301/-
Another sellout by the unions
Color me surprised. Seems they have been just as captured as every other industry.
Betting that Biden steps in and derails the rail strike. Any takers?
Was Humpty Dumpty pushed?
Peter Steele
Speaking of Coal Creek
https://youtu.be/J3OvqAECH78
I would have won the bet
Biden has put a hold on the railroad strike even though workers have been without a contract for a long time and are going to be screwed by the railroad robber barons. Welcome back to the roaring 20's folks where the rich become even richer at the expense of we the people.
Was Humpty Dumpty pushed?
Welcome back to the 1880s-90s, you mean
It's Gilded Age redux.
There is no justice. There can be no peace.
I don't even mind Biden stopping the strike
as long as Biden forces them into binding arbitration.
But that's not what he did.
This site says that Biden is determined to lower wages
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/07/16/rail-j16.html
It’s also what the fed is doing by raising interest rates. The guy running it says that he wants 10% unemployment so that wages quit rising.
Was Humpty Dumpty pushed?
It seems we’re being pre-conditioned
to rush into the arms of “any-port-in-a-storm” (WEF?) when the shit actually hits the fan.
Good that we all are rational critical thinkers./s
“ …and when we destroy nature, we diminish our capacity to sense the divine,and understand who God is, and what our own potential is and duties are as human beings.- RFK jr. 8/26/2024
we are shameful
It is insane how we have normalized the abuse of the prisoners for private profits with the dial now at Kamala.
Wasn't the whole private prisons for profit thing a Clinton/Biden deal? Right along with the drug/crack thingie, 3-strikes and civil forfeiture deal, it was all pretty quick wasn't it?
But a Sheriff then Warden in Alabama has a nice beachfront house and boat now for all the money he saved on food for the prisoners. Forget healthcare. Real civil people.
This is OK. This is where we are. Late stage capitalism.
We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.
both - Albert Einstein
I think you mean "shameless"
Clinton and Biden probably loved the idea, but I know that the first private prisons started a decade earlier, civil forfeiture came out in the mid-80's, the CIA started flooding inner cities with crack around the same time.
3-strikes was somewhat later. Maybe the early 90's.
Coming to a theater near you
Cold War II. Duck and cover boogaloo.
I'm great at multi-tasking. I can waste time, be unproductive, and procrastinate all at the same time.
Anyone with a couple or 3 brain cells
knows the proper way to prepare for nuclear war is to prepare to die.
One of the worst "great ideas" we had in the great USA was private, for profit prisons.
A champion of them is our brilliant VP. That person often described by RWNJ as a commie.
She kept prisoners in as long as possible because their work for businesses was so "important".
I did not know 40 hr work week was mandatory for AZ prisoners. I know that in Texas, it can wipe out a bad inmate record, increase chances for early parole. Texas knows more will follow, and they will never run short of new inmates wanting credit for "good time".
Anybody who advocates for nuclear preparedness is a nut. Anybody who thinks prisoner slavery improves society is a nut.
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981
Get prepared then
I just read how the military is going to send mini nukes to bases in Europe and some ships and submarines in case we want to do a first strike against Russia. Can’t remember where I read that but too lazy to go look for it again. My guess is that they will use one in Ukraine and blame it on Russia. Stay tuned.
Was Humpty Dumpty pushed?
Obama and
Her thought little tiny tactical nukes were a fabulous idea! Biden must want to prove his colleagues right.
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981
Exactly that.
We just moved out of downtown Denver, back to a place close to where our rental was before the fire. So we are back into fireball radius of 4 major 20MT targets, which means overpressures of 100+psi and neutron fluxes of fuckitall per cm2.
That makes me happy, in a nontrivial way. I want to become prompt plasma (or pulp, if behind a concrete wall), and not survive beyond the first milliseconds. Those dumb SOBs that think they have it figured out by stocking ammo, Spam, and canned beans have it all wrong, to my way of thinking. There is no “survival”. There is only death- and quicker will be vastly better. OTC, you have it right.
“The living will envy the dead…”
Twice bitten, permanently shy.
Since I was a child doing duck and cover drills,
I told my teachers, parents, fellow students, friends, that I want the nuke to drop squarely on my head.
I am 45 miles from the Port of Houston and NASA. Maybe I will get what I desire.
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981
In Dallas
.
In my Dallas elementary school, I remember we had two distinct warning signals. Three short rings of the school bell system meant a fire -- or a fire drill. We would march out of the building and stand in straight lines until the bells sounded a long blast to send us back to class. The other disaster signal had the principal turn on the intercom system and blow a police whistle. That meant either a tornado or thermonuclear war, toe to toe with the Ruskies, as Major Kong said in Strangelove.
We always knew the fire alarm was a fire drill. If the whistle blew during good weather, we knew it was not a tornado -- and it always scared the piss out of us. We did not go under our school desks, which would not have been possible because they did not really have an "under." You kept your books in a receptacle underneath your seat. Instead, we filed out into the hallway and then lined up two by two against the hall walls, with our knees and elbows on the ground -- and our hands clasped behind our necks, protecting our little heads from whatever debris might be flying through the air underneath the mushroom cloud.
Even at age 9 we could tell how silly that was. So when the whistle blew it was a real kick in the gut until the drill was over.
There was one other surreal aspect of the Civil Defense program in the Dallas Indenpendent School District. We all brought home a booklet that included our options in case of World War III. We could stay at school for the rest of the day, we could leave the school, or our parents could come and pick us up.
Write your own punchlines.
I cried when I wrote this song. Sue me if I play too long.
Our signal was a siren.
We did get under our desks. Then, we were led out of the classroom, and every kid from first to 12th grade walked from the campus one block to the county courthouse. We were told in the real nuclear event, go get inside the building, the basement being the safest place.
Well, the basement would be full of courthouse employees before we got there.
Something about the glass doors at all 4 entrances of the building did not inspire confidence.
At least the required trips to and from that safe place occurred when the weather was good.
My parents didn't mention any instructions. They would have done as they damn well wished, anyway.
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981
duck and cover
drills, Bert the Turtle PSA films about same, line up in the brick-lined hallway with face covered. Also the bi-weekly or monthly air raid sirens going off late on a Friday morning. I think the sirens were still going off into the 70s, or that's my memory. We were all supposed to know where our local Civil Defense shelter was, marked with the CD sign in yellow.
Also in the late 50s/early 60s the govt actually actively promoted the idea of homeowners building backyard fallout shelters. I am about 2/3 finished with mine, as many of you were probably out having a lot more fun all this time. Hope to complete it before Joe decides he's had enough of Russia getting too uppity and goes all Gen Buck Turgidson.
I remember the shelter push,
but do not recall anybody around my county actually building one.
Brandon might go completely nuts at any moment. Finish your building asap.
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981
From Donald Fagen's "New Frontier"
.
I cried when I wrote this song. Sue me if I play too long.
Yes, and this major West Coast city
Is only 50 miles east of the Navy's largest group of
Nuclear-powered submarines equipped with nuclear weapons.
As well as on that BC-to-Mexico faultline - ready for "the big one."
Per https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one and
https://www.huffpost.com/archive/ca/entry/the-big-one-earthquake-simulat...
Capitalism must end altogether
Capitalism is basically a never-ending BDSM relationship that began with Europe's conquest of the world and continues with prison labor and endless for-profit war. It's time for it to go.
Once upon a time there was a concept called "progress." It was the consolation prize developed to inure people to the general state of capitalist affairs. Today we're in wholesale regress.
I don't know if you caught this piece:
https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/fortress-greece?pc=1458
Key quote:
Theme song:
“When there's no fight over programme, the election becomes a casting exercise. Trump's win is the unstoppable consequence of this situation.” - Jean-Luc Melanchon
Jeebus!
No I didn't know that.
But reading this got me to look back on that all too brief moment of hope in Greek history - the 2015 election, when Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA) won a legislative election for the first time, winning just two short of an absolute majority. Their platform was to tear up the disastrous bailout package and start anew. The Athens stock market dropped by 30% before the election even happened, just because SYRIZA was leading.
SYRIZA won overwhelmingly. The center-left party PASOK was almost completely wiped out and eliminated from parliament (hmmm, I wonder if that became a trend?)
ND had only half of the seats that SYRIZA had. The Neo-Nazi Golden Dawn came in 3rd, but had only 17 seats of SYRIZA.
So why did they fail so completely? Reading over the Wiki there was one indicator that I had totally forgotten about. It happened almost immediately after the election.
Because they were just two votes short of a coalition, they had to join with someone. It could have been almost anyone.
The right-wing (now called "populist", instead of the more traditional "reactionary") ANEL only had 13 seats. The centrist POTAMI had 17 seats, same as Golden Dawn.
Do you know who SYRIZA could have partnered with? KKE, the communist party, with 15 seats.
Funny how the socialist left is always afraid of joining with the communists, when the communists are consistently their only allies in a tough fight. They seem to always want to partner with centrists, who will always stab them in the back.
I willing to bet that SYRIZA a) partnered with ANEL to try to "calm the markets", and it completely failed, and b) that ANEL prevented SYRIZA from making the bold moves that were necessary.
Speaking of Greek communists, I don't know how much you know about the Greek civil war, but the communists were the only ones that fought the Nazi occupiers. The moderate rebels that the West supported cooperated with the Nazis.
By late 1944 the communists had liberated all of Greece except for Athens. The British got to Athens right before the communists, so the Nazis could surrender to them, because the communists would have killed them.
The British then demanded that the communists disarm, which set off the civil war. And you probably know how that ended.
I recently read about what happened in Greece
just when it looked like they were going to get away from us and our demands for their austerity I think we threatened them in some way. And the rest is history. I’ll look for the story later.
Was Humpty Dumpty pushed?
No luck on finding it
Darn it. I can’t find the site I read it on either…silly brain.
Was Humpty Dumpty pushed?
Well I do know --
-- that one of my philosophical heroes, Cornelius Castoriadis, had to flee Greece because, during the Greek Civil War, he was a Trotskyist whereas the primary faction was Stalinist.
At any rate, the Greek situation -- at present -- seems to me to be another reason to get out of the business of complaining about "fascism." Horrific things happen in Greece today -- a place where the actual fascists do not participate in the central government. Why complain about "fascists" when there are such nice people doing the deeds in question? One recalls the dark day in 1862 when 38 Dakota men were hung en masse on order of that nice man Abraham Lincoln, and that the Indian Wars were Hitler's inspiration for his attempt to depopulate eastern Europe so it could be the new German homeland. All kinds of writers are now proclaiming our "descent into fascism" as if the "fascism" they declaim were something new (not so) and as if "fascism" required actual fascists (also not so, not of the past and not of the present).
I guess it looks like "fascism" if it's more obvious than it used to be or if it's happening to people one knows. I'm sure most of the people reading this post once lived lives in which, when they were very young, they had no idea of the nasty things done to the world's victims.
If you're not tired of reading horrific news, do check out Jeffrey St. Clair's column of earlier today.
“When there's no fight over programme, the election becomes a casting exercise. Trump's win is the unstoppable consequence of this situation.” - Jean-Luc Melanchon
Pakistanis got America's number