Topic Tuesday #33 2013/03/05 - "Do not pass GO, Do not Collect $200 - Go directly to Privatization"

Topic Tuesday #33 2013/03/05 - "Do not pass GO. Do not Collect $200 - Go directly to Privatization"

The seed for today's topic. Florida Atlantic University in it's efforts to pay for a 30,000 seat football stadium found an unlikely backer. The Stadium will be christened the GEO Group Stadium, thanks to a $6 million dollar (over 12 years) donation to the public university. GEO Group is the nations second largest operator of for-profit privatized prisons. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/19/florida-atlantic-football-stadium_n_2720223.html?1361323728
This leads to a great many questions about what privatization really means. We have corporate prisons, corporate schools, corporate space programs, and some would say politicians should dress up like race car drives so we can see who is sponsoring them as well.

Today I want to look at prisons, specifically.

The United States is the world's leader in incarceration with 2.2 million people currently in the nation's prisons or jails - a 500% increase over the past thirty years. These trends have resulted in prison overcrowding and state governments being overwhelmed by the burden of funding a rapidly expanding penal system. The original intent, some 200 years ago, when the penitentiary system (etymologically derived from "penance") was formed by the Quakers and other reformist groups, was to take sinners, lock them in a cell, make them read the Bible, and they would repent for their sins. This model of incarceration (which didn't have great success at rehabilitation and repentance) has not changed that much since the inception. What has changed is the perception, method, and value of incarceration.

Not all the privatizations for to Corporations, some just migrate jurisdiction from state to county. In Louisiana it works this way: County or parish sheriffs get about $25 a day for inmates that would have otherwise ended up in state prisons. Some of that money goes to house and feed the prisoners. What’s left over goes to the underfunded sheriffs’ departments to use for much needed equipment and for manpower. The sheriffs get their needed bullet proof vests, and somehow prisoners end up with longer sentences and jail remain at capacity to get their $25 a head. This narrows any funds left for an actual rehabilitation. Again in this example, the funds for those activities come from charity functions like rodeos and Church outreach.
This method is simple, the more you have the easier it is to take care of, and you end up with a more economical situation with more money left over. This is not as insidious as what the real private for profit prisons do. 

Slave Labor.

In the eyes of the corporation, inmate labor is a brilliant strategy in the eternal quest to maximize profit. By dipping into the prison labor pool, companies have their pick of workers who are not only cheap but easily controlled. Companies are free to avoid providing benefits like health insurance or sick days, while simultaneously paying little to no wages. They don’t need to worry about unions or demands for vacation time or raises. Inmates work full-time and are never late or absent because of family problems.
Under the Work Opportunity Tax Credit (WOTC), private-sector employers receive a tax credit of $2,400 for every work release inmate they employ as a reward for hiring “risky target groups” and they can "earn back up to 40 percent of the wages they pay annually to target group workers."

Companies can lease factory time in prisons. Lease prison work forces.
Noah Zatz of UCLA law school estimates that:
“Well over 600,000, and probably close to a million, inmates are working full-time in jails and prisons throughout the United States. Perhaps some of them built your desk chair: office furniture, especially in state universities and the federal government, is a major prison labor product. Inmates also take hotel reservations at corporate call centers, make body armor for the U.S. military, and manufacture prison chic fashion accessories, in addition to the iconic task of stamping license plates.”

Making stiffer penalties that lead to longer stays in the "big house" has proven a great way to get votes. Making other people responsible and shifting the financial burden is also a great slight of hand for policy makers. 

And thanks to all this, there is a dark economy of slavery in this country while record unemployment continues to plague the news, the government has it's armor and ammunition built by felons, and Corporate America hires prisoners for a few dollars a day to slice "Made in Honduras" tags off garments and replace them with "Made in America".

Is it ethical to incarcerate people for the sole purpose of making money? How can anyone think it is?

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/episodes/january-11-2013/prisons-for-profit/14485/

http://www.sentencingproject.org/detail/news.cfm?news_id=1445

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/19/corporate-welfare-incarceration-industry

http://www.alternet.org/story/151732/21st-century_slaves%3A_how_corporations_exploit_prison_labor?page=0%2C0&paging=off

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-pentagon-and-slave-labor-in-u-s-prisons/25376

Topic Tuesday #17 2012/11/13 - "Slicing the American Pie"

Topic Tuesday #17 2012/11/13 - "Slicing the American Pie"

States With Petitions to Secede.

After the 2012 presidential general election there came a great stir in the states that leaned in favor of the challenger from the GOP, Mitt Romney (some that ended up going to Obama as well!). This stirring is nothing new, but worth talking about. There are at the time of this writing 20 states, Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas - that are seeking peaceful secession from the United States. Most read like this one from Tennessee: "Peacefully grant the State of Tennessee to withdraw from the United States of America and create its own NEW government." Not everybody who wants to secede is polite enough to write a petition. Peter Morrison, treasurer of the Hardin County (Texas) Republican Party, wrote a post-election newsletter in which he urges the Lone Star State to leave the Union, with some rather unpleasant and pointed imagery.

"We must contest every single inch of ground and delay the baby-murdering, tax-raising socialists at every opportunity. But in due time, the maggots will have eaten every morsel of flesh off of the rotting corpse of the Republic, and therein lies our opportunity... Why should Vermont and Texas live under the same government? Let each go her own way in peace, sign a free trade agreement among the states and we can avoid this gut-wrenching spectacle every four years."

2012 Results

The whole affair of secession from the USA is largely a symbolic gesture  as the 14th Amendment signifies citizenship of being of the USA not of the individual states. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has even addressed the constitutionality of secession and how a state would go about it in a letter to a screenwriter who posed the question: "To begin with, the answer is clear. If there was any constitutional issue resolved by the Civil War, it is that there is no right to secede. (Hence, in the Pledge of Allegiance, "one Nation, indivisible.") Secondly, I find it difficult to envision who the parties to this lawsuit might be. Is the State suing the United States for a declaratory judgment? But the United States cannot be sued without its consent, and it has not consented to this sort of suit." Texas does have the ability to subdivide itself into 5 states. This would give it more Senators on the whole, but as you divide a state up, there is no guarantee of loyalty to the original cause.
As with any of these type of movements, Texas in particular, the logistics is what hamstrings the entire endeavor more than even the legal ramifications. There are a great number of nationalized services that would all have to be... "repatriated" into a state government. The cost of the operation would be phenomenal. Texas would have it better off. They have their own power grid. They have enough manufacturing and population to make sustainability an option. Of the other 19 states however... Well, it wouldn't be hard to see that any sedition among them would harm the citizens far more than help them. So in the end, secession just isn't going to happen. If it does... It will be a civil war and there will be millions of lives lost. /Begin SOAPBOX/ Pretty simple. Stay and fix the things you are trying to run away from. Do it legally. It was the law that got you into "this mess" in the first place! Make good choices, and advertise those choices to everyone else. /End SOAPBOX/

What do you think? Should the states be allowed to bow out? Do they even have the right to do so? How do you think it could be done? How many infrastructures would be interrupted? Would I need a passport to get to Louisiana?

Topic Tuesday #16 2012/11/06 - "Getting Accepted to the Electoral College"

Topic Tuesday #16 2012/11/06 - "Getting Accepted to the Electoral College"

Here in the United States, we utilize the Electoral College to elect the President. It's kind of a funny system, and after this, you may really hate it. It made sense to the founding fathers when it emerged from the 1787 Constitutional Convention. It was a hybrid of the Virginia Plan, the Connecticut Compromise and the Three-Fifths Compromise. It was chosen, in equal measures for it's "fairness" to smaller, less population dense states and due to legal slavery which was prevalent at the time but political suicide to rebuke at the time. Essentially a popular vote would just have been overly biased towards the most populated states. James Madison and James Wilson both argued for the popular vote. The original plan was to have the representatives of the Congress to elect a president. this was deemed too "intrigue" provoking, feeling that then a small group of men would have too much collusion and influence. The design of the Electoral College was based upon several assumptions and anticipations of the Framers of the Constitution:

• Each state would employ the district system of allocating electors.
• Each presidential elector would exercise independent judgment when voting.
• Candidates would not pair together on the same ticket with assumed placements toward each office of President and Vice President.

The system as designed would rarely produce a winner, thus sending the election to Congress. So it was amended and changed to what we have now, as a "winner take all" state by state model. Now into the nuts and bolts... Some definitions:

• Voter: You and Me - proud citizens of the republic.
• Candidate: The person that wants to run the country for the next 4 years.
• Elector: The people that have been chosen by the Candidate's Party to do the actual vote in December. Electors are generally chosen by the candidate’s political party. These Electors can be anybody but Senators or Congressmen. They are usually very politically active and well connected. What the Electors are supposed to do, is cast their votes based off the Popular Vote, which is what "We the People" do with that ballot. They are, in most cases, not strictly obligated to do so, but have 99% of the time. 
• Elector Slate: The full list of the chosen Electors for a given Candidate.
• Popular Vote: The actual voter ballot tabulation that is greater than all others.
• Electoral Vote: How many points your state has to give the Candidate. Each state gets one Elector per member of House & Senate that the state is allotted, or a minimum of 3, in the case of Washington D.C.. There are presently 538 Electors. To win this horse race, you have to hit 270+. 

Here's what happens:

1. You cast a vote for, say the Purple Teams Candidate.
2. The vote you cast for the Purple Candidate is assigned to Purple's Elector for your district (or some nomenclature to that effect)
3. The popular vote is tabulated and the Elector for the leading candidate of the Popular Vote in the District is awarded the District wholesale. Majority rules, winner take all. 
4. At the State level, the districts are tabulated, majority rules again, and the State's number of Electoral Votes goes to the Candidate. Maine and Nebraska each have a variation of “proportional representation".
5. The above continues until all the ballots are counted. Once someone has 270 Electoral votes, it's all over.
6. We all assume that whoever won. We are almost always right, and it is the popular vote - by proxy through proportional representation.
7. Paperwork - After the presidential election, your governor prepares a “Certificate of Ascertainment” listing all of the candidates who ran for President in your state along with the names of their respective electors. The Certificate of Ascertainment also declares the winning presidential candidate in your state and shows which electors will represent your state at the meeting of the electors in December of the election year. The electors meet in their respective states, where they cast their votes for President and Vice President on separate ballots. Your state’s electors’ votes are recorded on a “Certificate of Vote,” which is prepared at the meeting by the electors. Your state’s Certificates of Votes are sent to the Congress and the National Archives as part of the official records of the presidential election. 
8. Each state’s electoral votes are counted in a joint session of Congress on the 6th of January in the year following the meeting of the electors. Members of the House and Senate meet in the House chamber to conduct the official tally of electoral votes. The Vice President, as President of the Senate, presides over the count and announces the results of the vote. The President of the Senate then declares which persons, if any, have been elected President and Vice President of the United States.
9. The President-Elect takes the oath of office and is sworn in as President of the United States on January 20th in the year following the Presidential election.

So as you can perhaps tell, this is a convoluted process that simultaneously make it easier to calculate with the use of the Proportional Representation model, and ludicrous as it subjugates the power of your own vote to  to someone else, who we then trust will vote according to the vox populi (voice of the people).

So what do you think? Should the electoral college be mothballed and go with a true popular vote?

For more information on the Electoral College and it's methods, visit http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/about.html

2008 Election Results