Chomsky On Corporate Personhood

[8 minute clip in which he answers a question and gets to the heart of the matter]

Vicky Pelaez: The prison industry in the United States -- big business or a new form of slavery?

The prison industry in the United States: big business or a new form of slavery?
by Vicky Pelaez
Global Research

...

HISTORY OF PRISON LABOR IN THE UNITED STATES

Prison labor has its roots in slavery. After the 1861-1865 Civil War, a system of "hiring out prisoners" was introduced in order to continue the slavery tradition. Freed slaves were charged with not carrying out their sharecropping commitments (cultivating someone else's land in exchange for part of the harvest) or petty thievery - which were almost never proven - and were then "hired out" for cotton picking, working in mines and building railroads. From 1870 until 1910 in the state of Georgia, 88% of hired-out convicts were Black. In Alabama, 93% of "hired-out" miners were Black. In Mississippi, a huge prison farm similar to the old slave plantations replaced the system of hiring out convicts. The notorious Parchman plantation existed until 1972.

During the post-Civil War period, Jim Crow racial segregation laws were imposed on every state, with legal segregation in schools, housing, marriages and many other aspects of daily life. "Today, a new set of markedly racist laws is imposing slave labor and sweatshops on the criminal justice system, now known as the prison industry complex," comments the Left Business Observer.

Who is investing? At least 37 states have legalized the contracting of prison labor by private corporations that mount their operations inside state prisons. The list of such companies contains the cream of U.S. corporate society: IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Wireless, Texas Instrument, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Lucent Technologies, 3Com, Intel, Northern Telecom, TWA, Nordstrom's, Revlon, Macy's, Pierre Cardin, Target Stores, and many more. All of these businesses are excited about the economic boom generation by prison labor. Just between 1980 and 1994, profits went up from $392 million to $1.31 billion. Inmates in state penitentiaries generally receive the minimum wage for their work, but not all; in Colorado, they get about $2 per hour, well under the minimum. And in privately-run prisons, they receive as little as 17 cents per hour for a maximum of six hours a day, the equivalent of $20 per month. The highest-paying private prison is CCA in Tennessee, where prisoners receive 50 cents per hour for what they call "highly skilled positions." At those rates, it is no surprise that inmates find the pay in federal prisons to be very generous. There, they can earn $1.25 an hour and work eight hours a day, and sometimes overtime. They can send home $200-$300 per month.

Thanks to prison labor, the United States is once again an attractive location for investment in work that was designed for Third World labor markets. A company that operated a maquiladora (assembly plant in Mexico near the border) closed down its operations there and relocated to San Quentin State Prison in California. In Texas, a factory fired its 150 workers and contracted the services of prisoner-workers from the private Lockhart Texas prison, where circuit boards are assembled for companies like IBM and Compaq.

[Former] Oregon State Representative Kevin Mannix recently urged Nike to cut its production in Indonesia and bring it to his state, telling the shoe manufacturer that "there won't be any transportation costs; we're offering you competitive prison labor (here)."

PRIVATE PRISONS

The prison privatization boom began in the 1980s, under the governments of Ronald Reagan and Bush Sr., but reached its height in 1990 under William Clinton, when Wall Street stocks were selling like hotcakes. Clinton's program for cutting the federal workforce resulted in the Justice Departments contracting of private prison corporations for the incarceration of undocumented workers and high-security inmates.

Private prisons are the biggest business in the prison industry complex. About 18 corporations guard 10,000 prisoners in 27 states. The two largest are Correctional Corporation of America (CCA) and Wackenhut, which together control 75%. Private prisons receive a guaranteed amount of money for each prisoner, independent of what it costs to maintain each one. According to Russell Boraas, a private prison administrator in Virginia, "the secret to low operating costs is having a minimal number of guards for the maximum number of prisoners." The CCA has an ultra-modern prison in Lawrenceville, Virginia, where five guards on dayshift and two at night watch over 750 prisoners. In these prisons, inmates may get their sentences reduced for "good behavior," but for any infraction, they get 30 days added - which means more profits for CCA. According to a study of New Mexico prisons, it was found that CCA inmates lost "good behavior time" at a rate eight times higher than those in state prisons.

IMPORTING AND EXPORTING INMATES

Profits are so good that now there is a new business: importing inmates with long sentences, meaning the worst criminals. When a federal judge ruled that overcrowding in Texas prisons was cruel and unusual punishment, the CCA signed contracts with sheriffs in poor counties to build and run new jails and share the profits. According to a December 1998 Atlantic Monthly magazine article, this program was backed by investors from Merrill-Lynch, Shearson-Lehman, American Express and Allstate, and the operation was scattered all over rural Texas. That state's governor, Ann Richards, followed the example of Mario Cuomo in New York and built so many state prisons that the market became flooded, cutting into private prison profits.

After a law signed by Clinton in 1996 - ending court supervision and decisions - caused overcrowding and violent, unsafe conditions in federal prisons, private prison corporations in Texas began to contact other states whose prisons were overcrowded, offering "rent-a-cell" services in the CCA prisons located in small towns in Texas. The commission for a rent-a-cell salesman is $2.50 to $5.50 per day per bed. The county gets $1.50 for each prisoner.

STATISTICS

Ninety-seven percent of 125,000 federal inmates have been convicted of non-violent crimes. It is believed that more than half of the 623,000 inmates in municipal or county jails are innocent of the crimes they are accused of. Of these, the majority are awaiting trial. Two-thirds of the one million state prisoners have committed non-violent offenses. Sixteen percent of the country's 2 million prisoners suffer from mental illness.

To Read the Entire Article

Common Sense with Dan Carlin: Shows 207 - 212 -- Reflecting on a Time of Civil Unrest

[Dan Carlin is one of my favorite independent, conservative thinkers and I appreciate his insights -- in these series of episodes he reflects on current events, including the Occupy Movement]

Show 207 - Stirring The Pot

Bringing people together is on Dan's mind today as he looks at Truth, protests, Pan-National anger and the theoretical idea of a Goldman-Sachs-like entity outing itself as the global overlord.

Notes:
1. “Tony Bennett Changes His Tune on 9/11 Remarks” by Brian Canova for ABC News (The Note), September 21, 2011.

2. “Trader Alessio Rastani To BBC: 'Governments Don't Rule The World, Goldman Sachs Rules The World' ”

3. “As Scorn for Vote Grows, Protests Surge Around Globe” by Nicholas Kulish for The New York Times, September 27, 2011.

Show 208 - The Fruits of Disillusionment

Dan unveils a new streamlined show format while tackling an issue he dealt with in the last episode...the Occupy Wall Street protests.

Notes:
1. “The Tea Party loses another round” by Dana Milbank for The Washington Post, October 15, 2011.

Show 209 - A Show in Pieces

What happens when Dan meanders too far down an intellectual tangent to find his way back to the point? You get "A show in pieces"

Show 210 - Second Guessing the Navigator

Who is setting the national agenda and how do we feel about their choices? Dan discusses everything from the conflict between liberty and democracy to the ability of governments to solve social problems.

Notes:
1. “The Wrong Inequality” by David Brooks for The New York Times, October 31, 2011.

Show 211 - Tyranny of the Unwise

Is it possible that a political system based on voting and elections has less of a chance of producing wise leadership than a monarchy or dictatorship? Dan tries to look at this heretical idea with an open mind.

Notes:
1. “China mocks U.S. political model” by Patrice Hill for The Washington Times, November 9, 2011.

Show 212 - The Very Velvet Fist

What if pepper spray or other modern crowd control tools had been available during the Civil Rights era? Dan looks at the challenges the protest tactic of civil disobedience faces in a 21st Century world.

Media Roots: Wells Fargo Profits from Private Prisons

Wells Fargo Profits from Private Prisons
Media Roots

As big banks inject record amounts of cash into lobbying this year, largely aimed at access to financial regulators, Wells Fargo, in particular, stands out because of its added rapacious dimension of investments in for-profit prisons and immigrant detention centres. Certainly, legal wrangling over deportation policies is politicised. Yet, whereas pre-9/11, undocumented immigrants were summarily deported to their country of origin by border patrol agents along the border, post-9/11 for-profit detention centres are hugely profiting from the detention of scores of immigrants apprehended throughout the country, not just along the border at the point of entry.

Meanwhile, one of Wells Fargo’s biggest investors, the for-profit prison firm GEO Group, Inc., invests millions in lobbying for ever more draconian anti-immigrant legislation, as Eric Dolan (in the article below) and Hyun-Mi Kim (in the interview below) explain. Kim notes, the racist anti-immigrant SB 1070 Bill in Arizona was shaped in large part by the nation's top-two for-profit prison firms GEO Group, Inc. and Corrections Corporation of America. The two firms, says Kim, raked in a whopping $2.9 Billion in profits in 2010.

As regressive policies, such as NAFTA, create economic refugees forced to migrate from Latin America to the U.S. in search of employment, predatory anti-immigrant policies, shaped by for-profit prison firms, incentivise prolonged detentions, such as at the notorious T. Don Hutto Detention Center in Texas, as Davey D notes (below).

Kim correctly points out the complete betrayal by Obama to his campaign promises of compassion towards immigrant communities. Not only have record numbers of immigrants been imprisoned under Obama’s support for the regressive policies of I.C.E. and S-Comm, but Obama has even run defence on behalf of for-profit detention centres by exempting them from the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003. As Frontline has reported, immigrants “held in U.S. immigration detention facilities filed more than 170 allegations of sexual abuse over the last four years, mostly against guards and other staff at the centers, according to government documents obtained by FRONTLINE and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).” Thus, not only must immigrants endure economic abuse, class-warfare, and arbitrary detention, but torture as well.

To Read the Rest of the Reports

Blue Gold: World Water Wars (USA: Sam Bozzo, 2008: 90 mins)

Clancy Sigal: Blair Mountain and Labor's Living History

Blair Mountain and labor's living history: Ninety years on, the coal seams of West Virginia are a battlefield once more: for working people, the struggle goes on
by Clancy Sigal
The Guardian (United Kingdom)

My first time in Westminister Abbey, London, I was taken inside by a coal miner friend who was down from South Wales for a brief London holiday. Suitably awed, we gawked at Poets' Corner, the Coronation Throne, the tombs and effigies of prelates, admirals, generals and prime ministers – England in all its majesty and pageantry. Gazing at the Gothic Revival columns, transepts and amazing fan-vaulted ceiling, my friend said, "Impressive, isn't it? Of course, it's their culture not ours."

Our culture – class conscious, bolshie, renegade – rarely lay in plaques and statues, hardly ever in school texts, but mainly in orally transmitted memories passed down generation to generation, in songs and stories. "Labor history" has become a province of passionately committed specialists and working-class autodidacts, keepers of the flame of a human drama at least as fascinating and blood-stirring as the dead royal souls in the Abbey. It belongs to all of us who claim it.

I'm lucky because my family's secular religion is union. They include cousin Charlie (shipbuilders), cousin Davie (electrical workers), cousin Bernie (printers), my mother (ladies' garment) and father (butchers and barbers), and cousin Fred (San Quentin prisoners). Establishment history may have its Battle of Trafalgar and Gallipoli; we have Haymarket Square, Ludlow, Centralia and Cripple Creek: labor's battle sites, more often slaughtering defeats than victories.

Until recently, a lot of this history casually disappeared down Orwell's "memory hole", forgotten, censored or ignored. But with the spectacular emergence of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and fight-backs in states like Wisconsin and Ohio, young people especially seem to be regaining and reinvigorating a living history. Memory stirs.

This contest for memory is a class struggle by other means.

Half our story – the half where unions created the modern middle class – is written in the pedestrian language of contracts, negotiations, wages and hours laws … the nuts and bolts of deals. After all, unions exist to make a deal.

But the other half is inscribed in the whizzing bullets, shootouts and pistol duels of out-and-out combat. Labor has its own Lexington and Gettysburg. And none more bloodily inscribed than in the hills and hollows of the West Virginia coal fields.

To Read the Rest of the Article

Survival of the Fittest: People Power versus a Social Darwinist agenda (1886-1937); The Global Reserve Army of Labor and the New Imperialism

As some of you know we have a reading group working their way through Ted Nace's Gangs of America: The Rise of Corporate Power and the Disabling of Democracy.

I just finished chapter 11) Survival of the Fittest: People Power versus a Social Darwinist agenda (1886-1937). It is essential reading for those trying to get a handle on the historical roots of our current labor relations. We currently face a role back through austerity measures, attacks on collective bargaining, and the global flight of corporations, to the conditions described in this chapter and, correspondingly, the chapter provides a look at the way in which earlier laborers fought back to achieve better lives and opportunities.

You can find the chapter here in the PDF for the whole book.

For a deeper understanding of the exploitation of labor on a global scale in our contemporary world, check out John Bellamy Foster, Robert W. McChesney, and R. Jamil Jonna's essay "The Global Reserve Army of Labor and the New Imperialism" in this months Monthly Review.

Doug Henwood: Wall Street, Populism, and the Left

Wall Street, Populism, and the Left
Against the Grain (Berkeley, CA: KPFA)

Moving your money out of the big banks that have helped create the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression may seem like an excellent idea. But leftwing journalist Doug Henwood believes such actions -- along with community currencies and attempts to abolish corporate personhood -- are misguided. Henwood discusses the long, and problematic, history of American populism, and what a radical approach to finance might look like.

To Listen to the Episode

Citizens for Tax Justice: Corporate Taxpayers & Corporate Tax Dodgers, 2008-2010

Corporate Taxpayers & Corporate Tax Dodgers, 2008-2010
Citizens for Tax Justice

NEW REPORT: 280 Most Profitable U.S. Corporations Shelter Half Their Profits from Taxes.

“These 280 corporations received a total of nearly $224 billion in tax subsidies,” said Robert McIntyre, Director at Citizens for Tax Justice and the report’s lead author. “This is wasted money that could have gone to protect Medicare, create jobs and cut the deficit.”

* 30 Companies average less than zero tax bill in the last three Years, 78 had at least one no-tax year.

* Financial services received the largest share of all federal tax subsidies over the last three years. More than half the tax subsidies for companies in the study went to four industries: financial services, utilities, telecommunications, and oil, gas & pipelines.

* U.S. corporations with significant foreign profits paid tax rates to foreign countries that were almost a third higher than they paid to the IRS on their domestic profits.

To Read the Report

Jeffrey Kaplan and Jeff Milchen: A Citizens' Independence Movement

(via Herb Reid)

A Citizens' Independence Movement
By Jeffrey Kaplan and Jeff Milchen
Tom Paine

The power and influence that corporations enjoy today—indeed, the fact that corporations have the same rights as individuals—are not what our country's founders intended. But progressive activists are working mostly on damage control, rather than making genuine, lasting progress. Here, two veteran activists explain how to bring our single-issue energies together to tear down corporate rule and restore accountability.

Jeff Milchen directs ReclaimDemocracy.org, a nonprofit organization devoted to restoring citizen authority over corporations. Jeffrey Kaplan is a writer and researcher active in the group’s San Francisco Bay area chapter.

In an era when even Business Week runs cover stories about runaway corporate power, few Americans today doubt that corporations wield immense power over our laws, governments, and almost every realm of civic society. Every day, thousands of organizations work to resist harmful actions by corporations and their myriad front groups, but how will citizens move beyond reactive struggles to enable genuine progress?

Today’s challenge for those who seek to revitalize democracy and free our country from control by corporate interests is to show others a clear vision of an America where corporations serve a narrow role—doing business and nothing more.

The trend, of course, is in the opposite direction. There have been 150 years of legal decisions favoring big business, granting corporations legal rights that our founders intended solely for individual human beings. And while human liberty is on the defensive against authoritarianism, corporations are seizing power as aggressively as ever.

For example, courts recently have ruled that municipalities attempting to control the placement of cell phone towers are violating corporate “civil rights.” Corporations selling computerized voting machines claim the 4th Amendment prevents citizens from ensuring that proprietary software isn't used to manipulate elections.

Of course it isn't just Americans’ rights threatened. Perhaps the most significant U.S. export isn't grain or pharmaceuticals, but the legal and institutional structure of corporate control. U.S. authorities declared in July 2003 that Iraq must accept foreign investment and corporatization of its (previously national) oil industry before enjoying their recently granted “sovereignty.” In other words, democracy is permissible only after the most important economic decisions for the future of Iraqis have been decided for them and transnational corporations control their economic lifeblood.

The Rise of Corporate Power

In the early decades of our nation, corporations were tightly controlled entities that enjoyed severely limited privileges and no inherent “rights.” But during the Industrial Revolution, wealthy businessmen, especially railroad executives, succeeded in winning dramatic expansions of corporate privileges. By 1890, most long-standing restrictions had been removed, and the U.S. Supreme Court had granted corporations the legal standing of natural persons—i.e. “corporate personhood.”

Soon the Court bestowed Bill of Rights protections upon them, but with virtually none of the responsibilities borne by human beings. The Supreme Court effectively had subordinated the rights of citizens to institutions with the power to undermine our personal liberties and democracy.

A powerful resistance movement arose, which culminated in the Populist Party, the last third party in American politics to dramatically influence national debate. Although the Populists were defeated in the presidential elections of 1896, populist sentiment remained strong and corporate leaders felt the need to redirect this insurrection against corporate power.

The regulatory system installed during the early 1900s was their solution to this problem. Initiated largely by big business, the regulatory system succeeded overwhelmingly in channeling Populist rebellion against the corporate power structure back into protest against separate “abuses.” The regulatory reforms placed the adjudication of these individual grievances in the hands of agencies dominated by the business entities they purported to control.

The regulatory system remains today what a U.S. attorney general reassured corporate leaders it would be at the turn of the century—“a barrier between corporations and the people.”

Rethinking Activism

Perhaps we should tear down that barrier, rather than repeatedly entangle ourselves within it. Pursuing bureaucratic remedies such as environmental impact reports and e-mailing regulatory officials who came straight from the industry may be necessary tactics, but they fail utterly as an ongoing strategy. So long as we permit wealth—both corporate and private—to dominate political life, “democracy” will be a platitude from the mouths of demagogues rather than a reality.

So what can we do if traditional means of protest won't work? In simple terms, we need to build a political movement to reclaim democracy, starting where democracy begins—at the community level. Citizens can press local and state governments to pass laws challenging corporate personhood. Such ordinances and resolutions could be much like the ones more than 330 communities have passed in opposition to the USA PATRIOT Act—and for a similar reason: our rights as citizens are in grave danger.

To Read the Rest of the Essay

Yves Smith: Bank CEOs Lying When They Say They’ve Stopped Robosigning

Bank CEOs Lying When They Say They’ve Stopped Robosigning
by Yves Smith
Naked Capitalism

Readers may recall that we posted on the credibility-straining claim by the former GMAC’s, now Ally’s CEO, that his bank was no longer engaging in robosigning.

Now in fairness, we might have a little clever use of terminology at work. Robosigning narrowly speaking, refers to the use of low paid staffers to execute documents used in court filings by the hundreds per day. This created a huge scandal when it broke because it was a flagrant violation of court procedures. Affidavits, for instance, are used in place of testimony and are required to be based on personal knowledge. A $12 an hour functionary churning out signatures clearly has not even read the paperwork, much the less has any knowledge of the various foreclosures he is pushing through the pipeline.

Ally and other major servicers now piously claim that these systematic abuses of legal procedures that date back to the 1677 Statute of Frauds were mere “sloppiness” or “paperwork errors” and they’ve cleaned up their act. Should we believe them?

While services like #5 Ally may well have dispensed with factory-style signing procedures. there is evidence on the ground that says that the banks have not made meaningful changes. But there is even evidence that robosigning is still taking place, AFTER the banks were supposedly investigated by 11 Federal regulators (we’ve repeatedly expressed our skepticism about that efforts, and our doubts were confirmed by the GAO) and after the servicers entered into consent decrees which made this sort of thing impermissible.

In July, two separate investigations, one by Reuters, one by the Associated Press, found that past robosigners were still cranking out signatures. Reuters identified six robosigners at five different servicers. As we wrote:

So…the banks have perjured themselves, made commitment to regulators that they are brazenly violating. The Reuters investigation determined that at least 5 of the 14 servicers that signed consent decrees in April are not complying with their requirements: OneWest, Bank of America, HSBC, Bank USA, Wells Fargo and GMAC Mortgage. Note that three of them (Bank of America, Wells, and GMAC, now Ally) are among the five biggest servicers, so the impact is greater than the number of derelicts suggests. And one is the annoyingly pious Wells, which keeps maintaining, contrary to all evidence, that it is better than the other servicers. In addition, another six servicers that did not sign the consent orders were also found by the Reuters exam to have engaged in abusive practices.

To Read the Rest of the Report

Wall Street vs. Greece: G20 Opens as Greek PM Pushes for Referendum on Bailout and Austerity Measures

Wall Street vs. Greece: G20 Opens as Greek PM Pushes for Referendum on Bailout and Austerity Measures
Democracy Now

World leaders are gathering in Cannes for the opening of the Group of 20 summit today. On the top of the agenda is the Greece bailout and the European debt crisis. On Monday, Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou angered many European leaders by announcing his support for a popular referendum—allowing the Greek people to decide if they want to accept the conditions of the $179 billion European Union bailout. After days of increasing criticism from European leaders, Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou is now facing calls from within his party to resign. The Greek debt scandal has also pitted U.S. banking interests against France, Germany and other European powers. "The Americans are putting immense pressure on Europe, saying, 'We will wreck your economy, if you don't wreck Greece’s economy,’" says economic analyst Michael Hudson. President Obama is "basically telling Europe, ’Don’t go the democratic route. Support Wall Street.’"

Democracy Now: "Deadly Monopolies" -- Medical Ethicist Harriet Washington on How Firms are Taking Over Life Itself

"Deadly Monopolies": Medical Ethicist Harriet Washington on How Firms are Taking Over Life Itself
Democracy Now

One of the major themes raised by the Occupy movement is the increasing power of large corporations over more and more aspects of our lives. We spend the hour looking into the issue of the corporate control of life itself. Our guest, Harriet Washington, is a medical ethicist and has just published a book that examines the extent to which what she calls the medical-industrial complex has come to control human life. In the past 30 years, more than 40,000 patents have been granted on genes alone—many more patents are pending. Washington argues that the biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies patenting these genes are more concerned with profit than with the health or medical needs of patients. Her new book is called "Deadly Monopolies: The Shocking Corporate Takeover of Life Itself—And the Consequences for Your Health and Our Medical Future."