All the money invested in private prison companies has to come from somewhere, you know. Is it any wonder that one of the big players behind for-profit incarceration is a megabank like Wells Fargo?
The advocacy group Small Business United on Thursday called on Wells Fargo to provide a full accounting of investments related to private prisons and immigrant detention centers.
Wells Fargo is one of the largest investors in Geo Group, Inc. — the second largest private prison company in the world contracted by state and federal government agencies. The group spends millions lobbying for stricter immigration enforcement.
Wells Fargo has claimed the investments in the GEO Group were made by Wells Fargo mutual funds on behalf of clients, not investments made by Wells Fargo and Company.
“We demand transparency,” said Marco Reinoso, owner of Superstar Deli for 26 years and resident of Brooklyn. “I pay my fair share of taxes and deserve to know where the dark money trail leads, and whether our money is being used to further anti-immigrant bills that hurt our economy and lead to many in our community being treated with violence and inhumanity in these detention centers.”
And of course stricter immigration enforcement plus state and federal budget cuts across the board means more need for privately-operated immigration detention centers. Amazing how that works. Pushing to lock people up and treat them like cattle to be moved around is profitable on a large enough scale, like say a huge international bank investing in the second largest for-profit prison group in the country. Rights optional, of course.
After spending a month in solitary confinement in a GEO Group operated Texas prison, 32-year-old Jesus Manuel Galindo allegedly died of an epileptic seizure in December 2008. The cell lacked an operational intercom, which would have allowed Galindo — who needed regular medical attention — to call for help. The neurologist who reviewed Galindo’s autopsy said he was “set up to die.”
In another incident, former GEO Group employees working for the Texas Youth Commission failed to report horrid conditions at a GEO-operated prison in Texas. An independent report found the bug-infested prison smelled of feces and urine, had numerous water leaks and racially segregated the young inmates.
It’s a growing field as the One Percenters take a bigger and bigger slice of the pie, leaving more desperate and broken communities and families in their wake. There’s profit to be made off the increase in socioeconomic misery out there, and by God, America is going to lead the way in that industry.
Who says capitalist innovation is dead in America? Not me.
Shawn in ShowMe
And of course Wells Fargo fund managers were powerless to invest in something else. I mean with all that pent-up capital clamoring to invest in prisons, what’s a body to do?
Redshift
The combination of this post and the earlier one about the Jim Crow origins of felon disenfranchisement make quite a theme for the day. Why is it that political groups who talk the loudest about “law and order” are always really about locking up “those” sorts of people for their own political and financial benefit?
Comrade Dread
So we’ve got private arbitration courts and private prisons.
Can’t wait for the trifecta of letting banks and corporations start and fund their own private military contractors and cops.
Then we can let the free market take care of those pesky customers delinquent on their mortgages without the need for any government oversight at all and bring home all of the manufacturing jobs that went to Chinese prison camps. .
Citizen Alan
The first case I ever litigated in federal court was on behalf of GEO Group prison guards subjected to random strip searches. We lost, mainly, I think, due to the fact that the case went to the jury on the seventh anniversary of 9/11 and the defense attorney basically said that if the warden (a vicious little Napoleon of a man) could conduct searches of guards however he saw fit, then we might as well fling open the doors and let rapists and drug dealers walk free. I’m still bitter over that case.
JC
Well, just another little piece of evidence that I need to get off my rear and leave Wells Fargo – I already have enough, of course, more than enough – but complacency and ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ set in…
Michael
Two lobbying groups for companies that build and run private prisons and detention centers played a key role in conceiving and writing the bill that became Arizona’s vile anti-immigration law.
Ruckus
@Comrade Dread:
Can’t wait for the trifecta of letting banks and corporations start and fund their own private military contractors and cops.
They already do that. Xe, Pinkerton, etc, etc.
Villago Delenda Est
@Michael:
Not to mention that many of Brewer’s inner circle personally profit from said outfits.
This fucked up society NEEDS a collapse.
S. cerevisiae
Wait until they bring back debtor’s prison, that is the next step.
Shawn in ShowMe
@Villago Delenda Est:
Having the a lot of most able-bodied men on lockdown when the society collapses is a two-fer: The only people our overlords’ private security force will have to deal with are irate bloggers and out-of-shape office personnel.
Loneoak
I’ve been making my way through this reporting on the outrageous grifting happening at the level of the Regents at the University of California. I know some of the concerns are inside baseball but it is a classic example of corruption that desperately needs more attention. Some Regents completely changed the investment strategy for the endowment and pension funds to much riskier real estate and private equity schemes that benefit themselves (including for-profit education), fired long time managers who disagreed, hired private managers for 10s of millions of dollars to handle the more complex schemes, and then hit students and pension-paying employees for the money lost in the market. Of course none of them have any experience in education, they’re just investment bankers. It’s incredibly fucked up, GOP-style corruption (and implicates Schwarzenegger big time) and is a harbinger for anyone concerned about public higher education.
West of the Cascades
But … think of all the Job Creation this is causing! Of course (per Citizen Alan’s comment), the jobs involve working as prison guards in remote places for low wages enforcing sub-human conditions on fellow human beings and being subject to random strip searches, but other than that the system is working out just fine. Maybe if we give more tax breaks to the rich they will build more prisons, and all the rest of us can either become inmates or guards.
At some point this will all collapse. I’m a fan of President Obama, but one of the domestic issues I’m disturbed by is the increase in enforcement (often arbitrary) of immigration laws instead of a focus on reforming the system. Presumably that’s good politics and a “middle ground,” (“we’re strictly enforcing the existing immigration laws instead of adopting new, No-School-If-Brown laws”), but sometimes it feels like a surrender to the xenophobic elements in this society.
Villago Delenda Est
@Loneoak:
Reminds me of the shenanigans going on in Texas under the governorship of the deserting coward. Moving “trust funds” about so cronies can skim the fees. If the fund goes under, who cares? They’ve got their fees.
Just like the entire mortgage mess. The money is not in the repayment of the mortgage, it’s in the fees for packaging the mortgages and selling them to someone who is kept deliberately in the dark on the details.
willard
I see our future. The federal government is transitioning from an insurance company with an army to an investment bank with a prison system.
Comrade Dread
@Ruckus: Those are still, in theory, under the authority of the US government and bound by US law.
I’m thinking more of a free-market state where every large corporation can hire our private police to go and arrest customers allegedly in breech of contract, seize property, and do so without answering to the US government.
Granted, I suppose we practically have that situation now given how cozy the banks are with Congress, the regulatory agencies, and law enforcement in general, so they might not even want to bother with it, unless it starts to look like the people are going to upset their little arrangement.
piratedan
@Villago Delenda Est: Brewer’s Chief of Staff also is a lobbyist for the Private Prison industry… curious neh?
cleek
@Villago Delenda Est:
no thanks.
Shawn in ShowMe
@West of the Cascades:
In America, finding the middle ground IS a surrender to the xenophobic elements in society. That 27% constitutes over 40% of the voting population. You have to work with the
pyschopathscitizens you have.Villago Delenda Est
@cleek:
Of course, the problem is that most people will learn nothing from the fall.
Which is the tragedy.
jake the snake
This is one of the reasons that “the invisible hand of the market” reminds me of this story by Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore.
http://henrykuttner.bravehost.com/Kuttner,%20Henry%20-%20Time%20Locker.html
Villago Delenda Est
And, here in on the left coast, we’re at 11-11-11 11:11
cathyx
@Villago Delenda Est: Nicely done.
Mike in NC
Makes you wonder how cozy GEO Group and Rick Perry are. Pretty tight, I’d imagine.
scav
@Villago Delenda Est: Happy Corduroy Day!
John Weiss
@Villago Delenda Est: Read much about the French revolution? I thought so.
Bubblegum Tate
@Redshift:
Because that’s what they think “law and order” is: Silencing people who might disagree with them.
Maude
Wasn’t Nixon the Law and Order president?
Heez
Only the truly moronic would ever create a profit motive for increased crime.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the American political class.
Linda Featheringill
This reminds me of those damnpinko classes where they said that much of all sorts of incarceration was for the benefit of what we are now calling the 1%.
Apparently, the damnpinkos were right.
Bubblegum Tate
O/T: Conservative investors sue over sham Tea Party TV network
Hahahaha! Grifters gonna grift….
Calouste
The USA has between 5 and 10 times the incarceration rate of Western Europe. You wonder why. Oh, and the highest in Western Europe is the United Kingdom, where also some prisons are privatized.
Svensker
@Bubblegum Tate:
TBogg has an epically funny post up about this. Too lazy to link.
Martin
Hey! Newt is up to 15%! I think his turn is finally here. How will he fuck it up?
Poopyman
@Martin: By getting something caught in his zipper that oughtn’t be there. Same as always.
Comrade Dread
@Martin: Intentionally.
I get the feeling that Newt (and Cain) aren’t really serious about actually wanting the job, as much as they’re enjoying the spotlight, the chance to be relevant again, and setting themselves up for future book and speaking tours, the lobbyist circuit, and another four years of sniping from the sidelines about how if only the Democrats would act like Republicans unemployment would be at zero.
gocart mozart
Doghouse takes down George Eff Will
http://doghouseriley.blogspot.com/2011/11/apparently-theres-now-no-distinction.html
Caz
Does it ever occur to you that no one is forcing politicians to take special interest money in return for political favors?? Why blame those offering the money when much more blame lies with those who are supposed to be looking out for us but are taking special interest and lobbying money to screw us. Hold the politicians accountable, not Wells Fargo. What a backwards view of things you have.
geg6
OT, but tangentially related because it’s about bankers…
This story made me laugh because, apparently, I am better connected than the banksters at Goldman Sachs:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204358004577028552135309864.html
I can get a table at any of his restaurants with one phone call. Hee.
My high school boyfriend does all the food photography for his (and many other celebrity chefs’) cookbooks. The last time I was in NYC, we went to Babbo and had a chef’s tasting at the chef’s table in the kitchen. Two days later, he called and told us he wanted to do the same for us at Del Posto. We’re on a first name basis.
Take that, you sociopathic fuckers!
Catsy
Remember when the “cyberpunk” vision of a world controlled by megacorporations and their private security forces was considered hyperbolic fantasy?
We’re inching closer and closer to Shadowrun without the magic and cybernetic elves.
Jeff Spender
So, now that the recall election for Scott Walker is heating up, some of the Tea Partiers are letting their patriotism shine:
http://www.politiscoop.com/us-politics/wisconsin-politics/570-tea-party-plans-premeditated-felony.html?mid=5276
Calouste
@Martin:
I don’t think he has to screw anything up. Non-Romneys just have a natural shelflife of 6 weeks. Which means btw that by the start of the primaries there will be a new non-Romney. I think we only have Paul and S*nt*r*m left.
FormerSwingVoter
@Calouste: We have a higher incarceration rate than Iran. Where, y’know, it’s illegal to date before marriage.
When your country is sending more people to prison than some of the more unhinged dictatorships around, it’s time to fucking re-evaluate.
Chyron HR
@Caz:
Okay, you can start holding Republican policicians accountable right now.
We’re waiting.
Martin
@Calouste: I think 6 weeks is how long it takes to achieve maximum grift from the party
leadersrubes. It’s all diminishing returns after that.Warren Terra
Not topical, but hilarious, and this thread is several hours old:
Calouste
@FormerSwingVoter:
FTFY. (Although there are no numbers for North Korea.)
Bring out the foam fingers! USA #1!
aliasofwestgate
@Catsy:
Actually, far closer to Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. Right down to the insane advertising aspects of it all.
Calouste
@Warren Terra:
I would have thought it was recalled because they called Ayn Rand’s turd of a book a novel.
Amir Khalid
@Warren Terra:
Given the reviews when the film was in theatrical release (Ebert was amazed by its depiction of the deserts of Wisconsin), I would have have thought that the misleading part of the blurb on the packaging was the phrase “… comes to life”.
Catsy
@aliasofwestgate: Can’t really argue that.
@Warren Terra: FTMFW.
Glen Tomkins
Debtors’ Prisons!
An idea whose time has come — again! — and you heard it here first.
Debtors’ prisons are the perfect new growth industry. They’re recession-proof! The banks funding them may be too big to fail, but you and I sure aren’t. And after we fail, the least we can do for the economy is provide one final business opportunity by requiring perpetual imprisonment in a genuine job-creating debtors’ prison.
God, that’s such an awful idea it’s bound to catch on in time to be part of the Republican platform next year. Must credit gtomkins!
bin Lurkin'
@FormerSwingVoter:
More than any unhinged dictatorship actually.
The land of the free.
Let freedom ring.
We’re number one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration
seabe
I wonder what polls worse: allowing prisoners to vote (people in prison), or the stopping of the drug testing of welfare recipients?
OzoneR
@West of the Cascades:
It’s both, welcome to America.
OzoneR
@Caz:
Do the voters not return them to office often depending on how many corporate-funded ads they run attacking their opponent?
Caz
I hold both R and D politicians accountable. During the Bush years, our corrupt politicians and specifically the corrupt Bush administration spent like money was going out of style, expanded govt insanenly, and used the war on terror to erode our individual freedoms guaranteed under the Constitution (Patriot Act, for example).
So then Obama and the progressives take over, and spending goes up even quicker, with new record debts and deficits at every turn. Govt is expanding even quicker still, and the Constitution has become merely an annoying impediment that they use every means to avoid adhering to.
Our country became the greates on earth because our founders set up a system of limited federal govt and maximum individual freedom. But the leaders in all three branches have forgotten what got us to the top of the hill, and they have all conspired to fundamentally change our system of govt to one of great centralized control over the economy and virtually every aspect of our lives. Accordingly, and not surprisingly, our country is now on a downward spiral.
This can be corrected by reducing spending, allowing the free market to be free again, and protecting our freedoms rather than hijacking them for the greater good. They encourage class warfare, refuse to reign in their damaging spending, and chip away daily at our liberty.
The tea party has it right: limited govt, adherence to the Constitution, and responsible spending. But I don’t know that we can reverse the downward trend because politicians, both R and D, are so corrupt and drunk on power and control, that they are too busy pocketing special interest dough while the car goes off the cliff.
But that’s just my humble opinion, and I’m just a troll, so what the hell do I know. Socialism is bad whether it comes all at once or bit by bit. Either way, we end up with a ruined nation, and you people are assisting the destruction with your ignorant support of corrupt politicians. I just hope that the useful idiots remain under 50% of the voting population through November, 2012, so we can at least get a less corrupt leader in place.
Herman Cain is our best bet, Obama is our worst, and the Bachmanns/Perrys/Romneys/Newts are somewhere in the middle.
Waynski
I think Mitt Romney needs to explain why Baine Capital wasn’t in on the ground floor with this. They’re job creators for Pete’s sake!
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Caz:
I really really hope that you get your wish in the primary. You teahadists need someone to represent you in the general election and I can’t think of anyone who could do that better than The Herminator.
The above is said in all sincerity. Seriously. Good luck! :)