Okay, that isn’t part of the Decalogue, but as moral imperatives go it’s a hell of a lot closer to our national ethos than any of the Ten Commandments. Put that in front of your courthouse, jerky!
I’ll let Morris Berman say the smart words at which I’m only hinting:
As Jerry Seinfeld’s lawyer in the final episode of the series tells him: “You don’t have to help anybody; that’s what this country’s all about!” The problem is that if you live by the dollar, you die by the dollar. That’s what’s going on today. In fact, perhaps the really interesting question is not why we are finally coming apart, which strikes me as being more or less obvious, but how we managed to stay together for this long. Competition cannot be the glue of a society, because by definition it’s an anti-glue. Thus David Ehrenfeld, Professor of Biology at Rutgers University, recently wrote: “A society driven mainly by selfish individualism has all the potential for sustainability of a collection of angry scorpions in a bottle.”
Read the whole thing; it’s priceless.
Anyway, in my Facebook meanderings I found this article:
Private Prisons Spend Millions on Lobbying to Put More People in Jail
JPI claims the private industry hasn’t merely responded to the nation’s incarceration woes, it has actively sought to create the market conditions (ie. more prisoners) necessary to expand its business.
According to JPI, the private prison industry uses three strategies to influence public policy: lobbying, direct campaign contributions, and networking. The three main companies have contributed $835,514 to federal candidates and over $6 million to state politicians. They have also spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on direct lobbying efforts. CCA has spent over $900,000 on federal lobbying and GEO spent anywhere from $120,000 to $199,992 in Florida alone during a short three-month span this year. Meanwhile, “the relationship between government officials and private prison companies has been part of the fabric of the industry from the start,” notes the report. The cofounder of CCA himself used to be the chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party.
This is really bad, and it reminded me of this:
‘Cash for Kids’ judge took $1 m kickback from private jail builder to lock children up
A former judge has been convicted of taking a $1million kickback from the builder of a juvenile jail in the notorious ‘cash for kids’ scandal.
Mark Ciavarella sent hundreds of children and teenagers to the private prison for minor crimes after being given the money by the company which ran it.
Some of the children jailed were as young as 10 and at least one killed themselves because the excessive sentences ruined their lives.
If you read the whole article, you’ll learn that this piece of shit judge got only 13 years for what he did. Thirteen measly years, of which he’ll probably serve only a fraction in some minimum-security country club facility. This for ruining the lives of dozens if not hundreds of middle-class white kids. Is it any surprise that what the private prisons are doing is not only legal but probably very popular among the 1%? (After all, the inmates the lobbying prison owners expect to receive are going to be predominantly brown and black, and decidedly un-middle class, so why should any political backlash be expected?)
Morris has more to say about the ‘hustling’ ethos:
Consider the fact that every religion, and every civilization worth the name, has as its central tenet the notion that you are, in fact, your brother’s keeper. But the ‘hustling’ way of life enshrines just the opposite: it says that virtue consists of personal success in an opportunistic environment, and that if you can screw the other guy on your way to the top, more power to you.
To where might this lead?
There is a story, probably apocryphal, of a Native American scouting expedition that came across the starving members of the Donner Party in 1847, who were snowbound in the Sierra Nevadas and resorted to cannibalism in order to survive. The expedition, which had never seen white people before, observed the Donner Party from a distance, then returned to base camp to report what they had seen. The report consisted of four words: “They eat each other.”
…
Unless the Wall Street protests manage to turn things around in a fundamental way, “They eat each other” is going to be our epitaph.
I juxtapose the story of the corrupt judge and the for-profit prison lobbying for a reason: the former is clearly not legal, though the perpetrator got away with it so long because it was just a degree away from the latter, which is legal, and he probably might not have been caught, or at least not criminally charged, had he not been so greedy and arrogant to exploit a demographic that most of the public would clearly identify as having been wronged.
All this takes place in a society– such as it can be called a society– that still glorifies the accumulation of wealth without scruples, and even passes laws and regulations to make the most brazen and blatant thievery legal. Even in the wake of the real material devastation this culture of legalized theft has wrought, there can’t be found the political will to eradicate or even curb it. This is because, as Morris Berman cites John Steinbeck, ‘in the United States the poor regard themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”’ If I support a system that penalizes that rich asshole for stealing the system blind, then I won’t get my chance to steal. It’s a formula for certain death.
