As we learned from All The President’s Men, if not from Watergate itself, if you want to uncover corruption you need to follow the money trail. So who is making money these days? Beyond the obvious Military-Energy Complex, we also have private prisons and for-profit education.
First the prisons. In Mississippi, a corporation known as GEO Group managed three correctional facilities including the Walnut Grove Youth Detention Facility (WGYDF) about which the Department of Justice reported earlier this year:
WGYCF is deliberately indifferent to staff sexual misconduct and inappropriate behavior with youth. The sexual misconduct we found was among the worst that we have seen in any facility anywhere in the nation. Further, staff fails to report allegations of staff sexual abuse to supervisors and State officials, as required by law.
Evidence reveals systematic, egregious and dangerous practices at WGYCF exacerbated by a lack of accountability and controls. The Justice Department found reasonable cause to believe that a pattern or practice of unconstitutional conduct exists in several areas, including:
Deliberate indifference to staff sexual misconduct and inappropriate behavior with youth;
Use of excessive use of force by WGYCF staff on youth;
Inadequate protection of youth from youth-on-youth violence;
Deliberate indifference to youth at risk of self-injurious and suicidal behaviors; and
Deliberate indifference to the medical needs of youth.
“Our findings show that due to the unconstitutional operation of WGYCF, youth were sexually preyed upon by staff and all too frequently suffered grievous harm, including death,” said Thomas E. Perez, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division. “The widespread and significant deficiencies at the facility violate the Eighth Amendment’s mandate that imprisoned youth be protected from harm and provided with adequate medical and mental health care. “
As the first post further points out:
The CEO of GEO George C. Zoley earned a salary of $1,145,000, got a bonus of $1,334,498 and with other compensations like stock options, the total for him is $5,734,949. The company he heads up, the GEO Group, is raking in the blood money by the barrel full.
The post also goes on to note that GEO, along with Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), regularly run facilities “plagued with dangerous conditions due to the private operator’s cost-saving measures. .”
Along with prisons, schools should not be for profit. The State requires children to attend school in a similar way to how the State “requires” some individuals to go to prison. In both cases, private corporations should not be allowed to profit from the situation. If this is allowed, corporations would be in a position to write regulations which require citizens to consume their product. For prisons we see corporatists loving the war on drugs, of course, and now the crackdown on illegal immigrants, both of which increase prison populations and spur the building of new prisons.
For schools, we have textbooks and testing, as well as whole schools with the so-called charter schools. But as the second post says:
Testing is big business
The education commissioner of Texas, a Republican, recently said that:
“The assessment and accountability regime has become not only a cottage industry but a military-industrial complex. And the reason that you’re seeing this move toward the “common core” is there’s a big business sentiment out there that if you’re going to spend $600-$700 billion a year in public education, why shouldn’t be one big Boeing, or Lockheed-Grumman contract where one company can get it all and provide all these services to schools across the country.”
Texas has been at the forefront of the testing craze; in fact, testing was one of the things George W. Bush brought with him from Texas and pushed to a national level, through No Child Left Behind. In 2000, Pearson Education, the company that produces tests for Texas, “signed a $233 million contract to provide tests for Texas schools, and in 2005 they got another $279 million.” In 2011, as Texas was slashing its education budget to the bone, Gov. Rick Perry’s administration gave Pearson a $470 million contract “to come up with a new test that will hold Texas schoolchildren to a higher standard at the same time that budget cuts are forcing them into increasingly crowded classrooms.”
Ahh yes, the “Texas Miracle” as it was called during the Gore v. Bush presidential contest. The name is perfect for the right-wing framing: “miracle” implies that Bush’s education is great, but the reality is that it would be a miracle if the republicans did anything positive vis a vis education. The corporatists are still doing the same thing as with Michelle Rhee and the D.C. schools.
So once again: keep the profit motive, and corporations, out of basic state services.
