Private Police

Private police are on the increase.  These are police who work for corporations, and their objectives are not necessarily to enforce any law but to carry out the wishes of the corporation they work for.  Yet, according to this article, they are increasingly arresting citizens for "violations" of laws.

2015.0301Su.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/private-police-carry-guns-and-make-arrests-and-their-ranks-are-swelling/2015/02/28/29f6e02e-8f79-11e4-a900-9960214d4cd7_story.html?tid=sm_tw

Page 21.  “Private security guards have outnumbered government police officers since the 1980s.  Coordination between private and official agencies often ovelap and the private agencies now perform work previously assigned to official agencies.(2.4)  Wackenhut for example has contracts to guard the Internal Revenue Service, the General Accounting Office, the Federal Reserve, Oak Ridge National Security Complex, Savannah River nuclear plant, Jet Propulsion Laboratory,  even Fort Bragg, and this is not a complete list.  They also have various resources devoted to airports, ports, and specialized Global Response Teams and Executive Protection Services, etc. Wackenhut, DynCorp, Blackwater, Triple Canopy  are four of about forty-five “Private MIlitary Firms” that can be found on a “partial list”. (2.5)  There are recurring reports that some members of local police forces leave their jobs to begin work with the private police forces which pay more money and have fewer regulations.”

Feeding Our Children Silent Screams

Gestation crates are necessary for only one thing:  PROFIT.  Gestation Crates make the extremely rich people even richer, one poor pig at a time.

The crates simply aren’t even necessary to raise pigs. For generations, family farms have been raising these intelligent and social animals without crates.  It is not just that a sow spends a pregnancy or two in one of these torture devices, but the animal is bred again and again and actually can spend up to 80% of her entire life being pregnant, tortured and becoming actually insane.  When she is too old to be bred again she is killed. 

The hog producers on these industrial farms say these crates are efficient, effective and productive, and claim they reduce the cost of the meat produced for the public, keeping prices down.  This seems to put the blame for gestation crates on us, the public, the consumer.  It becomes our fault.  Do we really want to feed our children silent screams?

The primatologist Jane Goodall writes that “farm animals feel pleasure and sadness, excitement and resentment, depression, fear and pain. They are far more aware and intelligent than we ever imagined ... they are individuals in their own right.”

Are we proclaiming to history that the ONLY thing America values is money?  Have we sunk THAT far below the surface of Capitalism?  Do we want that to be our  enduring record?  Will that become our own memorial gestation crate?

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Cigarette Ads on Parade Magazine

 

Your advertisement for Pall Mall cigarettes in last Sunday's edition indicates a major change in Parade Magazine’s attitude towards tobacco advertisement.  While it states that the Surgeon General has detected "Carbon Monoxide" in the smoke, the advertisement does not mention that cigarettes are also extremely addictive (partly because of ADDED addictive substances), and that both smoking and "second-hand" smoking causes cancer and shortens life-spans.  Your insertion of tobacco advertisements into your magazine demonstrates a contempt for your intended readers not seen perviously.   It appears you value advertising revenue greater than you do the health of your readers or that of your reader’s children.   I will contact the newspapers who carry your magazine and ask them to find another magazine to insert into their Sunday editions.  John Womack.

Contact Message to Parade Magazine today.  You can reach Parade at http://parade.com/contact-us/ (Also just read that Parade has fired 85 long time workers as Parade was recently bought by another company)

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Capitalism Has Transformed the American Prison Industry.

Here are three comments about what Capitalism has done to the American prison industry.   They were taken from the book by John Womack, "Capitalism:  Servant or Master?"  
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1  As state owned prisons are converted to private prisons their lobbyists petition legislatures for stricter laws and longer sentences.  The more prisoners who are admitted into and kept in the prisons, the greater will be the profits the private prison industry will realize.  Page 20

2  The number of prisoners increased dramatically beginning in 1980, just as the deregulation of capitalism began, from under 500,000 in 1980 to 2,000,000 in the year 2000.  Page 36   FootNote:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States

3  We pretend our criminal justice system is modern and leads the world in that skill.   Yet we are one of the very few nations left on earth who still execute some of its prisoners, and most of those we kill are black, poor, undereducated, mentally retarded or mentally ill.  America has more citizens in jail and prisons than any other nation on earth in both percentage and total number.  More and more, our prisons in America are built by and run by private industries who NEED more and more prisoners to continue to increase their profits. They lobby legislators and congress for minimum sentencing requirements, longer sentences, and now are beginning to use prison labor to produce products for the private prison’s profit while working for far less than minimum wage. Page 90 

FootNote:  http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8289

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Who can REALLY vote? And how many times? And where?

There is a pressure developing among Republicans to "control" the right to vote.   Presumedly that is  to insure that citizens only vote once in each election.  Allegedly, they say, "some people" vote twice, particularly college students vote in the state in which they "live" and again in the state where they attend school.  So therefore, much more stringent controls need to be established over all voters in the nation.

But notice how the large corporations – none of whom can really cast ballots – still manage to "vote" – not with ballots, but with money.  And also, they can "vote" MANY times in all elections, day after day, in the long primary seasons which precede the balloting.  AND they can vote in two states if they want to.  In fact, they can vote in ALL FIFTY states if they "need" to.

If I had a large (as in really big) amount of money, I could bring pressure to legislators not just in North Carolina, but also in California, New York and Texas, and other states too.  I could speak to members of their senate and house of representatives as well as to their representatives and senators in Washington, DC.  And I could "talk money" to them.  Better yet, I could call up some "friends" of mine and talk to them.  Then my "friends" could call the representatives and convey my message in a way they would all be familiar with.  My new "friends" would be really good because they would be former representatives themselves and they would know how to phrase my wishes better than I ever could.  My "friends" would lobby the representatives very well, and even provide my wishes written in "bill-submission" form.  

And EVEN – and I won't really mention this – if I were a member of a corporation based in another country, and I was a legal resident of another country myself, I could STILL speak (with money) to our new "friends" back in the states.  All they would want to verify is that my money was in American dollars.  Here is a quote from my book "Capitalism:  Servant or Master?" p. 81:


         "At least thirty major U. S. corporations pay more money for lobbying than they pay in taxes.  Many of these same companies also receive subsidies from the American taxpayers so they are actually shown as paying a NEGATIVE income tax.  Here is that list:  <http://publicampaign.org/sites/default/files/ReportTaxDodgerLobbyingDec6.pdf  >
Many of these corporations are national in scale.  A large and an increasing number are international, some may have directors from foreign nations, yet they can still – according to the United States Supreme Court in “Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission” – provide instructional information, items of personal interest, and large sums of money to American senators and representatives to try to influence their votes on bills that are important to them and also to provide money for election campaigns.  This creates an opportunity for some foreign nationals to have greater influence in the United States Congress than many American citizens have who don’t feel they have the money to send any to their elected representatives." 

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Private Prisons Produce Profits.

China is the most populated nation on the planet with some 1.4 billion people; India is closing quickly at 1.3 billion.  Together they comprise more than 2.7 billion.  The population of the United States of America is 313 million, only 1/8 the size of the two most populated  nations in the world.

When we look at the prison population of those nations however, we find that the United States has almost 25% MORE of its people in jails or prisons than do the COMBINED prison population of BOTH China and India.

The graph shows an enormous increase in American prison population beginning in 1980.  This is when private, for-profit prisons began taking over an increasingly rising  prison population.  It was asserted by the private prisons that they could do a better and cheaper job.  The same time, state legislatures began writing laws that were seen to be more restrictive, and punishment times were increased. 

“The criminal justice system is urged by capitalist owners to convert to  privately-owned prisons.  They claim private enterprises would be more cost-effective than government-run prisons and would save money.  As state owned prisons are converted to private prisons their lobbyists petition legislatures for stricter laws and longer sentences.  The more prisoners who are admitted into and kept in the prisons, the greater will be the profits the private prison industry will realize.”  Pg. 20  of “Capitalism:  Servant of Master?”

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Who Pays For Duke's Problem - Us or the Rich Guys?

Duke Energy suffered a major pollution problem on February 9, 2014, when approximately 35,000,000 gallons of toxic coal slurry leaked into the Dan River near Eden, NC.  Three weeks later, a second leak began pouring arsenic-laced wastewater into the same river.  Now some 70 miles of that river is caked with toxic coal ash.  

Duke has 33 more lagoons storing coal ash in 14 sites it North Carolina.  Duke estimates the cost to clean up all this pollution will exceed one billion dollars. 

Profit:  The money remaining from the sale of goods or services after all the expenses, debts and taxes associated with the operation have been paid.

“Capitalism:  Servant or Master?” P. 71.  When corporations say they could reduce pollution but that would mean higher prices for us, that seems to imply these problems are really our fault – we would rather have the pollution and be poisoned, and get sick and suffer medically, and pay medical bills than pay higher prices for the products they want to sell us.  Does it actually make no difference to them?  Not really.  If they paid the full costs of their production a truer picture of what people are buying would be available to everyone.  While prices would rise for consumers of the item, the profits might also shrink for the shareholders and corporate officers.  That would reduce capital available to the company.  Some shareholders might move their investments to other companies. Some mutual funds would automatically switch to other companies through computer programming procedures.

http://myfox8.com/2014/02/26/duke-energy-not-required-to-pay-federal-income-taxes-for-past-5-years/

Citizens for Tax Justice in Washington D.C. says big-profit companies are using “loopholes and tax breaks” to avoid paying a single penny in federal income taxes.

The report includes Duke Energy on a list of 26 Fortune 500 companies that have not paid any federal income taxes in five years.

“Duke Energy had a tax rate of a negative 3.5 percent which means they actually got refunds back from the IRS,” pointed out Rebecca Wilkins with Citizens for Tax Justice.

Duke Energy has made more than $9 billion in profits since 2008, according to the report.

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