The vulnerable people in our society are being exploited through profit driven prisons. The use of for profit prisons has been a concern for our elected officials who are trying to portray themselves as servants of the people.
Work detail is a huge concern for the people who are incarcerated, they are the ones doing work for slave wages. There is a great incentive for law enforcement and policy makers to work along with attorneys to create policies and laws which land more and more people behind bars.Beside the enormous profit in monetizing the labor of prisoners, there is a lot of money to be made by caring for prisoners. This cash cow is what has led to the current policy surrounding undocumented immigration. The so called “zero tolerance” policy is intended to create a population for the prison industry to hold.
A few years back the for profit prison industry was suffering. Crime is actually down across the country.
The profits made from prisoner care and prisoner labor were also lagging. The big boys in the industry were worried about which way things would go in the upcoming presidential election. In order to hedge their bets these industry giants supported both sides of the ballot. The were especially generous towards Donald J. Trump. They were unable to give him enough money to guarantee the election. But the electoral college came through were the voters could not and delivered the white house to Trump.The xenophobic rhetoric coming out of the The White House has been fear based and largely false. This language is typical of fascists throughout time. There is always an attempt to justify the treatment of the minority, a propaganda program to dehumanize the minorities. The reason being that humans don’t genocide other humans. You have to create a disconnect between the first class citizens and those who are to be interned, confined and eventually ethnically cleansed. This is exactly what is happening in the USA today.
This effort to confine immigrants and incarcerate their children is profit driven. The quid pro quo of how many campaign dollars were given is being paid back through contracts to confine asylum seekers. The money being made through the concentration camps is emblematic of the way business happens in the USA today. Corporations are rewarded by government for the support given to their candidacy. Favors are repaid. Investments mature.
The everyday people have very little effect on elected officials. The people have been against the loss of freedoms all along, on both sides of the aisle.
People in general don’t want to see others suffer genocide. We like to believe that we are not the sort of country which subjects people to this type of dehumanization. That belief is not reflected in reality. In reality we have separated children from their parents all through this nation’s history. Our government has been involved in separating Native children from their parents for hundreds of years. Even now Native children are taken by CPS at a rate above any other ethnicity. This is the reality for children of central American children of indigenous parents arriving at the USA border.There is a drive to push people out of drug trafficking corridors in central America. This is happening in areas where the population is majority Indigenous. The tribal people of Central America are being displaced by gang violence. These gangs want the land where the native people have been living since the dawn of time. Because these narco traffickers are heavily armed, allegedly by the USA military, they are able to massacre the Native peoples.
The same military forces which are responsible for preventing the poppy fields in Afghanistan from becoming heroine in the USA seems to be responsible for preventing cocaine from making it’s way into the USA through these central American countries. It brings to mind the Iran Contra scandal where drugs were brought into the USA through these central American countries, guns were bought with the drug money and those guns were used to arm Iranian Contras. It was a whole big thing in the 80’s that led the the president saying “I don’t recall” and to Oliver North taking the Fifth Amendment before a Senate investigation.
So now we are at this point in history, where people who are against genocide and fascism are in the streets attempting to halt the concentration camps from easily detaining suspected illegal immigrants.
This morning I read that the Department of Homeland Security was deployed against protesters in Portland Oregon. The paramilitary forces had their full turtle suits on, using clubs and threats of arrest the Federal Law Enforcement officers cleared the protest camp so that they can continue the governments immoral, illegal and internationally condemned genocide of Central American people. All in the name of profit for private prison shareholders.This brings us to an interesting question: Are we a nation of profits driven people who allow genocide in the name of profits? Or are we a nation of people who stand up for liberty over profits?
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