China's Russia bailout is an ominous sign for the future

 William Pesek

Thanks to China, Christine Lagarde of the International Monetary Fund, Jim Yong Kim of the World Bank and Takehiko Nakao of the Asian Development Bank may no longer have much meaningful work to do.

Beijing's move to bail out Russia, on top of its recent aid for Venezuela and Argentina, signals the death of the post-war Bretton Woods world. It’s also marks the beginning of the end for America's linchpin role in the global economy and Japan's influence in Asia.

What is China's new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank if not an ADB killer? If Japan, ADB's main benefactor, won't share the presidency with Asian peers, Beijing will just use its deep pockets to overpower it. Lagarde's and Kim’s shops also are looking at a future in which crisis-wracked governments call Beijing before Washington. 

China stepping up its role as lender of last resort upends an economic development game that's been decades in the making. The IMF, World Bank and ADB are bloated, change-adverse institutions.  When Ukraine received a $17 billion IMF-led bailout this year it was about shoring up a geopolitically important economy, not geopolitical blackmail.

Chinese President Xi Jinping's government doesn't care about upgrading economies, the health of tax regimes or central bank reserves. It cares about loyalty. The quid pro quo: For our generous assistance we expect your full support on everything from Taiwan to territorial disputes to deadening the West’s pesky focus on human rights.

This may sound hyperbolic; Russia, Argentina and Venezuela are already at odds with the U.S. and its allies. But what about Europe? In 2011 and 2012, it looked to Beijing to save euro bond markets through massive purchases. Expect more of this dynamic in 2015 should fresh turmoil hit the euro zone, at which time Beijing will expect European leaders to pull their diplomatic punches. What happens if the Federal Reserve’s tapering slams economies from India to Indonesia and governments look to China for help? Why would Cambodia, Laos or Vietnam bother with the IMF’s conditions when China writes big checks with few strings attached?

Beijing’s $24 billion currency swap program to help Russia is a sign of things to come. Russia, it's often said, is too nuclear to fail. As Moscow weathers the worst crisis since the 1998 default, it’s tempting to view China as a good global citizen. But Beijing is just enabling President Vladimir Putin, who’s now under zero pressure to diversify his economy away from oil. The same goes for China’s $2.3 billion currency swap with Argentina and its $4 billion loan to Venezuela. In the Chinese century, bad behavior has its rewards.

If ever there were a time for President Barack Obama to accelerate his "pivot" to Asia it's now. There's plenty to worry about as China tosses money at rogue governments like Sudan and Zimbabwe. But there’s also lots at stake for Asia's budding democracies. The so-called Washington consensus on economic policies isn't perfect, but is Beijing's model of autocratic state capitalism with scant press freedom really a better option? With China becoming Asia's sugar daddy, the temptation in, say, Myanmar might be to avoid the difficult process of creating credible institutions to oversee the economy.

There could be a silver lining to China lavishing its nearly $4 trillion of currency reserves on crisis-plagued nations: It might force the IMF, World Bank and ADB to raise their games. Competition, as Lagarde, Kim and Nakao would agree, is a good thing. But more likely, China's largess will encourage bad policy habits and impede development in ways that leave the global economy worse off.

To contact the author on this story:

William Pesek at wpesek@bloomberg.net

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-12-25/china-steps-in-as-worlds-new-bank

"Better numb than Islam"

JUAN GABRIEL TOKATLIAN 

The attitudes of most American citizens to violence against Muslims bodes ill for democracy in the United States.

Over the half-century cold war, when the United States's enemy was the Soviet Union and the fight against communism was Washington's main priority, “better dead than red” was far more than a slogan. It epitomised and rationalised American public opinion's relative acceptance of huge defence budgets at home and abhorrent procedures abroad such as punitive wars, clandestine interventions, killing of foreign leaders and export of torture techniques. In the course of changing geopolitics, "better red than dead" found a new focus. Even before the collapse of the USSR, but especially after 9/11, America’s “war against terror” seemed to generate a new logic among a very large number of US citizens: “better numb than Islam”. 

Andrew Bacevich, fellow at Columbia University, showed in a Washington Postop-ed that fourteen countries where Muslims for the vast majority have been invaded, occupied or bombed by the United States since 1980; most recently, US drone-warfare has targeted Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya (see "Even if we defeat the Islamic State, we'll still lose the bigger war", 3 October 2014). A Congressional Research Service (CRS) report on the use of US armed forces abroad, published in September 2014, concluded that the overwhelming percentage of the 146 deployments over the post-cold-war period has been against Muslim-populated nations. 

What do we know about American perceptions of and reactions to this hardline, bellicose policy towards the Islamic world? Several polls over 2013-14, after most American troops left Iraq and their presence in Afghanistan was also much reduced, provide some evidence. A Gallup poll of March 2013, for example, showed that 65% of Americans favour drone airstrikes; a Rasmussen poll of December 2014 puts the number at 71%. Moreover, two different polls in July 2014 reflect highly negative opinions vis-à-vis Islam. A Pew Research poll on religious groups found that Muslims received the coldest rating, while a Zogby Analytics poll confirmed that attitudes towards Muslims were worsening. In addition, another Pew Research poll of September 2014 concluded that Americans see Islam as encouraging more violence than other religions. 

The disclosure in December 2014 of the Senate intelligence-committee's reporton torture by the CIA in the post-9/11 years has not seemed to alter the adverse views of Islam held by most Americans, nor their backing for whatever the United States government does. The most recent Washington Post/ABC News survey confirms that a majority of the US public holds that torture was justifiable after 11 September 2001. 

Why does brutalising civilians in the Muslim world not provoke any sympathy towards the victims? Why are Americans unmoved or disturbed by the illegal and immoral practices of the US intelligence system? Why is a very large percentage of US citizens so indifferent to or supportive of the amount of violence that the United States deploys against Muslims in their countries? Why are Americans willing to see their own democracy eroded in the fight againstterrorism in the Middle East, central Asia, and north Africa?

In the end, the combination of fear, frustration, and fatalism among Americans is perfect for legitimising abuse and injustice. If the logic of “better numb than Islam” is truly prevailing, then Americans - and those in the rest  the world - should get ready for a severe downgrade of US democracy.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/juan-gabriel-tokatlian/better-numb-than-islam

American Exceptionalism and American Torture

The Cold Air of the Dark Ages

by WILLIAM BLUM

In 1964, the Brazilian military, in a US-designed coup, overthrew a liberal (not more to the left than that) government and proceeded to rule with an iron fist for the next 21 years. In 1979 the military regime passed an amnesty law blocking the prosecution of its members for torture and other crimes. The amnesty still holds.

That’s how they handle such matters in what used to be called The Third World. In the First World, however, they have no need for such legal niceties. In the United States, military torturers and their political godfathers are granted amnesty automatically, simply for being American, solely for belonging to the “Good Guys Club”.

So now, with the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture, we have further depressing revelations about US foreign policy. But do Americans and the world need yet another reminder that the United States is a leading practitioner of torture? Yes. The message can not be broadcast too often because the indoctrination of the American people and Americophiles all around the world is so deeply embedded that it takes repeated shocks to the system to dislodge it. No one does brainwashing like the good ol’ Yankee inventors of advertising and public relations. And there is always a new generation just coming of age with stars (and stripes) in their eyes.

The public also has to be reminded yet again that – contrary to what most of the media and Mr. Obama would have us all believe – the president has never actually banned torture per se, despite saying recently that he had “unequivocally banned torture” after taking office.

Shortly after Obama’s first inauguration, both he and Leon Panetta, the new Director of the CIA, explicitly stated that “rendition” was not being ended. As the Los Angeles Times reported at the time: “Under executive orders issued by Obama recently, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States.”

The English translation of “cooperate” is “torture”. Rendition is simply outsourcing torture. There was no other reason to take prisoners to Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Egypt, Jordan, Kenya, Somalia, Kosovo, or the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, amongst other torture centers employed by the United States. Kosovo and Diego Garcia – both of which house large and very secretive American military bases – if not some of the other locations, may well still be open for torture business, as is the Guantánamo Base in Cuba.

Moreover, the key Executive Order referred to, number 13491, issued January 22, 2009, “Ensuring Lawful Interrogations”, leaves a major loophole. It states repeatedly that humane treatment, including the absence of torture, is applicable only to prisoners detained in an “armed conflict”. Thus, torture by Americans outside an environment of “armed conflict” is not explicitly prohibited. But what about torture within an environment of “counter-terrorism”?

The Executive Order required the CIA to use only the interrogation methods outlined in a revised Army Field Manual. However, using the Army Field Manual as a guide to prisoner treatment and interrogation still allows solitary confinement, perceptual or sensory deprivation, sensory overload, sleep deprivation, the induction of fear and hopelessness, mind-altering drugs, environmental manipulation such as temperature and noise, and stress positions, amongst other charming examples of American Exceptionalism.

After Panetta was questioned by a Senate panel, the New York Times wrote that he had “left open the possibility that the agency could seek permission to use interrogation methods more aggressive than the limited menu that President Obama authorized under new rules … Mr. Panetta also said the agency would continue the Bush administration practice of ‘rendition’ … But he said the agency would refuse to deliver a suspect into the hands of a country known for torture or other actions ‘that violate our human values’.”

The last sentence is of course childishly absurd. The countries chosen to receive rendition prisoners were chosen precisely and solely because they were willing and able to torture them.

Four months after Obama and Panetta took office, the New York Timescould report that renditions had reached new heights.

The present news reports indicate that Washington’s obsession with torture stems from 9/11, to prevent a repetition. The president speaks of “the fearful excesses of the post-9/11 era”. There’s something to that idea, but not a great deal. Torture in America is actually as old as the country. What government has been intimately involved with that horror more than the United States? Teaching it, supplying the manuals, supplying the equipment, creation of international torture centers, kidnaping people to these places, solitary confinement, forced feeding, Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Chicago … Lord forgive us!

In 2011, Brazil instituted a National Truth Commission to officially investigate the crimes of the military government, which came to an end in 1985. But Mr. Obama has in fact rejected calls for a truth commission concerning CIA torture. On June 17 of this year, however, when Vice President Joseph Biden was in Brazil, he gave the Truth Commission 43 State Department cables and reports concerning the Brazilian military regime, including one entitled “Widespread Arrests and Psychophysical Interrogation of Suspected Subversives.”

Thus it is that once again the United States of America will not be subjected to any accountability for having broken US laws, international laws, and the fundamental laws of human decency. Obama can expect the same kindness from his successor as he has extended to George W.

“One of the strengths that makes America exceptional is our willingness to openly confront our past, face our imperfections, make changes and do better.” – Barack Obama, written statement issued moments after the Senate report was made public.

And if that pile of hypocrisy is not big enough or smelly enough, try adding to it Bidens’ remark re his visit to Brazil: “I hope that in taking steps to come to grips with our past we can find a way to focus on the immense promise of the future.”

If the torturers of the Bush and Obama administrations are not held accountable in the United States they must be pursued internationally under the principles of universal jurisdiction.

In 1984, an historic step was taken by the United Nations with the drafting of the “Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment” (came into force in 1987, ratified by the United States in 1994). Article 2, section 2 of the Convention states: “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”

Such marvelously clear, unequivocal, and principled language, to set a single standard for a world that makes it increasingly difficult for one to feel proud of humanity. We cannot slide back. If today it’s deemed acceptable to torture the person who supposedly has the vital “ticking-bomb” information needed to save lives, tomorrow it will be acceptable to torture him to learn the identities of his alleged co-conspirators. Would we allow slavery to resume for just a short while to serve some “national emergency” or some other “higher purpose”?

If you open the window of torture, even just a crack, the cold air of the Dark Ages will fill the whole room.

William Blum is the author of Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Rogue State: a guide to the World’s Only Super Power . His latest book is: America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy. He can be reached at: BBlum6@aol.com

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/12/29/american-exceptionalism-and-american-torture/

A Wildly Unproven Theory About “The Interview” Based on Ancient Hollywood Wisdom

Selling Seth Rogen's Dog

by CLANCY SIGAL

Here’s how I figure: Sony’s Amy Pascal, producer Scott Rudin and the marketing people took one look at Seth Rogen’s dog and knew it was a loser. Desperate, they devised a quietly brilliant marketing strategy to make it look as if the North Koreans were criminally responsible for the hacking fiasco so that the film, on line and in theatres, would be sold out because patrons would go to see it as their patriotic duty. (In Atlanta’s Plaza theatre the audience stood and sang “God Bless America” before the picture went on.)

It would not surprise me if Sony had somehow persuaded, or maneuvered, Kim Jong-Un to do what he did (or didn’t do). Convince me otherwise.

Ancients ago as an agent I “repped” a sweet, innocent, virtually sexless comedy “The Moon Is Blue” by a client F. Hugh Herbert. Two aging bachelors (client David Niven and William Holden) campaign to seduce a young woman who stubbornly, propagandistically remains a virgin. No physical sex, no bad words, and we didn’t expect much box office despite its Broadway success.

The moralists rode to our rescue. The then-reigning rating czars at the Motion Picture Association banned it because the script reflected an “unacceptably light attitude towards seduction, illicit sex, chastity and virginity,” among other things. Hooray!

But we really lucked out when the Catholic church’s cardinal Spellman and his bishops from pulpits commanded their flocks to stay away which of course just added to our box office. One day my boss burst into my office shouting gleefully, “We’re in! The Pope just banned us!”

How did we ever manage that? I asked.

She grinned evilly. “Ah, we have our ways.”

Clancy Sigal is a screenwriter and novelist. His latest book is Hemingway Lives.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/12/29/a-wildly-unproven-theory-about-the-interview-based-on-ancient-hollywood-wisdom/

The West Needs More Than a White Knight to Defeat ISIS

Despite Billions Spent on Weapons, the US has not Been Able to Counter the Militants' Gruesome Tactics

by PATRICK COCKBURN

There is a scene in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass in which Alice meets the White Knight who is wearing full armour and riding a horse off which he keeps falling. Alice expresses curiosity about why he has placed spiked metal anklets on his horse’s legs just above the hoofs. “To guard against the bites of sharks,” he explains, and proudly shows her other ingenious devices attached to himself and his horse.

Alice notices that the knight has a mouse trap fastened to his saddle. “I was wondering what the mouse trap was for,” says Alice. “It isn’t very likely there would be any mice on the horse’s back.” “Not very likely, perhaps,” says the Knight, “but if they do come, I don’t choose to have them running all about.” It’s as well “to be provided for everything”, adds the Knight. As he explains his plans for countering these supposed dangers, he continues to tumble off his horse.

The White Knight’s approach to military procurement is very similar to that of the American and British military establishments. They drain their budgets to purchase vastly expensive equipment to meet threats that may never exist, much like the sharks and mice that menace Alice’s acquaintance. Thus the Pentagon spends $400bn (£257bn) on developing the F-35 fighter (Britain is buying planes at a cost of £100m each) to gain air superiority over Russia and China in the event of a war with either power. Meanwhile, equipment needed to fight real wars is neglected, even though no answer has been found to old-fashioned weapons such as improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that caused two-thirds of the US-led coalition’s casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A strange aspect of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is that there has been so little criticism of the failure of expensively equipped Western armies to defeat lightly armed and self-trained insurgents. This is in sharp contrast to the aftermath of the US Army’s failure to win the war in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s. The question is of more than historic interest because the US, UK and other allies are re-entering the wars in Iraq and Syria where they are seeking to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis).

Perhaps the military are not being blamed for lack of success in Iraq and Afghanistan because the failure there is seen as political, rather than military. There is some truth in this, but it is also true that army commanders have been agile in avoiding responsibility for what went wrong. A senior US diplomat asked me in exasperation in Baghdad five or six years ago: “Whatever happened to the healthy belief the American public had after Vietnam that our generals seldom tell the truth?”

Iraq this year has seen a more grotesque and wide-ranging failure than the inability to cope with IEDs. The Iraqi Army was created and trained by the US at great expense, but this summer it was defeated by a far smaller and less well-armed force of insurgents led by Isis. It was one of the most shameful routs in history, as Iraqi Army commanders abandoned their men, jumped into helicopters and fled. The new Iraqi Prime Minister, Haider al-Abadi, admits that 50,000 “ghost soldiers” in the Iraqi Army had never existed and their salaries fraudulently diverted into their officers’ pockets.

The Iraqi Army and Iraqi Police Service, some 350,000 soldiers and 650,000 police, had been built by the US at a cost of $26bn since 2003, according to the recent report of the US Special Investigator General for Iraq Reconstruction. It is a fascinating document that demands answers to many questions, such as how did $9.4bn get spent on training, staffing and supplying the Iraqi police, though this force is notorious for its corruption and incompetence. Another $3.4bn went on supplying the Iraqi Army with tanks, aircraft, boats, armoured personnel carriers and other equipment, much of which was later captured by Isis. Curiously, Isis was immediately able to find crews for the tanks and artillerymen for the guns without any lengthy and expensive training programmes.

The 3,000 American soldiers President Obama has sent back into Iraq are to start training the remaining 26 brigades of the Iraqi Army all over again, without anybody asking what went wrong between 2003 and 2014. Why is it that Isis recruits can fight effectively after two weeks’ military training and two weeks’ religious instruction, but the Iraqi Army cannot? Maybe the very fact of being foreign-trained delegitimises them in their own eyes and that of their people.

Renewed foreign military intervention in Iraq and Syria is primarily in the form of air strikes of which there have been more than 1,000 since bombing started in Iraq on 8 August. What is striking about these figures is that there have been so few compared to the 48,224 air strikes during the 43 days of bombing against Saddam Hussein’s army in 1991. A reason for this is that Isis is a guerrilla force that can be dispersed, so only about 10 per cent of missions flown actually lead to air strikes against targets on the ground.

Only against the Isis forces besieging the Syrian-Kurdish town of Kobani in northern Syria is the US Air Force able to inflict heavy casualties. It is not clear why Isis continues with a battle where it is most vulnerable to air power, but the probable reason is that it wants to prove it can win another divinely inspired victory, despite heavy air attacks.

In more than 10 years of war in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, it is the insurgents and not those in charge of Western military policy and procurement who have developed the most effective cocktail of military tactics and methods of attack suited to local circumstances. These include various types of IEDs supplemented by booby traps that make those few areas reconquered from Isis dangerous for soldiers and uninhabitable for civilians.

IS has turned suicide bombing by individuals or by vehicles packed with explosives into an integral part of their fighting repertoire, enabling them to make devastating use of untrained but fanatical foreign volunteers. Isis deploys well-trained snipers and mortar teams, but its most effective weapon is spreading terror by publicising its atrocities through the internet.

Gruesome though these tactics are, they are much more effective than anything developed by Western armies in these same conflicts. Worse, Western training encourages an appetite on the part of its allies for helicopters, tanks and artillery that only have limited success in Iraqi conditions, although bombing does have an impact in preventing Isis using a good road system for attacks by several hundred fighters in convoys of pick-up trucks and captured Humvees.

While Isis may be suffering more casualties, it is in a position to recruit tens of thousands fighters from the population of at least five or six million that it controls. Six months after the Islamic State was declared, it has not grown smaller. As with the White Knight, the US and its allies are not undertaking the measures necessary to fight their real enemy.

Patrick Cockburn is the author of The Jihadis Return.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/12/29/the-west-needs-more-than-a-white-knight-to-defeat-isis/

The Prison State of America

Chris Hedges

 Prisons employ and exploit the ideal worker. Prisoners do not receive benefits or pensions. They are not paid overtime. They are forbidden to organize and strike. They must show up on time. They are not paid for sick days or granted vacations. They cannot formally complain about working conditions or safety hazards. If they are disobedient, or attempt to protest their pitiful wages, they lose their jobs and can be sent to isolation cells. The roughly 1 million prisoners who work for corporations and government industries in the American prison system are models for what the corporate state expects us all to become. And corporations have no intention of permitting prison reforms that would reduce the size of their bonded workforce. In fact, they are seeking to replicate these conditions throughout the society.

States, in the name of austerity, have stopped providing prisoners with essential items including shoes, extra blankets and even toilet paper, while starting to charge them for electricity and room and board. Most prisoners and the families that struggle to support them are chronically short of money. Prisons are company towns. Scrip, rather than money, was once paid to coal miners, and it could be used only at the company store. Prisoners are in a similar condition. When they go broke—and being broke is a frequent occurrence in prison—prisoners must take out prison loans to pay for medications, legal and medical fees and basic commissary items such as soap and deodorant. Debt peonage inside prison is as prevalent as it is outside prison.

States impose an array of fees on prisoners. For example, there is a 10 percent charge imposed by New Jersey on every commissary purchase. Stamps have a 10 percent surcharge. Prisoners must pay the state for a 15-minute deathbed visit to an immediate family member or a 15-minute visit to a funeral home to view the deceased. New Jersey, like most other states, forces a prisoner to reimburse the system for overtime wages paid to the two guards who accompany him or her, plus mileage cost. The charge can be as high as $945.04. It can take years to pay off a visit with a dying father or mother.

Fines, often in the thousands of dollars, are assessed against many prisoners when they are sentenced. There are 22 fines that can be imposed in New Jersey, including the Violent Crime Compensation Assessment (VCCB), the Law Enforcement Officers Training & Equipment Fund (LEOT) and Extradition Costs (EXTRA). The state takes a percentage each month out of prison pay to pay down the fines, a process that can take decades. If a prisoner who is fined $10,000 at sentencing must rely solely on a prison salary he or she will owe about $4,000 after making payments for 25 years. Prisoners can leave prison in debt to the state. And if they cannot continue to make regular payments—difficult because of high unemployment—they are sent back to prison. High recidivism is part of the design.

Corporations have privatized most of the prison functions once handled by governments. They run prison commissaries and, since the prisoners have nowhere else to shop, often jack up prices by as much as 100 percent. Corporations have taken over the phone systems and charge exorbitant fees to prisoners and their families. They grossly overcharge for money transfers from families to prisoners. And these corporations, some of the nation’s largest, pay little more than a dollar a day to prison laborers who work in for-profit prison industries. Food and merchandise vendors, construction companies, laundry services, uniforms companies, prison equipment vendors, cafeteria services, manufacturers of pepper spray, body armor and the array of medieval instruments used for the physical control of prisoners, and a host of other contractors feed like jackals off prisons. Prisons, in America, are a hugely profitable business.

Our prison-industrial complex, which holds 2.3 million prisoners, or 25 percent of the world’s prison population, makes money by keeping prisons full. It demands bodies, regardless of color, gender or ethnicity. As the system drains the pool of black bodies, it has begun to incarcerate others. Women—the fastest-growing segment of the prison population—are swelling prisons, as are poor whites in general, Hispanics and immigrants. Prisons are no longer a black-white issue. Prisons are a grotesque manifestation of corporate capitalism. Slavery is legal in prisons under the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. It reads: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States. …” And the massive U.S. prison industry functions like the forced labor camps that have existed in all totalitarian states. 

Corporate investors, who have poured billions into the business of mass incarceration, expect long-term returns. And they will get them. It is their lobbyists who write the draconian laws that demand absurdly long sentences, deny paroles, determine immigrant detention laws and impose minimum-sentence and three-strikes-out laws (mandating life sentences after three felony convictions). The politicians and the courts, subservient to corporate power, can be counted on to protect corporate interests.

Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest owner of for-profit prisons and immigration detention facilities in the country, had revenues of $1.7 billion in 2013 and profits of $300 million. CCA holds an average of 81,384 inmates in its facilities on any one day. Aramark Holdings Corp., a Philadelphia-based company that contracts through Aramark Correctional Services to provide food to 600 correctional institutions across the United States, was acquired in 2007 for $8.3 billion by investors that included Goldman Sachs.

The three top for-profit prison corporations spent an estimated $45 million over a recent 10-year period for lobbying that is keeping the prison business flush. The resource center In the Public Interest documented in its report “Criminal: How Lockup Quotas and ‘Low-Crime Taxes’ Guarantee Profits for Private Prison Corporations” that private prison companies often sign state contracts that guarantee prison occupancy rates of 90 percent. If states fail to meet the quota they have to pay the corporations for the empty beds. 

CCA in 2011 gave $710,300 in political contributions to candidates for federal or state office, political parties and so-called 527 groups (PACs and super PACs), the American Civil Liberties Union reported. The corporation also spent $1.07 million lobbying federal officials plus undisclosed sums to lobby state officials, according to the ACLU. CCA, through the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), also lobbies legislators to impose harsher detention laws at the state and federal levels. The ALEC helped draft Arizona’s cruel anti-immigrant law SB 1070.

The United States, from 1970 to 2005, increased its prison population by about 700 percent, according to statistics gathered by the ACLU. The federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, the ACLU report notes, says for-profit companies presently control about 18 percent of federal prisoners and 6.7 percent of all state prisoners. Private prisons account for nearly all newly built prisons. And nearly half of all immigrants detained by the federal government are shipped to for-profit prisons, according to Detention Watch Network.

But corporate profit is not limited to building and administering prisons. Whole industries now rely almost exclusively on prison labor. Federal prisoners, who are among the highest paid in the U.S. system, making as much as $1.25 an hour, produce the military’s helmets, uniforms, pants, shirts, ammunition belts, ID tags and tents. Prisoners work, often through subcontractors, for major corporations such as Chevron, Bank of America, IBM, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Starbucks, Nintendo, Victoria’s Secret, J.C. Penney, Sears, Wal-Mart, Kmart, Eddie Bauer, Wendy’s, Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Fruit of the Loom, Motorola, Caterpillar, Sara Lee, Quaker Oats, Mary Kay, Microsoft, Texas Instruments, Dell, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Nordstrom’s, Revlon, Macy’s, Pierre Cardin and Target. Prisoners in some states run dairy farms, staff call centers, take hotel reservations or work in slaughterhouses. And prisoners are used to carry out public services such as collecting highway trash in states such as Ohio.

States, with shrinking budgets, share in the corporate exploitation. They get kickbacks of as much as 40 percent from corporations that prey on prisoners. This kickback money is often supposed to go into “inmate welfare funds,” but prisoners say they rarely see any purchases made by the funds to improve life inside prison.

The wages paid to prisoners for labor inside prisons have remained stagnant and in real terms have declined over the past three decades. In New Jersey a prisoner made $1.20 for eight hours of work—yes, eight hours of work—in 1980 and today makes $1.30 for a day’s labor. Prisoners earn, on average, $28 a month. Those incarcerated in for-profit prisons earn as little as 17 cents an hour.

However, items for sale in prison commissaries have risen in price over the past two decades by as much as 100 percent. And new rules in some prisons, including those in New Jersey, prohibit families to send packages to prisoners, forcing prisoners to rely exclusively on prison vendors. This is as much a psychological blow as a material one; it leaves families feeling powerless to help loved ones trapped in the system.

A bar of Dove soap in 1996 cost New Jersey prisoners 97 cents. Today it costs $1.95, an increase of 101 percent. A tube of Crest toothpaste cost $2.35 in 1996 and today costs $3.49, an increase of 48 percent. AA batteries have risen by 184 percent, and a stick of deodorant has risen by 95 percent. The only two items I found that remained the same in price from 1996 were frosted flake cereal and cups of noodles, but these items in prisons have been switched from recognizable brand names to generic products. The white Reebok shoes that most prisoners wear, shoes that lasts about six months, costs about $45 a pair. Those who cannot afford the Reebok brand must buy, for $20, shoddy shoes with soles that shred easily. In addition, prisoners are charged for visits to the infirmary and the dentist and for medications.

Keefe Supply Co., which runs commissaries for an estimated half a million prisoners in states including Florida and Maryland, is notorious for price gouging. It sells a single No. 10 white envelope for 15 cents—$15 per 100 envelopes. The typical retail cost outside prison for a box of 100 of these envelopes is $7. The company marks up a 3-ounce packet of noodle soup, one of the most popular commissary items, to 45 cents from 26 cents.

Global Tel Link, a private phone company, jacks up phone rates in New Jersey to 15 cents a minute, although some states, such as New York, have relieved the economic load on families by reducing the charge to 4 cents a minute. The Federal Communications Commission has determined that a fair rate for a 15-minute interstate call by a prisoner is $1.80 for debit and $2.10 for collect. The high phone rates imposed on prisoners, who do not have a choice of carriers and must call either collect or by using debit accounts that hold prepaid deposits made by them or their families, are especially damaging to the 2 million children with a parent behind bars. The phone is a lifeline for the children of the incarcerated.

Monopolistic telephone contracts give to the states kickbacks amounting, on average, to 42 percent of gross revenues from prisoner phone calls, according to Prison Legal News. The companies with exclusive prison phone contracts not only charge higher phone rates but add to the phone charges the cost of the kickbacks, called “commissions” by state agencies, according to research conducted in 2011 by John E. Dannenberg for Prison Legal News. Dannenberg found that the phone market in state prison systems generates an estimated $362 million annually in gross revenues for the states and costs prisoners’ families, who put money into phone accounts, some $143 million a year.

When strong family ties are retained, there are lower rates of recidivism and fewer parole violations. But that is not what the corporate architects of prisons want: High recidivism, now at over 60 percent, keeps the cages full. This is one reason, I suspect, why prisons make visitations humiliating and difficult. It is not uncommon for prisoners to tell their families—especially those that include small children traumatized by the security screening, long waits, body searches, clanging metal doors and verbal abuse by guards—not to visit. Prisoners with life sentences frequently urge loved ones to sever all ties with them and consider them as dead.

The rise of what Marie Gottschalk, the author of “Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics,” calls “the carceral state” is ominous. It will not be reformed through elections or by appealing to political elites or the courts. Prisons are not, finally, about race, although poor people of color suffer the most. They are not even about being poor. They are prototypes for the future. They are emblematic of the disempowerment and exploitation that corporations seek to inflict on all workers. If corporate power continues to disembowel the country, if it is not impeded by mass protests and revolt, life outside prison will soon resemble life in prison.

Chris Hedges spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.


http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_prison_state_of_america_20141228

The militarist agenda behind Washington’s confrontation with North Korea

By Peter Symonds 

29 December 201orth Korea was hit by a second Internet shutdown on Saturday in what has all the earmarks of a US cyber-attack aimed at escalating its confrontation with Pyongyang. According to the Xinhua news agency, North Korea’s entire Internet access and mobile phone 3G network came to a standstill in the morning and remained “very unstable” throughout the day.

The Internet blackout follows unsubstantiated allegations by the FBI and the Obama administration that North Korea was behind the hacking of Sony Pictures Entertainment in response to The Interview— a provocative film made in collaboration with the American intelligence-military establishment about a fictional assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

President Obama warned of a “proportionate response” against Pyongyang at “a time and place of our choosing.” He further inflamed tensions with North Korea by urging Sony to reverse its decision to withdraw the film from circulation. Just days later, on December 22, North Korea’s Internet access collapsed for the first time, blacking out the entire country. On both occasions, Washington refused to confirm or deny responsibility.

Every aspect of the intensifying confrontation reeks of a calculated US provocation. While the American and international media have presented North Korea’s alleged hacking of Sony as fact, the FBI “evidence” is so threadbare that many analysts have questioned its conclusion. Sam Glines, who runs the cyber-security company Norse, bluntly told CNN: “It’s clear to us, based on both forensic and other evidence we’ve collected, that unequivocally they [North Korea] are not responsible for orchestrating or initiating the attack on Sony.”

Pyongyang has denied any involvement in hacking Sony and proposed a joint investigation into the incident—an offer the US dismissed out of hand. Instead, the two cyber-attacks on North Korea appear to be directed at goading the Stalinist regime into a response that can be seized on to generate a major international dispute. On Saturday, North Korea hit back, accusing the US of disrupting its Internet operations and Obama of being “reckless in words and deeds.”

There is nothing “proportionate” in the US response to Pyongyang’s alleged hacking of Sony. The New York Times reported on December 20 that Obama had instructed the US military’s Cyber Command to devise “a range of offensive options” that could be used against North Korea, in addition to possible further sanctions, including measures aimed at isolating the country from the global financial system.

A comment published in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Time to End the North Korean Threat” demonstrates that powerful sections of the American ruling elite are pressing for a far more aggressive strategy directed at nothing less than regime-change in Pyongyang—a policy that threatens to trigger World War III. The article’s author, Richard Haass, is a central figure in the US foreign policy establishment—a former director of foreign policy studies at the Democratic Party-aligned Brookings Institution and former top-level diplomat, who is currently president of the semi-official Council on Foreign Relations.

After reviewing the options against North Korea currently being aired, Haass writes: “These ideas are fine as far as they go, but they don’t go far enough. The serious threat posed by North Korea far transcends cyberspace. Only one approach is commensurate with the challenge: ending North Korea’s existence as an independent entity and reunifying the Korean Peninsula.”

To justify such a dangerous course of action, Haass grossly magnifies the threat posed by North Korea’s very limited nuclear arsenal and its large but poorly equipped military. In fact, the capacity of North Korea to fight any military conflict has been seriously undermined by six decades of US-led economic sanctions, which have only escalated over the past decade on the pretext of halting the country’s nuclear programs.

Haass brushes aside the previous US approach, declaring: “There is no evidence that negotiations, sanctions or anything else have had or is having any effect on halting any of these [North Korean] activities.”

In fact, Washington’s negotiations with North Korea have never been in good faith. Offers to end Pyongyang’s isolation have always been accompanied by extortionate demands. When tentative deals have been reached, the US has sabotaged them. Since assuming office in 2009, Obama has never made a serious proposal to restart the six-party talks sponsored by China.

The US is not ratcheting up tensions with North Korea because the country poses a growing threat. Since taking over as leader following his father’s death in 2011, Kim Jong-un has hinted that the regime could be open to a rapprochement with Washington. Rather, the Obama administration’s aggressive policy towards Pyongyang is bound up with its far broader “pivot to Asia,” centrally targeting China and aimed at ensuring US hegemony throughout the region.

Haass’s comment was published just days after initial reports in the English language press that Beijing had decided to provide financial assistance to Moscow, threatening the US financial blockade of Russia. The WSWS warnedat the time that Washington would react aggressively to this challenge to its plans not only to dominate Asia, but the entire Eurasian landmass. By winding up tensions with North Korea, Obama is also threatening China, which has long regarded North Korea as a crucial buffer on its northeastern borders.

Given its strategic significance to China, Haass’s suggestion that Washington could enlist Beijing’s help in his proposal to eliminate North Korea as “an independent entity” is simply window dressing. While China has expressed concerns about the unstable Pyongyang regime, the last thing Beijing wants is a Korea unified by the US and South Korea, a long-time American client and ally, on its borders.

Haass himself makes clear that Washington should proceed with regime-change regardless of any assistance from China, writing: “Whether this is the case or not, the US needs to work with South Korea (and, if possible, Japan) to try to undermine North Korea from within.” His proposal to incite an internal rebellion along the lines of US-sponsored “colour revolutions” in former Soviet republics is utterly reckless and threatens to trigger a war on the Korean Peninsula that could draw the US into conflict with China and Russia.

The last time that US imperialism attempted regime-change in Pyongyang was in 1950. Having established a puppet police state in South Korea following World War II and encouraged its provocations against North Korea, the US and its allies seized on a North Korean military intervention into the South to launch a full-blown invasion. During the war, which cost the lives of millions of Koreans as well as many Chinese, US and allied troops, Washington seriously considered dropping nuclear weapons on China—as advocated by the top US commander, General Douglas MacArthur. A new war on the peninsula would have far more devastating consequences for humanity as a whole than the Korean War bloodbath.

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/12/29/kore-d29.html