I was surprised to learn there were so many ways to make money from locking people up and letting them out; here are four that I’ve come across:

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Fear on the Street: Inside the Stock Sell-Off

“There’s a growing realization among even the most optimistic investors that the United States is entering a new recession — a dreaded “double-dip.” Adding to the pain is the sense that the government and Federal Reserve are out of both ideas and ways to stimulate the economy. Corporate America is sitting on record amounts of cash but is refusing to make new investments with so little end demand for its products. Consumers and corporations are hoarding cash, and the economy appears to be seizing. The debt ceiling debate was a fiasco, snuffing any remaining confidence traders had for help from Washington, D.C.”

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“How can we justify massive tax giveaways to the richest two percent and continue tax loopholes for wealthy corporations at a time when 15.5 million children are languishing in poverty?” - Marian Wright Edelman

Truth is, we can’t.

From:
The State Of America’s Children 2011, Children’s Defense Fund

http://www.childrensdefense.or​g/child-research-data-publicat​ions/data/state-of-americas-20​11.pdf

Are Taxes in the U.S. High or Low?

By BRUCE BARTLETT

“The G.O.P. says global competitiveness requires the United States to reduce its corporate tax rate. But the United States actually has the lowest corporate tax burden of any of the member nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.”

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/31/are-taxes-in-the-u-s-high-or-low/

I can’t find much, if any national, top-level media coverage on the July GAO Federal Reserve Audit that revealed, between December 2007 and June 2010, $16 trillion was doled out by the Fed in secret loans to bail out American and foreign banks and businesses without Congressional knowledge or approval. It seems that Senator Sanders (VT) is the only site, other than random low-level websites—forums & blogs—in over 8 pages of Google searches results for the terms; Fed Audit, 16 Trillion. Even after including the search terms, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, FOX, there were no returns to indicate any of these outlets reported on this. Why hasn’t this received more attention, or am I missing something?

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I wish we could lay to rest the false meme that we would have defaulted if there was no ‘deal’. We were ‘Shock Doctrined’ (read Naomi Klein’s Book or http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine). If there had never been a manufactured crisis it wouldn’t have been as easy to ram through these policies that screw people relying on the social safety net. We didn’t have a DEBT crisis, but we do have a JOBS crisis, and too many people allowed themselves to buy into the lies. Good luck to all of us on the consequences. 

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“Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real changes. When the crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.” Think of ALEC as Milton Friedman’s little shop of horrors where legislators across the country can easily access the “ideas lying around.”

http://www.prwatch.org/news/2011/07/10903/alec-exposed-milton-friedmans-little-shop-horrors

After reading Levine’s article, I remembered having several conversations, in the early 90’s, with a friend, about the conditions required to subdue populations to enable corporate-elite control and abuse of the population. We agreed that for the most effective and lasting control there must be present the tools used to implement those conditions combined with the willing partnership of the people in their own submission, especially in advanced democracies like America, where the appearance of choice must remain unburdened, to the extent possible, by state sanctioned overt violence, if the democracy is to preserve a claim of legitimacy. We were young and kind of dumb, but interestingly, we touched on several of those that Bruce Levine includes in his article found at Alternet:

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I am not a believer in the push for privatizing various public services in American life for a variety of reason, mainly due to the idea that a democracy should be focused on the people in more than name only and the people’s money shouldn’t be used to primarily for private profit.

I found The Myth Of Charter Schools, (New York Review Of Books) by Diane Ravitch, a clear summarization of the problems associated with the privatization of the American public school system. I also included the 2009 Credo Study: Multiple Choice; Charter School Performance in 16 States (PDF) Ravitch referenced in the article.

A quote from the article hits the nail on the head:

“It bears mentioning that nations with high-performing school systems—whether Korea, Singapore, Finland, or Japan—have succeeded not by privatizing their schools or closing those with low scores, but by strengthening the education profession. They also have less poverty than we do. Fewer than 5 percent of children in Finland live in poverty, as compared to 20 percent in the United States. Those who insist that poverty doesn’t matter, that only teachers matter, prefer to ignore such contrasts. “

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/11/myth-charter-schools/?page=1