U.S. Used 'Shock' Tactics to Privatize Public Sector

current financial implosion is result of serial bouts of financial deregulation

Mississippi Prison Privatization

A private prison on U.S. 84 is the first big project to come to Adams County in years, but it won’t be the last, the governor says.

Gov. Haley Barbour’s message at Thursday’s groundbreaking for the future site of Corrections Corporation of America’s new facility was one of hope.

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Barbour also presented Adams County Supervisors President Darryl Grennell with official approval of a $3.9 million federal grant toward the sewer and water infrastructure, which will be provided for the facility.

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Private Fire Fighters for The Wealthy. The rest of you can burn

A private fire crew dispatched by a national insurance company that caters to wealthy clients is guarding 22 high-end homes threatened by the Castle Rock Fire, a blaze that has forced the evacuation of hundreds of million-dollar homes west of Ketchum.

The crew will protect only homes insured by AIG Private Client Group, an insurance company that offers "loss-prevention services" to its wealthiest customers. A truck and two-man crew sent by AIG from Montana arrived in Ketchum about 2 p.m. Wednesday to start dousing properties with Phos-Chek, the same fire retardant dropped from U.S. Forest Service aircraft.

"We're not going out there to fight the fire," said Dorothy Sarna, vice president and national director of risk-management services and loss prevention for the New York-based company. "We're out there to protect our clients."

Veteran fire managers now working the Castle Rock fire say they've never heard of a private fire crew protecting individual homes in the midst of a wildfire, said Dave Olson, a spokesman for the Forest Service.

The private crew has been granted access to areas closed to residents, but not all officials with public fire agencies were thrilled by the sight of the truck scooting through a smoky web of government fire crews.

"That sounds ridiculous to me," said Kim Rogers, a Ketchum Police Department spokesman, "especially since we haven't lost any structures. I mean, this is a Forest Service fire, not a private fire."

America's Mercenary Army

When years from now historians and government officials reexamine precedents set by the U.S. experience in Iraq, many "firsts" are likely to pop up.

One still playing out is the extraordinarily wide use of private contractors. A Congressional Research Service report published last month titled "Private Security Contractors in Iraq: Background, Legal Status, and Other Issues," puts it this way: "Iraq appears to be the first case where the U.S. government has used private contractors extensively for protecting persons and property in potentially hostile or hostile situations where host country security forces are absent or deficient."

Only estimates are available for the total employment by contractors in Iraq that perform "functions once carried by the U.S. military," according to the study. Testimony at an April 2007 congressional hearing gave the impressive figure of 127,000 as the number working in Iraq under Defense Department contracts. Breakdowns don't exist, but one Pentagon official said less than 20 percent were American.

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But the expanded contractor use has evoked new attention to a 1995 criticism of the practice. According to the study, a Defense Department Commission on Roles and Missions found then that depending on contractors was detrimental and that it kept the Pentagon "from building and maintaining capacity needed for strategic or other important missions."

An advertisement last week on IntelligenceCareers.com illustrates part of the problem. It seeks an "Intelligence Analyst" to work in Iraq for a Dayton, Ohio-based outfit called MacAulay-Brown, or MacB, which in turn is a subcontractor to the giant Lockheed Martin information technology group. The client is Counterintelligence Field Activity, the Defense Department's newest intelligence arm, which is responsible for coordinating force protection for the military services inside the United States and abroad.

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Why Are So Many Americans in Prison?

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According to a 2005 report of the International Centre for Prison Studies in London, the United States—with five percent of the world’s population—houses 25 percent of the world’s inmates. Our incarceration rate (714 per 100,000 residents) is almost 40 percent greater than those of our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia). Other industrial democracies, even those with significant crime problems of their own, are much less punitive: our incarceration rate is 6.2 times that of Canada, 7.8 times that of France, and 12.3 times that of Japan. We have a corrections sector that employs more Americans than the combined work forces of General Motors, Ford, and Wal-Mart, the three largest corporate employers in the country, and we are spending some $200 billion annually on law enforcement and corrections at all levels of government, a fourfold increase (in constant dollars) over the past quarter century.

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Remember the Kitten Killer, Frist? Why health care costs are out of control in the US

Hospital Corporation of America (HCA) is the largest private operator of health care facilities in the world. It is based in Nashville, Tennessee, United States and is widely considered to be the single largest factor in making that city a hotspot for healthcare enterprise.

The founders included two members of the Frist family, which became very wealthy as a result. The former majority leader of the U.S. Senate, Bill Frist is a member of the family and has a substantial stake in the company. Most of his $20 million (or more) personal fortune was made through his holdings in HCA. Jack O. Bovender, Jr., is the Chief Executive Officer of HCA.

During the 1970s-1980s the corporation went through a tremendous growth period acquiring hundreds of hospitals across the United States which numbered 255 owned and 208 which HCA managed.

In the late-1990s, after a merger with Louisville-based Columbia Hospital Corporation which formed Columbia/HCA, the company was investigated by the government for Medicare and Medicaid fraud and paid a settlement of $1.7 billion, the largest fraud settlement in US history at the time. Then-CEO Rick Scott resigned but no criminal prosecutions resulted.

The name subsequently reverted to "Hospital Corporation of America." HCA abandoned the use of its name in its home market and instead promotes its Nashville hospitals under the TriStar brand.

On June 13, 2005, Senator Frist reportedly instructed the trustee managing his HCA shares to sell all of his stock. The sale took place in July, two weeks before disappointing earnings sent the stock on a 15-point plunge. In November 2006 HCA was acquired by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, Bain Capital and Merrill Lynch Global Private Equity in what was, at the time, the largest leveraged buyout (LBO) in history, adjusted for inflation.

Prison Privatization. Your Tax Dollars Stolen by Shady Government Officials and their corporate Masters

WASHINGTON — Nashville attorney G.A. "Gus" Puryear IV, who worked for Sens. Fred Thompson and Bill Frist, was nominated Wednesday to be a judge in the U.S. District Court for Middle Tennessee.

Puryear, 39, is general counsel for Corrections Corporation of America Inc. and is credited with helping untangle the private prison operator from some of its troubles.

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Puryear served as legislative director for Frist from 1998 to 2001. Before that, he was recruited to Washington, D.C., to work for Thompson on the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee investigation of campaign finance wrongdoing during the 1996 campaign.

He also helped prepare Vice President Dick Cheney for debates during the 2000 campaign.

Puryear has given $13,450 to federal and state Republican campaign committees since 2001, according to reports filed with the Tennessee Secretary of State and the Federal Election Commission. He gave $3,000 to the campaign of Sen. Bob Corker.

Puryear would replace Judge Robert Echols, who took senior judge status in March.

Corrections Corporation of America Announces 2007 First Quarter Financial Results

Think of the BILLIONS to be had from locking up "illegal" immigrants. Much more profitable than the "war on drugs"
We can keep on pushing policies that drive people out of their homes countries to work in this thankless, racist, right wing hell then lock 'em up at every opportunity whereupon tax payer dollars can be used to pay private prisons to house them until Blackwater can drive them home in trucks paid for by taxpayers and driven by drivers supplied by Halliburton all while guarded by Blackwater thugs.
And then there's that WALL around Texas.

U.N. Independent Expert Denied Access to Hutto Detention Center

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The Special Rapporteur is conducting a three-week fact finding mission at the request of the U.S. The Rapporteur is an independent expert appointed by the U.N. Human Rights Council with the mandate to monitor, advise and publicly report on human rights situations in specific countries and on human rights violations worldwide. The tour of Hutto — a converted prison that houses about 400 immigrants, including children and asylum seekers — was considered a major part of the Special Rapporteur's mission. Earlier this year, the ACLU filed federal lawsuits on behalf of 12 children detained at the Hutto facility, charging that the children are subject to inhumane treatment.

According to the official terms for fact-finding missions, the Special Rapporteur must have “access to all prisons, detention centers and places of interrogation.” The terms also mandate that the Rapporteur be given confidential and unsupervised contact with witnesses and potential victims of human rights violations.
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