The Crumbling: For-Profit Prisons In the For-Profit Corporate State
There is absolutely no doubt that money (control) rather than truth is the driving factor in the corporate state. Be that the military-industrial complex or for-profit banksters minting billions off of police state spending & wars or the role that money plays in the perversion of the medical establishment or for-profit outsourcing of prisons or countless other dynamics. They are all part of the same ecosystem or culture of subversion of truth in favor of corporate control enabled by a for-profit political system that puts our rule of law up for sale.
At one time we showed the exponential rise in prison population within this country and how the knee of the curve (runaway imprisonment) started around 1980. It is no coincidence that I have remarked countless times that economic activity in the U.S. peaked around 1980. It also is no coincidence that runaway inflation and the debt bubble started around 1980.
If economic activity actually did peak around 1980, then the illusion of growth could only be maintained through insidious money printing for purposes of self-interest, greed and corruption. During that time we have had numerous crises that nearly toppled our financial system. They were all driven by self-interest, greed and corruption.
The vast majority of crime is economic. Social ills, be that the breakdown of the concentric rings of individual, families, communities and ultimately society and the subsequent rise of crime, gangs and illegal drugs are a direct result of lost economic determinism. Without an ability to provide for oneself and family economically, the human condition becomes increasingly fragile and unstable and the manufactured self becomes increasingly destructive. The old saying that bad money pushes out good money should be amended. Bad money also leads to crime on a wider scale and thus a widening circle of bad money. Sociological factors tell us that bad money leads to even more bad money.
How much in wasted human capital, lost economic opportunity, pressure on our health care system, additional state expenditures and most importantly, lost lives are a result of lost economic activity and economic determinism? And, what would the true unemployment and underemployment rate be were those in our prison system, who might possibly be factored into economic-related crimes, factored into employment statistics?
The crumbling of our society and the massive increase in prison population is directly a result of the increasing tyranny of the corporate state. Let’s see. Now, how would gold-backed money solve this? It would only make matters worse. Just ask the people who lived through the Great Depression.
Now, because our economy is so completely linked to the corporate state and the subset of that, the national security state, we have put countless citizens at odds with truth. Many resist necessary reforms as a matter of survival because economic activity is so scarce. Because citizens are pitted against citizens for the limited number of jobs that is a result of the corporate state’s subversion of economic determinism and economic activity through rigged economics, they remain enslaved to the limited economic opportunity provided by hegemonic corporations. Even corrections officers lobby against much needed legal reforms that would possibly release many who committed victimless crime; most notably drug and marijuana users who should at worst be in drug treatment programs.
Where are prisons often situated? In the most impoverished communities whose economies have been decimated by the corporate state. Prisons become a politicized gift of manna through the selflessness of politicians. Those jobs are valued preciously as jewels because economic activity is so limited. Mind you, the politicians giving the gift of prison jobs are the same politicians, who by supporting the corporate state for their own personal profit, helped create impoverished communities in the first place. Politicians in the corporate state truly are rich. They take with the left hand and give with the right. They take your economic freedom with the left hand and give you state-based economic welfare with the right.
As we have remarked countless times, the U.S. didn’t win the Cold War. In fact, our politicians on many levels have become the Soviets. Just as happened in the Soviet Union, the internal contradictions, including lack of economic determinism, led to its collapse. Ronald Reagan unleashed the tyranny of the national security state upon the United States through granting unprecedented power and authority to the military-industrial complex with his fatally-flawed strategy of outspending the Soviets. Reagan effectively embraced the same national security state that destroyed the Soviets Union. Reagan embraced the tyranny of his enemy in an attempt to defeat it. Now we see torture, state-sponsored murder, indefinite detention, endless pre-emptive wars, spying on citizens, lack of economic determinism and on and on. Sound familiar? We are the Soviet Union.
In the final years and days of the Soviet Union, the central state bureaucrats had used all of their lines of credit from within western countries as their system of central planning continued to crumble. Their politicians too resisted needed change that would encourage economic determinism and spur innovation and capital creation. Doing so would have required the central state to give up control and empower citizens and local economics. Instead, the Soviet central planners were left with an economic conundrum of how to shut down the national security state and its endless overproduction of weapons when their economy had come to rely so heavily on said military-industrial complex to provide economic opportunity of a centrally-planned economy. Sound familiar? It should. It is the United States. That great conundrum lies in the fact that central planners, whether they are American or Soviet politicians matters not, can never have the kn0wledge to run an economy any place except into ruin. Truth is found in just the opposite dynamic. It is the people of society who feed and clothe the bureaucrats, who are only then able to perpetuate their profligacy by living off of the productive assets in society.
Bureaucrats in corporations and within the state never seem to get it. It doesn’t matter if it is the Soviet Union or the United States or any other example of society. Bureaucrats and the state derives their power from the people. When the the power of the people is subverted, the system eventually and always becomes unstable. It’s simply a matter of when.
Then, as a last gasp, the state seeks to use control to maintain its illegitimacy… even though truth is right in front of its eyes.
The truth is Obama’s stimulus package should be to dismantle the corporate state and corporate personhood and to throw out the corporate state’s endless red tape, then enact new, sweeping legislation to return economic determinism to the people of this country. But, that doesn’t serve the powers of hegemony and for-profit politics. It doesn’t serve the corporate state.
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