Brent Nyitray
Fairlington Blade
Let the mutherfuker burn!
jnc4p
Kevin S. Willis
Michigoose
lmsinca
markinaustin
Arcanaut
novahockey
quarterback
ScottC
yellojktI’m not going to say “I told you so” but I did have the feeling this was going to happen somewhere. I just don’t think all civic responsibilities lend themselves that well to private enterprise.
It would be interesting to uncover what is happening in other states. Maybe it’s going better than in these three.
Because the private sector can do everything better, more efficiently, and therefore more cheaply than government, many states have outsourced their prisons to private prison companies to generate cash, and to save money in their budgets. However, three states have now dumped the largest private prison company in the U.S., due to numerous, serious issues. According to ThinkProgress, Idaho cut ties with Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), while Texas closed two CCA prisons of its own, and Mississippi ended their relationship with CCA as well. All of this happened within the last month. The problems these states were seeing ranged from inhumane conditions (including the use of prison gangs, denying access to medical care, bad food and sanitation, widespread abuse by guards, and more) to financial problems, such as falsifying hours to extract more money from the government, and deliberately understaffing the prisons.
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Ralph Nader says it’s not just about privacy when we consider the NSA story, it’s about privatization of what were and maybe should still be government functions.
This is a stark example of the blurring of the line between corporate and governmental functions. Booz Allen Hamilton, the company that employed Mr. Snowden, earned over $5 billion in revenues in the last fiscal year, according to The Washington Post. The Carlyle Group, the majority owner of Booz Allen Hamilton, has made nearly $2 billion on its $910 million investment in “government consulting.” It is clear that “national security” is big business.
Given the value and importance of privacy to American ideals, it is disturbing how the terms “privatization” and “private sector” are deceptively used. Many Americans have been led to believe that corporations can and will do a better job handling certain vital tasks than the government can. Such is the ideology of privatization. But in practice, there is very little evidence to prove this notion. Instead, the term “privatization” has become a clever euphemism to draw attention away from a harsh truth. Public functions are being handed over to corporations in sweetheart deals while publicly owned assets such as minerals on public lands and research development breakthroughs are being given away at bargain basement prices.
These functions and assets—which belong to or are the responsibility of the taxpayers—are being used to make an increasingly small pool of top corporate executives very wealthy. And taxpayers are left footing the cleanup bill when corporate greed does not align with the public need.
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And last, I hate that Paula Deen story. I don’t follow her cooking show or know too much about her but I have watched her a few times when my husband flips through the channels. She always seemed like a bit of a character to me. If what everyone’s saying is true it sounds like she made some pretty inappropriate and even racist comments and then botched the apology. Sheesh, I grew up with people who used the “n” word which was completely cringe worthy and caused a lot of family arguments and even tears on occasion. But, and this is a big but, there are ways and then better ways to comment or make your point. I thought this story had a perspective we don’t see in print very often. It’s something I think about a lot.
When the story broke, media coverage was almost tabloid-like. Not surprising, considering it was the National Enquirer that broke the story. In this day and age, when people want easily digestible bites of information rather than well-detailed and supported fact-based news, many saw the titles and nothing more. Titles such as ‘Paula Deen Admits To Using The N-Word’ and ‘Paula Deen’s Apology for Using The N-Word Is Ridiculous.’ As a result, reactions weren’t much better. As one of my colleagues said, it’s as if someone popped the lid off Ugly and let it all spill out. On Facebook, one page posted a picture of Deen with the text of the alleged comment, captioned “Racist Tw*t… Yes you are.” The ensuing comments on the post ranged from civil discussion to “racist white trash c*nt,” “C*nt fucking retard,” and “shove a stick of butter up her ass.” Really?
There were cases where people made offending remarks about her weight, about her diabetes, about being southern. People called for her to be hanged and lynched. People called her a “cracker,” a “honkey,” and other vulgar, racist words for whites. People called her a bigot, a racist, a bitch, all while calling her that most vile word you can call a woman– a c*nt. I won’t even spell it out, I find it so offensive. Since when did it become socially acceptable to skewer someone with the same type of ignorant language you are accusing them of using?
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I so want to write this kind of long(ish) sentence sometimes……haha
Filed under: big government, comics, free markets, NSA, prisons | Tagged: CCA |
All Things in Moderation 
lms:
That last cartoon is an excellent example of how totally unreasonable and irrational some on the pro-abortion side really are.
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An excellent article on the LIBOR scandal from Holmen Jenkins:
As they drain this swamp, investigators like to allege enormous damage to the public by multiplying small discrepancies by the number of transactions in the market. Treat these claims with skepticism. Whatever the extent of mispricing in downstream transactions, it is a smidgeon compared to the rake-off brokers used to earn in pre-electronic days. It is a smidgeon compared to the margins that middlemen could extract before published surveys were available to shed light on transactions previously invisible to most market participants.
It is also a smidgeon compared to the margins that would have to be built into prices if not for Libor hedges and other risk-sharing inventions.
A kick in the pants has been delivered to publishers of price indexes. They need to make their products more manipulation-proof. Where markets are thin and surveys are the only way to glean market intelligence, publishers already exercise a visible hand to expel questionable or anomalous data. A further solution might be to poll a larger number of traders and randomly exclude most of their answers so no trader would have any certainty of influencing the index.
To understand why such opportunities exist in the first place is to understand something about a generic condition of our world, in which technology has drastically reduced transaction costs and cheap money has vastly increased leverage available even to low-ranking bank employees, magnifying the return to small bits of illicit or licit information, including insider information.
The resulting teensy deviations are usually not material to downstream buyers and sellers (no matter what Mr. Almunia says). They would also tend, as a matter of logic, to net out over time. But the deviations can be quite material to an individual trader’s bonus (Mr. Hayes made $5 million a year) or a five-man trading desk’s profit-and-loss statement. Unfortunately, a cure-all does not suggest itself, although a blanket way to disincentivize excessive pursuit of small arbitrage opportunities would be to return to the normal (i.e., higher) interest rates that prevailed before the Greenspan-Bernanke era of too-big-to-fail monetary policy.
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One year since my son was going to school in Atlanta, we had Thanksgiving dinner at The Lady And Sons, Paula Deen’s restaurant in Savannah. It was pretty much the food I expected, lots of fried food and stuff dripping with butter. The staff as far as I recall was pretty much all African-American which really doesn’t raise an eyebrow in the South.
The dinner was buffet style so my food choices were my own. Here is what I had:
The whole incident reminds me of a similar situation with Dog The Bounty Hunter, also involving a legal case. Do not go around using the n-word if you expect to ever get sued. I do find it hypocritical that the media elevates these very specific personalities to stardom and then are shocked, shocked when the have unsavory aspects of their character revealed.
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Scott, political cartoons usually offend someone………….but they’re still just jokes. If we can’t laugh at ourselves or each other what are the other options?
There was some radio guy on Fox last week who told a woman on a panel to “Shut up. Know your role and shut your mouth.” When I saw the comic his comment was still in the back of my mind. I realize most men appreciate women as equal partners, although I’d like to know what percentage, but some men still don’t quite get it and unfortunately IMO quite a few of them reside in the HoR of the US government.
Regardless, I thought the cartoon was funny.
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Scott, and anyway you got back at me with your “pro-abortion” rhetorical device. At least my “propaganda” was funny……haha
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Yello, I saw her make a butter cream frosting for a cake once and was literally shocked at how much butter was in it. I always figured it was easy to make things taste really wonderful with lots of butter and sugar and bacon fat. What’s challenging is making it taste really good without all of that.
I had a seafood paella last night that was fantastic until my son and I were guessing what seasoning they might have used and he told me it didn’t really matter with as much butter as was probably in it it would taste great no matter what seasonings they used. And the delicious vegetable “cocas” was smothered in goat cheese….yummy.
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I think Scott is displaying his Manichean side in his response to that cartoon. 🙂
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As for Paula Deen, I’ve never been a fan of hers, but what bothers me most is the allegation that she made blacks use separate entrances than the whites. I find that pretty hard to believe, in the 21st century, but if she did that’s far worse than any language involved.
And the flip side to the comments cited in the article you quoted, Lulu, were the ones on the FoodNetwork site that ripped into the network for not renewing her contract. They used equally hateful language.
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They used equally hateful language.
Doesn’t surprise me in the least. I just deleted my facebook account this past week because I’m so tired of people being rude and obnoxious. I’m no goody two shoes but I find it pretty discouraging. And facebook’s not exactly anonymous. I told my kids they could just go back to emailing me photos so I could see what they’ve been up to. I’m just an old fuddy duddy.
If the separate entrance story is true that’s really bad for Deen’s image, such as it is, and cruel on top of it.
I know people who play the victim when something negative about them comes to light and so I wonder if she’ll go that route.
She’s only a celebrity though and not that important in the grand scheme of importance.
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Yeah, I’m still mainly on FB because my nieces and nephews indulge us older folks and still post updates (new boyfriends/girlfriends/jobs) to it, otherwise I’d be gone. It’s nice when you live out-of-state, but it’s even of limited use in getting touch with old high school friends and such. Now I know why I lost touch with them!
The people I really cared about came to my dad’s memorial service (just like they did to my wedding, all those many years ago) and we caught up.
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Funny in light of Greenwald and the traitor dude.
http://web.archive.org/web/20040310080634/http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110004719
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Weird exchange between Gregory and Greenwald on Meet The Press.
Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald blasted NBC host David Gregory on Sunday for publicly entertaining the idea that he should be prosecuted for publishing secret National Security Agency (NSA) documents leaked by former U.S. government contractor Edward Snowden.
“To the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden, even in his current movements, why shouldn’t you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime?” Gregory asked the columnist in a Sunday interview.
“I think it’s pretty extraordinary that anybody who would call themself a journalist would publicly muse about whether or not other journalists should be charged with felonies,” Greenwald shot back. “The assumption in your question, David, is completely without evidence, David — the idea that I’ve aided and abetted him in any way.”
“If you want to embrace that theory it means that every investigative journalist in the United States who works with their sources, who receives classified information is a criminal,” he continued. “And it’s precisely those theories and precisely that climate that has become so menacing in the United States.”
“Well, the question of who’s a journalist may be up to debate with regard of what you are doing,” Gregory opined. “And of course, anybody who’s watching this understands I was asking a question, that question has been raised by lawmakers as well.”
“I’m not embracing anything, but obviously I take your point,” the NBC host insisted.
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I find that political cartoon can get away with more than straight editorials. This one in the dead trees WaPo yesterday at first had me furious at its false equivalency but then I decided it was kinda funny.
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yello, I love political cartoons. I love how they can convey so much in one little frame and a few dialogue boxes. My nephew wanted to be a cartoonist for a long time but then ditched it in favor of painting. He’s a mural artist which is pretty much the opposite of cartoons in scale. He’s very political though and a real lefty so I think he would have been successful, not that he isn’t already.
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