AVIVA SHEN, - Think Progress
Stephan: To our national shame the warehousing of human beings has become a multi-billion dollar industry -- the living example of vampire capitalism, and the face of the New American Slavery. This is well-known throughout the world and is the source of a great deal of the anti-Americanism we now face. Our greed and immorality have squandered the enormous respect we were bequeathed by the Second World War.
Nearly half of all immigrants detained by federal officials are held in facilities run by private prison companies, at an average cost for each detained immigrant is $166 a night. That’s added up to massive profits for Corrections Corporation of America, The GEO Group and other private prison companies:
A decade ago, more than 3,300 criminal immigrants were sent to private prisons under two 10-year contracts the Federal Bureau of Prisons signed with CCA worth $760 million. Now, the agency is paying the private companies $5.1 billion to hold more than 23,000 criminal immigrants through 13 contracts of varying lengths.
CCA was on the verge of bankruptcy in 2000 due to lawsuits, management problems and dwindling contracts. Last year, the company reaped $162 million in net income. Federal contracts made up 43 percent of its total revenues, in part thanks to rising immigrant detention. GEO, which cites the immigration agency as its largest client, saw its net income jump from $16.9 million to $78.6 million since 2000.
As the AP explains, these remarkable profits come in the wake of an equally remarkable lobbying campaign. In the past decade, three major private prison companies spent $45 […]
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JEFF GOODELL, - Rolling Stone
Stephan: Shale oil like fracking is part of the dying gasp of old energy. My only concern is that these awful technologies will do such damage to the environment that it will take decades to repair it, if it can be done at all. Remember the Exxon Valdez event in Prince William Sound, Alaska, on March 24, 1989? The damage it did still degrades the sound.
When president Obama halted the Keystone XL pipeline last January, Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper revved up an alternative scheme to deliver oil from the tar sands of northern Alberta to the international market: Sell the oil to the Chinese. Within weeks, Harper was traveling to China to personally court Chinese president Hu Jintao and push a new route for the pipeline – one that would establish Canada as a leading petro-state, a kind of North American Saudi Arabia with ice hockey.
There was only one problem with Harper’s grand scheme: Canadians, it turns out, don’t want a new pipeline any more than Americans do.
ExxonMobil, Koch Industries and other oil giants currently produce some 1.6 million barrels of oil a day from the tar sands in northern Alberta. The oil – it’s more of an acidic, corrosive goo – is expensive to extract, dangerous to transport and more damaging to the climate than conventional oil. The problem is, the oil companies want to triple their production over the next 20 years – but existing pipelines will reach full capacity in only three years. And if you can’t move the oil, you can’t sell it. ‘Alberta is just like Texas,’ says Keith […]
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MADELEINE KRUHLY, - The Atlantic
Stephan: Anyone who has ever had a nonlocal consciousness experience will relate to this sense of timelessness, or being 'out of time.'
Here’s a question addressed straight to the soul (and the hippocampus): what are your most memorable moments of awe?
If you’re like me, those moments are a bit difficult to specify and describe. If I really put my mind to it, images of a particularly fantastic (and almost destructive) fireworks display, as well as a car ride through the mountains of Wyoming, resurface.
Admittedly, awe is a tricky thing to qualify– and for that matter, to quantify. As a subjective emotion, it’s going to be felt differently by each individual, and for different reasons. What one person considers an awesome sight or experience might be met with ambivalence in another.
Still, a new study by three psychology scientists (forthcoming in Psychological Science) offers valuable insight into the universal power of awe.
Although the study looks to investigate several aspects of this emotion, the initial — and perhaps most intriguing– hypothesis is pretty striking: the experience of awe will expand your perception of time.
In order to prove this theory, and to better understand the effects of awe on the human psyche, scientists Rudd, Vohs, and Aaker conducted three experiments.
The first was to test the aforementioned hypothesis that awe can alter time perception; participants unscrambled sentences, […]
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MARK ANDERSON, - truthout.org
Stephan: The level of corruption in the United States would put a banana republic to shame, and much of it in some way is involved with exploiting the poor. This is the same kind of vulture capitalism practiced by those who bought companies and then outsourced the jobs leaving whole towns in crisis. It is yet another manifestation of the kind of capitalism that cares nothing for national wellness.
A unique, hard-hitting report just completed by a California attorney exposes a largely unknown federal food-stamp racket involving large grocery retailers, food manufacturing giants and other private players, including the Federal Reserve and JPMorganChase, which combine to channel food stamp spending into a gravy train for the heavy hitters in the food industry.
And the report’s author, Michele Simon, says administrative costs added by these privateers inflate the overall price tag of the Supplemental Nutrition Allowance Program (SNAP). And high program costs are prompting potentially deep legislative cuts to SNAP in the pending Farm Bill - when a record 46 million Americans use SNAP, of which 47% are children.
A major fear is that SNAP cuts could wrongly target the program’s central mission to feed the hungry, when cuts should target the private players who harness the program for their own gain.
‘If we want to cut, let’s look at administrative cuts-not [necessarily] cutting the benefits themselves,’ Simon told this writer. She’s disturbed that JP Morgan and the Federal Reserve are well positioned in this debacle. Yet, her 28-page report, for all that it reveals, just begins to explore this fathoms-deep issue, since critical data is being withheld by the USDA.
Over the last […]
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Saturday, August 4th, 2012
EWEN CALLAWAY, - New Scientist (U.K.)
Stephan: The statement by porn millionaire Jenna Jameson that 'When you're rich, you want a Republican in office,' got me to thinking about porn, and porn usage so great it would make her millions of dollars. That led to this.
You can click through to the URL where you can download the full report discussed in this report.
Americans may paint themselves in increasingly bright shades of red and blue, but new research finds one thing that varies little across the nation: the liking for online pornography.
A new nationwide study (pdf) of anonymised credit-card receipts from a major online adult entertainment provider finds little variation in consumption between states.
‘When it comes to adult entertainment, it seems people are more the same than different,’ says Benjamin Edelman at Harvard Business School.
However, there are some trends to be seen in the data. Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption, the study finds.
‘Some of the people who are most outraged turn out to be consumers of the very things they claimed to be outraged by,’ Edelman says.
Political divide
Edelman spends part of his time helping companies such as Microsoft and AOL detect advertising fraud. Another consulting client runs dozens of adult websites, though he says he is not at liberty to identify the firm.
That company did, however, provide Edelman with roughly two years of credit card data from 2006 to 2008 that included a purchase date and each customer’s postal code.
After controlling for differences in broadband […]
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