DAVID ALEXANDER, - The Christian Science Monitor
Stephan: The necocons' terror-war prison and court system, as should have been obvious from the beginning, is evil. It violates every tenet of the Constitution, and has become a machine that makes enemies. Its outrages recruit and create terrorists.
I talked with a friend the other day who had just returned from Pakistan, which he has visited over many years. He told me this was his last trip. The anti-Islamic policies of the Right, the drones, Guantanamo, all conspire, he said, to make it unadvisable for Americans to go there.
About 20 years ago I had dinner, just the two of us, with the Bangladesh Ambassador to the U.S.. I asked him what he saw in the future. He replied very sadly, 'Your policies are creating an entire generation of Islamic foreign service people, as well as business leaders, and religious groups, that despise the United States, and see you as bullies, and offenders of honor. It is going to haunt your country for decades, generations.'
This prison is an abomination, and it is the great shame of our government. Just look at the numbers. These costs are absurd. Think how many school lunches could be paid for with this money. It is obvious this was begun in a state of ideological hysteria.
I hope it is beginning to dawn on people that:
You can not stop two American young men from building a bomb.
Your chance of being harmed by a terrorist is vastly less than your chance of being killed by a gun. Four people were killed in Boston, 3,835 have been killed by a gun since the Sandy Hook Massacre.
Is the cost of our civil liberties, and the rise of the surveillance state worth what we are doing to ourselves?
WASHINGTON — It’s been dubbed the most expensive prison on Earth and President Barack Obama cited the cost this week as one of many reasons to shut down the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, which burns through some $900,000 per prisoner annually.
The Pentagon estimates it spends about $150 million each year to operate the prison and military court system at the U.S. Naval Base in Cuba, which was set up 11 years ago to house foreign terrorism suspects. With 166 inmates currently in custody, that amounts to an annual cost of $903,614 per prisoner.
By comparison, super-maximum security prisons in the United States spend about $60,000 to $70,000 at most to house their inmates, analysts say. And the average cost across all federal prisons is about $30,000, they say.
The high cost was just one reason Obama cited when he returned this week to an unfulfilled promise to close the prison and said he would try again. Obama also said that the prison, set up under his Republican predecessor George W. Bush and long the target of criticism by rights groups and foreign governments, is a stain on the reputation of the United States.
‘It’s extremely inefficient,’ said Ken Gude, chief of staff […]
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LOU COLAGIOVANNI, - Examiner (Houston)
Stephan: This is what prison privatization is leading to. This is not the first case like this of of Judicial corruption. Yet it is full steam ahead for corporate prisons. How can anyone think that corporate prisons was a good idea?
Disgraced Pennsylvania judge Mark Ciavarella Jr has been sentenced to 28 years in prison for conspiring with private prisons to sentence juvenile offenders to maximum sentences for bribes and kickbacks which totaled millions of dollars. He was also ordered to pay $1.2 million in restitution.
In the private prison industry the more time an inmate spends in a facility, the more of a profit is reaped from the state. Ciavearella was a figurehead in a conspiracy in the state of Pennsylvania which saw thousands of young men and women unjustly punished and penalized in the name of corporate profit.
According to allgov.com Ciavearella’s cases from 2003 – 2008 were reviewed by a special investigative panel and later by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and it was found that upwards of 5,000 young men and women were denied their constitutional rights, and therefore all of their convictions were dismissed and were summarily released.
During his sentencing Ciavarella was defiant, claiming he had broken no laws and claimed the money he received was a legitimate ‘finder’s fee.’ Assistant U.S. Attorney Gordon Zubrod said comments such as these were typical of Ciavarella, according to the local reporting of citizensvoice.com:
I think that’s his way […]
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Stephan: It isn't hard to understand why this is happening. Consider this is the context of another fact. Eleven per cent of the American population takes anti-depressants. These social outcomes are telling us: We are not a happy people.
JUDY WOODRUFF: There’s been a stunning increase in the suicide rate among middle-aged Americans. The finding is part of a new study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that spells out how much suicide is a growing public health concern in the U.S.
Ray Suarez has more.
RAY SUAREZ: The analysis looked at data compiled over a little more than a decade, a period ending in 2010 that included the financial crisis and the great recession. In 2010, there were more suicides in the U.S., 38,000-plus, than there were fatal motor vehicle accidents.
Most disturbing, that spike among the middle-aged, a 28 percent rise overall, a 40 percent jump among white Americans, and among men in their 50s, suicides increased by more than 48 percent. Guns remained the leading method used in all suicides, followed by poisoning, overdoses and suffocation.
Some perspective on all this from Dr. Thomas Frieden, the director of the CDC.
And, Dr. Frieden, the Morbidity and Mortality Report is a pretty technical document. But, from reading it, can you tease out what stressors might explain this tremendous spike in the number of people taking their own lives?
Chart: America’s Rising Suicide Problem
Chart: America’s Rising Suicide Problem
DR. THOMAS FRIEDEN, […]
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MATT TAIBBI, - Rolling Stone
Stephan: If this had appeared in a lesser publication, or been written by a less accomplished investigative reporter, I would have dismissed it as conspiracy nonsense. But I spent time this afternoon backchecking. It all holds up. Once again all of this arises because of the corruption of the regulatory mechanisms set up to protect the integrity of the financial system.
Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world’s largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.
You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that’s trillion, with a ‘t’) worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in history – MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it ‘dwarfs by orders of magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets.’
That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. Word has leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, the world’s largest broker of […]
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NAOMI KLEIN, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: Here is some good news, about a shift going on in the environmental movement. It offers some hope.
The movement demanding that public interest institutions divest their holdings from fossil fuels is on a serious roll. Chapters have opened up in more than 100 US cities and states as well as on more than 300 campuses, where students are holding protests, debates and sit-ins to pressure their to rid their endowments of oil, gas and coal holdings. And under the ‘Fossil Free UK’ banner, the movement is now crossing the Atlantic, with a major push planned by People & Planet for this summer. Some schools, including University College London, have decided not to wait and already have active divestment campaigns.
Though officially launched just six months ago, the movement can already claim some provisional victories: four US colleges have announced their intention to divest their endowments from fossil fuel stocks and bonds and, in late April, 10 US cities made similar commitments, including San Francisco (Seattle came on board months ago).
There are still all kinds of details to work out to toughen up these pledges, but the speed with which this idea has spread makes it clear that there was some serious pent-up demand. To quote the mission statement of the Fossil Free movement: ‘If it is wrong to […]
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